Don't you bring me down today

... I don't need any help in that department.

One of the interesting side effects of blogging is mining the archives of your life. Like therapy, they allows you to discern patterns in your life that you might otherwise not have identified. I have an annual cycle: broadly speaking I am optimistic in spring, oppressed in summer, reflective in autumn and resigned in winter. I also have a monthly cycle, fairly obviously: I slide into a trough of anxious pessimism around ovulation time, which slowly transforms into a manic furious premenstrual spike, which collapses in an instant into a sharp hit of terror and vulnerability, from which calm is temporarily restored. Never a dull moment.

I have a daily cycle too. I never want to wake up, and I never want to go to sleep. The only thing that could make me a morning person would be a Wallace & Gromit style contraption that would heat up a big vat of hot water at the appointed hour, then pull off the duvet and tip me off the mattress down a slide into it. With some sort of pyjama-removing contraption on the way. 'Seize the afternoon!' is our household motto. It doesn't, as my friend E used to say, get the baby a new bonnet.

So it's early summer, and we're on day 12 of 28. I am splattered in Night Jewels (which sounds rude, but is in fact just the colour that the shower room will be once I have finished painting it). M was home late after his Orpheus rehearsal and we didn't eat till nearly 11. Didn't drink, either (even I know that you don't drink and decorate), but then we watched the last in the series of Mad Men -- which I can't recommend highly enough -- and I got stuck in front of News 24 with a large Manzanilla.

An hour later, I was still there, drinking in the full horror of global political and economic meltdown. There will be no oil. There will be no jobs. We will have no home. Inflation will be a million per cent. The dried beans and bottled water I keep for post-apocalyptic survival will be stolen by marauding child-rapers. I know *this* is part of a cycle, too, but last time we had a recession we didn't have rolling news channels. They are a terrible idea.

At 1.30 M came to get me, at which point I realised that it was raining, and remembered that the roof is leaking over the bed, but unpredictably, and not from anywhere I could spot when I hung precariously out of the skylight to inspect the slates. I sat on the edge of the bed staring gloomily at the place where it leaked last time.

Get into bed, he said.
You have no idea what it's like being me, I replied.
No, he said, but I know what it's like living with you. Get into bed.

When I got into work this morning, there was a bag of sack cloth under my desk. I have no idea who put it there.

joella

If it ain't broke

I try other perfumes, but I always come back to White Musk. I try other ways of waking up, but I always come back to Today. I try other print fonts, but I always come back to Arial.

joella

GirlonaBus*

At 7 am last Saturday I boarded the first X5 of the day at Gloucester Green. This near-legendary bus service has been carrying loved-up students and impecunious academics between Oxford and Cambridge for as long as I can remember. It takes three and a half hours to get there (you can drive it in two, if you put your foot down) taking in the less-than-glorious sights of Bicester, Milton Keynes and Bedford on the way. But it is seriously cheap: I bought my ticket via Megabus and it cost me £6.50 return. That's practically Indian.

I was heading to Glorious Trin, to take part in the '30 years since we let girls in' celebrations. I first of all thought I wouldn't go: I have written before of my ambivalence towards the place. But a couple of my friends asked me if I was up for it, and I got a special 'we thought you might be interested' note in the post, probably because I was Women's Officer one year. It was written by hand, in fountain pen (I smudged it to check). I found my resolve weakening.

And I also started thinking, actually, this *is* worth celebrating. Cambridge was founded in 1209. It started admitting women OVER SIX HUNDRED YEARS later, in 1869, but didn't actually let them have degrees until 1947. Trinity (founded: 1546) held out until 1978. Thirty years is a drop in the ocean in Cambridge time. We should be taking up as much space as we can.

So I said yes, please, thank you very much, I would like to come to luncheon and High Tea and intervening discussions about the changes that have come about over the last three decades and the work that is still to be done. Hell, how often do I eat luncheon? And what *is* High Tea? I was rather hoping it would feature Pimms, as I had never had it before I went to Cambridge, and I have still never had better.

And I'll be honest, I had a great time. I was worried it would be full of the kind of people I spent three years avoiding, but on reflection, most of those were men. It was, frankly, weird to be in a room full of women in a place that is, or at least was, so very, very male. It was a very warm experience, and a very interesting one, as of course pretty much everyone was also seriously clever. The formal discussions had their moments, but the best moments for me were the stories that came out in the spaces in between. Some were sad... a college boyfriend's suicide, institutionalised sexual harrassment in the City, lives derailed in other ways.

But most of them were anything but sad. These are not, on the whole, women who've had a hard time. These are women who were fortunate enough to get an education at one of the finest universities in the whole damn world. I could never quite believe they let me in, that it wasn't some kind of mistake, or at least a giant fluky stroke of luck. If there's anything I really took away from going back, it was that lots of women who have passed through that massive gate over the last 30 years felt exactly the same way. And that most of us who did have never forgotten it, have taken that feeling and done something useful with it. That's got to be worth something.

