Woman's Hour - LISTENER WEEK: Writing about your job. The evolution of the buggy. Community quilting.

Episode Date: August 27, 2020

LISTENER WEEK: Josie Channer and Teresa Devereux are both listeners who felt that they had to write novels about what they’d experienced through their work. Josie’s written Diary of a Prison Officer and Teresa’s based her novel Broken Lives on what she saw and heard as a social worker. They tell Jane about how they published their work and what they hope readers will get out of their books.Sarah Fraser is an associate professor at Princess Nourah Bint University in Riyadh, the largest female-only university in the world. She got in touch because she wanted to talk about the supportive and collaborative there,. She believes that despite most people believing the opposite, a country like Saudi Arabia does not oppress women. Rothna Begum, senior women's rights researcher at Human Rights Watch with focus on the Middle East adds her perspective.Plus the evolution of the pushchair and the joys of community quilting.Presenter Jane Garvey Producer Beverley Purcell

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme, peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hi, this is Jane Garvey and this is the Woman's Hour podcast. It is Thursday the 27th of August 2020. Good morning and welcome to the fourth day of our annual listener week where we discuss everything you want us to talk about. Everything we're discussing on the programme this week has come from an email from a listener. So today we're discussing buggies. Are they too big? Are they a status symbol? Do they take up too much space, particularly on public transport? And what about the needs of children with disabilities and indeed parents with disabilities? So a focus on buggies. Today

apparently you can pay, I mean, you probably shouldn't, you can pay 40 grand for a buggy. Also today, have we all got it wrong here about women in Saudi Arabia? Not necessarily what you might expect to hear, which is another good reason to do it, I guess, this week. And it wouldn't be Listener Week without a conversation about quilting.

So we'll have one of those towards the end of the programme today. We welcome your involvement. You know that at BBC Women's Hour on social media or email the programme via our website. We're going to start, first of all, with two listeners who have both self-published novels about their working lives. And they're both very interesting books about really very interesting working lives. Josie Channer has written Diary of a Prison Officer. Teresa Devereux's novel is called Broken Lives and it's about what she saw and heard as a social worker in children's services in Kent.

Now, first of all, Josie, we'll start with you. Good morning to you. Morning. When did you last work in the prison service then? I left Holloway Prison in 2009 and the book is set between 2003 and 2006 so set over a three-year period. And we need to make it clear it's a novel. Yeah it's a novel this. Yeah. Yeah. And it's what they call a self-published novel. It used to be called Vanity Publishing, I think. But this is a book that you know, prison officers, prisoners and governors. And, you know, the prison's quite a unique place. It's like you've got all these women under one roof from very different backgrounds.

And I felt that I could tell it from a very different perspective. Go on. go on yeah and i i just feel that there are stories about lots of stories about prison prisoners out there and prisons but i feel that this book has a different take on it i think i mean it's set really about um a character called amber and she's backpacking through Africa to find herself. But when she's going through her old prison diaries, she's really thinking why she fell in love with a job. And it's looking back over those years about why she fell in love with a job. And it brings up so many different issues around domestic violence, about discrimination and racism in the workplace.

There's all sorts of issues, prison officers being assaulted at work and how that affects them when they go home. So those kind of issues, I felt it's a different angle that I feel that I could take. Well, it was a different angle for me because you made very clear that in your novel, the prison officers are as institutionalised as the inmates that that was the view you seem to be taking well it every um office has office policy office politics and if you think about a prison it's kind of magnified it's magnified a hundredfold so you know you have all that going on and i really want you to focus on that aspect of it.

What is going on with all these prison officers cooped up in prison themselves? And there's a lot of issues. I mean, people think of a stereotypical prison officer. It really is. Prison officers come from so many different backgrounds, so many different countries especially in London you know and you have all those issues around discrimination office politics trying to get ahead in your career all those issues go and then you've got the dealing with the the prisoners and their issues so how does that all fit together so it was really I really enjoyed writing it because I could remember stories that actually happened and I was putting them in the mix of a fictional story. There are some brutal incidents. There's one in particular involving a bucket of excrement, which I'm going to find difficult to forget, I must be honest. But that came from real life. There's no question of that. Yes, that definitely did happen.

