6 Spotify playlists

There are some moments in life where we all need a little pick me up, an energy boost or something to relax us, and we don’t have the option of lying down on a nice patch of grass with our hands above our heads. Music can be a great alternative, and with things like Spotify, there’s a playlist for literally every mood, weather or season.

This is particularly useful for me, because whenever Belle asks me what my favourite food, colour or song is, I usually reply unhelpfully with “I don’t know, it depends what mood I’m in.” I have actually gone for deciding that my favourite colour is yellow, at random, just so I have an actual answer.

Here are some of my favourite playlists for when day to day life becomes a little too much. Which is my absolute favourite?

Well, it depends on my mood, obviously.

Walking like a badass

https://open.spotify.com/user/spotify_uk_/playlist/3V1WI57CMyQdmxy3aibCB4

You’ve dropped the kids off at school late at 9:04am. Your Tesco delivery is due to arrive 4 minutes ago. You live 20 minutes walk away from the school. What do you need to do? Walk like a badass. Blast this playlist through your earphones to help you walk with speed and sass, wherever you need to get to. View Post

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What do you see when you look in the mirror? What I see varies a lot. Sometimes I look in the mirror and see a big wobbly heffalump. Other days I feel more positive.

When I went to record a clip for the What I See project I was in a particularly positive mood, as you can see from my video here. It was because I was in London – going to London always makes me feel all excited and full of potential. Plus it wasn’t that long after I got my funky new glasses and I was feeling pretty awesome, like one of those modern social media types. If I was a man I would definitely have a curly moustache. View Post

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I got out of the shower, wrapped my hair up in a towel, and looked in the mirror.

(No, that wasn’t the horrible thing.)

I had some of yesterday’s mascara smudged under my left eye so I got a tissue and rubbed gently from the outer corner of my eye to my nose.

(The horrible thing is coming now.) View Post

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I am a big believer in women supporting other women. As my career has developed over the last few years I have benefited a lot from the support and advice of other women in business and always try to give that back to others too. I will always try to answer questions, offer tips and meet up with local women for a coffee and a chat if I can.

In the blogging world too I see how important this network is and the value of women offering both practical and emotional support to other women.

We really can do and be anything we want. There is absolutely no shame in asking for help when you need it. View Post

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Once you’re too old for club or college life, purchasing drugs can be problematic and risky – unsuitable for women with jobs and children. “It was fun when we were young, but not now that we want to keep control of it. We need it done efficiently,” says Rachel, 37, who is married with three children and works as a freelance photographer from her home in Bristol. She buys cocaine, mephedrone and MDMA from Karen, the mother of her son’s best friend, who goes to the same local primary school. And because it’s convenient, they swap the cash and drugs from buggy to buggy, while picking up the kids from school.

“No one would ever suspect, says Rachel, who’s active in the PTA. “There are a few like-minded parents who buy from her as well. It’s a nice primary school and they’d be surprised that some mums buy drugs in the playground.”

This is an extract from an article in this month’s Marie Claire about women and drug use. When I read it I actually just sat for a minute, open-mouthed, unable to say anything. What made the whole thing worse is that ‘Rachel’ almost sounds proud, as though her and all these other mums are playing some sort of kooky game. View Post

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A couple of weeks ago, I went to Bath university to see England play Australia. They won. It was awesome.

It was the first proper live netball match I have watched that wasn’t being played by slightly wobbly mums, and it was incredibly inspiring – we all came away absolutely buzzing, and with big plans for our own netball team.

Less inspiring though was the team mascot. The event was packed out with women and girls, and yet at half time they got this: View Post

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I was reading a piece in The Guardian at the weekend from Zoe Williams about the new trend for women only clubs and restaurants.

Reading it through initially, I was fairly unmoved. OK, so a few clubs are opening that are just for women – fair enough, there are plenty of men only clubs after all. So what if women want to hang out together, chat to other people socially, without any risk of sexual overtones?

But then the more I thought about it, the more ridiculous it seemed. Isn’t the whole thing that defines us as women that we are always hanging out with other women talking about stuff? Do we seriously need our own official space where we can feel safe to do this?

