My Superwoman complex

Me! I will save the day! I can do it! Me! I’ll fix it! I’ll make it! I’ll do it! Let me!

Every so often, I see a thing/person/situation that needs fixing or helping and my mind goes into overdrive. I’m convinced that I’ll be able to fix it and save the world.

The situation will often involve me needing skills I do not currently possess. But I am not to be dissuaded! No, not me! I shall not let little things like this stop me from saving the day.

An example of this was a few years ago, when I went to the Philippines to visit a little girl called Kimberly, who I sponsor out there. The whole sponsoring thing is another Superwoman thing – I will save all the children of the world via £12 a month!

So I’m visiting Kimberly and I noticed her younger sister had a limp. The family told me that she’d been given too much medication for something when she was a baby and now the left side of her body didn’t work properly.

Inevitably, this situation brought out my Superwoman complex. I fussed over her and photographed her and generally tried to make her feel part of the gang. Then when I left, I was like, “I’m going to save her! Me! I’ll save her from her limp! I’ll fix it!”

I started making grand plans to get her seen by a paediatrician. Given that there is one nurse per five islands in that area of the Philippines, I was obviously aiming a bit high, expecting that a) there’d be a local paediatrician and b) they’d be able to drop everything and run to see her.

There are two children’s hospitals in the whole of the Philippines (which is made up of over 7,000 islands so you see the numbers are against me here) but one of them was close-ish. In my mind, I had taken her to the capital city myself, found this children’s hospital, pleaded with the doctors to do whatever you do to fix the problem (the idea that there might not be a cure was not on my radar, my Superwoman complex does not allow for ‘no’ as an answer), they had responded favourably and been like, “O yes, Laura, we will do that because you are Superwoman and we will do whatever you need us to.”

I had also found a kind soul to give us a room in their splendid mansion (people have mansions in Manila, right?) and I would stay with her until she was well again and running around all carefree and well and healthy, like her sister.

I didn’t see a flaw in my plan. There was no reason why it wouldn’t work, of course there wasn’t!

There was only, you know, the fact that I was in the middle of a university course and didn’t really have the time/money to just move to the Philippines for a while and hadn’t the proper visas or whatever to stay there for any length of time. There was also the fact that, although I had been sponsoring her sister for a little while, I was, essentially, a stranger, and how likely was it that her family would just hand her over to me to run off to another part of the country with. There was also the fact that the organisation that I sponsor her sister through would mostly be like, “Um, you know you can’t just turn up to visit your sponsor child and run off with her little sister, right?”

Instead, I did the most appropriate thing, sent an email with my concerns to the organisation, they had a nurse assess her and do a medical report and promise to keep an eye on the situation and inform me of what action they might take if it didn’t correct itself as she grew up.

This seems lovely and fabulous, this helping.

But my Superwoman complex has always been a little disappointed that I didn’t take more direct action with Kimberly’s sister.

It can kick in at anytime, this Superwoman thing. I don’t even realise it’s happening til I’m elbow deep in a toilet bowl with a rudimentary unblocker thing that I’ve made out of a wire clothes hanger, going “Don’t worry! I’ll fix it! Me! I’ve got it! I’m doing it!”

It all sounds very nice, doesn’t it? Being a superhero. Fixing things. Helping people. Saving the world.

But, boy, the disappointment that inevitably comes with the times I have bowled on in to fix something that I have no idea about and not been able to. I’m sure most people would be like, “It’s no big deal. I don’t have any skills in that so of course I couldn’t do it.”

My main issue is that in my mind, I’m like a stealthy ninja. I am capable of things people think are impossible. In the words of Team America’s Kim Jong-Il, “I’m the smartest, most crever, most physicry fit.” I can rescue people from danger, successfully operate on life-threatening brain tumours, outsmart baddies, answer every difficult question (even about things I’ve never heard of, that’s how clever I am), lift really heavy things, bake the most delicious cakes anyone has ever tasted and just generally astound and amaze those around me. I’m also beautiful in an au naturel, beach babe type of way.

I’m an eternal disappointment to myself that none of the above is true.

It doesn’t stop me doing the Superwoman thing though. And you’ll be pleased to hear that I did manage to unblock the toilet.

An inconvenient birthday

About three years ago, I was in my final year at uni and my dissertation was due three days after my birthday. I was planning to let my birthday go by and then celebrate when my dissertation was finished.

