Are There No Workhouses?

Today, I read a thread on twitter likening workhouses to gulags. Quite aside from doing a grave disservice to the millions who died in actual gulags in Communist Russia, the person who wrote the thread seemed to have absolutely no idea how the workhouse system in England actually... worked. And then you have nobjockeys like that cartoon prick Rees-Mogg saying we should bring back workhouses, which is a terribly short sighted idea, which I will come back to in hot minute.

So, let me enlighten you, because the Victorian poor are, quite literally, my specialist subject.

The 1601 Act for the Relief of the Poor was designed to echo Protestant culture of taking care of the less fortunate that spread across Europe in the 16th century. Essentially, the people who could afford it gave money to the church, who kept it in a giant chest in the church (the 'community chest', see also: Monopoly) and handed it out to the deserving poor. This meant the church got to decide who was deserving - vagrants (meaning anyone who wasn't normally resident in the parish) got short shrift. Most places also later built a workhouse to house people who needed it. They were usually quite small. To give a couple of local examples: Werrington workhouse was one of the thatched cottages near the village post office, and the one in Empingham was the house called The Wilderness. Cities had correspondingly larger workhouses. People could only claim relief from their home parish, under something called 'settlement'. You could acquire settlement by being born in a parish, marrying a man born in another parish and then moving there, or by working for more than a full year in the same parish before applying. This is part of the reason people didn't move around much in ye olden times - they risked losing their settlement, and thus any right to relief. 

By the 1800s, parish relief rates, a local tax payable by landowners and freemen, were getting out of hand. The data showed massive regional variation in how much people paid, to support a massively variable poor population. Something needed to be done, and the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act was introduced. This law was harsh, make no mistake. It was supposed to offer immediate incarceration in the workhouse to any able-bodied person approaching the parish for relief. It was meant to be a deterrent. New workhouses were built to consolidate all the small ones in the area: huge, prison-like edifices popped up in every registration district.  They usually included an infirmary, and separated inmates into men and women. The new workhouses were run by the Board of Guardians, which replaced the parish as the administrative unit. They usually comprised local government figures, a few doctors and perhaps some of the local clergy. The settlement rules remained in force, and the Board were quite happy to pay to send petitioners back to their home workhouse if they could not prove settlement. 

Theoretically, the Board were only supposed to offer the workhouse (or in-relief) to poor people, but they were never so rigid in practice. How could they have been? Following a poor harvest, entire agricultural communities would require workhouse beds. Even the largest workhouses couldn't accommodate everyone. So, they bent the rules and gave people out-relief, depending on need. This wasn't necessarily money - they could give out fuel, flour, potatoes. A great many old people remained in their homes until death thanks to out-relief. Should you engage in family history and discover someone living on 'parish relief', that is what it refers to. Sometimes, this relief was given in exchange for maintaining the roads. Widows were also commonly given out-relief, to prevent their children being taken into the workhouse. If a whole family sought help, it was not uncommon for the Guardians to admit the husband, and give the wife and children out-relief to keep them at home (and therefore, together). 

The humanity of the Guardians depended very much on the area and its needs, but I have found many more examples of benevolence than of cruelty. 

If you wanted relief, you had to go before the Guardians - the worst kind of job interview format you can think of. You had to demonstrate your right to settlement, your reasons for asking for help, and do so with enough humility to make them want to help you. 

If you ended up in the workhouse, it was dehumanising. You were issued with a uniform, separated from your spouse and children (if they came in with you), and expected to work. The idea was to make the workhouse so horrible that nobody would choose to go there, thus saving money. But the very SIZE of the new workhouses demonstrated that the government were under no illusions about how this was going to work. 

There were several food scandals in the early days of the workhouse, with people being fed starvation diets. These scandals were incredibly damaging to the reputation of the new Poor Law, mainly because the rich didn't want the blood of the poor on their hands. The Poor Law Board was implemented after the above scandal, to act as a sort of Care Quality Commission for workhouse safety. 

The Board of Guardians, and workhouses, also served several other functions that rarely get referenced in general discourse. They provided residential care for the disabled, saving them from life in an asylum. They provided maternity services for unmarried women and those too poor to afford even basic private maternity cover. They issued medical orders to allow the poor to get medicine for free from the dispensary, and hospital admissions. They took the fathers of illegitimate children to court for maintenance on behalf of the mothers. They designed and built the first children's homes, and developed formal foster care. Now, none of this was done for solely benevolent reasons (child maintenance, for example, stopped them having to fund illegitimate children) or to anything approaching a modern standard of good practice, but in an era before the welfare state, the Poor Law WAS the welfare state. 

