Colleen Smith

TWO things have happened recently which have called me untold stress and sleepless nights.
The first was Christmas. Phew what a palaver! Thank goodness that’s over for another year!
And the second was my first date in a year. And ditto, with the phew and palaver.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it, but I really had no idea it would cause me such angst.
It all started with the work’s Christmas party.

It’s possible that I’m totally deluded, but I thought I looked pretty gorgeous (for a 47-year-old single, working mum teetering on the edge of physical and mental exhaustion, that is).

Anyway my mum had given me some Christmas money and my younger sister had given me some fashion tips (very high boots and skinny jeans, she said). I thought I looked a bit like the principal boy in Puss in Boots, but I did feel glam. And it was better than looking like the Dame, I suppose.

And I was looking forward to our Herald night out because the best bit about working for a newspaper is the people I work with. I sit all day surrounded by quick-witted, funny slightly mad people. And, the job itself is infinitely fascinating, although due to boring stuff like the laws of the land and the rules of public decency, a lot of the juiciest bits never make it into print.

We started the evening by meeting for dinner at 6.30pm (I could drone on again about boring veggie eating out and paying £18 for a godawful cheese pie, but the carnivores also had a ropey meal, and at least nothing had to die on my account, so all in all it was a result).

Then we met for the party and by the time we left eight hours later things were getting slightly hazy. Apparently I invented a new party game, danced with the Herald Express Christmas cake and there is photographic evidence that I was pole dancing, but I suspect digital jiggerypokery.

But anyway, the next thing I remembered as we walked back along the harbourside towards the taxi rank at about 3.30pm was stopping to eat chips from two well-dressed gentlemen who had been to a ball at The Imperial. I can’t remember exactly what was said, but one suggested that his friend and I should swap mobile numbers.

Now you should know here that I am practically a virgin when it comes to both texting and dating. I met the father of my children, my ex, He Who Shall Not Be Named, whatever you want to call him, at 17.
In those far off days, back in the halcyon summer of 1976, the closest thing to a mobile phone was the “Beam Me Up Scottie” transmitter on Star Trek.

I know this must seem hysterically funny to anybody under the age of about 40, but if we wanted to communicate with members of the opposite sex, we had to speak to them. What, I hear you cry, no texts? No MSN? No emails. It seems primitive now, but often we would walk to other people’s houses just for a chat! It’s true, you couldn’t makethis up…

So anyway here I was, the morning after the night before, with a hangover and no memory of the man I had met on the harbourside, except that he had nice chips.
For some reason which now escapes me, we never spoke on the phone. We began texting each other and, because of Christmas and work and life and his kids and my kids we couldn’t meet up for an actual date for another six days.

The textual tension over that next six days was unbearable. Nothing rude or coarse, just ever so slightly, politely flirty. I’m not saying it wasn’t fun. In fact it was probably the most fun I’d had all year.
But I stopped sleeping. I honestly had no idea why, but all of a sudden I was taking hours to nod off, waking up and taking another couple of hours to get back to sleep and then waking again another half-hour later. For six days I averaged three hours a night.
And when I was awake, my heart was racing and I was having heart palpitations.
I was expecting to wake up and find myself wired up to monitors in Torbay Hospital’s heart unit.

If I ever get asked on another date, ever again, I’ve asked my teenage daughters to confiscate my mobile. The agonies of trying to work out what those short little messages and digi kisses, and the length of the silences in between, really mean. The horrors of agonising over what is, or is not, an appropriate response.

Added to that there’s my way too overactive imagination. It was essentially a blind date, but by the time we actually met, 50 or so text messages later, I had built it up into Casablanca or Brief Encounter or the episode of The Simpsons where Homer first meets Marge.
Despite all that, and the fact that I was so over-tired I looked like an old hag, we got on fine, no embarrassing silences, lots in common to talk about, and had a perfectly nice night out.

But suffice to say, I am sleeping fine again. Back to my usual sleeping like a log (woke up in the fireplace, ho ho).
Turns out I was just plain terrified. What’s strange is that I didn’t recognise that feeling was fear. Because dating, after years and years (and years) of being with the same person, is like spinning into space without a lifeline (obviously I’m guessing a bit on the analogy here, not being an actual astronaut, let alone one who has experienced being lost in space for eternity).

Now the big question is whether I will ever be brave enough to go on another date. All those kindly friends (usually happily married ones) who ask why I haven’t met anyone else yet, and blithely ask if I’ve tried internet dating, have no idea of the degree of courage involved in taking such a step.
I think I’ll gather myself first and wait ‘til next Christmas before I try again.