I’d had a bit of a bust up with my flatmate, which consisted of her telling me that the flat was too messy and me agreeing but saying I couldn’t do anything about it at the time as my dissertation was due. I was therefore holed up in the library the majority of the time, trying to avoid more confrontation.

I had been to America the previous month, doing research for my dissertation, so it was really important to me that I did well. I hadn’t eaten or slept properly in days. Or changed my clothes. I just needed to get it done.

In the midst of all this, a friend said to me, “O, let’s go out for dinner for your birthday.”

I was like, how oblivious can you be? I’m clearly way too busy right now. Just hold off until the weekend and then I’ll be free.

In the nicest possible way, I kind of said, “I’d prefer not to.”

But he was insistent. “Yeh, let’s go for dinner for your birthday.” Another friend was there, looking at me expectantly.

I then kind of tried to say in a nice way, “Ok, but it needs to be really close by so that I can come straight back to the library.”

But no! He wanted to half way across London to Paddington. What. On. Earth! This is ridiculous. And really annoying. Why would you go all across London when there’s plenty of places for dinner near uni and you know I’m busy.

“It’s a great little place which does Lebanese food.”

I’m sorry, pardon? Lebanese food? You’ve brought me all the way across London to a random little restaurant, right in the middle of working on my dissertation and not being in a good mood after having a bit of an argument with my flatmate…. For Lebanese food. I mean there’s nothing wrong with Lebanese food, its nice, but it’s not like I’m a well known Lebanese food lover. Italian, yes. French, ok. Thai, I’m there. But never in a million years would I choose a Lebanese restaurant myself.

“Just go into the pub next door for a quick drink while I make sure everything’s ready in there.”

What. On. Earth. I need to eat and leave ASAP. I don’t need to be hanging around ‘having a drink’. I was on the verge of saying, “Thanks for the effort and everything but I’m going to go now. I’m trying not to offend you because I see that you’ve made loads of effort but I have to do my dissertation.”

Anyway, I go into this pub with my other friend, while the organising friend goes to the restaurant. We go in and there’s a bar upstairs that I’m told to go to as it’s quieter.

Up the stairs I go, into the little bar and….

“SURPRISE!” shout a load of my friends. I look into the room, see everyone looking at me and walk off…..

Not the traditional response, I realise. But really now… A party all the way across London, three days before I’m due to hand in my dissertation, my final peice of work for my degree, the culmination of three years of hard work. Really?

I sat in the toilet for about 20 minutes assessing the situation while another friend convinced me it would be fine. Eventually I chilled out a bit and rejoined the party. And it was lovely. Of course it was lovely. It was fabulous to see everyone in the same place. And I had a great time after managing to force myself to forget about the deadline. But I’m not going to lie, it was extremely badly timed.

The same friend who organised it also got me a nice dress (to wear to the party, but when he tried to convince me to wear it, I gave him a look that said I was not pleased). A few weeks later, I decided to wear the dress somewhere. I put it on and it was faaaaar too big. He had bought me a dress two sizes up from what I wear. TWO sizes up! How can you guess a dress size which takes someone from an average size to a definitely quite large size?

You know sometimes when you’re like ‘Are you EVER paying attention when I speak or do anything?’ That was how this incident felt.

How does a person sitting in a library day in day out for about two weeks, three days away from handing in a peice of work which really matters to her, make you think, o I’ll throw a surprise party right before her hand in date?

And that is my one and only experience of surprise parties! No-one else has thrown one for me since. I think I know why…

A trip back in time to the workhouse

It’s Wednesday and it’s time for Rambler5319 to take over with his guest post again. Enjoy….

 

Perhaps you remember the post NaCl (from 1st Aug) about salt: its early production techniques and different uses. In it I said I would try and visit the Salt Museum at Northwich in Cheshire and last Friday that’s what I did. First thing to note is that, a couple of years ago, the place changed its name from the Salt Museum to the Weaver Hall Museum & Workhouse. I had intended to write up on the whole visit but there was quite a bit of interesting stuff on the workhouse so will do that this week; next week will cover the salt bit of the Museum and another site visit.

I arrived, in boiling sunshine, an hour or so after opening time and yet was still able to choose any spec in the completely empty car park!

