Miss Laetitia Cash

Would you take more than five items into the five items or fewer queue at Marks & Spencer? This, I have decided, is one of the great dividing questions of our times.

You see I never would, and I think people who do either can't read, can't count, or have an inflated sense of their own importance.

The five items or fewer queue (as distinct from the five items or less queue that you find in lesser supermarkets) is there for a reason. It is for people who are buying a few things in a bit of a hurry. There are lots of these people at lunchtimes and it makes sense to have a special queue for them so a) they don't get stuck behind people doing their weekly shop and b) the shop avoids long queues. Everyone benefits. Granted, five is a fairly arbitrary number, why not four or six, but it's generally accepted and it's a system that works.

Until people like Miss Laetitia Cash come along.

I was behind her, with two items. There were lots of people behind me, all with five items or fewer, as they are decent members of society and can read and count. She had six items, which she nonchalantly piled on the till. That I can just about live with. But then she disappeared off, bashing me with her sharp-cornered handbag as she went (I was probably a bit close to be honest, as I was giving her pile of six items a Hard Stare).

And, just as it was her turn and I was about to take her place, she arrived back with four smoothies, and added those to the pile. The assistant did look at them all and then look at her and then look at me, but she went ahead and scanned them, as I suppose good customer service people do, even if their customers do not extend the same degree of courtesy to their fellow human beings.

And *then* she produced a cheque book, and proceeded to pay with a very posh cheque from a private bank I had never heard of (which is how I know her name is Miss Laetitia Cash) -- surely the slowest way to pay that there is.

Having taken up more time than three standard transactions of five items or fewer and created a nice long queue of people on their lunch hour, she sauntered off.

I fart in her general direction.

joella

Decaf soya cappuccino

My healthy bum regime currently precludes caffeine and dairy products, among other things. So on the whole I am avoiding coffee completely -- it's all too fiddly.

However, last night I was at the train station to meet my visiting Australian artist half-aunt, due in on the 18.18. Which, predictably enough for Virgin Trains, was running half an hour late. As it's a fifteen minute drive home, I decided to wait.

And I waited, and waited, and waited. After a while, the arrival time shifted ten minutes every ten minutes, so the train was always nearly here. I asked the information desk where it actually physically *was* about fifteen times, and each time they said which train, love? THE ONE I JUST ASKED ABOUT TEN MINUTES AGO WHICH IS NOW AN HOUR LATE AND HAS NO FIXED ARRIVAL TIME, I said. Oh, won't be long now, they said. It was like something out of a bad dream.

So I bought a magazine and decided I needed a coffee. I went to the coffee kiosk that all stations have but that nobody can ever remember the name of. I thought I'd just have a black decaf. But they did soya milk too. So I said 'decaf with soya milk please'. The barista reeled off a list of coffee styles, all of which are apparently possible with soya milk. Er, cappuccino, I said.

'Decaf soya cappuccino!' she shouted. 'You fucking what?' said the guy who had to actually make the thing.

When it came it tasted like fluffy eggboxes. Serves me right.

joella

pLeAsE dOn'T MaKe Me gO BaCk To wORk

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy my job. First, I have a work ethic, and second, I can see the point of what I do. It's still working for the man to an extent, but it's a much nicer man than most. He is a force for good in the world, or at least he tries.

But I feel like I've been working forever. I want a big fat juicy break. I had four weeks in Guatemala last year and that was wonderful, but I was superstressed before I went and superstressed as soon as I got back, and that's the price you pay for being away for four weeks. This needs to change.

I've had four days off and I feel good. I am getting stuff done at a good pace, and if I just had a few weeks like this, just mooching, I am sure my world would be so much more manageable.

Or would it? Perhaps I tend to chaos rather than tending to order. Perhaps I use the fact that I work full time as a reason, when in fact it is an excuse. Perhaps I better get my ass back to work pronto just so I can do something useful.

joella

Pisshead (not)

Happy Easter!

Mayhem this morning -- everything bar the table from the dining room which happens to be a conservatory was squidged into the kitchen thanks to the purple painting going on yesterday. Then add two people who don't normally cook together and get them cooking together, with about four square inches of worktop free.

Something had to go, and it did -- Miles smashed a picture frame while negotiating his way to the pan cupboard. (Or just the cupboard, for our never-to-be-sufficiently-damned kitchen has only one, but that's another story.) Broken glass and food do not mix well. It was tense.

But it all worked out in the end, and six of us sat down to a splendiferous roast dinner only half an hour later than planned, and with it some of the aforementioned Chablis. Very, very cold, it was, very smooth, and very, very delicious. It was like revisiting a foreign country, where the waters are warmer and it's tempting to swim out into them, but you know it could turn stormy at any moment.

Ah, wine. So we got a bit drunk but not very. Everything was sparkly and giggly for a bit, and then our guests left and S disappeared with her Quiet Man, and I settled down for a little snooze.

And now it's all normal again, except I feel a bit lazy and crumpled round the edges. Which I guess I am.

So this evening, rather than heading out on the piss, I have been trying to resolve the Great Bathroom Dispute. S wants it blue, only blue is allowed, no other colours except maybe purple. I am happy with blue but want a contrasting colour for the woodwork, of which there is quite a lot. I have had enough of purple. I bought a print of Cherry Autumn by Bridget Riley to hang in there and want to use a blue from that with one of the orangey-pinks or orangey-yellows.

S maintains that blue and orange can never exist in harmony, and I am out to convince her that they can, as long as they are the right blue and the right orange. And I have discovered a fantastic feature on the Dulux website called MousePainter. You choose a room to play with, choose the photo that's most like your room, then try different colours of paint on the walls, the woodwork, the floor etc.

The colours are a bit off, but it's a lot better than squinting at colour charts and trying to imagine them all over your walls. You can also ask it to suggest coordinating colours, or choose only from certain ranges. This is what DIY websites should be about. I approve.

The version on the Dulux Australia site is called MyColour and is even better -- you can see what it's like at night as well as in the daytime, and the rooms are bigger. But the paint colours are different. Why is that? Do Australians actually have different colours or do they just call them different things?

On both though you can save your schemes to show your sceptical housemates, and print off a list of all the colours you need. Then, if you measure your room, you can pop over to the Wickes website and put in the dimensions, and it will tell you how many pots of paint you need.

I think that's enough DIY websites for one day.

joella

Cleanliness is next to godliness is next to drunkenness

I don't do Easter in the sense that people who go to church do Easter. I am far too lapsed a Catholic for that.

But I do do Lent (normally: crisps, this year: cheese -- though I have modified this to allow goat's cheese and sheep's cheese given that I am currently eating no cow's milk products at all as part of colon detox -- a kind of SuperLent). I would point out that I had already given up cheese for Lent before I was told to give up cow's milk -- Lent's not about cheating.

And in anticipation of Easter we have cleaned the house from top to bottom -- well, top and bottom, the stairs are still pretty dirty. My job was the kitchen and the shower room, and neither has been cleaner in recent memory. S has done one of her super-blitz jobs on the front room, the back room and the bathroom, and Miles got out of his job -- the dining room which happens to be a conservatory -- by painting it purple instead. I am not sure about this at all, it does have a distinct 80s tinge now, what with the glittery black woodwork, but I hear the 80s are cool again, and anyway, it's better than the 'apple white' it was before.

We are having a big roast to celebrate tomorrow (nuts for me, chicken for everyone else, and I've made mine already how organised is that), and competing with the paint fumes will be... wine.

I said Year of Living Healthily (DAY A HUNDRED AND NINETEEN!), yet there is some very posh Chablis (well, fuck it, if you're going to do it at least make it worth it) chilling in the fridge. I did think about this very hard. I am still not 100% sure it's a good idea. But god, am I looking forward to it.

joella

A.G.R.O.

One of the fabulous things about being sober is that I can follow the plot of 24. Ten o'clock on a Sunday night is prime sorrows-drowning time, so much of the first series was me going 'why did he do that?', 'is she the one that did that thing with the guy from earlier?' and 'have we seen him before is he a terrorist?'.

This series it's all different. I can even remember some of their names. That Kate Warner really gets on my nerves. (See?) And it's a race against the clock to get into bed by 10 on Sunday nights, to watch on the portable that's balanced precariously on the laundry basket for just this purpose.

So imagine my horror and disgust when this week there was no 24 because of the fucking GOLF. Is there *anything* sadder than watching golf on television? I once found myself watching an angling competition on television, which is probably even sadder than watching the test card, but then I was pretty stoned at the time -- and it was 3am. It was not 24 time.

This is not the first time golf has disrupted my life. In 1988, the Open was held at Lytham, where at the time I was an 18 year old with a lot of attitude. The whole town was taken over by large cars and wealthy people in bad clothes, you couldn't get into places or park anywhere and everything was reserved for someone who wasn't you.