Later, I caught up with my friend J, who lives in a seriously cool house full of huge windows and hidden terraces. I admired it so much I fell down the stairs. I barely felt a thing at the time (thanks to the Pimms, and the post-Pimms visit to the Maypole, and generally being overexcited) but the next day I woke with a giant bruise on my left buttock, and made my way back to the X5.

It was a bumpy old ride home. None of my playlists were long enough -- I had to fall back on On The Go.

Love Resurrection - Alison Moyet
You Know I'm No Good -- Amy Winehouse
32 Flavors -- Ani DiFranco
Wouldn't It Be Nice -- The Beach Boys
On Your Own -- Blur
Chimes of Freedom -- Bob Dylan
Growin' Up -- Bruce Springsteen
Beautiful -- Clem Snide
Pictures of You -- The Cure
Information Age -- Damon & Naomi
Don't Want To Be Part Of Your World -- David Byrne
Waking Up -- Elastica
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised -- Gil Scott Heron
Going Underground -- The Jam
Hurt -- Johnny Cash
Night Boat To Cairo-- Madness
Cinnamon Girl -- Neil Young
Us and Them -- Pink Floyd
Common People -- Pulp
Only the Stones Remain -- The Soft Boys
Hippy Chick -- Soho
Silent All These Years -- Tori Amos
Black Steel -- Tricky
Moondance -- Van Morrison
From The Heart -- Weddings Parties Anything
Seven Nation Army -- White Stripes
Sweet Soul Dream -- World Party
Freedom Suite -- Young Disciples

joella

*(with apologies to Beth)

A reassuring glimpse of sanity

I'm glad to see the world hasn't gone completely mad.

Tory MP Nadine Dorries, who proposed a 20-week limit, said the government was "out of touch" with the public on the issue.

The *public* would bring back hanging. This is why we have governments.

joella

The difficult seventh decade

Israel turned 60 this week. I was thinking about the place. I often do, but I don't often get very far. This delightfully badly composed photo was taken just after it (she? are countries female? or is that just France?) turned 40, outside my grandmother's flat on David Pinsky Street in Haifa.



I was there doing the kibbutz thing. She lived there for about half her life: as a child and adolescent after leaving Germany before the war; as the new wife of a British soldier stationed in (what was then) Palestine; and again, later, as a widow. She lived lots of other places in between, but this flat is the only place I remember her living.

She came to visit us every summer for six weeks, and we went there twice when I was a kid, but this was the first time I went to see her by myself. She was an excellent host: she bought me a carton of Marlboro and got a crate of Goldstar in, and we got drunk together in her little living room and smoked a lot. It felt delightfully transgressive.

And while I'm sure I was significantly more politically naive in those days, it felt that the future was bright. I challenged a few of my cousins on their alarmingly dogmatic view of the world, but generally the sun shone, the swimming pools sparkled and the beer flowed. There was a sense of optimism, that problems could be solved.

This was even more prevalent the last (in both senses) time I visited, in the summer of 1992. We were there for the election of Yitzhak Rabin, and a shockwave of liberal elation swept across the land. Remember the morning of May 2 1997? It was a bit like that.

Then of course he got shot for signing the Oslo Peace Accords, and the rest is increasingly messy history. Life goes on, but if you want an argument against national service for teenagers, check out the dead eyes of the stoned young Israelis who have taken over Asia's less salubrious beach hangouts. They don't just hate Arabs, they hate everyone.

I don't have any answers, of course. Nobody does. The status quo is unsustainable, yet it sustains. Memories are long and wounds are deep, and they get longer and deeper.

I remember listening to Robert Fisk on Desert Island Discs a couple of years ago, who has spent most of his working life as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East. He said something like "I just wish everyone in Western Europe would appreciate the fact that theirs is a cutting-edge way to live".

Some of us do.

joella

Loving The Eels

That's it really. It's no surprise to find that Mark E's father was a dead clever physicist. He is a dead clever lyricist.

My favourite line is from I Like Birds:

"If you're small and on a search
I've got a feeder for you to perch on"

I can never work out if it's supposed to be rude or not.

joella

Boris: a momentary lapse of reason?

... or the beginning of the end? I can't decide. I'd like to think it was the former, because I can't actually believe that SO MANY PEOPLE COULD BE SO STUPID, but I also worry that Britain is actually largely made up of people who like being told what to do by public schoolboys with floppy hair. Can we really not break this habit? Must we really revert to a world of Us and Them? Must we really fucking *vote* for one? I can't bear it.

I leave slagging off of the man himself and what he actually stands for to Zoe Williams, who says it better than I could. But I remain, frankly, amazed that this has happened. I plan to move to a smallholding in Finland, eat berries, build a bunker and await the end of civilisation. We're all going to hell in a handcart.

joella