Okay. Yeah. All right. Well, we probably don't need to talk any more. Well, I think, you know, that story for me was around mental health and how we deal with mental health issues. So the book deals with so many issues around, you know, what you have the actual situation,

but what actually is the reason behind that. And behind that particular story, there was a problem around mental health, how it's dealt with in the prison system. And I don't know if it's changed that much. Well, interesting to find out. Let's bring in Teresa. Teresa Devereaux, you are, or up until very recently, were a social worker working in Kent and again your book is fiction but you have a character Samantha who weaves in and out of the narrative tell me about Samantha. Well Samantha although she's a fictional character she represents many mothers that I worked with during my time as a social worker who were addicted to drugs or alcohol, struggling to look after their children without any positive social networks.

Really, you know, most of us depend on having somebody to turn to. She had nobody and the people that she had were negative support rather than positive. She loves her children. She wants to keep them. Unfortunately, she hasn't got the parenting skills. She was never parented properly herself, suffered quite a neglectful, abusive childhood, a mother that was also totally inadequate. This social worker, April Gardner, is trying her best, as social workers do, to try to help her to keep hold of her children. But she struggles. i won't give too much away about what happens um and i came across so many women in that situation um

and i don't think there's to be honest there's not enough help out there to support these women there's also not often much help and support for social workers. People in your line of work bear the brunt of a great deal of criticism, don't they? Absolutely. And that was partly why I felt I needed to write the book. The social work in children and families is quite a shadowy, secretive world. We don't talk about our work. We can't talk about families' personal situations to other people. And generally people don't want to hear about abuse. When social workers come into the headlines, it's usually following a tragedy.

Well, to be honest, Teresa, it is only ever when there's a tragedy. And unfortunately, headlines are not written like social worker saves child and makes sure they're looked after. That's not going to sell newspapers, is it? Absolutely. So a lot of work goes on day in, day out. Children are being supported and helped and their lives immensely improved by the work that social workers do. And I think I felt quite frustrated all the time I was working. Social workers that wouldn't admit to being social workers in children and families

because when they did, you know, there was a negativity around that. Social workers would say, oh, I work for the local authority, or yes, I work with children, but they wouldn't say they were social workers. Wow. And I thought this is so sad because they do such good work. Well, can I just bring in Josie then? Josie, did you tell people that you were a prison officer? Did you feel able to?

Yeah, I think when I was a prison officer, there was slightly more support. I think nowadays, I think prison officers might feel not as supported. But things have never been good for people on the front line, I feel. And I imagine... Our whole society doesn't value people that work on the front line, I feel. And I imagine... Our whole society doesn't value people that work on the front line in our public sector. Well, of course, we're supposed to be doing exactly that now

in the pandemic, but I wonder whether we'll all forget about the valuable work done by people like yourselves in the past. And, Josie, I guess what you have in common with Teresa would be that you would go home from work often but wouldn't be able to forget about it no and I I tried to draw on that in some of the how the some of the characters in the book was feeling you know feeling depressed really at the end of a shift you know just completely deflated about being assaulted at work and then having to go home to their children and how that affects them, you know, just their own confidence

and not being able to deal with that in any way. And there was an incredible amount of abuse by attacks that prison officers would have to deal with when I was in service. And I think that's just increased over the years. Would you recommend it, hand on heart, Josie, as a career? I absolutely loved being a prison officer. And the whole book is about my character trying to find out why she fell in love with a job in the first place, because she has reached the end of her tether thinking,

you know, why did I ever join the prison service? So it's about that journey and finding out why. You know, at the root of it, and I guess a lot like the other guest in terms of, you know, why people like being a social worker, you're actually helping people and there is an opportunity in those roles to really make a big difference to people's lives. Yeah, yeah. It's not all negative, is it?

I know that was something you wanted to emphasise, Teresa, that you can be, initially, I guess, it might be regarded as a negative presence in somebody's lives, but you can be responsible for turning a life around. Well, it's quite interesting, really, because, you know know if a social worker turns up at a family home you know there's been a referral um people are terrified they think you're going to take your children their children um and we're absolutely not it you know what you're

going there for is you're trying to help them to improve their lives and this does improve their lives on many occasions and within broken lives I think I've hopefully I've got that across because there are sad endings and there are things that don't work out well but there are also things that do work out very well because of the work the social worker has done and the support they've provided. Can we just talk, if you don't mind, Teresa, about self-publishing? Actually, I've been corrected, and I apologise, by a writer, actually, Katie Ford, who says on Twitter... Oh, about the vanity.