It did bring some work with it, and I spent some evenings washing up in the kitchens of large houses being run for the duration by ex-chalet girls who brayed at the sight of the boy Glen, who I took with me a couple of times. They sent him straight off to do the barbecuing -- a man prepared to get his hands dirty was a wonderful find. Meanwhile I hacked at strawberries and avoided the wandering hands of clean on the outside filthy on the inside rich kids. And their dads. Nice.

Clearly, a statement had to be made. I had just got my 2cv, the first piece of the world to belong to me me me, and the boy Glen and I came up with A.G.R.O. -- the Anti-Golf Residents Organisation. We made signs with golf balls turned into CND signs and feminist symbols (as I recall, it's a touch hazy), stuck them to the car windows (not the safest move I have ever made) and drove round town with the roof off punching the air and shouting 'AGRO!'

I did feel a whole lot better.

I saw my little 2cv the other night. She lives about ten minutes walk away now, but it's the first time I've seen her since I sold her. She was all clean and shiny and had a new set of seats. My heart ached, but I know I did the right thing. It's hard being a grown up.

joella

Little fluffy poo

Well, something is working, whether it's the strange diet or the many odd capsules I am swallowing every day or the vast quantities of water I am drinking. I have never had poos like this.

Why is poo such a funny word? I have been using it a lot lately, and remembered a hilarious game Miles and I invented on a long boring walk home some time last year.

We were drunk at the time, but it does work sober, and you can try it whenever you are bored. It's sensible to play with at least two, otherwise you make stupid noises and people stare.

You think of the name of a song, substitute one of the words with poo, and say it out loud. Simple as that. 'How much is that poo in the window?', 'Dead ringer for poo', 'Brown girl in the poo' etc.

Our favourite though was 'I want to hold your poo'.

joella

Looking after number two

This week, Year of Living Healthily (DAY A HUNDRED AND THREE!) moved up a gear. In fact, it moved up my bum.

On Wednesday I went to see a quite severe yet rather glamorous ("I don't drink gin anymore because I just like it too much") nurse turned colonic hydrotherapist. She gave me a strong detox talking to, wrote a list of the things I am not allowed to eat for the next six weeks, and then got to work.

It wasn't quite what I was expecting. I mean, obviously I was expecting something involving tubing, warm water and slight indignity, but I did figure it would be a one off, a bit like getting your legs waxed. You go in, go through it, pay, leave, think 'why do I do this to myself', then think, 'oh, but it's worth it'. I didn't count on the full-on colon cleanse experience that I suddenly seem to have embarked upon. But apparently just washing out your bum does not a healthy colon make.

Instead, a healthy colon involves a spell of not eating wheat, or anything made from cow's milk, because these are hard to digest. Then it involves no alcohol -- this at least I know I can do -- but, far more frighteningly, no caffeine. Plus some herbs and some husky things and some Aloe Vera. It's all explained on the Cytoplan website.

And on top of all that I get four more 'colonics'. If you say it quickly it makes you think of tonics, which are good things and do not involve any poo.

I was wondering what do to with all the cash I am saving from not drinking. Instead of pissing it away I am sticking it up my bum.

joella

Victory for Kneely Chairs!

Back at the beginning of February I wrote about the chair fascism in my office, when my kneely chair was Banned. A man from the frighteningly named Posturite came to see me and brought me a chair which can do everything but make the tea, but upon which sitting is compulsory.

It was on trial, and I tried, I really did. But it gave me terrible neckache and made my legs feel heavy, and and and. I just can't work on chairs, I don't like them. And so today he came back with the nice but scary HR woman. He is taking it away and bringing me a kneely chair, only with a five point base so it is not illegal. I will look like a lunatic but I will not care.

Two months elapsed time, several hours of pain, several more of frustration, one lot of tears and many rants later, and I've finally got what I want. Which is almost exactly what I had before, but let's not go there.

joella

Earthling

I love my garden.

When I moved into the flat I shared with my Significant Ex, I had a kitchen of my own for the first time and I learnt to cook. I loved that flat, and I loved that kitchen. There wasn't a garden -- there wasn't even a balcony -- but I didn't really see the point of growing things, I had only just learnt to cook them.

Then when I left, I moved into the Flat On Top Of A Storage Building. That had a windswept little patio, on which S and I grew precisely nothing. We didn't even have a houseplant, though we did have a hammock. We were hedonistically utilitarian.

When we looked round houses, I just thought, right, yeah, garden, whatever, how far's the pub?

And then we moved in. And there was suddenly this whole extra outdoor room that I had no idea what to do with. I wish I'd taken photos of it now, it was like a little jungle. I had no tools, no knowledge of what anything was, nothing. And it kind of fell to me to work it out, because I seemed to care the most.

So I began my gardening life much like I had begun my cooking life five years earlier, by reading books and having a go. And now I can spend all weekend doing it. Miles comes out to help sometimes, and is a very good weeder, and even S has done a bit of digging.

This weekend I went to a plant fair with some of my planty friends. I bought a clematis (montana rubens, if you care) and an erysimum (a new kind called Apricot Twist, if you care), and I knew exactly where they were both going to go. I also know that lavender doesn't create new growth on old wood, I know that rosemary prefers poor soil, and I know that camellias shouldn't face east. Mine does, but I didn't plant it.

It is lovely to know that I still have room in my head for a whole body of new knowledge, and it's lovely to plan things and then see them happen. It is quite a lot like cooking in that respect, but everything takes much, much longer. I won't be a good gardener for a long time yet, but I'll get there one day.

There is also something quite profoundly calming and optimistic about it, especially at this time of year, when the sap is rising and everything is waking up. Last weekend was the first time I really went for it since the winter, and I realised that I could dig a lot longer and pull a lot harder than I could in October. It must use a lot of the same muscles as yoga. How very zen.

NB I am not premenstrual anymore, as if that weren't utterly obvious.

joella

Falafel

I have just been to the library and got out the Book of English Food by the rather splendidly named Arabella Boxer. It's about how and what the British ate between the wars, which is what interested me about it, that social history angle, although I am also on the lookout for good cake recipes since the appearance of cake tins in the kitchen following the birth of my sweet tooth.

But I mainly got it out for Miles, who likes traditional things. It has a whole chapter on Tea, in the sandwiches and buns sense of the word, and another one on Picnics. And I am sure he will look at recipes for Roast Rack of Lamb and Braised Oxtail and wonder how he ever ended up living with a vegetarian.

And indeed it would have been very difficult to be a vegetarian living in Britain between the wars. Not least (as I finally get to the point) because there was no falafel. And falafel is the food of the gods.

I can remember my first falafel. It was my first visit to Israel in 1980, also memorable for my first experiences of houmous, pitta bread, tahina, sunflower seeds, and Kinley, a fizzy orange drink made by the Coca Cola Company which I have never seen anywhere else in the world but which was bloody wonderful. These days you can buy falafel in supermarkets, but in those days you could only get it in the Middle East, and maybe in Middle Eastern delis, and we didn't have any of those where I grew up.

And it was like being shown a secret door into heaven. My sister, my dad and I took to hanging round the bus station at Haifa, where stalls would sell you a pitta bread with four or five hot little balls in it and you would fill the rest of the space up with five different kinds of olive, fourteen different kinds of pickle, some salad, some tahina and some chilli sauce. You would eat it far too fast and then do it again, until you felt sick.

Is there a more perfect food? Good for you, vegetarian, nay, vegan, super tasty, and you can do whatever you like with it. It's so wonderful that people fight over who thought of it first. I don't mind, just bring it on. I do have access to a Middle Eastern deli these days and very glad I am too.


joella

Better, kinda

Not feeling quite so much full of vitriol today. I have done some yoga and drunk some herbal tea and walked round the garden looking at all that life bursting through demanding to be lived.

I retain an inner sneer, however, especially for those who avoid telling you something you may find hard to hear but will find out anyway, those who look you in the eye and lie to you, those who try and sell you things that they know won't do the job they purport to do, and those who are stupid enough to believe the hype and don't listen to you if you are not.

In other words, the manipulative, the cowardly and the occupants of Golgafrincham Ark B.

When I get my period (any minute, by the sounds of things...) I will collapse in a little heap of pain and deep reflection, but right now the moral high ground is All Mine.

joella

Not a nice person and stuff

There's a Eurythmics song called You Hurt Me (and I Hate You). I buy that sentiment. There are lots of unpleasant things that I *don't* do, but I do have the capacity to hate people, and I do use it. In fact, I can't stop it.

If I could edit my own psyche I would tone that bit down, because it can be quite painful, although I don't think I would take it out altogether. It's healthier to acknowledge these things and it's a fairly good survival tool in a world where you have choices. But it is a little tiresome sometimes. I do hate some people on my hate list a bit less over time, but my average grudge stretches into decades.

And today I hate pretty much everything, but I hate the people I hate in particular (NB these can also be people who have hurt me by hurting the world -- I *really* hate Thatcher, for example). Fuck off the lot of you.

joella

The clocks go forward...

...the clocks go back, and here I sit as if I were the only one. And oh, you cannot hear me...oh, you cannot hear me... Can anybody hear me, out there?

joella

The path to a salwar kameez

There's a shop just down the road from my house called SK Fabrics. I have often looked longingly through the window, but have never dared go in.

