Me a long way from the sea

I'm back now. But it will be a while before I forget what solitary Friday nights in a seaside town can feel like.

joella

Me by the sea

I'm Up North visiting the parentals. All is well: my dad is recovering well from his shoulder operation, and my mother seems still to be suffering no major ill effects from having smoked 20 a day for the last 40 years. In fact she's still fitter than I am. So same as it ever was, which is cause for celebration in itself, as it can't ever remain thus, one eventually realises.

However, it's Friday night, and their idea of fun is watching Independence Day on TV while drinking endless cups of Nescafe Decaf. This is a film which makes me want to heave combined with not nearly enough alcohol, so I applied some green eyeliner and headed out in search of company.

There were two possible options, Mick Son of Mick and my uncle, but the one pub I ventured into was Dante's Lancastrian Inferno, heaving with testosterone, alcopops and semi-naked women. You forget what it's like round here at the weekend, I swear. To be female and fully clothed is freakish enough on Christmas Eve - to be out in a jacket in July is tantamount to declaring yourself a feminist. Which can be a dangerous thing to do.

So I elbowed my way out of hell, bought myself a can of lager at Spar and went for a walk down the front. It was kind of drizzly, so I had the entire coast to myself. It was amazing. I sat on one of the sheltered benches by the lifeboat station, sipped my Heineken, watched the late July night draw in and felt exactly as I felt half my life ago when I used to do exactly the same thing as a teenager.

I had several advantages then: 1) I smoked, so could spend far longer sitting on a bench by myself without feeling like a spare part. 2) I had a dog, so had an excuse to be sitting on a bench by myself. 3) I was a teenager (see 2).

It somehow felt that this was not a grown up thing to be doing, which seems profoundly unfair. Where are the 35 year old women sitting on a bench by themselves on a Friday night of yesteryear?

joella

It's raining outside but I don't care

God I love sunflowers

joella

Solitary pleasures

I'm working at home today and I've got the place to myself. I've just sung along to John Denver's Annie's Song on 6Music while preparing my vegetarian frankfurter, mustard and gherkin sandwich for lunch. Some things you just don't enjoy if there are other people around.

joella

Take me dancing naked in the rain

It would have to be warm rain. And it would probably have to be dark. And I would definitely have to be drunk. But in the right circumstances, I'd be up for it if someone else was too.

In the absence of the right circumstances, you do what you can. Yesterday I went swimming in the rain with my friend E. It wasn't warm rain and we weren't drunk (and it was a public place so we of course weren't naked), but it was still lots of fun.

The pool was steaming in the cold air and we had it all to ourselves, which I love. When you don't have to worry about bumping into people you can focus on other things, and let your stroke take over your worries, so they get some of their edges rubbed off and when you get out things have settled in your head a bit even though you haven't really been thinking about them.

I should really find a way to swim in an empty pool more often. Or, of course, dance naked in the rain.

joella

End of an era

They're shutting down the systems at work in 15 minutes. Everybody down the pub, apart from the poor souls in 'Move Team' T-shirts who have to engage with 30 years of dust, cabling and paperclips.

Next time we come into the office, it will be in a Business Park and everything will be grey, apart from those bits which have been corporately coloured in. The day I started here five years ago I came past the 'cyber curtain' made of old CD-ROMs stuck together with sellotape and found a bunch of flowers on my desk from my new manager. I feel sad.

joella

Planarity

Check out this madly addictive game that I picked up via meish.org, whose author always seems to find the best games...

joella

three word newsbites

In today's throwaway world, sometimes you need quick opinions. So here we go:

1. The founder of the BNP is dead.
joella says: good fucking riddance

2. Orchestra goes silent over appointment of female lead
joella says: deal with it

3. Blood donors warned over vCJD
joella says: better to know

This is fun! More soon.

joella

Google moon

Google is celebrating the anniversary of the first lunar landing over at moon.google.com. It's definitely worth zooming in...

joella

Attic humour

I'm currently reading, and greatly enjoying, Jay McInerney's The Story of My Life.

