Tricks of the mind

It's amazing how easily your mind can start to play tricks on you when you're in the house alone at night. I use 'alone' in its loosest possible term as I'm not counting the 3 sleeping children and 2 cats, none of whom would be much use in a fight (unless there's a martial art which involves screaming very loud and very high that I haven't heard of; they'd be very good at that. The children, not the cats that is.); but I am technically the only responsible adult in the house.
I sent my eldest daughter down to the shop to get some milk this afternoon, and what I didn't realise until about five hours later was that she'd left the back door open. Not wide open, just not shut properly, and that's all my brain needed to go into paranoid mode.
[Just to explain - the back door is actually at the front of the house, but leads into the basement, which is why I didn't notice it until I went downstairs to do some washing.]
So I had a quick look round down there, mostly to make sure the cats hadn't escaped, and they hadn't so I carried on with what I was doing. About 10 minutes later I started thinking about how I'd been up on the top floor bathing the girls, and anybody could've come in without me noticing. The little rational corner of my brain told me I was being stupid. After all, we live in a pretty safe area; the house is a long way back from the road so it's not like anyone would be able to notice that the door was a teeny bit open when they were walking past, and presumably they would've shut the door properly behind them so it would look less suspicious.
Unfortunately the rational corner of my brain is but a whisper against the strident shouting of the irrational paranoid corner of my brain, who's also a bit of a smartarse and can come up with a rebuttal argument for any point you can make. Admittedly, this usually consists of  'ah, but you never know', but that can be surprisingly effective. It worked against the first two rational arguments, and then we went into double bluff for the third - would they have closed the door? Or would they have left it exactly as they found it, just in case it had been left that way intentionally in the first place and thus shutting it would have been more suspicious rather than less.
Naturally I gave into my irrational brain and went downstairs to perform a thorough check of every nook and cranny, just to be sure that no sneaky double bluffing burglar/rapist/murderer/werewolf was hiding down there. 3 circuits of the playroom, bathroom and utility room later, I'd just about convinced myself that all was well. It's still possible that I'll barricade the door downstairs just in case a very thin burglar/rapist/murderer/werewolf managed to hide behind the oil tank (the only place I didn't look, because the gap is so small only my 5 year old and the cats can fit through it), but hopefully rational me will win on this occasion.
I do suspect that this paranoid part is something that comes along with being a parent and having responsibility for small people. I distinctly remember in the years pre-children when I really did live on my own, once waking up in the middle of the night because I thought I heard a noise downstairs. I was so tired that the only thought that went through my mind that time was, "Well if there is someone down there, they can take what they like, just as long as they don't disturb me," after which I promptly went back to sleep. I really wish my brain still worked like that.
As it doesn't any more, I'm promoting my mental wellbeing on this occasion by watching a real life crime documentary before I go to bed.
Don't have nightmares.

A-Z of blips

For reasons completely and utterly unknown, it seemed like a really good idea last week to see if I could blip a song I liked by a band beginning with each letter of the alphabet. So 2 and a half weeks later I finally made it to the end and in case you missed any, here they all are with an accompanying Spotify playlist. Enjoy!

A: Aqualung - Strange and Beautiful

B: Blur - Coffee & TV

C: Cure - Lovecats

D: Dinosaur Jr. - Start Choppin'
E: Electrasy - Morning Afterglow
F: Faith No More - Epic
G: Guns 'n' Roses - Patience
H: Hardline - In The Hands Of Time (and also accidentally House of Pain - Jump Around)
I: INXS - Elegantly Wasted
J: Jane's Addiction - Been Caught Stealing
K: K's Choice - Virgin State Of Mind
L: Lit - Miserable
M: Metallica - Enter Sandman
N: Nickelback - Burn It To The Ground
O: Offspring - Self Esteem
P: Primal Scream - Rocks
Q: Queens of The Stone Age - Feel Good Hit Of The Summer
R: Radiohead - Paranoid Android
S: Sultans of Ping - Where's Me Jumper?
T: Terrorvision - Oblivion
U: U2 - Beautiful Day
V: Velvet Underground - Venus In Furs
W: Whale - Hobo Humpin' Slobo Babe
X: XTC - Making Plans For Nigel
Y: Yello - The Race
Z: ZZ Top - Gimme All Your Lovin'

