Just when I thought I could not be stopped

All hail YouTube and last.fm for bringing the early 80s back to life. I am currently convinced that Ghosts is The Best Song Ever By Anyone, just as I was 25? 26? years ago when it first riveted me to my seat in front of Top of the Pops.

Ah. What the 80s did for us.

joella

Humankind?

My soon to be ex-colleague sends me an email that makes me fume. Not at her. Definitely not at her. At the loss of her, and the reasons for the loss of her. And the fact that I'm not, blogging policy or no blogging policy, going to say any more about it on the internet than this. There ain't no justice. Just us.

joella

To Barbie or not to Barbie?

I am just home from watching Persepolis, which I can't recommend highly enough. It stirred all sorts of thoughts in me. Which I may blog later if they settle into a firm enough form. They haven't yet. In fact they are so swirly that I am not sure what to make of this story, which was waiting there on the top of the BBC News feed for me when I got in.

Now, I hate Barbie, obviously. I hate the ubiquity of Barbie almost as much as I hate the commodification of the Playboy logo. I hate the way that girlhood is now almost inescapably fuchsia pink and lip-glossed. I think it's constraining and oppressive.

But not as constraining and oppressive as "fix your scarf, sister". Nowhere near. Give me bodily contours, even eating disordered ones, before you give me that.

Still, I am torn.

After, we went for dinner at the just as highly-recommended Al-Shami Lebanese restaurant. They are celebrating 'twenty happy years' this year. A card on each table offers diners in May a bottle of house wine on the house, with a message that says:

"Thank you, Oxford. Thank you Jericho. Thank you, the Arab and Jewish communities. It's great to live together."

They may have got a marketing person to write that, but I don't think so. It brought a little crosscultural tear to my mongrel eye.

joella

Home run, ballerina!

I don't do much television, but I am in love with Mad Men. Not so much the men, more the madness. It should be compulsory viewing for every educated woman who has ever asked 'and what has feminism ever done for me?'. It is big, and it is clever, and it is very funny. At times, it takes my breath away.

It's also reminded me of the existence of Sketches of Spain, the only Miles Davis I can really seen the point of. I am so taking that to the lake this summer.

joella

Britannica for bloggers

When Google Reader reveals that none of the bloggers I follow has written anything today, and none of my friends has updated his/her Facebook status, *and* there's nothing much going on by way of important world news, I find myself browsing the feeds marked 'worky'. Top of this list is the IWR blog. I read it partly for old times' sake - while working for this publication back in the 20th century I was briefly the second most prominent information industry journalist in Europe (out of two); partly because it is pleasing to see what started as the Learned Infonet, one of the UK's first commercial websites, that was run blog-style by m'ex colleague Ben MORE THAN TEN YEARS AGO, finally get taken seriously by its owners (we were so ahead of the times); and partly because it is actually, if you are geeky in the way that I am geeky, actually quite interesting.

I think it was this way, or perhaps from a link that I followed by going this way, that I found out that Encyclopedia Britannica is offering a year's free access to anyone who creates or manages web content. What happens at the end of the year is not clear, but they don't ask you for credit card details when you sign up, and I have done it, and I am rather enjoying it, fan that I am of serious reference works, and possessing as I don't a copy of the Big One.

I am a huge Wikipedia user, but I'm not the first to observe that it's gone off a bit of late. There are too many bad writers with agendas out there, and the balance is tipping their way. We've all read the 'wikipedia is as accurate as Britannica' story, but I think it depends what you're looking up.

Anyway, not only can I now search Britannica for free, I can link to any article in it from joella and then anyone can read that article. So, for the non-bloggers... any requests? Give me a topic, I will wax lyrical about it and then link to the sober, fact-checked, professionally edited reality. Or just the latter, if it's about sport.

joella

Filling my spud-shaped hole

One man and his clay
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

Is there anything more English than a long-haired man in pink trousers and a Peter Storm cagoule planting potatoes in clay on a drizzly Sunday morning in April?

I was sitting on a plastic chair at the time, pouring coffee from a Thermos and opening the shortbread.

How did I get here?