It sells fabrics, obviously enough, many of them fabulously embroidered and otherwise exotic. The problem is that I don't know what to do with fabrics. I have friends who know how to make clothes, curtains, whatever, can follow patterns, use sewing machines. I am not such a person. And I have felt doubly daunted because it's an Asian shop and is frequented by elegantly dressed Asian women buying fabric, it always seems, with unattainable know-how and confidence.

But today this all changed. My friend K is several months pregnant and summer is coming. She wanted a salwar kameez, but didn't have a clue how to make one happen, and was also too nervous to go in to SK Fabrics on her own.

So, having worked up to it via Bombay Emporium (ready-made Indian clothes, quite accessible as it also sells the kind of long floaty cotton skirts any self-respecting seventies child has found herself in at some stage in her life), we ventured into the world of fabric.

And I am very glad there were two of us. It was totally impenetrable at first -- what do you wear with what? How much do you need? Do they sell patterns? After a while four women came in together and began animatedly comparing different rolls of material in a language we didn't understand. K very bravely asked two of them if they knew anyone who could make her up a salwar kameez. Because we don't have a pattern, I added.

Oh no, there are no patterns, they said. Let me ask my sister over there, one of them added. Thanks, we said. And then for a good ten minutes we hung around, feeling increasingly bemused as the four women and the shopkeeper pulled out more and more rolls and talked and talked and talked and didn't give us another glance.

When we had looked at every single roll in the shop and were beginning to wonder if we should just sneak out, the shopkeeper asked us what we wanted. We're just, um, waiting for some advice from these ladies, I said. OH! they said and it all went off again for a while. Ask him! they told us, and sure enough, it turns out the shopkeeper knows a woman who will do it.

Then K tells him which fabric she likes, and he tells her this roll is for the shirt, this is for the trousers, and this is for the scarf. Okay, she says, but I don't think I need a scarf. He gives her a hard look and cuts her fabric for her shirt, her trousers and her scarf. He asks her some questions about neckline and sleeve length preferences, how tall she is and what size she is, and it's a done deal. After some prompting, he adds the fact that she's pregnant to the instruction. (Surely this is relevant when you are making clothes?).

It will be ready in two weeks. I can't wait to see it.

It feels like a whole new world has opened. I am no longer scared of SK Fabrics. I might even have a salwar kameez of my own one day.

joella

The blogs of war

Ouch, sorry about that, just came into my head.

I've been in Manchester for a teambuilding extravaganza, and am not sufficiently wired to blog from locations with no PCs (note to self: earn more money so can have laptop). Have been pining a bit -- horrific war on, no means to say anything about it. I did see an internet cafe, but I was just too damn busy bonding.

Others are anyway saying far more interesting things. Salam Pax for one: unmonitored blogging from Baghdad. And the BBC news reporters for another -- somehow this feels more immediate and genuine than the relentless 24 hour news coverage, even though nothing of huge note is being said.

Mr B, I hope you are safe in Istanbul and not doing scary things on borders.

joella

Sun salutations

Advantages of getting up at 6.30 on a beautiful morning to go to yoga:

You feel madly virtuous and beatific,

Dog pose is for some reason easier first thing in the morning,

You get to do an hour of exercise, have a shower, eat poached eggs on toast and *still* get to work on time.

Disadvantages of getting up at 6.30 on a beautiful morning to go to yoga:

You get to find out that there's a war on two hours before you would have done otherwise,

You have to watch a mucho-mascara-ed blonde woman in a gas mask on Evil Sky News in the changing rooms rather than listen to lovely John Humphreys on the Today Programme.

joella

Enter Sandman

Another beautiful spring day, and today I am having just as much fun listening to Enter Sandman on Radio 6. Now on the surface of it, Metallica and the Grateful Dead don't have very much in common, but I have exactly the same desire to be driving down a B road in a 2cv punching the air where the roof normally is.

Instead I am sitting at my desk in headphones waving my arms in the air like a loon. My manager doesn't have many heavy metal moments, I don't think.

joella

Box of rain

What a beautiful day it has been. The sun, the blossom in the trees, the wind, the daffodils.

And I am thankful for spring, but something is missing, and that something is my little 2cv. The first roof off drive of spring is a ritual we shared for many years, but this year Conrad gets that pleasure. That is better than no one getting it at all, but it's hard.

And so it was that I borrowed Miles's car to get to my leg waxing appointment at lunchtime. It can't touch a 2cv for convertible style and spring joie de vivre, but it does have a CD player, and that makes up for a lot. And the song that I played as I drove through Oxford with the wind as much in my hair as I could manage with a roof that has to stay on, was Box of Rain by the Grateful Dead (the link is to annotated lyrics from a guy at the University of Colorado -- surely an honour accorded to few other bands...)

I felt lots of things -- Box of Rain is one of those songs -- but most of them good. A great song for springtime. Play it loud.

joella

Cake in my tummy / toilets revisited

The pineapple upside down cake was a resounding success, even though I deviated from the recipe on the very first attempt (muscovado sugar instead of white, half self-raising flour instead of all plain, no glace cherries because they're gross) -- something I normally avoid. Recommended.

And Gez's boat has the most amazing toilet. He prefers men to piss into the canal, and you can see why -- the toilet is essentially a bucket of chemicals with a wooden casing round it, and he has to carry it down the towpath to a bucket-emptying place somewhere. It's also in the engine room, and the engine doesn't go, so the engine room is exactly at the outside world's ambient temperature. Last night that was pretty close to freezing, so when I stood up the whole bucket was steaming.

I went twice.

joella

The Mingers

They live in Leeds. They are a punk band. And the shouty one at the front is my cousin Talia. I am awestruck.

Check them out. I wish I had been in a punk band when I was 21. I was angry enough, but not nearly musical enough. And not very punky either. It was all intense lyrics, swirly guitars, Newcastle Brown and dope in those days. *Sigh*

joella

Cake in the oven

I get invited to dinner on Gez's boat. Sure, I say, would you like me to bring a pineapple upside down cake?

What is *happening* to me?

Gez says he would LOVE a pineapple upside down cake, so here I am, baking one. The last time I had pineapple upside down cake was some time in the late 70s, when we went on a family holiday to Ireland.

It was made by a great aunt of mine who lived, and still lives, in a post office. I got to play with the stamps. The whole house smelt of peat, which is what they used to burn on the fire. It rained a lot. My sister and I made a little town out of paper from a Richard Scarry book. And we had pineapple upside down cake.

It has lived at the back of my mind ever since and popped up occasionally, but I have never come within a mile of one since, and now I am baking one. Weird, weird, weird.

You get an interesting difference searching for recipes for pineapple upside down cake on Google.com and Google.co.uk (restricting to UK results). British recipes are based around golden syrup, flour and sugar (lots of sugar). American recipes mostly start with "take one pack of yellow cake mix".

Actually, is that interesting?

Oven beeping, me barking.

joella

The political compass

Another site I found by leaping around different blogs ... the Political Compass. At first I thought it was American, as I got to it from the site of a man in Atlanta, but it's not. Which makes it a bit more interesting.

Anyway, I got annoyed at a lot of the questions, but I came out

Economic Left/Right: -6.00
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -6.62

I tried to be honest and say what I really think rather than what I would like to think or what I used to think when I was younger and the world was simpler. I came out near Tony Benn and nowhere near either Thatcher or Ayn Rand, and I couldn't be happier about that.

joella

Ashes to ashes

This weekend I went up a hill in Sussex with Miles and his sister, as they scattered their mother's ashes. She loved walking, it was the hill nearest her house, and there is a huge post there which was once part of a mill of some kind. So they will be able to go back to the exact same place, and see the exact same view.

It was extremely windy, which did lead to us all returning with bits of ash in our hair, but it really made the scattering something to behold. I almost wished I had a camera, but the picture of Miles leaping up in the air with the jar as the wind swept the ashes out over the countryside will stay with me for a very long time.

I asked my mother what she would like us to do with her. She was quite taken with the idea of being made into a diamond (see LifeGem -- only in America, right?) but we decided in the end that would be too risky. What if she got stolen? What if I lost her in a swimming pool? We would probably need two diamonds so my sister and I could have a bit each -- what if they were disappointingly small?

I like the idea of being scattered though. It's the way to go.

joella

No Peace, No Sex

Not about toilets, but about other genital activity.

In the spirit of a bunch of ancient Greek sistas, women who are against the war are being encouraged to withhold sex from their pro-war partners, reports the BBC.

An interesting arty idea, but I am not sure how well the concept translates to the modern world -- didn't Pat Benatar warn us to Stop Using Sex As A Weapon? And shouldn't we always listen to Pat? But then, love is a battlefield...

joella

PS on toilets

There was a rather snotty article about blogging in today's Guardian Online -- the author argues that blogs are only of value if they are contributing to the body of knowledge on a subject. Maybe I have found my niche, and from now on I will just blog about toilets?

joella

More about toilets

... and my childhood obsession with toilets seems to have stayed with me.

