Pink* Will Eat Your Brain.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the colour pink.
As hues go, it is no more offensive than turquoise, oxblood, or chartreuse.
The politics of pink, however, are another matter.

These days if you have a young*** girl in your family, you will find that your house quickly becomes covered in pink.
This is not because the colour pink is somehow magnetically attracted to the female gender****, nor indeed are girls irresistibly drawn to the colour pink.
It is, quite simply, because just about every ruddy thing that is marketed to girls is, quite emphatically, pink.
 Now I'm sure there are girls out there who really do love pink, who would love pink even if they were told that pink was really not a girls' colour, who would fight for pink even though everything marketed at girls was green*****.
 However most girls don't really have the opportunity to decide whether they like pink or not: they are inundated with pink from the moment they are born.
 Very quickly, they learn to associate pink with for me and, conversely not pink, that's any colour that isn't pink, or perhaps a pinkish shade of purple, with not for me.
Most early learning toys come in two versions: one in bright colours, normally all the primary colours, but occasionally blue with decoration, buttons etc in various contrasting colours, and one in pink.
The message is clear: the pink one is for girls, all the other colours are for boys.
 Somehow, despite encompassing just over half of all children, "girl" is considered a special interest group: we have toys for children, and then we have toys for girls.

As girls grow older pink continues to overwhelm them, but now it also begins to direct their choices: having been trained to recognise pink as for me, girls are now directed towards certain types of toys, and away from others, by their relative pinknesses.
 Baby dolls, fashion dolls, dolls houses and princess or nurturer role-play and dressing up?
Pink
Pretty craft and design packs******.
Pink.
Horse-riding, ballet dancing or ice-skating?
Pink.
Absolutely anything domestic or containing the word princess?
My gods it's pink.
Yes, Cinderella, you shall go to the ball, however the garage, fire-station, race track and outer space seem to be off limits.
Sorry about that.
 Anything that isn't pink, such as construction kits, race cars, train sets, superheroes, dinosaurs, serious art supplies, spaceships, board games that aren't about fashion or dating, bats, balls, yo-yos, stunt kites, chemistry sets and magic tricks, is, somehow, not for girls.
 Now of course there are girls who will fight this stereotyping, and there are certainly parents******* who will make a point of buying the non-pink items, and who will steer their offspring towards the dinosaurs, or spaceships, or maybe dinosaurs in spaceships, but the social conditioning of pink is hard to overcome.
With the knowledge that pink is for girls, and the correlating information that non-pink is not for girls, comes the understanding that to step outside of these boundaries, to choose the wrong item, is to put yourself beyond the pale: to defy the laws of the tribe is to exile yourself from the tribe.
The result is that, eventually, even if pink were entirely removed from the world of toys, girls already trained by past exposure to all that pink, would still gravitate toward the stereotypically girly toys, because those are all they expect to play with.
 Likewise boys will avoid anything that falls within that girly stereotype, on the grounds that it is not for them.

As girls grow older pink becomes less predominant, not because their options are opening up -if anything they become even more constrained- but because, their training complete, they can now recognise toys and other items that are for them without the assistance of the colour pink.
 So pink becomes less dominant, a fashion doll's packaging, for example, will be blue and pink or, often, a lingeriesque black and pink, instead of the solid pink of their earlier toys.
 Eventually there is no need for pink at all: the girls', or rather the young women's interests having been firmly directed down the road of shoes, handbags, and hair products.

This may seem ridiculous, and it is true that few young women will end up completely conforming to stereotype, however I find it interesting that Woman's Hour , (on a programme about pink) interviewed a young woman who was colour blind.
 Her interests, even her taste in clothes, were very different to those of her friends, something she attributed to the fact that she could not see the colour pink, and therefore had grown up without the dubious benefit of a signpost to tell her which route she was supposed to choose through life.********

The world of pink, and the world of non-pink are very different places.




