I demand a better future

I'm just back from Telford and Manchester, a sewing machine richer, a Swiss Army Knife poorer, and full of the reflected warmth of family and old friends N & D plus their two-and-a-bit children -- the soon-to-be-middle one of whom I am reluctant godmother to. The reluctance is all to do with the god part and nothing to do with her: she is small and thoughtful and determined, and can already paint with one hand and eat with the other with only minor crossover complications.

Her mother N is one of my favourite people in the whole world -- also small (though quite big at the moment) and thoughtful and determined. We met when she was 14 and I was 15 and we worked together in a bread shop on Saturdays. 'Something reminded me of the Bread Oven the other day,' I said. 'I can't remember what it was now'*.

Really stale bread? she said. Or did you meet a Nazi?

She was referring to Grant the baker, who terrorised us both from our arrival at 8.30 each Saturday until he left around noon. It was so bad that we used to meet somewhere else at 8 -- the lorry driver's cafe in the winter, on the beach in the summer -- to gather our strength and so we would always arrive together. Then we would take it in turns to be the one who first ventured into the back of the shop to get the pork pies out of the fridge. He hated us both -- me because I tried to stand up to him and N because she didn't -- and me a little bit more (maybe) because I didn't hide the fact I was a little bit Jewish and a little bit academic and he didn't hide the fact that he was more than a little bit Jew-hating and more than a little bit of a porn-eating book burner. There were bruises along the way, and none of them on him.

I hope he's dead now, she said. I really do. I do too, I said. Let me know if you hear anything, so I can leave a pork pie and a gherkin on his grave.

The next morning, we were dissecting the Guardian Family Section article about tomboys. In my view, like most Guardian Family Section articles, it raised a potentially interesting issue then drowned it in mediocre middle class reportage. The tomboy in the 1970s sense -- the girl who wants to be a boy, as epitomised by George in the Famous Five -- is a fascinating creature. Does she want to be a boy because boys have freedom of movement and expression that girls are denied? Does she want to be a boy because she can see that boys are more valued in the world? Does she actually identify as a boy? Or does she just hate wearing dresses and playing with dolls and being expected to be passive and nice?

Th article didn't really tell us. The 'genuine tomboy' they interviewed did seem to have some interesting stuff going on, and I think that was handled well, though all the stuff about the 'anonymous mothers' of other tomboys rather diluted the positivity of the story of the lone seven year old whose mother doesn't mind.

But I ain't her, and neither is N, yet we were both labelled tomboys in our time. I don't want to be a boy, I said to N, while a little on the drunk side, and I never have. I just want to be taken seriously.

Exactly, she said. And I fucking hate (she added, five months pregnant, stone cold sober and waving a spatula) wearing a dress. When you wear a dress everyone looks at you, and tells you how great you look, and you know, it's nobody's fucking business how I look except mine.

This is a wilderness point of view in a world that has plastic surgery ads on the back of buses. But it's one I share, and we clinked glasses and toasted a better future for her daughters. I'd like to think they will have more options than we had, but observing our overmediated, X-factored, pink and blue-drenched age, I am not so sure.

Having said that, I had the late night munchies last night, and ate cheese and crackers sitting on the loo while M danced round the kitchen singing 'she's a matzo girl, living in a matzo world'. There's a place for everyone, if we can only find it.

joella

* I have remembered and forgotten what it was several times since first drafting this. Getting up early? Eccles cakes? Parkin?

What's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding?

I'm still sworn off the Today programme, but I'm as all over the BBC News website as ever I was... I find the newfangled Have Your Say bits deeply tedious, but it's as well to remind oneself that most people with strong points of view and the time/inclination to expound them in a random and anonymous fashion are both blinkered and borderline illiterate. LOL.

And I love the fact that you can spend time following a story that's caught your eye, come back to it later to see what's happened. The most recent of these for me is the story of Dr Humayra Abedin, a London GP trying to escape from a marriage she was forced into in Pakistan.

I was once stuck for many hours on a train limping north with no lights or heating -- I was travelling in the smoking carriage (it was a long time ago) with then-housemate S, and the woman behind us turned out to have some tea lights on her, so we lit them, passed the tobacco around and got chatting. She was British Asian, a doctor, and on her way to Edinburgh to see a man she'd met via a personal ad. She hoped he would still be there when she arrived -- we were running about three hours late and neither of them had a mobile phone (it was a really long time ago). She also hoped the sex would be ok and he wouldn't be too old.

I said I hope she didn't mind me saying, but she didn't look like the sort of person who would be travelling to Edinburgh to have sex with a man she'd never met. And then she told us that when she was 16 she'd had a white boyfriend, and her parents had taken her to Pakistan on holiday. When they got there they said she wasn't coming back, and that she could either train as a doctor or get married. Then they left.

She was there for seven years, and came back to the UK as a qualified doctor, whereupon she married pretty much the first man she met. He turned out to be a) lazy and b) violent, and a few years later she divorced him, bringing double shame on the family. We met her a few years after *that*, where she was having random sex with men she met via personal ads.

I have thought of her from time to time, perhaps most recently when I was watching a TV programme about the porn industry. Asked how she ended up in her line of work, one of the actresses explained how her dad used to rape her when she was a child. Now she makes porn films to get back at him -- all these men can have her seventeen ways to Sunday, but he can't touch her. Look what you're missing, dad! It was fair heartbreaking, it was.

On the face of it, Little Miss White Trash Porn Star and Dr Abedin have nothing whatever in common, but R, the woman on the train, made a link for me. I wish them all well, but there are mountains to climb.

So all I really want for Christmas is for women (everywhere -- not just the stroppy difficult ones) to be able to define themselves, carve out their own space in the world and inhabit it, rather than have their lives bounded by the expectations, the reflections, and the desires -- real and perceived -- of the people who have more power than they do and do not use it well. Oh and for the Pope to Get An Afterlife and leave this one to people who know what they're talking about. 

Since that's all up there with the moon on a stick, I'll settle for a new bottle of Yardley Sandalwood Eau de Toilette, the perfume of switched on spinsters everywhere.

joella

Topical poll

I could do this as a proper poll in the sidebar, as I have seen other bloggers do. But I don't envisage doing it often, and I know people get here mostly by accident (which is fine, this being the internet) or by design (which is better, but sidebar polls do not show up in feed readers).

So... the topic of the evening, with R & Ms Y and housemate P and post parsnip soup and sloe gin was -- who should Madonna go out with next?

The various suggestions were...

a) Justin Timberlake
b) George Formby (assuming he wasn't, you know, dead)
c) George Clooney
d) Grace Jones
e) M (though given the choice he'd go for Bjork)
f) P Diddy
g) Bill Clinton

It's a tricky one, and your thoughts would be welcome.

joella

Between the Lines

There are two things I often want to blog about and don't.

1. Work. As previously mentioned, NGO X has a blogging policy. This means I can't say anything BAD about the place, or anything MEAN about anyone who works there. So if, say, I felt that there were some DUMB things happening, I would have to keep them under my virtual hat. I'm not saying that, of course. I'm just saying that there's a box of wine in the fridge.

2. The challenges of stepmotherhood, which come and go in a way I cannot anticipate, especially at this most fraught time of year. I *thought* we'd made it perfectly clear that there were no obligations, no strings, see you whenever, but an unwelcome third-party analysis suggests otherwise. I'm not saying it's not hard for them. I'm just saying there's a box of wine in the fridge.

joella

Woolly thoughts

I can't say I did much to save Woolworths, but then there hasn't been one in Oxford city centre since I've lived here, or not so as I can remember anyway. But I'm far from the first to note that it has a special place in the national psyche, and mine is no different -- even though I hate Pick'N'Mix.

Lytham Woolworths: small-ish, surprisingly well stocked and recently closed. The site was purchased by Tesco, which is alarming in itself, but that's for another time. I spent many, many hours in this shop as a teenager, as it was the only local source of music once The Disc Centre became a handbag shop. A girl I once babysat worked in there when she left school -- her name was Johanna. Whenever I bought blank C90s from her she would look right through me (to be fair, I was not very good at babysitting), and I would notice that her name badge said 'Helen' or 'Andrea' or anything female except Johanna. I asked my mother, who knew her mother, about this once, and she said that they were required to wear a name badge, presumably so people could complain (or, I guess, write letters of fulsome praise) about them, but nobody actually said it had to be their own. I rather admired the low-level anarchy of this action.

Cambridge Woolworths: big, central, and featuring, at least in the late 1980s, a formica-tastic cafe on the first floor. I've never admitted this in public before, but I used to hide out in there on my own when I first went to university, so overwhelmed was I by the poshness and unfamiliarity of gowns and drinks parties and teenagers with their own cafetieres. In my first term I would take a book up there and drink milkshakes and eat toasted teacakes and smoke cheap cigarettes and look out the window and wonder if I'd made a terrible mistake. Then I would go back downstairs and buy some blank C90s and get on with it.

I can sort of see why what's happened has happened ... unclear retail proposition, online competition blah blah blah. But I wonder where, in the future, will we be able to buy a hot water bottle, a Tupperware box, some glitter pens, daffodil bulbs and a large box of Dairy Milk all under one comforting roof?

joella

Seasonal oppression

Here it comes again. I feel overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time. There must be a word for this?

