#magicmoment, licenced to quill

I am joining with Oliver’s Madhouse #magicmoments again this Monday.

I am really enjoying dipping into the #magicmoment posts to up my feel-good factor.

Last week, I’ve caught myself glowing with quite a few #magicmoments, little things that bring a smile to my face.

Admittedly, looking back, most of them have involved cake or chocolate in some form.school boy in shorts and navy blue uniform And it’s taken a few minutes pondering (fueled by some slightly healthier rice crackers) to think of one that reflects more positively.

But, here goes.

Last week, Junior came home from school with a certificate. Certificates aren’t that unusual in our house, as the fridge door will testify. Usually, however, they have the word effort somewhere in the strap line. This one, however, was laminated and presented to me with something of a flourish.

J proudly announced he was now officially entitled to use a pen. *Gasps of shock horror*

(Actually he’s been using pens, at home, in all shapes, sizes and colours, since he was a baby. We won’t mention the time he used the bedroom wall as an easel. His school, however, uses the bestowing of a pen as an incentive for the children to improve their handwriting. Until then, it’s pencil.)

The big beam on his face said it all. He was really chuffed (at least until that evening’s homework when he discovered that you can’t rub pen out very easily).

hand writing certificate

It brought a smile to my face too. J has struggled with his writing, having inherited my inability to spell. He grapples with his bs and ds. Getting him to write from left to right, instead of right to left, was a major achievement. Pencil grip wasn’t so much a technique, as a form of torture.

For months, if not years, he’s lamented his status as a pencil writer. So, although it may not seem much, we’re loving the ever-so-slightly corny accolade, Licenced to Quill.

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#silentsunday

schooll through sunlit horse chestnut tree

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Wet weather bad news for bees too

This week, we’ve had several seasons in each day. Admittedly, today’s early morning panic over the absence of sunscreen when I unloaded J from the car seems a distant memory.

There are grey clouds overhead, threatening to prove the futility of trying to line-dry the washing. I’ve despatched OH (under protest) to reactivate the boiler and consigned the summer Boden catalogue to the recycle bin. (Sadly, that lovely linen kaftan and boy-leg swimming costume no longer seem such a good investment).

Worse, it looks set to get even wetter and the doom mongers in the Oldies’ Daily Mail predict another wet summer. Bad news for just about everybody (other than ducks, newts and Thomas Cook.).

It’s especially bad news for insects. Last summer (another wet one) saw insect numbers decline drastically (fewer aphids, apparently).

Ordinarily, insect mortality doesn’t interest me much. (Last summer, I took to brushing the Hovel’s burgeoning community of woodlice and spiders into the dustpan. Then despatching them outside, for the birds to eat, when J wasn’t looking).

But (like most people, I guess) I’ve got a soft spot for butterflies and bees, like this little chap I spotted as I wended my way back from the farm.

bumble bee on flower

Bees are in decline. Two species of bumblebee have become extinct since WW2.  Most people attribute their decline to changes in agriculture, climate change and habitat destruction. And the wet weather isn’t helping. Many bees need hot dry weather to gather pollen and nectar.

Bees are good. They produce honey (an essential ingredient in my favouite honeyed lemon cake, and my heavily-adapted early morning porridge). They pollentate flowers (I’ve never worked the actual mechanics out, but people who know better than me attributed the failure of my plum trees last year to the lack of participating bees.)

There are things we can do to help. Simple things that are much more fun than relocating spiders.

Making your garden bee-friendly comes top. Add a bee house. Plant wildflowers and varieties that bees like. Thomson & Morgan even have a list of bee-friendly flowers and vegetables.

More information

The Bumblebee Conservation Trust

Thomson & Morgan, Save the Bees

 

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Britmums Live, are my wallet and ego ready for it?

It seemed a long time ago when I booked it, but it’s not much more than a month to Brit Mums Live. And I’m looking forward to it and feeling anxious in about equal measure.

At the moment, I’m debating on where to stay on the Friday night….I am feeling tempted by the Montcalm. montcalm brewery city

However, I’m balking at the price. I’ve obviously been away from London too long (or maybe it’s just that I no longer have an Admin Dept to pick up the bill). There’s a little devil in my head though who keeps telling me that it’s not much dearer than the Travel Lodge….

The reality is I’ll probaby end up reliving my commuting days.crowded commuter train

Anyway, that’s not the point. Hopefully, I’ll be too busy enjoying myself at Britmums Live to worry about my accommodation.

Over the next few days/weeks I’ll be checking out the other posts in the Britmums Live Linky. In the meantime, here’s me.

 

Name: Sarah Hill Wheeler (Juggling the Hill and Wheeler post-marriage seemed too complicated. And I got fed up having to explain that, legally, you have a right, not an obligation to use your husband’s name. So now I struggle with three combos and an absent hyphen).

