The less I seek my source for some definitive

A little journey story. Because I want to say it out loud. YM, as ever, MV.

When, some years ago, I first started seeing the blunt statement "trans women are women", I baulked at it a bit. I felt it was being thrown at me across the room, no returns, closing down issues and concerns. Pick your side and fight the other, or shut up. As Josie Long said yesterday, I deeply hate this entire discourse. I also felt I had a horse in the race, as it were (and horse racing can kill horses), as second wave feminism shaped my world, my thinking, my identity. It's part of me. A lot of  the older women I grew up reading and was influenced by, the radical feminists who now identify as 'gender critical' (aka TERFs, but that is often used as a slur), don't believe this. I took this seriously. Same with a lot of women my age and a bit younger, mostly (but not all, it's never all), who are now powerful presences in the media, politics, elsewhere. Some of them are my friends, and I always take my friends seriously.

But I could also see that many people younger than me have absolutely no problem accepting this statement, like, of course? Nbd? Why are we even talking about this? And I thought about the slow, gradual unpicking of centuries of misogyny by generations of feminists that gave me the ability to take up space in the world, and the work that still needs to be done there, and the slow, gradual work (with occasional explosions) done by generations of activists fighting other kinds of prejudice, oppression and discrimination. And the relative ease with which younger generations can take some of that for granted, the battles that are (for now, in some places) over, look around and say 'what do we need to do next?' (You can be legit asexual these days, guys! I wish someone had told me that when I was 15. I could have skipped a whole load of UTIs, for starters.) Some of these younger people are now also my friends, and I always take my friends seriously.

So I have done a lot of reading and a lot of thinking, and a lot of talking to people who I feel safe talking to about this kind of thing (which is quite a few, I have some excellent friends, these are the ones I take extra seriously), and I have essentially come to the conclusion that you can absolutely be a feminist (even, maybe especially, with radfem tendencies) and a trans ally at the same time. Put at its simplest, I don't want or need anyone to tell me what being a woman means, so I have no interest in or need to tell anyone else. And we can take the rest from there. You can quote me on that.

That only really fully crystallised with me this week, when I read That Blog Post. Lots of shit things have happened since, not least to the author, and believing she is a) wrong and b) should not have used her platform in this way does not make them any less shit. I deeply hate this entire discourse.

But as Eddie Redmayne responded nice and clearly (and for the record I'm just fine with posh white men saying what needs to be said): trans women are women. Trans men are men. Non-binary identities are valid. I was just going to post that, but I thought some of you might appreciate some of the context in which I am saying it.

I have no interest in, and no energy for, going over the same ground again and again with people who are not for examining their own views, privilege and prejudices, or those who do not even acknowledge that they have those things. You know, at some level, who you are. Don't @ me. But if you're on this journey too, stay with it. It's worth it.

This song has been my friend since I first heard it over 30 years ago. It still does the job. SOUND UP, as the kids say.

joella

Breaking the McDonald's seal

Christmas 2003, we went to India for a month. It was one of the best resettings I've ever had, and not just because it was a long one. We did a small group tour with Intrepid Travel, which was organised in partnership with Oxfam Australia, and we visited a bunch of NGO and community projects, including spending a full five days in rural Orissa with Gram Vikas, whose work tilted my world on its axis a little.

Intrepid are an Australian company, and our group included quite a few solo Australians, including three women who bonded with each other pretty quickly and were excellent life and soul value. I generally love the Australian women I have met on my travels. They are hilarious while remaining humane. They don't give a shit, while managing not to be dicks. They drink a lot of beer, and they taught me the phrase 'breaking the seal': it's the first time you go for a wee in a drinking session. Once that's happened, you'll be running to the loo all the time, like a proper girl. It resonated hard. My bladder control is on the excellent side, but only till it's not. Oh mate, they'd say, you're breaking the seal. They'd hold on waaaayyyy longer. But everyone's seal breaks in the end.

I have found it to be an adaptable concept. I didn't eat meat for 30 years, with hardly any breaches - and those were mainly politeness-based. Eventually I was someone who didn't eat meat because she didn't eat meat, even though my reasons for not eating any meat didn't fully hold anymore. I used to argue that the people who don't do something because they don't are important - you have to stand for something or you'll fall for anything etc. And I still think that's true - you need the unbenders in lots of situations, to keep you thinking and keep you honest. But I came up against some of the truly unbending, and my contrary self broke the seal.

