Category Archives: feminism

40. Instant coffee

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‘Is it ok if we sit here?’ the young woman asks me. I’m sitting at a long table outside a cafe, drinking a coffee and reading. ‘Of course,’ I reply. She sits down with her two young children. She gets a banana out of a bag for the toddler and, before long, her partner arrives carrying a tray with lunch for them all.

A little while passes and a young man joins them. They’ve obviously been expecting him. The three young adults all look the same age – late 20s, maybe early 30s. By the tone and topic of their conversation, I would guess that they met at university. The things the young couple tell their friend about their kids and about parenthood suggests that he is childless.

It’s a happy jokey conversation, although the woman has the lion’s share of looking after the children – the toddler especially, who wants to run here and there and is keen to smash the banana into his face and clothes.

The conversation turns to the cafe. It’s a great cafe in a great location, somewhere I always come to when I’m in Leamington. The three friends like it too, and share what they like about the sandwiches and the cakes.

Then, the young woman says, ‘The coffee’s great too.’ The friend replies, ‘Oh but it’s…[he names whatever the coffee brand is]. It’s awful coffee.’ He’s not drinking coffee. She is. ‘Oh, is it not?’ she asks, and I can hear her doubting herself. It’s not that the taste of this coffee – her subjective taste experience of this specific cup of coffee – is no good. It’s that she now thinks her Taste in coffee is no good. I can hear it in her voice.

Her partner, of course, sides with his friend, because, God forbid he’d be accused of not having good Taste in coffee. He agrees with the friend that the coffee here is ‘no good.’ (I’m sitting beside them, enjoying a perfectly lovely cup of coffee…but more about me later.)

I want to turn to her and say, woman-to-woman, ‘If this coffee tastes good to you, then don’t let anyone tell you it’s no good. Trust your own taste. And, as my friend Bernard Greene would say, F**k the begrudgers.’

For years, I used to apologise to people visiting my house for ‘only’ having instant coffee to offer them. Like I was somehow lesser than for not having fresh coffee and a cafetière or a coffee maker or whatever. And, if someone else made me coffee, I would apologetically ask that they make it weak. Because, let’s face it, the world is full of coffee snobs.

I used to be like that young woman, doubting my own taste in coffee because someone else (a man 99.9% of the time, because women have bigger things to worry about than posh coffee) told me it was no good. I tried liking it. I tried making it. I’d buy a bag of coffee and make a pot or two. But it was just too much effort for a less than satisfying outcome.

I dropped that attitude long ago. I have instant coffee in my house because that’s what I like to drink. That’s my taste and my taste alone. I like it weak. And milky. Is my taste in coffee bad? No. It’s neither good nor bad. It’s just mine.

So, if posh coffee (or wine or whiskey or anything else, food or otherwise) is your thing, then I wish you the very best of luck with it. I hope you savour every moment of it and that it brings you great pleasure. But don’t, for goodness sake, make someone else feel lesser than because their taste isn’t the same as yours.

Now, I quite fancy a chocolate digestive dipped in a mug of milky Nescafé.

25. My dream holiday

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There’s an ongoing battle taking place on in a living room in Warwick. My father-in-law insists he will make space for me to use the kitchen. I insist that I have no intention of using the kitchen. In fact, I want to stay as far away from the kitchen for as long as possible. We go through the routine multiple times a day. “I’ll be out of your way soon,” he says. “Take your time,” I say. “You’re not in my way.” He seems desperate to get me into the kitchen to cook elaborate and time consuming meals for myself. But, while he busies himself making batches of hearty barley and vegetable soup and rich meaty liver and sausage stews (in the middle of a heatwave!), that he will freeze for use over the coming weeks, I want to use the kitchen for no more than making a cup of tea or grabbing something quick and easy out of the fridge.

You see, I’m a solo parent. That means that, like so many parents in my position, I am 100% responsible for everything. My kids are great, they help out (when asked or urged) but, ultimately, the buck stops with me and me only. Apart from Sunday lunch at our next door neighbours’ house and the very occasional meal out, I am responsible for planning and making three meals a day, every day of the week, week in and week out. Sure, I take shortcuts such as batch cooking and eating leftovers, but that still requires planning. In addition, we live in a remote place without take-away options or the option of a quick trip to the supermarket to buy something last minute. I’m responsible for making sure the washing up gets done (by me or the girls), that the shopping gets done, that the gas bottle gets replaced for the cooker, and so on. I love cooking and baking, I really do. But the day in day out of it can become monotonous drudgery that takes up far too much time and head space.