Blog: crewcutandnewt

Twitter ID: @hill_wheeler

Height: 5ft 5ish (I think. As with expanding waistline, I gave up measuring

Hair: Strawberry blond, or facing red depending on your perspective.

Eyes: Somewhere between blue and grey, depending on the weather.

mother holding small boy and laughingIs this your first blogging conference? Yes (in fact it’s the first time in five years that I’ve managed to escape for an over-nighter!).

Are you attending both days?

Yes, but suspect the apron strings (and GWR timetable) may be tugging me back on Saturday afternoon.

What are you most looking forward to at BritMums Live 2013?

Just being there, putting faces to names and listening to some great speakers. I’m particularly interested in some of the WRITE sessions.

What are you wearing?

HELP. All my half-way decent clothes are still in storage. I tend to live in jeans most days, but I may use Britmums Live as an excuse to raid the piggy bank (again) and to glam it up a bit.quizzical looking woman inglasses

What do you hope to gain from BritMums Live 2013?

I am really looking forward to meeting other bloggers for the first time in the flesh (although I also find this a bit daunting). I am also hoping to gain some insights into where I want to take my blog.  I love writing it, but at the moment I don’t feel that I have a clear direction.

Tell us one thing about you that not everyone knows

I make great puddings.



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Wartime rape, when saying sorry is too much

I’ve recently finished my entry for the Guardian’s International Development Competition. I chose the theme Women and conflict, sexual violence as a weapon of war.

For the past three weeks, I’ve been mired in accounts of rape, femicide and brutal discrimination. I thought I would write about how the courts (international and national) treat wartime rape.

Historically, there has been a tendency to dismiss wartime rape as a terrible but unavoidable by-product of war, or to veil it in silence. Although there was widespread evidence of wartime rape at the Nuremberg trials, it was not prosecuted.

william hague and angelina jolie in front of memorial in Rwanda

hague and jolie honour war victims in Rwanda

More recently, in March, William Hague joined Angelina Jolie in Rwanda to highlight the plight of victims of sexual violence in the ongoing conflict in the DRC. DRC has been daubed the “rape capital of the world.” It’s too easy to sensationalize, but each day 1150 women are raped in the DRC. After being raped, women are often mutilated or shot in the genitals, a message of subjection to their communities.

Given this, it’s hard to understand how or why Jolie and Hague have come in for such a grilling.

OK, maybe I shouldn’t resort to reading the Oldies’ Daily Mail, but I was shocked by some of the comments. Neglecting the Euro crisis? Running away from problems at home? You’d think Hague was lapping it up in Tuscany, or Centre Parcs, rather than visiting a refugee camp.

William Dartmouth, foreign affairs spokesperson for UKIP, accused Hague of “chasing photo ops with Hollywood stars” instead of doing his job “defending Britain’s vital economic and diplomatic interests.” Compared to the latter, the mass rape of civilians is dismissed as an adjunct, “a terrible thing, practised down the centuries.”

As has been the case so often, women’s experiences of war are marginalised.Politicians and historians have often paid more attention to looting and the destruction of buildings than they have to the impact on the lives of women and children.

Today’s announcement by the Mayor of Osaka, Tasha Hashimoto, is a case in point.

artist's impression of nanking massacre

artist's impression of nanking massacre

Hashimoto has said that the forced prostitution of Asian women in the Second World War was a wartime necessity.”For soldiers who risked their lives in circumstances where bullets are flying around like rain and wind, if you want them to get some rest a comfort women system was necessary. That’s clear to anyone,” he declared.

What Hashimoto failed to mention was that the so-called comfort women system was based on the abduction and rape of women, mainly from occupied China and Korea. It’s estimated that between 50,000 and 200,000 women were forcibly conscripted in this way. Approximately three-quarters of them died in the camps, or shortly afterwards.

Although the Toyko trials included prosecutions for rape as a crime against humanity, they failed to address the plight of the so-called “comfort women.” Survivors only received acknowledgement and any form of apology from the Japanese authorities in 1993.

The controversy rages, with revisionists denying the extent and culpability of Japan in the detention and rape of women during the war.

Recently, Japan’s foreign minister, Taro Aso fanned the flames further when asked in parliament if the government intended to revoke the 1993 apology.

“The definition of what constitutes aggression has yet to be established in academia or in the international community,” he replied. “Things that happened between nations will look differently depending on which side you view them from.”

It seems trite to point out that rape has been established as a war crime since the Geneva Convention, that imprisoning women in rape camps, and beating them to death if they refuse to comply, constitutes aggression under most definitions.

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the images are etched on our collective memories. Over 100,000 women imprisoned, raped and beaten to death hardly feature in our history books. And, if revisionists like Hashimoto and Aso have their way, they wouldn’t feature at all.

iris chang memorial

memorial to iris chang who did much to reveal massacres

Never again we said after the Holocaust and Yugoslavia. And Rwanda.

Ambitious perhaps, in retrospect. The promise now feels drained of meaning.

However, we can at least expose the lie, It never happened at all.

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