If you pay peanuts, you get MRSA

Back in the glorious days of Thatcherism, it was decided that it would be cheaper and more efficient for councils, hospitals, schools etc to 'outsource' their ancillary services -- cleaning, catering and so on. No longer would the state be responsible for employing and managing all these people.

We all know what happened: the same people got paid less to do more work, as new private companies fought to undercut each other to get contracts.

And it's got worse. I heard a fascinating but horrifying talk last week about how many of the people doing these essential jobs are actually part of our huge 'informal economy'. The companies providing, say, cleaning services to hospitals often aren't even employing their own staff: instead they get them from agencies, whose working practices may be dubious as hell but who provide that much vaunted 'flexible workforce'. You want three people today but only one tomorrow? No problem, we'll just send two of them home.

So what do you get? You get hospital cleaners with no secure contracts working for appalling pay and in terrible conditions. Some of them don't get paid sick leave, and some of them lose their jobs if they are sick. So what do they do if they are sick? They come into work, because they can't afford not to. Not everyone in this brave new outsourced world gets to stay home with Lemsip and Heat magazine.

Sick people cleaning hospitals. Now isn't that ironic?

joella

Vile noodle experience

Every now and again, I worry that I've run out of things to say. Last week, I was a bit short of words. Not of thoughts, but of words: there are some things joella doesn't talk about.

But fortunately, yesterday I had a lunch so spectacularly shite that I feel compelled to share the experience. This is particularly for the benefit of Oxford-based readers, so that they may sidestep the trap into which I fell.

About ten years ago, my Australian half-uncle, then based in London, introduced me to the joys of wagamama. I'd never seen or tasted anything like it and I absolutely loved it. I still go there whenever I can, and have a yasai chilli men or a yasai yaki soba, some gyoza and some miso soup and pickles, washed down with a raw juice *and* a Asahi Super Dry.

The Lexington St branch, the second to open and the one I have been to most often, is looking a bit faded now (I knew those hands-free taps were a bad idea), but there are any number of shiny new branches, many of them outside London.

However, Oxford hasn't got one. What we have instead is a copycat Noodle Bar. It claims to offer Chinese rather than Japanese food, but that's no excuse for the execrable quality of its cuisine.

The concept is good: it offers four different kinds of noodle, which you can have fried or in soup with a range of different ingredients. There are also rice dishes and lots of side dishes. You sit at long shared tables, wagamama style, and dishes come out as they are ready, also wagamama style.

But there the similarity ends. I had fried mai fun noodles with mixed Chinese vegetables. M had ho fun noodles in soup with chicken. We ordered seared vegetable dumplings and salt and pepper squid on the side. We also had jasmine tea, which came very fast, but then it doesn't take long to put a single teabag in a pot (and charge £2 for it).

Mine came first. What's the cheapest vegetable you can think of? Onion. What's the nastiest? Green pepper. Which two vegetables were present in large, slightly undercooked quantities? Exactly. M's soup was watery and insipid, with some chicken and some noodles present but not much else.

The squid was evil: tough as boots and in the kind of batter I last tasted at 2am in a bad fish and chip shop in Harlesden. I would put money on it not just being frozen squid, but frozen batter as well. Which is pretty inexcusable. And the dumplings almost didn't come at all, and when they did the dough wasn't cooked through. Seared they were not.

In fairness, when we complained about the dumplings they were taken off the bill and the very competent hostess made sure to come and apologise. The service was actually very good, and though the food was shit, we did leave a tip. And then legged it - I was dying for a coffee to take the taste of onion away.

I think they should be ashamed of themselves: the main dishes are very cheap but the sides and extras aren't (eg a 60p charge for chilli oil) and it's clear there's no cost left uncut in the quest for profit. Bleurgh.

Round the corner from the Noodle Bar is the fantastic Cafe Orient, and for delightful Japanese food in the middle(ish) of town there is edamame. Never will I darken the Noodle Bar's door again, and I am grateful that I know that this is not what Chinese food tastes like. But judging by its popularity, it looks like most of Oxford doesn't.

joella

Six hours on a train

... with no caffeine, no alcohol, no crisps, no music, no crossword, no novel and only one celeb mag, courtesy of my colleague S.

Manchester and back in a day for a team meeting. Only weirdos and workaholics would attempt this. I knew it was happening and I could have prepared better, but I turned the alarm off at 6 and it was only thanks to M waking me at 6.30 that I made the train (at 7) at all.

I found a seat, did my skincare, tried to make my hair look less like a combination of bed head and hat hair, and then realised I had nothing but work to distract me all the way there and all the way back. Bleat.

Still Sober Girl, but I tell you, when I got home tonight, if there'd been a bottle of white wine in the fridge I'd have drunk at least half of it by now.

joella

Go Ken!

I've been following the Ken Livingstone / Evening Standard reporter saga with some interest. Unreconstructed he may be, but Mr Livingstone is a proper socialist and I do admire him for that.

And he has the guts to take on what can seem like unwinnable fights. A bit like the McLibel Two: you know you're right, and you might lose in the end but so many people will see you die trying that the other side will look pretty stupid and wish they'd never started it.

