Happy Friday! Going back to work has been tough! This has pretty much been my face this week!

This cheered me up greatly. Ma has decided that she and I might be the same person!

How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation – I found this long but interesting..

Burnout Isn’t Just a Millennial Affliction I linked to the original essay because I found it interesting but I wasn’t sure that I bought the this only happens to millennials. It’s refreshing to see someone tackle it in terms of money and class as they were my first thoughts. I’m working class and a lot of the Gen X stuff doesn’t resonate with me because I didn’t grow up with money and don’t have much now!

By mollycoddling our children, we’re fuelling mental illness in teenagers. Sarah and I have talked a lot recently about resilience, and about how resilience is built by allowing children to handle situations with some guidance but also by allowing children to deal with consequences. It’s something we aren’t doing with children at the moment, and this week, Luc and Helene were telling me the story of their NYE and their friend’s lost house keys, which illustrates this point perfectly. I’ll start with the Dempsey way! When I was 12 or so, I lost my house keys, given to me when I started secondary school. Ma give me some money and her house keys and told me to go and get some more cut. She also told me that if I lost them again I’d have to pay to get the replacements. The next time I lost them (of course I did!) I had to pay for them with my money and Ma pointed out that if it happened again, then we’d need to change the locks and guess who’d be helping put them in? So I learnt I how to get keys cut, that being careless resulted in a financial consequence for me and I learnt about further consequences. For the record I didn’t lose them again! Compare this to the experience of one of the godchildren’s friends on NYE, she lost her house keys. She ended up staying at Matt and Ruth’s, distraught because her parents ‘didn’t care’ about her. (Now obviously if she hadn’t had anywhere to stay her parents would have come home but Luc had already said she could just come and stay at theirs, they aren’t horrible people). She was upset, not because she’d mucked up and lost her keys but because her parents hadn’t come home. She had no understanding of what she was asking and wasn’t particularly fussed about losing her keys. (L and H were pretty gobsmacked about this, they would have been mortified!) If at any point in the last year when she had lost her keys previously (at least five times according to Helene) her Mum and Dad hadn’t just replaced the keys and had the locks changed and dealt with all of the hassle resulting from her carelessness but made her deal with it, she might have understood why it was important to keep track of her keys. Ok this is just keys but it’s not really, it’s how we raise children, I read that the average working mother spends the same amount of time with her children as a stay at home mother did in the 70’s. I joke about Ma’s ‘unapologetic’ parenting style but it has some merit….

Your favourite independent bookshops: ‘I want my ashes scattered in the fiction section’ No Barter Books?

Are books clutter? Why Marie Kondo’s advice to give them away has not sparked unanimous joy. I tend to have an audit when we go to Northumberland, then I take them to Barter Books and get credit to buy more books. There are too many that I couldn’t part with, the joy they spark isn’t only about what’s in the book. The copy of Good Wives, that was my mother’s and has an inscription from my grandma. My copy of The Secret Garden from my mum. The Complete Works of Tennyson that I bought years ago and is over 100 years old.  These things are important to me and I will not let them go.

Sixty-four-metre ‘fatberg’ discovered in English seaside resort

South West Water is also planning to open a pop-up shop in the town to inform people about the unwanted visitor and to urge them not to “feed” fatbergs by pouring fat, oil, grease and wet-wipes into the system.

Who does this? I can’t get my head around it, I’ve never done it because I was brought up not to but it’s not like there hasn’t been massive ‘please don’t do this’ campaigns for years. What is wrong with people.

Worse Than Watergate – I read this on Tuesday and that morning, I had just said to a friend of mine (who is working for no pay because of the shutdown) that the US might have found a someone more corrupt than Nixon…

We might mock Trump and his wall, but it’s not so different in Britain

Brexit proved our economy is broken, but our leaders still have no clue how to fix it This. I can’t agree with this more….