The house is a mess, and this is compounded by a) the makings of various home made gifts (austerity Christmas, you see -- more stressful than you think it's going to be) and b) the fact that it's freezing (austerity gas consumption), so the colder rooms have an air of neglect. This includes the bathroom, which has a radiator that's on but about to spring a leak, just to add a little edge to things. The bathroom is mainly used by housemate P... I don't know when his cleaning gene kicks in, but I've seen no sign of it yet.

A couple of weeks ago, I thought I would cheer myself up by buying something from the Gudrun Sjoden sale. But as with so many mail order things, it just doesn't look right on. So that's another post office queue to endure.

On the other hand, I don't have any plumbing this week, and I am off to buy a samosa in the sunshine.

joella

Of rats and rock stars

I was stashing my plumbing stuff in the shed on Monday afternoon when M came out to empty the mixing bowl of compostables into the compost bin. He took the lid off the bin and then yelped. He yelps rather fetchingly, but it's always hard to tell whether it's something serious (eg he's fallen off a ladder while holding the electric hedge trimmer) or not (eg there's an episode of The Simpsons on that he hasn't seen yet).

It was a rat, rapidly disappearing into the cabbage leaves and coffee grounds. And no, we have never added any meat, fish, bread, or cooked food to the compost, nor, for the last couple of years, any egg shells. And still we are infested. I blame the cold. And the students. Most things are their fault.

Our local council offer a free rat management service (which gives you an idea of the extent of the rat issue in these parts) so, after a little vegetarian soul searching, I booked a visit from the rat man. Those who have already met him claim he is exactly what you would expect -- "there's something medieval about him" -- so I'm kind of looking forward to it in a life's rich tapestry sort of way. But also oppressed by having vermin to deal with as well as a leaky roof and a global recession. No fair.

And it's absolutely freezing, and I've got a cold coming on, so the next day I was beginning to wish I *hadn't* agreed to go all the way to sodding Birmingham to see Jarvis Cocker on a school night. I just wanted to stay in with a hot water bottle and a good book and forget about the world out there.

But, as my Significant Ex used to say, it's amazing how wrong one person can be. For it was a near-perfect gig experience, despite being held in a Carling *spit* Academy, where there is no proper beer and they won't let you buy water in a bottle, never mind take it in, and the annual toilet paper budget is used up by the middle of February.

Against all odds, we found the venue and managed to park close by, then bought our Guinnesses and found a spot that was acceptable for me (5'4"), for P (boyfriend of one of M's daughters, who is something like 6'6"), and for our respective companions (both somewhere in between). The place filled up benignly around us, the support band were pretty good, we gradually warmed up and then on he came.

For the first half of the set, he bore an uncanny resemblance to Mr W, the man who taught me Physical Geography in the sixth form. This was quite confusing, as I do not recall finding Mr W remotely attractive, though he did unknowingly play a cameo role on the day of my deflowering.

By the end he looked much more like the beardy one out of Parts & Labor, or indeed several other beardy geek noise merchants, and calm was restored.

And from start to finish, he rocked, in a funny, clever, cool, Northern, totally right on but not at all earnest sort of a way. I don't think there's anyone else who can do that. I was completely into it, in that rest of the world falling away, nowhere else I'd rather be sense. I don't get that feeling very often, but it's up there with the best feelings in the world when it happens.

And it was even better because it was unexpected... we have a copy of Jarvis in the house but I've never got into it. Seeing it live, it all made sense.

The first encore ended with Don't Let Him Waste Your Time, which is a beautiful song to hear a rock star singing. I was suddenly reminded again of Mr W, and had a little vision of him shrugging off his anorak and flinging himself around the playing fields singing it to me as I blinked back my first 'was that it? And why is he ignoring me?' teenage tears.

I don't think I'd have listened to him, though. You have to find some things out the hard way, and thank god we have music for when we do.

joella

The mathematician and the Muslim

I left the room because nobody wanted to talk about poverty and faith and gender, and that's my topic of the day. I went to a seriously interesting talk about this (among many other things) at lunchtime, so in a way I started it, but it went off in its own direction and I was suddenly on the outside.

Housemate P was talking about faith. M was talking about maths.

But what happened, said P, before there was algebra?

There's always been algebra, said M. There might not have been anyone around to experience it, but it was still there. All of existence is numbers. Numbers is all of existence.

Heck. I shall go and tend the fire. *There's* something I believe in.

joella

Sloe business

A month ago, there were two litres of sloe gin, steeping, we said as we stabbed the sloes with forks, for Christmas. Now there is one litre.

I have no regrets. The sloe gathering was huge fun, and only minor injuries were sustained. Likewise the preparation. The end product, even with inadequate steepage, was glorious. No lives were lost, and many arguments were augmented.

No, the problem is as follows: I'd like to see if we can get more sloe gin out of the prematurely drained sloes, by adding more gin and more sugar to the empty (bar sloes) bottle. It's a high risk manoeuvre, but it might just work. M agrees the risk is high, and would like to spread it across both bottles: decant half the gin from the already steeped litre into the drained one, then add more sugar and gin to both. I would rather risk losing a litre of cheap gin (well, 750 ml, the rest is sloes) by adding sugar to it and have nothing else happen than compromise the quality of our remaining purple ambrosia. 

What to do (given that there is still a month to go till Christmas)?

joella

Post-viral reality TV

Right, I said to M last night as we watched Survivors, if I get it first, fill the bath with cold water. And every pan in the house. Maybe we should get a water butt after all.

Jo, he said, it's television. It's not really happening.

Hmm, I said. OK, let's have another sloe gin.

Later, the ethnically diverse bunch of sensible women (apart from the one in shock) and aggressive men (apart from the little boy) that were left to carry on the human race stood on the fast lane of the M25 and wondered where to go.

Well somewhere with a well and a septic tank, obviously, I said. Like, duh.

Jo, he said.

OK, OK, I said. But you know, if J the plumber and M the Field Secretary have made it, I reckon we'll be all right.

joella

No BNP near me

A request came round this week to join a 'working party' on the allotments this morning -- there was a chopped down tree to clear, and some hedging to plant. It was a glorious morning, so we girded our loins, rugged up and got on down there. I wasn't really sure what to do, but direction was provided, and pretty soon we were lopping and wheeling and dragging dead wood up the site and handing it over to a man who was building a bonfire with the look of someone who has been building bonfires for many years. It was amazing how quickly the tree was broken down and shifted, and then we started digging holes for hazel and buckthorn and spindle.

After a couple of hours, we knocked the dirt off our spades and began taking our leave -- M had offered housemate P a lift to the bus stop with his music gear, and anyway our lower backs were feeling the pinch. Well you can't go *yet*, said M the Field Secretary. We're just about to have a drink. And he produced a bottle of Southern Comfort which he proceeded to mix with hot blackcurrant squash from a giant Thermos and hand round in plastic beakers.

Southern Comfort was briefly my drink of choice, just after my vodka and lime phase. I decided it was cool, in the same way I decided that Sobranie Cocktail cigarettes were cool, and I drank it, and smoked them (on special occasions -- the rest of the time it was mostly Embassy Regal), until I moved onto beer and roll ups when I became a Proper Student.

I've hardly had Southern Comfort since, for the very good reason that it is pretty disgusting, but this was different. It was a hot sweet drink on a cold sharp day, stomping on the ground to keep warm, looking around and laughing with everyone taking the serious piss out of Joe Swift, and realising that I was the youngest and the smallest and the only female person there, and certainly (with the possible exception of M) knew the least about growing vegetables, but that this didn't, at that moment, matter one iota. Knowledge comes, and I can drag a chunk of tree with the best of them.

I set off home feeling warm of heart, muzzy of head and heavy of foot, as there was a massive clump of clay firmly attached to each of my wellies. There was a clear need for snacks, so I took a detour via the Best Samosa Shop In Town, a tiny, friendly Muslim-run newsagent on Magdalen Road where I made my purchases on the threshold because by the time I got there I was shedding mud with every step.

Then I poured a glass of white and spent a little while getting to know my enemy by perusing the leaked list of BNP members. Lancashire doesn't come out of it well, I have to say, and there is one on the street I grew up on, which is rather sad but not that surprising. But Oxford, for a city, doesn't do so bad. You can see the list on wikileaks, or for a neat graphic representation, which doesn't name names, check out BNP Near Me? You'd think, looking at that, that the centre of Oxford was completely BNP free, but scrutiny of the list reveals that there is one instance where the OX4 postcode has been typo-ed as OX41. A&L, he's on your street. Sorry about that.

But I'm looking on the bright side. The bonfire will be lit on the winter solstice, and there will be more Southern Comfort and stomping to do.

joella

Willing to fight?

I bought the Guardian as usual on Saturday, having returned to the newspapers, if not the radio, with the Obama victory. I normally buy it, with a loaf of Polish bread, from our local Asian newsagents. This week though, I bought it in the Co-op, from the smiling young man of African extraction who usually makes a point of asking if I have any ID, and then laughing a lot, because from him I am usually buying wine.