And I'd like to tell you that every bit of meat I have eaten since has been pasture-fed and out-door reared and organic and free range, but while a lot of it has, you know and I know that would be a big fat lie. I have had an American Hot. I have had a Steak Bake. I have had a gala pie. But till t'other week, I had gone the entirety of the 21st century without a Big Mac.

Till December 2019, I had, in fact, only once been to a McDonald's in the 2000s. It was at 6.30am in January 2002 in Huehuetenango, Guatemala. I was there on a work trip, it was freezing cold, it was literally the only open place in town, and the project officer accompanying us had no idea why two of us hovered on the threshold, wondering what the Spanish for 'we don't visit McDonald's on principle' was. We quite quickly got over ourselves and had a coffee and an Egg McMuffin, but it felt, even in the circs, unpleasantly transgressive. These guys, these guys are part of the problem, we felt.

But there's problems and problems. I mean, look at the Labour Party. And about a month ago, we seemed to be at it again here in Ecoville. It's a long story, and it's been going on a long time. I have written about it before*, but not for a while, not for years. Mainly this is because I know there are people who don't like me writing about it. Or, possibly, anyone writing about it. Which is a challenge, as it's such good material - so good that we actually got covered by a real magazine this year. Which is a good read, I think. But it might have stirred something. Something did, at any rate, as a little bomb went off.

The timing was unfortunate. To live successfully in a place like this you have to work out how to play the long game. You get knocked down, and you get up again, but it can take a while. It's always been important to me to be making a contribution, and I've always found a way to do that. There are low-exposure and high-exposure jobs (which broadly, but not perfectly, equate to low stress and high stress) and there are jobs that anyone can do, and jobs that only some people can do. A few years ago, while I was still very much licking my Food Wars wounds, I found myself a low-exposure job that needed specific skills (treasurer of the co-op that buys stuff for our on-site food and household goods store). This role is actually Quite Hard, but also Mostly Appreciated, and can, if necessary, be done anywhere there's an internet connection. It was a good fit, but I was getting a bit tired of it: sometimes it involves chasing people for money, and I hate that part; there are some bits that are wildly inefficient, by design; and also I just felt it was all a bit staid. A bit wholemeal. I wanted to be a bit more creative with what we bought and where we bought it from. But no one else was interested, not really. You have to pay attention to that, in the long game. Pick your battles, Jo.

So I was thinking well, things feel quite stable at the moment, we're doing ok. M is currently well, my job is going great, my dad's not been in an ambulance for a bit. Maybe I should be offering a bit more. We are, as one of my neighbours beautifully put it, all crew.

We elect company directors every year - lots of people have done the job (it's a two year term) but it's very much at the high exposure end of things. There are never quite enough people willing to stand - certainly not in recent years. I think we could have up to 12, and there are currently five. So if you decide it's a thing you can do, you're pretty much guaranteed to get the job. So. Hey, I'm a company director! Go me. So is M. Go us. We thought about it a lot, and figured it was our turn to take some of that stuff for the team. He's done it before, I haven't, but when he did, it was all in the house anyway, whatever he was dealing with, so I figured it was worth doing it together. Deep breaths, I thought. We're growing up and growing past and growing on.

BLAM!

(Actually, maybe it was that that was the trigger? It's fine to do the books but not to make decisions about [checks agenda] firewood and trampolines? I don't know).

Also - and this has happened several times - like a lot of people, we're supposed to do a lot more communal meal cooking than we actually do, and it's a point of some contention in our house. I know I should try harder, but how we eat together, or don't, is at the absolute heart of a lot of my own sadness, anger and frustration about living here. It's the main thing I am trying to grow past, so I can focus on the joyful, creative, productive parts. But it takes me actual months to build up the energy and the enthusiasm. And then... just when I do, (and I try, I really do - this time I'd sourced a special ingredient from a kosher deli, ffs), BLAM! Someone says something, someone does something, and I think oh fuck it, I am not giving this a day of my life, and we invite people we like around for sausage pasta** instead.

