Tag Archives | Life in general

Life is too short not to have a Filing System

By on November 15, 2011 in Household Hints & DIY, Slider

How can people live without at least one small filing cabinet in their houses?  How do they access the mountains of paperwork which drop through our letterboxes, into children’s bookbags, handed to you on the doorstep by frightening, burly men …. oh sorry, forget that last bit.  But you get my point.

At any given time, I have a pile of papers on my desk that are waiting to be dealt with by return letter, the filling in of forms, the production of other documents, ‘phone calls at the very least and almost always requiring the handing over of shining piles of cash.

The only way of keeping on top of this lot is to have an accurate, well organised filing cabinet which is regularly scanned and weeded for superfluous and out of date papers.  I have a large filing cabinet that has been travelling with me for the last 20 years.

The top drawer is devoted to The Wartime Housewife (and who isn’t?), the second drawer is for major household categories that require money to change hands eg utilities, car, schools, bank, tax etc, important documents such as medical cards, passports, birth certificates, and instruction leaflets with their receipts and guarantees.  The third drawer is predominantly recreational – Scouts, vet, English Heritage and that sort of thing.

When the car needs insurance or an MOT, I go the Car File and take out the envelope marked ‘Car Docs’ which contains MOT, Insurance policy and the log book.  Today the Inland Revenue needed a copy of a document from several years ago and I was able to go straight to my drawer and retrieve it while the chap was on the ‘phone.

The thing about accurate filing is that it saves so much time.  Having systems for dealing with incoming mail and tasks means that you have infinitely more chance of keeping on top of things and significantly less chance of letting something critical slip through the net.

I have an In-Tray next to my desk where papers go for sorting.  I then have three magazine holders on the other side of my desk marked ‘Things to be Done Imminently’, ‘School & Scouts Letters and Forms’ and ‘Things to be Kept at Hand’.  The things in the first two holders will also appear on my (typed) Things To Do List which is pinned to my noticeboard and, when completed, the documents are either filed or thrown away.

I also have plastic folders for ongoing issues (in the To Be Kept at Hand), such as the car accident I had last year and every time I make contact with the insurers, I add a note to the file with the details so that I have an accurate record of every step.

The other things I do which I find endlessly useful, is I keep a sheet on the computer which has a list of all my regular income and expenditure on a monthly basis and every time something changes, it is updated and a printout stored in the file.   This not only helps me to keep a tight rein on my finances but I am frequently asked for this information and I save so much time by having the data at my fingertips.

My only problem is that I do have a box of filing which came with me from the old house, but it is only small and if something isn’t in the file, it will be in the box.

Without these systems I would probably be in jail.  I have poor short term memory and too many demands and variables in my daily life.  My brain is, by nature, chaotic and I impose these structures in order to function. Before I realised the value of systems, I lived in chaos and was constantly fire-fighting.  Life is just too short.

Comments { 7 }

Ill-mannered letters and other people’s whiplash is grinding me down

By on November 10, 2011 in Home and Family

Angry Bird - like wot I am

In fact, it’s not just the paperwork, it’s the tone of the paperwork.

Having recently become self employed, there is an astonishing amount of paperwork required of me on an almost continual basis, mostly because there are lots of things that I now have to pay for which I didn’t before.  I am also constantly asked to account for myself to various bodies and, whilst I understand that this needs to be done, I come close to getting upset by the hectoring tones of many of these letters.

One letter, asking me for details of the work I have been doing has the penultimate paragraph in large, bold type, some of which is underlined, threatening that if I don’t provide this information within 15 days the payment in question will stop.  This is the first letter of its kind from them and I would mind less if it hadn’t, in fact, been sent to the wrong address.

I have two other ill-mannered letters this week.  The first one regarding Council Tax which is threatening me with court action if I don’t pay £27 which is 7 days overdue.  They informed me that I was  constantly falling into arrears in this financial year and that it simply would not do.  I only received the letter confirming my Council Tax bill three weeks ago.

The second made me want to spit blood with rage at the hypocrisy of it all.  For the first time in a very long while, I was overdrawn at the bank.  Overdrawn by £8 for a grand total of 4 days.  This meant that a direct debit was not paid and for which I was charged £8.  Fair enough.

