Category Archives: Site Diary

So I’ve had another week of being a wimp and achieving very little. My excuse is having come down with a lurgy virus at the end of last weekend such that I spent Monday to Wednesday with a streaming nose. By Thursday I was only coughing like a coughy thing and I thought I was healthy enough to go fencing on Saturday. This may or may not have been true because getting hit took a lot out of me and, given the lack of training and the amount of cotton wool in my brain, I got hit quite a lot. I cried all the way home and I have some impressive bruises today. I also feel somewhat more human although I’m not looking forward to being bruised stiff and still having to do the monitoring tomorrow.

(In the interests of sounding a little more kick-ass and capable, I would like to point out that I took my lurgy out with me for field work last week, spending three out of five days out on site, and Monday was a twelve hour day, training in Hull.)

To make me sound slightly more like I’m achieving things, I’m in the process of redrafting / editing two short stories as well as just getting 25 Ways to Kill A Werewolf from my editor. One of the two shorts is being particularly troublesome and I think I was trying to be too clever. Never mind, I’ll keep trying!

Also, the Big Thing this week – at least in terms of media coverage – was the death of Margaret Thatcher. I admit I had a “Ding dong, the witch is dead!” moment but Thatcher lost her power twenty-three years ago, so it was somewhat unfair. I had thought about writing a blog post about her, from the point of view of how we apply narrative to real life in order to make sense of it and how she has become a good, modern example of a “strong” woman – as well as a modern example of a “Politician” role model. But nearly everything that can be said has already been said by others.

I’m a little disappointed about how much is being made of her role in relation to her family. We have been called on to give her due respect because she was “a mother and a grandmother”, and people have questioned her mothering abilities, saying they are glad they were never her children. Despite being a “divisive political figure”, it’s a little sickening that she can be so instantly reduced to (less than) a woman. Her closest male counterpart in British political history is Churchill – who also served best under conflict-like pressure and called out both the police and the military on striking miners. While I doubt he was the greatest father in the world, no-one questions whether that makes him less of a prime minister. We are not told to respect his memory because he was a father and a grandfather but because he was a strong-willed, divisive (outside of war-time) leader.