Instead (and I do get the inherent tension here, so don't even think about explaining it to me, I'm not in the mood, I'll never be in the mood even when I'm in my best mood) there was a proposal for a Saturday morning conversation whose framing included the question "Do you think that a public blog is a useful way to initiate discussion and facilitate change in a community?" No. Of course it's not a useful way to initiate discussion and facilitate change in a community. But hey fellas, neither is a lot of the other stuff that's happened around here, a lot of it more in your face and screamy than that, and some of it pretty gangy-uppy, at least in my experience. Specifically, men claiming exclusive knowledge of the concept of inclusivity really. pushes. my. buttons.

And I have buttons. Your correspondent tried to do all the things she was supposed to do. She joined the teams. She turned up for the discussions. She explained why she was unhappy with the things she was unhappy with. She engaged with every single process at every single point. The above things happened anyway (most of them before she wrote a single blog post about them).

And this time she tried again. She lost a lot of sleep in the build up to the conversation, and did not practise her best self care. She may have drunk too much wine, stridden around the house ranting about 'this fucking place', done some sobbing and wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, but she got some wise counsel, she calmed the fuck down and she showed the fuck up.

As did around 20 other people, which is pretty impressive for a Saturday in December. She proposed a reframing of the questions, because she thought they were the wrong ones. We need to be talking about how to deal with conflict before it becomes a cold stale deposit in our arteries, congestion in our lungs. We've unpacked the shit out of this, years after the events, and it hasn't really helped, so why dwell?

And we took that forward, the kind, thoughtful people who'd shown up wanting to move this on, and we had four separate conversations about different aspects of the challenges ahead, and it was hopeful and energising and actually, maybe, worth the angst. (Jury's out on that one, I was planning a calm December and did not get one, but whatevs.)

Two hours we were there, and then four of us went to McDonald's. I had a Big Mac Meal with a full fat Coke, and I enjoyed every inch of it. The following week, I went to London for work, and thanked my colleagues for helping me learn more about systems and how they work, and how important it is to ask the right question, diagnose the problem whose addressing will have actual impact.

The last night I was there, I left the pub four pints deep and made my way back to the YHA. I got off the bus outside the Oxford St McDonald's. Yes! I thought, and I ordered a Filet-O-Fish from a machine. It arrived, about 45 seconds later, and I ate it, surrounded by girls from many nations and women of all classes. It tasted like very heaven.

Another seal done gone.

joella

* Links available on request
** One of our very favourite comfort dinners. It's by Jamie Oliver, and the recipe is here. It's not vegan, vegetarian, kosher or gluten free and it has wine in it for extra points.

Free at the point of use

I have this brown mark on my foot. It just kind of arrived a couple of years ago. My mother said I was getting old. I *am* getting old.

Over the summer, my friend N came to stay. A few years ago she went into hospital Up North (where she lives) to have a mole removed from one of her eyebrows. You can see the scar if you know where to look, but they did a lovely job. More importantly, while it turned out to be a Bad Mole, she has since been given the all clear.

She spotted the mark on my foot when we were both curled up on the sofa watching TV and said 'has anyone looked at that?'. No, I said. 'Go to see your GP', she said.

So I booked an appointment via the EMIS system. I've been going to the same GP practice for over 10 years, and I think it's great. I got to see the doctor I always try to see - one of the partners, who is also a trained homeopath and the closest thing to a British bluestocking I can imagine. She had a student in with her, and they both looked at my foot. 'Need to refer that, I'm afraid,' she said, and filled in a form. It was ticked 'urgent', which alarmed me slightly. I took it downstairs and gave it to the receptionists.

A couple of days later I got a phonecall at work from the Dermatology department at the Churchill, who'd called me at home and got the number from M. She offered me a 9.30 appointment the following Tuesday. I said I *could* make that, but I was supposed to be in an all day meeting that day, but I wasn't working on the Friday? She said I could come at 9am on Friday instead. I said thanks. She said she'd send me a letter to confim but it might not arrive on time, but there was a map on the website. I said thanks. I took advantage of this. 

[NB The letter did arrive on time, but I didn't open it, which I'm quite glad about, as it told me I had an appointment at a Tumour Clinic and I should try not to worry.]

I turned up at the appointed hour, and was directed to Waiting Area 2, where five minutes later a doctor called me in and asked me some questions. Do you want to see my foot? I said. I want to see all your skin, she said. We went into an examining room, I went down to my bra and pants and she looked at all my various moles. Right, she said, we do need to get the consultant to look at that foot. There will be a short wait.