But he wasn't smiling when I handed the paper over. 'Everybody wants to talk about Baby P', he said. There was nobody waiting behind me, and we both stood there together for a few moments, looking down at the photo of him on the front page. It felt like we should mark the unspeakable awfulness of it, but we didn't have a very good way of doing it.

To be frank, I felt much the same way about the Remembrance Sunday ceremony I attended the previous weekend while I was Up North visiting the parentals. My dad came out of the cafe opposite the War Memorial at about 30 seconds to 11, stayed for the two minutes silence and then disappeared back in. I lasted a little bit longer on either side, but not much. 'I didn't expect there to be so much God stuff in it,' I said as I squeezed back into the booth. And I didn't -- he did, which is why he timed his cheese toastie with such precision: he's done this before. Atheists want to do their remembering too.

To make matters worse it was the unchallenging yet somehow non-inclusive sort of God stuff that I find so non-comforting at funerals. Every self-important civic dignitary, committee member and general do-gooder in town was there, plus some embarrassed looking naval cadets, a sprinkling of elderly veterans and a truly awful brass band. But that was about it. Large swathes of the Great British Public, in fact, were largely unrepresented, maybe because they couldn't be arsed, but also because I suspect it would have been as irrelevant, or worse, a ceremony to the great majority as it was to me. And I think we should be able to do better than that.

I always buy, and wear, a red poppy, and when I can get hold of one I wear a white poppy too. When I was at school I used to buy two red ones and paint one of them with Tipp-Ex (which is quite sweet when I look back at it), because I had no idea where to get a white one. There still weren't any other white poppies on display in small town Lancashire last weekend. Can't say I'm surprised: to my mind, the white poppy is for the grey areas, and I didn't sense much desire to acknowledge those.

joella

Me, my dad, and Lytham windmill

Me and my dad
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

We were on our way to the second hand bookshop. The wind was like icy knives, the fighter planes were roaring over on their practice runs from Warton, and we were talking about the demise of Preston docks.

And then the sun came out. Sometimes I wonder, why would I want to be anywhere else?

joella

We have lift off! (Probably)

So BJ the plumbing assessor looked at my plasterboard chase photo, looked sideways at me and said 'are you left-handed?'.

Yes, I said.

Hmmm, he said. And then he signed it off.

So unless the small detail of it being the wrong type of wall is picked up by the IV (internal verifier) or the EV (external verifier), I have finished my NVQ.

Congratulations lass, he said, shaking my hand. Cheers, I said, grinning like an idiot.

He gave me a receipt for my folder. I shall stick that on the wall till the certificate arrives. I agreed to come back and have my photo taken for diversity purposes. A genuine woman! And a left-hander!

And now I'm off to Lancashire to connect with my past and convene with my kin. And raise a glass to the free world.

joella

Interim review

What feels like a long time ago, but was probably about four years, I took a deep breath and walked into a plumber's merchants on a Saturday morning. 'I'd like a WC siphon please', I said, when the man behind the counter eventually looked over at me.

'Round or square'? he said.

Shit. I had no idea, as the thing I had in mind had kind of rounded bits and kind of square bits. I nearly legged it and never went back, but instead I blushed and said 'um, can I see them both?'.

It was a square one, most of them are. In fact I've only ever seen one round one and it was from the 1950s. The cistern was made from asbestos. I'm sure he knew that.

On Monday I went into see D, the plumber's merchant that J the plumber introduced me to. They've known each other since they were 10, and call each other 'Marmite mangler', which seems to me to be a 10 year old's insult if ever there was one.

All right? he said. What can I do for you today?

I need a WC siphon please, I said. Low level? he said. No, close-coupled, I said. And it needs to be kind of short. Eight inch two-part do you? he said. Perfect, I said. And a doughnut washer, please.

Rubber or foam? he said. Oooh, I said, I've only used the foam ones. What do you think?

I'd go for rubber, he said, you get a bit more give.

Rubber it is then, I said. (And he was right). In fact I got two, and am currently wearing the other one as a sort of 80s-style bangle.

I'm still waiting for the final photo opportunity that will seal my NVQ (I thought a plasterboard chase would do, but turns out it needs to be masonry). But nonetheless, there is progress.

joella

F**kin' A!

Nice work America! This is my favourite version of the song of the year. Be grateful I'm sparing you the Billy Bragg version, which is heartwarming but also kind of shit.



joella

Evening in America?

If evening in America is the end of the day that began with Reagan's Morning, then I do So Hope So. I am more excited than I expected to be, and more anxious than I'd like to be. I've had a Genius playlist based on Young Americans on all day, which I'm tempering now with a bit of Gil Scott Heron, and I'm wondering what time to set the alarm for. This might be the first time I turn on the Today Programme in weeks.

But I remember 1992, when we went to bed thinking we might have a Labour government, or at worst a hung parliament, and woke up to five years of John Major. I was teaching A level sociology in a crammer college in Oxford at the time. I walked around all day saying 'how can so many people be so stupid?', and being met with incredulous / condescending / outright hostile stares.

That was the day I realised three important things:

1. There are a lot of Tories in the world and they are not all older than me (they weren't even all older than me *then*)
2. I should have paid the damn Poll Tax and voted Labour. Instead I refused to join the electoral register and lost my vote. I've always wondered how many other people did exactly the same, and what effect our votes might have had.
3. People lie in exit polls. It had never occurred to me that you might vote one way and say you had voted another. I defend your right to do so, but it sucks.

So... it ain't over till the skinny black guy says Yes We Can. But the signs are good, the signs are good.

joella

Because I'm worth it

Last Friday I had a meeting with my mentor. He is someone I see every couple of months -- I explain what I'm trying to do at work and he picks gentle holes in it. I close the hole, and another one appears. After a couple of hours he says 'yes, that just about makes sense' and I leave feeling a bit tender but much happier. It's very therapeutic. And the idea is that I do a better job as a result, which is why NGO X is prepared to spring for an off peak train ticket to London and a sandwich afterwards.

Normally I try and combine this with another meeting in London, as by the time I've got myself back to the office it's hardly worth it, but last Friday I decided instead to take the afternoon off. I was on the South Bank, so I thought of the Hayward or Tate Modern, but those are default choices. I wanted to be intrepid.

Intrepidness also involves avoiding the Tube, so I decided to go somewhere I could walk to. I settled on the Imperial War Museum, which I don't think I've been to before (or if I have it was a long, long time ago). I got most of the way there by walking along the river, past the London Aquarium, which awoke my Blackpool nerve endings... water noises, chill wind, the smell of cheap food, hordes of disoriented people having organised fun a long way from home.

In the IWM cafe, I read my book about growing vegetables over a homity pie and a glass of red, which led to a conversation about the trials of clay soil and the joys of sweetcorn with an elderly couple with cut-glass accents. Turned out he owns a farm just outside Oxford. She lives in Chiswick. I suspect they were having an assignation.

I stumbled into a First World War trench on the way to the loo, which was interesting, but I still had Blackpool on my mind and it was a bit too reminiscent of the Gold Mine ride on the Pleasure Beach. Anyway, what I'd really come to see was the Holocaust Exhibition.

I've been to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and to the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam, and seen various films and read various books - most recently The Lost, by Daniel Mendelsohn (a hefty tome that I read in Finland and which M dubbed 'Jo's Bumper Book of Jews'). I've learned something from all of them. But the exhibition at the IWM is easily, far and away, the best thing I've ever seen, read, watched or listened to on the subject. It manages to combine the sort of historical analysis that can only happen from a reasonable distance with survivors' testimony that can only be gathered from living memories. I was in there for hours, and then, by the exit, I sat down and wept.

I started to wander through the In Memoriam exhibition about WW1 afterwards, which is also excellent, but I couldn't really take it in. So instead I wandered around the park outside for a while, then headed back over the river to meet my friend R after work. I did this by getting on a bus, and I was incredibly pleased with myself for managing to avoid rush hour Tube hell *and* get a great top-deck view all the way over Westminster Bridge and into Soho.

I was hoping I could persuade R into the Intrepid Fox, which I used to love. I wanted a shot of the legendary, terrifying toilets for my collection. But sadly, it is boarded up. We went instead to the gorgeous Busaba, and then to a strange little wine cafe on Lexington Street where we squeezed into the tiniest space imaginable and drank something exorbitantly priced but delicious while trying (and failing) not to bang our heads on the legs of ham swinging from hooks around the place. Not that it was a problem, we were too busy talking talking talking.

I couldn't avoid the Tube forever, and I used it to get myself to Paddington in time for the last sensible train back to Oxford. En route I checked my phone to find a text message confirming a rumour that I hadn't dared really believe might be true. I was hoping M would be up to help me celebrate, but figured I would probably, in my half cut state, be rather annoying company. But then halfway home I looked up at a familiar window, to see someone leaning out of it, surveying the street scene. It wasn't C, as I had expected, but his 17 year old daughter G, who invited me up. There was a little session going on, of the sort I almost never get to take part in these days. I wondered at the appropriateness of this, and then thought 'fuck it'.