And for the Swedish amongst you and in the pursuit of completeness (although I couldn't find them on Spotify)
Å: Åke Hasselgård - My Melancholy Baby
Ä: Änglagård - Kung Bore
Ö: Örjan Englund - Kärringar ska veta hut

A return... of sorts

Sometimes my capacity for sheer laziness shocks and appalls me.

When I stopped doing #oneaday last month, I didn't actually intend to take a break from posting for quite this long. In fact, I've been surprised at how much I've missed blogging; there have been so many occasions when I've been doing something else, and mentally started writing a post in my head, but without the motivation that came from doing #oneaday, they never made it from my head to my fingers.

I really enjoyed being part of the #oneaday group, and through it have added some lovely people to my twitter-stream. Unfortunately I still don't have the desire to take the challenge back up and place myself under the pressure of 7 day a week entries. What I need is a little bit of motivation to do more without taking all the fun out of it. As of next week, my youngest child will be at daycare for 15 hours a week over 3 days, so my intention is to write something on each of those days. It may not necessarily be on here, but there will be writing of some sort happening.

Fingers crossed I can get over my natural inclination towards indolence and the novelty of having time to myself again after all these years. Otherwise it's just going to be 15 hours of surfing the net, twittering, playing games and drinking coffee.

Actually, that sounds rather good....

Taking a break

Yesterday was my first miss of oneaday after a 50 day run. I'm pretty pleased (and very surprised) at getting so far, but think that it's time to take a break for a week or so. It started out as fun, and a challenge, but has recently descended into being a chore and I have enough daily chores as it is. Not that I've quite run out of things to write about, but my enthusiasm for writing about anything at all has disappeared and that doesn't make for interesting reading. I don't want to give up altogether, and hopefully I'll feel a little better about things in a week or so and can pick up the gauntlet again.

We'll see.

But thanks to everybody who has made the time to read my frequently inane ramblings - I don't think I would have even got this far otherwise.

Not quite what I intended

My original plan for today's #oneaday was to write about a tv programme called 'Simon och Tomas: Design' that is usually shown on Monday evenings. But we turned the tv over to the right channel at the right time, only to be confronted by something called 'Stjärnkockerna' (which I think is sort of a cross between Celebrity Masterchef and that cookery show that Anton du Beke presented, whatever it was called) instead which was something of a disappointment.

We discovered Simon and Tomas not long after we arrived here, and it was the first piece of non-UK or US TV that we really watched. They are a pair of interior designers (similar-ish to Colin and Justin) but Simon is English and only speaks English (and swears a lot in English) most of the time, and of course Tomas is Swedish and speaks - well, Swedish. The bilingual conversations that they have fascinate me, as well as making it easier to keep up with what's being said in Swedish, and they're also quite amusing. And that's without mentioning their two little dogs, or 'the boys' as they call them who go everywhere too and generally cause chaos.

Anyway, as they weren't on this evening, I can't write about them. As you were.




(Sveriges Fulaste Hem -> Sweden's Ugliest Home)

Ice hockey or UFC?

Last night one of Mr.B's colleagues took us to an ice hockey match at the local stadium. Happily we also had use of one of the corporate boxes, so were able to watch in some comfort and with a free cup of coffee.

It wasn't the first ice hockey match I'd ever been to (I went once in the US a few years ago) but to be honest, most of what I know comes entirely from playing EA Hockey on the Megadrive. And the main thing I remember from playing that is that it's ok to fight members of the opposing team. Which is what happened last night. (Not me, the players).

