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

Mucus Pocus

I was wrong about the To Do list. I left my desk on Wednesday evening covered in tiny post-it notes about the most urgent things for Thursday, and I haven't been back to it since. I have barely been downstairs since. It turns out you can avoid all sorts of things when your brain stops working.

I don't believe in going to the doctor for a cold, or even flu. I was brought up by a nurse to take a couple of aspirin, sweat things out and see them through. Very grateful I am too: I know people whose childhoods were antibiotic-and Vicks-nasal spray heavy, and my immune system sees theirs off every time. The exception is my tonsils, which flare at the first hint of trouble, but I see them as a sort of early-warning system.

However I can only remember one cold as bad as this in my entire life. I was at university and supposed to be writing an essay about Thatcherism (which we were still enduring at the time). The words ran off the page. Instead I spent days wrapped in my big towelling dressing gown drinking hot chocolate and Cup A Soup in front of the electric bar heater, looking at people as if down a long tunnel and wondering if my ears would ever unblock.

Colds like this, you begin to wonder if actually you *are* at death's door and should be doing something more about it than lying in charity shop pyjamas turning your head from side to side occasionally to hear the gunk unstick itself from one side of your skull and stick it to the other.

So this morning I rang my mother about my phlegm, which has now changed colour.

She asked me a few questions and then said 'that's not phlegm dear, that's mucus'.

I resisted the temptation to say 'whatever', and she asked me a few more questions. Yes, I had swollen tonsils, but they've gone down now. No, I don't really have a cough. Yes, I have sinus pressure, but no, it doesn't really hurt. Yes, I have had a bit of a temperature, but nothing feverish. Yes, my nose is really really sore. Brown, mostly.

No, she said, you don't need to burden the NHS. The colour is blood, because I have been blowing too hard. I should take some antihistamine to reduce the inflammation, and I should stick some Vaseline up my nose to, well, you're an adult, you know what Vaseline does. And then I should get back to drinking plenty of fluids and staring at the ceiling.

That's what I thought. It's good to know I have internalised *some* useful healthcare advice over the years.

I have asked M to pick up supplies of Ribena, Vaseline and OK magazine. The only person I feel more sorry for than myself is Kerry Katona, so I could do with the wider perspective.

joella

Eternal phlegm

I was supposed to be fixing the toilet at my hairdresser's this morning (now there's a job where I shouldn't have to supply my own old towels...), but instead I am lying on the sofa with a tissue stuffed up each nostril, a bubbly ear and a brain as fuzzy and distorted as a 1970s television with its magnets on the blink.

I am just ill enough not to be able to do anything today apart from get bored, drink Ribena, and generally feel sorry for myself, but just not ill enough to avoid going into the office tomorrow.Short of full-blown influenza, there's no avoiding that To Do list, but I will be grumpy as hell and heavily Lemsip-dependent all the way to the weekend. I've been here before, I know how it goes. It's a waste of sunny term-time... the outdoor pool will soon be full of pesky kids all day long. I am also not painting walls or planting crocosmia. I am just lying here, one day closer to death, producing fluids that serve no purpose in staggering quantities.

The only bright spot on the horizon is The Wire Series 2, which plopped onto the doormat this morning. It was £8 cheaper to buy it online, but the wait nearly killed me. I am wondering what's the earliest time one can decently start watching TV when one is a bit ill? Six o'clock?

joella

In the wars

We were both awake at five am. This doesn't happen very often.

Are you all right? I said to M.

As long as I don't move, he said. How about you?

As long as I don't swallow, I said. Or breathe.

He put his back out yesterday shifting a bag of garden mulch. I have a bunged up head and mega tonsils. So prosaic but so debilitating.

Still, it makes for guilt-free Womans Hour listening...

joella

Show me epic

This week I have consumed (among other things) the following:

• Too much alcohol. Plumbing S and I independently came to the conclusion that our low-level aches and pains and high-level misanthropy could be attributed to end-stage liver disease. More likely, as it has resolved into snot and a sore throat, it's just a bug, but still.
  
• Last week's Mark Haddon piece in the Observer. I commend it to this house. And every other house.
  
• The beginning of an article about John McCain in this week's Observer. I read the first quarter or so, and then a the phrase "no retreat, no surrender" sent me walking to my vinyl as if in a trance, to search out Born in the USA. No one expects me to be a Springsteen fan, but I am.
  