So I got home smelling of smoke and pork, giggling a little and giddy with happiness. I"m guessing most people's Me Time won't look anything like mine, and I wouldn't try and persuade you that it should. But I would try and persuade you that it's worth taking some. The glow still hasn't quite worn off.

joella

Many switch in, switch on, switch off

Got a text message from local government the other day
Opened it and read it, it said they were suckers
Wanted me to put out my blue recycling box and garden waste bag for collection before 7 am tomorrow
Picture me giving a damn?
I said ooh, I'm glad I subscribed to that, I'd have forgotten otherwise.

joella
 

Recession playlist: track #3

The Bevis Frond's Maybe - part obliteration, part all seeing. A mainstay of my soundtrack to the last recession, and important for other reasons too. At least one boat is named for this song.

And are we the worst, who see it all, and still refuse to act?

Yeah, maybe.

joella

Party like it's 1991

I'm just back from a municipal swimming experience. Which is better than no swimming experience at all, but it did make me pine for the lake. In the lake, you could swim and swim and swim, turning thoughts over in your mind until they came to rest naturally.

And while I was there, swimming in the lake, I thought a lot about calmness, and how I should strive for more of it. Which of course I forgot as soon as I got home and got furious with the shrieking students and the parking hell and the relentless greyness and the price of butter. But as I was swimming today, for the first time in ages, my muscles seemed to remember, and I found myself thinking about calmness again.

I get angry too quickly. Not as quickly as J the plumber, who goes from 0 to C-word in about five seconds, but too quickly. With people, not with things. I am quite patient with things. But with people, I get furious, because they are so often Inconsiderate Or Just Plain Thick. Or are they?

Take the students next door (I wish someone would, BA BOOM!). Now, I graduated into a recession, and it wasn't much fun. Some people got jobs, but they were mostly the ones who had confused me by suddenly cutting their hair and putting on a suit around the beginning of their third year. That was their "student experience", and now it was time for their "junior financial analyst experience". Or whatever.

Those of us without a five year plan, or an old school tie network, who had thought we'd maybe see what happened next, found that what happened next was we signed on. My dad kept asking me when I was going to become a yuppie, I wrapped my oversized Oxfam overcoat more tightly around me and glared at him.

And got wrecked. A lot. For quite a long time. It was great fun. But it was also about the only thing that made any sense. And we were a luckier generation than this lot -- we were impoverished but we weren't hugely indebted. Nobody delivered us pizzas, so we could more or less cook; nobody had invented alcopops, so we drank cheap beer, and we didn't have mobile phones or laptops or iPods to maintain. It was all a lot more manageable. I'm also pretty sure we spent considerably less on personal grooming. Or maybe that was just me.

After a year or so, I borrowed some money and went travelling with my Significant Ex for a year, during which I'm pretty sure we spent less than we would have if we'd stayed at home. Eventually, of course, I did get a job, and pretty grim it was too. But that's another story.

So I do have sympathy with my neighbours' regular, valiant attempts to obliterate reality by means of vodka, class As and screaming*. It's cold, and it's going to get colder. And if you've been overindulged to the extent that you tumble dry your washing all year round, it's going to be tough when those bills start coming in and your dad's not paying them anymore.  

joella

* Not limitless sympathy, mind. Though they have been a lot better since M went round in his pink dressing gown and yelled 'I'm not interested in 'sorry', I'm interested in you shutting up'. 

Middle room finds fame

M's band's first YouTube video - shot by M himself (he asked me to do it, but I was too embarrassed: I am possibly fleetingly visible making soup in the kitchen) in our middle room.

Advisory: mostly work-safe, but does contain the clearly discernible word "wanking".

joella

Keep Calm And Carry On

I'm basically living in a self-imposed news blackout at the moment. I am waking up to silence rather than the Today programme, avoiding news.bbc.co.uk (a harder thing to do than I ever imagined), switching off the television set (not very hard at all) and not buying newspapers.

It's not that I don't care about global economic meltdown, but there is Nothing I Can Do. For anxious people, this is all the chickens come home to roost. We secretly knew they would. We hate being right.

But I can see no point in immersing myself in the current media frenzy, with its heated debates and BIG DOWNWARD POINTING ARROWS. It doesn't help, it just makes the dull screaming noise that's usually far in the distance much, much louder. I don't need the dull screaming noise right now. I've got stuff to do.

The dust will settle, and I will re-engage. A lot of it will be bad, but there are good bits too. One of them, of course, is the death of Thatcherism. I am glad she lived to see it. There are many, many things that the free market will never provide, and they are mostly the same many, many things that are worth celebrating about humanity.

So here's to more human times, eventually, and in the meantime check out this glorious Steve Bell cartoon. I broke my news blackout for this one, and it's going on the wall.

joella

joella

No blanket

One of my oldest friends is waiting for her decree absolute. I know her finances are precarious, and these are times when we all need some friendliness around, and you know, I love this woman, so the other night I gave her a ring.

It was one of those decisions where you wonder if there is a sort of sixth sense at work. It was her birthday, but she was in bed when I called at 9pm. I was on my way down to the Co-op for a bottle of wine, she was exhausted. The usual -- a long day at work plus solo early evening grappling with a recalcitrant three year old (possibly with a sixth sense of her own) -- but - happy birthday! - compounded by a letter from the lawyer of her nearly-ex husband. Something to do with the mortgage -- I didn't see any logic in the details, in fact the whole thing sounded rather bizarre and unhinged.

Which was what was troubling her. 'It's out of character, Jo,' she said. 'And that's when I get scared'.

This is a man who I know goes on days-long vodka and cocaine benders. He gets through cash like it's water. He's a useless waste of space, with fading looks and waning charm. And he has been a spectacularly rubbish husband and father. But... scared?

Scared? I said. But he's never... has he?

There was one of those silences when your stomach lurches, when you know there's something big that you didn't know, should you have known? Did she say something that you should have heard? Or did she not want you to know? If you had known, what would you have done? What could you have done?

Well, she said quietly, that's why the baby was born prematurely.

I was home by this point, bottle of wine open, red mist forming, tears rolling. Mate, I said, I am so sorry. I didn't know. I am so sorry.

I regret and resent every ounce of effort and energy I have ever expended on this man. But I also know that it won't be the last time -- there will be more instances in my life when I will prioritise the feelings of and cook food and pour wine for men and (more rarely, but not never) women who are abusing people I care about.

Usually, as in this case, I will not know what is happening. But not always. The first time I swallowed my disgust at the behaviour of the boyfriend of one of my friends, I was fifteen years old and she had an eating disorder. I said what I thought, and it wasn't me who got the hard time, it was her. What do you do?

I am not claiming moral high ground here, and in fact I don't think there is any. I have sustained bruises and gone back for more -- a long time ago now, but you don't forget -- and it could happen again, it could happen to anyone. One of the formative moments of my life was reading a -- I was going to write Guardian but it was before I was buying my own newspapers and my parents are not Guardian readers so probably -- Times article about Hedda Nussbaum's relationship with Joel Steinberg. She was a well-educated, middle class Jewish girl. He would beat her up and make her sleep in the bath, with only a blanket, "except when he said 'no blanket'".

I have been haunted by the words 'no blanket' all my adult life. They make me a kinder person as well as a more aware one. Technically, we all have the potential to be the abuser as well as the abused. The hippie in me says, let's just not fuck each other over for a bit, right? Life's hard enough right now. The pragmatist in me says, let's do the right thing by each other when it happens.

Now, where's my axe?

joella

Recession playlist: track #2

This one's for Gordon. I used to love this song back when I had a broken heart in the dark days of Thatcherism.

joella

Under Sink Cupboard

Under Sink Cupboard
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

We plumber-sociologists can tell a lot about a person by the state of the cupboard under their kitchen sink. I've seen a lot of these cupboards, not because I've worked on a lot of kitchen sinks (although I have worked on a few) but because that is usually where you find the mains stop tap -- and even if it's not there, it's the first place you look.

They are often pretty disgusting places. This is for two main reasons:

1. Hardly anyone ever cleans them out. A clean bathroom is no indicator of a clean under-sink-cupboard (USC) -- in fact a clean bathroom often means that the person who lives there pays someone else to clean it. You deal with your USC yourself, you do, and it separates the men from the boys.

2. They are wet and/or greasy. New kitchens are often put in in a tearing hurry, no corner left uncut, and the traps leak or the seal round the sink doesn't work properly, or, as in the case of our cheap kitchen sink and every other cheap kitchen sink like it, the pop up waste is a load of leaky old shit and the water gets in round the edges and drips straight down onto the Brillo pads underneath, creating a big lump of smelly sticky rust. (There are not words for how much I hate pop up wastes. They should be banned. But that's another story).

Sometimes you find that USC is empty. This is either because the customer has thought ahead and cleared it out -- that's only happened to me once -- or because they don't own any cleaning products. These people will also not have any milk. They are squatters in their own homes. They will probably have a big leather sofa though, and their new sanitaryware will be oversized and cheap. I do not often warm to these people.