There was a particularly nasty shove by the opposition of one of the home team which left him injured, but for some reason went unpunished. A couple of minutes later someone decided to punish the culprit himself by taking a swing at him and was promptly sent to sit in the corner for 10 minutes to think about what he had done. However the home team's blood was well and truly on the boil by then and it wasn't long before another fight broke out but on a much larger scale than before. I couldn't help but be bewildered at the sight of two men having a full on brawl (helmets and gloves off) whilst 4 match officials just kind of stood and looked on. Apparently that was because they were trying to stop everyone else from joining in - although there were still a couple of other scuffles. The fight went on for at least 5 minutes and the spectators were starting to get a little restless. Eventually the referees put a stop to it and then proceeded to spend even longer deciding on who was going to get punished and by how much. They read a big long list of names and penalties out after that, but it didn't mean an awful lot to me.

Interestingly, the chants that were used wouldn't have been out of place at any English football match. The away supporters were very vocal (and there were quite a few of them considering the distance they had to travel to get there), but I was quite disappointed in the lack of home supporters. To my knowledge, our team are currently near the bottom of the table where they have been languishing over the last few years, and the supporters have got a little frustrated and started to give up on them. Which is a shame as it's times like that when you need your supporters the most. But then, they did play pretty badly so I can kind of understand why. The supporters were also at their most vocal when cheering on the fight which was quite depressing.

Final score: Södertälje SK 2 - Skellefteå AIK 7 (One SSK goal was scored in the first 2 minutes, and one in the last 2. The rest of the time they were mostly fighting and falling over.)

Dinner for one

Too tired to do my ice hockey report justice so that will have to keep till tomorrow. We went back to Mr.B's colleague's house for dinner afterwards, and had a really lovely evening with him and his family. Good food, good wine and good company - what more could anyone ask? 

They introduced us to this fantastic sketch that is a staple fixture on Swedish tv on New Year's Eve (and lots of other places too according to wikipedia). Despite the fact that it stars an English actor, I'd never heard of it before. It's a beautiful and clever piece of vintage comedy and worth 10 minutes of your time:

Tom Tits Experiment

As this week has been half-term, we managed to get in a proper family day out to the Tom Tits Experiment. Shamefully it was the first time we'd been together despite the fact that it's only a 10 minute drive away. Basically, it's one of those hands-on science museums for kids which is nearly as much fun for adults.

We all had a great time, although I did struggle a little bit trying to find the words to explain Newton's 3rd law and Moments to an 8 year old and 5 year old so they could understand it. The 'body' exhibition meant dragging up GCSE Biology from the depths of my memory in which I had shoved it to explain which internal organ was which and where it went. I liked the pickled brain in a jar best, but they were more interested in the plastic models of foetal development and the actual birth process.... happily there were no awkward questions to catch us unawares.

This was by far and away my favourite thing that I saw though:

I asked the youngest at lunchtime what had been her favourite bit so far. Her answer, "The ice cream that we haven't had yet."

We managed to get round everything inside, but we'll be making another trip back in the summer as there's lots of outdoor stuff that obviously wasn't available today (being covered in 3 feet of snow still), including a hot air balloon!

The power of film

There are many films that are extremely powerful and memorable in one way or another, but believe it or not, in this instance I'm actually talking about the Blair Witch Project. I remember vividly going to see it; I was living in Switzerland at the time, but there was one small cinema in town that showed US films with subtitles rather than dubbing. A friend was over for a visit and it seemed like as good a way to spend a Saturday afternoon as any. Unfortunately we would have been better off in the pub. Original? Yes. Scary? Erm.... not really. We spent most of our time giggling at the lazy subtitling - there was one point where the female character screams and swears at one of the others for a good couple of minutes, and what did the subtitles say? 'Non.'

Anyway, it was coming to the end and I was ready to write it off as something of a disappointment (particularly considering the hype) when we came to the last scene. For some reason this image freaked me out, probably more than it should.

So when I turned round this afternoon to find my eldest daughter stood with her face pressed into the corner of the lift I admit it did send a few chills down my spine momentarily. Simply because of a 5 minute piece of film that I last saw 10 years ago.