What was not fair enough was the letter that I subsequently received from my bank lecturing me on the evils of being in debt, that it was totally unacceptable to overdraw without authority and would I like to see an advisor and go on a debt management course.

Do you know what?  I would like the banks to go on a debt management course.  Added to that, I would like the writers of these letters to think twice before assuming that everyone is a work-shy, backsliding criminal.

I just get angry, but I wonder what an elderly or vulnerable person would feel like if they received letters like these.

And whilst I’m on the subject of getting angry, I would like to share with you my entire morning spent trying to get a quote on my car insurance.  My insurance has gone up by over £250 since last year and that was the cheapest quote I could get.  I was expecting it to go up a little bit because I took someone’s wing mirror off back in July and, apparently foolishly, owned up on the flimsy grounds that it was categorically my fault.

I asked each insurer (I rather quaintly get my quotes from humans on telephones) why premiums had gone up so much.  Each one told me that a large factor was the no win no fee companies urging people to claim for whiplash.  Apparently the new trick is to get your friend to bang into your car from behind, you both claim on your insurance, then get a whopping payout for whiplash – the going rate is currently £2k.

When some stupid tart ran into the side of me a year ago (still not gone to court, incidentally) I was bombarded with calls from claims companies for weeks afterwards asking whether I was getting headaches or back pain. Several of them suggested that I was foolish not to claim as whiplash was virtually impossible to gainsay.  Needless to say, I refused to play the game, again on the frail excuse that I was not actually injured.

Nonetheless, my premiums have gone up by £250.

I am very, very cross.  I probably blame Thatcher.

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I can live how I like (within reason)

By on September 27, 2011 in Home and Family

My life is very hectic as I’m sure is the case for many of you; I am constantly running from place to place and the timetable of my day is effectively ruled by my sons’ activities.  I try to sit down for half an hour to have my lunch (whilst watching ‘Doctors’ I’m slightly ashamed to say) and I usually sit down to watch a bit of television or a film for an hour in the evening but then I carry on working, often until around one o’clock in the morning and frequently later.  This does not sit comfortably with a 7am start.

I am a woman who needs my sleep.  Over the years, the only thing that has stood between me and total meltdown is that I fall asleep the moment my light goes out and do not wake until my alarm goes off in the morning.  I lose sleep cumulatively over the week and, at the weekends, I sleep until at least eleven in order to restore my factory settings.

But now, my day is longer, I drive 450 miles a week just going to school, work and clubs and there are things afoot at the Wartime Housewife which are demanding more time and concentration.  I need more sleep and I have decided that whenever possible, I will go to bed for an hour at some point during the day and, most importantly, I will not feel guilty about it because I’m a grown up and I can do what I like.

The problem is that we have all been brainwashed by generations of people who say things like “Early to be, early to rise” and who frown on people who get up late.  There is now a culture of never sitting still, never having thinking time or acknowledging when one needs to rest.  My grandmother always had an hour’s rest after lunch and she was much better for it.  A geologist friend of mine used to put a card on his office door saying ‘Do not disturb – I am thinking’ and would put it on his timesheet as Thinking Time.

The difficulty that both my sisters and I have, is that our mother was ill for many years with depression and agoraphobia and would stay in bed all day, every day, not getting dressed or doing anything in the house.  We have spent our lives doing regular checks on ourselves to make sure that we’re not starting to behave like her or slipping into bad habits.  Even though our mother is now better, she still takes to her bed at the drop of a hat and we sub-consciously rail against any behavior that feels similar.

I didn’t get to bed until gone one o’clock this morning and, as I was coming back from the school run, I could feel my eyelids drooping as I drove along the A6.  Not good.  So I went back to bed for an hour and now I feel better.  And what’s more, I shall continue to do this whenever I feel like it, in the interests of sanity.

I am the Wartime Housewife, I am a grown up and I can do what I like (within reason).

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Social Stereotypes: The Mothers who Cannot Win

By on September 14, 2011 in Health and Beauty, Home and Family

The Telegraph Saturday magazine always has a Social Stereotype piece by Victoria Mather with an illustration by Sue Macartney-Snape.  This feature has been going for some years now and is becoming increasingly un-funny as, I suspect, she’s running out of ideas.

