So what’s new for 2012:
- I’ve tried and failed as yet to get excited about the forthcoming London Olympics.  It might be the greatest show on earth but for me it’s a few months of transport hell;

- My newest novel attempt has reached 28,000 words. Please ask me more about this!

- We have a whole bundle of health issues going on chez Rose22joh, and are praying for a swift and happy resolution;

- I can blog about the EU again if I feel the need – and there’s a lot going on that could do with some reflection.

- I’m TIRED!

So voila: this year’s offerings are likely to be on writing, politics, parenting, faith and of course feminism. Probably.

And the fact that my New Year post is up before February? I’m counting that as a win!

From Wikileaks…

Oh dear Wikileaks.  I hope you realise what you’ve done.

There’s a lot of comments on the internet about “this is what the internet should be about” or “this is what openness and transparency should mean” or “this should be acceptable in a democracy“.
I couldn’t disagree more.

I’m going to try to look at what on Twitter is tagged #cablegate from a slightly different perspective.
Here’s four bits of private thought or private discussion to think about:

#1 “Um, is your mum really going out wearing that top?  It’s not her colour, I mean, seriously.  It brings out the red in her nose and makes it look like she’s been drinking.  The fabric clings to her sides and the pattern shows off the rolls of spare tyre fat.  She looks like a bulgy, drunken -thing- squeezed into your t-shirt, except she bought it for herself. So embarrassing”.

#2 “She smells. Again.  She’s our best friend – it’s always been all three of us together. We’re going to have to stage an intervention.  You’re going to have to say something, I mean.  It’s for her own good really – if we notice, presumably everyone does.  It’s not like she doesn’t wear deodorant, but ergh, she needs a stronger one or something. Foul”.

#3 “He hit me.  It was just once, really hard, on the back and he grabbed my wrists so I couldn’t hit him back so they hurt too.  He got too angry and just turned into some kind of monster.  A one-off strike.  He’s never done it before.  He’s never hit our daughter. I don’t think he would. But I never thought he’d actually hit me.  Should I walk out?”

#4 “He’s boring.  But Milly says if you want something from him just smile.  He probably doesn’t get many girls anywhere near him, I mean would you even talk to him if you didn’t have to? Yuck, he’d probably want to date you or something.  Gross.  But he does ‘get’ maths and I don’t want another D”.

No one ever said that humans are nice.

And knowing what to say publicly and what to say privately or not to say at all is part of the process of growing up.

Things have changed a bit even in my lifetime.
Two generations before me it was all stiff upper lips and keeping mum – well, it was a time of world war.  Then things loosened up a bit with the babyboomer generation, the not-at-all-threatening-nowadays Beatles and Rolling Stones, letting it all hang out Woodstock-style and talking about sex became the norm.  The yuppies made it less necessary to be discreet about money.
And now, so much of the time, anything goes.

The issue becomes how much of your life to live in public – with Facebook, Twitter and blogging, what do you say and what do you keep to yourself?
This is accompanied by increasingly candid celebrities – the Kerry Katona/ Katie Price self as a commodity measuring self-worth in column inches. Katie Price is of course also a very canny business woman and extracts a high price for this exposure.

The risk with such instant and compulsive access to broadcasting that we say it without thinking.  That can be a big mistake – your job can depend on you not saying the wrong thing.  Just because you can say something publicly, doesn’t mean it should be said publicly.

Take my (let’s be absolutely clear about this) fictional examples above.  In those situations:
- would the speaker be better off if the content was said publicly?
- would the subject of the discussion, in the terms discussed?
- would the world be a better place for it being said out loud in full hearing of the subject?

I don’t think that there’s a single example above where either party or the wider world would’ve derived benefit from those thoughts or private discussions being put out in the public domain.  I’d be interested to know what you think.

Clearly thinking horrible thoughts about your friend’s mum’s dress sense and actually saying it to your friend in those terms would be stupid – at the end of the day, “c’mon, she’s my mum, dude“. Even if the critique is true.

With the boyfriend that hit out in anger, the call is much harder.
Let’s be absolutely clear, one adult hitting another or a child is utterly, utterly unacceptable and should never, ever happen.
As ever life is a bit more complicated than that.  The problem here is what’s at stake for the parties involved.  It has clearly happened – but is it a one-off, or a slippery slope? Should it ever be spoken about, apart from to each other?  Is there counselling needed as a couple or anger management? What about praying together? Would raising it in public cause more problems than it solves? Or does no never mean that this violence should signal the end of the relationship? Would walking out at this point be sensible, or a serious overreaction?

Sometimes you need to be able to have a candid conversation in order to be able to handle a situation well.  Take the smelly friend – to me, it is clearly in her interests in the long run to know, but definitely in her interests that her friends get together in the short term to work out how to do so so that no hurtful language is used. Even if it feels a bit like talking behind her back – which of course is what they are doing even if they don’t mean it badly.
It is ok to think uncomplimentary things about friends sometimes – I’m particularly bad at washing up, and remembering birthdays and to phone people. I’d expect others to say this about me.  But not necessarily to me, thanks guys, behind my back but privately is just fine.

