The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
BABIES OF LOCKDOWN
Perthshire poet Jim Mackintosh shares some of his inspirations and other musings...
“I was still very guarded and took everything one day at a time for fear of miscarrying. I was teaching my Pilates and barre classes over Zoom which was a welcome distraction from my anxiety.
“I went off on maternity leave at 35 weeks, thinking I would have four weeks to prepare. Six days later I woke up at 11.30pm with some mild to medium cramping. I woke John – my husband – up, not sure what to do and convinced I was not in labour.”
However, baby Charlotte was indeed on her way and her speedy arrival meant she spent 12 days in NICU to help with her breathing.
Sam says: “When she was discharged I felt I had the support of NICU and could call them if any further issues. I didn’t end up having a community midwife come to visit but the health visitor did ask if I wanted them to come. If Charlotte had been my first baby I would definitely have wanted their support.”
When she came home from hospital with Charlotte the restrictions had been relaxed a bit so she was able to enlist some help from her mum. She does remember that she found it incredibly challenging: “Freddie was not allowed to visit us in hospital,” and describes those days as “the first time I truly felt split in two”.
“Not being able to attend baby groups with Charlotte has been difficult. I have met with friends who have a child the same age as Freddie for walks. Once things are more normal I’m looking forward to going to some baby groups or even meeting for a walk with my local buggy club.”
If she could share some advice with other parents it would be this: “These are unprecedented times and it’s OK to find joy in the simple things. Having an afternoon watching Netflix drinking hot chocolate. Let people help – my neighbour walks our dog.”
For Sam one thing is sure: “Charlotte has been the bright light that came out of 2020.”
Claire McCormack, 39, also welcomed her first baby last year. Along with partner David Webster, the couple became parents to baby Sebastian Webster on October 5.
Like other mums, Claire’s experience of becoming a parent has been different to the norm, but timing meant that she and David were both able to attend her 12-week scan at Ninewells. “However, I had to attend the 20-week scan on my own,” she explains.
“The care and treatment at the hospital could not have been better. When my contractions were ramping up they allowed me to stay, made me as comfortable as I could be. David was with me – he had to wear a face covering and I wasn’t required to. I can’t really imagine being in labour with a face mask on! I had to stay in hospital for a few days after the birth and at that time I was only allowed one of my two named visitors – David and my mother – at any one time.”
She feels they were well supported once they came home from hospital, and luckily Sebastian has been a good sleeper right from the early days, but Claire does admit the family have missed out on connecting with other new parents.
“There really hasn’t been any opportunity for that. Sebastian is starting Baby Sensory classes – which are online at present – so that will help. My family and David’s family fell in love with Sebastian right away, just like we did. He is such a happy, little soul – his smile lights up what has been an otherwise bleak world in recent times. Things are looking up though with the rollout of the Covid vaccine. I feel so blessed to have Sebastian.”
Suzanne Zeedyk is a research scientist and founder of Connected Baby – an organisation that helps parents and professionals use the science of connection in their relationships with young children.
Although she agrees the current situation is tough, Suzanne reassures parents they shouldn’t worry too much about spending a lot of time at home.
“Babies’ biggest needs are emotional ones,” she explains. “They need help with big feelings and they need a companion for exploring the wider world. Babies can be understandably exhausting for parents, because they need so much help with their feelings. All that emotional attention parents give them is helping to build their brain and the stress system in their body.”
She recommends doing something that can seem counter-intuitive to new mums – making their own emotional health the priority. “If you are meeting your own emotional needs, then you are better placed to meet your baby’s emotional needs.
“Get yourself lots of support,” she suggests. “Try online baby groups, even if you know that once a week you are going to baby sessions and connecting with others you are meeting your own needs.”
Senior charge midwife Suzanne Knox has been helping mothers in the Angus area to navigate pregnancy and birth during the pandemic. “Things moved quite quickly during the first lockdown,” she says. “Partners were not allowed to attend appointments or scans. Over time we adapted as we had time to plan and understand the safest way to
proceed for both staff and families. Partners can now attend for labour and birth and visit the ward – although children are not allowed to attend appointments or visit the ward.
“I think there was an increase in anxiety for everyone. This journey, which is supposed to be exciting and shared with loved ones, became one that no one could have envisaged and things changed very quickly.