Here’s the front entrance

The Museum is housed in the refurbished original buildings of the old Workhouse, built as you can see in 1837, the year Queen Victoria came to the throne. The irony is that an original salt museum, built in 1887 by two local businessmen involved in the salt industry, collapsed due to salt mining subsidence! A replacement was built in 1909 and eventually the collection moved to Weaver Hall in 1981.

I went in and paid my entry fee; parking was free. The curator led me through to the start point – the video room; a film show for one as I was the only visitor so far. After the brief intro film, the first displays were all workhouse related. Of course the workhouse was never meant to be an easy life; it was tough in order to deter people from taking it as an easy option. No state handouts for people to become dependent upon. All inmates had to work. Children were educated in the belief that by so doing they would improve themselves and their prospects. Here’s a quote from a 1901 Poor Law Handbook:

“The care and training of children are matters which should receive the anxious attention of Guardians. Pauperism is in the blood, and there is no more effectual means of checking its hereditary nature than by doing all in our power to bring up our pauper children in such a manner as to make them God-fearing, useful and healthy members of society.”

Interesting that they saw ‘pauperism’ as an inherited (“in the blood”) condition.
Here’s a poster, from a London workhouse in 1902, showing one kind of job people were given to do – in this case, Oakum Picking:

Note, from the write-up, the effects on people doing this work over a period of time. I’m sure they are what today we would call RSI (repetitive strain injury).
Next up was the laundry area and here are some examples of items you would expect to find there:

You can see the two signs to encourage the workers to keep going: one says, “Hard Work Is Its Own Reward” and the other hanging on the right wall, “Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness”. Do you believe it?

An interesting chart was this one below giving the daily & weekly meal allowances for each category of inmate: male, female, child, over 60s, nursing mothers & sick. Have a good look through and see what you reckon to those meals if you had to eat them.

In some areas of the country H.M. Prisons allowed each prisoner 292oz (8.27kg) food per week; workhouse rations, in the same area, were set at 137oz (3.88kg). Meals were to be conducted in silence and sometimes without cutlery! However if you look at the allowances in the Northwich Workhouse some do seem quite generous. I was curious as to what they might equate to so did a quick measure on my kitchen scales of some of the food rations there.

For example, here’s a pic of the over 60s allowances which they could have in place of the breakfast gruel.

Here’s the same sugar ration in a jam jar:

1oz of tea per week equates to the tea in approx 14 tea bags (had to add a bit as theirs would have been loose tea); that means approx 2 cups of tea/day. 5oz butter looks reasonable but it has to last a week. The sugar pile on the plate is 6ins (15cms) diameter, or roughly half a jam jar, but as they were not getting any other sweet food maybe that just had to do. Apart from sugar in tea what else would they use it for?

Bread weight works out at roughly 1 slice (modern day) = 1oz (on my bread anyway); that means men got the equivalent of 12 slices/day, (adding breakfast & supper together) which seems quite a bit more than I’d consume. Most days men got 2lbs (908g) of potatoes.

Here’s my plate with 1lb (454g) so half a day’s ration:

That’s 19 smallish potatoes so 38 for a day’s worth of 2lbs.

There were some other historical exhibits but not related to the workhouse or salt industry. Here’s one poster, advertising a concert at a local dance hall, in the early 1960s.

You could have seen the Beatles play for an entrance fee of 10/- (or 50p/80 cents). Notice you also got The Cadillacs and The Psychos on the same bill. The following week Gene Vincent was due to appear with “HMV Recording Stars” The Outlaws; tickets were only 7/6 (37.5p/60 cents) for that one. And you could dance for four hours (7.45-11.45pm) – if you had the energy. Ah, those were the days, eh?
Then I came across this one. It was quite a high toilet from the ground to seat level. I wondered why? The note on the top warned the reader not to use it in the corridor (as if anyone would in a public place!). You may be able to read that.

It also said to lift the lid to find out more info, so I did and here’s what it said inside:

Imagine that – no flush. You just leave the waste, which dropped down a long pipe, to be washed away by water from the kitchen. It didn’t say if the toilet was likely to be located upstairs or downstairs; if upstairs imagine the length of the pipe down to the ground floor where your number twos would wait for someone in the kitchen to empty the sink. Hmm…..(I understand some people pooh-poohed the idea of including this exhibit….haha.. See what I did there?)

The next exhibit was interesting because of why it was made: “the model of the canal boat Wren was presented to Rev R.V. Barker, at the end of his ministry, by the local boatmen and the address was signed by the captains of the canal boats – Wasp, Beagle, Bunbury & Wren – in recognition of his ministry to them in Nantwich in 1879.