In 1909, pensions were brought in for the first time for those who hadn't needed relief within the last five years. This was extended to universal provision in 1911, and marked the beginning of the slow end of workhouses. They still offered beds to tramps (read The Spike by George Orwell for a brilliant account of what being a tramp meant in those days), still offered maternity services for the unmarried (which was a source of immense shame in most areas), still offered inpatient care to disabled people, but essentially became hospitals. Peterborough workhouse morphed into Peterborough District Hospital over a number of years. Bourne workhouse became St Peter's Hospital, a residential home for disabled children and adults. The majority of remaining workhouses became Public Assistance Institutions in the 1930s, being subsumed into the NHS on inception, and most workhouse sites remain NHS-owned - one of Stamford's, for example, is an ambulance centre and residential service. Yes, affluent Stamford had two workhouses, housing 450 people, with a separate children's home. 

So why did they stop? Who decided workhouses were a bad idea, and why? For the same reason the government decide anything: cost. It is not cheap to maintain buildings designed to house hundreds of people. It is not cheap to hire the staff - all workhouses had a master, a matron (usually the master's wife) and various medical staff. Cleaning etc. was done by the inmates, but these inmates needed to be fed. After the workhouse scandals of the early Poor Law reform, they needed to be fed so they wouldn't die. It is much cheaper to keep people in their own shitty homes than to pay for them to be housed in government-run buildings, with accompanying government standards, however appalling those standards are from the modern perspective. 

And that remains the reason why reinstating workhouses would be a fucking terrible idea, morally, fiscally, practically. If you use  people who are currently in receipt of not-in-work benefits as your basic admission criteria, you have a minimum inmate population of eight hundred and ninety THOUSAND, not including spouses/children. So now you have to build workhouses to house those 890000 people, their partners and children, including adequate heating, electrics, food, water, medical care, ensuring the housing complies with individual access needs for the myriad disabled people. You have to pay for staff, and their training, and a Workhouse Quality Commission. Workhouses are not prisons - the inmates have done nothing wrong aside from not being in work - so you better have adequate facilities. The compensation market for wrongful practice would make an absolute fortune. 

Would that cost the government less than £70 per person per week? Would it fuck. Paying people their benefits directly absolves the government of responsibility if that person ends up in shit housing, with no electric, no medicine and no help. Put them in the workhouse, and the government better fucking deliver. 

Here endeth the lesson.

Further reading: 

The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700-1948, Lynn Hollen Lees

The Evolution of the British Welfare State: A History of Social Policy since the Industrial Revolution, Derek Fraser

The website www.workhouses.org offers a comprehensive catalogue of workhouses, children's homes and other institutions in England, often with pictures and maps.

In Which Jamie Oliver Needs to Take a Day Off

So, Jamie Oliver is back on his high horse. Not content with bringing in a sugar tax, driving up the price of popular beverages while doing precisely nothing to combat the diabolical amount of sugar in food, and wading in to tell us how BLOODY EASY breastfeeding is, he has now targeted Tony the fucking Tiger for promoting sugary breakfast cereals at children.

You see Jamie, who is clearly a man who struggles with not eating enough to feed the Five Armies, appeared in the Guardian this weekend claiming that the real issue with trying to get families to eat healthily is as old as the industrial revolution:

The Observer, 3rd June 2018, "Jamie Oliver: I like to laugh and that's all that matters at my age". Good job, really.

Let's...let's UNPICK THE STATEMENT SHALL WE?

The industrial revolution did not hit harder and earlier in Britain, it fucking STARTED here. Nor was it the first recorded time that families went out to work. There is this ridiculous idea that before the age of machines, the common folk of Britain were like Summerisle, all folk tales and flowers, dancing and singing, romping in fields. The picture of health, the picture of idyll. And then came machines, all steam and smoke and the RUIN OF MANY A POOR BOY. It's a lovely idea, and complete horseshit.

If you were in the lower ranks of British society at any point in the last thousand years, you worked. You got up with the sun, you put in a fifteen hour day, and then you went to bed, interspersed with an awful lot of bread. Men? Ploughing. All fucking day, dawn til dusk, ploughing. Women? Everything else. Making fabric, making and fixing clothes, feeding animals, making butter, making bread, making cheese. All this in addition to childcare, education (because how else would children learn all these life skills?), cooking and cleaning.