“For many first-time mums this is a time when they meet lifelong friends and are out at groups, but this is so different with many people meeting for the first time online,” explains the midwife. “Everyone wants to share this time with their family and friends and to show their new baby off. Not having parent and baby groups is hard for those who live alone with their baby or have a partner who is perhaps back to work.”
The midwife would also reassure new parents, saying: “The most important people for a new baby are their main care givers in the early stages of their lives. Cuddles and play stimulate brain development.
“We are still here for you any time you need us. Please try to enjoy your pregnancy and new baby, despite all the craziness in the world around you. It’s OK to feel worried, but the safety of the women and families of Tayside is our priority and we will continue to do our best for you. You may not be able to see it behind the masks, but we are still smiling.”
SEBASTIAN IS SUCH A HAPPY, LITTLE SOUL – HIS SMILE LIGHTS UP WHAT HAS BEEN AN OTHERWISE BLEAK WORLD IN RECENT TIMES
Q Where in the world are you happiest? A Perthshire.
Q Favourite part of Scotland to explore?
A In between the various restrictions, we’ve taken the chance to go further into Perthshire and walk along the Tay at Dunkeld and the Earn at Crieff – both breathtaking but I’m lucky to be the poet in residence for the Cateran EcoMuseum which embraces all that’s beautiful about east Perthshire and the Angus Glens so anywhere there is pretty special.
Q
What was your Plan B, in terms of a career? A Being a poet means I don’t even have a Plan A. Although I always fancied being an architect.
Q Your house is on fire, what item do you save?
A My wife says she’s technically not an item but insists that I say her.
Q How has lockdown affected you?
A My 91-year-old mum still lives at home so my wife and I have pretty much lived in snuck with her for 10 months. It has of course meant no one has been in either of our homes since then but we wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Q
Theme song for your life?
A The Freedom Come All Ye by Hamish Henderson.
Q Last meal on Earth? A A Murray’s pie. Hot enough so the juice dribbles down under my sleeve.
Q Dream dinner party guests?
A Hamish Henderson, Seamus Heaney, Hugh MacDiarmid and Robert Burns with me holding the coats and keeping score.
Q
Favourite holiday destination?
A Embo, just north of Dornoch. To sit on the dunes with my pals enjoying the craic.
Q What makes you happy?
A Genuinely? The warm embrace of family and good friends enjoying each other’s company.
Q
A Social injustice and inequality in all its guises.
What makes you sad?
Q How do you unwind? A Go walking, read, listen to music and of course write poetry and maybe enjoy a dram.
Q
A Many family ones, too many to mention –
Happiest memory?
weddings, significant birthdays, graduations and holidays.
Q And most embarrassing?
A It’s an accepted reality in my family that one of my jobs is to embarrass them with some random moment of forgetfulness or misspeak.
Q
A My dad passing away before he could see me appointed the poet in residence at St Johnstone FC.
Q
Biggest regret? Who would you like thank?
to
A Anyone who has read this far or bought one of my books.
Q What advice would you give to your younger self?
A Just dae it time deid! for yer a lang
Q Do you give money to beggars?
A I hate the word beggars! I hate the fact the question should be relevant but I happily help out anyone in need when I can – a meal or a hot drink.
Q Write your own epitaph A Jim wisnae a bad poet/ he didnae know it/but he was dying /for the want of trying/So it has to be said/
That now he’s dead/Jim wisnae a bad poet.
Q What keeps you awake at night?
A It’s trying to forget I sent you that as an epitaph.
Q Where would you rather be right now?
A In a theatre, either waiting to go on stage spiralling into a bottomless pit of self doubt or in the stalls with friends and strangers anticipating the lights fading and becoming immersed in live performance, anything, just about anything.
Jim Mackintosh was recently appointed as the Makar for the Federation of Writers Scotland 2021. He’s the author of six poetry collections, and is navigating his way through lockdown by focusing on various projects.
Jim is currently calling out to the people of Perthshire and beyond to take part in a film poem he is creating about what they’ve missed about live performance and their hopes for the future. He is asking for theatre and concert lovers and those who work in the arts to record a short video clip or write a couple of lines and send it in to Perth Theatre by tomorrow Sunday, February 28. Find more at horsecross.co.uk
Saturday, February 27, 2021 | 7
When renowned environmentalist and author Jonathon Porritt speaks for the Perth-based Royal Scottish Geographical Society (RSGS) on Monday at a special virtual event on Zoom, he won’t be the first prominent figure to warn about the perilous state of the planet.