(She said it was because the lift was smelly and she thought that by sticking her face into the corner she could escape. And nobody hit me over the head while I was looking at her.)

My life in music (part 1)

Inspired partly by Rachel's Temple of Love post last week and heavily influenced by the 'CD CV' feature Mark Radcliffe does sometimes, I present to you some of the stand-out tunes that I can date my life by.  There's even an accompanying Spotify* playlist which I had a great time making this morning, and which could have contained an awful lot more songs.

Stand and Deliver/Take it Easy: These are two of the first songs I ever remember, largely down to having a much older sister who thought it was hugely amusing to teach a 5 year old all the words to the very first Eagles album. As she was a punk at the time, I suspect she knew she would be pushing her luck to teach me to sing along to any of the other music she listened to.

Agadoo/The birdie song/Pass the Dutchie: 3 songs that launched a thousand children's birthday parties. Not a high point to be fair.

Love in the First Degree: We could spend hours pretending to be Bananarama and making up rubbish dance routines. Happily this phase didn't last too long thanks to...

Hot in the City/Paradise City: The same sister who indoctrinated me with The Eagles as a small child also introduced me to rock music when I neared my teenage years. She very kindly copied some of her vinyl onto cassette for me (yes, it was that long ago) which I had to hide from my parents. My mother walking into my room right at the sweary bit of 'Mr Brownstone' got us both into a lot of trouble, but it was worth it.

The Final Countdown/China in your Hand: For some reason I had a tape with Europe on one side and T'Pau on the other and I listened to them both far more than is actually healthy.

Money for Nothing/Poisoning Pigeons: These were courtesy of the record collection of my friend's dad and we spent many Sunday afternoons listening to Dire Straits and playing cards. Tom Lehrer was more reserved for singing in the van on the way to one of our frequent camping trips.

Harvest for the World/Another Day in Paradise: These were the first two albums that I ever bought with my own money. I'll be your baby tonight was the first cassette single I ever bought, I think because it was in the bargain bin (at least I hope that was the reason).

Time of my life: I remember vividly going to a sleepover with a load of friends and watching Dirty Dancing for the first time.

The Time Warp/Should I stay or should I go: Listening to these takes me back to secondary school discos and sweet sixteen parties. Mostly good memories...

Dizzy/Sit Down/Birdhouse in your soul/Mmm mmm mmm mmm: Inextricably linked with 6th form college and sneaking off to the pub at lunchtime with boys who had floppy hair.

Purple Haze: My first serious boyfriend who forbade me to speak while Hendrix was playing. He was also into Sepultura at the time, but I tried not to listen to that.

Caravan of Love/We are Family: We used both of these in 6th form productions. Best thing about being in the music & drama department was being told indirectly by one of our teachers that if we put Bacardi into a can of coke, nobody would know that we were drinking.

Two Princes: My year out working and living away from home for the first time. This was the favourite song of one of my housemates'. I think I probably drank too much to remember anything else.

The playlist has a few more that aren't mentioned here - no particular memories associated with them, but they're very much of their time.
Post-1994 music will come another day.

*If you don't have Spotify and would like it, send me your email address as I have a spare invite or two.

What's brown and sticky?

Ever noticed how you can have the same conversation multiple times with a straight face and then on the 25th time all of a sudden it is quite the most hysterical thing in the world?

This happened to me at tea-time this evening, all because of this:

And yes, I am more than 7 years old.*

I had bought the girls some miniature bars as a treat and as a result Mr.B had one of those 'things I never thought I'd say' moments when he told one of them, "If you don't finish your tea then I'll eat your Plopp." Things snowballed from there and I ended up in the serious giggles, tears rolling down my face and unable to breathe. But the funniest part? The kids had absolutely no idea why I was laughing so much (the only thing Plopp means to them is horrible gooey chocolatey caramel stuff) yet they giggled along with me anyway. Ok, maybe they were giggling at me, but still.