But what about getting the maths help from the geek you’d never go near unless you needed his help?
Leave aside that quite often the maths geek turns out in the long run to be the better sort of husband and the good looking, popular boys usually start to believe their own publicity and are less good to be around- no teenage girl really believes that, even with Glee on TV.
The reality of life is that often you do things that you might not otherwise do to advantage yourself because its expedient to do so.  You might even talk about it with your mates. It doesn’t make it the morally right thing to do.  But that often doesn’t stop you. And you can usually find a way to justify it to yourself.

Everyone has a nasty part of their mind.
(Oh yes, even Christians).
And sometimes we just go with it.
(It’s not hypocritical to acknowledge that, the whole point about being Christian is recognising your sin, knowing you’re flawed and seeking to overcome it, not do it again and be forgiven).

So how does this link to the Wikileaks release?
According to the Guardian:

Clinton led a frantic damage limitation exercise this weekend as Washington prepared foreign governments for the revelations, contacting leaders in Germany, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, France and Afghanistan.

The point about diplomacy is that, in order for positions to be informed ones, the type of thing that for an individual might be an inner monologue, or at a push a private conversation, needs to be discretely shared with others within an administration so that agreed internal positions can be found.
Then the right language can be found to achieve the right outcome.

For that reason, I am slightly amused by comments like “the next G20 is going to be soooo awkward“.   If so I guess that would be choice not necessity.  The point is that diplomacy is the art of moving from the raw approach to the smooth interface.  Seeing the furiously paddling legs of the swan may belie the graceful beast above the water but it is merely exposing the workings, not invalidating the whole bird.

Who gains from the Wikileaks cables release?
People who want to exploit divisions between friends, or those who wish to synthesise outrage in order to justify an action of their own.
Some will be genuinely offended, feel let down or angry.
Some will just be curious about the weird world of diplomatic communication.
Some in IT security will no doubt be expecting a call to beef up information protection.
But those that lose are the diplomatic and security personnel who have been compromised, the people who were discussed or quoted, the people who might now face personal danger as others “respond”, and the people who genuinely believe in more governmental openness and see this as a nail in its coffin because it so clearly shows that with great IT power appears to come great irresponsibility.
And if the middle east is destabilised, we all lose.

Are Wikileaks villains, misguided, or heroes of openness?  It’s up to you.
But for me, sometimes discretion is the better part of valour.

(image c/o http://www.essentialstyleformen.com/features/advice-discretion-is-key/)

This year I will be having Christmas in three major parts: once with my parents and enormously pregnant sibling (technically it’s his wife that’s pregnant but you know what I mean),  once with my in-laws and once with my husband’s sister’s family.

What’s Christmas about for me?
I always like “going home” for Christmas: the English winter, the prospect that there might be a light dusting of snow, the dark green pine tree with sparkly decorations, the sort of magic that candle flames and twinkling lights in the dark brings, midnight mass or the child-friendly crib service.
I love the food, the family traditions, and now I’m older and have my own child creating tradition of our own (we’re not big turkey fans, so working out what we want instead and getting it supplied locally is part of the fun).
TV seems to play quite a major role too – not so much the Queen’s speech any more, but certainly Doctor Who or Wallace and Gromit on Christmas day. And now my son’s a bit bigger, the post dinner walk is a bit more important for all of us – we can walk off dinner and he can burn off a bit of energy.

But it’s the Christmas service at church that’s so beautiful and so essentially part of the whole thing for me.  As a regular churchgoer, I’m representative of over half of the UK population in terms of my faith (according to Tearfund in 2007), with 7.9 million attending church monthly and 4.9 million weekly (of which about 1.1 million are for my particular denomination).
The numbers shoot up at Christmas – those with a negative agenda on this will call this “cultural Christianity” and say that those people don’t count or should describe themselves as not Christian in the 2011 Census count, but frankly I’m pleased to see anyone that wants to be there and if they want to self-define as Christian that is surely their business and not that of the BHA.

Children and Christmas
What about children’s perceptions of Christmas?   With the church-going caveat firmly in my mind, I asked my toddler what was special about Christmas.
“It my birthday!” he said.
No, sweetie, you’ve had your birthday.
“It Jesus birthday… but I get presents”, he said, unprompted.
I quizzed him a bit more.  Apparently he wants to see his grandparents and his cousins, but Father Christmas is a character on Peppa Pig.  He’s quite excited about carrying a candle in the church too.

