I remember my brothers coming home on leave in the second world war and never once swearing in front of us homebodies: a remarkable achievement.
taboos
Guest Hoyden: Remembering The Lost
I’m just going to say again what I’ve said lots of times before – we need to construct the rituals and the social rules for talking about and publicly recognising miscarriage, still birth and infant death.
Extreme breastfeeding in novels
I am reading Emma Donoghue’s Room at the moment. It is one of those novels that everyone is suddenly talking about. Narrated by a five year old, it is about he and his mother’s very isolated life. The book has an extraordinary premise, which I won’t give away here, but there is another element to the story that everyone can’t help but seem to notice and unpick and that is that the five-year old is still being breastfed.