 All of which is pretty awful, all by itself

However, long before a girl has learned to like pink, before she has any say in the toys and clothes she receives, whatsoever, pink may already be making its mark upon her brain.

As I mentioned earlier, most early learning toys these days come in two versions: normal (for boys), and pink (for girls).
 The boys' versions are brightly coloured, with plenty of contrast between the various shapes, buttons, numbers and so on.
The girls' versions are, by and large, pink.
 This means that while a boy playing with the toy intended for him will start to develop an understanding of those shapes, numbers, and colours without really trying, a girl playing with that same toy in the "girls' " version will not.
 Indeed, as the mass of pink or lilac buttons blurs together, a girl who tries to take an interest in shapes and numbers (colours being notably absent from her toy) will find it quite difficult.
 The lesson to girls, right from infancy, is: maths is hard.

Deterred from an interest in basic maths by its difficulty, and by the relative ease of other, less complex, activities, girls are moved away from mathematics, science and engineering, before they even know what those words mean.

Pink will eat your brain.


 Of course girls can fight against the tide of pink, they can develop their own interests, and even those who truly, naturally incline towards pink, are not condemned to a life of brainless fashion-following.
Girls who like pink are every bit as capable of becoming renowned historians, architects, or cognitive scientists, as any other girls.
Nature can defeat nurture.
 The pink doesn't make it any easier though.













*Not Pink the singer, pink the colour, Pink is actually pretty cool.
Yes, I just put an asterisk into the title.
I'm not proud of this**.

**Maybe a teeny bit.

***Where young means somewhere between a foetus and old-enough-to-draw-a-pension

****Technically, only words have gender.
People have sex.
There is nothing wrong with sex.
The word gender, however, is used to denote, not merely the sex with which a person is born, but also that to which the subscribe whether it is that assigned by birth or not.
So it's a nice, egalitarian word, even if it is horribly inaccurate.

*****I'm sure of this because I know more than one boy who likes pink.
Pink is not marketed to boys.
Quite the reverse in fact.

******Often low in creativity and high in spangles and words like princess.

******* Hi there!

******** This is clearly anecdata, but I do find it rather telling.

Yo Ho Ho

I haven't written about Christmas this year, in fact I haven't written much at all in the last month.*

The latter will be remedied, but Christmas, frankly, can go hang.

I have much more important things to write about, chief among which is the fact that we now, inexplicably**, have a four year old.

 Obviously this demands my full attention, and as Eleanor's birthday happens to be the same day*** that many people spend finding presents in their underwear, devouring unreasonable amounts of food, and generally rejoicing that a saviour has come to earth and his name is Santa Claus, it seems reasonable that Eleanor should take priority.

 This year Eleanor wanted a Pirate Party and we were happy to oblige.

  We were slightly less happy by the time that we'd printed (and promptly mislaid) the invitations, created a passable girl pirate poster for stick**** the eyepatch on the pirate, wrapped up a suitably booty-filled parcel to pass, baked and iced (with much piratical swearing) a ship-shape***** cake, planned all the other games, made all the other food, and tracked down various nautical napkins, party bags and general celebratory tat.

But finally we relaxed in the knowledge that the difficult bit was behind us.

More fools we.

We forgot, of course, that while all the other things may be fiddly******, tedious, time consuming, and tiring, they at least do not contain the most fiendishly unpredictable and troublesome factor of all.

Kids.

 The party, in fact went pretty well, assuming ones criterion for a good party is "Does not descend into complete chaos", but there were a few hiccups along the way.

 The first came when one of the guests came down with the flu, presumably from a spare germ that had decided to break away from the pack and infect someone outside of our family for a change*******.

 This reduced our pool of guests to three, with Ellie's friend Dan, as he had been last year, the only boy.

 Fortunately he did not, as he had last year, feel left out and awkward.

Maybe he thinks pirates are more macho than fairies, or something.

At any rate Dan soon avenged this slight when he bounded in, looked happily around the room and announced "I think we should pop all the balloons!"

