If you are not a dog person, feel free to look away now …

Well after my temper had cooled I sent Battersea an email explaining that I felt disappointed in them (two days of frantic phone calls to the behaviour hotline not having produced any result), and they were immediately helpful. The story is that they thought the answerphone was working, after a period when it hadn’t been, but maybe it wasn’t. That is these days a pretty simple piece of technology, but anyway, these things do happen.

So I had a good long chat with a behaviour guy, and he broadly agreed with what I’m doing in terms of using the crate most of the time when I’m home (for no more than four hours at a time), spending time in the bedroom when he’s in the living room, and trying going out for short periods.

What worried him, as it is worrying me, is that Champ doesn’t seem to be happy about this at all, and is looking more stressed than before. The Battersea guy, unlike other sources, agrees with my view that separation anxiety isn’t always (despite what most of the books say) about a dog that has put itself too high in the status hierarchy and therefore feels it has to protect the rest of its pack.

Instead it can just be a dog that is unhappy alone, nervous and insecure, which to my mind is Champ to a T. When we’re out walking if something frightens him – and it doesn’t have to be much, a flapping bit of tape will do it – he cowers into me for protection.

Anyway, I got the feeling he is expecting to see Champ back at Battersea soon, and it may well come to that, but I am going to give it another two weeks, in the hope Champ might suddenly decide to grin and bear it …

Government ministers in the UK are being given a choice:

All members of the Cabinet have been told by the government car pool that when their car is up for renewal they can swap it either for an XL Jaguar or a Toyota Prius.
The Jaguar costs £50,000 and is regarded by environmentalists as a “gas guzzler”, although it runs on biodiesel, which contains a 5 per cent blend of vegetable oil. The Toyota – priced at £17,500 – has a “hybrid” engine, running on petrol and electricity, which cuts its carbon emissions.

The Independent reports that at least one, unnamed, minister, has already said that he’ll go for the Jag on the basis of “security”.

Complete bosh! (A discussion on Five Live this morning suggested that “security” came down to it being a bigger car, and hence more collision-resistant, and more powerful, so “able to get out of trouble”. Two questions: How much risk are ministers at? Not great – since Northern Ireland has calmed, anyway. How often has “a powerful car” saved a politician’s life? No examples that I can think of.

Any minister who opts for a Jag should be named and shamed, embarrassed out of the government.

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Elsewhere Caitlin Moran – a sort of poor-woman’s Julie Burchill – has some interesting thoughts, amidst the sarcasm, about the apparent rash of people being convicted of varying offences that they filmed themselves on their mobile phones. Not that I’m a Baudrillard fan, but he might have something to say about it … simulation and reality and all that.

It has taken a while – I wrote the piece the best part of 18 months ago – but my first academic article has just been published, Resurrecting Our Foremothers: My Hopes as a Biographer, Journalist, and Blogger. It is on Thirdspace, a feminist internet journal “for emerging scholars”. (You might call mine a slow hatching, since I suspect most of the other contributors are rather younger.)

It draws for theory on my Mass Comm thesis, and in practice on my early experiences of blogging. Were I to be writing it now, it would include of course references to the Carnival of Feminists, but re-reading it now (when I’d pretty well forgotten what it contained) I am struck by the fact that there is a single theme in what I do, even though it is not obvious. From Miss Frances William Wynn’s account of Princess Caroline and the pumpkin, to Friday Femmes Fatales, what I am trying to do is bring women to greater prominence, to preserve and propagate their words and thoughts.

Gosh, there is some sort of coherence after all …

Do look too at other items in the journal, particularly “Writing Bridges: Memoir’s Potential for Community Building”.

Elsewhere, I recently came across a more literary feminist journal, Trivia: Voices of Feminism. (I think they are taking postmodern irony too far in the title, but there is some interesting stuff there.)

Entries need to be in today (or perhaps early tomorrow). Winter on Mind the Gap is particularly asking for posts on Feminism and the Body, although any other feminist subject is also welcome.

Submissions to: mindthegapcardiff@yahoo.co.uk

You really do have to worry about the Observer, which is sounding more like the Daily Mail every week. It might want to adopt a new slogan – “Women must be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen”.

The splash today is “UK baby shortage will cost £11 billion · Career pressures blamed for shortfall · Early motherhood cuts women’s salaries”. The story itself is not so bad, in fact has some sensible stuff about the need for childcare, flexible working etc, but most people will, of course, only absorb the headline.

It also persists in the “women just stupidly forgot to have children” trope:

“If women had had, by the age of 36-38, the number of children they wanted when they were aged between 21 and 23, the birth rate would be 13 per cent higher, it calculates. Only five per cent said they did not originally want children, yet four times as many were childless by their late thirties.”

Well I wanted many things when I was 21 – although I didn’t want children – and I don’t now want many of the same things. I didn’t want many of the same things when I was 25 or 30. At 21 you are still chiefly the product of your conditioning and upbringing – you are only just starting to grow up and construct yourself as an independent individual.

No doubt many of those women later changed their minds, or decided that while a baby might be nice, it wasn’t their top priority. Also, no doubt, when they asked those early twenties women the question, they were thinking of having a baby as something that would happen in the far distant future – it is not a serious practical prospect.

With, as I’ve reported before, 30 per cent plus of women in Scotland chosing not to have babies, when are the researchers (and the newspaper editors) going to recognise that this is a valid, sensible, entirely normal choice?

Meanwhile, while I think Labour’s focus on “choice” in schools and hospitals is ridiculous – you just want a good local one, I have to strongly disagree with the complaint about “too much choice” in general life. It is the same as information; you just need to turn the statement around. In the past we were information/choice poor – now we are rich.

Of course both personal and societal structures need to adapt, and there’s likely to be some tension in that adjustment, but we don’t want to go back to poverty. Certainly thousands of types of breakfast cereal might be ridiculous, but you can choose to ignore most or all of them, and if enough people do that there will be an immediate corrective effect. We’ve just got to celebrate good ranges of choices (such as whether or not to have babies), and ignore the silly, corporate ones.

But choice is yet to reach Wi-Fi A Times writer has a great idea for small businesses to get ahead of the big boys … And I wonder if local government shouldn’t play a role here too.