Is he typical?  Well, in 2006 there was some research done (and admittedly with older children), handily put in one place on the internet by the Evangelical Alliance which showed that not all children see Christmas time as a wholly positive experience:

Reported in the Daily Mail 19 December 2006

• 44% of 7-11 year-olds regarded Christmas day as a celebration of the birth of Jesus – although in Northern Ireland the figure rose to 71%.
• Although 89% were excited, and 79% were happy about the holiday period, one in six said they felt sad, nervous or left out at Christmas.
• Perhaps not so surprisingly, one in four (24%) believed the season was about giving, rather than receiving, presents.
• Giving clearly matters, however, with almost two-thirds (63%) saving their pocket money to buy presents, adding up to an average piggy-bank of £34. 33% nationally and 45% in Scotland managed to save more than £50

What other sorts of Christmas are there?
So what’s the point of a secular Christmas? It seems pretty much that Christmas just becomes an occasion to get together with family or friends,  give them gifts to show you love them, eat food and keep warm and have light in an otherwise pretty depressing time of year.
That was certainly the message from last year’s intro sequence to the Doctor Who Christmas special…
It’s also the message from endless American movies about the true meaning of Christmas.

Well, that’s lovely.

I just wonder whether, if you don’t go to church because you explicitly reject the Christ bit of Christmas, whether you reject the non-christian but religious-routed elements too?
The pagan festival of Yule falls on 21 December, celebrating the return of the light after the shortest day of the year (celebrating the rebirth of the sun, not the sun, as one wiccan put it), with the similar festival for Mithras, Roman god of light, on 25 December.
Wiccans use oak and holly to represent the summer and winter (think about the Christmas song “The Holly and the Ivy” and the traditional yule log – which was a big bit of oak and not a chocolate swiss roll in years gone by). Feasting and giving gifts was a tradition of Saturnalia (the Roman festival on 17 December).
The good news is that mice pies should still be available to you – they seem to originate with Henry V, and Christmas pudding too seems to be without religious significance.
Is that all there is to Christmas?
Ok, so there’s a bunch of traditions and a chance to catch up with family.  Is that it?
Or, how does the story of a baby born over 2000 years ago in a backwater of the Roman empire relate to any of this?
Tell you what, rather than me write it all out here, here’s a fantastic idea… the Natwivity!

The art of storytelling has been part of the church since it all began, so think of the Natwivity as a Nativity play for the Internet generation.  Put it this way – if you’re the sort of person to read blogs, then you might also be onFacebook, or on Twitter.
The press release tells me that “the Natwivity takes advantage of social media’s unparalleled capacity to engage people as they go about their everyday life to re-tell the Christmas story in a fresh, personal way. It is possible to follow on Twitter and Facebook and you’ll be able to pick up the ‘tweets’ at home, in the high street on your phone and at work”.

I’m really looking forward to it – the point about using 140 character tweets is that there should be an immediate, real-life feel.
Each day from throughout Advent (1^st December to Christmas Day), different members of the cast will tweet a140-character update. They include Joseph, Mary, the shepherds, the three wise men and King Herod.

By reading these daily tweets, followers can learn more about each character’s thoughts and feelings, from Mary’s angst as she rides on a donkey over the hills of Bethlehem right through to the night the shepherd’s saw their familiar hills illuminated by an angelic host.

So if you were wondering at all about the Christ in Christmas, or just feel nostalgic for the primary school Christmas play where you only got to be Third Shepherd or a non-speaking Angel, why not follow @natwivity on Twitter, or “like” www.facebook.com/natwivity.

And Merry Christmas!
——————–

Natwivity is hosted by the award-winning team (Jerusalem Awards) behindEasterLIVE, a similar project last Easter; Share Creative and the Evangelical Alliance.

Thought I’ try out something on Twitter.
Admittedly Saturday pm not the best time to do so, but tant pis (or for the benefit of a colleauge who asked me if I could translate that, c’est la vie but with more cynicism…).

So, an idea.  Take a subject you’re trying to think about deeply.  give it a #hashtag (I like #EU deepthought).
Then, in homage to the great brain of Douglas Adams who gave the second greatest computer in all creation the name Deep Thought, give yourself 42 tweets to put some of your thoughts out there.
You might get a thousand responses.
You might get none at all.
You might just get WTF or equivalent (hon ment to @RalfGrahn at this point…)
But you might sort your thoughts into something amazing.
A bit of crowd sourcing would help that I think.

Here’s the 18 Tweets so far… come on over!

1. rose22joh

   thats 18 swift thoughts out there- well, 16 ignoring explanatory tweets. Need a break to do some more #EUdeepthought… and watch XFactor… 8 minutes ago via web

2. rose22joh

   is best outcome for EU citizens, EU businesses, national interests etc actually all the same thing? Or just vested interests? #EUdeepthought 12 minutes ago via web

3. rose22joh

   or is it right to have best possible negotiated outcome for all 500m citizens? Is 2 chamber negotiating actually delivering? #EUdeepthought 14 minutes ago via web

4. rose22joh

   my #EUdeepthought experiment – can you make a blogpost/ converse and find a new perspective in just 42 tweets? 16 minutes ago via web