Other times, you will find that it is so absolutely rammed with random crap that it takes about 20 minutes to empty it. This is especially frustrating when it turns out that the stop tap is not actually in there after all, but you don't find that out until you've decanted years and multiples of methylated spirit, J-cloths, picnic paraphernalia, tea lights, shoe polish, light bulbs, hoover bags, paint brushes, pet food etc. These people will also have a fridge full of random crap, some of it also not excavated for years. Their bathroom will be painted in an unexpected colour, which they'll have done themselves and never quite finished. It will be impossible to work in without knocking over an MFI shelving unit that contains 47 bottles of random toiletries, and it will feature lots of cobwebs. These people buy TOO MUCH STUFF, all of it cheap. They watch lifestyle programmes on TV but never manage to change their lifestyles. They are forthcoming with cups of tea, though, and nearly always have biscuits in.

Other times again, it will just be a bit manky and contain brushes, cloths, rubber gloves, cleaning products, washing powder, dishwasher tablets and the household carrier bag collection. If they're in, these people will apologise profusely for the mess it's in and insist on emptying it themselves. You might not even need to go there, because these are the people who also know where their stop tap is, and turn that off themselves as well. They clean their toilets regularly, including the walls and floor around it, and they also often have real coffee. They generally find a plumber first and then decide what to do, rather than spending a fortune in Bathstore on stuff that will never look right in their house or work right with their plumbing. These are the slightly anxious people and I like them best.

Possibly because I've had so many of them inflicted on me, cleaning out my own USC has been on my to do list for about two years, even though the only person who I'm likely to inflict it on is myself. Last weekend, I did it. Check it out.

I probably don't need to add that I am very pleased with myself. In the process I discovered a bottle of descaler, so I descaled the kettle (satisfying); I discovered an ancient bottle of Lemon Ajax and a Spontex scourer, so I cleaned the outside of the kettle (*very* satisfying); and I discovered a packet of silver dip cleaner, so I cleaned all the silver plated cutlery that used to be M's mother's and had been slowly turning black (*incredibly* satisfying).

Rainy Sunday afternoons aren't all bad. They allow one's hidden domestic goddess a brief moment in the sun.

joella

Recession playlist: track #1

Here's a good starter. I reckon we'll be onto Leonard Cohen by the end of the week.

joella

What's in an honorific?

In my second year at Cambridge, I shared a set of rooms with my (female) friend E. We had a party, the table (visible in the background in its undamaged state) got damaged, and a repair bill, addressed to Mr L and Mr D, duly arrived from the Clerk of Works. I went into their offices waving it around and demanding an explanation. They had a list of everyone's names, in fact they were the people who painted people's names on their doors at the beginning of the year, and in those days (and possibly still) men were just listed by surname while women were called Miss. So it's not like it would have been *hard* to ascertain that we were in fact women. Well, they explained, we just address all our students as Mr, it's usually right.

I'm not paying it, I said, until you actually address it to me. I'd like to think I flounced out, but I expect I stomped. And, if memory serves, a new bill to Miss L and Miss D was forthcoming.

I didn't have the stamina at that point to challenge the Miss -- I was a Miss when I got there and a Miss when I left and am a Miss to them still, but everywhere else, ever since there have been forms to fill in, I've been ticking the Ms box.

It's great being a Ms. I remember when I opened my first bank account at 15, running my fingers over the MS that was embossed on the cash card, and thinking 'I chose that'. I love it when they ask, as they still SO OFTEN do, 'is that Miss or Mrs?' Neither, I still SO OFTEN enjoy saying, it's Ms. Yeah, I can see some of them thinking, that figures. I don't care. I am happy to be defined by the fact that I won't be defined by my marital status. Make of it what you will, that's why I do it.

And every now and again, especially online, you see a form that just has Mr or Ms as the main options. That, brothers and sisters, is progress. You'd never have seen that in the 80s. Although, now I think about it, it still doesn't leave space for people who identify as neither male nor female. I am not sure they have any option except to get themselves a PhD.

But it's not all progress. As I get older, and have to talk to people about boring grown up things, those who used to default to Miss (which is at least technically accurate) now default to Mrs. What I particularly hate, and I'm sure I'm not alone, is when someone rings up for M, aka Mr D, and I answer instead. "Is that Mrs D?", they say, in that flat monotone that call centre people have.

"There *is* no Mrs D," I say in my scariest voice. "Well, actually, there is, but she's in the attic."

And then yesterday I had the pleasure of calling an anonymous appliance service centre FOUR TIMES, because our cooker is playing up, and I can't get through a recession without a working hob, thank you very much. The whole experience, with the automated menu that doesn't have any of your options, the checking with the kitchen installer to find out where the gas isolation valve might be, the inexplicably getting cut off twice, was so exhausting that I didn't have the energy to disentangle myself from the lazy assumption that only married women might need their burners servicing. Fnarr.

The phone rang this morning and it was the engineer, telling me what time he'd be coming round. 'Is that Mrs L?', he said. Yes, I said. Yes it is.

joella

Know your onions

I get very upset when I stand behind people in supermarkets who are buying those microwavable cheeseburgers already in a bun. Food is one of life's greatest pleasures, and we've never had it so good, but you have to know what to do with it, and millions of people don't.

These days I sometimes go to Sainsburys on a Saturday morning with ex-housemate S and baby Tungsten. She's come a long way from the days when she'd ring me up from the Co-op in Botley and say 'what should I buy?', but she'll still stand there at the meat counter and ask me questions about stew. S, I say, I haven't eaten meat since 1983. I've never cooked the stuff. I have no sodding idea.

Her mother was what used to be called a 'good plain cook'. Her cheese and onion pie was one of the highlights of my late adolescence. But S was the youngest of five, and somehow never learnt. Most of her recipes are mine. Most of *mine* I made up in my early 20s, many of them based on things that the mother of my Significant Ex used to cook on her Aga. When I was living at home, I somehow never learnt either.

I'd never cooked anything till I went to university. My first recipe was pasta with sauce made from a tin of chopped tomatoes mixed with packets of minestrone Cup A Soup. The soup had croutons. It was kind of crunchy. I can't believe I fed this to people. But I worked at it, and these days I am a passable cook. I am best at soups and things which spend a long time in the oven, like roasted vegetables and pasta bakes. I think this must be an Aga throwback thing.

This is a rather long-winded way of admitting that I am again taking my hat off to Jamie Oliver, if as begrudgingly as last time-- he still gets right on my tits. The first episode of the Ministry of Food made me cry. If we lived in a decent social democracy this would be a public health issue the government addressed at its root, as in fact it did during the war, but as we in fact live in a celebrity-obsessed Daily Mail reading dystopia, it's down to Jamie to enrich the lives of those single mothers on benefits. 

But if he *can* get people learning how to boil spaghetti, it might just save us all. It's not just poor people who can't cook, I've seen plenty of middle class fridges full of Waitrose ready meals and mouldering bags of salad, but it's mainly poor people who live in such a nutritional desert, with all. The reasons for this stretch back forever, as Felicity Lawrence explains very well, and will stretch forward forever too if we don't do something about it. It's a national tragedy. 

joella

Joe Six Pack And His Slippery Slope To Socialism

You know, I almost feel sorry for George W. First he started a really stupid war by lying about stuff, and as a result we worked out that his 'serious' face was not to be trusted. So the next time he put his serious face on nobody believed him, and as a result he's presiding over the sudden disintegration of global capitalism. What's a cowboy to do?

I don't have any shares and my pension was most of a hill short of a hill of beans anyway, so as long as I have enough of a job to cover my share of the mortgage, and M has enough work coming in to cover his, I reckon we'll work something out. Neither of us has a credit card, and we have learnt how to grow onions, potatoes, broad beans and (tbc) brussels sprouts, so we can move into Austerity Mode at fairly short notice. There's a lot to be said for being low maintenance. As Plumbing S said, while taking a chainsaw to another fallen tree, 'I might be oil-poor but I'm wood-rich'.

On the home front, I have taken Mr B's advice and found a secret weapon in the War Against Brookesalikes. Our new housemate is black and 6'3". I was telling him about the recent shrieking issues. Oh, I'll go round next time, he said. When I ask people to keep the noise down they usually do, for some reason.

I'm almost looking forward to it.

joella

I'm still afraid of America

... which is probably why - instead of being in bed like a sensible person - I'm still drinking vodka, watching the jaw-dropping Twitter Election Feed and wondering if I can stay awake through the televised debate or should go to bed and consume the mediated version in the morning...

joella

Watching the students #1

They've not been so bad yet really. Tonight though there was that noise that you know augers ill. That noise which is largely made up of bad dance music combined with shrieking at a volume that can only be achieved with heightened levels of intoxication, with all the doors and windows open. And it was only 8pm. On a schoolnight.

We were eating where we normally eat, with the back door open because we'd made a lot of smoke cooking, what with my Jewish potato cakes (I am potato rich at the moment) and M's chargrilled broccoli with chilli and garlic. We were relaxed about the noise as we have made this noise ourselves, except with better music. And it was only 8pm, and we were drinking steely ice cold Sauvignon Blanc and generally counting our educational blessings.

