Backski

The hotel did have internet access, but it was unutterably overpriced and mostly not working.

Having said that, it all felt so jetset. Oxford to Gatwick, Gatwick to Madeira, stay in posh hotel for a week (incidentally getting kisses from Italian rock star, but that's not for now), back to Gatwick, *change planes* for Glasgow, drink leisurely pints in (okay not exactly jetset Premier Lodge) hotel bar and sleep the sleep of the recently holidayed in preparation for a big meeting today.

Meeting over, experience the joy of BA self-service check-in -- sometimes technology really does change the world for the better -- then buy splendid bottle of Tobermory whisky in tax free shopping as homecoming present. Take off belt to avoid beeping the security thing and invoking unpleasant search procedures, nearly home now so don't bother putting it back on.

Get to Heathrow, hang around for holiday bag which is gloriously and unprecedentedly pretty much first onto the carousel, dump onto trolley and skid hilariously down ramps and round corners arriving breathless but just in time for the airport bus back to Oxford, while lesser travelled mortals are still blinking at the hopeless Heathrow signage and wondering if it's safe to take off their flight socks yet.

Arrange for M to pick me up round the corner from the St Clements bus stop. Feel generally supremely in control of things.

Get off bus, retrieve high-tech bag which is essentially a rucksack with straps which zip away. Decide not to unzip them, as only have to heft bag round the corner.

Three steps later, as bus is pulling away, unbelted trousers slip down a bit too far, catch on sandals, left ankle slips over sideways... hop... hop... bag held funny, hop.. stagger... falling in slow motion... crash.

Suddenly, I am sitting in a puddle of expensive single malt.

And of course, someone I know is right behind me.

Arse.

joella

Offski / tapski

Well, I am about to go on jolly hols with my parentals and sister. I have lots of books and summer skirts and am hoping I can get a pedicure.

Also utterly exhausted: after a long night on Stella-then-red-wine (WHY?) I got up early to finish fitting a garden tap for M&A with plumbing S. This involved us first drilling a hole through an outside wall with the most enormous drill I have ever seen. First we both held it, then we took turns. It was exhilarating but my arms are still shaky.



The tap itself is a tiny bit skew -- all to do with distance from the wall -- but we can fix that another time. What's important is that it works perfectly. No leaks, no drips, we even earthed it. Who'd have thought it. We rock.

Anyway, back in a week unless you can blog in Madeira. Which, thinking about it, you probably can. You can blog most places these days...

joella

Illiterate as well as fuckwitted

M and I popped into Londis this evening to pick up some beers and the Friday Guardian on the way to get takeaway Chinese for a houseful. While hovering round the newspapers, I caught sight of the Daily Mail.

The headline read:

One in 5 children grow up with no fathers

No. No. No. One in five children grows up with no father. The subject of the sentence is the one child, not the five, and one child has one father, on the whole. Naturally, I didn't read on to find out what pearls of wisdom the Daily 'family values' Mail chose to impart about this heinous situation.

But I guess you should expect nothing more from a rag aimed at pea-brained bigots.

I'm listening to Long Hot Summer by the Style Council on vinyl. I want an Embassy Regal and a little transparent lighter with hearts embossed on it to spark it up with.

joella

Stand up for your pipe bending rights

In all fairness, plumbing doesn't often get macho. At least, our plumbing class doesn't -- though this is largely down to the skill of our teacher Jonathan, who manages a rare combination of being as macho as a man can be while simultaneously having a gentle and gender-aware side. It's quite a killer.

Yesterday, we bent 22mm copper pipe. And you would not *believe* the number of 'bender' jokes that were made. Better a girl plumber than a gay plumber be. (And heaven forfend there should be a gay girl plumber... in fact I'm not sure plumbing pupils know that there really are gay girls)

I was told I had "inappropriate footwear". I did. And I had inappropriate upper body strength too -- and not in a too much of it way. But I made the most of both my footwear and my upper body, and the pipe bent, dammit.



I got a round of applause after it, and I felt it was deserved.