The difference wrought by the Industrial Revolution is that suddenly, women went out to work. Rather than working at home, or on lands they had some right to, women were employed in mills, in foundries, at coal faces. The idea that women gave up work on marriage to cook and clean and sew is a fallacy - in industrial centres, they kept on working. Pregnant? Working. Maternity rights? Lol, no. Maternity leave? Nope - you were expected to be back at work within days of delivery or you lost your job. After all, there were plenty of other women happy to take it.
Outside of major industrial towns, unmarried women worked in domestic service, and married women worked at or around the home: lace making, straw bonnet making, cleaning jobs, laundry work, nursing and maternity services. Some of these jobs (particularly lacework) earned them more money than their husbands, especially in rural places which mainly relied on agriculture, like Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire. And these women would be churning out a child every eighteen months or so. The average family size in the 1840s was eleven children. It had gone down to seven by 1911.

So Jamie, in his infinite wisdom, thinks that these Original Hardworking Families used acquired or innate knowledge to feed their children well. At least, that's what I think his point is, with the follow up about 'fairly humble communities'. LOL. Nope.

A woman working in a factory who had a child had no hope of being able to sustain breastfeeding. If she was fortunate, she might be allowed to bring her baby into work for the first few weeks - I found a great, if terrifying, tale of a woman blacksmith working in the Black Country who rigged up a cradle attached to her smithing apparatus, so she could rock the baby without leaving work. But ultimately, it wasn't going to work, and these babies were fed on cows milk if they were lucky, and cornmeal mixed with water if they weren't. Cows milk was likely to pass on tuberculosis, if the unsterilised bottles didn't give the baby dysentery. Cornmeal and water is not exactly a beneficial diet without any supplementary milk. The baby would typically be left with a day nurse, often an infirm female relative or an older child, and often fed opiate based medication to keep it quiet - hungry babies cry a lot. This combination of mild neglect, overmedication and poor diet was the principle cause of the horrifying infant mortality that blighted the nineteenth century.
A woman working away from town had slightly more chance of keeping her baby with her and well fed, unless the poor thing happened to be born at a time when the women all went into the fields to work. A study of rural Kent (Microhistories by Barry Reay) showed a surge in infant deaths coincided with harvest time, most likely because of unsterilised bottles and improper childcare.

But they knew how to cook? Right? They could cook? Yeah? Pukka?
No.

A girl who was raised working in mills, from around six years old, would not learn to cook. She might see her mother cook, but it's as likely that she grew up in a house with no kitchen.
No kitchen!?!?, I hear Jamie cry, clearly having had visions of every house being like Bob Cratchit's at Christmas, copper aglow, turkey bought with careful savings. The problem is that Bob Cratchit was reasonably well off for a working class lad - born in approximately 1810, he could read and write well long before compulsory schooling was introduced, and had the connections to get him a job for a banker.
A kitchen was a waste of space for most poor factory workers, living in a few rooms of a shared house. They might have access to a kitchen, they might equally not. Their food would have been bought from day to day, and mostly consisted of bread, oatcakes, cheap fatty bacon offucts, and thin porridge. The occasional meat pie would bulk it up, once the man of the house had his share, and fuck knows what the meat pie seller had used to fill it with. These children's main meal might be part of their daily wages, and consist of little more than some oatcake eaten while working. Yum! Better that than some Frosties, eh Jamie?

A girl who went into service did so at around eleven years old. She might learn to cook from the housekeeper. She might teach herself to cook. She might already know how to cook if her mother had taught her. She could take these skills into a marriage. But if, as many did, she lived in rural areas, their food budget would depend on factors as fickle as the crops, the weather, and the whim of the landowner. Bad harvest? No money. Crop failure? No money. Too much labour? No work, no money. If you cannot afford fuel, what are you supposed to eat? A bit of corn stolen from the land, a few potatoes grown in the garden, it amounts to nothing without the heat to cook it.

And then, consider the motherless children, which considering the high mortality rate in childbirth were manifold. Those men who couldn't marry quickly sent their children to other family, or the workhouse. And if food was bad out of the workhouse, it was diabolical inside it.

There was no golden era where working women could fit in a fifteen hour working day, come home and cook a nutritious and cheap meal for their kids from scratch. It has never been a thing. I suspect what Jamie is thinking of is the early twentieth century, when women not having to work once they married was a badge of honour. And with the development of labour saving devices like economic ovens, twin tub washing machines, and the ilk, women had time to cook. The Book of Household Management was a ubiquitous wedding gift for the new brides of the 1920s and 1930s, full of useful recipes, among other slightly aspirational articles on how to get ready for new babies, how to diagnose a rash, and how to accept a wedding invitation. This was a luxury compared to their grandmothers' married lives.