But I did wonder how many of them there must be in there to make that much noise, especially when they did assure us faithfully and politely that they would let us know before they had a 'rowdy evening'.

So I stood on my chair to look out of the window at their house. There was definitely a gathering in the back room, but not what you'd really call a party. There was also someone leaning over the sink in the downstairs bathroom, visible through the frosted glass. She was there a while.

I think one of them's chucking up already, I said to M. That's probably a good sign.

She carried on, lifting her head up then going back for more. Then another head appeared from the right. If I remember that bathroom correctly (and I have seen it, as I expressed an interest in the plumbing while the landlords were doing it up), head #2 belonged to someone who must have been sitting on the loo.

How odd, I thought, to chuck up in front of someone else. Especially when there are three toilets in the house.

And then I thought, no, she's not chucking up, she's snorting something.

I bought M a little video camera for his birthday. I am thinking of starting a StudentCam channel on YouTube.

joella

Sun comes up, it's Saturday morning

It's been a weird old week, no? Every morning the Today programme woke me up with more tales of global economic meltdown. I don't understand how banks work -- in fact several of us round a pub table with plenty of maths qualifications between us established that we had no idea what the FTSE numbers actually represent. I've always secretly believed that nobody does really, and indeed that all financial instruments more complicated than a biscuit tin under the bed have something of the Emperors New Clothes about them. And on the evidence of this week, I think I might be right. 

I take no great pleasure in this, of course. I don't want thousands of people who earn honest livings to lose their jobs or homes, and I don't want to wake up one day to find that all our stuff are belong to China. 

It's pretty gloomy at NGO X as well, as we are busy making ourselves fit for the future and that future has people giving less money to NGOs as they need it all to keep the heating on and buy cheese. There are days when I can see why people choose to be doctors or policemen or schoolteachers. *And* the mortgage has just gone up *and* we don't have a lodger at the moment *and* the weather has that 'I'm going to get cold soon' edge to it that normally I love but this year... this year makes me feel poor. 

But I don't turn the radio on on Saturday mornings. Instead I sleep and sleep and sleep until I'm good and ready to wake up. I still have some residual exhaustion (emotional, probably) from the Hot Place, so I wasn't good and ready until nearly 11. M was still asleep too, and we woke up to a sunny, sunny morning, and more silence than you would expect at the end of Freshers Week. 

The allotment needs attention. I'm going to pack up last night's leftover curry, make up a bottle of Ribena (we can still afford high-end cordial), get out the hand tools and go and get dirty. It will all, one way or another, work itself out.

joella

While You Were Out...

Today I have been mostly sleeping, and catching up on the things that happened while I was in the Hot Place. It wasn't that I didn't have internet access, I did... it was just that these things all seemed irrelevant. And probably were.

But they don't feel so here. And so we have:

1. The return of the students.

The neighbourhood is again full of badly parked cars and badly sorted rubbish (I'm thinking of offering lessons in both), and Tesco is again full of young people sporting tiny iPods and huge hair and buying Taboo and Doritos. One lot of our neighbours are mostly the same as last year's, and they were generally ok, but the other side are new. We hated their predecessors, but one ought to show willing, so we went round to introduce ourselves. They assured us that they were 'just five girls', were quiet and hard working, and will be sure to let us know if they have any parties. Splendid, we said. We'll get on fine then. And I hope it's true. In my mind they are already Posh Caroline, Ginger Caroline, Sporty Caroline, Scary Caroline and Baby Caroline.

2. Google Chrome.

I was quite excited about this for a while, as the work laptop I was using only had IE 6 on it (oh, the joys of a 'trailing edge' IT strategy) and I couldn't bear it. So I downloaded it, but gave up on it after a couple of days... a bit like early Gmail and its lack of a Delete option, I found its lack of a 'home' button annoying (I liked that there is no 'homepage' as such, I liked that a lot, but I wanted to be able to get back to that from another page without opening a new tab, and I didn't find a way to do that). The clincher though was that a lot of pages didn't work -- and didn't work in an ugly, flickery, jumpy sort of way -- because I didn't have the "right plug-ins installed". And I couldn't install them without downloading them over my shitty connection and then logging in as an administrator. As these pages worked just fine in IE I didn't *quite* understand what the problem was -- maybe GC doesn't do backwards compatibility -- but I also couldn't be arsed to find out. So I uninstalled it. I thought I might try again when I got home, but then I discovered that Firefox 3 had also happened while I was away, and its Most Visited and site tagging give me some nice new things to play with. So I can't see the 'value added', as they say in local government, of getting my head round GC for the time being. I'll watch this space though.

3. Sarah Palin.

Wow. She's a whole new kind of woman, and I am Very Afraid. I'm not sure what she *is*, but she is *not* a feminist, and I really don't see how she or anyone else can claim otherwise. Having a woman running for high office means there has been feminism, and that that woman has benefited from the achievements of feminism. It does not mean she embodies those values or will promote or even protect them. We had a million years of Thatcher, we should know that by now.

Now, personally, I also don't buy the 'Feminists For Life' thing. I don't think you can be a feminist and not support a woman's right to choose to have an abortion. Not in a world where women don't have the right to choose not to get pregnant, or even in a world where they do, but they don't exercise it, or something goes wrong, or they thought it would be ok, or they don't want to make a fuss, or they didn't or couldn't care about themselves enough to stop it happening. We need to work on all that, for sure, and the best case scenario is a world where no one gets up the stick without wanting to be there. I support all moves in that direction, and if we got there, then abortion, like the Marxist state, would wither away. But while we're, you know, waiting for utopia, any move to outlaw abortion is a misogynist move. In my opinion.

But that's far from my only beef with Ms Moose Hunter. The thing that really sets my teeth on edge is her claim to be "just your average hockey mom". I'm not quite sure what a hockey mom is, but I'm always uncomfortable when women go round defining themselves by their relationships to other people. Especially when, like the Carolines, they use the word 'just'. Feminist it ain't, either, but I think I should move on from that -- my discomfort is more about the passive-aggressive pressure that is put on children when their mother (or father) has a deal of her own identity or self-esteem invested in their prowess.

I think my own mother did me proud in this regard -- though if she *had* had the desire to be a hockey mom she would have been sadly disappointed -- most of the time I was supposed to be playing hockey at school I actually spent hiding in the toilets, and when I couldn't manage to hide I always tried to be Left Half (or is that netball?) as that seemed to be the position where it was easiest to do nothing without getting shouted at. The only time my games teacher noticed me was when she was comparing me to a dead body.

She did me proud in other regards too though: when I was the same age as Bristol Palin (and a year younger than the "young man she will marry"), she walked into the room where I was doing my chemistry homework, closed the door and leaned back against it, and said 'I think you should get fitted for a diaphragm'. I remember looking down at the long carbon-based equation I was drawing out on my narrow-lined page, putting down my pencil, and saying 'I do know about Durex you know'. (We didn't call them condoms in those days, that all came with AIDS).

No, she said, you need something you take care of yourself. I'm not sure she'd call herself a feminist even now, but that was a remarkable thing to say to your 17 year old daughter. And so I went off on my own (I don't think I asked her to come with me, and I don't think she offered) to the anachronistically named Family Planning Clinic, to have an Amazonian woman in a white coat stick half her hand up me and say 'oooh, more room than I thought, let's try a 70!'. I emerged feeling small and invaded, bearing a large plastic box with my new diaphragm and a large tube of spermicidal gel which I would, in time, come to work out that I was allergic to.

But that box was as important to me as my first car. Thanks, non-hockey mom.

God, I take myself seriously at the moment, don't I? Let me get my alcohol intake back up and I'm sure normal service will be resumed shortly.

joella

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Socialism*

So... I am back from the Hot Place. I missed a night's sleep in the process and am going through that weird not-quite-jetlag conflict-zone thing where you are fine for most of the day then fall heavily asleep at a random time and wake up in the middle of the night disoriented, thirsty and tearful.

Off and on, there and here and in between, I have been thinking about tomato's razor-sharp post on disaster tourism.

So... why did I go? The short answer is because they asked me to. There isn't much I can say about the specifics, but there are some serious information management 'challenges' (quite how serious I had no idea till I got there, to be honest).

Did I make any difference? Yeah, a bit. And could make more if a) I follow a few things up from here with the high-ups and the techies, and b) I go back early next year to do a bit more work with people there. I represent reasonable value for money. You get a lot out of me.

But those are the easy questions. I thought about some of the harder ones as well.

Why was I there to be asked? Mmm. Because I have more or less worked out what I'm good at, and I have more or less worked out that a) I need to be doing it -- ie that indolence is not good for me -- and that b) the end result of my labours needs to be convergent. I'm not an artist, I'm not a capitalist. But I'm not an altruist either. My motivations are as selfish as the next person's, but maybe less realistic: I think the best chance we have is via a fairer world. But I don't go out literally feeding the poor or negotiating with the G8. I'm an applied egalitarian. It's a bit weak, when you look at it hard. Unless you can be sure that good information management changes the world.