Today he has splendidly announced that he has thought about it really really hard and decided that he still isn't going to apologise to the Daily Mail Group.

I quote:

"No one in Britain is less qualified to complain about anti-Semitism. In truth, those papers were the leading advocate of anti-Semitism in the country for half a century."

He said that while it is true the Daily Mail has moved on from anti-Semitism, it now targets asylum seekers and Muslims.

"For the Mail group the victims may change but the intolerance, hatred and fear pervade every issue of the papers."

I second that emotion.

An aside, the Hebrew word for 'yes' is pronounced 'ken'. The first time we went to Israel, my mum kept looking around and saying 'who is this bloke Ken they keep talking about?'

joella

Feeling shirty

I don't need Skinny Trinny to tell me that short sleeved shirts suit me. And they are comfortable, practical and the shops are full of them. So I should be happy, right?

Wrong. Because they are All For Men. If you are a man, or I suppose a woman about six inches taller than me with a flat chest and no waist, there are any number of groovy short sleeved shirts in the shops that will make you feel spring-like and funky.

But if you are a woman, nothing. Well, okay, a few, a very few, but they are all tiny. I stood in Zara in Reading on Saturday and roared with frustration as an XL shirt's poppers gaped. I am not XL. Really, there are many many women more L than me. I have a broad ribcage and big breasts, and so do lots of other people. Why can't anyone make shirts to fit us?

I want to buy girls' clothes, I really do, but I just know I'm going to be buying boys' shirts this year. Again. They will be too long and too straight, and I will look like a lump. Again. Oh well.

joella

Gardening by fire

Last year's gardening project went a long way, but it stalled in September, when we ran out of a) summer, b) energy and c) money. There are unlaid paths, heaps of clay, rampant weeds (both alive and dead) and bits of brick and general building crap everywhere.

There's still very little of a) and c) in evidence, but M and I scraped together a bit of b), wrapped ourselves up warm and ventured out to assess the situation.

The tools were accessible because I had already tidied up the shed, formally marking the beginning of the gardening year, but it was nigh on impossible to work out what to do with them.

So we started with things that weren't diggable. M rather manfully volunteered to take all the rubble to the tip, and I started wrestling with the girly lattice bits installed on the top of each fence panel by our predecessor that have slowly but surely been falling off for (I imagine) the last decade.

And then I decided to burn them in the firebowl. And what a fantastic idea that was: they were dry as a bone so they burnt like a dream. I worked my way down the garden pulling old nails out with the hammer, wrenching the bits of wood apart, dragging them through the ivy / honeysuckle / brambles that were holding them in place and carrying them down to the fire to break up and burn.

Three hours outside in February and still toasty warm, if rather smoky by the end of it. Fantastic. I saved some of the wood for next Sunday so I can be warm while I am weeding.

joella

Off to see the Lizard

I am blessed with some lovely friends and a generally pretty cool social life, though as I discussed yesterday with Mr B, I am increasingly valuing my non-procreational friends even as they diminish in number.

You get different things from different people, though, and what I love about the Lizard is that she is undeniably, incontrovertibly good for me. I don't see her very often but when I do we have a riot. We laugh till we wet our pants but we also get right to the heart of things, where we are at, where we want to be at, what's right, what's wrong.

She used to live in a mobile home near Aldermaston, and would give directions including the classic line 'turn left at the bomb factory'.

Tomorrow we have a whole day together. I cannot wait.

joella

Spring is coming

Sunshine through satsuma peel. Evidence of a) sunshine and b) satsumas. Things are looking up.

joella

Valentine's Day is over

... and thank heavens for that.

Tonight I was honoured, as a non-single person, to be invited to R's Single and Cynical evening in a very nice pub in town. It was quite a big pub, and every table bar one (well, bar three all pushed together) had a lone couple sitting at it, holding hands, staring at their hands or wringing their hands, depending on the stage in the relationship.

The noisy tables in the corner were ours, and we all moved round every time someone went to the toilet, expertly directed by R, who decided who we should all be sitting next to. I haven't had so much fun on a Monday night in ages. What a splendid idea that was.

joella

How Wikipedia does it

I am a huge fan of Wikipedia, though I have never contributed. I don't think it replaces Britannica and its ilk -- we will always need formal reference works. No, I think it is something else entirely, and a something which makes me feel all warm inside about the internet.

Anyway if, like me, you've ever wondered how entries develop (the culture of it, rather than the process, which is clearly explained on Wikipedia itself) check out this splendid screencast - you need sound - on the evolution of the entry for Heavy Metal Umlaut. Class.

joella

Revisiting past humiliations

I got a letter this week inviting me to a meeting of (and suggesting I might like to join) the Oxfordshire branch of the Cambridge Society.

Now yes, I went to Cambridge. I loved it (though not everyone does), and I got a lot from it and still do. They really are formative years, and I feel very lucky to have spent them in such an amazing place.

However, it doesn't have its elitist reputation for nothing. If you are one who arrives there relatively "loud, poor and northern" (to use the words of an ex-boyfriend), you don't half get reminded of it sometimes.

