Meanwhile out in the real world

A fascinating article from Guardian Weekly about a journalist called Somoura Sorious is doing the rounds at work. I quote:

"The things I said in Living with Aids about the African male's sexuality are things that no white journalist can say," he muses, relaxing over a drink at a pub in Clapham, south London. "There are honest things that the western media ought and need to say about Africa but political correctness has prevented them."

It's well worth a read, for lots of reasons, and I believe every word of it. It reminded me of the story I heard on the Today programme this week about how teenage girls are part of a campaign to get lads' mags moved to the top shelf. Young men in this country are doing awful things to young women, but the brave new post feminist world gives none of us much space to debate this.

Maybe we will see the fourth wave of feminism rise in the (global) north, and this time it really will be about men as well. And maybe the same thing, only different, will happen in the south. Maybe we really will EVAW.

Or maybe I am just high on the fact that this week I have stood up to the playground bully and survived, it's 10.30 at night and I am blogging in the garden by candlelight while listening to Neil Young, and some of my best friends are men.

joella

What a difference a year makes

What a difference a year makes
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

It was my last first year plumbing class tonight... I passed CT-9 and felt impossibly proud of myself. Plumbing S passed also and we celebrated with posh white wine. I don't think either of us ever imagined we would actually get this far. In a week that's been pretty desperate in many ways, this is a total result. As S said when both sets of our pipework passed their pressure testing (jeez, could there *be* a more double-entendre laden occupation?): Go Us!

joella

For every hand extended, another lies in wait...

... keep your eye on that one. Anticipate.

So said Ani DiFranco many years ago, but it's not so easy when you're trying to anticipate someone who is a) nutso and b) (deliberately?) inconsistent.

So here's plan B.

1. Seethe, but quietly. In the background. On the back burner. Keep seething, but try not to boil in public. Be like a watched pot.

2. Use obscene language occasionally and unexpectedly, but with great force. 'Well, I see where you're coming from, but if you don't mind me saying so you're taking the FUCKING PISS'.

3. Be disarmingly (to the point of inappropriately) open about your feelings at all times. 'If you insist on taking this approach, well, I'm just going to undermine it, like anyone else would, because it's bonkers'.

4. Out the views of others by making your own clear, and once you have friends in new places, cackle wildly with them whenever you can and make Murder on the Orient Express style plans.

5. When unavoidable, agree to what you have to and then do what you were planning to do anyway.

6. Develop exit strategy while smiling, smiling, smiling.

7. Remember, if all else fails, there's always red wine and being paid to have a hangover.

joella

Changes coming round real soon make us women and men

Since I laid my cassette obsolescence wager with Andy, I have been spending a lot more time with my extensive tape collection. It lives upstairs in my bedroom, which is appropriate, as my bedroom is (among other things) a place for reflection and private thoughts, and my tape collection is a little seam of such things, which sits quietly, waiting for me to mine it.

It spans my life from the age of about 13 to about 28, with a big emphasis on ages 17 to 22, when I heard more music than I had ever heard before or have ever heard since, but had no money, so I taped everything instead of buying it.

There are many many shit recordings of shit albums (The Eagles Greatest Hits, anyone?), which really I should grit my teeth and chuck, and a fair few recordings of albums which I now own on CD, so they should really go as well. I baulk at both as my tape collection is organised (and numbered) chronologically -- by the order in which I recorded them, not the order in which the music on them was originally recorded.

So if I died tomorrow and someone wanted to write my biography (ok, unlikely), they might learn something about me from my tape collection that they would never glean from my CDs. My tapes are a chunk of me - either I made them, or someone who cared about me made them.

The best tapes of all are the compilation tapes. The compilation tape lasts 90 minutes, but takes (took) probably double that to create, and is usually a one off. My compilation tapes were mostly made by boys especially for me, and just thinking of them sorting out the track listing and adjusting the recording levels is almost enough in itself. But a significant subset of my compilation tape collection is home-made: I made them for someone else and took a copy, or I just made them for myself.

When I made them, I always gave them a name, which was usually a snatch of lyric. So here is the first in an occasional series - the track listing of tape #42: possibly my first ever compilation tape, created in I think mid 1987.

