I work away from home three days a week. I then spend a lot of my time worrying about what to do with the other four days.
Worrying may be a bit of an understatement. Occasionally I torture myself with the thought that I should have gone out and done things that I have always wanted to do. I have no idea what I have always wanted to do. Filling my days with outside things hardly seems like a lifetime’s ambition but there go the thoughts that urge me to get out and about and do, do, do.
Take photographs of little known bits and parts of Bristol. Go for lunch specials. Go places. Do kid-friendly things. Do adventurous things. Do something that no one else has done. Do something, anything.
A lot of the days are filled with being tired. On one particular Tuesday, I had had no more than 3-4 hours sleep for each of the previous five or six nights. I couldn’t do anything. I was too tired. Then there are the in-between days where I am tired but not fatigued and energetic but not jubilant or even pleased or probably not even particularly happy. I could go out though and I could do something.
Those days are torture. Do I or don’t I? Caught between a duality is the least pleasant place to be. I worry that I will go out with the little one and I will be too tired to enjoy it, too tired to allow her to enjoy herself and far away from home while physically aching from the lack of sleep.
I hadn’t realised that being tired was physically painful until I had a baby. I have read some other blogs where mothers lament all the time they used to have and now have none which is why they don’t do anything. I don’t feel like that. Even when I had all the time in the world I would still be stuck in this awkward space of do I or don’t I. I would just find different excuses rather than I am too tired.
There’s no escape from the mind. Anyway. I decided to test out my doing / not-doing experience by spending one day in the house. No going out no matter what. Then the next day was spent outside doing anything I could think of. I would pay really close attention to all the parts of the torture that I could recognise.
I have mentioned some of the doing ones. If I go out I will be miserable or my little girl will be miserable and I won’t be able to do anything about it. It will be awful, I won’t be able to handle it. I will suffer in some way. If I stay at home I will be able to rest and feel better so I can go out another day.
If I stay in I will be miserable. I will be bored. We will both be bored, restless, unhappy and irritable and we will watch too much television and ruin our lives.
I stayed at home on the Monday and it was not so great. I didn’t get out of my pjs until after lunch and then felt guilty that I appeared to have done little all day when M’s dad came around. By the end of the day I was restless and bored and not as rested as I would have expected. Being at home with a toddler means that I end up cleaning after a toddler all day. She is brutal and merciless when it comes to investigating everything and everything includes the insides of cupboards and drawers.
On the Tuesday we went out and stayed out from 9 to 5. We went to Flinty Red for breakfast and to swimming after that. We walked up to Stokes Croft and headed over to Montpelier for bread and Eccles Cakes and cake and brownies. I had Mersina in her pouch and I was pushing her stroller as well so I didn’t feel overburdened with stuff. She would occasionally walk and when she was tired she would come up for a cuddle and I would strap her in to the Ergo.
We walked past Cheltenham Road and up Gloucester Road so we could see what Atomic Burger looked like but completely missed it and settled at Zazu’s Kitchen for lunch instead. All was going well so far until after we’d ordered and M decided she wanted to leave. She grabbed my bag and handed it to me. She then started trying to push her pram out the door and made a few dashes for the door and the road and even fell to the ground a few times to express her displeasure at not being able to leave.
Even then it wasn’t too bad. I played her some cartoons on my phone and we played an app called peek-a-boo and then I rushed through my burger while she ignored her children’s meal so we asked for it to be taken home.
We walked for a while and M slept for a while and we visited the Bristol Central Library to play with their toys and read their books. Again we were fine. We were both quite happy, in fact. It was a busy day and none of it was unmanageable.
The worries that plague me had assured me it would be unmanageable and that I would ache and suffer etc etc. Well I did ache a bit the following day but it was from carrying my toddler for hours.
I am not going to write myself some enthusiastic little motto or piece of advice to take with me. The above should suffice. There’s nothing wrong with staying in or going out but worrying is a bit of a killer all on its own.
Backpack on and ready to go on an adventure. Our exit was aided by the fact that she was feeling a little better that day and didn’t have green snots streaming down her face like she did the previous one.
When did spread-eagled naked women become a selling point for a cafe?
A newly open cafe on Clare Street and Corn Street, right in the centre of beautiful Bristol, is happily advertising itself as a place where they have copies of Playboy for the customers.
Here is the tweet which promotes this “entertainment for men”
Here is a link to the playmate of the month, Anna Clark, whose charming delights Martin Booth from Bristol Culture was happy to enjoy. Not only him but Fork magazine seemed to love them as well.
If you click on the link you will see that the images are not just hazy, fuzzy nods towards a respectful appreciation of the female human form. They are graphic images of a woman’s body in provocative poses.
I am honestly bewildered by how trivial this seems to many people. In the week that Lucy Ann-Holmes has been leading a campaign to stop the Sun from publishing topless women on its page 3 and Deborah Orr wrote and called it misogyny, no one seems very fussed that the Birdcage in Bristol thought it would go one step further and show women with all their clothes removed, let alone just their tops.
Orr writes “So often the publication of breasts as popular entertainment is there to say: “Look! She’s only a woman. That’s all.” This is true even when the woman in question is enthusiastically compliant.” – That does not ring true for me. Men, and some women, are essentially just looking at breasts. Just looking at physical parts that are sexually attractive and that sell. They are not looking at the woman behind the breasts.
In a newsagent you do not get a chance to look at the breasts and the rest until you purchase that type of magazine off the top shelf. This made me wonder if it was illegal to have this material in full view and with ready access to little children such as my 19-month-old daughter. However, the reason newsagents place magazines away from normal access is out of a voluntary sign-up to a code developed by the National Federation of Retail Newsagents (NFRN),(see Bailey Review pdf) so there is nothing illegal in it.
They do suggest something that the Managing Director of Birdcage may want to keep in mind – “Making your customers aware that you adopt a ‘family-friendly’ policy on display, you may find that parents with children are much happier to shop in your store.” (National Federation of Retail Newsagents, 2011)
So it is not illegal but you would not be able to show the images in those magazines on television. You could not post them on advertising billboards and you would not be able to post them on Facebook without them being deemed offensive.
I asked Bristol City Council whether such a display was illegal and they failed to reply. I won’t address the moral and cultural implications of pornography but it is on my mind as I read about the Istanbul convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence and read Lauren Wolfe’s interview in New Europe. There is further research about the effect of pornography on children but maybe this isn’t of interest to the Birdcage either.
So tell me, Giorgina Haslam, how do you justify using women’s naked bodies, positioned for the sexual pleasure of men, to advertise your cafe? What does this say about your cafe? You obviously don’t want people like me visiting.
I would rather visit somewhere where people looking at me want to know about me and not about what pleasure my physical form could give them. Especially when most of the time my breasts are exposed in order to feed my child.
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Posted in Baby, Bristol, Coffee, Comment
Tagged Birdcage, Breastfeeding, playboy, pornography