Last Saturday, the stereotype was ‘The Mother Hen’ and the description was of a dowdy woman who had let herself go and was neglecting her husband because she put all her energy into her children.

I know it was a tongue in cheek look at an extreme person, but for some reason my hackles went up.

Mothers really don’t seem to be able to win on any level.  If they go out to work and leave their children with child-minders, they’re vilified for not putting the work in with their children.  Even if no-one actually says anything, they still feel guilty because they want a career and a family.

If they manage to look glamorous, there is an assumption that they probably have no interests or hobbies if they manage to find that much time for personal grooming.

If they don’t look glamorous, then they’ve let themselves go, are almost certainly ignoring their husband’s needs and are clearly three types of hippy.

If they feed the family on ready meals they’re accused of  handing out a death sentence through heart disease, obesity, diabetes and probably St Vitus Dance and elephantiasis of the bollocks to boot.

But if they cook everything from scratch then they must be a crank and an obsessive who wouldn’t even let a fish finger or a French Fancy into the house without fainting.

Now.  I know that there are women out there who do take ‘parenting’ to extremes and who do ignore their partners and hover round their children, monitoring their every move, intervening at every turn and refusing to allow them any opportunity to take risks or develop independence.  Helicopter Parents I believe is the current expression.

But I’m sick to death of women who choose a more traditional template for raising their families being somehow looked down upon and having the piss taken out of them.

I could rant on for several hundred pages about how feminism has turned round and bitten women on the bum, but I will only say this.  The point of the feminist movement was to give women choices; choices about how they lived, worked, raised children, conducted relationships, to bake or not to bake.

What has actually happened is that they now feel they have to do everything and often end up not doing anything very well.  I did have a period  as a full time, stay at home mother and I loved every minute of it.  Now that I’m a single parent, I no longer have that luxury but at least, most of the time, I work from home.  That’s my choice  and I couldn’t afford childcare in the holidays even if I wanted it.

Of course the woman in the piece is over the top and we all know women who, once they have their children, no longer require the services of a husband.  But I can’t help feeling that this is yet another mealy-mouthed attack on the mothers who believe that raising children is a full time job.

Guess what?  It is – however you choose to do it.

Reproduced without the permission of The Telegraph

Comments { 9 }

Heartily sick of DIY (or how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a relentless Black & Decker)

By on August 24, 2011 in Home and Family, Household Hints & DIY

Tool Academy

The Wartime Housewife?  Tired of Doing it Herself?  This can’t possibly be true!

But, friends, Romans and countrymen, it is true.  For the last five years, all I have done is put up curtain rails, shelves, cabinets and racks, assembled furniture and applied locks and bolts to various doors.

This has been closely followed by taking down curtain rails, shelves, cabinets and racks, disassembled furniture, and the buying and fitting of new locks and bolts.

Not long afterwards I begin putting up more curtain rails, shelves … you get the picture.

I have always been grateful that I not only have the skill and the will to do these things but that I also have decent tools – to say nothing of the finest set of chisels that money can buy (one of my best birthday presents ever) – but, as of today, the novelty has absolutely, categorically worn off.

Today I have:
put up two curtain rails and put up curtains
applied a bolt to the bathroom door
sorted through and relinquished the entire contents of the airing cupboard and relocated them
sorted through all my tools and DIY accoutrements, put them into labelled baskets &  thence into the shed
sorted through all my curtains and packed away the ones that can’t be used
changed the beds
put some things in the loft (I have a huge loft – hurrah!)
done two loads of washing

… and in between that, cooked meals, been to work, tidied the sitting room, sewn half a dozen name tags and broken up two fights.  And the bloody cat ate all the ham out of our sandwiches at lunchtime.

If I never see my tool box again, it will be too soon….

Oh my lore my blimey; I haven’t put any pictures up yet. Now where did I put that hammer….

The Wartime Housewife falls forward onto the kitchen table, a single lightbulb illuminating her floral pinny damp with pitiful tears as the tumble-dryer provides a fitting Bennett-esque musical motif.  She blows wind and cracks her cheeks.  Exeunt all pursued by a bear etc etc.  The curtain falls.