For example, a few years ago I went for a liquid lunch at Mezzo on Wardour Street with three of my more stylish friends. It was beyond posh, as far as I was concerned, so I immediately headed to the toilet.

Spotless, top-end design, lovely soft paper, lots of bottles of stuff to spray on yourself -- all making you feel like a Special Lady. *But* invisible sensor taps, so you look like an idiot unless you know how to use them (ie, you spend a lot of time having lunch in beyond posh places) and, worst of all, toilet attendant people! They give you a towel you don't really need because you've already surreptitiously wiped your hands on your trousers -- having spent so long looking for the taps you're buggered if you're going to look for the hand dryer as well -- and then there is the little tray on the side with pound coins in it.

Who takes their purse to the toilet?! Not me. But there are people who do, who kind of drop a little coin in as if it's perfectly normal. ARGH! So on the whole, Bad Toilet.

Then after lunch, the two of us earning a good living went underwear shopping, while myself and V sloped down the road to The Intrepid Fox and took up residence behind pints of Stella. Unsurprisingly, before long I found myself in the toilet.

And those toilets were something else. No locks (practically no *doors*), no seats, no paper, no cleaner since the last one died of distemper, fag burns everywhere and probably several grams of speed ingrained in the cracks in the cistern lids. But at least you weren't hassled by attendants, although someone did try and sell me some acid. Or was that in the place in Bath where the toilets were much the same? I forget.

I was profoundly struck (being quite pissed by this stage) by the schizoid nature of modern life, that one can find oneself over the course of an hour pissing in such vastly different environs.

And that is the thing I remember most clearly about the whole day. And many days. Sad but true.

And so it was that last night I found myself watching UK's Worst... Toilets! with an unhealthy level of interest.

But I was disappointed. The unisex toilets by the Westgate Centre car park are way fouler than anything they found, and somewhere in Britain they must still have something along the lines of Lytham's infamous Bog Island -- swampy underground toilets with ancient locks that take 2p and slam behind you like a cell door, and a big mildewed mirror that teenage girls use to perfect their smoke rings. They filled it in a couple of years ago, but it can't have been the only one.

No, I was not impressed with the quality of the research. If you want to search out bad toilets, you should consult a specialist.

And a bit of gender awareness would have been well placed as well. All that shit about 'people' urinating in city centres at night. All those temporary urinals that the Metropolitan Police have installed for 'people'. Come on. Piss pollution is a man thing.

I am beginning to scare *myself* here, but, as the man from the British Toilet Association said, after food and drink, toileting is the most important human need. It's time we gave it the attention it deserved.

joella

Toilets

My mother always tells people how, when we were kids, my sister would remember places by what she had to eat there, and I would remember them by the toilets. So it would be "mum, do you remember the really shiny toilet with the funny smell?" "Oh, you mean the ferry to Ireland" "yes, with the chips!"

Damn, this was going to be a really interesting toilet story but then I got Messengering with the lovely Ms Y and now it's time for bed, via the toilet with the nasty wooden toilet seat, I hate those.

tbc

joella

Sober Girl

For the first few weeks of Year of Living Healthily (DAY SIXTY TWO! DAY SIXTY TWO!) I didn't do very much at all. Just Living Healthily was quite taking it out of me. Then I tried going to the pub a few times.

The first time I felt drunk and smoky even though I didn't drink or smoke, and I was late meeting Miles just as if I *had* been drunk. The second time I got bored straight away and couldn't get home fast enough. The third time I really enjoyed myself and had the pleasure of driving home afterwards rather than hanging around waiting for a late night bus. People are curious at lack of alcohol in one who is often found ordering a pint and a whisky at last orders, and it makes for a good conversation. So far, so good.

But then I live in soft Oxford, where much quiche is eaten, some of it vegan.

This weekend I went back Up North for the first time since Christmas. It was a bit different.

First off was a drink with my sister. What do you want, she said. A Kaliber please, I said. A what? she said. And she *works* in a pub. The person behind the bar had exactly the same reaction. Once we'd located them in the bottom corner of the fridge we were ok though.

Next was my lovely friend Mick. A Kaliber please, I said. I'm not fucking buying one of them, he said.

Then I went to a party. First up was a wine tasting. The only other sober person there was doing the spit-it-out thing, but I decided not even to do that, it would just be too tempting. So I sat in the corner with my Sugar Free Red Bull as the person next to me waved his glass at me, shouted "Get Pissed Sober Girl!" and gave me a Chinese burn. Luckily he drank for both of us and went to bed at half past nine, although he did, to give him credit, win the wine tasting (jointly with his girlfriend who was the best possible person to have at a party, whatever state you are in).

After that, I did enjoy myself thoroughly for several hours, went for long stretches without feeling like a freak, even danced a bit, feeling crushingly self conscious but reasoning that absolutely nobody else would notice (other sober person had long gone by this point) and the music was at that point too good to waste. I also did useful sober person things like collecting empties and wiping up the Triple Sec before anyone slipped in it.

By the time I went to bed (two o'clock, not bad I thought) I was the best sober person anyone had ever met, and they were all lovely too. I sensibly brushed my teeth, took my makeup off, read my book for a bit and went off to sleep (after one failed attempt when someone burst in, shouted GET UP! and left again) listening to grown adults throw themselves around downstairs to Fraggle Rock.

Boy did I feel pleased with myself the next morning.

But having said that, if there were no pissed people, there would be no parties, or at least, not anything like as good as that one was. So we can't all be sober, some of us need to be pissed. It's a dilemma, that's for sure.

joella

Tomato soup cake

I am far from the only person I know who read the 'Baking with Sylvia' article in the Guardian last week, but I think I was the only one who really took it seriously.

It is about how she saw baking as therapeutic and consoling -- something precise and measured and achievable and warm in a hostile world. I have often felt the same about cooking. Not the getting in late have to eat fast kind of cooking, nor the feeling like a dobber trying not to use butter kind of cooking, but the kind of cooking where you have plenty of time and a real feel for what you want to make.

I am quite a good cook, if I say so myself. In theory it's the kind of thing anyone can be good at if they put in the hours, but in practice I do think there's something more to it. It's a bit like gardening, only on a completely different timescale. Creative, satisfying, and a way of caring for a part of yourself that needs to feel grounded and that it is dealing with known quantities. You also need people to cook *for* (cooking for one is no good at all), but I do it as much for myself as anyone else.

So it was interesting to read about Sylvia Plath's baking, and although baking is not my usual thing, I decided to make her tomato soup cake with the conveniently provided recipe. I had some mellow music (Holly Cole's Dark Dear Heart), it was Sunday afternoon, chill out, contemplate, bake.

Only it didn't quite happen like that. S's sister and her three children are staying this weekend, and if you are a four year old girl there is nothing like the prospect of making a cake to get you excited. So S and the small person became my assistants, we had flour and sugar everywhere and I had to belt out to the shops for more eggs as we had scrambled about a thousand of them for breakfast. The tomato soup became a secret ingredient that everyone had to try and guess, and there was about five times as much cream cheese frosting as you could possibly want to eat if you hoped to hold on to your teeth.

So it was not the introspective cake it should have been, but it was a big hit nonetheless, except with the person who is at an age where he only eats sausages and other things made of mechanically recovered meat. I wonder what Sylvia would have made of it?

joella

Census returns of the Jedi

Great headline, good story. Makes you proud to be British. And I don't even like Star Wars but I think the idea of Yoda on Thought for the Day is very cool indeed.

joella

Why I am going on holiday with my parents

1. Because I've still got parents but won't have forever and I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently
2. Because they asked me last year and I said no but maybe next year and now it's next year and I try not to say things that I don't mean
3. Because I wasn't home for Christmas last year or the year before or the year before that and won't be this year either
4. Because they're paying.

Actually, no 4 makes me sound a lot more callous than I actually am -- I was going to do it before they were paying. I WAS!

Don't for a second get the impression though that I don't like my parents, or that I don't like spending time with them, as neither is the case. My parents are great people, I love them very much, I get on very well with them, and I see them every couple of months -- not bad going considering we live over 200 miles apart.

But they don't travel well, or maybe more accurately, as I don't know unless I'm there, we don't travel well together. The last time we left the country together we came back sitting at opposite ends of the plane and pretending not to know each other. Admittedly we had all been to my grandmother's funeral, but still. Add to that that the family dachshund had been self harming because we left him in kennels, and you really start to get the harmonious picture.

So it was with some trepidation that I agreed. As did my sister, but she went last year, had a good time and is on the whole about seventeen times more easy going than I am.

Then all we had to do was find a holiday. They wanted to go to Italy, I wanted to go to Cuba, so we had to manage holiday expectations right from the start. We settled on Spain, because I wanted to practise my Spanish, but the places they shortlisted were miles from the sea. They wanted somewhere quiet. I found somewhere which seemed quiet but had plenty to do, but it wasn't posh enough. Dad has to have a four star hotel.