Yeah, vanity publishing, Jane, is when you pay... I was going to say that. Don't all pile in, for heaven's sake. Katie says, Jane, vanity publishing is when you pay vast sums to somebody to publish your book self-publishing is when you do it all yourself which is so my mistake I apologize go on Teresa I was going to say that actually yeah because vanity publishing I think people used to do that in the past but now it's not necessary there's lots of support out there and organizations that

you can use which are really worth paying for and you don't have to pay a fortune in the same way. Yeah, quite. That's my experience anyway. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed reading both of your novels and I really learnt from them both and it's interesting that you both decided to self-publish

and I imagine there'll be loads of people listening who will think, oh, actually, I've had a really interesting life or working life and I'd like to tell others about it. So I think hopefully you've encouraged lots of others. Teresa, best of luck. Thank you very much. Thank you. Teresa Devereaux's novel is called Broken Lives.

It's about her work as a social worker. And you also heard from Josie Channer, who has written Diary of a Prison Officer. And you'll find both of them online, just Google away and or use the search engine of your choice and you will find all the details you need. Now it's Listener Week on Woman's Hour. So we're discussing subjects that you have suggested. And we had an email from a listener called Mike, who was a bit concerned by the sheer size of contemporary buggies for children. So they have got larger,

they have evolved over the years. Let's talk to the journalist and writer Linda Rodriguez-McRobbie and Carrick Brown joins us too from New Life, the charity for disabled children. Linda, this is in a way an under-discussed area of our national life But you tend to assume buggies have been with us forever, but of course they haven't, have they? No, they haven't. And it's a really interesting area, I think, of discussion because it sort of reflects a lot of the changes in society and a lot of what the ways we do things have changed. And buggies really became kind of a big thing in the 19th century. And then, just as they are now, they were very much a status symbol. They very much, they used to be called, you know, they were called prams, which was short for perambulator, which basically meant that you had a place, you were telling the world that you or your nanny had a place to perambulate in.

You had a park, you had grounds. Yeah, and before that, children were just held or left on the floor. Absolutely. You know, there's some evidence that there were sort of small carts and things like that, that, you know, you sort of pack your children often, but largely they were just held. And that was, you know, as big a strain on parents as it is now. Although there's, you know, quite a lot of evidence that holding your baby or, you know, using harnesses or, you know, things like that is great. But it can be quite difficult. It can be quite difficult over time. So this was liberating to some degree.

Can you take us through some of the most popular brands? People will know a lot of them, but just name a few. Well, of course, there's Bugaboo and Baby Zen and Up a Baby and Stokoe. McLaren is probably one of the most influential because in 1965, McLaren redesigned the whole concept of the pram and turned it into the umbrella stroller, this wonderful sort of fold-up thing that you can throw in the boot of the car and take wherever you need to go. And that really changed the game in a lot of ways. And you can pick up a stroller buggy for what, 40, 50 quid, the most basic type? Oh, yeah. I mean, you can get them for super cheap and you can get them for

ridiculously expensive. Okay. I mentioned 40,000 pounds, but actually that's true, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, I think right now, you know, most parents are looking at an outlay of cost between about, say, £400 to £1,500. And that sounds absurd. And in a lot of ways, it really is. But at the same smaller, and we were going through the buggy years, we lived in London. And, you know, this object, this buggy was the thing that I touched more than almost anything else in the house, excepting my phone. Definitely touched that more. Okay, that's a separate debate, which a fiery debate that we can have on another day. Let's bring in Carrick Brown from New Life. Carrick, it's a different sort of issue for people who have a disabled child or disabled

children or are themselves disabled. How have buggies evolved for you? Hello, Jane. Hi, Linda. The buggy has evolved in order to become more modular and be able to meet a greater variety of needs for children with disabilities. We as an organisation have been able to feed into the design of many different types of buggy that are on the market in order to make them more user-friendly without compromising the integrity of the functionality within the buggy. Sure. So how do they need to be changed, Carrick? So it depends on the child's needs as to what the functions need to be. But if you imagine a child who has a challenging behaviour and as such has quite erratic movements. The buggy itself needs to be

quite large in its structure. It needs to have tensile strength built into the design in order to be more robust. But on the other hand, children with more medical needs, they will need to be able to carry lots of medical equipment ventilators oxygen cylinders and also have different abilities in terms of tilting space functions in order to help with recovery from seizures perhaps or indeed an ability to move from a forward facing position position to a parent-facing position in order to be able to monitor the child's condition. And for a parent with disabilities?