Comments { 11 }

Radio Call Signs or The NATO Phonetic Alphabet

By on July 20, 2011 in Culture, Home and Family

I am in the process of packing up to move house and spent several hours this afternoon ringing round all the companies who need to know my change of address.  Having a name which has ‘bs’ and ‘fs’ and ‘vs’ in, there is plenty of margin, however clearly one speaks, for errors of spelling etc.

Therefore I always spell things out using the Phonetic Call Sign Alphabet as used by the police, NATO etc.  It really does make things easier and is worth learning if you often have to spell things out over the ‘phone.  I learned it when I worked on a constructions site at Heathrow Airport and we had to communicate over crackly radios with the sound of jets roaring away in the background.

The BBC website explains why we use it.  “This alphabet was created by the NATO allies in the 1950s as a means of communication that would be intelligible and pronounceable in the heat of battle.  All the letters sound different, so there is no confusion over long distances over what people are saying. The reason that any phonetic alphabet is (or was) used is because telephone, radio and walkie-talkie communications had the habit of crackling over long distances, blotting out whole words or even sentences.

The normal alphabet cannot be used, because some letters, for example P, B, C and D sound similar, and over long distances were indistinguishable, so a new method had to be found. When the code was invented it was also considered that consonants are the most difficult to hear against a noisy background. Hence the sequence of vowels in the phonetic code played an important role when the code was invented, so that when you hear a noisy ‘-oo-oo’ you know the letter is a Z. The vowel-sequence thing works for most (though not all) combinations of letters.

All of the words are recognisable by native English speakers because English must be used upon request for communication between an aircraft and a control tower whenever two nations are involved, regardless of their native languages. But it is only required internationally, not domestically, thus if both parties to a radio conversation are from the same country, then another phonetic alphabet of that nation’s choice may be used.”

I did battle with 18 call centres today and I can assure you that it works.

A = Alpha H = Hotel O = Oscar V = Victor
B = Bravo I = India P = Papa W = Whisky
C = Charlie J = Juliet Q = Quebec X = X-Ray
D = Delta K = Kilo R = Romeo Y = Yankee
E = Echo L = Lima S = Sierra Z = Zulu
F = Foxtrot M = Mike T = Tango
G = Golf N = November U = Uniform

There is also a protocol for numbers:

1 = Wun 2 = Two 3 = Tree 4 = Fower 5 = Fife
6 = Six 7 = Sefan 8 = Ait 9 = Niner 0 = Zero

 

Comments { 25 }

The School Reunion

By on July 4, 2011 in Home and Family

My School

Gosh, what a day.  As you know from my post back in March, I was rather apprehensive about going back, as one of the girls who bullied me was also going to be there.  I had arranged to meet my Naughty Friend, who I have not seen since we left school, as well as a couple of other girls, Orville and Vivienne Ferret, who I was really looking forward to seeing.  Also, to my delight, Denise Gnasher contacted me the night before to say she was going with her family and, although we’ve kept in touch, we’ve not actually met up for nigh on seven years.

One of the first people I saw as I approached the Old Girls’ Marquee was the bully.  I wouldn’t have recognised her and I said so and she appeared to be ill at ease.  I didn’t have a chance to speak to her alone, but as the conversation progressed among the group and I made the point that we had all been sent to the school in order to be safe, that many of us were bereaved or had very dysfunctional home lives.  Wasn’t it a pity, therefore that, because of the behaviour of other girls and certain members of staff, it turned out that we weren’t emotionally safe at school either.  I saw the look on her face and left it at that; she had been as troubled as the rest of us.

The rest of the day was spent touring the school, seeing all the wonderful changes that have been made, and exchanging histories and reminiscences with many other women who had come from all over the country to share the day.

We talked to lots of the girls who are still at the school, as well as one of the current House Mistresses and they listened wide-eyed to our tales of how the school used to be.  The girls were obviously very happy there and the whole feel of the place was one of nurture and contentment and it seemed impossible to them that we had lived in such a regimental and strictured environment and had never thought to complain.

It was a cathartic day.  The last time I went back I was very bitter that the school had changed and become such a comfortable place, too late for my generation to have had the benefit of it.  Now that my children are growing up, I am genuinely delighted that it has become such a healthy, happy school full of lively, well-adjusted girls.