(Charlie - go for main crop potatoes. They do not need chitting, it says so on the bag.)

joella

This is the modern world

I was not *browsing* the Daily Mail online. I was not. I found this link while blog-skipping. What a brilliant story.

Girl orders taxi, gets cupboard

I'm mainly left wondering how someone of so little brain can have £180 lying around. I doubt the Daily Mail could shed much light on that.

joella

Modern gender relations

"If I stab you with *this*," she said, holding up her paring knife to the light, "will it go in very far?"

"Yes," he said. "Hurry up and have your period."

I think of this as back to basics communication. And I put the knife down.

joella

Cultural capital

I'm just home from a rare night out with ex-housemate-once-schoolmate S, who doesn't get out much these days, and ex-housemate-once-schoolmate K, who gets out plenty, but not often with me.

We ended up wandering Oxford's tiny gay village (it's tiny, the gay people are normal size). It's not that we were specifically looking for a gay pub, just that they are the closest proper pubs to the shiny new Castle complex, where we'd eaten pizza. There are bars in there, but only an idiot would want to drink their uber-priced fizzy lager while listening to lowest common denominator music at ear-splitting volume. And I've never seen the point of drinking standing up.

We ended up in the Brewery Gate, which I'm sure used to be home to excruciating open mike nights, but which is now mostly home to low-key lesbians. And perfectly friendly with it, possibly because they mistook me and S for low-key lesbians ourselves. It wouldn't be the first time, it's been happening on and off since we were at school together in the mid-late 80s.

Not that I could give a monkey's arse, mind, but it did mean that once we'd finished arguing politics, we started reminiscing about how much fun that was and wasn't. The school in question recently held a '30 years since we let girls in' event. Doing the sums, you can work out that we were a relatively new phenomenon at the time, and there were some occasions when we wished they hadn't bothered.

In our year, though, the head of school was a girl. We wondered if that was the first time, but we couldn't really remember. The deputy head was a boy. I remembered being surprised they gave him the job, he was clever enough, and lots of people liked him, but they tended to go for the clean cut kids. He was a bit edgier. Worst of all, he was a smoker.

Well, said S, he got the race vote, didn't he.

What? I said. He wasn't black!

No, she said, but he was vaguely brown.

She had a point. Vaguely brown was the closest we got to black. I don't think there was a black kid in the whole school.

Hang on a minute, I said, I'm half Jewish! Why did that bring me no plaudits? Jewish has never been cool, said S. And what about me? I'm from North Shore. There were more vaguely browns than North Shorians. Also true, though that was more of a class thing than a race one. North Shore was the wrong side of the tracks.

I had sort of forgotten how clearly delineated those social slivers can be, how narrowly we defined our tribes. However homogenous a group of kids you are, you can always find a way to create a social hierarchy. Further back in time, at a primary school with a catchment area of basically one housing estate, I remember it mattering which end of the estate you lived on. Which cul-de-sac. It didn't stop us getting on with each other, even the vaguely brown ones, but it mattered.

And these were not down to choices we had made ourselves, paths we had taken, we were too young for that. This was 100% down to the hands our parents had been dealt, and the way they had played them. I've been mulling on this in a dark, premenstrual sort of way and I find it rather depressing.

joella

Can't sleep, bed's on fire

We're both a little bewildered this Mon-Tues-Weds (we don't have a word for the early part of the week, do we? Does anyone?). It may be down to essential post-weekend regrouping of neurons and nephrons. It may be down to PMT (mine, obviously) and its ripple effect (I shouted at a colleague today, I think it was merited, it was remarkably effective but I am still hollow with embarrassment), it may just be one of those things.

Whatever. I went to see the bum lady on Monday, seeking clarity via plumbing-assisted decongestion. The sort of bowel equivalent of having a facial. I returned cleansed but a little vulnerable and even more random.

You look like someone who's fallen out of a tree, said M. You're scrabbling round in the leaf litter wondering what's happened.

Thanks, I said. Would you care for a pickled onion?

I'm not sure I can handle any more responsibility at the moment, he replied.

joella

ART SQUAT!

What's the opposite of a lost weekend? Whatever it is, that's what I'm recovering from.

