The Angel in the House

Throughout my late teens and twenties I would have fulminated against Coventry Patmore's poem 'The Angel in the House' as patriarchal sexist gobshite, particularly nonsense such as: Man must be pleased; but him to please/ Is woman's pleasure' My feminism was fairly scattergun, I used to copy huge tracts out of The Female Eunuch and Sexual Personae onto my school file. I was Millie Tant and I was proud.

However, these days I'm not an angry young woman any more. I'd still class myself as a feminist and I get a bit depressed about young women who totally reject the term feminism. I do hope that they know that they deserve equal pay for equal work and that it is more important to be valued for who you are than what you look like.

This weekend I might not have been an Angel in the House, but I have tried to be a good mother. And it's been immensely rewarding. On Saturday I took my son on the train to York and I gave him new experiences: we ate tapas in La Tasca and then went to the Jorvik Viking centre. I do advise my readers that the viking centre smells like a viking city - open latrines and leather tanning and all, and that eating a mound of patatas bravas and tortilla before visiting is somewhat foolhardy. On Sunday I cooked us a traditional Sunday lunch and then we went for a long walk around a lake. This weekend has been very different to recent activities as it didn't involve booze, dancing or bringing the wrong coat home. But it was really rewarding and I enjoyed it. Especially as my son said 'Mummy, I love spending time with you'.

I do believe that women are valuable people who deserve to be judged on far more than their housekeeping and parenting skills. But, sometimes, being a good Mum is its own reward.

Doing it Yourself

In this world there are two sorts of people. The first decorate their house every year and take annual leave from work to achieve a new habitat all based around a leaf motif they saw in Good Housekeeping magazine. Then there's people like me. I buy quite nice houses and then let entropy take over to the point where it becomes a crap hole and I move somewhere else into a home one of the Other Type of people has done up. Simple.

This is not purely down to laziness. It is because I've never felt very confident about decorating so I've always felt it unwise to start with a half decent room and end up with rubble a few short hours afterwards. So I don't decorate. Or at least I didn't until this year. I always took my post-backlash feminism extremely seriously during my marriage and left all DIY type jobs to my ex. Only, sadly, he isn't the Good Housekeeping type either so it never got done.

Today, dear reader, has been a day of new starts. I painted my porch. This is not the simple task it sounds. My porch is huge and was constructed by Heath Robinson in the late 1970s of untoughened glass and putty. Wet rot had allowed holes to develop in the superstructure. It has been thoroughly gnawed by a rabbit.

In the past 12 hours I have toughened the wet rot with Ronseal sealant. I have filled the holes with putty. I have painted all the woodwork. Sadly, I am not an adept DIY-er as I get bored easily: I'd much rather slap putty and paint around than, you know, sand or prepare surfaces. The puttied areas look like one of those Christmas cakes that are iced roughly to resemble a well-skied mogul field. However, there are now no holes in my porch and I'm proud of myself for getting it all done in 12 hours, whilst also teaching my son to play tennis. I'm such a DIY queen that I'm sure Nick Knowles will be around to recruit me to help with his plumbing*. I wish.

So, just how much of an independent Doing it for Myself Amazon am I? Well, there's one thing I ought to admit. Whilst I was in the shower washing off several laminated layers of paint'n'putty the shower curtain frame detached itself from the wall and fell on my head. As I don't own a drill I had to get my ex round to put a new one up. But I told him to buy me a drill for my birthday on behalf of our son. So, maybe come September I will wholly be doing it for myself.



* Yes, I do recognise this was rude and unnecessary. But you don't know just how bad my Nick Knowles obsession is...