Spain was looking out, at least on my and my sister's budgets (this was before they were paying). We moved on to Greece, but I have bad memories of Greece. Then Tunisia, but Dad's not sure because they're Arabs and he's Jewish. Hey, there's Croatia these days, but we're not at all sure about the food (we're all vegetarian).

Somebody mentioned Israel, but I vetoed that, and then Egypt, nope. What about Florida? No, Mum doesn't want to fly for more than four hours. The Gambia? Don't be ridiculous.It was looking like Centerparcs (only not in Holland, you understand).

Then, just after they had decided to pay so that we wouldn't end up staying in a tent on the lawn of their hotel, my sister found a brochure for Turkey. It's affordable, the weather's great, we're near a beautiful beach, the flight's the right length, all that mezze is great for veggies, and the hotel looks amazing. We're off!

Of course, Turkey does share a border with Iraq, but I decided not to mention that. They tell me it will all be over by May anyway.

joella

Special dispensation

I believe in monogamy. Or more specifically, in serial monogamy -- one person in your bed and by your side for your whole adult life is a lovely idea but how many people do you know who actually manage that? Not many. We all grow and change, relationships stop working, people break up. But I do believe you should only do one at a time.

I don't approve of dirty shaggers: if you want to sleep around that's fine, but make sure you're free to and use a condom. If you're not free to, then don't: if you want someone else badly enough to leave the person you're with then you shouldn't be with them anymore anyway, and if you don't want someone else *that* badly, then deal with it.

And most of the time, it's as simple as that. That's the line I walk, it's one of those non-negotiables. I don't eat meat, I brush my teeth every night no matter what state I'm in, I don't sleep with more than one person at a time. However you look at it.

And I take this very seriously. I even find it hard to fantasise about other people, because that means I have to fantasise the person I'm with out of the way first, and by the time I've been through that process (amnesia? job abroad? paralysis from waist down?) and all the associated guilt, I've often gone right off the boil.

Which is why, being a literal sort of girl, I came up with the Special Dispensation, a pre-negotiated arrangement which allows me to sleep with a specified person as a one-off without having to split up first, should the situation ever arise, which of course it won't, but I am anxious and believe in Being Prepared.

For at least ten years the SD applied to Billy Bragg, a reasonably accessible rock star, but the closest I ever got was being sick at his feet -- this was probably a bit too close, certainly for him. Around this time he also lost his appeal, which might have been a consequence of that humiliating experience outside a club toilet but I think had more to do with his embracing of his 'dad' status and getting together with The Blokes. It's just all too matey and not at all sexy these days.

And so the post fell vacant, though Ani DiFranco probably merited it for a while.

But I have realised it should really go to Nick Cave. He writes songs about love and sex and death that make me want to scream, and he just keeps getting better. I don't want to use my SD on someone about whom people say "well, I prefer the early stuff". Amazon said of Nocturama (just out): its heartstopping beauty is nothing short of life affirming. I couldn't agree more. I'd do him.

joella

Life in the fast lane

I went swimming at lunchtime, thanks to my fierce friend & colleague L, who goes three times a week and makes me feel shit if I don't go with her at least once. She is in her costume and in the pool before I have put my bag in the locker, and striding out of the changing room fully dressed by the time I get back from the shower, so we only go together in the loosest possible sense, but it does get me there and for this I am very grateful.

And something very liberating happened today. There are two lanes at lunchtime, plus a wider bit which you can use as a lane but usually has Very Slow Old People in it, plus women who don't like getting their hair wet. And the lanes are marked Slow and Fast.

In essence, I have observed, this is like marking them Women and Men. Women tend to think "well, I might be Medium, but I'm definitely not Fast", and go in the slow lane. Men tend to think "well, I might be Medium but I'm definitely not Slow" and go in the fast lane.

Which would be ok I guess, except there are usually far more women than men swimming at lunchtime, so you get seven of us bumping into each other's feet and some lucky guy gets a whole lane to himself. But the leap from Slow to Fast seems just too big for the average woman to make. I have certainly never dared.

Until today. Today the slow lane was crowded, the big wide lane had people doing random things in it, and I was feeling brave. So I got straight in the fast lane and did front crawl as fast as I could for four lengths and nearly killed myself. Then... the lone man in the fast lane got out and I had the whole lane to myself!

So I went back to my usual mixture of strokes, getting off on the space but swimming as fast as possible in case anyone shouted 'Hey, you're only Medium' at me. And, of course, ready to slip under the barrier into Slow if a genuinely Fast person came along.

About four lengths later, something odd happened. A woman came out of the changing rooms, looked in the pool at me, then got in the fast lane. And then another, and another. And by ten lengths in there were as many of us in the fast lane as in the slow lane, all shapes and sizes and colours of the rainbow, different strokes for different folks etc. One of the pool staff picking up floats stopped to watch, a whole lane full of women who had thought 'yes, I feel fast enough today'.

It was great.

At one point I did get stuck behind a leg-flailing woman in one of those tankini things. I felt like saying 'hey, don't you know this is the fast lane?'. But I didn't.

joella

The Lipson-Shiu Corporate Type Test

Following a lunch largely consisting of radishes and chocolate (my tastebuds have gone haywire recently, of which more another time, no I am not pregnant), I went back to look at the Escher Lego. And then looked at the rest of the guy's site.

I do have a small fondness for geeks, and the Lipson-Shiu Corporate Type Test is a very good geek page for anyone who's ever had to do Myers-Briggs (me, I've had to do it twice, once as a result of below-mentioned running battles). I am a SCIE by this reckoning, I quite like that.

joella

Escher Lego

Don't ask me how I came across this. It started with one of those emails from someone who has fifty million dollars in an offshore bank account and wants to give you half of it, but the rest of it was just one of those random clicking things you do sometimes.

Anyway. This man, and his friend, have spent many months making Escher out of Lego. I am part awed and part freaked out.

joella

So-called personalisation

In the job I have just left, I had several running battles, positioning myself as the defender of the website end-user against the Forces of Marketing. One of these was about site personalisation. Certain people seemed to wet their pants at this prospect, while I sat in the corner and said No, just... NO.

We got the phone bill last week, I paid it online via the Co-op Bank. You have to log in for that, but obviously there's a point to it, or else you could be paying any old person's phone bill, nice idea, but it won't catch on.

It was quite a hefty bill, though, and I noticed that only two of our 'friends and family' numbers are actually for current friends or family, so I thought I would follow their friendly advice and log into 'my bt.com' (or whatever they call it) and change them.

We have a broadband connection (a BT one, in fact). BT is a huge company with presumably a great deal invested in its online customer service. Could I get the fucking thing to work? No I could not.

First of all, I know I have been into this service before at some stage, but it might well have been from my previous abode, in which case the phone number and (possibly?) account number are different. It seemed to recognise one of my standard usernames, but not with one of my standard passwords, but it told me I could enter my account number and it would give me my password.

So I did, and it told me my account number wasn't valid. Which it most certainly is because I had just copied it straight off the bill, so either I had a different account number when I registered that username, or someone else is using that username. Either way, I wasn't getting anywhere.

So I tried to register again, filled in the form with all my details, some of them twice, and hit return. Nothing for a while, then a 'page cannot be displayed' error. So I went back and the form was empty. And I really could not be arsed filling it in again.

This is what happens with websites. Even when they're good, they're not very good. And at least if it had worked I would have got something out of it that would have saved me money. Who is going to bother to go through all of this to choose the type of content they see when they get to an organisation's homepage, compared, say, with clicking on something that looks interesting?

No one. And even if you do it once, even if your username and password doesn't go straight out of your head, will you do it twice? Will you arse. You'll go and do something less boring instead.

I know I am running registration and personalisation together, and I know about cookies and all that, but my point stands. And we will continue to have Liz's old house, my sister's long-gone Dutch flat and S's ex-boyfriend on our Friends & Family till the cows come home.

joella

Also

Blogging is very different from other kinds of writing, isn't it? It kind of reminds me of when email first happened. I had an email address very early, because of my strange job writing about online information before much information was online. And as a result I wrote long, involved emails to other people I knew who had email addresses, and a couple of these saved exchanges now feel like relics from another age, so intimate and detailed are they. Email took some getting used to, and of course evolved as well, to the point where now I get so fucking much of it I rarely use it for anything important.

For a while there was texting, but that's pretty limiting, and there's no easy way to save them offline, as it were, and then there was Messenger, but I got pretty burnt by that when I inadvertently became someone's masturbation aid. Just the once, mind. At least, as far as I know.

And now there's blogging. While the main person I am writing for remains myself, I think, I obviously do bear a wider audience in mind. This mostly has an effect when I want to tell a story which involves other people. Etiquette obliges one to avoid naming names, or to omit certain details, in order not to piss anyone off. But it's complicated. I quite enjoy the challenge, but every now and again it's almost impossible.

