Yesterday afternoon, I was roasting at the citadel in Namur. Late last night I checked into my hotel in a very damp and cool foreign location. Air travel is extraordinary. I had a good dose of working mother’s guilt as the boys waved good bye to me on Sunday evening and the Princess sobbed “why do you have to go away so often?” For the first time, Mr. Waffle was also away so we had to deploy our babysitting team to look after the children and get them to bed this evening. It seems to have gone fine but it is odd to think that our little family was in three different countries today.
Work
Equal pay for equal work
Today is equal pay day in Belgium. Here is the mildly amusing poster (it’s not that I’m emotional, it’s that I’m underpaid is a rough translation of the slogan) and here is a long pdf document from last year that the Belgians have translated into English as well. That latter perhaps only for the enthusiasts. Peggy even has a video.
When Ireland joined the EU in 1973 it sought a derogation from the equal pay legislation on the grounds that it would beggar us. But we didn’t get it. Is it any wonder I love Europe? In the 1960s and early 70s women working in the public sector and many parts of the private sector including the banks faced a “marriage barâ€. If they were married, they had to give up their jobs.
I suppose in that context it’s no surprise that more than 30 years after the forced introduction of equal pay legislation, the gender pay gap continues. In an EU document (found via this blog, it is so typical of the EU that it’s easier to find its documents via a random blog than via its own multifarious and exciting websites for the various directorate generals – “corporate strategy, what’s that, we’re all individuals here†and people think they’re just faceless bureaucrats, you know) there is a table showing the gender pay gap over 25 European countries in 2002. The average gap is 25%. 25% people! Your sister, your daughter, your mother: their work is worth 25% less than a man’s. See how your country performs on page 22.
More funny children stories tomorrow.
“I’m going to live forever, baby, remember my name.”
Although I am no stranger to celebrity (did you know that I have been on Bulgarian television and euronews ?), it is with a certain amount of pride that I tell you that I am going to be two radio programmes this weekend. Before we started, the presenter of one said to me “I gather you have a blog, can we talk about that?”. My almost overwhelming desire for increased readership (my ego, my ego) fought a severe, though ultimately unavailing battle, with my desire to maintain some anonymity. Anyone who finds me on the radio, gets the usual prize, yes, yes, a reply to your comment.
My appearance on Bulgarian television merits, I feel a full description. Many years ago, when it was still a distant and exotic country and not somewhere three quarters of the Irish populace had bought summer houses, I travelled to Bulgaria for work. When I left home, it was snowing and many flights had been grounded but I fortunately (ha, ha) got a flight for the first leg of my journey to Germany. When I got there, it was to find that Lufthansa had dug in its heels and was refusing to go anywhere in this kind of weather but, it did offer me the alternative of travelling with the plucky Bulgarian flag carrier (the name of which temporarily eludes me). As the meeting I was speaking at was the following day, I felt I had to travel with them though I noticed that most of the other passengers, including many of the Bulgarians were refusing to do so and demanding the Lufthansa flight for which they had paid. Funnily enough, this did not inspire confidence.
Anyhow, I travelled on to Sofia uneventfully but arrived very late. Whereas I had been due to arrive at 6.00 in the evening it was closer to midnight and very cold and snowy when I got in. Inevitably, my luggage was lost. I had packed in my luggage details of the hotel where I was staying. I was a lot younger then. It was before mobile phones were as prevalent as they are now. I looked around the depressing airport (if you’ve ever been to Charleroi airport, it was like that but without the glamour) and the couple of slightly sinister smoking male figures hanging round and felt nervous. All the shops and desks were closed and the person scheduled to meet me at 6 had, obviously, long since trotted home to bed. When one of the sinister figures sidled up to me and asked “you need hotel?”, I think the answer was clear to both of us.
The sinister figure said he needed my passport to book the hotel so I handed it over and hopped into his cab. Mercifully, sometimes being foolish and naive doesn’t lead to disaster as all was as he described and he dropped me safely at the Hilton or some such bastion of American imperialism. I got my passport back too, though, for all I know, not before it was copied a number of times.
After all this trauma, I phoned various people from the hotel to share my anguish. This was my first experience of a satellite phone. Did you know that they were ferociously expensive yokes? I didn’t until I came to pay the bill and the cost of non chargeable to my employer phone calls considerably exceeded my room charge.
The next day, the day of my presentation, was Sunday. To summarise: I had no luggage, no idea where I was supposed to be staying, the vaguest idea of where the conference might be, no presentation (also in my luggage), no washbag, no knowledge of Bulgarian and no possibility of ringing the office to solve some, at least, of these problems (Sunday, remember?). Nothing daunted, your heroine began to wander round Sofia in the snow looking for a half remembered hotel location. I ended up in a government ministry building. A caretaker there whose job seemed to come with a bedsit, from which he operated, took pity on me, brought me in, looked at my travel stained, grubby and damp (from falling in the snow twice) clothes and called someone. In due course, his neighbour, a doctor who spoke English came in. Not only could she speak English but she knew about my conference and where it was. And because she was a saint, she brought me there on a tram.