Title: Changes coming round real soon make us women and men

Side A

Born to run: Frankie Goes To Hollywood
Thunder Road: Bruce Springsteen
Summer of '69: Bryan Adams
Footloose: Kenny Loggins
Jack and Diane: John Cougar Mellencamp
Crazy Crazy Nights: Kiss
Backstreets: Bruce Springsteen
Paradise by the dashboard light: Meatloaf
Heaven: Bryan Adams
Come on: Wham!
Only the good die young: Billy Joel

Side B

Rattlesnakes: Lloyd Cole
Modern Girl: Meatloaf
Wild Thing: The Troggs
Always a woman: Billy Joel
Undertow: Suzanne Vega
Vienna: Billy Joel
Don't you forget about me: Simple Minds
Let's hear it for the boy: Deniece Williams
True colors: Cyndi Lauper
Just the way you are: Billy Joel
Electric dreams: Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder
Absolute Beginners: David Bowie

Now that's clearly too much Billy Joel (some might say *any* Billy Joel is too much Billy Joel, but I had a big BJ phase in my teens, largely due to the fact that Blackpool Record Library had all his albums and not a whole lot else), and the Kiss song is dreadful, but the rest of it doesn't stand up *too* badly, and some of it is still, you know, really good. It *is*.

The only song of all of those which I have on CD is the Suzanne Vega one, and the only one I have as an mp3 is Modern Girl (which I downloaded one night when I was pissed). Most of the rest I own on vinyl and will probably never buy in any other format, and there are a few which I taped off the radio and which don't quite start at the beginning or finish at the end. I played it loud yesterday as I tidied up my bedroom, and I had a wonderful time.

It's a little work of art, the compilation tape. I really don't want it to die.

joella

Weekend in the crime capital of the universe

Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

We went to Nottingham at the weekend to visit K, the littlest fruit of M's loins. It's the crime capital of the North Midlands or something, but somehow its reputation escalated in my mind over the weekend even though Nothing Bad Actually Happened.

What Did Actually Happen was mostly lots of fun. We visited several fine pubs. The one we liked best is pictured -- apparently it's run by Christians but I saw no obvious evidence of this. We visited another one which is actually in a deconsecrated church, but that one was definitely more hen party than Holy Father.

We had a v cool ninth floor room in the Park Plaza, which also had funky lifts and an ice machine (what more do you *need* in a hotel?), and after a break for Doctor Who, skyline admiration and mini bar gin and tonic (HOW MUCH?) we headed back out.

Wow. Downtown Nottingham on a Saturday night is not for the faint hearted. Average age: 21. Average % of flesh covered: 21. Average number of Bacardi Breezers consumed: 21. We picked our way through the carnage as nightclub touts looked through us and girls fell off their shoes all around.

Just as I was beginning to wonder if in fact I had woken up in a world where my existence was entirely irrelevant, an Indian man stopped us to admire my outfit (I was wearing an apple green shawl I bought in Delhi), and I decided all was not lost. We had some Indian beer to celebrate, which we drank looking out of tall French windows into the back yards of tall, once elegant Victorian red brick buildings. And this was in a *no smoking pub*. Verily the world doth change.

Well, some of it. The next day we found ourselves the only customers in a pub in Bestwood Colliery village, having walked there through Bestwood Country Park. The colliery's been gone since 1967, and I'm not sure the pub's been decorated since. Are you doing food? we asked. Well, said the barman (who last went to the dentist also circa 1967), you won't get a dinner. Sandwiches? we said. Well, he said, I haven't any bread.

Pause.

But I have got cobs. (Aka baps, northerners! I don't know what the southern word is). Great! we said. What fillings do you have? Well, he said. Ham. Cheese.

Pause.

Ham and cheese.

Great! we said. We'll have one cheese, and one ham and cheese. K? K said she was all right, she'd had an egg for breakfast. Oh, he said, I've got an egg as well. No, that's fine, we said.

Pause. Long, long pause. I imagined him making a nice cheese bap with cheddar in, a little side salad, maybe some crisps.

He brought out one square bap with a square of cheese, and another square bap with a square of cheese and a square of ham. Happy Father's Day! said K. We all snorted shandy out our noses.

I quite like Nottingham, on reflection.

joella

Beetroot curry, helicopter lullaby

I had a gorgeous night on Friday, after a week that was anything but. K cooked some amazing curry (some beetroot, some spinach, some lentil) and five of us ate it in her garden and talked about life and work and boys and, well, stuff. We dissed people we don't like and argued about people some of us like, and put bits of the world to rights and left other bits wrong.

S and L left before it got dark, and K and plumbing S and I hung out for a couple more hours, drinking white wine and pink wine, making gradually less sense but having no problem with that whatsoever. We tore ourselves away eventually as we all had an early start on Saturday, and S and I cycled off into a night that was still warm round the edges.

To get home we had to cross the ring road. On the way there I had followed the CYCLISTS DISMOUNT instructions, and skipped across at the pedestrian crossing, which was scary enough even with the green man beeping. On the way back I followed S up to the traffic lights. 'Is is ok to do this on a bike?' I said. I don't know, she said, but it seems a bit wussy to get off. Time to stand up and be counted.

