Goodness, how I get it wrong, a few days back I mentioned about getting "River" by Ted Hughes and how I enjoyed it in the 1980s. I did read it in the 1980s but it was not the one I was enthusing about, it was a different poetry book  "Remains of Elmet" by Ted Hughes and had brilliant photographs of the Calderdale Valley in Yorkshire. Fiona and I, with Miles, walked the Calderdale Valley in the early 1990s alongside the canal and it was really brilliant in the freezing cold temperature and bright Pennine Winter light. We walked right up to the Summit Level where the Rochdale Canal starts. It was really fascinating being at the point in in the Valley at the canal watershed where the water went neither one way or the other. I think we will go back there pretty soon.

Interesting article because if I was a woman with a child or children I would like an equality of choice between getting money for childcare and keeping the money myself when I provide the childcare: that is being a housewife. I found this article of particular relevance to me having been a househusband for 20 years. There is a lovely quote by a woman, "A self-aware housewife is a rebel against the constraints of the market". This is just yet another of these tiny social and economic signs that keep cropping up that people living their lives in the way they want to without actively campaigning for or going against the prevailing social order, effect social change, because indeed they are social change: they embody it.

Over 25 years ago I read a book called "Gender" by Ivan Illich who examined these issues in the context of what a housewife does as being work and what it would cost to replace the full range of services a housewife offers. The distinction being that economic work is the only one that society values whereas social work i.e. that done by a housewife is not valued and is poorly understood in terms of its economic contribution. Interesting stuff. I am going to read Gender again.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20222752