I thought about my average week, discounting the family I live with.* This morning I played netball – a women only team. During the week I work at home, sometimes going out to meet a (female) friend for lunch or a coffee. Most of my clients are women. Sometimes I pick Belle up from school and have a quick chat with another mum.  Wednesday nights I might go out to netball again. Sometimes I see my mum or my sister.

Do I sound like I need a woman only club??

If anything, I need to get myself into an office job in a male dominated industry. My life is practically begging for some sexual overtones.

Perhaps it’s different if you don’t have children, but I just don’t buy that women lack space or time together with other women. I certainly don’t believe, as one woman quoted in the article claims, that it’s hard for women to make friends. “In London it’s quite unusual to make new friends,” she says. “I think it’s because when you meet someone and say ‘let’s be pals’, in mixed company, that seems weird.”

Nonsense.

‘Let’s be pals’ has been my friend-making one-liner of choice for years. On our first day of college, 18 years ago, my friend Nicky and I spotted a girl we liked the look of in our French group, sat down next to her and said ‘do you want to be our friend?’ There were boys in the room. Nothing terrible happened. I still consider her one of my closest friends and I’ve been employing a similar tactic ever since, albeit more often on twitter nowadays.

What do you think? Is there a need for women only clubs and restaurants? Does your life lack female only contact or would you actually quite fancy spending an evening with just men, drinking whiskey and chatting about cars?**

Let me know…

*Not that I actually discount them in real life, I’m not that cruel, it’s just for the purposes of this musing.

**Because obviously this is all men do.

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I read an article in Grazia this week that made me mad.

It was written by an anonymous male journalist, who was claiming that being cheated on is basically much harder for a man than a woman. He was empathising with the recently wronged Robert Pattinson. “Believe me,” he said, “it’s so much worse when a woman cheats on a man.”

Of course it is.

Just like it’s always worse when a man gets a cold?

(Did you detect my oh-so-subtle sarcasm?)

He goes on about how much harder it is for men to be cheated on, because it leads them to doubt themselves and their sexual prowess and makes them wonder what they were lacking as a man that made their partner stray. “When women have their hearts broken,” he whines on, “they get endless counselling sessions from friends until they feel better.”

Seriously, does it get much more patronising than that?

Firstly, anonymous male journalist, I would like to point out that just because we don’t have penises, doesn’t mean we are immune to worrying about our sexual performance. Newsflash for you – women occasionally experience self-doubt! Gasp! We also like to think outside the bedroom too, so our trampled self-esteem will affect lots of other areas of our lives as well. (This is similar to multi-tasking. It’s that thing women do when they think about more than one thing at once*.)

Also, this sweeping statement about women finding comfort in their friends makes several very basic and not always correct assumptions. It assumes that all women have friends that they feel comfortable confiding in, and it assumes we want to bang on and on to them about our problems. Neither of these are necessarily true. Heartbreak is often a very personal and private thing, and although men may have this image of women gathering in packs, necking Chardonnay, proclaiming all men to be bastards and immediately ‘feeling better’, it’s simply not true.

The fact is that being deceived by someone you love and trust is gutting, whether you’re a man or a woman, 18 or 80. Just because women might be more inclined to vent their emotions with friends sometimes, doesn’t mean the pain cuts any less deep.

If anonymous male journalist is still wondering what it is that he lacks as a man, perhaps he should focus less on the contents of his trousers, and more on his understanding on how women think and feel.

*Said in an anonymous male writer style patronising tone

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Do you ever feel like you’re the victim of everyday sexism?

Have you ever been wolf-whistled in the street, or leered over by a gang of builders? Maybe your boss has attempted a drunken fumble, or you’ve been passed over for promotion at work because you have a young family?

Where do we draw the line?

At what point does harmless banter become sexual assault? When does discrimination at work become the stuff of tribunals?

Complain about a wolf-whistle and you risk being labelled a prude, or uptight, admit that you have a problem with normalisation of porn, as I have, and you’re labelled narrow-minded and frigid, but just because soft porn has become so mainstream, and incidences of sexism occur everyday, doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem. If anything, its proliferation makes it even more pressing.

Anyway, I’m blathering on. All I really wanted to do was tell you about a new project called ‘Everyday Sexism’, created to draw together women’s daily encounters with sexism. Go and read the stories from other women, add your own, and let’s not be afraid to stand up and say that sexism still exists, and that speaking up about it doesn’t make us all frigid man-haters.

