2013-06-20T02:11:37-04:00 Jo Rees http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=jo-rees Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Jo Rees Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1667443 2012-07-12T07:20:52-04:00 2012-09-11T05:12:10-04:00

Jo Rees http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jo-rees/


We're all so collectively brilliant at Brit-bashing, aren't we. It's going to rain and then rain some more and we'll come last and it'll all be RUBBISH. And they haven't included Beckham in the GB team. Shame on them.



These are just a couple of the opening gambits in many of the repeat conversations I've had with cabbies and other fellow non-ticketees about the inevitable failings of our 2012 efforts. I've talked myself into a huge cynical sulk about how - even if I could have been bothered - I'd have had to get up at 4 a.m. to log onto the unfathomable Olympic website having re-mortgaged the house in order to be able to afford tickets to see anything remotely decent.



I have secretly poured scorn on the fluky friends who got cheap opening ceremony tickets, the smug ones who've bagged the cycling, rowing and horse-riding, and the downright rich ones who will be at the athletics final.



But it doesn't matter that I haven't got tickets because I'd rather eat my own head than battle through the massive crowds and pushy A-types not observing queue rules. Besides, they'll have had no time to do a Jamie or a Gordon make-over on the food, so the hot-dogs will be inedible and the water eye-poppingly expensive. And quite frankly, you get a much better view on the tele.



Oh yeah, and that's all before the traffic conversation, which we've all had. Have you tried to drive around London recently? I mean, what have they DONE to the traffic lights? OMG! Don't get the cabbies started on that one.



But suddenly, the Olympics are upon us and my eight year-old wants to go to Stratford anyway and see if someone will 'give' us tickets on the gate. Like we might be the benefactors of some sort of Charlie and the Chocolate factory golden ticket scenario. Because she's clocked that her mother is too poor - slash - too lazy to have got tickets for the once-in-a-lifetime event happening on her doorstep.



This isn't just hype from watching too many adverts. No. This is genuine childlike excitement. She's collecting cards and playing Olympic top trumps and learning facts about our brave Paralympic athletes and Oscar Pistorias. I even caught her and her little sister in the bath doing impressions of Rebecca Adlington, our swimming hopeful coming up for air having won gold.



And I have to admit the kids' enthusiasm has broken me. Because now I've started to remember being a kid myself and watching the 1984 LA Olympics Opening Ceremony and all those white grand pianos playing Rhapsody In Blue and it was the most spectacular thing I'd ever seen. And how I fell a little bit in love with Daley Thompson, our Decathlete champ, when he did his victory flip on the mat.



So now, despite myself, I'm starting to get excited about the hours of justifiable TV watching and the prospect of getting overly-competitive from the sofa about completely random sports whose rules will remain a mystery, but for a fortnight I will be an expert on.



I'm even a bit sad that I'm not going to the Olympic village, although I will be popping along to see the Torch when it's in our neck of the woods next week. With all the bunting left over from the Jubilee, hosting an Olympics barbecue doesn't seem like such a bad idea all of a sudden. I shall even put our home-made Good Luck Team GB poster in the window. Because, you know, even though it might rain, when we're not slagging ourselves off, we Brits are pretty good at organizing things. Which means that there's always an outside chance that London 2012 will be epic.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1645458 2012-07-03T06:37:34-04:00 2012-09-02T05:12:16-04:00

Jo Rees http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jo-rees/
But that's the truth. Whilst working at home gives welcome flexibility to many careers and allows many women like me to work after having children, those of us bashing away at our laptops in the kitchen, or trying to make a call in the freezing loft-conversion study, are actually working much longer hours than we would do if we commuted to an office.

The work guilt seems to be much stronger in the work-at-home parent (although this might be termed a work ethic). We work through lunch because breaks don't really exist. And if you do happen to make a sandwich in the kitchen, it also involves clearing up breakfast and unpacking the dishwasher. There's no leisurely company expenses lunches in swanky restaurants, or an hour of mooching around the posh shops, or gym-trips like my friends in offices have. I found myself snarling at a friend who was flying business class to New York, but happened to have conveniently booked a 'me-time' day on the company either side of her actual meeting.

OK, so it's not all easy for her. She might get the glory of being a career girl in a highly paid job, but she also has to pay a nanny most of her salary to pick up her kids and help with their homework. But the trade-off for working at home and actually being there for your kids is not that easy either because quite often you neither do your job in the most effective way possible, nor parent terribly well.

You can always tell the work-at-home parents because they turn up consistently late to the school gates with a five-mile stare, and the anxious frown of someone who hasn't even got half way through today's to-do list. As a writer, I've often just got into my flow by the time I have to leave for the school run, and having just written a murder or a sex scene suddenly find myself presented with a painted egg-box, or a handful of gluey pictures to inspect from my five-year-old and have to react appropriately. It's jarring to say the least.

The problem too is that, with your home as your work environment, there's no switch off and work seeps into home-life no matter how much you don't want it to. The amount of times I spend shushing my children as I try to write a pitch, or burn the teatime fish-fingers whilst I'm on a call to my agent, or am furiously mouthing for the kids to creep quietly through my study to the garden, when all they want to do is play, are too many to count. With no shut off comes no planned down time and work seeps into evenings, weekends and even holidays.

People with office-based careers seem to earn automatic respect and many do, I'm sure, work long hours and find it depressing that they're not at home. But they also get the camaraderie of work colleagues and the mental switch off of walking out of the house to a new - and probably cleaner - environment for the day.

As more and more women change their careers to opt for working at home, I would caution them to check over the fence to really make sure that the grass is greener on the other side. Because they might just find themselves in their kitchen at lunchtime in their tracksuit bottoms, mourning for their powersuits and Pret-A-Manger.]]>