It has a brilliant joke in it. The Manhattan-based heroine, who is "beautiful, blunt, world-weary and 20", while at the same time being doesn't-know-she's-born overprivileged, goes to acting classes when she's not too hungover or coked out of her brains. When she or one of her classmates manifestly fails to perform, her tutor will shout "she's in the attic!", while never explaining why.

This goes on for several chapters until the reader is more curious than any of the class seems to be.

And then we find out. A blonde would-be-starlet with zero acting talent had found herself a wealthy sponsor, who then financed plays on the condition that she got to play the leading role. She was consistently dreadful. One play was a dramatisation of the Diary of Anne Frank, and she of course was playing Anne. It was so bad that most of the audience left, and when the Gestapo came banging on the door, someone shouted "she's in the attic!".

I kept myself awake last night I was laughing so hard.

joella

Assume nothing

In response to my exciting discovery that I have a male brain (which nobody except me seems particularly surprised to hear), one of my colleagues, now in her 60s and a grandmother, confided that during routine surgery in her 30s they discovered a miniature set of male genitalia tucked away inside her. Where are they now? I said. Oh, about here, she said, waving in the general direction of lower left abdomen.

I have known for many years that gender is a fluid concept. But it seems that sex isn't that black and white either. I guess any trans-sexual could have told me that ages ago, if I had been in the mood to listen.

joella

I have a male brain!

... according to the BBC, anyway. I kind of knew I would have since I watched Secrets of the Sexes last night and discovered that ring fingers being significantly longer than index fingers (as mine are) indicates exposure to above average levels of testosterone in the womb.

My mother told me years ago that that's why I am left handed, and I already knew that left handedness indicates some right-brain dominance, and I already knew that I have some of that. But I have a good left brain as well.

But I didn't know the thing about the fingers. Or that this also apparently means I have a strong heart and should be able to run fast. Better get out there.

joella

An inch of difference

... is what Billy Bragg, back in 1997, said a New Labour government might bring. But, he added, it would be an inch worth living in.

I move backwards and forwards on this one. There are areas where it's a lot more than an inch, but many others where I think an inch is pushing it a bit, and where Mr and Mrs Floating Daily Mail Voter exert an influence on government policy massively disproportionate to their value as human beings.

So I am relieved and reassured to see stories like this one about the (at the moment only temporary) cessation of deportation of failed Zimbabwean asylum seekers. To do otherwise would be inhumane, whatever the impact on electability. Seems like someone's acknowledging that, and in an 'inch of difference' sort of a way, I applaud it.

joella

But seriously...

... for reasons I haven't quite yet managed to understand or articulate, I am relieved that the bombers were a) suicide bombers and b) British.

I *think* (having just discussed at length with Ms Y, and without wishing to trivialise the horror of what has happened in any way) that it's to do with what I perceive as the sheer unscalability/unsustainability of such a bonkersly extreme reaction to the reality of modern Britain.

I feel there's stuff the British Asian community can (and should) do to diffuse and address some of the issues, and that there's stuff the Government and the rest of British society can (and should) do to support them. There's a glimpse of silver lining in shared horror. If we do it right, we could end up in a better place. If we do it soon, there might not be too much more tragedy to live through en route.

And it's not like we haven't been here before. Young Asian men with rucksacks are going to have a hard time for a while. Maybe older Irish men could help them out a bit.

joella

Anglo-Asian relations

... are clearly of critical importance at the moment. So I feel it may not have been helpful to stumble naked down the bedroom this morning and lean over my 'Juliet' balcony to shout down to M to please turn off the hosepipe so I could have a shower. Mr A, our Muslim neighbour, was inspecting his roses and having a quiet cup of tea, and got a whole lot more of an eyeful than he'd bargained for. Had I not been so embarrassed I might have managed a cheery 'good morning' (though this may have been interpreted as shameless on top of, er, shameless) but as it was I just fled.

joella

I hate this flat land, there's no cover

(this title being nothing more than an obscure Billy Bragg lyric running through my head which seems somehow to fit today's mood)

So today I went back to work. It was ok. Someone had sent me a bar of chocolate in the internal post. Noone had lifted my water glass. I was only 23% over my email limit.

I came home via a compulsory induction trip to the New Building, which my entire organisation is moving to at the end of the month. It is in a business park and it is mostly grey. But hey, it's close to the ring road. It will be like working in a Radiohead song.

