Thanks, Mum & All The Girls I Was Friends With
The Positive Effect Of Women

My dad worked nights, and shifts, so I saw him only at brief intervals, where he was usually a little grumpy. My mum was the one who raised me and my brother, and despite what she thinks, I think she did a good job.
People laughed when my dad hung out washing — because that was women’s work. But we did it too, because it helped my mum, and she needed the help, because she was busy. It was that kind of environment where being a sensitive intellectual guy was considered gay, and being gay would have been the worst thing. People get locked into a pattern of proving they are neither intellectual, sensitive, or gay, from an early age, and it can last them a life time.
For nearly 30 years my mum was a Home Carer — looking after the elderly and the disabled in their homes, as part of a service that the local County Council provided. She doesn’t get it when I say that I was proud of her. Her current disability was caused by an incident helping someone else that threw her back out.
Thatcher, for all her faults, was a strong woman. it had an influence growing up under her, that anyone who didn’t just isn’t going to get. To me, looking back on it, my experience was that England was a bit like 3rd world country (I am being somewhat hyperbolic before anyone beats me up for this statement), but being working class was not fun in many regards.
Germaine Greer was a great intellectual adversary pitted against Tom Paulin and Tony Parsons on The Late Show. She was necessarily acerbic, and cut through the air of smugness which transmitted through these two guys and even Mark Lawson, the show-runner.
PJ Harvey, Tori Amos, Bjork, Kristin Hersh, Marianne Faithful, and so many more touched me with great music. Music that for me had a different flow than the male music a lot of people listened to at the time — the lackluster Paul Weller photocopies who bored me. It engaged not just on an intellectual level, but on an emotional level, and with an emotional availability a lot of the guys seemed uninterested in exploring.
Jeanette Winterson, Janet Frame, and Margaret Atwood, you are my literary mothers. Martin Amis is head music, and you are soul music with more smarts than the trick and pony show these intellectual bores trot out to impress?
Sally Potter and Katheryn Bigelow, you informed my film tastes. There are other there too, but you spring to mind as I am writing this — and writing on the fly does not induce me to Google things.
Yes, all the great women fed into my thinking and being.
But it was the women I knew on a daily basis who really had the biggest impact on who I became. Why? I never felt I had to prove myself in my female friends’ company, but that anything I wanted to do or needed to was supported.
My best friend was and is a girl. I won’t drop her name in here, but we could not see each other for years and sit down and talk comfortably. Thankfully Facebook meant the gulf doesn’t have to be so wide. We’ve been friends for about 20 years.
What is the point of this ramble? Uh, I kind of made it two paragraphs back I think. Or maybe not. By having a majority of females shape who I am I think I turned out better than I would have with mainly male role models — I am sure there are some perfectly nice guys who came up through that route, but I think I learned things and experienced things in a way I wouldn’t have if I was learning the same things from men. Strong women have always been and always will be a feature of my life — I seek them out. I find it hard to fathom a world or an environment where that isn’t the way. Chauvinists puzzle me; I just don’t understand how they can be successful human beings operating that way.