The lights went green and we flew out across the ring road, crossing six lanes of traffic all stopped for us. We were shrieking with laughter and S stuck her legs out like Pippi Longstocking as we swooped round the bend and off onto the slip road.

I was still grinning like a lunatic when I got home and lay in bed listening to that quintessential urban Friday night sound of police helicopters circling overhead. Work can be bollocks sometimes, but without it I wouldn't have met many of my lovely friends, and time spent with them, as the Snoopy poster on my teenage bedroom wall used to say, is never long enough.

joella

Crack crack sploosh

Looks like my naked rain dancing might finally be starting to pay off. The neighbours will be relieved.

joella

More on the pink sun

Just about this time last year I returned home from a month in Zambia. It was an experience that has stayed with me in more ways than I can count, not all of them comfortable, but I fell a little bit in love with warm African nights, with their scent-laden, leaf rustling, star-gazing gorgeousness. I would sit outside nursing a Scotch on ice, reading by citronella candlelight and wishing I still smoked.

But the sunsets are rubbish. At six o'clock every day the sun falls out of the sky. One minute it's daylight, four minutes later it's as black as your hat.

When I came home, I lay in a long, hot, essential-oil scented bath, scrubbing weeks of dirt from places dribbly showers just don't reach, and then I wrapped myself in a huge bath sheet, lay down on my bed and wished everyone in the world could have a long hot bath, a big soft towel and a room of their own. The world would surely be a better place if they did.

And as I saw the pink sun hanging in the sky I wished everyone in the world could see a long summer sunset too. It doesn't change your life, but it creates a little space in which to be glad you're alive.

joella

Pink sun, Pink Moon

The other night, I was driving home down Cowley Road, which pretty much runs due east out of the city. I was coming from the ring road end, in proper Radiohead style, and therefore heading due west. It was just after 9, and Nick Drake's Pink Moon was on the stereo. I am not overstating myself too much when I say that it fitted my mood perfectly.

But then I rounded a slight bend just after the Q8 garage, and I saw the sun setting. If the sun is normally the size of a £2 coin (v similar in diameter to the 2 euro coin, eurozone fact fans), this sun was the size of a dinner plate. It demanded your attention, and (shortly afterwards) your helpless wail of appreciation.

This sun was also perfecty, impossibly pink, and it was sliding down the sky in a way that managed to be simultaneously inevitable and imperceptible. The sun will die! But slowly, so we can watch. It will go down in its own flames, and we will have plenty of time to realise that we are nothing without it.

Like a good Doctor Who episode, this train of thought will be continued.

joella

What's in a name?

Apart from my mother (who, frankly, can call me what she likes), there are only two people in the world who are allowed to call me 'dear'. They know who they are. It took a while for me to understand the sense in which it was being used, but I have managed it, I think. When either R or S calls me 'dear', I experience it as genuinely affectionate, and I don't feel remotely patronised. In fact I quite like it.

Tonight, something similar yet unprecedented happened with another term of endearment. J the plumbing technician had suggested that I spend the evening on CT8 -- an exercise which involves drilling holes for pipe clips in a perfectly straight line and exactly 150 mm apart (well, +/-2 mm). You need to do one lot in wood, the second in bare brick and the third into a plastered surface. Here you go, he said, when you get to making holes in the masonry, you can christen our brand new drill.

This is a proper grown up drill. It's made by Hitachi, and its casing is green and black patterned rubber. It has the aura of a space age trainer or a ninja snake, and it has a special side handle for extra whoomfage. We were not worthy. At one point, plumbing S was complaining that she was getting nowhere. I said 'you just need to give it some welly', but then R the farmer came over and pointed out that she was never going to make real headway till she took the drill out of reverse. Later on, B the teacher came over and said 'girls are often scared of drills', and showed me how to throw my body weight behind it. All the advice was useful, but not as useful as the practice. I passed CT8, and I was proud of myself.

After our work had been checked with a tape measure and a spirit level, it all had to be dismantled. I carefully removed all the screws, and started to lever our used rawl plugs out with a screwdriver. Jeez, this is boring, I thought. I wonder if it's also pointless? So I carried my first batch over to J, spiky and dusty like a handful of dying moths. Do you need these back? I said.

He smiled at me and said 'no, you can chuck those away, love'.