I would not, of course, have let him burst them all: they were Eleanor's birthday balloons and she didn't want them popped.

 It would have been nice however, to let him pop one of them, unfortunately the party included three infants******** and, torn between potentially upsetting three little ones, or definitely disappointing one big one, I went with option two.

 I then spent the rest of the day feeling like a bad hostess.

Later on Dan also wanted to pop all the bubbles people were blowing (is this a stage they go through or  something?) and while I couldn't let him do that, he was able to pop some bubbles at least.

Then there were the games.

 Things got off to a less than stellar start when my happy suggestion of "Shall we play some games?" was met with a chorus of Nos.

 On further enquiry I was furnished with such reasons as "They might be boring", and "I might not win" (thank you Eleanor) so, safe in the knowledge that they weren't boring, and facing the possibility of my daughter's not winning everything with total heartlessness, I went ahead and inflicted games on them anyway.

  Pass the Treasure went pretty well, Stick the Eyepatch on the Pirate was fairly successful, though fraught with blatant cheating, Musical Islands gave us no problems beyond the fact that the same two children kept winning, and Captain Says was utterly ridiculous.

 Dan won every round.

Even when he stopped playing and started being the captain instead, he still, to all intents and purposes, won.

  It seems that, somewhere between the ages of five and six, children go through a developmental burst which allows them to understand the rules of Simon Says: among the assembled pirates only Dan had reached that heady age.

No matter how often we explained the rules, no matter how wildly we telegraphed oops, I didn't say "Captain Says", as soon as any instruction was given, all the other children leapt********** to obey.

 Eventually we had to stop and serve lunch just to escape the insanity.

Lunch was vaguely successful : nobody liked everything, I had cunningly made a vat of plain pasta-with-pesto as a fallback for fussy eaters, none of whom would touch it, and I forgot to serve the potato-skin-boats that had taken me half an hour to assemble that morning, but everyone found some things they liked, nobody suffered an horrendous allergic reaction to anything, and the ship shaped cake went down like the Titanic.

Following this the kids all charged off to play upstairs and, apart from a few games of I Spy Through My Telescope, and the revelation of the totally chosen in advance, not at all just made up to give a prize to anyone who hadn't won one, location of the hidden treasure (everyone stuck a sticker on a map when they arrived,  yes, normally this would be in a footnote but I think my asterisk key is getting tired), the party was over.

In the end, despite, or perhaps a little bit because of, the hilarity and riot, everyone had a good time, Eleanor didn't care that she hadn't won a single game, and everyone went home happy.

 They also went home with an enormous balloon each.

Dan can burst that one if he likes.

*Due partly to the amount of other things we had to do, but mostly to our having had every cold or flu bug in the western hemisphere, one after another.

**Well, not inexplicably, I mean, I know how it happened: I was there for much of it after all.

It still seems pretty weird though.

*** This was not the plan.

She was supposed to be born on the second of January, so we could buy her presents in the sales.

****Because, as Eleanor pointed out, a pin would hurt too much.

***** Literally.

******For which read aggravating beyond belief: have you ever tried to ice a cake shaped like a pirate ship?

It should be quite simple.

It isn't.

******* It has been suggested that perhaps there are simply an awful lot of bugs going around at the moment.

I dismiss this theory out of hand, in favour of the obvious truth: They Are Out To Get Us.

**********(*********) One of them male, so Dan wasn't the Only Boy after all.

*********Maybe I should start using numbers or something, before this all gets out of hand.

********** Which was odd because we hadn't told them to leap.

 Sorry, there doesn't seem to be an option to add numbered footnotes.

Mince-pie Day

We made mince pies

Well, obviously we made mince pies, it's that time of year after all.
This is basically a Nigella lawson recipe, with a few alterations*.

Ingredients

240g plain flour
60g Trex-type vegetable fat
60g Butter cut into small cubes
An orange or so
A teeny pinch of salt
Icing sugar
Mincemeat (normally I'd make my own, that being half the point of these pies, however this year, for several reasons, that did not happen)

Put the flour into a big bowl, throw in the cubes of butter, and stir them around a little so they get covered in flour.