Yes, so obviously trying to make it as lightweight as possible, trying to influence the price point of a buggy is really important, particularly when parents who are caring for children with disabilities are often on benefits and therefore can't afford the high cost of the more complex buggies, which is one of the reasons why New Life has an equipment grant service and an emergency equipment loan service in order to provide buggies in order to help children with immediate needs. Well, that's that's good to hear. Our listener, Mike, feels that buggies, a listener is actually asking, when did a pushchair become a buggy? Well, we can discuss that perhaps as well. But Carrick, listeners are asking how they have evolved, not just in styling, but in size.

Are they bigger, genuinely? There are larger buggies, absolutely. Having said that, there's a lot of research and development that goes into the design of a buggy to try and make them as small and as user-friendly as possible as well, often at a greater cost to the user. But, you know know taking into account the complexity of family situations you know the ability to be able to also transport siblings who may or may not have have disabilities themselves and

also taking into account the parents health needs and the complexity of social situations you know actually wanting to be aspirational for children with disabilities so that they can go on beaches they can go into nature reserves and and can have an improved quality of life it's extremely important to parents of course and to new life everybody understands that in theory but i wonder whether in practice some people can be very ignorant, Carrick, when they encounter perhaps a family travelling with a disabled child and what they might perceive to be a larger buggy. I'm not sure that I'd quite agree that it's ignorance.

We depend very heavily on fundraising support from the general public. However, I would reflect on the fact that there are many disabilities that are invisible. And as such, to the general public, you wouldn't necessarily understand why there's a need for a larger buggy, or why a older child is in need of a buggy even. Yes, I think that's absolutely right. Children might appear to be, quotes, too old to be in a pushchair or buggy. And some people will perhaps make a judgment about that. Carrick, thank you very much. We'll put a link up to New Life on the Woman's Hour website.

Linda, is it true to say that buggies, pushchairs have been styled to suit men? Is that a real thing? Yes, I would say, yeah. I think especially in the 1990s and maybe even a little bit earlier, there was this notion that, you know, men had been kind of divorced from all the stuff that was going on around babies and that baby stuff was too cute and too plastic and not design cool. And in the late 90s, especially, there was, especially as men were taking on greater role in infant care, there was this sort of, you know, women had put up with badly designed stuff for years and years and years, but men wouldn't. And, you know, it is offensive, I'm not gonna lie.

But the idea that like, um, women could kind of take care of the soft stuff, furnishing the, you know, the, the nursery and things like that. But men wanted to be able to have something that they could kick the tires up. You know, it wasn't, it wasn't too dissimilar to going and, you know, buying a new car. Um, and there was this conscious kind of outreach to, to men as the buyers of this, knowing that many men would be pushing them and wanting to have them sort of involved in that process. And so you really did see, you know, a departure from kind of more cutesy designs and maybe some brighter colors and things like that

to this sort of, you know, it's gray and red and, you know, kind of really car-like. And the other thing was pushing the design elements, pushing the functionality that, you know, that you could do things with these new strollers. But introducing terms like off-road, I mean, it is ridiculous. Can I also just go back to something you were saying earlier about when the pushchair, the buggy, the bush chair, as I think I wanted to call it there, as a compromise, it is the centre of your world. And then I was just racking my brains to, can I remember the last time I used one?

No. But you're absolutely right. It was there. It's like you can't remember the last time your child willingly held your hand as you walked down the street. Yeah. One day it's all over. Yeah, so sorry.

We're getting very emotional. I know, I'm getting a bit misty about it. Do you have a view on men who push buggies or push chairs with just the one hand? Well, I mean, it's impressive. I mean, the thing is, it's like I really despaired at my old, at our buggy because it didn't have a um it didn't have a cup holder which sounds like just sort of the most terrible thing ever but you know you're walking down the street and you need a place to to hold your have your coffee and and push the buggy at the same time safely so yes um i i mean i do think that like being able to push it one-handed the the kind of the universe of

functionality that was introduced to buggies in the last, say, 20 years has made them better and sort of a high tide rises all boats. So you're seeing that a kind of better class of buggies even in the lower price points. And I think the other really interesting thing about buggies is that a lot like cars, there is a kind of burgeoning secondhand or auxiliary market. So you have kinds of ways to deal with the fact that they are very expensive. Yeah, and they are. And of course, there will be a time when you actually don't need it anymore. So a secondhand one would be a good investment. Very sadly, very quickly. Yeah. Linda, thank you so much. Really enjoyed talking to you. Is there

anything worse? I've got lots of memories flooding back now than the buggy wheels going through dog poo in the park. And you only find out when you get back home. That is hideous. Your thoughts on that. Welcome. I'm also interested in the views of people who think that perhaps children should be facing whoever's pushing them rather than looking outside. I know there are looking outwards rather. There are various arguments we can have about all this, but do please get involved at BBC Women's Out on Twitter, or you can email the programme via our website. We have an edition of the programme

on Bank Holiday Monday, which I'm really looking forward to. It is about the 40th anniversary of the Willie Russell play, Educating Rita. So we've got some people involved on that programme who went back into education later in life, partly inspired by seeing the play or the film, of course. And I'm delighted to say that

