But when will they wake up and smell the cappuccino? Shirley Conran told

But when will they wake up and smell the cappuccino? Shirley Conran told us that life was too short to stuff mushrooms It is also too short to delude ourselves We make choices. Sometimes our children suffer as well as gain from our choices. We may continue to argue about the repercussions of these choices. Meanwhile, to cram some Fifties version of authentic mothering into an hour a day is just insane.

We have won nothing but the right as Erica Jong once said to be "terminally exhausted".We do not know how much time Nicola Horlick's male colleagues, or her husband come to that, spend with their families Somehow the issue doesn't arise. We know only of the juggling, the stress, the getting up at ridiculous hours of high-flyers like Horlick and of the sadism of others when the cracks begin to show.Fictional characters like Superwoman may soar off into the skies leaving the rest of us under yet more pressure to keep our feet on the ground, to be super-real, super-ordinary whatever our successes Superwoman, you see, is not very sisterly. She is the exception that challenges the rule and as long as we continue to believe in her, the rules as we have seen will stay exactly as they are.. An excruciatingly long and painful labour has finally given birth to a Hebron agreement in which Benjamin Netanyahu's government has essentially agreed to do in 1997 what Israel was legally obligated to do in March 1996, pursuant to an agreement solemnly signed in Washington in September 1995.

These negotiations have demonstrated that under the present Israeli government, backsliding from agreements already signed is far more likely than any genuine progress toward peace. Fortunately, there is one giant step towards peace that the Palestinians and the international community can now take together, without Israel's prior consent. They can dispel the dangerous illusions that the Palestinian lands conquered by Israel in 1967 are "disputed" rather than occupied, that Palestinian statehood is within Israel's power to grant or deny, and that the "Palestinian Authority" is or has ever been anything but a transparent euphemism for the state of Palestine. There has long been a strange, other-worldly quality to the veil of words drawn across the face of Palestinian statehood. Prime Minister Netanyahu pledged to his Likud party's congress last September that "you can dream every night and you will still wake up every morning and see: there is no Palestinian state, there is no Palestinian state, there is not and there will not be a Palestinian state".