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