We cannot compare our working lives today to those of 250 years ago. We don't go to work hungry and half expecting to die. Our children don't have to go to work to earn their keep at six years old. We have proper maternity protection and are unlikely to die in childbirth. We have PENICILLIN for god's sake. But we still don't always have the time to spend four hours in the kitchen after everything else, whether it's a full day at work, or whether it's a full day of juggling children. Or both.

Jamie Oliver needs to take a day off. Or better, Jamie Oliver needs to get up, make all his kids fucking granola or whatever he thinks they should be eating instead of Frosties, make their healthy lunch boxes, do a twelve hour hospital shift, go home, cook his kids a meal from scratch, do their homework with them, get them to bed without resorting to opiates but also in time enough to make sure they get enough sleep for school, and do this for seven days. I look forward to his findings.

May The Fourth Be With You (And Also With You)

CONTENT WARNING: Graphic labour/birth description, no pictures. 

"Soph? My waters have broken"
"Oh Jess! Don't cry!"
"I'M NOT CRYING. I'M REALLY PISSED OFF. I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE GOING TO LONDON TONIGHT"

And so, the tale of Noah begins. You see, Noah was not due until the fourteenth, but he decided to break with long family tradition of being overdue, and come on May 4th instead. This could have been to honour our granny, who was 81 yesterday. Or it could have been to impress his father by being born on Star Wars day. The neonatal creep.

So I told Jess to phone the hospital to check her waters had actually broken, and then sat anxiously by my phone. Jess took a good two hours to finally get herself up the hospital, where they confirmed that her waters had broken (as if you could mistake it for anything else) and that the baby was fine. She went home to AWAIT EVENTS. I spent this time exhorting her to RUN UP AND DOWN STAIRS over Whatsapp, and discovering my toddler had chucked seasalt all over the dining room to drive cars through. Parenthood. Who'd do it?

By about 2:30pm, she was feeling contractions and asked me to come and help. I got there about an hour later, and she was wandering about. Our mum had seven kids, with nary a stitch or any pain relief, and was a massive advocate of active labour. When I had Jack, my mum made me run up and down stairs for half an hour to get labour established. It worked. And it worked with Jess as well. Me and her husband, Scott, watched Deadpool and drank tea while she paced, posed:

and crept about like a praying mantis. It was like watching a very odd step class.

Time passed. By about 5pm, the contractions were beginning to bite. At 5:30, I decided we should probably go to hospital soon (as the arbiter of all things birthy) and Jess agreed. I timed her contractions for fifteen minutes, and they were every three minutes, lasting a minute. So, at 6:15pm, off we went.

Except that at the hospital, they make you fucking WAIT for triage. Jess was starting to struggle with the intensity by the time we arrived, and it's quite hard to handle massive contractions in a corridor. I got her to squat straight into them ("Use your knees for the squeeze"), using the handy bars all over the walls as a prop. They took her to triage at about 7pm, and finally actually assessed her at 7:45pm. We got Jess to kneel on the bed to cope, which is the position I found most useful having my lot, and she stayed mostly on her knees after that. She was falling asleep in between contractions, or staring at me like a horror movie doll, which was a sign to me that labour was well established. Her assessment showed she was 5cm, and the baby was happy, so she was transferred to the Midwife Led Birthing Unit.

It was my first time on the MLBU - Alex was born in the consultant unit, and Sooz had Evie in a consultant room because it was nearest - and it's AMAZING. Look at this fucking bed:

Look at all those supports! LUXURY! There was also a beanbag, birth stool and hanging rope thing in case you want to give birth Tarzan style. Jess stayed on the amazing bed throughout.

The internal examination really ramped up Jess' labour, and she wasn't really getting more than a minute's break at a time, with waves of two or three minute contractions. And believe me, it fucking hurts. So she asked for entonox, and I said she had to wait a bit longer because I'm actually a sadist. Then the midwives changed over and took forever to find the entonox, while Jess went swivel-eyed-loon with the pain, and actually PUNCHED THE BED. I haven't seen Jess go full mental for years, it was hilarious.

Yeah, I know, you're not supposed to laugh at the birthing woman, but it was funny.

I know, she should have punched me. It is to her credit that she didn't.

