Stories of middle-aged women

"As a woman of 50, I’m surrounded by my contemporaries and what women of that age go through: parental loss, cancer, dealing with Alzheimer’s, children growing up. All these issues that are here in our lives and they’re invisible."

thus spake Samantha Bond recently, here, when bemoaning the lack of stories of middle-aged women.

Such am I.  I and my peers are coping with aging relatives, taking on legal powers of attorney, mourning those we are losing alive to Alzheimer's, and vicariously taking on the troubles of our grown-up children.  Our children may be living the dreams we once had: emigrating, studying fantastic university courses.  Or they may be worrying us with troubled relationships, dangerous driving, failing exams, not working. 

Is there not drama in such lives?  Apparently not, and hence Bond's moan.  There are few theatre, film or stage productions of the lives of people like me.  Despite the bulk of theatre audiences being made up of middle-aged women, despite the novels written by and for us, there are not the productions, and hence there are not the roles for the actresses like Bond. 

Middle-aged women are like the main supporting wall of a house, central and sustaining, but hidden.

Fusor reactor

I went to a staff development event for work yesterday (yes, Saturday). Amongst other things we had a lecture from Dave Elliot, a professor of engineering on renewable energy. He has just retired but his web site is still here on the OU site, otherwise find him on wikipedia.

A couple of things stick in mind:

1. there's no point in building nuclear reactors because we've only got enough fuel for it to last a few years, then we'll have to find something else and have to deal with the nuclear waste for thousands of years.
2. fusor reactors are absorbing 50% of research money on renewable energy, but it will take up to a hundred years to build something useful

He mentioned this newsletter web site http://www.natta-renew.org/ if you want to keep up to date, which I'll have to do because son is planning to build a fusor reactor over the summer and his university is supporting him.

Legalities and paperwork

Daughter and I are spending a few days with parents in Yorkshire. They're encouraging and helping me to sort out legal power of attorney for someone. Do you realise what a pain this legal procedure now is! There's a twenty six page document to complete with signatures from at least three different people. No wonder the radio had a File on Four enquiry about it a few weeks ago. It's almost more trouble than it's worth because the people who most need to set one up have trouble accessing, reading and absorbing all the information that they have to know in order to protect themselves.

You can find out about it from the Office of the Public Guardian.