Nic Dempsey

Happy Friday! This Friday is especially wonderfull as it marks the beginning of a Bank Holiday weekend and tonight is Gin Club!

Here are this week’s links…

I’m not keen on people emoting about parenting but this is worth reading because it’s important.

The actual termination, I was unconscious. I just remember everyone was so nice. There’s no way this isn’t political: I had a late-term abortion, and I felt so lucky. It was the actual worst thing that could have happened in my life, and I had it as easy as could be. My doctor was supportive, I was in a major city with a nice hospital, I didn’t have to cross picket lines. Nobody argued with me. I’m so angry I have to be thankful for that. It should be that easy for everybody.

A moment that changed me: Living on my own for the first time. It may be that I’ve read a couple of articles recently, by women droning on and on about how freeing living alone is. . I live on my own and yes it can be, it can also be bloody awful – falling down the stairs and spraining my ankle being my most recent terribleness. I guess that what I’m really struggling with in this article and the others I’ve read, is their naval gazing self indulgence, like they are the first person ever to experience this so it must be entirely new. It’s like how teenagers believe they are the first people ever to have sex and do drugs.

However, if you live in London, then living on your own is much harder to do because it’s so expensive. Whenever, I feel that paying over half my net income on rent is too much, I’m going to re-read this article. The great London property squeeze.

I’ve actually been talking to a couple of people this week about how this plays out in their lives.

Don’t let psychopathic murderers suppress our common humanity. I know I’m a leftie snowflake but this pretty much sums up my opinion every time there is a terrorist attack because they win if we change who we are…

The terrorists want to drive us apart, to sow suspicion and fear, to oblige us to replace liberty with security and answer them with bombs and bullets of our own. For a terrorist organisation any of this, if implemented, would mean mission accomplished. So we should do the opposite. We defy them by proving that this is not what we are

What I’m really thinking, the insomniac I had a bout of it after Stef died, I think that I’m mostly cured of it. I’ve learned to do with less and nowadays going to sleep is fine, staying asleep is more tricky!

Roger Moore died this week. Rather than talking about Bond or whatever, here is his recipe for a perfect martini. Much better than Bond’s….

Why we put things off.

10 of the UK’s best castles for a family day out. I’ve been to 3 of the ten and I prefer my castles more ruined. Although I see from the comments that you can get a steam train to Bodium Castle, which is Ma’s 70th birthday present sorted!

If we’re not reading, why do we expect our children will? Confession, I didn’t pass my English Lit GCSE first time around. I took it again and passed. I didn’t read any of the set texts the two I remember were Fahrenheit 451 and A View from the Bridge (we covered that play the year before GCSE and then I did it twice with exams and retakes and my views on Eddie, who I did not see as a tragic figure but as a creeper with a completely inappropriate fondness for his niece, didn’t go down well any of the three years that I expressed it! We also did poems Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and WB Yeats and I didn’t really enjoy it. I choose not to do English at A level because I was afraid that it would ruin reading for me.  I read quite a bit now but I read much more as a teenager and more serious books too (I had the head space!). However, I was encouraged, Ma read, my English teacher gave me books to read, our school librarian encouraged us to hang out and read (which was a sacrifice as Ruth doesn’t really like teenagers!), the library staff who let me have first pick of the new books. Reading was encouraged, there were always books. This isn’t the case for everyone.