The entonox came at 9pm, and after that, she was mostly fucking fucked. Completely pissed. She didn't get the giggles, or start screaming she was BOLD, like Sooz did. Instead, she huffed on it like crazy when the contractions came, and then completely zoned out. She later said she felt like she was drunk in the toilets at Flares. She looked pissed as a fart. I'm surprised she didn't suggest karaoke.

At about 9:30, I nipped to the loo, and when I returned, she said "I JUST SCREAMED I NEED TO PUSH", and with the next contraction, was in transition. Transition is the joyful phase between contractions to open the cervix and contractions to push the baby out, and most women try and go home or give up at this point. With Jim, I was halfway up the stairs to delivery, stopped and was like, "Nope, I'm going home". Needless to say, I did not go home. If Jess harboured any longing to leave, we couldn't hear her because of the entonox tube in her mouth.

So, she began to push at about 9:45pm, and with a first baby, this can take hours. I know, it looks like a two minute job in every TV show, but it's fucking hard work to push a massive baby-head down a relatively narrow muscular tube that's never done it before. The midwife clearly expected this to take about a year and a half, when suddenly some hair appeared at the opening. She went and got the birth pack open, and fetched an apron, and all of a sudden, he crowned. Crowning is when the head comes through the cervix. Motherfucker, it BURNS. Jess was a-howling and a-screaming and pushing like a demon, and panic-pushed his head out in one fell swoop. The midwife didn't even get her apron on.

So, Noah's there, head poking out. Jess is euphoric and waiting for the next contraction to breathe his body out. The midwife is entirely taken aback by all this, and praying Jess hasn't ripped her entire pelvic floor out. Scott is being adorable and saying to Jess "His head's out! His head's out". And me? I hadn't eaten since 11am coz of my useless gallbladder, so I was sat on a birth stool opposite, eating a banana, tweeting updates, with a perfect view of the whole thing, occasionally shouting encouragement.

The next contraction, Jess breathed Noah out beautifully and he was born at 10:15pm, all tiny 7lb 5oz of him. And that was that. We breed like Weasleys.

Not a nipslip, but TINY BABY FINGERS

Noah did not appreciate being born. He howled at the indignity of the thing for a whole hour, until Jess managed to latch him on, and then he was happy. Honestly, who turns up ten days early for a party and then cries coz there's no food? I stayed to see him weighed, and the delivery of the placenta (bleurgh), and went home before the stitching. Thankfully, Jess still has a pelvic floor.

Jess was an absolute star. Labouring without water is more intense (no buffer), and labouring quickly is a proper mindfuck. From the internal onwards, she never got more than 90 seconds break, and only went a little bit mental. Scott was also a star. He didn't panic, he didn't pass out, he didn't shy away from cutting the cord. It was an honour and a privilege to be there. I am so proud of them.

So, numbers: SROM at 8am, established labour at 7pm, transition at 9:45pm, delivery at 10:15pm. Well done Jess, you take after me. Enjoy your 90 minute labour next time.

Better Than Joe Wicks

On my mum's birthday, three days after Christmas, my gallbladder finally had enough of DEALING with my SHIT. Dealing with CHEESE, and MILK, and CHOCOLATE. In fact, it had probably had enough several days before since I'd been feeling sick and off food since Christmas Eve. I remember saying to Tom that I hoped I wasn't coming down with a sick bug because I would hate to not be able to eat at Christmas. OH. OH THE NAIVETE.

I spent that night in screaming, doubled up agony, with absolutely no idea what was wrong. At first, I thought I had trapped wind. Ha. No. I developed rigors, which is a Bad Sign, but didn't even recognise them. I couldn't wake Tom up. I had to keep putting Alex back to bed when he followed me to the toilet when I was being sick, and at one point felt something rip in my back. At no point did it occur to me to ring an ambulance, because it turns out I am only good at diagnosing other people. I googled. I worked out it was my gallbladder. I figured it probably wouldn't kill me (turns out I was wrong, it can kill you quite easily). At about 6am, I woke Tom up enough to get me some ibuprofen and then managed to sleep for a bit. I managed to sort myself out enough to ring the doctors and then rang 111 to see if I wouldn't be better off just going to hospital. They sent a paramedic out. The paramedic decided I didn't need admitting because I was in far less pain than before. The doctor put me on antibiotics. Another doctor put me on more antibiotics a week later. A week after that, I went to A+E and finally had a blood test to check there were no stones in my liver since I was still jaundiced. This showed the infection had cleared. I went for a scan a few days later, more than three weeks since I first got ill, which showed my gallbladder was absolutely fucking RAMMED with stones. So much so that the sono was surprised my gallbladder was still intact. So, at least I knew what was wrong. It also showed I have a fatty liver, which is not great in someone my age. I managed to get a surgical referral four weeks and three days after my initial diagnosis. 