Like yesterday. I really wanted to explain why I hate Valentine's Day so much, because that's what was dominating my thoughts all day, and this is currently the place where I muse on these things. But it's impossible without mentioning my Significant Ex, and while nobody from his time zone has ever visited, he might well be furious at even a passing mention, by name or not. I do try and avoid it, honest.

And then there was a whole Valentine's Day episode with Miles that I just skated over, on the grounds that, well, it was a long time ago and should be laid to rest. He never normally reads this, he gets more than enough ranting I suspect. But I think his curiosity was piqued, so he did, and then he pointed out that I hadn't explained why it was that I wanted to chop him into little pieces with my axe. You just can't please some people.

This is blogging about blogging, which is only mildly interesting even to me, so I think I will take myself to bed. Tomorrow: Why I Am Going On Holiday With My Parents.

joella

Upon not being in London

Between one and two per cent of the population of this country was in London by noon today, demonstrating against a war that is almost inevitable. I didn't get out of bed until 1pm. I am trying to work out why.

It's not that I want the war to happen. It's not that I didn't have anyone to go with -- Miles wouldn't have come, because he agrees with Julie Burchill -- but some of my favourite people got up early this morning in order to stand up and be counted, and several of them asked me if I wanted to come too. It's not like it's a long way, it wasn't raining, and I do think this is a profoundly significant time: decisions made now are going to have huge ramifications for the future of international relations. So what then?

I think it has to do with what I feel is the essential futility of the gesture. There was a fabulous Onion article the week after September 11: Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake. Getting on the bus to London this morning would have felt a bit like that.

I think we're just reaching the end of a marketing campaign. The date it's all going to kick off is in a diary somewhere in the White House with a big ring round it, and every day left between then and now is planned down to the colour of tie and the timbre of voice. The French and the Germans have thrown things a bit, causing a huge brainstorming session somewhere, but really, that's detail and it won't change a thing.

The consequences will be huge and unpredictable, Europe and NATO may well never be the same again, but George W Bush is going to have himself a war, Tony Blair is going to back him because he feels that's better than not backing him, and it really doesn't matter what the rest of us think any more than it matters what the Iraqis think.

Of course, I could be wrong. In which case I take my hat off to anyone who stood in the cold for hours today needing a wee.

joella

February the Fourteenth

I hate Valentine's Day. It's worse than Christmas.

When I was 10 I got my first Valentine's card. I thought it might be from Robert Jones, whom I was mad about. I still have a bit of lead in my elbow from where he stabbed me with a pencil. I don't think he even did it on purpose, but it was the most attention he had ever paid me and there was no way anyone was taking that lead out.

Anyway, I was in transports of ecstasy until it transpired that the card was from my mother and sister, who had thought that thinking it was from Robert Jones might cheer me up. This was not an accurate assessment of the situation, as I was instead deeply humiliated and then inconsolable for days. I probably made them feel shit as well. I'm sorry. I should have refused to have anything to do with the whole thing from that moment on.

But I didn't, I persevered. Mistake.

There were a few blissful years when I first got together with my Significant Ex, where February 14th was a day full of magic and romance. Once I remember taking ecstasy and making snow angels together in the middle of the night in a perfect college garden setting. That kind of thing.

But the conversation that kick started the decline and eventual end of that relationship also took place on Valentine's Day. It was the only Friday night we had had on our own together for months, is why, it was more of a coincidence than anything else, but it was pretty fucking awful. We had separated by the time it came round the next year, and that year I went back to see my mum. She didn't try and give me any cards that time, but she did take a photo of me on the beach at Lytham, which is a little bit too studied in its misery, but mostly does the job.

It got even more complicated once Miles and I got together, and for a few years I made a point of spending the day on my own, drinking red wine, being reflective and then just being pissed. That didn't work last year, as we were in Guatemala together, and I felt I should perhaps show a bit of grace and maturity and get over stuff. He bought me a necklace with a little jade axe on it, which was Dead Symbolic as for a while I used a real axe to chop wood representing him (and other people, I was fairly generous in my fury) into little pieces. And we moved on.

Or that was the plan, because the whole hearts and flowers thing still makes me want to hurl something out the window. LIFE ISN'T LIKE THAT OKAY?

Glad I've got that off my chest.

joella

I don't have to sell my soul...

New PC comes with New Job. This is normally seen as a good thing, but in this place it takes weeks to get everything working, not least anything making a noise. What is it with firewalls and RealPlayer? And of course it is not 'supported' so you're on your own with Real.com's badly mis-named Knowledge Base and lots of General Errors. Not Loving It.

But persistence will out, and this morning I succeeded in getting radio with a combination of Windows Media Player and Netscape 7.

Why the fuss? Because of 6Music, that's why. Surely the best thing to happen to radio since Triple J, in fact better, because Triple J is Australian so I always get the middle of the night shows when I'm listening at work, and it's just not the right vibe.

So a good day so far. Get radio working, and the first thing I hear is the first track from the first Stone Roses album. And I am right back to summer 1989, stoned out of my head and wondering what a Dord is and why anyone would want to be one.

joella

Will I get sussed?

I had a little crisis of confidence on Friday. I don't have a clue how to do my new job. Not really.

It's like this. Once upon a time I went to school and turned out to be very good at exams. This is because I can remember a lot of things for a short time, which helps you do things like history, and also can spot when things I don't know are similar in some important way to other things that I do know, which helps you do things like chemistry.

So I ended up at Cambridge University doing a degree in social and political science, where I spent three years reading complicated books and developing a new technique which involved writing essays by knitting together little bits of information from multiple sources in a reasonably coherent order without necessarily understanding all of it. Then I had to remember it all for just over a week while I did my finals, and then I was free.

Since then I have worked in a series of environments -- insurance, IT, information science, education, new media -- about which I have known absolutely nothing of any depth. I have simply applied my ability to remember things, my ability to spot patterns and my ability to communicate to the job in hand, worked hard enough not to be ashamed of myself, and moved slowly towards doing something I can see the point of.

So you could say I have spent my life convincing people that I know a lot more about the business in hand than I actually do. And if you think that I have got each new job on the back of my experience in my previous job, I am currently working in development as a knowledge and information manager based on the fact that I know how to run a website based on the fact that I wrote about knowledge and information management based on the fact that I ... what? Wanted to move to Oxford to be with my Significant Ex, and I copyedited an article for school librarians better than anyone else on the day. That saved me from the job as a researcher in the insurance industry which I got because I had done some questionnaire coding for a research project and hey, that was close enough.

Really, everything I sell myself on is built on foundations of sand. And what if they find that out, just as I am getting to do something useful?

The other argument goes that this is what everyone does, and the whole pain of adult life is realising this. Everybody is winging it, all the time. How scary is that?

joella

Two good jelly-related things

1. Vege-Gel from SuperCook. I love jelly, but gelatine is a fairly gross thing even if you are not a vegetarian. For me, it falls into the area occupied also by wine (when I am not Living Healthily, obviously), interesting crisps, instant noodles and parmesan cheese -- stuff which doesn't look like it has any meat in it but actually contains bits of stomach, bone, bladder etc heavily disguised.

We all live by wavy lines, and mine wiggle quite a bit in this area. I look at the label if I am buying myself, but I don't think about it if I am eating out or someone else is cooking or shopping. And with gelatine, there's also the issue of Evening Primrose Oil, which I swear keeps me sane, but the gelatine-free capsules are so tiny I would need to take thousands of them. So I don't think about it, and I swallow.

But back to the point. I can't bring myself to make jelly, even though I love it, because that is so obviously eating gelatine for gelatine's sake, and that is Bad. And then I discovered Vege-Gel. Make it with a litre of freshly squeezed orange juice plus raspberries and elderflower cordial, and you have a sublime triumph of a dessert that looks like a huge, shimmering breast and has harmed no animal in the making. What more could you ask?

2. Lost Horizons by Lemon Jelly. This kind of music is called downtempo, I found out today. I had always thought of it as chill-out but I must be showing my age because I don't even know my genres on the stuff I *like*. Anyway, it's groovy, it's funny, it's clever and it's very English, which I like very much as I assumed you had to live in France or Manhattan to get this vibe right. And it's hard to truly love an album when you know you are not nearly, remotely, hope in hell as cool as the young men in smooth trainers and twisted denim who recorded it.

Also their website is at www.lemonjelly.ky, which made me laugh. The site itself is a bit irritating, although they have had the sense to do a HTML version for grumpy old-fashioned Flash haters like me, so they get points for that.

joella

Groovy urban boho life 3

Miles and I are in adjoining rooms communicating via MSN Messenger.

me: do you want a cup of herbal tea
him: ooh, yes please

(That's enough groovy urban boho life - Ed)

joella

Groovy urban boho life 2

We have a wireless network, so I can in theory write my blog from any room in the house. Or anywhere on the street, in fact. But it's not working properly yet.

joella

Groovy urban boho life?

Shit, I have just written not one but two posts about my bloody *chair* at *work*, then went to read the blogs of my friends and realised that Justin Ruffles has described my life (kind of, he was describing someone else's really) as groovy, urban and boho.