5. rose22joh

   Is it possible to make the best of what we have rather than always striving for something extra? #EUdeepthought 18 minutes ago via web
6. rose22joh

   not just question of implementation, goldplating etc. but focus on end result delivery, reducing need for legislation etc. #EUdeepthought 20 minutes ago via web

7. rose22joh

   question: how to see if what’s in place already compatible enough + delivers as good or better results than something new? #EUdeepthought 22 minutes ago via web

8. rose22joh

   @RalfGrahn thanks – or as no time trying to do it in just 42 tweets… #EUdeepthought 27 minutes ago via web

   • Delete
9. rose22joh

   maybe (@bloggingportal) Day of Multilingual blogging a chance to examine this more… #EUdeepthought 29 minutes ago via web

10. rose22joh

    or is that just the ones writing in English? #EUdeepthought 30 minutes ago via web

11. rose22joh

    most Eurobloggers seem to be pro EU but sceptical on practicalities these days #EUdeepthought 30 minutes ago via web

12. rose22joh

    not easy to have sensible debate on what EU is and does- express modicum of positivity on concept and accusations of bias fly #EUdeepthought 31 minutes ago via web

13. rose22joh

    constitution debate might have somewhat got in the way of a real discussion of what is actually wanted and by whom #EUdeepthought 32 minutes ago via web

14. rose22joh

    civil society groups in e.g. UK always very big on compliance and very active – same everywhere? #EUdeepthought 35 minutes ago via web

15. rose22joh

    is there a way to enbrace the big society concept in the EU? #EUdeepthought 35 minutes ago via web

16. rose22joh

    or the people drafting the legal / political texts? #EUdeepthought 36 minutes ago via web

17. rose22joh

    is it the decision making process that tends to favour prescription? #EUdeepthought 37 minutes ago via web

18. rose22joh

    surely aim is that should always be done well, not done uniformly? #EUdeepthought 39 minutes ago via web

19. rose22joh

    The irony about so much EU stuff is that it is often opposed because would require doing things already done well differently #EUdeepthought 40 minutes ago via web

In line with the #guestpostday stream on Twitter, I’d like to introduce something a bit different today – a guest post by a friend @parishspinster prompted by my blogpost on women and violence.
Please give it a read, and encourage her to keep writing…

In this age of instant celebrity, it’s becoming less and less likely that Noel Coward would have urged against child stardom in such an old fashioned medium as the stage. 
When you can post your angel’s every waking moment to Facebook and YouTube every child can be flashed around the world in less time than it takes to say ‘mind the paedophile’. 
Most parents are convinced of their offspring’s innate talent, genius and beauty.  With these springboards, there should be no limits to their achievements. 
So why do so many aspire to nothing higher than being ‘famous’?

Fame these days is a very transient state.  To reach the pinnacle, you need to have that something extra that will keep you in the public eye.  It’s hard to predict the alchemy that produces this longevity.  Still, not to worry.  You can always sell your soul to the media.  Others will follow your example.
There’s no need to be any good in your chosen area of fame.  Mediocre is fine.  Believe you can be a star and a star you will be.  Start acting like one now.  No time to waste.

Be orange.  Never mind that all your friends are orange too.  You know theirs came from sun beds or bottles but they will believe yours came from your jetset lifestyle. 
Straighten your hair until it doubles as a plumb line.  Handy for those little DIY jobs around the house, but your nail extensions are so long you can’t unzip yourself to go to the loo, let alone wield an electric drill.  Anyway, that is what men are for.  Whatever you do, be thin.  If you can’t be thin, hate yourself.  If you have daughters, make sure they learn to hate themselves too.  A girl is never too young for pierced ears, or for false eyelashes and lipstick for that matter.
Because a daughter is more than a human being in her own right.  She is the embodiment of your hotness.  She exists solely because you were so damn sexy that you got yourself impregnated.  So it’s only right to celebrate this fact, to dress her up in tiny tight tops with ‘kiss me, I’m gorgeous’ appliqued across the area her breasts will occupy in another decade or so, to see her totter across the room, her still-forming feet wedged into glittery stilettos.  It doesn’t get much cuter than that.  And it does no harm.  Everyone else does it.  Suri Cruise just looked so adorable.

And when she’s older she can go into HMV and buy a button badge that reads ‘Dirty Whore’.

And when she’s a bit older than that she can choose her wedding dress from the bridal shop next to the gentlemen’s club, the one advertising pole dancing lessons.  A nice bit of symbiosis, that.  Buy the dress and get the stag night special offer thrown in.  The boys’ll be okay, they can warm up at the pub over the road.  Erotic dancers every Thursday, Friday and Saturday.  £3.50 entry.  Over 18s only, of course.  Doesn’t matter about the advertising hoardings (or should that be whoredings?), they’ll have already seen worse on the internet.

Sorry, what did you say?  Treating women as sex objects?  What do you think all this was in aid of?  The tanning, the hair, the  nails, the clothes, the absolute horror of not being like everybody else.  This is image we have chosen.  We’re all porn stars now.