I think Cambridge is at its worst when in the process of actually celebrating its own existence. My very favourite example is something that happened to me during Commemoration Feast: an annual event to mark the founding of Trinity College by Henry VIII in 1546. This is an invitation-only event: as an undergraduates you are invited if you got a first in your exams the previous year (when you are known as a Scholar), if you are on the College students union committee, or if your tutor puts you forward as an all round good egg. In my second year I was Women's Officer, a TCU post, so I duly got an invite, which I accepted.

To my delight I was placed next to R, a friend of mine also on TCU, but the man sitting opposite me was rather less delightful. What follows Really Happened.

So, he said, what are you reading? SPS, I said [Social and Political Sciences]. Well, he said, I didn't realise they *gave* firsts in SPS. Well they do, I said, but as it happens I didn't get one. So why are you here? he said. I'm on the TCU committee, I said. Ah, he said, so we could call you a social scholar. I suppose you could, I said, and turned to talk to R in mild discomfort.

Shortly thereafter, the main courses arrived. As the vegetarian option, mine was something spectacularly (and predictably) uninspiring. But R's looked very good, it was meat of some kind in (if memory serves) a redcurrant sauce. Can I try your sauce, I said. Yes, go ahead, she said. And I daubed my finger in the edge of it and then licked the sauce off.

At which point I again caught the eye of the Scholar sitting opposite me. He looked me straight in the eye and said 'How are you going to tempt me into abject submission if you behave like that?'

I was invited to the same feast the following year, and had no hesitation in ticking the 'I am unable to attend' box. Why put yourself through it? I was speechless at the time, and have still never managed to come up with the perfect comeback. In fact I have enabled comments specially, in case anyone can think of one.

R didn't go to the college ten year reunion because she didn't want to put herself through it. I did go, and while I was freaked out (not to mention hungover) for a good few days afterwards, I did have a really good time. But there was still that status thing hanging in the air.

It was a black tie dinner (of course), and I don't think I had been to a single black tie function in the intervening decade. After a slightly panicked wardrobe rummage I decided on a long black dress and my dad's old dinner jacket. I thought I looked passable. I am not sure most people noticed or cared either way, but while I was sipping whisky after dinner in the Master's Lodge a woman came up to me and said Nice dress. Monsoon, about four years ago? Er yes, I said. And the jacket's my dad's.

So to summarise: do I want to get together with a bunch of people who, by being the kind of people who wish to define themselves by their elitist education, may likely also be the kind of people who make me feel provincial, underachieving and socially inadequate? No, I don't think I do.

joella

Hooray for the Mid-East!

... as it seems to be called all of a sudden on the BBC website. What was wrong with good old Middle East? Have they got an American writing the headlines or something? They'll be using commas instead of the word 'and' next. Weirdos.

Anyway, I am very happy. Partly of course because it's the best chance for peace in years etc, but mainly because it's got Ellen bloody MacArthur out of the headlines. I Am So Sick Of Hearing About Her. Not very sisterly, I know. But true. As housemate S might say, Ellen, you're boring us now.

A couple of years ago I went to an acoustic night with four or five solo performers. One of them was a lovely young man who sang a song about mid 20s underachievement anxiety called "Look what Ellen MacArthur's done". I bet he's having a really bad day.

joella

Black pepper baths, a walk in the park and Posh Dinner

A lovely weekend of belated birthday celebrations, by myself and with two Rs who both have the same birthday as me.

Highlights included

- my first musically accompanied walk into town in many years (I used to live with a Walkman on, but this fell by the wayside when I stopped making / receiving compilation tapes sometime around the millennium)
- a lovely solo visit to MOMA cafe, the only place in town where you really can curl up with the papers
- lovely dinner with R&T *and* finding their house with no problems at all thanks to Wendy the GPS
- spending Sunday morning finishing the gorgeous Norwegian Wood in a super-hot bath with bubbles and black pepper oil
- walking in the park at sunset with M, S and puppy S, with proper tea and cakes after
- posh dinner with R&J at the surprisingly empty Cherwell Boat House. Ok, it's dark on Sundays in February, but it's still a beautiful spot.

For the first time this year I feel pretty much ready to take the working week on. Go me!

joella

Why am I always on a plane or a fast train?

I don't buy nearly as much music as I used to. I spend a lot less time listening to it than I used to as well... and what I do listen to is more often old and familiar than new. I don't know what I do with the time that I used to spend on listening to new stuff to the point where it became familiar stuff, I just know it's not there anymore.

But every now and again, an album comes along that I fall for. Maybe they hit me at a time when I am receptive, and maybe the time after a holiday is a receptive time. Whatever, I am currently slightly obsessed with Want One, by Rufus Wainwright, a birthday present from my lovely boyfriend.

Specifically, I am taken with the opening track, which is lyrically so simple, but says so much and which is big and crashy and has room for all kinds of feelings. I have already been caught waving wooden spoons round the kitchen to it while washing up. (Still no dishwasher...)

joella

Just a couple more

1. Birthday snowsuit



2. Big big shadows



...okay I'll stop now. I've got caffeine withdrawal headache *and* period pain today, *and* I've spent it proofreading, so all in all my outdoorsy alter ego is taking a good pasting.

joella