Trying to look on the bright side, I can walk home from there in just over half an hour, past locksmiths and motorist discount centres and takeaways and petrol stations and the police station and a tattoo museum. In no time at all I shall forget the dreaming spires and feel proper urban.

joella

Lost weekend

... that's lost in the achieved nothing but got spectacularly drunk three times sense. I don't have them so often anymore. Night times are great... drinking wine at pavement tables, bombay mix for dinner, building log fires in the garden at midnight to accommodate the tail end of a street party, endless heated debates... but daytimes are awfully bleak.

I find, as I post-mortem my hangovers, that the bleakness is a cause of the drunkenness as well as an effect. We're all freaked about the bombs. I need to do something different with my days but I don't know what. We need to remortgage and send off housemate S on her travels. I'm still not properly better but I can't really justify not being at work anymore. It's all... so... big.

In an attempt to address / redress some of this, I have spent today in bed reading Vibrator, a novel of fairly spectacular bleakness itself. Kind of neutralising. Then I made a huge pot of tuna pasta bake, quintessential comfort food, and settled down with the paper. The world can wait.

joella

Pissed McPissed

I'd just like tp poimt ouit that i AM A pissed person. Typing is hArd WORK. tHIS IS NOTa joke .

joella

Sifting through the emotions of today...

... I have come to the conclusion that I am significantly prouder to be British today than I was yesterday.

Why? Because yesterday we won a competition of slickness by way of a Tory peer who can run fast, a Powerpoint presentation, and the presence of David Beckham in beige. It may have been a joyous victory but I am not convinced it is one which demonstrates anything more fundamental about Britain than the fact that we can market ourselves and convince people that we know how to manage big projects. Not to be sniffed at, but still, hardly something you'd go to war to defend.

Whereas the response of the emergency services today was nothing short of awesome. I'm not talking about the bravery of it -- that is awesome too, but that is awesome everywhere. I'm talking about the preparedness and the professionalism. Something kicked in, and a whole infrastructure rose to the occasion.

And that is down to planning. And the planning is down to awareness of risk -- transformed (of course) by 9/11. Awareness of risk can bring a range of responses -- ranging from complete freedom of movement backed up by (inevitably) limited contingency in case of attack, right through to hugely restricted civil liberties, designed to minimise that risk.

I think today was an amazing illustration of how intelligently, on the whole, that line has been and is being walked in the UK. I'm glad I pay my taxes.

joella

God bless Ken Livingstone

I was moved to tears by Ken Livingstone's statement after the bombings today. It ended with an address to the people behind the attack:

In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.

They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don't want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.

(read the full statement here)

Can't imagine Dobbo making that speech, can you? And even on a day like today he manages to distance himself from the Government's immigration and asylum policy and give the big up to multiculturalism. The man's a genius.

joella

WTF?

Well, no problem feeling stuff about London *today*. Listening to the news gave me that horrible creeping feeling, last felt on Boxing Day, when you know it's a whole shitload worse than they're telling you, but they either don't know or they have some damage limitation anti-panic media strategy in place. Even disasters get spun these days.

There's something really low about this form of terrorism. Not that I am saying there are 'better' forms, but there's something uniquely disgusting about blowing people up on public transport. Powerful people don't get the bus.

joella

Waiting to feel something

I can't get excited about the Olympics. It's got to be better than getting the World Cup I suppose -- athletics fans are generally well behaved and don't piss in fountains and beat people up. And it's got to be good for East London. And it'll be nicer for the athletes than all those hot places they usually have to run in.

But otherwise... no, nothing. I'll check my brain again later, maybe I'm missing something.

joella

To-do list

I've been signed off sick all week. This is only the second time in my life I've had a doctor's note - the first was after I went to South Africa last year. Maybe I'm allergic to Pretoria.

Anyway, I am still sleeping a lot of the time, and other significant activities include gargling with soluble aspirin, reading, and feeling grumpy. But I have decided to do one thing a day that I have been meaning to do for ages but haven't got round to.