*(Although at times you may think otherwise. The correct answer to the joke in the title if you didn't already know is: a stick - one of the few jokes that always stupidly makes me laugh like a drain whenever I tell it to someone who hasn't heard it before.)

A bad day

Today I am having a bad day. Ok, I know that in the grand scheme of things it's actually nowhere near being a proper bad day, more of a string of petty annoyances, but I find myself less equipped than usual to deal with them in an adult fashion. Don't worry, I'm not going to bore you further with a detailed list of things that have gone wrong (and because if I did I would be forced to confront just how trivial they really are).

Anyway, the consequence is that I have more to do than time to do it in, so reluctantly I've had to admit that this is the least important thing on the list, and will not be doing a proper #oneaday entry today. Hopefully I will have pulled myself together by tomorrow...

Happy St. David's Day.

Worth a read and other things

Interesting thing, habit. I'd kind of got into a routine of posting my oneaday stuff late at night, often in a hurry to get it done so I could go to bed - for no other real reason than it usually takes me that long to think of something to say. So when yesterday I ended up writing and posting much earlier in the day, it kind of threw my evening out. I was left with one of those nagging feelings that I ought to be doing something else besides watching tv and I just couldn't shake it. That aside, there was a certain amount of satisfaction to have got it over and done with and out of the way. Hence my attempt to repeat this today.

Although it doesn't make for much of an actual blogpost, I have been enjoying doing a 'worth a read' roundup of the week - although I do read as many of the posts as I can each day, I quite like having a Sunday catch-up. And Google Reader makes it that much easier.

Anyway, without further ado, here you are:

A Grandia Tale by Lauren (because I still have my PC copy of Grandia somewhere in storage and now want to play it again)
These are the sheep that I walk past to and from work every day by Sean
Feeling sexy by Chris
Cheescake Brownies by Jennifer (because they sound so damn good)
Tolkein: why I don't hate him like you do by Jazmeister
Temple of Love by Rachel
Demystifying games by Chris
I <3 by Daniel

This week has obviously been a good week, and it was actually quite tricky to pick these ones out - there were a lot more I could have added.

Oh, and can I just mention, for those very kind people who have added me to their blogrolls, my name is Kirsty. Not Katy (due to a misread very early on in the life of #oneaday I suspect).

I've started so I'll finish

When it comes to games, my perseverance has been somewhat lacking recently. I'm gradually wearing Mr.B down in my attempts to persuade him to let me buy a 360 and/or PS3, but don't feel like I can totally justify it until I've completed more of the games I've got for the consoles we already have.

Christmas left me with a huge stack of games thanks to gifts and a trip round a 2nd hand games shop where I just bought a load of random stuff because it was cheap. Some of which weren't even worth the £1.99 I paid for them, but that's besides the point.

My list of owned but unfinished games currently looks like this:

PS2
Dark Chronicle
XIII
The Da Vinci Code
Atelier Iris 3
Persona 3
LoTR The Third Age
LoTR Fellowship of the Ring
FF XII
Myst III

Wii
Zack&Wiki
CSI Hard Evidence
Tunguska

DS
Scribblenauts
My Sims Kingdom

Mac
Fable (the Lost Chapters)
C&C Tiberium Wars

I suspect the problem is that I don't have the time or concentration usually to pick one game and play it often enough so I keep forgetting where I am and what I'm supposed to be doing when I do play them. And some of them have just failed to grab me altogether. I did finally manage to complete Zelda Spirit Tracks last night, so need to pick one to get on with next. Most likely Fable or FFXII - depends whether I can kick Mr.B off the PS2 (he is addicted to Need for Speed Underground) for long enough...

Nordic Walking

After my trip there this afternoon, I wanted to write today's post on the Systembolaget, but was a little concerned that it had the potential to turn into another rant so I'll save it for another day. Instead I just wanted to mention the phenomenon that is Nordic Walking.

