Women should concentrate more on their knitting

Is it just me or are the UK streets starting to feel like no go areas for anyone who isn’t fully tooled up? And yes, I know that there’s always an element of ‘the good old days’ and ‘increased reporting of crime figures’ skewing our perspective on things but I can’t help feeling that, even accounting for these factors, things are definitely going down hill faster than Gordon Brown’s career. What I don’t get is the possible reason for this mess. However, surprise surprise, I do have a theory and it’s this; women have changed. Not only have women changed but quickly too, within one generation I’d say. Mum would never have gone to the pub on her own and left Dad at home to watch the kids. Neither would she have pilled up and spent all night away from the family. She certainly wouldn’t have got involved in any kind of drunken disorder outside the clubs and chippies, something that we see our women getting stuck into more and more these days. And by the way, I’m not talking specifically about my mum here, I’m talking about everyone’s mum (if like me, you’re around the forty mark). Admittedly these are extreme examples but in general it holds true that, somewhere during woman’s quest for equality, the family unit seems to have lost something. It’s fine to talk about discipline at school, respect for the police and the rest of it but fundamentally these principals should be learnt by kids at home. A home where mum plays her role, albeit different, alongside a dad. I don’t think a home where a mum blatantly and brashly competes for ‘equality’ is necessarily a good place. I don’t know about anyone else but in pretty much every successful family I’ve experienced there’s been clear delineation between mum and dad. I tell you something else too; it was traditionally always the mum who knitted the whole thing together. I think her abandoning that task in her quest to be treated like a man is a big mistake, one that’s helped further fray the edges of a UK society that now seems to be slowly unravelling.