Which of course you can't. The biggest question of all is... should well-meaning organisations intervene in times of conflict, famine and flood (or is it true, as John Cage might say, and M points out from time to time, that if you try to improve the world you only make it worse)? There is no such thing as a neutral intervention, and even those with the most benign intentions can have, over decades, over centuries, potentially catastrophic unforeseeable consequences. The road to hell etc.

On the other other other hand...
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. (George Orwell)
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. (Mohandas Gandhi)
All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men (sic) to do nothing. (Edmund Burke)

What's a girl to do?

joella

* with apologies to Max Weber, who, in his way, changed my life.

All fur coat and no knickers

You don't have to know me very well to know how important water is to me. I think about it all the time. I carry it with me everywhere. I have a qualification in its supply and removal. Clean water is life's first essential, but also one of life's greatest luxuries. There's not enough of it around and it's unforgivable to waste it.

So rubbish plumbing Really Pisses Me Off. 

The bathrooms in the guest house here in the Hot Place were recently 'refurbished'. The walls and floors are tiled, the toilets are those swanky looking back to the wall numbers with push button flushes, there are mixer taps on the basins and showers. There are towel rails and toothbrush holders galore. 

But the place leaks like a sieve. I first got here in the early hours of the morning, having travelled all day, and tried to go for a shower. No water came out. I investigated, and found a tap coming out of the wall that seemed to control the supply to all the cold taps (there are hot taps too, but I can't see much call for them -- the cold water is never cold and we are always hot). I turned it on and the toilet cistern started filling, which was reassuring. Then I realised why it was turned off: the joints to the shower taps, which come straight out of the wall, were leaking a steady stream of water. It just runs straight down the wall. This also robs the shower of some of its already fairly feeble pressure. Not that you can easily stand under it, as the holder for the shower head has broken off. Everything, in fact, that is screwed into the tiles can be pulled straight out. 

So I have developed a routine: enter the bathroom, turn on the water. Go to the loo. Fill basin (using my own travel plug, as the pop up waste pops neither holds water not pops up, so I have hoiked it out), wash bra and pants (we can get our washing done, but they will not do 'ladies underwear'). Leave them to soak, get in the shower. Get out of shower. flush loo (not done before shower to protect shower pressure, also sometimes the push button sticks, so the water just keeps pouring down the loo). Rinse underwear. Brush teeth (using bottled water, the stuff out of the tap smells funny and is sometimes a strange colour) while cistern is refilling, in case I need to go in the night. Turn off water. Go to bed. Repeat loo, shower and teeth part in the morning.

*This* morning, I turned on the water. No reassuring rushing noise. Turn on shower. Nothing. Turn on basin tap: feeble dribble. Swear a lot. It's 38 degrees outside and I am bleeding.

I went searching for a jug and a bucket, a perfectly effective washing method in much of the world, but no joy -- we do not have a jug and a bucket here, we have a shiny but USELESS bathroom. So I ended up standing by the basin, chucking water over myself with a coffee mug. I assumed that the water would make its way to the drain down by the toilet, but no, that would have required the floor to have been laid by someone competent. And it wasn't. 

It's enough to drive you to drink. But there isn't any of that either. 

joella

On the first day of Ramadan...

... I was woken up at 2am by a text from my colleague, who is staying on the second floor. 'R U awake? My place full of sand.' I had been vaguely aware that there was something going on outside, but my place was not full of sand and I had not investigated further. But it didn't sound good, so I called her.

Turns out that there was a massive sandstorm happening. Trees and powerlines were coming down -- one of the reasons I hadn't heard anything was because my room is right next to the generator, and when that's going you can't really hear anything else. 

And it is also on the ground floor, the smallest and gloomiest one, at the back -- probably because I'm not staying long. But this saved me from my colleague's sandblasting -- the top floor is a sort of hasty add-on, and the windows blow open and let in whatever's going around. As she is Muslim and had to get up before sunrise to eat, and everything in her kitchen was an inch deep in sand, her Ramadan didn't get off to the best start. As I didn't have to get up before sunrise, and indeed have given up on breakfast altogether, all I had to contend with was a gritty bathroom. It was a bit of a mudfest by the time I'd finished. 

We all got picked up at eight as usual, but it was like driving through a ghost town. There are no shops or food places open during the day, so I'd been warned to bring my lunch. Which I did, but I wasn't sure where to eat it. In the end I shut myself in an empty office. By the early afternoon people were yawning (I was also advised not to try and have any meetings after 11am), and the local staff left at 3 -- I can see why, but it can't make for the most productive month. We hung on, but nearly missed the lift home, which also runs earlier, just nobody told us. 

Returned to find half the guesthouse still with no power. The guards gave a sort of *you* try finding an electrician during Ramadan shrug. My room was one of the lucky ones (I am getting fonder of it by the day) but the ground floor kitchen was not. This meant that the fridge had been off for about 20 hours... which in 40 degrees is not pleasant. I held the milk and various other things at arms length while pouring them away, and discovered that my pan of leftover spaghetti, which had been destined for the next day's lunch, was full of oily cold water from the rapidly defrosting ice box. It was dark by this time, but my Kenyan colleague bravely cooked dinner for us, wearing my plumbing head torch, which luckily I had the foresight to bring. Me, I was too hot and premenstrual to do anything but feel oppressed, read an ancient copy of OK magazine that I found in a cupboard, and eat Cheetos. With extra sand. 

Around 10pm someone twiddled the right wire and everything came back but the TV receiver and the top floor. L moved down a floor for the night and the day closed.  

joella

Arriving in the Hot Place

It was a ten hour flight, in two legs, broken in the Middle East. When we touched down there, nearly everyone got off. I waited for the new people to get on, but only two or three of them did. When the plane took off again it had about fifteen passengers. On an Airbus A321.

 

About halfway through the second leg, I thought sod it, I'm having a drink. I wasn't going to, as the Hot Place is also dry. But there was a drawer full of wine, and nobody else to drink it, so I had one. The stewardess was happy to have something to do. 'All alcohol must be consumed on board', she said. 'Right you are,' I said. 'Can I have another?'.

 

We 'deplaned' in no time, obviously, down the steps into a hot moist night and onto a bus. Three fat men sprawled across the only seats, under a sign which said 'Seating reserved for women and children'. I decided not to make a point. It was a short and badly lit journey to the terminal, past big white UN planes that loomed suddenly out of the darkness.

 

I'm far from the world's worst flyer, but there's always something to worry about. Will they remember my vegetarian meal? (They did on the first leg, but not on the second, but they kindly picked the sausage off the pizza for me). Will my luggage arrive? (Yes, it did -- it was strangely comforting to see my bright pink case emerge, I'd imagined it being flung around an empty hold, scattering pants and instant noodles all over the place). Will there be anyone there to meet me?

 

Er, no. There wasn't. Now *that's* never happened before, and I didn't particularly want my first experience of it to be after midnight in a near deserted entrance way populated by a few rangy taxi drivers and a few mangy cats. And a man asleep on a bench.

 

Thanks to a roaming mobile and good paperwork, I could call the duty driver. His English wasn't up to much but I got the impression that he was 'coming'. Thanks to half a bottle of red wine, I didn't get scared. I just sat down away from the sleeping man, ignored the taxi drivers, got out my Moleskine and pencil and started writing this.

 

joella

Shape shifting

I am packing for the Hot Place. It is very difficult. I have been to hot places before, though not this one, and I have been places before where women need to cover themselves up. But I have never been to a hot place where women need to cover themselves up *and* look on the tidy side of presentable.

'Hot and smart?' I said to the person briefing me. That might be a challenge. You just wait, she said. Everyone looks immaculate all the time. I don't know how they do it.

Normally, I would take baggy-ish T-shirts. But these won't do. Most of my T-shirts feature holes, paint splatters or political slogans, and I sense that none of these will be acceptable. Man-made fibre is also not recommended, because of the heat, which rules out my super-easy-care travelling shirts. I try one on anyway, but my bosom is clearly discernible. This is also bad form.

So I have gathered together every flowing cotton garment I can find. I don't know if I can 100% avoid elbow and decolletage exposure, but I think most bases are covered.

joella

My dreams are so unoriginal

I don't really like remembering them, they are always anxious. It's a miracle I've got any teeth left at all.

Usually it's a relief to wake up thinking 'it's all right, I didn't really kill him'. But this time, I just told everybody he'd died. It seemed the only way out of the situation.

But it became unsustainable, because he was actually still very much alive. His mum was all upset, and it was my fault. There were job complications. Tax returns. He wasn't going to stay not-dead.

So he went home, and I went round wearing a bright orange T-shirt which said, Wire-style, MY BAD. *This * morning, it was a relief to wake up thinking 'it's all right, I didn't really not kill him'.

My *real* day went downhill from there. Let's just say I'm almost looking foward to spending the next fortnight in a place where the weather forecast looks like this:



joella

Stories from the lake #2: getting the hang of things

Shot plus sky plus lake
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

This is one of those stories best told with a photo.

joella

Stories from the lake #1: Team Antinranta

The weekend before we went away, I read an article in the Guardian about how you should never, ever go on holiday with your friends. I began to worry.