When the conference organiser saw me, she started blessing herself in reverse (orthodox, you will recall) which I found unnerving for a number of reasons, and thanking God for my lucky escape from all the dangers which might have beset me late at night in Sofia. She also told me I was on next, so on I went, presentationless, unmade up and uncombed, dressed in quite filthy clothes. Wasn’t it great that Bulgarian telly was there?
O frabjous day
Today is my birthday.
To celebrate, I took yesterday off work. On Thursday my lovely, lovely colleagues surprised me with cake, flowers and chocolates. This is as a direct result of my insistence on constantly reminding the people around me of the date of my birthday. How can people be expected to remember, if you don’t remind them? And, if you’ve forgotten, it’s never too late to send a card.
Mind you, this conversation was was not entirely what I hoped for:
Me: It’s my birthday, happy birthday to me. Gosh I’m so old now. Who would have thought youthful little me would ever reach this great age. Goodness gracious me, go on, go on guess how old I am.
Foolish work colleague: 40?
Indignant me: 38!
And, after a particularly busy period, things are going swimmingly at work in general at the moment.
The Princess greeted me with this the other day:
The excitement. However, since she is left handed and firmly believes that the world should be ordered to suit her, this is what I got on my birthday card:
Lovely all the same.
As it is my birthday, I reserve the right to put in here whatever random things take my fancy. This, as you will be fully aware, is not the kind of operation we usually run here at waffle blogs incorporated. Please see below, Cinderella of the ancien régime:
The Princess is very taken with “Barbie of Swan Lake” these days. What can I say; it was recommended to us by friends. We will cut them in future. It stars Frasier as the baddy and Janice from “Friends” as his daughter. You would think that at least one of these people had enough money to be saved from the indignity of doing voiceovers in “Barbie of Swan Lake”. So taken is the Princess with this that Mr. Waffle has bought her the music by Mr. Tchaikovsky. She is unclear as to why Mr. Tchaikovsky is so derivative and composes music identical to that made famous by Barbie but she likes his stuff. You may see her dancing/flapping to the music here.
In conclusion, you might like to know, 38 is a lot of candles and this isn’t the half of it:
Please feel free to sympathise
I recently failed to get selected for a post in Ireland. Yes, I know my job here is perfect but, supposing that we wanted to move back to Dublin, wouldn’t it be nice if I could get paid?
My family in Ireland, in the manner of families, delved into the details with more enthusiasm than I might have wished successfully bringing out the peeved adolescent in me: “How many candidates were there?” “Dunno, can you leave me alone please?”
I rang home the other day and got my brother. I heard him calling my mother “It’s John McKenna on the phone”.
“Who’s John McKenna?” I asked when she picked up. “Nobody,” she said hastily “just your brother being foolish”. In the background I heard him say “No, no tell her he’s that golfer who never makes the cut”.
And to think that the poor Princess has two younger brothers.
Reality Television
Whispering male voice with peculiarly patronising tone: Mr. Waffle is home alone until Thursday while his wife is off for a work trip (or an illicit break of the working mother as it is better known). He has faithfully promised her that he will not be cross with the children while she is away even if they cry all the time and conspire to make him late for work.
Whispering male voice continues: Mr. Waffle returns from work and is left alone with his three small children. [Camera pans around scenes of chaos; the boys cry and the Princess is bold]. We see Mr. Waffle remaining calm and firmly putting her in the “coin colereâ€. The annoying whisperer observes: The boys continue to cry; will Mr. Waffle remain true to his promise or will he snap? Daniel gets sick. Michael crawls away while Mr. Waffle mops up. The Princess wees in the confines of the “coin colere†because, as she explains, she couldn’t go to the toilet because she was in the “coin colereâ€. Michael calls merrily from the bathroom “I’ve climbed on to the cistern and I’m trying to get my head into the toilet bowl from hereâ€.
In fact, my loving husband, tells me it wasn’t as bad as I might have imagined when I left first thing on Monday morning but he said that Wednesday was a particularly low point. In the morning, he dropped her highness to school with the boys in the buggy. Then he walked home and loaded them into the car and took them to the creche and climbed up to the third floor with the boys crawling ahead. At lunchtime he picked her highness up from school and deposited her at the glam potter’s house and went back to work. In the evening he collected her and then the boys. A fatal error. He should have collected the boys first. The boys were cranky, the Princess was cranky. He had to get shoes on all of them and carry/chivvy them down three flights of stairs and get them into the car. Hideous. But now I’m back from no internet land and I will mind my loving family and post all the material I wrote while I was away.
Finally, I see that I belong to the most discriminated against group in the British workplace. And who will be paying the pensions, eh?
