Has women's lot improved as a result of feminism? I read an article this week which questioned whether it had improved at all except for for a few of the top professionals. I think this is rather pessimistic. It is undeniable that more and more women are leaving school with better qualifications and are in the workforce in much greater numbers. It is not just a clutch of women who are doing well. There are definitely more women around in the senior positions, if not in the most senior positions, but this percolates down. Whereas in the past women in senior positions may have tried to ape male behaviour, there is now a sufficient critical mass to start changing things. There are more policies aimed at encouraging women from the grassroots up. There is more flexible working and more and more men are also opting for this so it is less of a career siding than it once was. There is more support for getting women back into the workplace through tax credits and other incentives.

Undeniably, childcare has become more expensive; life in general has become more expensive. More people are in debt and more families need two incomes to get by. Many women are struggling to cope as single parents with little input from their ex-partners. Are they better off or worse off than if they had stayed with their partner as undoubtedly would have occurred in the past? It's a hard call.

Feminism has also shed more of a light on areas like domestic violence and rape. It is not the failure of feminism that is to blame for still high levels of such violence and low levels of prosecution. The struggle against violence was always going to be a hard and long one.

What happened was that feminism somehow came to a pause when it was still in its youth. Its political side became associated with extremism and a sense of humour failure. The personal stuff - sex, basically - got more emphasis. Sex and the City was suddenly what feminism was about - sex, shopping, dressing up, Girl Power. Grown women aspired to look like dolls and even act like them. They convinced themselves and were repeatedly told that they were doing it for themselves and not to please anyone else, as if that made placing looks above any other quality somehow a good thing and something to do with "empowerment".

I just don't buy the ultra-pessimism that says things have only got worse. True, there is a huge divide between the aspirations of women based on class. Natasha Walter's book talks about girls aspiring to be glamour models. This could not be further away from the young students I see regularly who are aiming to set up NGOs, go into medicine, travel the world. Undoubtedly, the gap between rich and poor has widened. Is that feminism's fault? Has feminism thrown us off the scent or is it that the world is complex and floating in a sea of many different currents? 
 
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This time round he actually has some sensible suggestions. With our first daughter he had the entire Dutch football team lined up. Luckily, she was a girl. With the second, he wanted something like Constanza, which sounded like some throwback to a bygone era to me. With the third, we spent days looking for a suitable Basque name [he was born in the Basque region] before settling for a totally different name.

This time round he has fixed on Gael and Cormac or something that sounds like Acier. I can live with the first, not sure about the second and I will have to work on the third. My mum is worried people at school will call the baby Gail, but he will just have to stand up for himself. In the meantime, the neighbour, who is upset about the cat's death, suggested we name the baby after the cat, but as his name was Oblivious that might cause problems. Still, could be a middle name...
Meanwhile, I am getting a lot of comments about how pleased I must be to finally be having a boy and even more so how pleased my partner must be. In fact, we don't care what sex the baby is and my partner rather likes the idea of a whole posse of girls. We also get a lot of knowing winks and statements along the lines of "you'll find out what boys are like. You'll never sit down. Not like girls". I'm not sure quite how to respond as they could equally have said that, for instance, rebel daughter was going to love pink and talk all day long. In fact, the really great and interesting thing about children is they all come out differently. Let's just wait and see.

I went back to the car park, while catching up on work messages and trying to arrange a tour of the labour ward so we know where it is. There's no room in the hospital car park so I had parked in the nearby shopping centre. The car was wedged between two other cars. I couldn't open any door so I had to go in through the boot, which entailed pulling the boot door down from the inside, not something I would recommend at 28 weeks pregnant. Ditto climbing over two sets of seats. Thank God I wasn't 38 weeks or I could have been stuck in the car park for hours. Why have they built car park spaces so small that most modern cars don't fit in them?
My mum had done the school pick-up/football pick-up/ballet run. She emerged from ballet hell saying 'never again'. Not many people can withstand the ballet test. And joy of joys, the experience is due to be repeated on Wednesday afternoon when I have the anti-D injection, again at school pick-up time, and bonkers daughter has ballet. 

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I was quite excited about the presents since they are all very bonkers daughter-ish - a body art kit, modelling clay, a fashion designer kit and paints, glitter, etc. I had not quite counted on her wanting to do them all in the first half day of opening the presents...In the afternoon we had cake with my mum and her husband and then we headed up to the Harvester near our house for dinner. The bonkers one downed a glass of lemonade and emerged from the toilet in a state of some excitement. "My wee has gone fizzy!" she announced, delightedly. The next day was a bit of a comedown as she had extra ballet to which she went, reluctantly, dressed in a top, shorts and tights which she had cut several large holes in.