• A fair bit of Neutral Milk Hotel, whom I think I knew on vinyl in a previous life, and have fallen for again since last.fm played me The King Of Carrot Flowers Pt One. Wikipedia tells me it's in a major key. I find this hard to believe.
  
• The second half of Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple. He writes well, though, while offering some analysis of the situations he witnesses (much of which analysis I would dispute, but still), he offers, as A&K pointed out when they lent me the book, very little by way of alternative 'underclass management'. The poor, it seems, will always be feckless. I have more to say on this, but it's incubating.
  
• Wait Until Spring, Bandini, by John Fante . A sort of Dalrymple antidote, but not chosen for that reason. Chosen for its Catholicism, really, I find Catholic literature much easier to relate to than Jewish literature.
  
• More gherkins than usual, having stocked up on my favourite kosher pickles at my favourite Asian grocers. What holds for literature does not hold for food.
  
• The end of series 1 of The Wire. Surely, and I do not say this lightly, this is the best television ever made by anyone ever. We are not worthy.

joella

Any colour you like, as long as it's black

I was talking with a friend about the creative inspiration that constraints can provide. It started with her asking about my photos of toilets. I explained that I am collecting them, possibly, for a Pecha Kucha night that Oxford Improvisers are organising in November.

I love the idea that nobody can go on for more than 400 seconds, so there is no danger of that awful feeling you get in meetings or at conferences when someone is still on slide four ten minutes in, and you surreptitiously check the handouts to see how many slides there are, and there are 48, and you think maybe it would be preferable just to die now.

But I also love the idea of the freedom that comes with the format -- as the audience knows what's fixed, they are more likely to get involved with what is changing, and enjoy the ride.

Even so, 20 blurry photos of the toilets of Oxford's pubs and restaurants, with plumbing-obsessed commentary, might be a bit much. So I might not go there. But that wouldn't change the fact that I like constraints. They can make the unapproachable approachable.

For example, I choose my library books by deciding, while walking up the stairs, on the letter that the author's surname will begin with. One year I decided to buy all my Christmas presents on Cowley Road. It worked a treat. I looked hard in shops I never normally go into, and I found some really interesting things.

And currently, I have a rule that (apart from underwear) I will only buy clothes that are either second hand or less than two thirds their original price. They also have to broadly align with the best shopping advice I ever heard, which was from that scary American Vogue woman whose name I forget... she said "if it's not perfect for you, it doesn't matter how much of a bargain it is, don't buy it".

"Perfect" is not a concept I have in clothes, as I just don't have that sort of body, but there are things you put on and think, well, I don't really like it, but I need a new X, and it only costs £3, and I'm not going to think about why it only costs £3.

I don't buy those things anymore. I probably do buy things made by children in Chinese sweatshops, as it's practically impossible to avoid them, but I try not to. I read labels. I look for ethical trading statements on websites.

So last week I found myself, as I do several times a year, looking at the Fat Face sale rail. It covers all the bases. I came home with a strange dress (all dresses are strange, but this one is particularly strange as it rather suits me), and a shirt and some cut-off trousers. I know short people aren't supposed to wear cut-off trousers but really, sod it.

I showed my new clothes to M when I got home. I like it, I said, when I buy clothes that look like I've always had them. I find it reassuring.

I feel a bit like that about girlfriends, he said. I wasn't sure how to take that.

joella

June Z Chorley

Facebook tells me that a friend of mine has become friends with a woman whose name I recognise from long-ago information management conferences. This was one terrifying woman, she was like a whiskery tarantula in bad knitwear. I seem to remember the friend in question leaping behind a pillar mid-conversation in order to avoid her, in much the same way I once saw my uncle J, who was drinking outside a pub, hide behind a bush when he saw his mother coming down the street in her most lurid woolly-hat-and-lipstick combo. It is a salutary reminder that "friend" is not the right word for what FB does to people.

I drift into long-ago information management conference reverie... days of interviewing Ukranians with my brick-size tape recorder, nights of insane 'on the company' binge drinking after compulsory networking receptions. It feels like another life, though I still count a pleasing number of its members as my (real) friends.

And then I do one of those involuntary, embarrassing, gurgling laughs that make my colleagues look at me askance, as I am not talking to anyone or even reading anything, just sitting there, staring into space. I have remembered June Z Chorley (not quite her real name).

June Z Chorley was an American librarian who used to write a column for one of our esteemed publications. From America. For reasons that are lost in the mists of time, P, who was in charge of all things editorial, felt that she might be a good person to edit said publication for a few months over the summer. She thought this was a fine idea, and she came over from America to live among us.