Willie Russell has agreed to take part and so too has Dame Julie Walters. So very much looking forward to that. That is Bank Holiday Monday's edition of Woman's Hour. Now it's listener week all week and Sarah Fraser listens to Woman's Hour. She's also an associate professor at Princess Nora Bint University in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. It is the largest female-only university in the world. There are 60,000 students there. Sarah teaches on an international master's programme and says the atmosphere is supportive and collaborative. And Sarah believed that Saudi Arabia is a country most people in Britain seem to still think oppresses women. And she really just wanted to take the opportunity

to attempt to redress that impression. So I talked to her and asked her how long she'd worked in Saudi. I've been based in Riyadh for four years now and there have been significant changes in those four years. And although the perception in lots of Western countries is that some of the changes have been cosmetic and superficial, at the Saudi Arabia, which is a government defensive mechanism because people in Saudi do feel that the West has got a very negative impression of them. And therefore, that negative impression has now been going on, obviously, for some decades. I think people are very nervous about saying things in public, particularly with the greatest respect in the world to

institutions that obviously have the brand name that the BBC do. And to be honest, I think people just say, look, this is our country. We're perfectly happy with what we're doing. You know, if you don't like it, then, you know, leave us alone. Right. So the women you're teaching on this master's course, they will go on to have professional lives in business in Saudi Arabia. They will stay in Saudi Arabia and they will be entirely free to earn a living and keep everything they earn. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I mean, lots of them are working now. I mean, we have women in senior government positions. We have people running their own businesses. We've got people in middle and senior management in some of the major telcos.

We've had more master's babies than I can shake a stick at. What you mean students giving birth to babies? Yeah. So what percentage of Saudi women work? I don't know the exact statistics at the moment, but I mean, certainly of our students, over 50% of our students work, yes. And then lots of them, I mean, as master's students all over the world do, obviously, when they get their masters, lots of them get promoted and get to the next level of seniority, etc. We've got some fantastic women because, you know, they work all day at a job, they come to school in the evenings, and then they very often go home to husbands, children, etc, etc. And on the ground, when you're actually there, women feel marginalized. I mean, okay, yes, a lot of things have changed in the

last few years. And I'm sure if you were there in the 1970s, as a Western woman, life was very different. But women have got a lot of power. Like what? They've got domestic power, because the family is so highly respected. And being a mother is the most highly respected thing that a woman can be. They hold that domestic power. They hold that power within the family. And a very trivial example is that since women can drive, you don't see whole families in the supermarket because the husband doesn't need to drive the wife anymore. So the wife's in the supermarket with the children, but he's now not there, whereas four years ago... Hang on, because he doesn't have to be? Yes, yes.

But that's no argument for not letting women drive, is it? No, it isn't necessarily an argument for not letting women drive, but it's a symbol of the fact that as some things that we respect very highly in the west have potentially potentially some negative connotations as well and you know as more women work then there are going to be more implications for things that, you know, women's hour has talked about many, many times in a Western context. You know, that throws up more issues of things like childcare, et cetera, et cetera. So there is a body of thought within some women in Saudi Arabia that let's just not move too quickly. Let's embed some of the changes that we've already made before we start changing anything further,

just so as, metaphorically, we don't fall over our shoelaces. Well, it's a view, and it's the view of Sarah Fraser, an associate professor at Princess Nora Bint University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Rothana Begum is senior women's Rights Researcher at Human Rights Watch. Rathna, Sarah makes the case that women in Saudi do have, she claims, a lot of power. What do you say? Well, women in Saudi Arabia have actually spoken to us over the years about the impact of the male guardianship system, which essentially means that all women from birth and guardian, which could be their husband, their father, their brother, or even their son,

to make crucial decisions on their behalf. And we've talked to both women from very highly educated and accomplished areas, doctors, engineers, or academics, as well as women from less privileged backgrounds or less elite backgrounds who have talked about this, the impact. So you could be there, women have talked about having supportive families or male guardians. But they've said that it's been incredibly humiliating to have to get their permission in order to, say, travel abroad. So doctors have talked about how humiliating it is to go to their son to get travel permission in order to go to an international conference or to go to a work trip. And just to be clear, that is still in operation, that hasn't changed. Things have changed. So Sarah is correct. In the last four