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A while ago I asked the question ‘does it matter what women wear‘? and Clare from The Potty Diaries, who I am now going to think of as my roving Russian reporter, said that yes, in Moscow it definitely DID matter. In fact, it matters very much.

I was intrigued, as I’ve heard from friends that Russian women are quite something, so Clare has very kindly written us a fascinating post from actual Moscow. How cool is that? Please leave Clare lots of lovely comments so she’ll come back again another day.

‘Yes, sure.  Write me something about women in Moscow’ said Slummy Single Mummy on Twitter when I offered her a guest post.

Oh god.  Do I have to?

Well actually, yes I do, because I offered and so – bolstered by copious supplies of camomile tea and a half empty tin of condensed milk (can you tell that I am somewhat out of my comfort zone?) – here goes.

Russian women – or rather, Muscovite women – are just like the rest of us.

Cue long, expectant, pause.

Oh, alright, just kidding.

Russian women are nothing like the rest of us.  They have much better shoes, for starters.  And much shorter skirts.  Perhaps a little less (for which read ‘no’) body hair.  And fewer boundaries about what it is acceptable to do to get what they want and to where they want to go.  And I would go as far as to say that ‘sisterhood’ is even less considered an important attribute here, than it is elsewhere.

Mind you, why would they be like the rest of us? They’ve grown up in a society where femininity (aka ‘Sex’ obviously, but I’m going to stick with ‘femininity’ to spare your blushes) is a currency to be utilised to it’s full extent in a world where nothing is certain.  Remember, the other currency – the Rouble – has proved less reliable than femininity, crashing twice during the 1990’s, devaluing people’s savings and pensions and leaving previously comfortably-off people with next-to-nothing. That’s not some 1930’s anecdote from school history lessons; it’s within living memory for the majority of the population here. So nowadays, most people’s main aim in life is to make as much money as they can, as fast as they can, in almost any way they can, and then get the hell out of Russia to raise and educate their children somewhere else.   A country with a strong currency, preferably.

And whilst I don’t want to launch into a full-on sociological thesis here, it seems to me that this –  along with the small matter of how 70 years of Communist repression affected the individual and his/her hopes and dreams – impacts strongly on how women here are, and how they present themselves.

When I first visited Moscow in the mid-90’s, I was astounded by how good-looking many of the women and girls were.  They were, quite frankly, intimidatingly gorgeous – and they knew it.  After a while I began to work out that yes, there were some seriously good gene pools going on here, no doubt about it, but there was more to it than that.  Russian women identify early on what their main physical attribute is, be it beautiful hair, a fantastic figure, great legs, and maximise that.  So, if they have beautiful hair, they grow it.  A fantastic figure? Show it off.  Great legs?  Let’s invest in short skirts and sky-high heels then.

Some things have changed in the 17 years since my first visit (the impact that the advent of fast-food culture and the hugely increased numbers of cars have had is depressingly obvious – although still less so than in many more ‘Western’ societies) but what hasn’t is the Muscovite women’s determination to make the best of themselves.

And neither has their complete and utter incomprehension of why the rest of us wouldn’t bother…

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Next Thursday is International Women’s Day.

To get into the spirit of things, and to show my solidarity, I have bought tickets for a couple of events that day as part of the Bath Literature Festival. One of them is titled ‘Does it matter what a woman wears?’

Other, less feminist minded family members rolled their eyes and smiled indulgently when I announced my plans for the day. I want to use the word ‘scoffed’, but perhaps that’s a little harsh. I’m sure I heard stifled laughter from Bee though, as she looked up at my outfit for the day, which involved various clashing shades of pink and purple.

It’s an important questions though.

Does it matter what a woman wears?

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I cried at work this morning.

It was a bit embarrassing, but strangely liberating at the same time.

I started crying in the car, in that way where the tears just spill out over your face without you being able to help it. By the time I got into work I had stopped, but was still in the precariously balanced state between crying and not crying, where the mere mention of kittens would be enough to push you over the edge.

I went into the kitchen to wash my cup, and to chisel off the dried up cookie residue, left over from my biscuit dunking activities the day before. I was holding it under the tap when a colleague came in. “Are you alright?” she asked.

Big mistake. View Post

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