This achieves two objectives: one, I feel better about myself for having done these things, and two, I feel that I am not lying around all day being a burden to society. Or to my household, at least.

So... On Sunday I engineered the re-potting of the bay trees, which used to belong to M's mother and which were looking bedraggled and yellow. M did most of the actual repotting, but I was the one who got us out to buy the pots and mixed the compost and the iron sulphate which will with luck turn them into happy trees again. Then I trimmed them carefully back into a ball shape with the secateurs, and hung up bunches of bay leaves to dry in the kitchen. Then I had a little lie down.

On Monday I bought curtain tie back hooks (part of the curtain tie back fitting job I have got lined up for later in the week) and, more significantly, used an unexpected council tax rebate to order a new dishwasher from the Co-op's online electrical shop. It's silver! It's coming on Thursday! I can't wait!

And today I gave joella a little face-lift. Well, I started last night but I didn't get very far. But I'm quite pleased with the result. She needs to evolve. As do I.

joella

Ch-ch-changes

If you are looking at this while I am in the middle of playing around with it, no I am not sticking with Georgia. It's just how it comes.

joella

Convalescence

Well, kind of convalescence, as a) I still have a sore throat and so technically am still ill, and b) I had a smear test today and that's nobody's idea of taking it easy.

But to make up for b) I bought myself some white linen trousers, and to help with a) I bought myself a summer duvet to snuggle under and do a little Sudoku and some light reading.

Which is where I'm off to now. Laters.

joella

Unexpectedly moved

I was too young to go to Live Aid and also lived a bit too far away. As it turned out, it was also held on the first day of my first ever Saturday job, so I missed the first five hours, though my parents did very kindly tape it for me, and I still have the video. I would have given just about anything to have been there, but it was in no way attainable.

Live8 was a lot more attainable but I was a lot less interested. I'm 20 years older, I've been to a lot more gigs, and I work for an organisation that is part of Make Poverty History. I guess I felt it was something I didn't need to do, even before I got bloody tonsilitis at bloody Glastonbury.

But I've found watching it on TV strangely emotional. The whole Live Aid resonance was unexpectedly nostalgic, and reminded me of Saturdays in the bread shop and, later, nights working in the Queens pub with the Who on repeat on the jukebox. How young we were. Robbie Williams was incredible. So was Annie Lennox. And when Pink Floyd played Wish You Were Here, I found tears rolling down my cheeks, for things past and gone and never coming back. Lord only knows what it would have been like to be there, though I could have been stuck in the toilet queue for any of those moments.

Time I wish there *had* been a toilet queue to be stuck in though: Mariah Carey. What is she *like*? An American size silicone bowl of saccharine gack topped with self-important sprinkles. Ewww. And that bit with the orphans from 'Africa', like Africa is the same size as Chicago or something. You can see why Madge is an Anglophile.

My extreme loathing of Mariah Carey nearly neutralised my general irritation with Jo 'Madonna excelled (sic) my expectations' Whiley. But not quite. Let's just say it was very gratifying when George Michael slapped her.

joella

A perfect moment of bathos

For many years, I was never quite sure what bathos was. It was just one of those words, like schadenfreude and Machiavellian, whose precise meaning hovered just beyond my reach. Maybe you don't get much of it till your 30s.

Last night I had to turn down an offer of two 'golden circle' tickets to Live8 because of my tonsilitis. (No, that's not bathos.) I then had to miss a gig by the Hellset Orchestra, and go to bed just as the party started when everyone got back, also because of my tonsilitis. (Not bathos either).

M was so hungover that I was in the better state this morning, so I cooked breakfast for five, then the resilient young people headed off to enjoy their day, and the invalid and the hungover one retreated to the sofa and huddled under a blanket to watch Live8 on TV.

There was a little frisson when old Bob came rambling out to ramble on a bit, and then, bloody hell, Bill Gates! Now that's impressive. The richest man in the world endorsed the exercise and said some moving things about how we know what to do and we've got the money to do it, now let's just make the decisions that mean it can be done.

Yes! we all cheered. Go Bill! Go us! Make Poverty History!

Thanks, he said. And now... I would like to introduce... Dido.

That was bathos, wasn't it? I said. Oh yes, said M.

joella