There's a lot of media fuss about posh plumbers at the moment but I think it is just that -- fuss. It's not a nice or an easy job. I quite like that about it, but I've always enjoyed a challenge. Plumbing S and I have already had enquiries from masters of wine and Lima residents...

joella

Salty deep aching stuff

Sometimes it's like someone took a knife baby
edgy and dull
and cut a six inch valley through the middle of my soul


Somehow I don't think Bruce Springsteen was writing about waking up in the middle of the night with the kind of period pain that sinks its teeth in slowly while you drift in and out of anxious, panicky dreams, leaving you exhausted from crying halfheartedly at the pointless terror of it all, and bruised from adopting increasingly unsustainable curled up positions involving balancing abdomen on balled fists.

But it's the best description of it I've ever come across.

joella

Garden update

We are blessed with fabulous friends. In four days we went from Strange Garden on Slope via much digging (below left) to curvaceous grooviness (below right) which is ready for Mick son of Mick to come and build walls round. Much respect.

  

In the process, we filled a skip (left), and that's not including all the earth that got barrowed up the garden for the terraced patio. It was unbelievable. Later, we took everyone out for curry, much to the delight of Mr Singh in the Star of Asia. It was a fantastic weekend, though I am still aching in strange places.

joella

Mega mega multicultural thing

We did so much goddamn digging on Saturday that we has the whole of Sunday afternoon to go to the Cowley Road Carnival. And it was the best antidote to the BNP and UKIP I could have imagined. M recorded the audio on his groovy new minidisc recorder -- have to investigate audio files on Blogger... Meanwhile here are some photos.

  
  
  

joella

Biggus Diggus

Ever since we moved into this house, I've wanted to do something drastic to the garden. Well, not *quite* since we moved in -- it took a few months for me to work out what a garden was *for*, and a few months more to understand that it was mine to do what I wanted with.

All months since then have been enriched by having a garden to play with, but it's never been quite right, because although I have learned a lot -- the importance (as in plumbing) of Having The Right Tools, what's a weed and what's not, how big things get, what will and won't live through winter, why you should never buy plants mail order, that things which say on the label that they need sun really do need sun, that to be good at planting you need to understand time (the first time in my life I have accepted that there are more than three dimensions) -- it's still the garden of the previous occupant.

She was a woman who had plenty of money and plenty of taste, but that taste was Laura Ashley gets off with Willam Morris with a few extra frilly bits and neo-Grecian touches on the side.

Robust was not her (though class was and I thank her for a fabulous loft conversion). The garden has always been deeply impractical, with steep steps near the house leading to uphill long thin lawn with ivy-ridden beds too narrow or shady to be healthy and crumbling brick paths. I have always longed to do something drastic, and since I discovered the joys of ferns and hostas in a shady garden last year, I've wanted to start by digging out the lower third of the garden, which is, for most of the year, both damp and dark.

It always seemed a low priority for M (and indeed housemate S, who has been heard to say that she would concrete the lot given the chance), but something's changed. M and I are best as a team when I (Aquarian, implementer) really really want something to happen but don't have the skills to create the plans and I badger him (Virgoan, mathematician, artist) to design it.

And we've really started it now. There's a skip outside, M's been at it all yesterday and most of today, C's been digging like a man possessed, I've been measuring up sacrificial flowerbeds, we've had construction consultancy and reality checking from a man who knows stuff we don't, and the formidable Mick son of Mick is on course for doing the building of walls and laying down of stones next month, enthusiastically if not ably assisted by us.

And we have assorted friends and relatives coming to dig for victory over the weekend -- demonstrating admirably that you don't need football fans (as they are all 'busy') to shift several tons of clay -- our rare blend of gentle sensitive loving girls and boys will get the job done nicely.

Progress so far:

  

Exhibit A (left) -- view from my room a month ago.
Exhibit B (right) -- two days post-skip

joella

Lesser of several evils

I didn't vote Labour in the European elections, I couldn't. I am one of the millions who 'drubbed' them (as Radio 4 is rather quaintly putting it) because of the heinous Iraq fuck up. I voted for the Respect Coalition (website here, weird spoof website here), not because I particularly wanted to but because I desperately wanted to vote a combination of anti-war and the nearest thing I could find to the opposite of the BNP, and that seemed to be the best option.

But I did vote Labour in the local elections, contrary to my own expectations. And the reason I did was on the strength of a statement from John Reid, following the furore over his comments (which I paraphrase) that smoking is one of the few pleasures poor people have access to, and that calls for a smoking ban are part of a middle class obsession with telling other people what's good for them.

