… or at least she is writing on one of the Guardian’s. Who’d have thought it?

And she makes a very good point: if women rush out of being nursing aides and into plumbing, who is going to do the nursing? A lot of the answer has to be more than a simple rebalancing; rather it has to be the allocation of a lot more money.

But the elephant is this: women are lower paid than men because the work they do is undervalued. Why should the valuable work a woman does caring for small children in a nursery or looking after the bedridden in a nursing home be rewarded at a far lower rate than, say, a lorry driver? Pay rates are set by pure tradition and prejudice, nothing to do with skill and certainly not social value.
If women all do as they are instructed, retrain and move “upwards” to higher paid work, then who will clean the hospital floors, take classroom assistant jobs and serve in restaurants? Presumably yet another wave of new immigrants, destined to be just as poor, and probably mainly women too in these service sector jobs. It is no answer to gross inequality. The only answer is to pay people fairly.

It is pleasing to see that the report about women’s pay deficit – still 17 per cent below men’s, which is costing the country £23bn a year has been getting a lot of attention.
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Elsewhere, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin which I recall as being spectacularly wonderful when I visited some 15 years ago, is to get a major revamp:

The neoclassical museum will gain a new wing during the overhaul, which will cost a maximum of €351m (£240m) and be financed by the federal government….
The new fourth wing, which will be built across the entrance to the museum’s massive courtyard, “will allow us to show all major cultures on a single level,” Klaus Dieter Lehmann, the head of Berlin’s Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, told a press conference yesterday. “You will then have, on one level, everything from Mesopotamia, through Egypt, Greece, Rome and classical antiquity up to the Islamic era.”

I can feel a trip to Berlin coming on …

To the Institute for Historical Research last week for a seminar,’The Worst of All Her Afflictions’: Experiencing Breast Cancer in Early Modern England’, presented by Marjo Kaartinen. It almost took me back to my agricultural science days in its goriness – horrible surgical implements and blood-soaked descriptions – one of the younger participants was turning distinctly green as she listened to Fanny Burney’s description of her masectomy (carried out of course without anaesthetic) and the picture of a breast dissected by an 18th-century surgeon circulated remarkably quickly …

Nonetheless it wasn’t all gore. There was also an interesting debate on the likely incidence of the disease then compared to now. Of course it will never be possible to get statistics, but it might be possible to get an impression from contemporary accounts, and particularly women’s level of fear of the disease (given all of the other deadly dangers around). And the impression was that it was quite high, particularly given that the number of women over 40 in the population was low.

But very few records survive in women’s own words. There are a couple of reasons for that. Due to – understandable – fear of the operation, women usually did not approach surgeons, or decide to have it, until the disease was very far advanced (although surgeons did understand that it was important to operate early). So they didn’t survive long afterward – usually only a few months. (If, of course, the operation didn’t kill them.)

Also some facts (that you might not want to know) about breast cancer. Untreated breast cancer presents as black growth and produces dark, evil-smelling liquid; in 60 per cent of cases it ulcerates. This was a smell that early modern physicians and surgeons recognised. They understood that the disease tended to spread into the lymph nodes (which they would check while performing a masectomy, but metastising was not yet understood). Untreated, the disease usually killed in about three years.

In the early modern era some thought it came from environmental factors, some thought sex life or lack of it – it was well known that nuns were prone to it. Some thought sour milk to blame, others lack of exercise, melancholy, green sickness. Breast-feeding was thought by some to be a cause, and this was one reason for the use of wet-nurses.

“Treatments included all of the usual herbal remedies, usually applied topically, and often caustics, which must have been hugely painful. Books of medicine often contained receipts for “canker in women’s breast”.

But women victims often seem to have kept their condition secret until it was utterly impossible to hide. By that time, often, surgeons would not operate. The traditional Hippocratic view was that if the cancer did not move – was attached, presumably to the breast bone or ribs? the patient would only die faster if operated on. This may have been the reason why the Machioness of Northhampton, a waiting lady in Elizabeth (I’m not sure which one), went to Antwerp to consult doctors there.

There’s one final irony: Fanny Burney survived many years after the operation, so it is likely that her illness was not cancer, and the operation was unnecessary.

The artistic form of choice to express the horrors of the First World War was poetry. Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke brought home the misery, terror and boredom of life in the trenches, and the recurring nightmares it induced. We have not, as yet, seen an emergence of a literary oeuvre of what history may well call the Iraq wars, but no doubt time will cure that. Could it be theatre? I’d like to think so.

Christmas is Miles Away, now at The Bush Theatre, will then have a place, albeit, I’m afraid, a small place, as an early attempt to tell – if only from the perspective of the home front – of the effects of the first Gulf War on one young squaddie, a young man, still a boy really, who was messed up enough even before he arrived at the war.

But that’s not how Chloe Moss’s third play, which debuted at the Royal Exchange, Manchester last year, starts out. We are in the middle of what seems like a classic coming of age story. Christie (David Judge) and Luke (Paul Stocker) are ill-matched “best friends”; the former the teachers undoubtedly call “the smart one”; the words they use about Luke are probably unprintable.

He’s your classic inarticulate, angry, bottled-up teen – not that, in his company, Christie is much better. They communicate through grunts, shrugs and monosyllables: “nothin'”, “what?”, “yeah”. But Moss, and the actors, do a good job of ensuring that the audience still finds this perfectly clear.

Into this rather volatile, conflict-ridden relationship comes the inevitable problem, a girl, Julie (Georgia Taylor), who’s winningly naive, nervously adventurous, and well-intentioned. Inevitably, however, her presence means problems, particularly when a drunk Luke, thrown out of his own house, wants to hang out at Christie’s at 4am. READ MORE

Does anyone know of a book/article with a list of initials used by pamphlet writers in late Elizabethan/early Jacobean London? I’m looking for an S.P. in 1594, and it is hard to know where to start!

The story goes that tight-fitting T-shirts with the slogan “This is what a feminist looks like” are highly popular on US campuses. Great, I say.

Unfortunately some are complaining:

“I think these T-shirts feed into anti-feminist rhetoric that says that women who stand up for their rights are somehow unattractive, not sexy, humorless and not getting any,” [Pamela] Paul told Women’s eNews. “It may look like a proactive gesture, but what else should a feminist look like? Why shouldn’t a strong woman look good? It’s giving legitimacy to the criticism that is so ludicrous that it doesn’t merit acknowledgement. I think it’s kind of a sad way to represent power.”

Pluh-leese! Someone is supporting feminism, publicly saying: “I am a feminist”. There couldn’t be a better message. And the shape of the T-shirt they put that message on, be it XXXL, or super-tight cropped, does not matter in the slightest, in fact it helps to say “feminists come in different shapes, sizes and lifestyles”, as, of course, they do. And they should support each other in making whatever choices (wardrobe or more serious) they make.

The general view is that the residents of London are isolated, self-focused, uncaring individuals, not a community. Nonsense.

My lovely neighbour and dog-sitter, already working for a tiny hourly rate, insisted on giving me back £10 of what I paid her yesterday (which included an overnight stay), and has volunteered to have Champ for a small sum each week – “the gas money” she calls it.

I already had considerable faith in human nature, but this has further boosted it.

(Unfortunately, with Champ in terms of leaving him on his own, it is one step forward and one back. He is a little better about being in the room on his own, and I can get out the door for about 30 seconds before he starts whining, but I did a 30-minute test with a tape-recorder running this afternoon and he howled and whined loudly at regular intervals – 30s to a minute – throughout. He just is not happy on his own.)