The sex and power report sounds raunchier than it is.
It’s the title of a recent Equal Opportunities Commission survey which shows that fewer women are now occupying top jobs.
The report contains neither sex nor power, just the fact that 6,000 women have disappeared from the country’s top 33,000 posts, leaving men to run everything from big business to the courts and parliament.
Don’t worry. This is not going to be a feminist rant about discrimination.
The truth is that my generation of women fought very hard and proved that it was possible to beat discrimination and reach the top.
So why do women appear to have given up in the battle of the sexes? Maybe it’s just that they were smart enough to realise that the so-called “top” jobs were not worth the fight.

Women, especially the majority of us who are also mothers, have decided that the future of equality is actually about reinventing the workplace.
A generation of frazzled superwomen tried valiantly to do it all. Women even bragged about our ability to multi-task, instead of copying men and pretending it was patently impossible to work and bring up a family without one or the other suffering.
Many sacrificed their chances of having children by leaving it too late to discover that fertility wanes with age.
So it doesn’t really surprise me to learn that even at the highest level of the workplace, women are looking for a new way forward that does not mean the destruction of health, happiness and family life.
And the very bravest men in society are beginning to follow our lead. They are the 10 per cent of the British male workforce who have asked to go part-time in the last year.

Women have always had to find part-time posts which fit in around child-rearing, school holidays or in deference to the main breadwinner.
Working part-time is not an easy choice. Obviously you get paid less, and have to be happy to accept a less materialistic lifestyle. And then there are the pension worries. Plus there is a culture in the workplace which automatically equates longer hours with a better worker.
But in practice it’s easier to put your all into a three or four day week, and come back the following week refreshed and ready to really go for it again.
And enlightened employers know that staff who have a full life outside the workplace bring fresh ideas back into the office on a Monday morning.
In this modern 24/7 economy, we should work towards a future where the three-and-a-half day week becomes the norm.

So many jobs already need seven day a week cover – shops, telephone helplines, the hospitality industry, the NHS, the media even.
The obvious way forward would be for men and women to work three-and-a-half day weeks. Not exactly job-share, but kind of.
Think of the benefits for family life. Both partners could work the same shifts, and have time to spend together and with the children.
Or when children are very, parents could choose to share out the work and child-rearing roles equally to avoid leaving babies in nurseries when they are too young.
Of course many industries, especially those which have traditionally had a mostly female workforce, are already offering such flexibility. And they are the employees whose staff report higher job satisfaction because they are free to choose a work-life balance that works.
As a single mum and part-time worker, I know I whinge a lot.
But there is a part of me which knows I am really lucky. I love my job and I love being a mum, and sometimes I feel I get the best out of both worlds.

The whingeing starts when it all feels like an impossible balancing act.
But I have seen my highly-paid, top executive brother, working a 60-hour week and permanently wired into his Blackberry palm pilot (nicknamed “Crackberry” because  they’re too addictive to put down) checking emails even when he’s back home in Torquay at Christmas with his wife and four children. I might want his wage packet, but I know that as a mother I could never do those hours without hurting the children.
Yes, true, part of me rails at the injustice. While he has been steadily promoted, his wife gave up her career in accountancy to stay at home and bring up their four children, and is now struggling to get back into work.
And it’s not fair that women still get paid 17 per cent less than the male workforce for doing identical jobs.
But I still think women are on the right track. The good thing is that we are beginning to win a new kind of power. The power to choose. The power to say No. The power to know what we don’t want.
And when men in the workplace stop being scared of giving up their positions of power, stop thinking it’s all about the money, and are brave enough to invite women to step up and help them run the country; when they realise we can do a better job of running things when we work together, then women will happily start to swell the ranks of the top job lists once again.

AND while we’re talking about getting the work-life balance right. Book your summer holidays in England this year, because the weather experts predict that last year’s sizzler was nothing compared to what’s coming up.
As well as global warming, apparently we’ve got the El Nino weather system heading this way to thank for another scorching summer season, caused by above average sea temperatures in the Pacific.
I can’t wait!

I have  just come back from taking the children to Disney in Paris for a couple of days.
Disney is one of very few holidays which suits teenage girls and a five-year-old boy: a long-promised treat, paid for mostly with three years’ worth of Tesco vouchers.

And we enjoyed it. It was all very Disney. No rubbish on the sidewalks. No chips in the paintwork. Everything just perfect and ticketyboo.
I had been to Disney in Florida for a day, but that was exactly 25 years ago, on my 21st birthday.
And the spooky thing was that despite the quarter century time gap, and the fact we were on a different continent, the only obvious difference appeared to be in the weather.
But there were subtler differences which gradually peeped out behind the Disney façade now and again.
Let’s take the slapping incidents, for example.