We see loads of people doing this round and about, mostly older people, quite often in couples, and it has fascinated me since we arrived. I don't know how much benefit there is to it but they all look quite fit and healthy when they're jauntily striding down the road, so I'm quite tempted to give it a shot. Mind you, strolling down a path that is narrowed from the snow with an old lady determinedly nordic walking towards you can actually be quite intimidating. I jumped into the snow out of the way just in case - those sticks are not supposed to have spikes on the bottom as far as I know, but there's no accounting for what home modifications these innocent looking white haired little old ladies might have done...

Here's a short semi-related video that made me giggle at the end:

'Forced' maternity leave

I read this post by Sweden's EU minister Birgitta Ohlsson earlier this evening and found myself rather frustrated.

Whilst it is admirable that gender equality is such an issue in Sweden, it often feels to me like things have been pushed too far in the opposite direction, to the detriment of women's choices rather than their advancement. Childcare provision is excellent and affordable, which gives women the ability to return to work after having children without too much difficulty - unlike in the UK where childcare is sometimes prohibitively expensive. However, instead of encouraging women to return to work if they wish, rather they are actively discouraged from staying at home to the point where it is almost socially unacceptable to do so. Frequently on official forms the only options are for working/studying/jobseeker/parental leave; there is no tick box that a full-time stay-at-home parent fits in. It may be that a mother staying at home to care for her children is a traditional gender stereotype, but that does not automatically make it wrong. And there is no reason why a man cannot be a stay at home parent either - if they decide that is how they wish to raise their children. But this choice has been virtually taken out of the equation, and that to me is not progress. Birgitta Ohlsson does not want women to be forced into staying at home, she apparently just wants them to be forced into employment instead so they can pay tax, regardless of their wishes.

The main issue of the article deals with compulsory maternity leave for the first 6 weeks after a baby is born. The maternity/paternity leave system here in Sweden is a vast improvement over that in the UK, with it being longer and also allowed to be shared between the parents as suits them, giving the fathers just as much opportunity to spend time with their child as the mother. But whatever you like to think, men do not actually suffer any physical side effects from the birth of a child, and the first few weeks are much less important for them than they are for the mother. Ohlsson has stated that she intends to return to work within a month of giving birth. When the time comes, if she feels like she can then that's great. Unfortunately right now she obviously has absolutely no idea of what is in store. Any new mother will tell you that the first few weeks are difficult. Your hormones are reeling, and unless you are very lucky, you will also most likely be suffering from sleep deprivation. And that's assuming that the birth itself is straightforward with no lasting physical effects, and not even taking breastfeeding and the possibility of PND into consideration.

I don't think the issue should be of the women who are going to 'suffer' from not being allowed to return to work in the first 6 weeks, rather it should be about the women who will be protected from being compelled perhaps by an uncaring employer or spouse to return to work immediately if they are not ready to. One situation will not likely cause harm, the other could prove to be extremely harmful. Whether 6 weeks is an appropriate length of time I don't know, but I believe there should definitely be a set period of 'compulsory' maternity leave for just these reasons. And let's not forget that this is not just an issue affecting Sweden, it is an EU law that is under discussion and not all other countries in the EU necessarily have such an 'enlightened' view on gender equality as Sweden.

Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to say that all women should stay at home with their children, rather that either parent should have the choice if the opportunity is there. Not everybody can afford to live on one salary, but people should not be stigmatised by the choices that they make. Isn't that what liberation is about? Giving people the freedom of choice.

Sporting allegiances

Before we moved over to Sweden, one of Mr.B's colleagues gave him a bright yellow 'Sverige' t-shirt just so he would know who to support when we got here. And moving to a new country does give a certain sense that you should be cheering them on in their sporting ventures as it would be rude not to. The difficulty comes when your home country team comes up against your adopted country - who do you cheer for then?