Fame is just around the corner.

So why have I now got rather fabulous “East village” In a New York Minute NYC nail color-painted nails? And why do I find this so pleasing?
(image from the fabulous www.mymakeupblog.blogspot.com – do visit that site! East village is the nail varnish at the top).

There’s too much going on.  I’m trying to manage it with lists and reminders in my phone.  I’m using all of my skills that I define as “ruthless prioritisation”.  But to keep sane I need some “me” time.  now many people would get away from it and go jogging, to the gym, may be jog to the gym.  But the toddler prevents this when there’s no other babysitting available.
I’ve bought myself more time by minimising my Facebook and Twitter time, but that’s freed up less than I think either my husband or I expected. I was hardly a heavy user (yes it’s the language of drugs – yet another report out today warning of the addictiveness of online life and warning that Facebook friends are not “real friends” – which is bleeding obvious when there’s no possibility of them minding the toddler for you while you get 5 minutes peace… only real in the sense of continued contact with people you care about or are interested in).
I’ve backed off for the next couple of weeks because it’s too easy to get sucked into commenting on the Pope’s pronoucements on the Equality Bill, Chris Addison’s spam friends email address problems, yummy mummy regime issues or Barroso’s Commissioner portfolios.  All this rather than just get the wretched CIPD project written!

So tonight I’m doing some work on my CIPD CTP project. I’m so tired I can barely remember what the acronyms stand for.  And the PowerPoint slides need me to manipulated the data first, to identify the method by which participants feel they learn most effectively. I need my toddler to be asleep to get to do this, but working on this after work means I’m tired and when I go to get into the nice new bed having done some of the assignment, I can’t switch off and so the whole cycle just perpetuates with me getting more irritable and less suitably in a frame of mind to do the best I can.

So I’m taking a few minutes out in what seems like pointless procrastination, painting my nails and getting a bit of a break before getting back down to it. Spending time on my hands, even though I’ve no time on my hands at all really. And writing this of course.   Taking a few minutes up could also free up my mind and allow for some of those leaps of inspiration, or even genius (but let’s not get carried away now).

Besides, they look pretty.

Um, bit embarrassing this.

I’ve been wondering why, in amongst the spam I get from various Russians offering me photos of Miley Cyrus, why I keep getting hits on my blog from www.google.de and in particular from http://maedchenmannschaft.net .  I had a look at the site, but couldn’t see any reason why a site that was apparently called “makeover team” would have any interest in my blog on politics, parenting, women’s issues, faith etc. so I deleted the trackback as a spam thing.  Oops.

I don’t speak German, but there’s a good reason for this, honest. 
When I was at school, languages were still compulsory (nowadays they are introduced in primary school but are optional after age 14 which of course has led to a decline in the number of Brits good at languages).  However, my school had 4-form entry and decreed that two forms would learn French, Latin and Spanish and two French, Latin and German. 
My thirteen year old self thought about this: I was good at French and felt at home in France, and as my Mum grew up in Germany (sort of, it’s a long story) and we’d always had German christmas foods at home – lebkuchen, stollen, that sort of thing (God bless Lidl for giving us an easy source of them this year) so learning German looked like a sensible, logical step. 80 million native speakers, nice climate, not too far from home… so I chose Spanish. 
I looked at the total number of speakers worldwide (452,480,979 apparently), the fact that practically the whole continent of South America speaks it and calculated that if I was going into the world of business I’d be best off learning Spanish.  Besides, Spanish is a romance language, like French, and therefore relatively easy to pick up if you’ve learned one…

At university I got to live in Barcelona to study (in an Erasmus group, which meant that actually I was learning Spanish in a group with French and German students) and was allocated a Spanish student to “buddy” me (she prefered to speak Catalan, of course, this being Barcelona). 
I got to spend a big chunk of time in Basel, Switzerland, because my boyfriend at the time was doing his language placement there, and because he was working I got to pick up some German language (which when I use it now, makes native German speakers laugh becasue apparently I speak a few words not of German but of Schweiz Deutch, which is rather like a German saying they speak a few words of English and coming out with Geordie…) 
I’ve bought two CD-based German courses (intended to use while breastfeeding at night but a DVD would’ve been better).  I’ve been to Germany on more occasions than I’ve been to Spain, but I still can’t really do more than ask my way to the U-bahn station and buy 500g of ham.  Oh and apologise in Swiss German for barely speaking German… 
But despite all this, somehow I’ve just never got around to learning German properly, although I’ve picked up restaurant Italian and Simpsons/ Buffy the Vampire Slayer-subtitle Dutch in the meantime… 

But as the references keep coming from that same website, I did a bit of investigation and played with translating the webpage that apparetnly mentioned me.  Here, coutrsey of Google Translate is why I keep getting links from http://maedchenmannschaft.net/jetzt-vorschlagen-die-bloggerin-des-jahres/:

Jetzt vorschlagen: Die Bloggerin des Jahres von Susanne

Es gibt so viele tolle und wichtige Blogs von Frauen, wir selbst kommen gar nicht hinterher, sie euch alle vorzustellen. Und weil bloggende Frauen noch immer viel zu wenig Aufmerksamkeit bekommen, es aber mehr als genug Perlen in der weiblichen Blogosphäre gibt, wählen wir 2009 zum ersten Mal das Bloggermädchen des Jahres.
Ab sofort und bis zum 31. Dezember 2009, 18:00 Uhr könnt ihr hier in den Kommentaren eure Lieblingsbloggerin vorschlagen (einmal reicht), sehr gern mit einer kurzen Begründung, warum ihr Blog so toll ist. Die Abstimmung über das Bloggermädchen des Jahres 2009 läuft anschließend vom 2. bis zum 31. Januar.
Viel Spaß! Eure Mädchenmannschaft

There are so many great and important blogs by women, we did not even come afterward, introducing you to them all.
And because blogging women still receive far too little attention, however, there are more than enough gems in the female blogosphere, we choose 2009 for the first time Girl blogger of the year.
Effective immediately and until 31 December 2009, 18:00 Clock can suggest it here in the comments your favorite blogger (once is sufficient), very happy with a brief explanation of why her blog is so great. The vote on the Blogger Girls of 2009, then runs of 2 31 January.
Enjoy! Your girls team

And here’s the link to me, courtesy of Euroblogger Julien Frisch:

Julien Frisch sagt:
9. Dezember 2009 um 00:24
Ich weiß nicht, ob ihr auch englischsprachige Blogs akzeptiert, aber ich würde Bit more complicated… vorschlagen.
Die Autorin Jo ist Mutter und bezeichnet sich daher gerne als “Mummy blogger”, schreibt einen tollen Mix aus persönlichen und politischen Beiträgen – und wenn sie twittert mischen sich oft politische Tweets mit Anmerkungen zu ihrem kleinen Kind.
Letzte Woche hat sie erst ihren Sohn in den Schlaf gelesen und dann als eine von wenigen Frauen am ersten Skype-Wave-Twitter Eurobloggertreffen mit Bloggern aus ganz Europa teilgenommen.
Ein tolles Profil! 

Julien Frisch said:
9. December 2009, at 00:24
I do not know if she accepted English-language blogs, but I would suggest bit more complicated ….
The author Jo is a mother and is therefore happy to refer to herself as a “Mummy blogger,” she writes a great mix of personal and political contributions – and if she twitters her tweets often mingle with political comments about her small child.
Last week she read only her son to sleep and then took part as one of the few women on the first Skype-Wave tweet blogger meeting with bloggers from all over Europe.
A great profile!

 Thanks Julien for the nomination!  It’s lovely to read how others read my stuff, and it’s true, I’m more a mummy tweeter than a mummy blogger (partly because I try to guard my son’s privacy a bit which is easier to do in 140 characters than a long blogpost). 
But I want to show that female bloggers, even though motherhood is a massive part of a woman’s life, don’t lose their ability to have interesting thoughts on wider issues too.  Why shouldn’t I combine the two?  My son thinks it’s perfectly normal that Daddy does the shopping on line but Mummy writes, talks to people and can make the compter play his favorite songs from Cbeebies. 
I desperately wanted to be part of Joe Litobarski’s Euroblogger’s meet up even though it clashed with my son’s bedtime -and let’s face it, if someone like me doesn’t get involved how will the experience I’ve got of work, politics and life and the ideas I want to be able to share and debate get out there?  Life doesn’t stop when you’re a women that’s got kids, it changes and you have as much place and as much right to have views as everyone who doesn’t, or is a man, or has children that sleep…

You may or may not know that the subject of the Eurobloggers discussion was the problem of the fact that we all blog in different languages.  There are various ways of dealing with this, from amchine to manual translation, but I’ve added a tool to the right sidebar (go on, take a look) so you can, if you like read my site in German.  Happy reading!

And finally, this post has taken ages to write because my son refused to settle to sleep so we’ve had stories, two different pairs of pajamas, a baby doll that needed a nappy change and a refill of milk.  That’s why there’s not so many women mummyblogging who get to spend time on other issues… it really is a full-time job and there’s no 39 hour week legislation in force for this job…

Just about anyone you ask will tell you that practically no one goes to church on a Sunday (actually it’s more people than go to football matches each week, but no one’s saying that football’s on it’s way out and the stadiums should be converted into bijou residences, are they?) 
And indeed speculation at the time was that many people that had said that had done so out of habit or tradition - that they were not really Christian other than for hatches, matches and dispatches, and that many people would’ve preferred to put ”C of E” rather than Christian in any case becuase it conveys a sort of equivocal, half-hearted, keeping the door ajar approach rather than a total immersion.

