A woman’s right to choose has been for decades one of the central planks of feminism. Safe, legal abortion must be available on demand. And looking back from the relative freedom women have gained today, it is hard to imagine how bound women once were to their biology, how they were once as Simone de Beauvoir put it ”slaves to the species”, unable to pursue achievement as individuals because of their role as vessels for future generations.
There is a Saki story about a woman who begins telling the truth about everything, even her age, which greatly annoys her older sister. ”Veracious, even to months,” she goes around informing everyone that she is 42 and five months old. The habit grows on her, ”like lichen upon an apparently healthy tree”. Soon she can no longer restrain herself from truth-telling. She tells the truth to her dressmaker – which is reflected in the bill. Finally, in a few ill-chosen words, she tells the cook that she drinks: ”The cook was a good cook, as cooks go, and, as cooks go, she went.” Sadly, this satirical portrait of the pitfalls encountered by the sanctimonious truth-teller will probably seem rather shocking today.
Our increasingly puritanical society seems to demand that those in the public eye tell the truth about everything, even or especially, those matters about which it would once have been de rigueur to dissemble.
HE SUBJECT of wind power seems to be causing an increasing amount of feeling
and perhaps, no pun intended, hot air. While the pro-lobby is keen to point out that something must be done before climate change wipes out the planet, the antis are building up steam as they protest about what they see as the despoiling of Scotland’s beauty spots.
Wind power seems like something Scotland ought to be good at: we certainly have lots of windswept hills. However, we have lost our tradition of using renewable energy and there are legitimate concerns about introducing it again, this time on an industrial scale.
Windmills and watermills were once a feature of the landscape across Britain and it was interesting when visiting the Dutch paintings at the Queen’s Gallery in Edinburgh to note seventeenth-century depiction of the white cliffs of Dover dotted with windmills.
Note: A house price crash hasn’t happened yet, a gentler correction is underway, but a fall may still come.
Why have property prices doubled in five years? The government has bought the idea that it is because there are not enough homes to meet demand. This is rubbish and John Prescott’s pledge to build one million homes in the south-east of England is a stupid way to try to bring down house prices.
WHEN you are climbing a steep hill, sometimes it is good to turn round and look at how far you have come. Saturday, May 1, will be such a day. That is the day when the iron curtain that drew over Europe half a century ago and that was pulled open with the collapse of the Soviet Union, will be torn down completely and consigned to the tip.
Season’s greetings to the medical team assessing maternity services at Caithness General Hospital. If it is decided to close them, Mary’s stable could seem less a scene of primitive hardship and actually quite attractive to the women of Wick.
Women there are protesting against an outcome that could lead to them travelling 100 miles by ambulance down the A9 to Inverness while in labour. After all, at least Mary wasn’t
hurtling along at 60mph when she gave birth but relaxing in a warm and dry abode, comfortably furnished with hay. According to the journal Science in Society, roadside births have a mortality rate of 68 per 1000, eight times higher than hospital births and 16 times higher than home births.
Keys. You may have some jingling in your pocket or handbag. Take them out. Look at them. Describe them. Collins dictionary remarks that they are metal instruments that, when rotated, open locks. But there is more to them than that.
In a recent survey, one group used the adjectives “little”, “lovely”,”magic”, and “intricate” to describe them while another chose “awkward”,”worn”, “jagged”, and “serrated”.
This cleverly designed study, reported in this week’s New Scientist, attempted to prove scientifically what poets have always known. Language matters. The first group of describers were Spaniards, who see keys as feminine; the second were Germans, for whom they are masculine. The words they used were identified by “gender-blind” English speakers as gender-linked.
IN THE former Gold Rush town of Oroville in Northern California a week ago today, a 92-year-old man leapt from the green steel of Table Mountain Bridge into the deep green water of Feather River. Coval Russell died instantly landing on rocks. He ended his life on a brilliantly sunny morning for one main reason – he was kicked out of
jail.
The incandescent beauty of the scene before him could not make up for the fact that it was not Butte County Jail where Russell spent one of the happiest years of his life. ”Pops”, as the other inmates called him, was sentenced early last year for stabbing his 70-year-old landlord with a pocketknife. Once he got used to his surroundings, razor wire and
clanging doors, Russell found some things he did not have outside.
IN some parts of the US there is water, water everywhere, but in others there’s hardly a drop to drink. Last week in Texas eight people and thousands of cattle drowned when 30in of rain fell in just a few days, causing flooding along the San Antonio river, which crested 30ft above normal levels. Meanwhile, in prairie states such as Wyoming, less than a
quarter of the normal expected level of rain has fallen. Farmers are making special prayer appointments with ministers as they watch their land turn dustier by the day.
Well done, Dr Eileen Ruberry. Finally, an important medical personage has seen sense on the MMR and recommended that the government retreat from its intransigent approach and allow concerned parents to choose triple injections. This does not mean she is convinced by Dr Andrew Wakefield’s attempts to prove the combined measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine is linked to autism. She is not. It simply means that she recognises that allowing a minority of parents to choose the time-consuming option of separate jabs is the best way to deal with the situation.
The situation in Iraq is complex and difficult and although I opposed it strongly before it started, my view now is that after the fact, secular society and those who are trying to build a new peace in Iraq ust be supported.
Here are some of the columns I wrote on this issue from the Herald.