So, for me, a holiday is not having to do any of that or, at least, reduce it to an absolute minimum. The girls have been away all week and I’ve only had my own food needs to think about. For me, that was as good as spending a week in one of those 6-star hotels in the Maldives or Dubai. Seriously, it was bliss. I gave absolutely no thought to what I would eat for any of my meals. When I was hungry, I grabbed a piece of fruit from the fruit bowl or popped up to the M&S Simply Food just 200 metres away and bought a yogurt or a meal deal. One night I ate microwavable mac and cheese in front of the TV and it tasted like haute cuisine, simply because I didn’t have to cook it and I didn’t have to clean up after. For lunches, I popped into a bakery near the library and got a spinach and feta roll or a sausage roll.

The break from cooking is part of a larger sense of what ‘holiday’ means to me. As a solo parent, I am constantly in decision-making mode for every single aspect of my life and the lives of my two children (with advice and support coming from wonderful family and friends). Financial decisions, educational decisions, health decisions, house and car decisions, and on and on. So, a holiday for me is also a break from decision-making. When friends and family ask what I want to do when we’re in the UK and Ireland my answer is “I don’t care.” And I really mean it. So long as I don’t have to make a decision about what to do, I’m up for anything. By the end of the past twelve months we’ve just had, I can’t tell you what it’s like to set aside my decision fatigue and rest my tired brain.

The girls are back now from their week away and, boy, did I miss them. But it’s pizza for dinner tonight and maybe a take-away tomorrow. I’m still in holiday mode and, try as he might, my father-in-law is going to fail in his bid to get me into that kitchen.

A bliss-inducing cappuccino that comes with Smarties on the side.

Reading, part II: If she can see it, she can be it*

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*Motto of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in the Media

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Katie’s exciting first foray into the world of novels. As I was writing that post I was also thinking about Lily’s reading habits, and about the lack of female protagonists and heroes in the types of books she likes to read. And, as I was thinking these thoughts, it transpired that Lily herself was thinking exactly the same.

Currently, Lily is working her way through the Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz. Before that, she read all the Harry Potter books and she’s also a big fan of Percy Jackson and has asked for more of those for Christmas.

So, when she got out of bed one night a few weeks ago to come share her thoughts with me, I realised we had the same concerns. ‘There are no girls in the Alex Rider books’, she announced. ‘And, apart from Hermione, there are no girls in Harry Potter. It’s all boys.’ She backtracked a bit, explaining, ‘Well, there are girls, but they don’t do anything. They don’t do the stuff the boys do.’

A couple of weeks before this, Lily had a sleepover at her friend Luisa’s house, and accidently left her Alex Rider book there the next morning. Going to bed the next night, with the book still at Luisa’s, she didn’t know what to read. Not wanting to start a new book while in the middle of another one, I suggested she read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay ‘We should all be feminists’ (here’s a link to the TED talk of the same), that I had left on her bedside locker some weeks earlier, when she’d moved into her own bedroom. She shrugged and, unconvinced, took the book from my hands for want of anything else to read. An hour later, she was out of bed, wanting to talk about the essay with me, about the hotel reception scene, about men assuming Chimamanda couldn’t have money of her own. The essay exercised her already feminist view of the world and added a new layer to it.

So now, here she was, complaining that her action/adventure/espionage books were devoid of female heroes.

I had been thinking the same thing, while also contrasting those books to another favourite author of Lily’s, Jacqueline Wilson. Although Lily is no longer as interested in Jacqueline Wilson’s books as she once was, there was a time when she devoured everything that the prolific Wilson produced. And I realised that she was, on the one hand, reading books with girl protagonists in domestic settings, with domestic problems involving families, school friends, mothers in bad romantic relationships (a recurring Wilson motif) and, on the other, boy protagonists charged with saving the entire world, involved in international espionage, the sons of gods and wizards.

She reads all sorts of books, of course, and I’m being reductive to some extent, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I see the domesticity of girls and the world-saving of boys in the books that my 10-year old daughter reads. Even Susan, Lucy, Peter and Edmund, in their equal roles as kings and queens of Narnia, conform to gender stereotypes when Aslan confers on them their symbols and tools/weapons.

Because I haven’t, as either a child or an adult, ever been interested in those genres of action/espionage/fantasy that Lily is currently so fond of, I am in no position to advise her on books with female protagonists. I know the Skulduggery Pleasant series has a girl hero (who is Irish, to boot). Apart from that, I’m at a loss. Therefore, if anyone can recommend books in those genres with girl protagonists, I’d appreciate it.

Alternatively, as I’ve suggested to her, she may just have to write those books herself.