Either he really doesn't get out much or I have got to get back with it. What am I doing, fixating on chairs, elegant and Scandinavian though they can be (if they are not banned)?

So. Groovy urban boho things that are happening.

1. Miles is listening to Orchestra Baobab while tapping on his laptop in our fairy-lit back room
2. I am not watching Footballer's Wives tonight because I am going round to Roger's house in a minute to swim in his pool
3. We bought a bike lock for our new shiny dustbin because the last two got stolen
4. I am going to India for Christmas

It's not really working is it? Bugger.

joella

Okay, I take it back

The HR woman came to see me today. She is not horrible, in fact she is very nice, but perhaps her phone manner is not the best.

It is not my place of work that has banned my chair, it is something to do with the national Health & Safety Executive. Nobody is allowed to use them anymore, not just me. Apparently they are bad for your knees.

I still think I should be allowed to sign my knee rights away and keep using my chair if I want to, but there comes a point where you have to give in gracefully. And seeing as she expressed lots of sympathy at my situation and offered me a made to measure chair and some physiotherapy for my shoulder, I thought perhaps I had reached it.

joella

Chair fascism

Today a woman from my HR department made me cry. I cannot remember the last time anyone made me cry at work. My chair is in contravention of a UN Resolution. It has been banned.

The conversation went a bit like this:

her: Can I ask what kind of chair you have?
me: Um, it's one of those kneely ones.
her: They have been banned. You can't use it anymore.
me: What do you mean, banned?
her: They have been banned. If you keep using it we will be fined.
me: But I have a letter from a doctor you sent me to when I started working here saying it is a fine chair and good for me!
her: They have been banned. You can't use it anymore.
me: But why?

I didn't get an answer to the question why, she just got screechier about the being banned part, despite my aforementioned letter from bona fide occupational health doctor. The best I could do was insist on seeing the paperwork describing the exact nature of this ban.

What can be so evil about my poor little chair? It is a Stokke Variable and my mother bought it for me in 1994. I have taken it to seven desks in four offices since then and nobody has ever minded.

I love my chair. I don't like office chairs, I never have. They don't fit me, they make me fidget and make my shoulders hurt and legs ache. And it's not just offices: I always did my homework lying on a beanbag on the floor, and my college work like that too.

It's my chair, I want to keep it. Nobody else has to use it, I am an adult and happy to take full responsibility for anything that happens to me while I am sitting on it.

And why did I cry? Because I am feeling vulnerable today, it's my vulnerable day of the month when the world feels like it's falling apart even if nothing bad happens. And then I got grief down the phone from someone who doesn't understand about me and my chair and doesn't want to. I spend thirty seven and a half hours a week working for an organisation that has a fucking diversity policy, and they want to make me have the same chair as everybody else.

joella

Giving good headline

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but I would argue that a good headline can give it a run for its money.

Like cryptic crossword clues, writing a really good one demands skill, finesse and humour, and reading a really good one can make your day.

This may be especially true among people who have written them for a living -- l once did this, among other things, for IWR and those of us who read the thing (mostly those of us who wrote it) would congratulate each other when a particularly fine specimen was produced. Sad really.

But I have seen few finer than one from yesterday's Sunday Times, which said as much in eight words as the whole article it introduced:

Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.

Loving it loving it loving it.

joella

Scary little man from Texas

He's going to do it isn't he?

I wonder if being the President of the United States is a bit like working in marketing -- to be really good at it you have to believe your own hype. You have to be able to say things like "hold the vision", and "drive the strategy forward" and "grow the business" without snorting your tea out your nose and rolling your eyes heavenwards.

When Dubya puts his military style bomber jacket on and that extra bit of Brylcreem and starts doing little salutes to people maybe he does really feel that these are things you need to do in serious times. Where men are men and women are... um...

... filling in petitions in the forlorn hope that they will make a difference.

www.oxfam.org.uk/iraqaction

joella

Astrology and gastronomy

Happy birthday (yesterday) to me
Happy birthday (yesterday) to me
Happy BIRTHDAY (yesterday) dear ME
Happy birthday (yesterday) to me.

For I'm a reasonably well balanced person
For I'm a reasonably well balanced person
For I'm a reasonably well balanced PERSON
And so says most of me.

Right, that's enough self-obsession for one year.

Yeah right. Cos, like, why write a weblog otherwise?

I have heard that it is going to be a blinding year for Aquarians. This is excellent news. I have felt slightly let down this far by the supposed Age of Aquarius, but nonetheless I remain convinced that it is the coolest by far of all star signs, and anyone who disagrees is just jealous.

And the signs are pretty good. I had a wonderful birthday: my new colleagues gave me cake and cards, lots of people rang me up and emailed me and the spot on my chin began to look as if it might one day not be the first thing you notice about me.

Then M took me to the jolly posh Le Petit Blanc in the evening and we had a fantastic meal, talked of things heavy and light and made barely a faux pas between us (though I still don't know what the etiquette is for buttering bread if there is no side plate -- use the table or use your hand?). And *still* in bed by midnight like a healthy person.

Tonight I had dinner with a fellow Aquarian at the not so posh but still very delicious Chez Gaston where they give you a side order of gherkins to go with your pancake without making you feel like a weirdo. It had been a long time, and it felt really good to see her again and talk about new things and old. Next week will be back to normal, but I will try and keep this one special.

Days till my birthday: THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY FOUR

joella

Counting blessings

Counting several things actually. Days of Living Healthily: TWENTY-SIX. Days till my birthday: ONE. (Actually, less than that, in fact about 34 minutes as I type, but ONE is what I felt when I woke up this morning). Blessings: MANY.

Monday is a rubbish day to have a birthday party. I have managed it, but only in the days when serious drugs could be consumed on a schoolnight, and as a) I am not taking drugs anymore, b) I don't have friends who are taking drugs anymore, well, not on a schoolnight, well, certainly not on a Monday, and c) I am not consuming *anything* of interest at the moment, I decided it was a disastrous idea to try. Everyone would be glued to Enders or at yoga or something.

So I decided to have it today instead, and then I came up with the splendid idea of having it at the Waterman's Arms, and then Miles came up with the double splendid idea of having it at lunchtime.

You think that the web has got something about everything, yet nowhere is there a mention of Sunday lunch at the Waterman's Arms, or even much about it at all. Yet it is my favourite pub in all the world. It squeezed fourteen of us in, and Jen provided birthday balloons and banners and a little chocolate log with a candle in it. I was bursting with happiness.

A lot has happened since I last had a birthday on a Monday. I live somewhere else, work somewhere else, love someone else. And while I still have friendships which go back at least two birthdays-on-Mondays, I did seem to go through a phase of shedding them not long after last birthday-on-Monday. This was a source of great pain to me at the time, but if it hadn't happened then today wouldn't have happened, because I wouldn't have met most of the people who were there. And while a wildly diverse bunch in themselves, they all know who I am, I think. How lucky am I.

Oh! It's really my birthday now! And my first present of the day is a little piece of kit which means I can plug the TV in in my room when something needs videoing, rather than having to video it in S's room then carry it all upstairs to watch in mine. This does make sense, but only if you understand the television dynamics in our household. Won't go into them here.

And so to bed.

joella

Food Justice

I've got a feeling I've got a little political phase coming on. Partly it's New Job: lots of political stuff coming my way rather than lots of shite about e-marketing and content management systems, and partly it's because I've got time for it in my head at the moment. It's either that or watch Midsomer Murders every week. Or maybe both, who knows.

A long time ago, when I had the Job In A Business Park, I went out for a long walk at lunchtime down to the only real shop it was possible to walk to. It had really good home made sandwiches and I liked it a lot. I think it's shut down now, because they opened some kind of hideous shopping plaza across the road.

But it was still open then, and I was walking back to work, daydreaming about what I was going to do with my life, because though I was working with some lovely people, the Business Park was destroying my soul and this wasn't going to change anytime soon. It was a feeling that had kind of been there for years, but it was harder to ignore there than anywhere else. That song by Sinead O'Connor where she screams "Why don't you go out there and do something useful" -- that song was going on in my head.

And I decided that one thing I would really like to do was take on junk food. There had been a story in the news about teenage parents whose baby had died of salt poisoning beacuse they had fed it on liquidised burgers and fried egg sandwiches, which is what they were eating. I was reading about the McLibel two. I had been into Iceland looking for something that the Co-op didn't have and got angry about all the frozen shite that was really cheap but which you'd get scurvy if you lived off, and I was coming to terms with the fact that I had just moved in with Ms P who not only didn't know how to cook, she didn't know how to shop. If you didn't feed her, she'd live on toast. And ketchup.

And I was thinking to myself that while people say that it's cheaper to eat junk food than fresh food, is it really? Somewhere like India or South East Asia, the cheapest food comes from street stalls where they make it right in front of you. Things like lentils and potatoes are dirt cheap, surely? But of course you've got to know what to do with them, how to cook them, make them taste good, do stuff to them so kids will eat them, get round this thing that men have about it's not a meal if it's not got meat in it, etc.