Take little blobs of the Trex (or whatever fat you're using) and flick them into the flour bowl too.
Keep going till you run out of Trex, then stir the bowl again until everything is floured.

Now put the bowl in the freezer.
Alternatively, if you live on planet Earth and your freezer is full of food, put it somewhere very cold and surround it with ice cubes.
Traditionally we would put it in our freezing-cold annexe, however, as the annexe isn't actually freezing cold this year, we settled for building an ice-cube igloo around the bowl.

Leave the bowl there for an hour or so and go and talk about global warming, make paper chains, or watch the Muppets Christmas Carol, while it becomes very, very cold.

Squeeze an orange into a cup or jug, add a little salt and put this into your fridge, or, if the fridge is full too, stick it next to the bowl of flour.

Complain bitterly about recipes that assume you own a food processor**

Fetch the bowl of flour and fats, and very quickly rub the fat into the flour to produce a breadcrumbly mess***

Now pour in the salty orange juice, stir it in, then use your hands to bring the whole mess together.
If you need more liquid squeeze another half orange, but only add as much as you absolutely have to.

Make the dough into two balls, stick them in the fridge****.

Now go and sing some carols for a while.
If you have snow, make a snowman.
Also, know that I hate you.

Turn on the oven to a high pie-setting (The original recipe suggests 220).

Now roll out ball of dough number one and cut out as many circles as you can.
You should be able to fill at least one and a half fairy-cake trays*****, but you may need to reroll it a little.
Make sure the circles are big enough to fill the indentations in the trays: they don't need to be big, but they do need to reach the sides******.

Use the left over pastry to cut out little stars, or other fiddly decorative things, to go on top of the pies.

Now repeat this with the other ball until you have filled two trays with little circles.
Leave the rest of the dough for later.

Put a blob of mincemeat onto each circle of pastry and top with a star
Put the pies into the oven for ten minutes.

Meanwhile roll and cut out as many circles and stars as you can manage, ready for the next batch.

As soon as the pies are ready, take them out of the trays and leave them to cool.

The minute the trays are cool, put in the next batch of pies and cook as before.

Once everything's out, sprinkle them with a little icing sugar.
A little.
At least try not to get it absolutely everywhere.

Let them cool.

Eat one.
Save the rest.

Or you could just make more.
You probably have some mincemeat left over, after all.










*And a lot of sarcasm.

**This invocation to the domestic gods is obligatory, even if you do, in fact, own a food processor.
It's not as if the writers could see into your kitchen after all.
Or is it?

***If you own a food-processor you could do this the easy way.
The laws of cosy Yuletide baking, demand otherwise however.

****Or, you know, somewhere that actually has room for two balls of dough.
Somewhere cold though.

*****If you don't have trays with little indentations in them you could probably get away with using fairy-cake cases.
The pies might come out a little crinkly round the edges though.

******Ours do not reach the sides.

Pidea day

We didn't make anything.
We've all had a stupid fluey cold, and nobody feels like baking.
We went to the cinema instead.

We will be making cheese and leek rolls, which are basically just cheese and onion rolls but with leeks instead of cheese.
Since I was feeling guilty for my cinema-enabled laziness* I thought I'd better post something, so here's the basic idea behind the rolls.
You can vary this by changing the cheese you use, or the accompaniments, or the pastry, or all of them frankly.


Cheese and Leek Rolls

Ingredients

Premade puff pastry
Some feta cheese
Some gruyere
A leek or two
A little pepper (and salt if you like that sort of thing)
A beaten egg or a little milk


First chop the leek finely, into itty, bitty, tiny pieces.
Grate the gruyere and crumble the feta.

Now roll out the pastry into a reasonable rectangle, and cut this down the middle into two wide strips.

Distract eldest child with workbooks or something and summon toddler for cheese-based bonding** session.