I suspect that actually there’s something very British about this sort of attitude.  Andrew Marr pointed out in his excellent series “The Making of Modern Britain” that what probably saved the UK from Oswald Mosely’s fascism was the British sense of humour, that we don’t commit too lightly or take things too seriously (look how long Jedward managed to stay in the X Factor if you need a more trivial example). 
CofE means: of all the faiths that I’m not currently practising, this is the one whose service I didn’t go to on Sunday… 
If that’s true, I guess they were the people that would’ve found my last three churches (TBT at Christchurch Mayfair, Holy Trinity Brussels and St Mark’s Battersea) a bit “too much”, not CofE in the sense they mean it. But I digress.

So I’ve just found this excellent post over at Sharpe’s Opinion, which sets out in a short, neat way something I’ve thought a bit about for some time. 

Political party membership is falling in the UK, and I think that part of the problem is that to join a political party, you need to feel that you subscribe to all of a diverse range of policies (and pay for the privelege of saying that you do so).
Actually I remember my politics teacher at school saying exactly that- that she had never signed up to a political party because she could not support the whole message of any of them. And she was one of the cleverest people I knew (Miss Pickles, you were a legend!  But as she was a sit-up-and-beg-bicycling, bun-wearing non-TV watcher I’m not honestly expecting to be able to find anything online from her to hyperlink to other than this link to the school…)

So you might be someone that thinks marriage is the best thing for encouraging families to stay together and that there should be tax breaks to encourage this, but pro-European. 
Or you might favour positive action in recruitment for women, disabled people and minority groups, but strongly in favour of grammar schools as the best way to help bright children from disadvantaged backgrounds be socially mobile. 
Or you might be in favour of local income tax but own a house worth over £2 million.
(Just to clarify this is not me we’re talking about in these examples - I don’t even own a house!). 
In each case, your two interests would conflict with two of the few clear policies espoused by a major political party.

So – assuming that there’s no one policy area on which you are intending to be a single issue activist – how would you be able to “commit” enough to actually “do” something in politics to make the world a better place?
  
It’s not that easy at the moment.
If – as it seems from my paddling in the UK and EU political blogospheres- one of the main ways of getting your voice hear is through the team/ brand loyalty of a political party.  This guarantees you a pool of potential readers who will click onto or link to your blog just because you’ve got a little bird or tree or rose emblem just like theirs (or indeed a different one to theirs).  There will be lists that you can get onto, bringing more readers to debate with in the comments section and share ideas and build your knowledge. 
But these of course are the hardcore supporters, and while bloggers like Iain Dale are clear that they are not official party mouthpieces, they do tend to take a my-party-right-or-no-actually-we’re-always-right type of attitude (unless on an issue where they’re personally affected in which case they try to justify both views).
And what happens if, like Charlotte Gore, you fall out of love with your party over bits of what they stand for? 
It’s a bit like a religion isn’t it?  But while exegesis or midrash are “allowed” in some religious circles, and small group discussion is thought to help you understand and deepen your faith, there will always be some people who are happy with the simple faith version, looking for an easy label and willing to say “C of E” and get back to mowing the lawn without trying to go into what it means and why.  And indeed there will always be some people within the faith that don’t want you to do more than parrot back received wisdom – could that be said to be the case for political parties too, as in “we have clever people to do the thinking and they’ve come up with this, take it or leave it?”

So can anything be done to make this better?
Not clear.  Experiments like Jury Team tried to overcome the political party system, but the polling at the 2009 European elections for their independent candidates was hardly spectacular. 
Esther Rantzen might be trying to use her celebrity in a Martin Bell-like manner to stand against a politician whose morals she disagrees with, but she’s not exactly standing on a platform of anything that people can sign up to positively, merely that she’s been known in the past as a consumer champion and is not the sitting candidate.
I suspect that actually a different electoral system allowing for coalition politics might be part of the solution. 
Then, I don’t know, pro-European Tories could be free to praise the benefits of the EU to the rooftops, Labour supporters that think that an insurance-based healthcare system might actually be better than the current NHS, and Lib Dems who think that students should pay tuition fees would all be free to say what they think without fear of losing the whip or never getting on in their party and therefore never making it to the front benches/ government. 
Maybe the way to avoid groupthink and to really stimulate new ideas is to have lots of different groups suggesting them.  And while I guess there’s a Pythonesque risk of ending up with the Judean People’s Front/ People’s Front of Judea, at least it would be debate out in the open rather than manifestos out the front but little black books and the like behind the scenes.

Of course which ever party forms a government via which ever political system, I’m sure they’ll do their best to be a good govenment.  But as the old saying goes, it doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always gets in. 
I guess there might be a lot of people out there wondering which is the “C of E” option on the ballot papers…

Well, it actually happened and I was there.

What was this momentous event?

It was the first get together of eurobloggers.  At Joe Litobarski’s instigation we met online – initally via twitter, Google wave, IM etc. but actually in the end via Skype’s IM system after a conference call for more than 20 proved unwieldy (and my microphone wouldn’t turn off, meaning everyone could hear my toddler enjoying the Sarah Jane Adventures).