years, there have been some changes. The most crucial of changes have been the fact that women can now drive. So two years ago, the authorities finally lifted the ban and now women can drive. The next biggest issue is last August, women are now allowed to obtain passports and travel abroad once they're over the age of 21, like men, without male guardian permission. So that is actually a crucial change, but we're still seeing other remnants of the male guardianship still retained. So that includes, for instance, the fact that as a woman you still need a permission from a relative in order to be able to marry, to exit prison if you've completed a sentence, sometimes even a shelter say if you've been admitted because of domestic violence,

as well as if you need to obtain a life-saving abortion and it's not just these issues women still continue to face discrimination in other areas such as divorce custody of their children inheritance whether they can pass nationality to their children a number of other areas still mean that there's a lot of discrimination against women and i do want to make clear that we have always there are of course accomplished women out there who are living fairly privileged lives because they happen to have supportive guardians. But they've made it really clear to us that at any time that could change. They could go from a supportive father to an abusive husband if they married the wrong man. That person could also just change tags. They could be very supportive one second. They have a falling out and now they have power against

them on other issues. And then, of course, the women from far less privileged backgrounds who've talked about the fact that not only have their guardians have this power over them, but they can use it against them. So they would extort them. Things like where they have to give their father money from their income in order to be able to live as they wished. People like Sarah, sorry to interrupt, but people like Sarah who have worked in Saudi Arabia, and she isn't the only person who's been in that position, obviously, make the case that progress in terms of women and Saudi is necessarily slow. It cannot be rushed. Do you agree? No. So what we're seeing in Saudi Arabia has been the fact that the reforms have been far too slow. They didn't give up the lifting of the driving ban for two decades. They went on for this. This was only the country in the world which really completely prohibited women from driving. And while women really advocated, they took to the streets, they

protested against this, they were really reluctant to give this up. And the reason why they did that was because they didn't want women to advocate for more reforms, most crucially the end of the male guardianship system. It was the sense that if you give some reforms, women will ask for more. And the truth is that the state itself is the one that's enforcing discrimination. If you end discrimination by the state, you can then move as a state to end discrimination in practice. Because the reality is that even though women can now travel abroad or drive, if you are a woman from a family which simply does not allow you to drive, you can't even get to the point of trying to secretly drive. You can't actually get to a point of actually getting a passport to leave the country,

you're still going to find that your life is still the same as it was five years ago for the rest of the women in the country as well. Thank you very much for talking to us, Rathna Begum, Senior Women's Rights Researcher at the organisation Human Rights Watch. Now we've asked for your ideas this week. And as ever, as so many of you love craft and crafting, I thought quilting might crop up this week. And indeed it has. Let's talk to Sue Brown and Louise Asher. They're part of a collective of women, people, women who run small businesses in printmaking and stitch and textiles. And I guess, Sue, you've been somewhat tested by lockdown, like a lot of people,

and you've had to think more creatively about what you do. Oh, yes, I think everybody thinks because you're creative, this space of time is going to give us that oomph to get creative again. But round about mid-May, I think my creative community decided they were finding it difficult, even though they were finishing stuff and starting new projects. Go on, tell me about the sort of projects that they were involved in at the time.

Well, there's a lot of finishing off. I think everybody who makes stuff has got a whole pile of projects that they're going to finish and definitely the prompts that I'd put out for my creative community people were enjoying them but they were finding them difficult to get into again because it was going on for so long wasn't it this this whole lockdown business so um I decided we needed to do something I found myself cleaning the back of the fridge and I thought this can can't go on, that's not very creative. That's a very, very bad sign, that is, because the things you find behind your fridge, well, there's a whole other life form going on in my house. OK, you are involved now with Same Sea Different Boat.

This is a community quilt piece. It's made up of lots of different squares of fabric. Louise, you're involved in this as well, aren't you? I am indeed. It was something that I felt quite passionate about when Sue spoke to me about it. I run a workshop of creative workshops with artists and makers from around the UK.

So I've got a quite large reach of ladies and gentlemen that are very creative and again like Sue said we're finding it quite difficult and I was getting lots of emails and messages saying I'm really struggling I'm really struggling with being in I can't seem to concentrate on anything

so the idea of bringing something together that we could all be involved in and something that didn't exclude anybody. So whether you were a printer or a stitcher, you could be involved. So how do you contribute to Same Sea, Different Boat, Louise? Well, between myself, Sue, and Liska, we have quite a large Instagram and social media presence.