When we got back from France we were driving home and heard a news report about a Disney cast member who had been suspended for allegedly slapping a teenage boy.
A father, who has video to back up his claims, says a Disney Tigger character punched or slapped his son around the ears. It seems that bouncy old Tigger could soon be bounced right out of his job.

I don’t know which of the Disney theme parks this occurred at, but the children and I instantly decided it must have been Paris.
This was, firstly, because we had just seen an excessively-bouncy Tigger over-acting his part with far too much energy that very weekend. For some reason his Tigger suit was a lurid, acid Orange colour.
And this particular Tigger got into character up to the point where he was bouncing madly on and off fences and on to off-limits stretches of perfectly-manicured grass. To be honest, the children around him looked slightly worried.

The girls and I decided he might have taken something, or been affected  by the toxic colour of his costume.
But the second reason we suspected the slapping might have happened in France was because of the very different style of parenting we witnessed.
We were in the queue for, I think, Space Mountain 2 when there was a slight altercation behind us and a teenage French girl attempted to push by us.

As an aside here, we had already begun to notice that French young people just don’t get queueing. They seem to see it as a mark of weakness to get in line.  Even though the queues were perfectly clearly marked, they just ran past in groups whenever the slightest gap appeared.
Maybe it was just the young Parisian city-dwellers, and perhaps teenagers brought up in London, New York and Rome all have to develop similar dog-eat-dog survival techniques.

But when this particular girl tried to push by me, I decided that perhaps I should just shuffle slightly to one side, blocking her path. Childish, I know, but like all well brought-up Brits, I see queue jumping as the ultimate in bad manners.
I was then aware of some quiet French conversation behind me, but my 30-year-old grade C French O-level certificate was no real help here.
I turned around just in time to see an extremely chic and smartly-dressed woman of about my age violently slapping a stocky 13 or 14-year-old boy across the face. Hard.

The boy, also dressed in expensive city-smart clothes, was I presumed, her son.
He did not make a sound. He just stared blankly at the floor ahead of him and carried on shuffling quietly forward with the rest of the line.
I was shocked. It was an enormous culture difference.
I was worried that I had somehow caused some family disagreement by drawing attention to the queue jumper.
I realised that in England, parents have now accepted as a norm that it is not acceptable to use physical violence to chastise a child openly. (I’m not saying it doesn’t still happen behind closed doors, but very rarely in public).

And what shocked me even more was the way the boy wordlessly accepted this punishment.
Can you imagine how a teenage boy in this country would react? I would expect a loud  war or words, threats to ring Childline, and the possibility that the boy might strike back.
It was not the only time that I witnessed parents being far more strict and controlling than we ever see in this country. Even in the family fun atmosphere of Disney, children were not allowed to step out of line.

OK, it’s nice to see children being well-behaved. But it made me wonder how often that kind of violence and public humiliation were used to gain good behaviour.
What made it worse was that even though I disagree totally with smacking children, neither I nor anybody else in the queue raised so much as an eyebrow to intervene on the boy’s behalf.
That was partly down to my personal cowardice, partly the language barrier and partly a feeling that somehow, in France, this was perfectly acceptable parenting.

In contrast, when we went to have a character breakfast with Mickey Mouse and co, the cast of Disney’s Robin Hood were touring the tables, including the evil Sheriff of Nottingham.
Now my five-year-old had no idea that this 6ft man in a lion’s outfit was supposed to be the evil Sheriff. As far as he’s concerned, as a big fan of the recent BBC Saturday tea-time series, the Sheriff is supposed to look more like Lily Allen’s dad, Keith.

And so my little lad was quite perturbed when he was suddenly practically picked up off the floor by the scruff of his neck by a giant stuffed lion, to pose for an in-character photograph.
There was no fuss. He bravely smiled for his picture, but quietly pulled me aside afterwards to ask in a worried voice why a lovable Disney character is grabbing him by the collar.
I explained it was just play-acting, the lion was supposed to be the baddie, and he was doing the same as a joke with all the children.
He accepted my explanation, but I could see that he was slightly upset at being man-handled in this way by an adult stranger.

Which made me wonder about how easily the Tigger incident could have been misconstrued, because of subtle differences in culture, language, acceptable children’s behaviour and sense of humour.
On the surface everything at Disney looks the same, but scratch the surface and you start to wonder if it is such a small world after all?