Ghosts well and truly laid to rest.

Comments { 8 }

The psycopathic reminiscence of a God-bothering, intermittent punk rocker

By on June 29, 2011 in Culture, Home and Family

As I was rummaging through boxes, I found a book that I used to write in when I was about 14/15.  I have been trying to find this book for years because it has a poem in it that I have never been able to find anywhere else.  I have now discovered that this was because I’d got his name wrong.  I shall share it with you on Sunday.

Reading through this book, which was cunningly called ‘My Book’ was quite an eye opener.  Firstly the front cover was decorated with the ‘Madness’ logo of the M-shaped man in the pork pie hat, as well as the names of my favourite bands (The Clash, 999, The Undertones, REM etc), intertwined with leaves and flowers – how very middle class.

The contents, however, were an uncomfortable miasma of my favourite poems, my own poetry (which wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been), the poems of an older girl who was a friend but who wrote excruciating verses about love and kittens, and an awful lot of psalms and passages from the Bible.  In those days I was an unmitigated God Botherer (despite being a punk of convenience) and I remember long and earnest discussions in the Christian Union which eventually turned me off Jesus and onto Wicca, in whose leafy embrace I remained until only a few years ago.

And the handwriting!  I had decided that the truly poetic of heart would write with a slopier, more ornate hand, but what I developed over the course of the book would have caused a graphologist to brand me a psychopath and deviant of the first water.  Tiny, almost horizontally slanting letters, with great curling heads and tails and with illegibly distorted forms – virtually code, and I can only read it now with a magnifying glass.

But I can’t fault my taste in poetry; Keats, Tennyson, Donne, Blake.  I had only just discovered John Donne who was introduced, as an aside, by a supply teacher of great merit, who also switched on my passion for Chaucer.

It seems particularly apt that I should find this book just days before I’m due to go to my school reunion – a kind of pilgrimage is ever there was one.

So pricketh hem Nature in hir corages
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;

Sondry londes indeed.

Comments { 7 }

Midland Clearances

By on June 27, 2011 in Home and Family

I’ve spent the last three days (and many days prior to this) clearing an outbuilding of stuff which has been there for two and a half years.  Some of it will go into the Household Sale at Great Bowden Village Hall on Sunday at 2pm, much of it has gone into the bin and a small proportion is going to auction.  It has been dirty, greasy, back-breaking work, made all the nastier by the copious amount of cobwebs and long-leggety things of various sizes and densities.

There is, undoubtedly, a tremendous sense of purging when one clears out.  I have lots of interests which all need ‘stuff’ in order to carry them out and books on practically every subject under the sun; Boy the Elder and I can research almost any subject we choose without ever going outside the house or onto the internet.

However, having moved four times in five years, if I want to keep any of the friends and relatives who regularly turn out brandishing screwdrivers and flexing muscles, I need to shed some stuff.  My dining room is bulging at the seams with excess possessions and, once they’ve gone, I can start the onerous process of packing up all the stuff which we don’t actually need on a daily basis.

The next task is the boys’ rooms.
I’d rather have the spiders.

 

 

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Coming soon…

By on June 10, 2011 in Home and Family, Household Hints & DIY

I’m really sorry that I’m being so shoddy about my postings at the moment.    I am trying, but I have so much to do in order to make the impending move as painless as possible that my mind is full and my hands are dirty.  Would that it was the other way round.

I was researching an article for you yesterday morning,  but A Man came round to mend the broken window pane in my front door.  Boy the Younger had found a piece of wrought iron, which Boy the Elder had found and kept because he liked the shape.  Boy the Elder made one sarcastic comment too many, so Boy the Younger hurled said piece of iron down the stairs, narrowly failing to inflict serious head injuries on his brother, but absolutely succeeding in smashing through the front door.  I would usually repair a broken window myself, but there was beading involved and I have so much to do at the moment, that I called in a local professional, thus supporting the local economy.  The window took half an hour, the stories about his daughter took considerably longer.

I was going to finish and write up the article last night but … well … I fell asleep in my comfy wing-backed armchair, with little Jeremiah snuggled up in my arms.  By the time I woke up it was time for bed.  Said Zebedee.

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