Last week she accepted a record settlement of pounds 140000 from her former employers after
Last week she accepted a record settlement of pounds 140,000 from her former employers after complaining that a male colleague at the same level was earning “substantially” more than herHELEN BAMBER: a City of London bond dealer earning a salary of pounds 43,000. She discovered that a male counterpart was earning pounds 170,000 and last week won pounds 81,000 in compensation from an industrial tribunal. HOW TO SPEND THE EXTRA DAYLIGHT HOUR
If skies are blue…
Walk: an hour before sunset (it is at 7.30 approximately) get your trainers on then go power-walking (taking big steps and pumping your arms by your sides) for half-an-hour. Stop, turn around and power-walk back home again.Fly a kite: spend 25 minutes making a kite using a plastic bag, wood and string, then visit your park and spend 35 minutes getting frustrated because you can’t make it fly. Alternatively visit the Kite Store (48 Neal Street, London WC2) and buy a kite, then spend an hour getting frustrated because you can’t make it fly.Time freeze: go to Greenwich Park and escape from BST by visiting the Old Royal Observatory, where all the clocks are kept on GMT. Or stand on the prime meridian, the brass line that marks GMT, and be one hour behind everyone else.Tower it: climb to the top of Blackpool Tower and see the Isle of Man. The tower is nearly 519 ft tall so you’ll spend most of your hour getting to the top (nearest station Blackpool North).Play: hire a group of players to perform Tom Stoppard’s hour- long play Artist Descending a Staircase (with a cast of six men and one woman) in your garden.
The script is pounds 5.25 from French’s Theatre Bookshop (0171 387 9373). Steinberg and Clarke (0181 877 1102) can provide performers at pounds 70 a person.And if they’re not…Scholarly: look at one of the Books of Hours. They are lavishly illuminated medieval manuscripts of devotion, originally meant for prayer. They are very fragile and are only displayed as works of art at some larger libraries. Contact the British Museum Library (0171 412 7000) for more details.Steamy: seduce your partner with the lights off but curtains open. You’ll have all the lighted excitement of daytime sex without the inconvenience of having to get up and carry on with the day. If single, invite your object of desire around for a “British Summer Time Dinner” (followed by the above, if you’re lucky…)compiled by Dorothy Koomson.
his Tuesday Mrs Rob Hobart (chairman) and the committee request the pleasure of your company at the Berkeley Dress Show, and with it the first night of an ancient British institution; the annual debutante season. Alas, the Glorious Second also marks the beginning of something else: the media’s open season on the upper-middle classes. “Be kind,” I was urged repeatedly when researching this article. Everyone involved is on the defensive about something that most people still regard as an event for a bunch of selfish bimbos who enjoy splurging lots of money on having fun.
One deb talked over tea with two of the mothers hanging on to her every word; the suggestion that we might meet unchaperoned was smartly quashed: “We wouldn’t want anything said that could be misunderstood by people who have their own views on the deb season whether they know anything about it or not.”
The office of the Queen Charlotte’s birthday ball, which marks the proceedings’ unofficial end in September, would like the press to say that it will be a beautiful and glamorous event that will raise lots of money for sick babies. The press, regrettably, would prefer to write about debs streaking, and had a field day last year when two American girls, Delight and Cherish Thompson, were invited to the ball, causing much pursing of lips (“it could have been perceived as becoming a free-for- all” said one mother) and an embarrassing public spat.Coming out is no longer what it used to be. Presentation at court, once its focal point, was considered old hat and stopped nearly 40 years ago, while the lavish balls have steadily thinned out in favour of low-key, early evening drinks. As a marriage market – once its raison d’etre – it is now a non-starter: boys are no longer an unknown quantity for the modern girl, and few, if any, hope to land a husband from the circuit.