With global issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss and the pandemic looming large in today’s world – as well as geopolitical concerns surrounding the fate of democracy – Jonathon’s presentation will consider whether this moment, early in 2021, is an important “inflection point” for the human race.
He’ll question how our actions and responses today will affect the fate of the planet in years to come, as we set about tackling humankind’s existential threats and work towards a more just, green, caring and sustainable world.
But the talk won’t be framed around “doom and gloom” scenarios.
Jonathon, who was the former director of Friends of the Earth in England and Wales and co-founder of Forum for the Future, will strike a “realistic balance” between the scale of the problems needing solved and why he thinks there is reason to be hopeful for the years ahead.
“It’s one hell of a balancing act at the moment in terms of trying to keep a sense of real legitimate hopefulness against a backdrop of things that just keep on getting more and more disturbing for the climate and the environment in general,” says Jonathon, 70, in an interview with The Courier from his home in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.
“But that’s the balancing act I think everyone is wrestling with at the moment. Whether this is from a personal point of view, from a professional point of view or from organisations people work with, whether you think it through the lens of young people or old people looking back on their lives, it’s an extraordinary moment.
“And having to do this in the midst of a pandemic – I’m not sure how reassuring it is when you hear people, including me, saying that the pandemic is a ‘picnic’ in comparison
to what we’re going to have to do to manage the climate emergency.
“Of course you can’t say that unless you can give people a sense of real hope that this is an actually do-able challenge that will make a massive difference to the lives of all of us alive today and all future generations. The thing is if we don’t do it, the prospects are really seriously, very grim.”
Born in London in 1950, the son of Arthur Porritt, Baron Porritt, 11th Governor-General of New Zealand and his second wife Kathleen Peck, Sir Jonathon Espie Porritt, CBE, became the 2nd Baronet on the death of his father in 1994.
Educated at Wellesley House School, Broadstairs, Kent; Eton College and Magdalen College, University of Oxford where he earned a first class degree in modern languages, he started training as a barrister but switched to teaching English at a West London comprehensive school from 1974 which he loved. It was around this time he got involved with environmental issues.
A prominent member of the Ecology Party (now the Green Party of England and Wales) in the 1970s and ’80s, he gave up teaching after 10 years to become director of Friends of the Earth where he stayed until 1991, just prior to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 – which for him, was a life-changing experience.
In 1996, he co-founded Forum for the Future, which remains his “home base” in terms of all the different things he does today.
Awarded a CBE in January 2000 for services to environmental protection, the married father of two daughters was chairperson of the UK Sustainable Development Commission between 2000 and 2009.
Despite lockdown, he remains as busy as ever and continues promoting his new book, Hope in Hell which was published last June.
After four years of the Trump administration seeing US climate policies rolled back and environmental regulations weakened, he is feeling more optimistic thanks to the Biden-Harris administration’s “fantastically ambitious” $1.9 trillion climate action plan which will be a “game changer” and means the mood is lifting in terms of getting international collaboration between the US, the EU, China and India.
He remains cynical, however, that G7 world leaders “keep saying the right things” about how they are going to “build back better and build back greener”.
Yet since the start of the pandemic, international investment programmes, he says, are still running two thirds of their investments in “old climate trashing carbon intensive extractive industries” and just one third in more sustainable industries and jobs of the future.
Jonathon also has a “bee in the bonnet” about Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates’ new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, where Mr Gates’ focus is on how technology can help solve the climate crisis.
While technology will play an important role, Jonathon remains wary of “shiny optimism with lots of people suddenly getting over excited about technology fixes.”
“There’s a lot of good stuff in his book,” says
Jonathon, “which is going to give politicians some comfort – that they have to do this and that it’s do-able. That’s good.
“But then of course the book is just a kind of song of praise to new technologies and all sorts of investable opportunities into which Bill Gates has already pumped tons of money.
“There’s not much about the natural world really and very little understanding about what we’re going to have to do to reinvent land use and farming practices, or to include social justice.
“There’s just too much techno fixing. Sucking carbon out of the air: you put all these billions of tonnes of carbon up into the atmosphere and now we’re going to spend billions and allow investors to make billions to suck all those billions of tonnes of carbon back out again.
“He’s really excited about that. But I’m not excited about that at all because it’s a price that we shouldn’t have to pay for a stable climate.