So we kind of put it out to everybody that by sending Sue obviously has got incredible skills as a printmaker and my community are more stitchers so combining the two how we had a wider range of an audience that we could get involved in this and Sue kindly did an online, really how anybody out of a cardboard box could make a print. And then Sue printed them all up and then we posted them back out and then they could stitch. And what was achieved in a 10 centimetre square was pretty phenomenal.

Yeah, that's a bit. But there's a certain amount of trust involved in this, isn't there? A little bit, yeah. I mean, we didn't quite know what we were going to get and the variety that everybody was in the same experience of the pandemic. But the unique stories and personal experiences that came out of each square was really amazing. Give me an idea they were so personal um we had things you know people obviously spent lots of time in the garden so there were lots of printed and stitched birds we had lots of people really concerned about the environmental issues of gloves and masks being thrown away so we had lots of printed masks we had a an interesting portrait of boris um lots of feelings boris johnson yes of boris

johnson um i think we had a square uh with a bit of a tribute to chris witty um there's some real there's humor there's you know there's sadness as well it was a whole combined yes um i'm tempted i'm going to ask anyway how is bor is Boris Johnson portrayed? He's got a face mask on. He has got a face, yes, and blonde. It's very flattering, I think. Okay, I think what's important, we were actually having a conversation in the office this morning, and obviously there are only ever three of us here first thing in the morning at the moment, and I think we were just talking about how we were, and the truth is, everyone at the moment, you think we were just talking about how we were and the truth is everyone at the moment you ask somebody how are you and everybody just says okay because the truth is it's so hard to actually tell the truth isn't it that none of us really start the conversation and

are you finding all this helpful Sue this working together? Yes it's helped me I mean I was beginning to feel very low mid-May and I thought I need to join together. And that was the idea, getting everybody creative again. And we've had printmakers who haven't stitched for years. We've had stitchers who've never done printmaking. The letters that have come with these squares have been phenomenal. We were expecting 20 printed squares and maybe another 20 textile squares. we've had over 300 this this patchwork isn't well this this quilt is going to be like a massive four meter long piece of textile really really briefly how do people get involved can they still get involved yes they can if they go to my blog which is suebrownprintmaker.blogspot.com

they'll find all the um ins and outs and how to get on with uh having a go and contact us direct really good to talk there to sue brown and louise asher and to hear about that project same sea different boat that quilting community that's creating something wonderful out of the fairly hideous last couple of months pretty much everybody has lived through, if we're honest. Thank you to everybody who's emailed today, notably about buggies. This is from Malcolm. It made me laugh. You probably will laugh at this concept. I did, Malcolm. But in pre-COVID days, you would see a fair number of off-road buggies being pushed around on a Saturday morning park run, normally overtaking me with the small child in the buggy shouting faster, faster. Yeah, there you go. Very, very macho indeed. From Maggie, I bought an aspirational buggy for my newborn 17 years ago. I should have listened to the sage advice to keep it small and foldable. Just recently, I saw a woman fail to get on a bus as a smaller, nimbler buggy had jumped the queue.

However, my buggy did travel many off-road miles across the Salisbury Plain, and the chassis is still doing service as a go-kart at Wheatland Farms Holiday Lodges in Devon. Well that's good to know, there we are, there's a second life for the chassis of a much loved and well-used buggy. Maggie, thank you very much for that. I was remembering all sorts of stuff during the course of that conversation, also not just the dog poo and what a nightmare that is for buggy wheels, but the time I just lost a buggy, I lost a McLaren. And I still think about that. It was red. One minute it was there. Next minute gone. I was with my friend Emma. Neither of us understand where it went.

But if you do have it, I mean, it is too late for me now, but I hope you got some use out of it. From Janet, almost every time I see a man and a woman with a buggy, the man is in control of it. From Janet, almost every time I see a man and a woman with a buggy, the man is in control of it. I suspect their reasoning is this thing has wheels, which means it is mechanical and therefore a bloke thing. Once in a park in St Anne's, I met an older lady pushing a buggy with a younger man just walking along beside her. When I told them that they contradicted my theory, the lady said, I am grandma, I outrank him. That, of course, is technically true. When I was a toddler, I should say I'm 70, says Janet, the contraption was called a go chair and you faced your parent. I worked in retail for many years and frequently noticed that small children in facing away buggies could become