We didn't expect it to be much of an issue for a while as Sweden didn't qualify for the football World Cup, and wouldn't necessarily have played against England even if they had. But then came the Winter Olympics. We've taken an interest in both Great Britain and Sweden as they've been going on and haven't begrudged Sweden their 8 medals to GB's 1. But now it's the acid test - Sweden and Team GB are currently going head-to-head in a tense playoff for the last place in the men's curling semi-finals and all of a sudden we have to pick our allegiances.

I'm wondering if it's wrong to just cheer on whoever is winning at the time...

(But on Saturday, regardless of who is skiing from Britain or Sweden, we shall be cheering on Ghana and the Snow Leopard in the Men's Slalom.)

Braid (in which I pretend to write a review)

Not very well today with something that may or may not be Vinterkräksjuka so am cheating a little and using the sort-of review I wrote on Braid because of Spriteclub.
I'm doing so rather reluctantly, as so many of the #oneadayers are proper games reviewers and this bears no resemblance to something they would probably write. Anyway, here goes (with fingers crossed none of them read it).

For anyone who has never come across it, I would describe Braid as a kind of puzzle platformer where time goes both forwards and backwards.
I can sum it up in two words:

Original
Frustrating

The frustration does of course mean that it is incredibly rewarding when you finally work out how to do a level, but I'm not entirely convinced that the payoff is always worth the frequent temptation to throw the computer out of the window. I don't really understand the relevance of the story but then I never did get to the end so maybe it makes more sense the further you get through.

The whole being able to rewind if you get killed is a great concept, and the fluidity of time and motion varying with each level stops it from getting repetitive. I like the style and artwork but can't comment on the music as I only ever played it with the sound off. It's a good enough game that having played the first few levels on the demo I was really keen to buy the full version. Maybe I'll eventually complete it, some time around 2015.

Struggled for a while trying to decide what score to give. In so many ways it should be a 9, but in the end the aggravation with certain levels was just too much - it almost took it down to a 7, but the fact that you don't have to complete every single level in a world before unlocking the next one rescued it up to a final well-deserved 8.

When internal debates go wrong

My lovely Swedish teacher decided to give us extra homework half way through this week in the form of preparing a discussion of an article about women having babies at 60 years old. The fact that we were barely able to talk in basic sentences about ourselves last week without resorting to English is presumably besides the point.

Naturally I decided to work out my discussion points in English first, but this proved to be more difficult than I expected. Obviously a simple statement against it was not going to be enough, but for every reason behind my stance I found I could think of a fairly legitimate counter-point. Things that would have seemed clear-cut to me 10 years ago, now were much fuzzier. Which did make me question whether what I was thinking was actually right. I was originally going to write a post detailing all these points and opposing arguments in the hopes that it would clarify things for me, but unfortunately it didn't and I ended up tying myself in knots.

I admit my opinions are influenced by my own life - whilst my mother was not incredibly old when I was born by today's standards, in the 1970's she was. Maybe I was just an unpleasant child, but I will always remember being horribly embarrassed when I was young by my white haired mum and dad and hated being constantly asked if they were my grandparents. And though I loved them dearly, the generation gap was immense and despite trying, my mother often struggled with relating to the way things were for me as a teenager. She grew up in the second world war, left school at 13 to work in t'mill, and was married with a child by the time she was 20 - all perfectly normal for her generation, and worlds apart from mine. Although as I got older the generation gap did diminish quite a lot and I relied on and valued her knowledge and experience a tremendous amount, especially when I had a family of my own.

So my final answer to the discussion point ready for tomorrow? Jag tycker att det är inte bra för kvinnor att bli mammor 60 år gammal, men det är ett personligt val.

If you disagree, then that's fine. I can probably tell you all your arguments anyway.

Worth a read round-up of the week

In case you haven't had time to read all the #oneaday blogs this week, here are a few you really should not miss:

A cautionary tale by @cidergirli

One a day by Jazmeister (Almost entirely for one sentence in the last paragraph which made me smile)

Rudeness, favours and karma by @sorayaleila

The trouble with cinemas by @Rhiarti

And you should definitely read this and this by Chris about the future of #oneaday if you haven't already.