“My priority is to stop the carbon getting into the atmosphere to start with and then we can start thinking about how we are going to get some of it back out.”
Jonathon concludes that Britain comes out “pretty neutral” between economic investments that are good for climate versus net negative programmes sticking to the old carbon industries.
“I don’t want to be too cynical, but we’ve had lots of what have so far just been warm words frankly,” he says, praising government investments in active travel schemes, but challenging the UK Government to follow the Scottish Government’s lead on a “pretty solid retrofit scheme” for homes.
He believes the biggest positive change in mindset will come when people see the economic uplift from addressing the climate emergency in terms of new jobs, skills and ways of improving lives very directly.
Describing fuel poverty in the UK as a “scandal”, the policy change that would make the most immediate practical impact, he says, would be to retro-fit the country’s ailing and energy-inefficient housing stock.
With the Committee on Climate Change suggesting this would involve tackling around 20,000 properties a week for the next 10 years, it would create thousands of steady jobs, improve health and wellbeing, improve the environment and reduce expenditure in the NHS by an estimated £8 - £10 billion a year.
Jonathon admits after more than 45 years of “banging on” about the environment, he feels “quite upbeat” about the way the discourse around the debate is changing.
Today, there’s a growing “sense of urgency” that real change can happen, and this fills him with cautious optimism. But it’s also necessary to put social justice at the heart of that debate.
“Politicians are beginning to wake up to the realisation there’s no sense trashing the entire environment to create wealth in the short term,” he says.
“We are starting to see more intelligent approaches to that. And for me – and this is a personal thing – more and more people are linking this to the social justice agenda.
“Otherwise people are going to go on saying ‘really does this have anything to do with my life now and the kind of difficulties my children and grandchildren are going to face in future?’”
DEALING WITH THE PANDEMIC IS A PICNIC IN COMPARISON TO DEALING WITH THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Tickets for An Evening with Jonathon Porritt on Monday are available at rsgs.org/events. The talk begins at 7.30pm and tickets are £5 for RSGS members, U18s and students, or £8 for visitors.
Sara Sheridan is feeling angry. Not in a “I want to punch someone” sort of way. It’s more a case of every time she walks down George Street in Edinburgh, the presence of countless male statues reminds her that for most of recorded history, women have been “sidelined if not silenced” by men who named the built environment after themselves.
A committed feminist since her teens, Sara, 53, has been fighting for gender equality for years.
But ever since she was commissioned by Historic Environment Scotland in 2018 to
“remap our country as if the landscape had been dedicated to the memory of women, rather than men”, she admits she’s been “radicalised” and often feels pent-up anger as to why so many successful women through history have been “forgotten”.
“It was a really interesting book for me to write,” says Sara, reflecting on the publication in May 2019 of ‘Where Are The Women?’ – a hardback guidebook to an imagined Scotland where the achievements of real Scottish women are commemorated in buildings, monuments, street names and statues.
“It’s like an intersection of creative nonfiction. The Scotland is real, the women are real but all the monuments are made up.
“It’s the sort of thing that would make a real historian wake up in the night worried. That intersection between real history and fiction. But I’m a novelist so I’m used to making things up!”
Sara will be launching the paperback edition of the book on March 4 alongside an online Historic Environment Scotland event for Women’s History Month.
She will talk about her guidebook to that “alternative nation”, where the cave on Staffa is named after Malvina rather than Fingal, and Edinburgh’s Arthur’s Seat isn’t Arthur’s, it belongs to St Triduana.
It’s a world where you arrive into Dundee at Slessor Station and the Victorian monument on Stirling’s Abbey Hill interprets national identity not as male warrior William Wallace but through the women who ran hospitals during the First World War. The West Highland Way ends at Fort Mary, while the
Old Lady landmark.
The plinths in central Glasgow, meanwhile, proudly display statues of the suffragettes who fought until they won.
“These imagined streets, buildings, statues and monuments are dedicated to real women, telling their often untold or unknown stories,” she says.
But at the same time, she doesn’t expect everyone to agree with what she’s saying.
“When I did events in 2019, there were plenty angry people turning up to support me,” she adds, “but usually you get one old guy up the back saying ‘Yes, this is all about women, but why have you cut out the men?’. I’m like ‘Yeah, it’s a book, imagine if that was your real life!’”