Meanwhile, I am finding it increasingly difficult to get up from places which I have sat down in and ended last week feeling rather as if maybe some people were right and this whole baby thing was rather foolish/antisocial [I have been reading articles about climate change] and generally not well thought through. I had been talking to someone about childcare, which is always a subject which sets the spirits falling. I have also been contemplating the whole birth thing. What happens if you don't have the energy to push? I am also more upset than I could really imagine about the cat's death and have been looking at photos of him as a kitten. 

This week I have a myriad of scans and tests, if I have the energy to get to the hospital.

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We are still getting over the trauma of Wednesday. Bonkers daughter woke very early yesterday and wanted to know why the cat had to die just before her birthday. Rebel daughter is still totally devastated and until the end of the day swore she never wanted a pet again until we started reminiscing about Obli's kitten years. She now wants two kittens. I keep expecting to see the cat sitting on the floor by the window waiting to be let out. Even my brother is upset and he hated cats. He still regards the cat we had when we were little as a "killer" and "user". He was caught red-handed with my brother's hamster hanging out of his mouth. I tried to say that it was the hamster's fault for escaping, as all his hamsters did. One died after eating a hole in my mum's velvet curtains, another died of acute rubber poisoning after eating half of my brother's banana man pencil end. Probably beaten eaten by a cat was the least nasty way to go.

We have cleared all the cat stuff away - the litter tray, the bowls, etc. The girls want to keep the bowls as mementos and the two youngest ones have been making paper flowers to go on his grave. They are hoping he will come back as a butterfly in the summer. I'm trying to convince them that it might be better to come back as something with a slightly longer life span.

Meanwhile, life goes on. I was too upset to put petrol in the car on Wednesday coming back from the vet's so was inevitably running late in the morning. Plus we had run out of food entirely for the dinner. Why is it when you shop online that you always run out the day before the next shopping comes and you always forget about five essential things? There was a hold-up on the M11 and then the van in front of me got stuck in the max headroom sign entering the car park. Some days I wonder how I ever get to work at all.

I would like, ideally, to be winding down from work around now, but things just seem to get more hectic. However, I can't complain as it is all very interesting. One of my jobs involves interviewing amazing students who will undoubtedly change the world. I come back from every interview thinking I am not achieving anything at all. The other job involves a lot of interviewing of entrepreneurs. Again, I think: why am I not out there creating some amazing new company which will do something marvellous. It all seems so accessible. I had never really considered it before, but now, having spoken to Business Link, countless entrepreneurs, having read books on "mumpreneurs", etc I am thinking there must be a gap in the market for whatever it is that I am passionate about. The trouble is that, after years of not indulging said passions due to lack of time, I am not sure what those passions are and, lurking at the back of my mind is the horrible thought that perhaps my only passion is sleep. I'm not sure this is a good basis for a business plan. I did like synchronised swimming when I was young - I was fascinated by them having to smile as well as do backward somersaults in the water and used to practice the moves in the pool. There must be some sort of business idea related to synchronised swimming and writing, surely...

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We went to the vet yesterday. I warned bonkers daughter that he might not come out of the vet's so she could say goodbye as she had ballet. She tried to get him to eat, but he hadn't got the strength. Rebel and big girl daughters came with me to the vet's as there was no other option. We went in and, sure enough, the vet said there was nothing she could do except more tests which would probably not help. She suggested putting him to sleep, which is what I was expecting. It was horribly quick and we had to say goodbye to him. He could barely look at us. I signed the form to put him to sleep and that was it. Rebel daughter fell apart. I wasn't much use as I was too upset to say anything vaguely comforting. I just kept repeating that it was for the best and it would stop him suffering. The vet's assistant said something about him chasing butterflies in heaven and gave the girls chocolate buttons.
Bonkers daughter came out of ballet and immediately started sobbing inconsolably. We came home with the body and buried him in the garden when my partner arrived. As usual, there were three very different approaches to his death. Bonkers daughter wanted to create a memorial and get a new kitten and kept going on about Obli's spirit. Rebel daughter told her that she hoped bonkers daughter wasn't going to get into all that "mumbo gumbo religion stuff" [the heaven thing had not impressed her] and said she never wanted a pet again because it was too heart-breaking to lose them. Big girl daughter chatted about sweeties - the whole death thing is beyond her comprehension. We are going to make a scrapbook of memories about Obli over the weekend. We have had him for 13 years since he was a tiny kitten and used to curl up on my toes under the duvet. He converted my partner, a cat agnostic, to regarding him as his little companion, the only other male in the house. He had two rather lovely friendships with the only other non-scary cats in the neighbourhood and he was absolutely useless at catching birds. I had to give him lessons in keeping down low. The house feels very strange without him.  