That was the essence of my big rambling thought. How cool it would be to be part of something that meant people didn't buy value burgers anymore because they had better options that didn't cost them any more. I could do a course in nutrition! I could write a book! Heart disease rates would drop through the floor! Nobody would ever eat KFC again!

But I did recognise this for the hopeless middle class daydream that it was, wandering through the Business Park with my stomach full of smoked mackerel salad sandwich on granary bread, and while I returned to it a few times like all the other hopeless middle class daydreams, it never went anywhere.

Then today I discovered Food Justice -- the campaign for the Food Poverty (Eradication) Bill. Thank god for people who understand how to get things done. Now *that's* what I call strategic. Support them! Tell your friends! I'm going to.

joella

Grown up office life

I've got a new job. Still in the same place, but a new job. My lovely team, my surrogate dysfunctional family, are now over the road arguing about rice cakes and remaining resolutely cynical about anything corporate, and I am in a room on my own trying to work out what it is I now do. Yesterday I had two visitors, but today I have only had one.

It's a grown up move. Very strategic, and I have bought new boots to prove it (and to make myself taller and more imposing).

But I am a little bit sad.

I felt just like this when I moved from the House on the Hill to the Job In A Business Park.

Not much of your working life can be like that -- I guess I am lucky to have had it twice. Justin Ruffles is doing a great job of documenting the days on the hill with his Ghost of Working Past occasional series. My favourite so far is January 18th. It wasn't all great -- in fact bits of it were downright awful -- but you knew who your friends were. And some of them still are. Can't be bad.

joella

Cervix on TV

A friend writes to me and tells me he is checking out my blog but that nothing in my life can compare to his recent 'camera up arse' (medical reasons, presumably) experience. Ha.

Not once, not twice, but three times I have seen my cervix on TV, as people have stuck cameras up there while they have been trying to fix various things wrong with it. Successfully, as far as we know, which is good, because I am in no hurry to repeat the experience. I can report that it looks like a big pink shiny doughnut, and that one inadvertently knees oneself in the face when they start poking around with very long cotton buds and other less fluffy things.

So there.

Although there was the time his penis exploded. I can't beat that.

joella

Another place

Went to MOMA today (or Modern Art Oxford as it is now calling itself) to catch the last day of the Tracey Emin exhibition This is Another Place. I might well not have made it except M went a while ago and came back saying he imagined it was like being inside my head. So I couldn't really not go, could I?

And while some of it completely passed me by, and some of the rest of it made me pull faces and shudder slightly, I think I can see what he meant. It was a bit like an Ani DiFranco album embroidered on a blanket. A bit heavy handed at times, but maybe that's just because people don't say this sort of thing out loud very often, so you can't afford to be too subtle or nobody will get it.

I felt a lot of things, but one of them, oddly, was grateful.

joella

Best laid plans

I would just like it on record that, in the spirit of Year of Living Healthily, I tried to cycle to work this week. No really, I did.

On Sunday I spent ages (not because it should take ages, but because I am extraordinarily inept at these things) fitting a new back light to my bike. Brand new. Not cheap. A proper one. Lack of such a light has been my reason for not cycling for the last two months -- I know how easy it is to die a horrible death on the roads of Oxford if you aren't visible enough.

Anyway. Lights on bike. Sorted. Get up early, dress appropriately, sling bag across body, don helmet, wheel bike through house, climb on, feel virtuous and *incredibly* healthy, set off.

Freewheel down hill to T-junction with Cowley Road (where I need to turn right). Wait patiently for gap in traffic. Wait less patiently. Identify tiny gap, push off, realise shoes aren't actually very appropriate as foot slips off pedal and neatly kicks new back light off bike and into the middle of the road.

Reach the other side and get off. Watch helplessly but still with hope as ten cars zoom past, missing light by inches. Shout FUCK IT very loudly as No 1 bus crushes light into dust.

Walk bike back across road, cycle back up the hill, chuck bike and helmet in through the front door, walk to the bus stop. Refuse to get No 1 bus on principle (as one should anyway because they are run by bastard homophobic Stagecoach, but normally one just can't be arsed).

Do best to maintain bad mood all morning, and largely succeed.

joella

Radio silence

Been kind of a quiet week. Year of Living Healthily is now thirteen days (THIRTEEN DAYS!) in, and birthday countdown (FOURTEEN DAYS!) has begun.

And how do I feel? Okay, but a bit disappointed that I am not bursting with energy like a satsuma. I am getting more sleep than I have in years but am nowhere near leaping out of bed in the morning with joy in my heart.

But here are some good things I have been doing with my time:

1. Skincare. I have never been any good at this. But now I have invested in lots of things from Neutrogena (their animal testing policy is ok if not perfect). As well as cleanser and moisturiser, I have two products that I am very excited about. It goes to show how far skincare has come since I last took an interest (sometime in the late 80s when I spent far more time looking in the mirror than could possibly be good for the soul).

The first is Visibly Firm Night Cream. I am ridiculously pleased with this, firstly because I have never had night cream before, and secondly because it is such a beautiful colour. Its magic ingredient, apparently, is 'active copper' (as opposed to what? Passive copper?), which means the tub has a copper coloured lid, which goes perfectly with the cream inside, which is a wonderful shade of pale blue. This in itself has been enough to make me put it on every night, although truth be told I don't think I am visibly firmer yet.

And secondly there is the utterly fantastic Pore Refining Mattifier. This stuff is magic. It's clear silicone stuff that stops your nose shining *all day*. I love it.

More good things later, have to do some work.

joella

Blood, shit and tears

Sounds quite obscene doesn't it? But it's all depressingly mundane.

I am constipated. Very. It's been days.

Eight days (EIGHT DAYS!) without cigarettes and alcohol have taken their toll on my already sluggish-as-a-sleepy-slug digestive system and I am beginning to worry about what will actually happen when all systems are, as it were, go.

Have also been aggressively premenstrual (never a help in the 'movement' department in itself). Been doing lots and lots of shouting at people under the cast iron nicotine withdrawal excuse, and also spent hours cleaning out the tumble dryer fluff filter and making lists of things to throw away.

I have been out for Big Pads and linseed. Sometime this week it's gonna get ugly.

joella

Sunshine on a rainy day

It was fiercely sunny this morning as I exited at an unexpectedly early hour to visit the lovely Elaine for some much overdue depilation. I didn't have a hangover -- almost unprecedented for a Saturday -- and the whole street was twinkling with frost. And it felt good, especially as for the last week we have had nothing but darkness, floods and pestilence.

So, having checked that the street was empty, I started singing Sunshine on a rainy day. But in my head, the next line was "makes my soul drip, drip away". I don't remember caring too much when it came out and I used to sing it in the rain, mostly, but today it didn't feel quite right. Surely we need all the soul we can get?

So when I got home I decided to check. Couldn't find my dodgy early 90s tape with it on, probably left it in the car when I sold it. So went online to check it out -- and then I got Angry. Because if you search Google on Sunshine on a rainy day you'd think it was a bloody Emma Bunton song. And it bloody isn't.

I get kind of pissed off with girl and boy band cover versions at the best of times -- too often they are soupy massacres of songs that weren't that wonderful first time round -- but I fucking hate Emma Bunton.

Partly this is because she has covered songs that I actually like and turned them into a flouncy pouty gingham and cleavage slice of hell, and partly it's because she's such a big name that people think these songs, including, to my great distress, Edie Brickell's What I Am (off the wonderful Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars) are *hers*. As if.

Anyway, cut a long story short, the Zoe lyrics sites tell you that it's "makes my soul trip, trip, trip away", while the Emma Bunton lyrics sites opt for "drip, drip, drip". Couldn't put it better myself.

joella

The Joy Of...

... knitting. If you have just given up smoking (Day Three! Day Three!) then knitting is brilliant. You can keep your hands and just enough of your brain busy to stop thinking about it for, ooh, minutes. Well, until you drop a stitch and have to stop because you don't know how to pick them up. Come home Ms P and fix my knitting! Soon.

But when the wondrous piece of handiwork (a scarf, somewhat wonky, for Miles, also somewhant wonky) is finally finished it will be a true joint effort -- at least five pairs of hands will have had a go. And thanks will be due to Julia, for the knitting needles, the casting on lesson and finding the splendid red parrot fandango.

joella

Year of Living Healthily

... starts today. Yes it does. No cigarettes and no alcohol. No cigarettes, obviously, because they are evil. And no alcohol because it makes me want to smoke. And also I drink too much, so let's give it a rest and see what I do with all that time and money.

It's going okay so far, but I've only been awake for six hours and I'm probably still drunk from my quite odd but very pleasant NYE spent house-hopping round OX4 and ending up with splendid fireworks chez Ricardo. Don't remember going to bed, do remember waking up thinking 'I am not going to feel this shit for a whole year'.

Snack of the day to keep my mind off the enormity of this undertaking: Tabasco olives, by the spoonful.

Happy New Year

joella