Named as one of the Saltire Society’s most influential women, past and present, Sara has been writing books about female history of one kind or another for more than 20 years. She is known for the Mirabelle Bevan mysteries, a series of historical novels based on Georgian and Victorian explorers, and has written non-fiction on the early life of Queen Victoria.
Yet within weeks of starting this project she became “furious” as she began uncovering all these women she’d never heard of.
“I was getting crosser and crosser thinking this is absolutely crazy!” she says. “We’ve got all these amazing stories and we’re not teaching that in schools, we’re not honouring that history. Our history is very white and very male. We really need to start challenging that.” of
Hoy is a prominent
Orkney
Sara thinks there are a lot of different cultural and social reasons why so many successful women have been “overlooked” by history.
One is that during the late Georgian/ early Victorian period it was considered “improper” for women to be in the spotlight. Susan Ferrier, for example, was an amazing writer and was tipped by Sir Walter Scott. Yet she stopped writing because she didn’t like being recognised as an author. She herself was conditioned to think it was inappropriate for her as a woman.
Another reason, she thinks, is that a lot of women’s achievements are “subsumed into male stories”. “You get a lot of situations where the man that somebody is married to or somebody’s father or brother was very famous, and they get all the credit,” she says. “That’s happened several times because it was an easier story or it was considered bad that women were working.
“I think as well because so much of our library culture, artefact culture is curated by men. Men tend to just pick the things that seem familiar to them and seem important to them. A good example of that would be suffragette banners. When the suffragettes won suffrage, many of these banners were offered to museums. But the curators turned them down.”
Sara is aware that the Presbyterian missionary Mary Slessor is synonymous with Dundee. However, had Mary Slessor been a man, she’s convinced her achievements would have been as well known as explorer David Livingstone who has statues in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and who arguably didn’t achieve as much as Slessor.
“Dundee is quite interesting as well because one of the things I discovered when I was writing the book is that our built heritage really sort of outlines the way that people will achieve,” she says. “In Dundee, for example, there was kind of a rash of late Georgian or mid-Georgian poets – female poets – who were all working class. They were very well known in their day. You look at that and that didn’t really happen anywhere else in the country.
“Then you start to look at Dundee at that time and you realise the factories were starting up, women were getting employed and had money. They could put money into backing pamphlets and there were other women who would buy those pamphlets. In those days you published a pamphlet and people subscribed to it. A bit like a podcast today.
“That’s why that happened in Dundee. The actual environment in which the women were around meant that in Glasgow you had a lot of labour activists because you had a lot of factories.
“Or in Edinburgh, you had a whole load of dramatists because this is where the main part of the theatre was based. Those poets in Dundee might have gone on to be labour activists if they had been living in Glasgow at the right time.”
One woman who really surprised Sara was Eliza Wigham – an Edinburgh-based Quaker and anti-slavery campaigner. She was described as one of six key women in the British Trans-Atlantic Anti-Slavery Sisterhood. She campaigned to free indentured workers in the US after slavery had been banned.
Sara says the “great news” to come from her book, for all males and females, is the knowledge that previous female generations were “amazing”.
Yet despite awareness being raised, and women making up more than 50% of the population, she still feels the issues are so “deeply embedded” in culture and society that it will make much more effort for equality and openness to be “normalised”.
Sara’s book was written before the #BlackLivesMatter movement highlighted the “inappropriate” nature of some statues and street names in our cities that commemorate slavers.
Inevitably, the gender issue raises similar questions about how we commemorate women. Should some male statues be placed in museums and replaced? It’s an argument that also applies to LGBTQ communities, she says, and the diversity of communities and our collective history “really needs to be looked at”.
“I think about me as a kid growing up in Edinburgh. What a difference it would have made if I’m walking down George Street with my brother and he sees six statues of men who look like him and I’m walking and I don’t see any who look like me. What you’re telling your daughters is your achievement isn’t possible or doesn’t matter. If they do do something, they think they are the first because previous generations of women weren’t memorialised.
“Children need to know they come from a broad spectrum of achievement to be able to reach their potential. If we do this for anyone, we do this for the kids.”
I WAS GETTING CROSSER AND CROSSER THINKING THIS IS ABSOLUTELY CRAZY
For details about the Historic Environment Scotland online event on March 4, go to https:// www.historicenvironment.scot/visit-a-place/ whats-on/event/?eventId=1c6c663c-672a-4e4ca1a3-acb601038024