Just a note here. The NICE guideline for acute cholecystitis, which is the proper name for a gallbladder infection, is bloods, scan, admission, IV antibiotics and a cholecystectomy within a week. This is because of the risk of chronic infection, sepsis and death (woo). I am still kinda fucking salty that this did not happen for me, because my temperature was 0.4 degrees under admission criteria when the paramedic came out. 

My first hospital appointment got cancelled because a water main burst under the hospital and they had to close the hospital down, so I didn't see a surgeon until eleven weeks after diagnosis. His happy news was that my surgery will be in the next twelve weeks. He gave me a diet sheet to force my liver to burn up its fat store before surgery. It reads like a diet of kings... two eggs for dinner? In what universe?

Now, some people get gallstones and they get the odd twinge if they eat the wrong thing. My dad is one of these lucky bastards - he's had a couple of biliary colic episodes ever (biliary colic is all the pain, no infection). Other people get gallstones and suddenly find they have zero tolerance for fat. Your gallbladder is a little organ that hangs out by your liver, injecting bile and helping digest fat. It spasms to release bile when you eat fatty food. Stones aren't always a problem, but if they get caught in the opening of the gallbladder, these spasms are CHRONIC FUCKING AWFUL AGONY. I mean it. I have had three huge-headed sons without painkillers, and gallbladder pain is worse than that. You can't get away from it, it's like a massive belt around the bottom of your ribs, squeezing and making you feel sick and wrong and breathless. I most commonly get pain on the opposite side of my rib cage and diaphragm, and in my back, because it rebounds all round your ribcage. My diaphragm always hurts and is distended. Breathing is a real issue when it's bad, as is the accompanying nausea.

via http://theawkwardyeti.com/

Unusually, I had no pain from my gallbladder until it got infected. Since then, constant fucking pain. I can't tolerate saturated fat at all. At. All. The first week or so was terrible, I thought I would die of hunger. It was the first time since childhood where I can honestly say I was properly hungry. I went ketotic for ages, and I know that's some sort of bizarre holy grail for dieting, but fuck me it's horrible. Your pee reeks of sugar, your mouth tastes constantly sweet, you feel achey and wrong and tired and sort of gluey in the limbs. But it passed, and now I'm used to it, and it's OK. Boring as fuck, but OK. 

I cry when I have to do the shopping because I can't eat what the kids have. Cooking for the kids is an endless nightmare - a few days back, they had jacket potatoes so I picked at the grated cheese. It hurt for hours. And I can't watch food programmes because I start to imagine the joys of food and then my gallbladder hurts because FOOD IS A THOUGHT CRIME. In terms of funsies, I've missed Christmas food, New Year booze, pancake day, Mother's Day, Jim's birthday cake (which I've just sobbingly made, without licking the bowl), and I will miss Easter and my birthday as well. 

I'm listed for surgery now. I can't wait. I cannot wait. I literally cannot wait. If I could spare six grand, I would have had it out privately weeks ago, but...lol, no. This is the most miserable illness I've ever had, and doubly cruel to take my cheese away. I know the recovery can be a bit rough, but I really don't care. 

But I have lost 20kg in less than three months. So there is a tiny silver lining. If you would like to experience this weightloss for yourself, but inconveniently lack gallstones, here's how*:

- Eat twice a day - muesli and Skyr for lunch with some jam for calories, and then something fatless and dense in lentils and other veg for tea. Shellfish are good. So is rice. Plain chicken is your only real meaty option. Jelly and fruit pastilles are allowed, Haribo isn't. If you haven't been in pain all day, you  might risk a stick of kikat as a snack in the evening. Otherwise, fast for eighteen hours out of twenty four.

- Should you eat eggs, chocolate, cake, pastry, pie, red meat, cheese, oily fish, butter, yoghurt or full fat milk by accident, don't panic. Fetch a metal kebab skewer and stick it in, nice and deep, under your ribs. Oh sure, it'll bleed and hurt, and you might end up with an infection or rupture, but it will remind you why you don't eat these things anymore.

