Blizzard conditions today and books

Well that is a bit of an exaggeration but the wind is swirling the snow around the back garden and we have what looks like a lunar landscape in the making. There was more snow last night - though not very much - and it has been snowing today in short bursts. I managed to walk to the post office earlier but I would probably need to get out my wellies and dust them off if I wanted to venture out now. Next door's new dog will be starting to think that the world is always white as he has hardly known anything different.

I am currently reading Natasha Walters' The New Feminism. It was published in 1999 and actually presents a very much more relaxed attitude to many things which are a big issues now. For example she talks about surveys showing women are not bothered about what people think about their appearance - clothes, weight, hair etc. This is certainly not the case now with girls as young as 5 worried about their weight! Are we going backwards over such issues?

The author has some interesting things to say about the way working life is organised on the basis that the breadwinner is cut off from their domestic life on the assumption that someone will be at home to take care of it. If domestic responsibilities were more evenly spread between men and women then working arrangements would need to be more flexible. I've worked with men who have had to leave work at particular times to pick up children and no one bats an eyelid.

Flexibility and getting rid of the long hours culture are probably two of the keys to the problem. With ever changing technology more and more work can be done wherever it is convenient to do it. There is video and telephone conferencing for communication. I can't help feeling that much of the business travel undertaken these days says more about people's love of status and being seen to be important than about the necessity for a face to face meeting. When I was doing a job which involved travelling to apparently essential meetings I used to get fed up of the waste of time and effort some of my journeys were. Yes I liked the travelling but that didn't stop me feeling some it was a waste.