If the week so far was subjected to one of those trendy word clouds, the biggest by far would be change — both with and without the definite article. For starters, an ambulance service in the East Midlands is allowing staff to take a year of paid leave for the male menopause. Yes, you read that right, even though in my mother’s day the menopause was called “The Change” — if it was mentioned at all and only women had it.
The service is also offering blokes going “is it just me, or is it hot in here” while fanning their faces “extra uniforms” — to accommodate sweating and man boobs? — and allowing them to flex their shifts around their symptoms.
Then, as morning coffee time rolled around yesterday, there was more change in the air. Like you I was “sat”, as we must say now, in front of the telly for the main event from the man billed as the Candidate for Change (admittedly only by his spin doctors and client MPs) after “30 years of the status quo”.
The speech happened and yes, even though there was a surprise First Lady-style syrupy intro from Akshata, Rishi Sunak could not embody change for this simple reason: Any Tory PM perorating with the words “it is time for a change and we are it” after 13 years of successive Conservative governments is clearly a desperate electoral gambit, just as a cushion embroidered with the words, “be the person your dog thinks you are” is a cute joke.
An ambulance service in the East Midlands is allowing staff to take a year of paid leave for the male menopause
Anyway — before we get back to the manopause/menopause — I’ve never understood the appeal of change as a political offer for the Tories. Surely the appeal of the Conservatives is to keep things as they are, which is why John Major warbled on about long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, green suburbs, dog lovers etc.
The entire purpose of the party is not to make long-term decisions for a brighter future, it’s to hold on to power up to and beyond the next plebiscite by any means possible. For this lot, as with previous lots, this basically means putting more blue grout not in the red wall but in the grey wall, as the Centre for Policy Studies concluded last week.
Tory voters are old, Labour voters are young, which is why all Rishi’s policies are all about “things old people get grumpy about”, as CPS’s Robert Colvile opined. Like smoking, maths, the triple lock, pensions, immigration, immigrants speaking the King’s English etc.
If we want things to stay the same, they must change, as the Tories would have said if di Lampedusa hadn’t got there first. Back to the menopause, then. The andropause is not a verifiable symptom (yet), and I admit part of me worries that this is an NHS trust enabling men to claim yet another aspect of female biology and women’s “lived experience” for themselves.
Will we see, I wonder, men monetising the menopause now too? Mariella Frostrup, Davina McCall, Lisa Snowdon, Meg Mathews et cetera have made the menopause almost sexy since Germaine Greer wrote The Change in 1991.
If you think about it, these midlife glamazons have almost made an industry about something i.e. periods not happening, just as Tory conference was all about the Northern leg of HS2 being cancelled.
When I asked my mother when she had been through the Change, she looked at me blankly. She was 51 and already a grandmother. “Darling, I have no idea,” she said.
I don’t want to minimise the impact of the menopause. Mine was unremarkable — put it like this, I didn’t decide to do several podcast series about it — but 75 per cent of women have symptoms from mood swings, hot flushes, lack of libido, heavy periods, headaches, insomnia, cystitis.
I want to maximise instead the fact that, as the therapists tell us, change is, in fact, loss. Especially for women. According to the latest Women and Work report from McKinsey, women are leaving leadership roles at the fastest rate ever; other research shows that Britain could be losing about 14 million working days a year because of menopause issues, and the two are not unrelated.
If men working for the ambulance service in the East Midlands need menopause me-time, fine. Be my guest. But the change I really want to see is this, given the female sex is still a bit like the North of England — neglected by both the boss and political class.
I would like to see women being paid equally and not being sacked for ageing — as well as a high-speed and high-capacity train service connecting the North and the South in my lifetime. I won’t hold my breath, though.