The Finnfans came to stay, arriving late on Thursday night bearing a bottle of Welsh gin. I can report that Welsh gin is good, but perhaps not the best thing to drink on a schoolnight. Our friends C & A came for dinner on Friday, and we had a huge curry and real ale extravaganza, inspired by Madhur Jaffrey, Vicky Bhogal (whose writing style, at times, annoys the hell out of me but whose recipes are fantastic) and the Punjabi cookery classes that M took in the 1980s. We are still eating the leftovers, which is as it should be. There were no leftover poppadoms, which is also as it should be. We finished the Welsh gin at the end of the night, which is possibly not as it should be.

All this was organised *after* I'd made my 9am leg wax appointment for Saturday. I won't go into how much fun that wasn't, but the upside was a late breakfast and a lazy afternoon reading the papers and preparing for the ART SQUAT!

I had already been invited to the HA! Art Jam, an "environmentally conscious interactive mash-up of art, film, music and performance in a derelict Mercedes showroom", as several of M's band were providing the soundtrack (and a bit more) to a performance by Cafe Reason. I had decided it was beyond the call of girlfriendly duty to hang around in NW London all night with nobody to talk to. And I'd already seen it once.

But the Finnfans thought it was a great idea, which made it into an entirely different proposition, and off we went. It was a disappointingly homogenous crowd (we represented pretty much the only under 18s and over 25s in the place, and most everyone else was an art student or looked like they should be) but there was plenty of weirdness to look at. It was a struggle to find the promised political agenda but I guess it was in there somewhere, in an easy-on-the-eye sort of way. If the world was cooling down rather than heating up, would art students put on more clothes?

Anyway, an educational experience with perhaps more nudity than the younger members of the party would have opted for, but that's what educational experiences are about. It was benign while being very strange. And that's as far as I'm going with a review, K was much more articulate about it all.

And then... the snow! The SNOW! Not a flake in sight at 3am, and a good three inches five hours later. It was wonderful, fluffy, crunchy stuff which we all ate a bit of via snowballs on our way to the Excelsior for breakfast. I haven't been in there for years. I sort of know why, the Welsh Rarebit is still sitting in my stomach, fattening me up for ritual slaughter at the Festival of Grease.

Later, we all squidged into M's room to watch downloaded Doctor Who on the iMac. And I've done almost nothing but sleep ever since. Well, that's a lie, but I'm off to see Elbow at the Cardiac and I hate it when posts lie around unfinished...

joella

I do not want what I haven't got

When I first moved to OX4 I tried very hard to love a pub called the Ampney Cottage. It was the closest pub to our flat, so the obvious choice to become our local. I badly wanted a local. I wanted to be able to walk up to a bar and have someone say 'all right, Jo? Usual?'

Sadly, the Ampney Cottage was a shit pub. The late lamented New Inn became our local instead. For a while, the barmen did recognise me, as well they should as I practically lived in there, and I've yet to hang out in a pub with better music.

But fashions change on Cowley Road. Most businesses are chasing the student pound, and the Brookesalikes we co-exist with don't seem to be willing to engage with anything that predates them. They don't want dingy pubs with Formica tables, pinball machines, pints of mild, and brown velour banquettes. No. They want laminate flooring, widescreen R'n'B videos, Bacardi Breezers and patio heaters.

The New Inn has become Corridor. It's all terracotta walls, fairy lights, bad art and extra cold Euro lager. It's not awful, but there's nothing to love about it. The Ampney Cottage is now a Hobgoblin. Possibly thanks to a huge smoking marquee out the back and not enough tables for the floor space, it's usually completely rammed with homogeneous 20-somethings doing shooters, and is, if anything, even more characterless than it was before.

As I was walking past it the other day I saw a board outside saying 'New Menu! Get involved!'

Get *involved*? Get involved in what, exactly? Spending money and getting pissed? Hmm, I sneered to myself, someone round here probably has a degree in marketing.

If you were to walk round the New Building at the moment, you might spot a photo of me taken at my desk. This is also a piece of marketing, one of a series of photos of staff looking like they are engaging with 'Have Your Say'. I have headphones on and am staring intently at the screen while grinning like a lunatic. I was not Having My Say when it was taken. It was lunchtime and I was laughing my ass off at this:




Genius. Unquestionably.

joella