- Drink plenty because you will be dehydrated as hell, and it's a useful way of getting calories in. Enjoy your single cup of tea a day (unless you can drink black tea), and remember, no alcohol. If you forget and have a glass of wine, ask someone to punch you in the upper abdomen or mid-back. You won't do it again.

- Take supplements. No, really, you will die otherwise.

- Now and then, regardless of how obedient you've been with your diet, stab yourself again with that skewer. Just in case you get complacent.

- Carry this diet on for a minimum of three months, and then wonder at your weight loss, strawlike hair, fragile skin, reduced concentration, poor mood, exhaustion and decimated social life!


*NB: Don't do any of this. I mean it. 

Halfway Through

I started my MA in October 2016, as my mum died. I had surgery a month later. It was Christmas before I knew it. It wasn't really until the later end of January 2017 that I started to try and focus. Then I went on Zoladex for six months, which had the unexpected side effect of levelling my mood to the point where I could actually work. My grades swung up.

My second TMA (an evaluation of a primary resource and a secondary source) scored me a whopping 85%. Turns out working with primary sources informally for several years gives you some useful analytical skills.

Then I had two lengthy assignments on poverty and the evolution of the seaside resort. The first essay got away from me a bit, but still scored a respectable 78%.
My final TMA was written for my mum. Before it was due, I went to my dad's house and scoured my mum's bookshelves for all useful literature. I came home with a pile the height of my toddler. I kinda ignored the question on the theory of urban renaissance, and wrote a history on the birth of Cromer for my mum. And my tutor loved it, and I got 82%, rightly losing marks for er...skating over the actual question.

That was back in August. This left me with four months to come up with an idea for a dissertation, research it, write a proposal and sample chapter and get it in for the first week of January. Yeah, the OU don't like us enjoying Christmas. I had decided to do something on illegitimacy months before, and this was sharpened when I studied the changes in the welfare state. This was partly because of my mum: she was an unmarried mother in the fens at the end of the 1970s, and she suffered a lot of stigma and loneliness and I wanted to know where that came from, particularly as my experiences of family research showed illegitimacy to be historically endemic among the rural working class.
However, I also wanted to study crime, and had been intrigued by stories of infanticide in the press when studying the crime and justice unit in my MA. So I decided to look at how the two were linked, using Coroner's records. Victorian Coroner's records are pretty much my favourite ever source. They are handwritten depositions taken at inquests, and they give the working class a voice that you just don't find (except occasionally in court reports) in the Victorian era. They also tie in with my morbid fascinations with pathology and history of medicine.

I spent six weeks going to the library every week to transcribe my source, (and have since done lots of further research on them), and I then wrote a proposal over six weeks. I was incredibly poorly over Christmas, getting flu and then a chest infection and then cholecystitis, so the essay aspect of my EMA got banged out in a fit of painkillers and delirium. But I got it in on time, so whatchagonnado?

And then I waited. I had PLANS for January and February, like going to SEE people I haven't seen for the better part of a year, only my fucking gallbladder meant I was on a sparrow diet of fuck all, in pain 70% of the time, and couldn't walk to the school without getting breathless. So instead, I kept working on family histories, and watched a shitload of RuPaul's Drag Race. We can't be cultured all the time, darling.

I signed up for the dissertation module of my MA, which was a painful £2000 to see go all at once (I used a mixture of student finance and OUSBA to pay for the first module as I went along). I also applied for a research grant to fund some books and going to the National Archive.

My results came in on 12th March. I got 69%, a pass with merit. Yes, I would've liked 70%  but what can you do? It turns out that my proposed topic is too woolly, and my methodology and TERMS need defining. Naturally, I need to wait two months to get allocated a tutor before I can screech "heeeelppppp" at them. In the mean time, I have a literal library of stuff to read.

I have spent the time since my mum died deliberately immersing myself in work. I have coped by reading and producing hundreds of thousands of words of history. By telling people's stories. By reminding myself that grief is a hallmark of human experience.
And I have been antisocial, and I have hidden from real people, because living in the present frightens me. I am possessed by a tidal wave of grief that rises inside me, but never comes out, because I won't let it. Because I am afraid to lose control, and I have become so accustomed to sitting on my feelings that I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to do with them.
I channel my grief into my work, to stop me going numb. And when I cried at the unhappy deaths of children in the 1880s, I was crying for my mum. And when I cried because it all got too much, I cried for my mum. And when I told everyone all about the stuff I'd found out, I was trying to tell my mum. When I lay terrified and in pain with cholecystitis, I only thought of my mum doing the same eighteen months before for different reasons. When I lost weight, I thought of my mum losing weight. When I had my abdominal scan, I thought of my mum's abdominal scan that I held her hand through because she was so frightened. I was not afraid, I was only sad.