Scrub toddler liberally, then show her*** how to mix the different ingredients.

Let her play.
Hide, if necessary.

When everything is combined, take whatever didn't go on the floor, season, and show her how to sprinkle it onto the pastry.

If anything survives, fold over the sides of the pastry strip to make two long rolls then cut these to whatever length you want.

Arm the toddler with a pastry brush, and allow to splat the beaten egg or milk all over the rolls.

Put them into a medium oven for twenty minutes or so.

Eat.
If you dare.


*Though given that the film was Tinkerbell: The Secret of the Wings, I don't feel all that guilty.

**Hopefully of the emotional, rather than literal, variety.

***Or him, or whatever, really.

Catching Up

I've been pretty quiet lately, what with one thing* and another**.
This doesn't mean that we haven't done anything though.
In fact, we've finished our Houses project.
I really didn't find this one as inspiring as the others we've done, but I'm glad I persevered as Ellie was terribly keen and, in the end, we got through an awful lot.

So, what have we been doing?

We've experimented with construction materials.

Experimented on our constructions.

Built a dwelling or five.

Re-written the classics***.

And played a few games.


Somewhere along the way education occurred****.

*Eleanor.

**Phoebe.

***On the subject of the classics, The Jolly Postman is a triumph of the Wold Newton genre.
Many thanks to Nicky for the loan.

****Ok we did some other things too, like reading books, talking about houses, pointing out different buildings while we were out, and so on.
But I didn't get any good photos of those.

Harried pieday

We made a Homity Pie.

Supposedly this is a frugal recipe from the days of rationing.
I think it's changed a little

Homity Pie

150g flour, in a half and half mixture of white and wholemeal (or whatever you want)
150g butter and another couple of blobs for cooking and greasing
One egg, beaten
A good bit of grated cheese (maybe 200g, whatever you have, really) preferably strong cheddar
Two or three leeks
One or two onions
A clove or so of garlic (just so it doesn't feel left out)
Whatever greenery you want to use up, chopped and/or blanched if necessary
Some potatoes, probably one more than you think you'll need
A little thyme and/or parsley

Peel the potatoes and cut them into thick slices.
Clean and slice the leeks, peel and slice the onion or onions (into rings, not fragments) and chop or crush the garlic.

Parboil the potatoes for about eight minutes, drain, and cut into medium sized chunks.

Go back in time to the point at which you put the potatoes on to boil, melt a blob of butter in a pan and sweat the leeks, onions and garlic.

Mix the chunks of potato with the softened, slightly golden allium**, then stir in the cheese.

Leave this for a while and get on with the pastry***.

Stir the flours to ensure they are properly combined, then rub in the butter till it resembles breadcrumbs.
Stir in the beaten egg and squidge it with your hands till you have a soft dough somewhere between uncooked shortbread and a raw cheesecake-base.

Do your best to roll out this sticky, crumbly mass, then press it into a pie dish or cake tin, trimming the edges neatly.

Ladle in the filling, sprinkle the herbs on top and put it into a medium pie-oven (about 180 for us) for between forty and forty five minutes.

Serve with mashed squash and whatever green vegetables you have unpied.





*Eleanor, despite still suffering some confusion over irregular verbs, seems to have got the hang of whom, for some reason I find this terribly amusing.

**I just really like using that word.

***Or don't bother, I'm not really sure about the need for pastry here, I suppose it's a more respectable looking main course when encased in a crust, but it makes a fairly wonderful cheese, allium****, and potato bake without it.

****Did you know that chives are also allium?
Allium.
Allium, allium, allium.

Post Office

Christmas preparation has truly begun, presents bought, credit card crying, and letter to Santa written.

The only problem how to post the letter to Santa?

Well as part of the homes project we were looking addresses and how post works, so Ellie and Amelia (with help from Phoebe), making use of boxes collected through the year (YES their finally gone!) made a Post office

Phoebe Investigates