Family Values

My Family Values

Stealing ideas is fine

I got this one from The Guardian. It's a series of articles worth reading, as long as the interviewee with the values is worth the attention.

There is no such thing as a work /life balance

This is a myth put about by those Norman / Norma no-mates without any friends or any life outside their workplace. Those people you run a mile from on a social because they're just going to bang on about work-related crap. There's work – which is what you do for the money, and which (unless you're one of those oddballs described above) you'd jack in in the blink of an eye given a lottery win; and there's life – all the other, good, stuff that you'd cling on to like a very clingy thing.

Fire brigade shifts are the best ever

Another myth put about by people who don't understand, who don't 'get' family. Those shifts are superb. Okay, the pay's rubbish, your working conditions (unless you take early retirement at Purley or Biggin Hill) involve discomfort, heat, and occasionally wondering if you're going to get out alive, but that time off, those school runs, you can't buy that in terms of family bonding.

The people setting the agenda, well, they really shouldn't be

“I'm against working from home” they say: see Norma / Norman above.

The people at the top, setting the family life agenda and making the decisions, are loaded with ex-public schoolboys (politics, the civil service) sent away from home to boarding schools at a young age to be 'whipped into shape' and arse-raped by prefects. That doesn't hardwire sensible family values into them, does it? They're loaded with people who have made the sacrifices necessary to claw their way to the top (elsewhere), including spending no time with their families.

Therefore, in terms of family values, anyone with the power to make decisions on my behalf, lacks the experience and the values to do so, and can bugger right off.

Families need glue

Someone needs to take things by the scruff of the throat. To organise. To say “today, we eat together at the table / all watch this film / all play Scrabble (or cards, or Trivial, or whatever) / all go to the theatre. I imagine in some families the job falls to the same person all the time. In ours it's shared around a bit more. I think that's healthier.

The ability to agree to disagree...

...and move on. Vital.