He has never called me love before. In fact his entire demeanour has been scrupulously gender neutral -- which I have genuinely appreciated as he is, in Plumbing World, entirely alone on this front. So what's with the love? Is this a momentary lapse of political correctness? I prefer to think it's more that he has decided that I am ok, and the 'love' is an acknowledgement of that, a general relaxing into what comes more naturally. I might be wrong, but until proved so I will feel quietly happy.

joella

Love Like Semtex

When your face is hot and your ankles are chilly, when your subconscious aggression causes you to forget to turn up for your appointment to help you handle your subconscious aggression, when you're burning up and nobody has any ice, when you need to keep your head when all around are losing theirs ... in short, when you're having a week like mine, you need a banging tune to listen to and friends in IT places who can tell you how to bypass the new Surf Control software.

Check out Love Like Semtex. Jump around!

joella

Juxtaposition of power holding styles

Clearly I can't be too blunt about this, as I am not Call Centre Confidential, but let's just say my current manager's style is neither consensus-focused nor, for me at any rate, empowering. She's the boss, and you don't get to forget it. We work very differently, and I'm struggling with it... particularly today, her first day back from hols, when I got a round bollocking for making a decision while she was away that she didn't think I should have made.

It's exhausting and it's not a little scary, and as I left for plumbing I wiped a couple of tears away. I had to get the bus to Blackbird Leys, as last night the brake cable on my bike snapped and I don't know how to fix these things, so all in all I walked up the drive to college feeling pretty bloody miserable.

I was a bit early, and as I turned the corner to the plumbing and gas block, there was D the teacher sitting on the steps smoking Lambert & Butlers with a couple of my fellow students. There was a time when the small talk was the hardest part of the class, but as I approached, D and R moved away from each other to create a space in between them on the step, and D slapped the empty space and said 'you look colourful today!'

Is that a compliment? I said as I sat down. Yeah, he said. Thanks! I said. Where's the bike? he said. Bust, I said. Want a lift home later? he said.

I had to wipe a few more tears away, but nobody saw.

joella

Thatcher Thatcher Plumbing Snatcher

Warning: this rant might sound a bit rich coming from a homeowner, but I'm going to say it anyway.

A colleague of mine asked me and Plumbing S if we would change the cistern on the toilet in his flat. It was a high level cistern, he said, and he wanted to replace it with a low level one before he put the flat on the market. He doesn't actually live in the flat -- he used to, but he moved in with his partner when their first child came along and he's been renting it out ever since.

Okay, I said, that sounds quite straightforward, I'll come and have a look.

It's an ex-council flat, and it was built in the 50s or 60s -- classic low-rise, lots of concrete, of a type which is mostly (but not all) now in private ownership thanks to Thatcher and her Right to Buy 'nation of homeowners' ideology.

I have never seen anything like the plumbing in this flat. The toilet was the least of it -- it was the original, and pretty grim, but it did actually work. It would actually be fairly difficult to change the cistern, as all the pipework and fittings had at some point been covered in thick gloss paint (and I also couldn't find the mains stop tap -- it might be that you need to turn the whole block off), but my question was more, why would you bother? Really, the whole lot needs to come out and into a skip: hot, cold, waste, boiler, everything. It's fifty years old, it's been bodged and rebodged, and the world - and the water regulations - have moved on.

He can't afford to do that. The chances are that the next owner won't be able to afford to do that either. The fact is that a lot of low-end ex-council housing is owned by people who can't afford to do proper maintenance and upgrading. Even worse, a lot of it is privately tenanted and owned by landlords who can't or don't upgrade it.

Similar flats which have stayed in public ownership have had their bathrooms replaced, had double glazing fitted, had central heating installed with pipework which doesn't resemble a box of snakes, using public money rather than relying on low-income families to find the thousands of pounds necessary to get it done properly. Yes, housing maintenance is a big drain on the public purse, which is why it was so abhorrent to 1980s Tories, but the public purse has more flexibility in it than many private ones.

I'm not a housing expert, and I know there's some pretty vile social housing out there, but there are some situations where the free market just does not work, and low-end housing is one of them. There's a woman in her 90s who lives in a tiny terraced house behind my parents. She doesn't have a bathroom at all, just a tin bath, a cold tap and a toilet in the yard.

Yet the UK is fifteenth out of 200+ countries in the world's Human Development Index for 2005. Nobody should have to live like that in a country as rich as ours. I don't know if I can really argue that no council housing should ever have been sold off, but did we, as individuals or as a society, really have a full understanding of exactly what rights we were giving up when we exercised our right to buy?

joella

Hrumph

"There's always been a lot of discussion about personalisation and the web but it has never really taken off, probably because it's not that useful."

So says Jakob Nielsen today, and when he says it, people believe it. When *I* say it, people with diplomas in marketing smile at me patronisingly and tell me I am insufficiently visionary.

I notice they've dropped the 'personalised supporter experience' on our website though. In fact I think they dropped it about three months after they launched it.

*hollow laugh*

joella