It was immediately apparent that our assumptions about her, based largely on her byline photo, had been ridiculously naive. She was not at all glossy. She was at least ten years older than said photo suggested. She also wore more Birkenstocks, and was a fair bit more lopsided and bonkers and a lot more ornery.

Most of the time, it was just me and C in the office with her. She made strange grunty noises that were a little offputting, and when she rang people up she would get our company name wrong. I sat with my back to C, but I could sense his fingers tense over his keyboard every time it happened. We would both silently shake with laughter, and then we'd carry on with what we were doing.

This was a pretty low-tech office (we once had to burn joss sticks for several days to mask the smell of decomposing rodent) so it was fingerless gloves in winter and baking hot in the summer. The great perk of the place was the swimming pool in the garden. It was unheated and therefore absolutely freezing, except for a magical 3-4 weeks in the dog days of summer, where jumping into it at lunchtime was the only thing that kept me sane.

I think it was an afternoon following such a lunchtime. I was subbing away at my desk, and C was subbing away at his, when one of us (I forget which now, but probably me, as she was in my eyeline) noticed that there hadn't been any grunty noises for a while and looked over.

June Z Chorley was still in her chair, but face down on the desk.

I emailed C: "I think she might have just died".
He replied: "Shit. I think you're right. What do we do?"
Me: "Find someone to check for vital signs."

Without saying a word we got up, and left the room via the less-used exit into the photocopier area, where we started laughing and could not stop. I can still remember my face aching, and the hopeless effort to hold it together while asking J the receptionist to go and see if she was still alive.

She was grinning too when she came back out of the room, having woken June up from her deeper than usual nap. A few seconds later the woman herself emerged, and C and I busied ourselves checking pigeon holes for any faxes that might have arrived for us recently (we had email, but almost nobody else did) and trying not to look at each other.

June Z Chorley was not, to be honest, much fun to work with. But the moral of the story is, the worst colleagues make the best stories once enough time has passed. As with so many things, it pays to take the long view.

joella

Q is for the apparatus of state*

I have been working with one of NGO X's country offices, trying to arrange a visit. They need some information management support. I will not name the country here, as it is the sort of place that does not give visas to people who do information management. Let's just say that if you made a list of all the countries in the world in the order you'd choose to go on holiday to them, it would come pretty near the bottom. Especially in June.

To enter the country, you first of all need a four digit number. The country office has to apply for the number, which the government will produce, or not, within four weeks to three months. Once you have your number, you can apply for your visa.

I was planning to go at the end of June, but there is still no number. There is, as I understand it, a certain degree of influence that can be applied to the process, but only a certain degree. The office have been exerting that certain degree of influence, and assuring me that my number is "nearly ready".

However, I am also negotiating something with another organisation, who want me to go to a planning session in New York. They kept their dates open for a while, as I could not tell them when I might be around. But they have now settled on early July.

It's ok, I tell the country office, there's no rush for the number, as I can't come in late June anyway. Ah, they say, but once you have the number, you have only a fixed amount of time to apply for your visa.

So now we have gone into reverse. I received a crackly phone call this morning from man who clearly understands these things in a way that I never will. He will now delay the number for as long as possible. He will send it by the end of June, and I will then be able to delay my visa collection until the 20th of July. Once the visa is stamped in my passport it will then be valid for entry for either a month or three months. We don't know which, and it is not knowable. So I will go on the 20th of August, if I have to. Or shortly thereafter, if I don't.

It will be possible, he says. Inshallah, we both say.

joella

*title inspired by Nonstop Tango's Dictionary.

The gender politics of insertion

I was down in a basement, trying to get a fall on a bath waste. What you need there, said BJ the plumbing assessor, is an emanef into the soil stack.

A *what*? I said.

He described it in a bit more detail. Oh, right, I said. I'd call that a street elbow.

[A normal elbow is a 90 degree bend that takes pipe at both ends. A street elbow takes pipe at one end and a fitting at the other. They are very useful for getting round tight corners. Here, we had an elbow onto a bit of pipe pointing downwards into a cut off soil stack. A street elbow would mean the pipe could go in right up to the bend, saving a very important 20mm or so.]

It's a street elbow in copper, he said. If it's waste, it's an emanef.

