O E T R Y C O R N E R

by Peter Craig

Spain offers paid time off for painful menstruation.

Spain is the first country in Europe that offers paid time off for painful menstruation.The bill is part of a law that was passed by the government last week.

In a bill that featured numerous sexual and reproductive rights laws,including ones expanding abortion and transgender rights, women now have the right to three days of menstrual leave a month — with the option of extending it to five days — if they experience painful periods.

The bill is part of a law that also enables access to abortion in public hospitals in Spain. Doctors may also use the medical procedure, abortion,to help pregnant women with lifethreatening medical conditions or to help complete an early miscarriage.

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Rain! Not pitter-patter, dingle-dangle spring rain, but rushing, racing, drain-the-sky pale rain. Not drizzle or mizzle but raging rain, flashing and dashing out of the mist, splishing and splashing around my head.

Our father said it would ‘refresh’ the parched land.

But more refreshments poured down to slake that land, soaking the streets like a surging spring, spraying us all like a screw-loose showerhead. Sluicing each tub, bucket, barrel, and pail, it crashed and plashed, and narrowly missed drowning our poor pet dingo secured by his rein.

Then father declared the land right as rain, but the clouds didn’t care and crashed down to land, turning the bush to a bog, shrouded in mist.

Billabongs conjoined, spawning brand new offspring, sweeping away fenceposts, pickets and pales, and all the damned rivers burst out of their heads.

So, we squished and squelched our way ahead, cloyed and clogged in the runnels of rain, as buildings collapsed and conspired to impale anything adrift on the spongy swampland. Then father’s nerves twanged taut as a hairspring, so he drained a wee dram of his Highland Mist.

Flotsam and jetsam ebbed and flowed through the mist, a chair, a table, an old bedhead, an inflatable doll, a mattress spring and a bust of the Queen (what a sad end to her reign).

Would we ever again put our feet on dry land? (No longer a question beyond the pale.)

Then our father prayed, looking pious and pale, eyes clouded over in a supernal mist, picturing ‘boats, beasts and a flight from the land’, while a still, small voice of calm in his head forewarned about, ‘FORTY DAYS AND NIGHTS OF RAIN.’

So, like convicts in a get-out-of-gaol spring …

With paddles and pails and a makeshift masthead, we sailed out of the mist, away from the rain. Farewell to Queensland. G’day Alice Springs.

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Equality Minister Irene Montero,who belongs to the junior member in Spain's left-wing coalition government,the "United We Can" Party,was the driving force behind the new laws.The minister said that the government will pay for the menstrual leave provision. Period products are now also to be offered free in schools and prisons,while state-run health centres will do the same with hormonal contraceptives and the morning after pill.