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Bonkers daughter's homework is another story altogether. I have tried endless ways of getting the whole difference between odds and evens into her head. She knows her two times table, she says, but she still insists that 27 is an even number. I decided last week that the problem was that it was all a bit abstract for her so I got out my purse and divided everything into groups of twos and threes. She was more interested in singing a song about Bradley's mum in Eastenders, who I divulged in a weak moment that I had done an acting course with eons ago. She thinks Bradley's mum is my best mate and that it is only a matter of time before I too appear on Eastenders.

Anyway, needless to say, the coins approach failed, as did the turning it all into a game approach. In fact, big girl daughter seemed to be better at it than the bonkers one, who just doesn't seem to look at life in a logical way. This is the girl who said to a friend, a propos of nothing: "If I was a giant strawberry and I was sitting on your thumb, would you eat me?" This is also the girl who spends every second of her life creating 3D cards, castles, guinea pig runs, cots, etc, in the moments when she is not gazing intently at herself in the mirror and designing new hairstyles and outfits. She wears an eye mask to bed and sometimes one rubber glove with the fingers cut out. Literacy homework is slightly easier, although she does insist on either whispering or singing the words or reading the book under her legs. Spelling for her is some sort of artistic endeavour. She loves to write, but her writing is more like a picture than a coherent sentence. I know I should persevere on the homework front, but I am kind of in awe at her inability to grasp basic logic. I think she might be some sort of artistic genius.

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I am not sure about the whole sexualisation of children debate. That is not to say that I am not worried about the exposure of children to so much sexualised imagery from an early age, but I am not entirely sure that banning lads’ mags, banning explicit posters and only allowing certain music videos on TV after the watershed [as proposed in last week's report by psychologist Linda Papadopoulos] is a sufficient or effective response, given how widespread those images are, given that lads mags sales are actually falling and most of the focus now seems on online material and given that a lot of kids view music online these days. Can you censor the entire internet? It is so easy for kids to pick up x-rated stuff by just a click of the mouse. A friend of mine was horrified a while ago to find that her son had been accessing images of women urinating naked which he had apparently been shown by a mate. He is 7. What do you do? I know there are parental controls you can put on your computer, but lots of kids now have mobile phones and what if they go to friends’ houses where there are no parental controls in place? And what do you do about sites like Youtube which the kids love for watching things like Alvin and the Chipmunks, but where you are never more than a click away from Alvin and the Chipmunks x-rated?

But doing nothing seems a bit futile too, given that the porn industry will not exactly be lying back thinking of England. Since porn sells to such a wide market and we operate under a system which responds to market demand, it can surely only increase its hold if left to its own devices. I listened to a debate on the radio the other day where a woman was trying to make out that the kind of things children are exposed to these days are more or less the same as has existed throughout time. Children have always wanted to dress up in their parents’ clothes and to be provocative, she argued. However, there is surely a difference between putting on your mum’s high heels and viewing bestiality on the internet or even seeing a man swipe a card down a woman’s buttocks in a music video. I am not even sure it is just about sexualisation. It seems to be more about turning people into objects and dehumanising them. Into that category I would put the whole incorporation of business speak into our personal lives – for instance, talking about people’s personal brands – and the whole idea that you can basically sell every facet of your life and that that is being a good businessperson aka Katie Price or the notion that everything can be bought, even, potentially, something as personal as a face.

I think it's part of a general malaise that kids are growing up with, which affects adults too. We are busy churning away at life, against a backdrop of potential end of the worldness [with every week seeming to turn up a new climate disaster], war, global financial collapse, etc. It doesn’t exactly encourage a positive outlook. No-one seems to have any vision for how we can get out of this mess and, of course, it opens the door to multiple types of extremist. Meanwhile, we flounder around in all the trappings of despair.