I eventually worked out that it's called an 'M and F', because it is female (receiving) at one end and male (inserting) at the other. I *hate* asking for male and female things in the plumbers merchants. T, I said to the customer, you don't fancy popping down Travis Bickle* for a 40mm solvent weld M and F do you?

T is the absolute best kind of customer - easy going, involved, on-hand with his (considerable) brute force where required, and willing to go to Travis Bickle and ask for things with embarrassing names.

All good. But I wonder if we will ever have a world where you can screw (or in this case glue) one thing into another without one of them being male and the other female. I know it's an obvious thing to call them. I know that the tiny flicker that crosses the guy's face when you ask for them, which means he's just had the same thought you've had, shouldn't really, in the big scheme of things, matter. But, you know, it does.

joella

*Travis Perkins. But M has always called it Travis Bickle, and then we found out the Finnfans do too, and that's now what it's called.

The undulation of an Oxford weekend

(because I don't go into the office till Wednesdays these days, and when people ask how my weekend was I have already forgotten)

A dash to the Marsh after work for drinks with S, who is off on maternity leave. A power walk to the Pegasus, picking up R on the way, for a decidedly weird take on the myth of Orpheus that involved toy theatres and bubble wrap. A wander to the garden of the Chester Arms to talk art and building and music with Greek people in hammocks. A stumble home via felafel at Bodrum Kebab.

An amble to the Farmers Market for a bag of vegetables and a plate of egg and potato curry and reading the paper (and ignoring the smell created by the Modern Parents who think it's ok to change nappies on the grass right in front of people who are eating). A stroll to the allotment to check on the tomato plants, and from there to Silvesters to buy some more: they were properly dead. A wobbly walk home with a flimsy plastic tray, and a wobblier bike ride down the hill with watering can over the handle bars and a rucksack full of tools and slug pellets.

A couple of hours of gentle pottering. A cycle home for tea, then over to meet R&J at the Fir Tree, then to the Orpheus after-party at the Magic Cafe. A decision *not* to cycle home, more of a weave.

A hangover. A slink downstairs in the early afternoon, then a slink back up again to apply more Night Jewels to the walls of the shower room. A girding of loins (successful) for an early evening trip to Hinksey Pool for the first open air swim of the year. A shivery scamper down the side of the pool afterwards to stand under the shower and feel warm and replenished.

A late dinner of lasagne from leftovers and a sliding under a blanket for two episodes of The Wire (one is never enough). A final ascent for the sort of sleep you know will come quickly and be deep.

joella

Stork talk

A colleague tells me she is expecting twins. She has the sort of figure I have always yearned for, tall, willowy, strong. Even though she sits two desks away, I have obviously not looked below her neck for the last couple of months, as she's suddenly a completely different shape.

I'm delighted for her. And she will be a brilliant mother, she is one of the most clear-headed and right-minded people I have ever met, but something registers deeper inside me. She was one of the ones I was watching, to see if she would. Most women do, and many that don't, would if they could, if their bodies worked better, or their lives had gone differently. I keep an eye out for the ones who choose not to. They are the ones I want to find, to talk to. There are hardly any of us... sometimes I think I've found one but it turns out there's a story of loss, of pain, of regret. You can't tell by looking.

I'm pretty confident I've made the right choice, but you never know. It's a big choice, so it's good to have it challenged, especially as the door is closing. I wouldn't want to get to the other side of it and realise I'd spent the last 30 years in denial of my maternal instinct. That would be dumb. But I get plenty of challenges. Every bump, every birth, every raise of the eyebrows and 'so have you and M ever thought about...'

Yes of course we fucking have. *He's* already done it... there are three full-size people wandering around as a result. So it wouldn't be for him. And me... no, I just don't want to. Never have. Not *enough*. There are many reasons, some healthier than others, and maybe one day I will write them all down. But the main one is simple: I like my space. *That's* the conversation I want to have, about the guilty pleasure of empty Sundays, hours of mental and physical wandering through books and music and streets and gardens. I have time to hang out the washing. Learn to use power tools. Make things instead of buying them. Think a lot. Sleep a lot. Care about the detail. If I want to. Engage with the big picture. If I want to. Answer to nobody, pretty much.

That's a lot to give up. If I'd had pregnancy thrust upon me, so to speak, I'm sure I'd have got on with it and never looked back. But no, I had a choice, and I've taken it. I used to think everyone was like me, and hugely surprised to find out they weren't. The surprise has got milder over the years, but it's still there.

joella