Random thoughts

Decisions?

We were speaking to another couple at the hotel we are staying at and, as so often happens at our age, we started talking about our health and general fitness.

This can be quite competitive as the different couples try to outdo each other with our various health issues.

Or at least the wives do, the men tend to pretend unconcern.

Which thinking about it, is very often the root reason they didn't see a doctor earlier when treatment would possibly have been more straightforward.

Anyway the husband of the couple we were talking to had prostate cancer and had two rounds of treatment. Radiotherapy and hormone treatment. Unfortunately there wasn't at this stage any evidence that the cancer was being brought under control.

His PSA levels, the wife told us, were still rising. Which wasn't good news.

She went on to say that she still worked, but was considering whether she should take early retirement, just in case her husband's cancer proved terminal. She seemed reluctant to commit at this stage as she enjoyed her job.

Was that being selfish, I don't think so. The brutal truth is, if his cancer proves to be terminal, she would still have a life after he was dead and having a reason to get up and do things and meet people, will be, despite the grief, a support in the difficult times ahead.

Some questions have multiple answers. All of which are valid.

A literary first, at least for me!

I was reading a book, a piece of crime fiction based in Stuart London, when blow me down, one of the main characters had Parkinson's! 

I've read hundreds of books over the years and I have never seen this before.

Jane Austen, mysoginist?

The big question I want the answer to is this; why did Jane Austin hate women?

What's that? I'm talking rubbish, Jane Austen was an early feminist, determined to be independent and self supporting. A true champion of her sex 

Well that maybe true, although I bet she didn't think of herself in those terms and I have my doubts, but the facts are she dislikes women.

So what evidence do I have of this? I've just read Pride and Prejudice, which btw I think is grossly overrated and the Plot line goes something along the lines of; Woman meets good looking wealthy aristocrat, plays hard to get, marries good looking wealthy aristocrat. Oh and I forgot;

Views her mother as being a massive embarrassment, and greedy and stupid.

Which to be fair the character is.

But Jane Austen is being grossly unfair to her mother character. She was facing probable homelessness upon the death of her husband, who also held her in contempt. Her daughter's would then be without a dowry and fast approaching an age when they would be viewed as too old for marriage and would be dependent on family charity, which in the real world of regency Britain frequently came cold and reluctant.

The best many such daughters could hope for was to get a job as a governess.

Inheritance and property rights did not favour women, they had few rights and fewer safeguards. The harsh truth is that on the death of her husband, she and her daughters could be kicked out of the home by the male inheritor.

She was facing poverty and homelessness.

So if in the book she was desperate to marry off her daughters, she had good reason.

Indeed most of her female characters are written to be unsympathetic, with a couple of exceptions. Whilst the majority of the men, even the cads, all have some saving grace and are much more sympathetically portrayed.

Very strange.