We discussed overcoming language issues in EU blogging – en anglais English, evidemment (something that makes me as a native English speaker both grateful and a bit guilty) – and the solution to better linking up and boosting the readership of EU blogs and conversations between bloggers is likely to be a bit linguistic, a bit techie, and reliant on the willingness and goodwill of all those involved.
I couldn’t stay for it all – evening events tend to end up clashing with toddler bed time although he did very well and his fathe’s arrival home meant I wasn’t too neglectful, but eventually bedtime had to come.

Congratulations, Joe, on a great initiative.  And it was lovely to meet everyone.
Now let’s see where we can go from here!

Who’d want to work in the EU institutions? 
Thousands, apparently, including me. 
It’s not easy to describe the job of a European Commission official, but in reality the actual work is not so different to the work of the civil service in any of the EU Member States.  And the pay, the tax rates and final salary pension – despite the recent reforms – are pretty attractive too.

So how exactly to you whittle down thousands of applicants to the couple of hundred you need to fill the vacancies that are available in the EU instututions?  Until recently the answer was essentially this: set a multiple choice quiz on EU related issues, and a numeracy test.  Put all prospective candidates through this in their second language (preferably English, French or German), then get them to write essays against the clock on EU-inspired subjects which, despite all the research and practice would not actually be marked unless the candidate passed the multiple choice and numeracy parts of the test sufficiently well…  there were further rounds with interviews etc, but as I didn’t reach them that aspect’s a bit less familiar to me.
Julien Frisch had a very interesting post over at http://julienfrisch.blogspot.com/2009/08/epso-criticised-by-european-court-of.html on the criticism of the European Personnel and Selection Office (EPSO – interesting to note that the Commission uses “personnel” long after other adminstrations have swtched over to “human resources”) by the Court of Auditors.  It’s worth reading, even if this post is a couple of weeks old now, not least because ESPO officials have actually joined in the debate below.
It is clear now that future methods of staff recruitment will be via Assessment Centres, a process familiar to many job applicants.  And the new approach is aimed at ensuring that it’s not just a way of identifying those with the time to study EU trivia (e.g. those still in educational environments).  Instead, the approach is supposed to allow demonstration of skills that would be required when doing the job.

So, with a decade of relevant experience, relatively good French (some remaining Spanish – and I’d have to improve at that in order to get a promotion within the Commission once in) and having entered my career for the purpose of gaining the skills to do this, am I actually going to enter the next concours?
I’ve been taking some time on my holiday to think about this.  Basically we’d be happy about a move to Brussels and I want to sit the concours.

But there’s a but.

I’m working part-time in the office and full-time as a mother.  While the UK Civil Service is actually pretty good about recognising the contribution that I can make, it’s not actually as easy as I’d hoped because face-time in the office does still count for something, especially as you get more senior. 
So I’m not sure the Commission would want me. 
Unless they’ve changed the rules that were in place when I did my stage that as Directives (e.g. those covering maternity rights) are addressed to the Member States so they don’t actually have to be exemplary in terms of employment law when it comes to part-time and flexible working?  They must’ve done – I gather there may even be some jobsharers now, but no one’s yet been able to point me to where within the Commission they work (and at what level).  
And with many highly qualified candidates attempting to find themselves the ideal post by appealing to the relevant DGs, who’d take on someone that only wanted to work part-time?  Several of the people I knew that passed the last concours have given up on trying to find a post – in other words they went through all of the stages I mentioned above, officially “got the ticket” but still have not got a job at the end of it.
Could I really put myself and my family through the extra stress of preparing for the different stages of the concours? And the extra stress of trying to get a job as a part-time employee?

The other thing is that, with 10 years experience, I’m not terribly keen on starting at the bottom again (moving from middle management to policy administration without a team).  Now, if there was to be a Head of Unit concours in the near future I can imagine that that would really be of interest…  So unlike my normal work-self, I’m feeling a bit indecisive.

There are probably people out there thinking that I’ve no right to expect to be employed as a part-timer.  That by having chosen to have a child and – let’s be honest about this- the likelihood that I’ll want to have another at some point, I somehow forfeit the right to be pursuing a professional career too.  Especially when you read some of the comments that are attracted by articles on this sort of subject on the Daily Mail’s website or even Comment is Free at the Guardian’s site. 
My brain hasn’t switched off.  I’m no less good at the decision-making or subject analysis or line management aspects of my job than I was before I had a child.  
What I can’t do any more is work more than my official conditioned hours, unless there’s a real emergency and/or I’ve had a chance to arange alternative childcare. 
My childcare is timelimited.  Even if it wasn’t, there’s a tiny little person who loves me and is dependent on me, and would not understand if he suddenly couldn’t see his mum.  
But the thing is, should there be an expectation that you’ll work more than conditioned hours on anything other than a rare occasion?

May be I’d better go and try to find the latest version of the Staff Regulations, and then think about it some more.  I’ve got a few months to find out…