After the museum I headed north of the town to sit by the canal and have my sandwiches.

What a lovely peaceful spot and, a few minutes later, just the chugging sound of a westbound narrow boat passing by.

Different pace of life on the canals! 4 mph speed limit though most go a bit slower to prevent damage to the banks caused by the waves the boat creates as it goes along. Soon it was home time and back to the hustle & bustle of city life. (Time also to remember that we today have much to be thankful for in state and government provision so that the poor don’t have to go to institutions like the old workhouse any more.) It had been a really interesting day out.

Why do I always say things twice? Why do I always say things twice?

I’ve got this thing about repeating myself. I haven’t worked out why I do it. My biggest one is when I agree with someone, or answer in the positive.

Example:

Customer: “Can I pay with my card here?”
Me: “Yes! Yeh. That’s fine.”

Customer: “Do you have a toilet here?”
Me:Yes, yeh, we do.”

Customer: “Do you sell chocolates?
Me: “Yes, yeh, they’re just over there.”

Why ‘yes’ AND ‘yeh? Sometimes it’s ‘yes’ and ‘yep’. Or ‘yeh’ and ‘yep’. I’ve tried to stop it but it’s like alcoholism or something. I just can’t stop. I can see the problem but I’m too addicted. It’s something I have no control over. I just wait for the next person to ask me something so I can answer twice!

“Hi! I’m Laura and I answer twice!” I’d say at the Answering Twice Anonymous. Or ATA, as they’d be known.

Sometimes I do it when I think I’ve skipped over the point too quickly and maybe the person listening might have missed it.

Example:

Friend: “Are you nervous about your exams?”
Me: “Well, it’s not that I’m nervous as such. I’m studying all the time and I feel ok about them. You know, so I wouldn’t say it nerves. More just getting them over with. I’ve been studying a lot. I feel ok about them.”

I could really save a lot of time by just saying things once. But as fellow members of the ATA will know, sometimes you just want to make extra sure the person is keeping up with what you’re saying, by saying it twice. I know it doesn’t actually work, but I sort of think it does when I’m doing it.

G is for…

GIFFGAFF!

What’s Giffgaff, you might be thinking? Well, what might it be?

My first thoughts were that it’s a word for what well-to-do people say when they mess up a sentence, as in “I’ve made a real giffgaff there.” Or it could be an insult, along the lines of a nincompoop, eg, “O, you giffgaff!” Maybe it could be some kind of cleaning product, given that it sounds like Jif, which later became the way more rubbish ‘Cif.’ The advert might say something like “Look at how Giffgaff cleans away all the dirt! Proven to be 98% more effective than other leading brands.”

Add to these suggestions anything you also might have come up with, maybe it’s a kid’s clothing brand or another euphemism for nakedness. All fairly decent guesses I think.

But no, it’s a mobile phone network! It just seems silly to me, a mobile phone network called Giffgaff. And who thought it up? Were they sitting around in the board room, bouncing ideas around and THAT came out as the best one? Really? What were theothers? Fliff-flaff? Binkbonk? Doodah? Fluffoff?

I know Orange and O2 and 3G aren’t particularly inspiring names, or anything to do with phones, but they’re at least credible. Just straightforward. And the advertising which includes the name is memorable. The future’s bright, the future’s Orange. Simple. I doubt many people would sign up if the advert went ‘The future’s bright, the future’s Giffgaff.’

Quite a few things have names that I think must have been a result of no-one else turning up for the Ideas Meeting in the board room, or everyone being tired/on drugs/too scared to say it sounded rubbish.

Wii. It’s just basic silliness. Playing on the Wii is NOT an appealing prospect and, in fact, I believe most people grew out of that after doing it once as a toddler and being told that it’s not for playing with, dear, it belongs in the toilet.

A brand of biscuits that was quite popular when I lived in Southern Africa was called Eet-Sum-Mor. What is that about?! It’s like they asked a 14 year old what might sound ‘cool.’

“O just do it a bit like text-speak and it’ll raise your coolness ratings by a billion!” says the 14 year old. “Ok,” say all the grown ups. “If that’s what the kids are doing nowadays, let’s go with it. We were going to call it Eat Some More but Eet-Sum-Mor is better. Should we add ‘LOL’ on the end too? Oo! Tempting!”