I'm not saying I wholeheartedly endorse his view, but I do think it was a brave contribution to the debate. Unsurprisingly the media went crazy, and he issued the following statement:

"We want everyone to live a healthy lifestyle but not everyone lives in the same circumstances. If we wish to change people's habits we will often have to help change the circumstances in which they live."

Now *that* is a sentiment I cannot imagine coming from a Tory politician, and it caused me to reflect on all the small ways that Labour councils and Labour governments -- yes, even this one -- listen more and take fairer decisions than the Tories ever do or did for just long enough to put my Xs in the Labour boxes.

I saw Billy Bragg play three times during the 1997 election campaign. His line then was 'New Labour may only make an inch of difference, but it's an inch worth living in'.

It feels more like a millimetre at the moment, but you've got to figure the alternative's still worse.

joella

Summer holiday-ette



  

    



Went to the seaside last weekend... still have the sunburn and the slight hangover to prove it.

joella

Evil thoughts on a hot night in Oxford

Whatever I had, I think M has come down with. He is lying in bed not able to cope with the world at all. Last night he went up about three hours before I did. All evening I had heard noise from back gardens, but it was only when I went upstairs that I realised it was all coming from one group of people, who were braying loudly in that alcoholic posh way I remember so well from university.

The room was like an oven, but when you opened the doors at the end (it has one of those balconies that you can just about stand on) you got deafening shrieks and bass howling and ra ra ras. And my poor boyfriend was lying there in airless darkness because he couldn't bear the noise that came with the breeze.

And it was gone midnight. I went outside and shouted 'Hey! Loud people! Can you keep it down please!'

Nothing. So I shouted again 'Oy! Loud people! Keep it down please!'.

Nothing. I went back in, closed the door. Too, too hot. Opened the door. Posh screeching.

So I went out again and yelled 'Oy! It's fucking Monday! Shut up shut up shut up!'

I think they heard that, but it didn't work for long.

M went downstairs to sleep. I opened the doors and the skylight and fumed.

Then the idea came to me. I would go out to the shed, get the ladder, prop it up against the hedge, get the hose and soak the bastards! On the blastiest setting it would surely get across the two intervening gardens, plop down on their nasty little gathering and get their spliffs wet.

Got my pyjamas on and went down to recruit M as helper -- ladder a bit wobbly you see.

Jo, he said, I think you're a bit drunk.

Well, that trampled on *my* flower so I went back upstairs and actually they did quieten down fairly soon after.

But how much fun would that have been? There's still a while to go before the end of term, maybe I'll get another chance.

joella

Remember them

It's the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Eleven years ago, on the fourth anniversary, I was in Beijing. We went down to the Square -- well, you would, wouldn't you -- making good use of the vast cycle lanes that cross the city and trying to avoid getting legs splattered with the yellow phlegm that people hawk constantly because of the pollution.

And... nothing. Apart from a slightly higher than usual police presence, it could have been any other day.

We cycled back to the hotel and put on the TV, to see protests and commemorations all over the world, particularly in Hong Kong.

It was u n r e a l. I couldn't process how I felt at all. It just made me want to weep and then get drunk. Which is what I think I did.

joella

Mirror mirror on the wall

Who is the most suburban of them all?

I fear sometimes it may be me. Had the fabulous L and A round tonight (not 'L&A', though they have been several times), and I fear I fretted a little too much about the coordination of the coffee cups and saucers.

Though my concern was that they should under no circumstances actually match, so maybe that counts in my favour.

And who could fail to take pleasure in M's red and yellow tomato salad with green basil leaves on white plates?

But it's fair to say that the line between sense of occasion and Abigail's Party-esque corn on the cob holders is a thin one, and one I was not brought up knowing how to walk.

joella

My contribution to sustainable development

An email update from OneWorld popped in while I was eating my Pret Vegetarian Sushi. I feel very smug.

joella

Gritting teeth

I can't decide which is the more irritating: having a housemate who thinks Big Brother is worth watching in the first place, or having one who turns over to it while you go out of the room briefly during the 10 o'clock news, then sniggers to her boyfriend when you walk back in and turns it back over.

It's going to be a long summer.

joella