We were:

• Me: first most likely to sauna au naturel, eighth most likely to eat blood sausage and jam*.
  
• M, braver of cold lakes, lighter of fires, cooker of breakfasts. Usually in that order.
  
• Mr B, who has all the moves, including the ones that make the boat go in a straight line. He was oarsome.
  
• H, who brought glamour and intrigue: her continued presence was decided by Turkey's Constitutional Court.
  
• K, aka Sauna Girl. Löyly, vihta, implausible bikini, vodka. Repeat to fade.
  
• Dr A, researcher of indigenous foods and expounder of obscure philosophies.
  
• L, growing fast to fill the space where the Old Testament stops and pear cider starts.
  
• J, half boy, half biscuit. All about the show that must go on.
  

Me, Mr B and Dr A were all at university together. K was there too, though my orbit and hers never intersected at the time. There are few people I have known and loved for longer. What a ridiculous thing to jeopardise, I thought, while wading through mucus the week before we left. What made me think that a fortnight in rural Finland with *other people* and *other people's children* was ever going to be a good idea?

I don't know what made me think it, or even if it was me who thought it first, (though I seem to remember that alcohol was involved) but having done it, I say shame on you, Guardian Family Section. Find the right people and set them by the right lake in the right Scandinavian country, and you will have just about the best holiday imaginable.

joella

* This is not a Germaine Greer-style euphemism. That, I'd be much higher up the list for.

So far so good

Everything here works. Nobody is rude and there is a ridiculous amount of space. There are rollercoasters in lakeside woodland and gherkins with every meal. Also vodka. Ace. joella

Offline alert

I'm going to be quiet for a bit. Not that I've had too much to say recently. I *am* feeling better though, and look forward to letting thoughts settle like leaves and form new things to say. Shortly. With maybe some photos too. Meanwhile wherever you are I hope the weather is clement and the gods are smiling.

joella

Big is... um

I share several significant dimensions (not height, sadly) with the first 'big girl' to reach the final of Miss England. Not sure how I feel about this. Anything that means fewer teenage girls (or indeed grown women) hate their bodies has to be good, so I salute her role model curves. And she's only seventeen -- and wants to be Miss England -- so it would be unfair to expect her to have too much in-depth awareness of body fascism.

But the bit about beauty coming from within is squidged rather breathlessly into the last five seconds, like someone mouthed it at her from behind the camera. Maybe I should send her a copy of the Beauty Myth. With a Post-it note pointing out not to feel bad if she never reads it -- the beauty myth is harder to shake off than Catholicism. Heroin has nothing on it.

joella

In which I emerge from the gloom of sinusitis...

... with an increasing sense of smell, a reducing Kleenex consumption, and a gradually recovering ability to take an interest in anything beyond the end of my nose.

Two such things as examples:

1. The over 60s nationwide bus pass. What a wonderful initiative. My parents came at the weekend and we got the bus into town with them. My mum got out her bus pass, and it worked! In Oxford! All the way from Lancashire! I couldn't get over it. My dad also has a bus pass, but he hadn't actually been on a bus since 1969 so he hadn't brought it with him.

2. Freecycle. One of the best things the internet has ever made possible. M managed to blow up the food processor. There were flames coming out of it and everything. We got a new one (it was a Kenwood and he'd always secretly wanted a Magimix, what with them being French. They hum more discreetly and chop more stylishly). So we had a million attachments for a lump of melted plastic, but I couldn't bear to throw them out. So I put them on Freecycle, and someone replied within about three minutes, and was round to pick them up within half an hour. I initially figured she must be taking them to sell as spares on eBay -- not that I would have minded, better that than landfill -- but it was a much lovelier story. Turned out her mum had died three years ago, and ever since she'd had her mum's Kenwood food processor in the cupboard *with no attachments*. She just happened to log on as my message came up, in fact her husband had recently said she should get rid of the base as it was taking up space and she was coming round to agreeing with him, but feeling sad about it. So I made her very happy, and she made me very happy. And M is making Thai curry paste like there's no tomorrow, so everyone's a winner.

I hold these small things up as proof that the world gets better in some ways even as it melts down in others. Somewhere in between there's a DRM free music download site that will sell me Enter Sandman.

And so to bed.

joella

10 reasons why it doesn't pay to check your blog stats

1. You find out that you are the top hit on Google for the phrase 'aubergine insertion babe'.

Actually, I don't need any more reasons than that.

joella

Smell-o-vision

A long, long time ago I had one of my first proper attacks of the munchies. I sat in a corner on my own, stoned out of my tree and working my way carefully through a packet of chicken flavour crisps.

Every now and again I would look up and say 'but they're so... *chickeny*!' Nobody was listening to me, they were all listening to Frank Zappa instead. Or possibly Captain Beefheart. I had a lot of nights like that a long, long time ago.

I was reminded of the chicken flavour crisps yesterday, when I got out of the car at the New Building (I have been going to work, but I have not been cycling there, I am exhausted at the end of the day as it is). Just before I got out of the car I gave my nose a good blow, then I cleared up the resulting mess -- there is still a ridiculous amount of it -- and set off across the car park. Halfway to the door there was a gust of wind, and it stopped me in my tracks.

I could smell the air! It smelt amazing! Salty and damp and fresh and amazing. I leant against the wall and breathed and breathed and breathed. Then I went inside and I could smell even more things, toast and carpet tiles and printers. Sadly, by the time I got my coffee, my sense of smell had gone again, but it comes back sporadically, in brief bursts. I get to smell the inside of a tissue. Or the ends of my fingers. Things that don't normally have a smell. While food, perfume, wine, flowers are still largely lost to me.

It's the weirdest thing. I was in olfactory heaven in a car park by a ring road. Who knows what the seaside would have done to me.

joella

For those about to rant, we salute you

I've been too ill to do any ranting of late, though as soon as I get to post 'Jo woke up and smelt the coffee' as my Facebook status I intend to get straight back to it. It can only be a matter of days now, I got a hint of Vicks Vaporub last night and a tiny burst of sandalwood this morning. The second course of antibiotics is maybe taking hold. Either that or my sinuses have been served with an Asbo and decided to turn themselves around.

Meanwhile, may I recommend Jeremy on the Guardian on wasting food, and Ben on various Christian factions on women bishops. I was hoping for a good one on this pile of wank, though he's done a fairly good job of digging his own hole.

joella

Even more too much information

Yes, it's still all about me. I did in the end burden the NHS, and am now on my second course of antibiotics, as the first lot didn't do anything except give me the runs. Around the same time, I came on, and the first tears of self-pity rolled down my cheeks. I didn't have enough hands to staunch all my flows. If my ears start leaking, I said to M, I really will be losing stuff from every orifice.

Also, I am slightly worried that, like the dog with no nose, I must smell revolting. Do I smell of poo? I asked. Well, he said, it's hard to tell, since you've been honking of fish for a week.

I threw a box of tissues at his head.

joella

Teething problems

Sight is the only one of my facial senses that is currently working properly. As a result I am still utterly miserable and have nothing of interest to say, except that I went to the dentist (which is an interesting experience when you can't breathe through your nose) to get my canines built up. This was one of the alternatives offered to having braces -- the idea is that if my canines are bigger and fatter they deflect the grinding that my inner fury otherwise inflicts on my increasingly fragile incisors.

I was impressed with the results -- basically, this is what celebrities get done, though for aesthetic rather than existential reasons. It's like Botox for teeth. But the left one did not even survive two days: there was an ominous crack upon its first encounter with a packet of Walkers smoky bacon, and half of my celebrity tooth fell out.

I haven't even got the bill yet. Arse.

joella

Farewell feminine mystique

I was lying in bed this afternoon, surfing the web for mucus management strategies. I tried a bottle of Otrivine that I found in the bathroom cabinet, but it tastes (and burns) a bit like speed when it hits the back of your nose, and that can't be good for anyone. I tried a little acupressure: nada. Then I came across nasal irrigation. I am a fan, nay evangelist, of at least one other kind of irrigation, and I wondered, frankly, why it hadn't occurred to me before.

I don't have a neti pot, which seems to be the accessory of choice for those who wish to wash their noses out. The other suggested approach involved a 10 ml syringe "without needle" (like, duh). None of those either. I put the bath on, and then headed downstairs in search of inspiration.

About half an hour later, M walked into the bathroom and yelped. I hadn't warned him that I would be leaning naked over the sink with a turkey baster up one nostril.

I made a terrible mess (I figured I would, that's why I didn't have any clothes on): I don't think anyone needs the details -- M is still recovering -- but let's just say I did not come across nearly as elegant as the nice lady who does the neti pot demo on YouTube. But it did clear my nose, kind of. I briefly had dual nostril function, and have had it sporadically since.

But I can't smell a damn thing - I made sardine and chilli pasta for dinner, and got not the tiniest hint of fishiness. I'm beginning to wonder if normal nasal service will ever be restored. Is this what it's like having hay fever? Shit, have I got late-onset hay fever?

Still, it's meant I have been able to spend the weekend on the sofa watching Glasto entirely without guilt. I got ninety nine problems but the mud ain't one.

joella