Organic-Ally

The beginning of the year found me being employed on a zero-hour contract at a local university (there are two close to me). My job was to support hybrid teaching, making sure that online students were well looked after. Because the students (as well as faculty) were logging in from very different time zones, I was working rather strange hours.  Once we found ourselves being an hour late for lunch because the lecturer's "ten minutes" (he was in a totally different time zone) became a full "sixty minutes" by which time the catering staff were all anxious to leave. So, for the first time, as a zero-hour contract worker, I began to imagine what life might look like if employers simply change one's hours without warning. What protection do workers have? If I had spent x amount of money travelling to work and then the employer says I was only needed for three hours instead of six, would that be fair? I'm still working and thinking through this, for a conferen...

Today is a day of celebration for me. It has been since 1998 when I got married. Sadly as I pondered the blessing that my husband has been to me, I know of friends whose marriages have fallen apart. What appears to be common in these is that these friends are/were married to high-earning lawyers. As my son is just about to start on his law conversion course (after an undergraduate degree in Classics), I had spent many hours mulling over why some marriages hold and some don't. These friends and I also share another characteristic: we are all highly-educated women, previously with enviable careers working for some of the top multi-nationals, had kids, and we became stay-at-home mothers. Why did their lawyer husbands then decide to explore and then prefer relationships with other women, themselves also lawyers? I can only think that their ability to earn high incomes meant it was easy for their wives to remain at home. This, in itself, is not a bad thing. However, as I learned, stayin...