But when I write beautifully, I do it for my mum. When I do well, I do it for my mum.

I wonder if I'll ever do stuff for me again.

The DWP's Valentine's Day Message

On Valentine's Day, the DWP charmingly sent this tweet out:

Claiming to be living alone is one of the most common types of benefit fraud – don’t ruin #ValentinesDay by failing to declare your true circumstances https://t.co/tZuNYZ5fer pic.twitter.com/ahutOO6NUy

— DWP Press Office (@dwppressoffice) February 13, 2018

And my friends, I took umbrage.

Long ago, in the distant mists of 2012, Tom moved down from Newcastle and in with his parents. He didn't move in with me straight away. We hadn't ever spent more than a week together in one go. We hadn't been together two years. He had just got a job but we didn't know it was going to work out at that early phase. It would have been foolishly optimistic to move straight in together. When you already have two very small children, you do not want the upheaval of a 'new daddy' moving in only to move out a few weeks later when you realise that actually, you can't fucking stand each other.

So, we lived apart. I assiduously tried to find out the cohabiting rules from the DWP, about what counted as living together and what didn't. This was ludicrously difficult information to obtain. You cannot just phone the DWP and ask them because this will arouse suspicion, and provoke scrutiny and you get enough scrutiny on income support as it is. You can find the current rules here. You may notice that they are OBSCURE AS HELL, and there is no more palatable version for the recipients of affected benefits. These rules can be used to define almost any sexual relationship as living together as a married couple, whether the sexual relationship persists, whether or not money is shared, whether abuse is present, whether the relationship is happy. I wouldn't let Tom sleep here more than three nights in seven, I wouldn't let him keep any of his stuff here, I wouldn't let him contribute to any of the household expenses. Even though he categorically was not resident here, I was still terrified that the DWP would decide he was and force that arrangement to become permanent before I was ready, or worse, prosecute me.

When Tom did move in, after a year of this anxious situation, I cancelled my income support the same day. It was the greatest relief.

Here's the thing. There is no room in the DWP's rules to allow you to have a trial run, to make a mistake in relationships and undo it quickly, unless you have considerable external financial and practical support - the sort where your boyfriend can live with his parents without issue, or where you can afford to run two households while you get to know each other. You either declare that you're living together immediately, or you break the law.

It is overwhelmingly single mothers who are prosecuted for breaking this law, as they are claiming the benefit in the first place. Those who are prosecuted are usually in abusive relationships. The partner is not prosecuted. The partner is blameless according to the law.

Single mothers are a great target for abusers. Income support doesn't really give you much money, and usually the shortfall is made up in tax credits when you begin to live together if your income remains low. However, income support automatically entitles you to maximum housing benefit for your house in your area, free school meals for older children, and maximum tax credits as applicable. It is a useful gateway benefit. And it can be held over you by a man who wants to live under your roof for free, abuse you, spend your money, and then threaten you with "If you try and leave, I will shop you to the DWP". This is not recognised or allowed for in DWP rules - they are very clear about an abusive cohabiting relationship still counting as living together as a married couple. Financial abuse is often one of the first signs of an abusive relationship developing, and being on benefits means you are additionally vulnerable to partners exploiting the anxiety and dependence inherent in that way of life.

Since the two child tax credit rule was brought in, there is an additional very real risk of declaring cohabitation too early in a relationship if you have more than two children and have been single since before April 2017. You WILL lose tax credits for any more than the older two. You will NOT get those tax credits back if the relationship fails.

There are some advantages to being on income support. There is reassurance in knowing that you get a certain amount of money at the same time every week or month. There is reassurance in that safety net, particularly when the rest of your life is a mess. You don't get much, and there is almost no financial room for anything to go wrong in this situation. You can't save up for a crisis. But it's more reliable than a zero hours contract, more reliable than hoping someone will swoop in and save you, particularly when someone you loved has let you down. It may be the first time you've ever had to manage your own money, the first time you've truly lived independently.

But in return, you surrender your freedom to run your romantic life as you choose. You surrender your freedom to decide when to make a casual living arrangement permanent. The state decides if you're living as married, according to a set of rules that could apply to almost every single relationship I know; serious or casual, with children or not.

It's a hell of a price to pay for being a single mother.