Saying the unsayable (From The Northern Echo)

Saying the unsayable

2:50pm Friday 16th December 2011 in Sharon's View By Sharon Griffiths

WOW. Sometimes we need women like Helen Fernandes to wake us up a bit and re think our ideas.

Helen Fernandes, who trained in Newcastle and whose family live near Richmond, is consultant neurosurgeon at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge and chair of Women in Surgery. She was the first female surgeon to be appointed to Addenbrooke’s, is one of the country’s leading neurosurgeons and specialises in treating adults and children with brain and spinal problems.

She was also probably the first Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons to take maternity leave.

For a feature in The Times last weekend – on Britain’s top surgeons, of whom she is most definitely one – she was pictured in scarlet dress and killer heels. She has three children, saves lives on a regular basis and runs two small businesses for fun – a wedding and conference facility and her village pub.

She got where she is by working 90- hour weeks when she was training, and spending 80 per cent of her early salary on childcare and domestic bills.

She is talented, hard working, quietly spoken but doesn’t mince her words. And her advice for women wanting to get on in the male dominated world of surgery is “don’t whine on for hours about childcare issues or the fact that you’re a mother.”

She also thinks that some women blame sexism for their lack of progress in surgery. Women who blame sexism are generally not up to the mark. She says: “Sexism has almost become an excuse.”

A man wouldn’t dare say so. That’s why sometimes it takes a women to say the unsayable and keep us all on our toes.

DOWN with exams! More scandals involving exams – this time exam boards competing to make exams as easy as possible and also more or less telling teachers the questions – means that public exams don’t do the job they were designed for any more.

Every year we have soaring exam results. Yet every year employers have to put on remedial classed for semi-literate school leavers, and universities have to add extra courses for people to catch up.

It doesn’t take a bucketful of A grades to work out that there’s something distinctly odd doing on. And our hard-working children are being cheated out of the qualifications and the future they thought they were working for.

Public exams were meant to give an objective, standardised idea of a student’s attainment. Well they don’t any more. Not at all.

So let’s ban the lot. A world without exams would make life so much simpler and happier.

Well, we might need just one or two – maybe, from a national exam in English and maths – one exam, run by the state, so no exam board is tempted to find new ways of increasing profits. There would be an identical syllabus and exam questions all over the country, so everyone would do exactly the same and we would all know what we were dealing with. And employers could tell at a glance if students could read, write and add up.

Universities can set their own entrance exams, as they always used to.

Teachers can get on with teaching instead of worrying about league tables.

And our children might actually get an education.

What we need are boys to carry the bags

MARY Portas, queen of shops has come up with a blueprint of how our High Streets could be improved and our town centres revitalised. Some interesting ideas, although most are common sense.

One of the reasons supermarkets have made their millions is that they never underestimated our basic laziness.

Who would have thought we would ever willingly pay extra for ready-grated carrot or readybuttered potatoes?

And a generation which has grown up being able to park free yards from a store where they can buy everything, is not happily going to trudge around town with heavy shopping bags.

Until we have free parking spaces outside every shop, it’s always going to be tough to compete with supermarkets.

Which is why small shops have to do their bit too. Some do.

On the last day of a Cornish holiday in the summer, I found a farm shop selling wonderful locallyproduced food. I wanted to do the equivalent of my weekly shop there.

Tricky, as my car was parked up the hill on the other side of the harbour and there was a limit to what I could carry.

No problem.

“The boy will carry your bags,” said the shop owner. So I carried on buying and eventually paraded back along the quayside, over the narrow swaying harbour bridge and up the hill, followed by a teenage boy weighed down with my shopping bags. I felt like a grand lady from another age. Much, much more fun than pushing a trolley.

The same thing has occasionally happened on the markets in Northallerton and Richmond.

At that Cornwall shop I’d spent at least £20 more than if I’d had to limit myself to what I could carry alone.

The teenage bag carrier was earning some money and getting some practical work experience into the bargain.

Win, win all around I’d say.

What a find!

A STATUE that had been out in the garden at the Marquess of Zetland’s home at Aske Hall near Richmond has just been sold in New York after a visiting expert recognised it as belonging to second century imperial Rome and possibly worth around £1m.

In fact, it sold for £12.2m. Gulp.

I’ve just looked around our garden – flat football, two plastic seats and some chipped B&Q flowerpots.

Sigh.

Backchat

ALL right, I’m convinced.

After confessing that my breakfast was a yoghurt eaten while checking my emails, I have been roundly told off by readers.

Amy Johnson, of Darlington, calls a yoghurt breakfast “measly”. “I like a scone, with or without marmalade, or a marmalade sandwich and my mother used to mainly have a scone for brekky.”

George Dale emailed to say that his old dad always believed in having a good breakfast “because who knows what the day will bring and you’re betting off facing it with a full belly”. Indisputable.

Cynthia Chapman said: “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. The old saying that you should breakfast like a king, makes good sense for reasons of health and nutrition but also mentally, giving you a small time to take stock of the day before you have to plunge in.”

A nice lady in the queue in Marks & Spencer told me she started every day with a bowl of porridge and was as fit as a fiddle.

And Elaine Hauxwell wrote to say she read my piece in the Echo – delivered by the wonderful paper girl Barbara – while sitting up in bed enjoying a leisurely breakfast, which is the joy of retirement.

Of course, as usual, I read all the emails while eating my yoghurt. But, now convinced, I’ve had porridge at the kitchen table every day since. I could get used to it.