quite distressed in a shop because their surroundings were unfamiliar and they couldn't Yes, I totally get what you mean there. And this is also something that occurred to another listener who says, They never see anybody they know unless that person stops, bends their back to look over and around the hood. Such young children and babies constantly looking at strangers, their faces into the wind, the rain, the sun, cigarette smoke. Those who are pushing the child can't see if the child is in distress, in pain, crying or turning blue with cold or choking. Language development is said to be poor and no wonder if the child doesn't have the greatest amount of time to see their parent or guardian speaking to them. Yes, it doesn't surprise me

that people have mentioned that and I think it is something that I know will be, it's kind of an ongoing conversation, isn't it, about whether a child should be facing the carer um just a brief mention to self about self-published authors which was a topic today uh Jeanette says you said that self-publishing is a form of vanity publishing this isn't the case well I did apologize on air for that I got that wrong she goes on Jeanette vanity publishing requires nothing more than the author submitting material. This is printed, unedited and unproofread. And the so-called author gets usually a large number of books with nothing else forthcoming after paying a hefty bill. In the past, this has meant something like £2,000 for maybe several hundred books, which the payee is left with. Self-publishing requires a degree of proof

reading and editing including the print proofs being checked and the price depends on the number of books ordered and there are numerous companies. Okay I think that's important if we'd had time on air we could have had that conversation too today but I think it's worth saying that I did speak to the contributors off air before the programme and I was told that the figure that they had paid for their self-publishing, just out of interest, was around two and a half, three thousand pounds. So if this is something you want to pursue, that's sort of the figure you might be looking at. Obviously, there are all kinds of options, but that gives you an idea because I had absolutely no idea. I wanted to go back to something that we talked about yesterday, which was tending graves with a fantastic listener called Joe, if I remember rightly. And it prompted an email, which I thought was very interesting, from a German listener who says, I listen every day to the Woman's Hour podcast because I went to university in the UK.

In Germany, grave tending is the bread and butter of many gardeners next to the big city graveyards there are always flower shops and you can hire them to look after your family grave there's even a word for it of course there is in German I'm going to attempt to pronounce it Friedhofsgartenerei graveyard nursery is the direct translation and yes a good graveyard gardener will reflect the family's or person's character and identity. My husband was buried 10 years ago and I have really come to value my relationship with my graveyard nursery, says this listener. Germany, you might not know, is the only country in the world where the law dictates internment by an undert interesting. This is quite a superfluous email, I realise, says the listener, looking at flowers and gossiping about the state of the graves. OK, that's interesting.

This is quite a superfluous email, I realise, says the listener, but the main point is I really enjoy the programme. And not superfluous at all. I found that absolutely fascinating. Please, please, anyone, wherever you are in the world, we're here for you. If you listen, you're a listener, so you can email us and tell us what you think. And a number of people wanted to express their admiration for the young women who featured yesterday in that conversation about women of colour and mental health. And this is from Anne, who says,

I listen very sadly to those stories. It is a generational thing. It takes cultures a lot of time to change. I was born in the 60s into a family that just got on with it and where tears were frankly not welcome i'm too weary to operate like that now and i've sought help it's good that these things are talked about and that people can support each other and um let's see a couple of yes because people are still talking about accents as well so um this is something again we talked about yesterday on the

podcast are women more likely than men to be obliged to change their accent in order to be taken seriously? Ruth says, years ago, I started my teaching career in Sussex, where the children found my Yorkshire accent amusing. I've definitely modified my voice over the last 40 years that I've lived in the south of England, despite being proud of my Yorkshire heritage. I think it's got something to do with both perceived class and the stereotypical view of the thick northerner, much beloved of playwrights and comedians. And Ruth says, I would welcome the day when accent was not seen as a measure of intelligence, honesty or value. Thank you very much for that.

And I thought the conversation about women in accidents was interesting too. It's always surprising what gets a reaction and that was something that people were really very invested in. So thank you for that. Jenny is here tomorrow with the final Listener Week edition of the programme. She's talking, amongst other things, about juicy crones,

sexual harassment on university campuses and why singing can be really positive for your mental health. That's tomorrow. Join her then. Are you still there? Good. There's someone I want you to meet. Their name is Sean, they're 16, and they're in trouble. Follow Sean's journey by subscribing to Power Up on BBC Sense. The world is dying. It's time to take action. Power Up.

Power Up. Power Up. Power Up. Power Up. I'm Sarah Trelevan, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody.

Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby.

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