She handed me one of those hospital gowns with no back, and went back into the outer office. I put it on, then lay down on the examining couch to read my book. After a couple of minutes, I put my socks back on, as it was a little chilly. Five minutes later, she came back in. Are you ok? she said. The consultant is coming soon.

Five minutes after that, he burst through the door with a student in tow and bearing a special mole magnifier. I took my socks off and he had a good look. Then he talked about the ABCD of moles to the student and got her to have a look too. Colour was his main concern. Can I see? I said. It was a bit tricky because of the angle, but I could see that it might look basically brown, but is actually very splotchy.

How did you get here? he said. I got dropped off, I said. How are you getting home? he said. I'm going to walk, I said. Ah, he said. Not if we take this off now. Oh, I said.

Well, we don't have to do it today, he said. But I want that off in the next two weeks. Because of where it is, you won't be able to walk for a few days, and you'll have to take it very easy for a couple of weeks to make sure it heals properly.

Oh, I said. I'm supposed to be going to Brussels next week for work. Not if we take it off today, he said. Oh, I said. Is the week after next ok? I mean, is it dumb to wait?

It's fine, he said. Chances are it's not melanoma but not worth the risk of leaving it there. There's something not right about it.

OK, I said. Thanks.

So I got dressed, the first doctor took an MRSA swab from my nostril (I have no idea why), and gave me a green form and a white form, which I took back to reception.

The receptionist took the white one, and directed me down the hall to the surgery appointments office. The woman in there looked through her bookings. It looks full, she said, but I keep a few slots hidden for two-weekers like you. How about 1.30 on the 14th?

Great, I said. She gave me an appointment card and a leaflet about minor surgery, and I walked home via the public right of way across the golf course.

When I got home I opened the original letter they'd sent me, where it did say that they also treat private patients. One wonders what extra you'd get for the money.

And while the ultra-specialist part of my care so far has been delivered via a male consultant, who was brusque but not bossy, every other contact I've had has been with a woman. And they've all thought about how I might be feeling and what else might be going on in my life. 

So I have to say to Ms Death Panel Palin and her freakish ilk: if this is socialised medicine, you guys should Bring It On. 

joella

An invitation to the School of Life

I got a phone call a few weeks ago from Roman Krznaric, who I have met a few times - I once hung a radiator in his front room, and for several years I had a wood chest in my garden that used to belong to him and his partner K. He was calling because he is leading the 'Work' course at the School of Life, and he wanted to know if I would come and give a talk about becoming a Lady Plumber.

I was full of reasons why I might not be a good person to give such a talk - I am not really a plumber (or am I? I don't know), I'm still a 0.6 FTE NGO X wage slave, I actually bring in substantially less money that I did before I hatched this plan (though I grow my own salad leaves now, thus saving untold ££s), I don't really know what happens next - but he said no, that was all cool, and the course was just as much about questions as about answers. OK then, I said, you're on.

I was more nervous than I thought I would be, but maybe everyone is when they talk about themselves. Plumbing is quite easy to play for laughs, which helped, and there is a story in there - the Dark Days in the New Building, the inspiring if unpredictable presence of J the plumber, the urge to challenge a few stereotypes, and hell, to do something new. I don't think there's anything extraordinary about my experience, and nobody who finds it as hard to get out of bed in the morning as I do is ever going to change the world, but maybe that's the point.

And it was great fun. The best bit was the Q&A session... it was interesting to say out loud things that I have only really ever said to myself. Someone asked if I'd thought about going back to help out at the college, and wouldn't that be a good thing to do, and I'd sort of thought about it, but not for a while, and yes it would.

Generally, it was inspiring to be around such active thinking about the nature of work, what's important about it, and how it defines our lives. I'd like to have more of these conversations out loud. It's not an easy thing to do, so respect to the School of Life for starting some those conversations off.

joella

Target Women

How did I not know about Sarah Haskins till yesterday? More on how I came to know about her another time, this is too good not to share. Enjoy.

joella

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?

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

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.

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

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

Bonjour tristesse

There has never been a more inappropriate item of clothing than a high-vis cycle vest at a Diamanda Galas gig. I tucked it into my bike helmet and tucked my bike helmet under my seat, but still it glowed, like a radioactive ingot in a post-apocalyptic world.

What I should have been wearing, of course, was black. All over, from the inside out. That's what most everyone else was wearing, including the lady herself. I'd call her something like the High Priestess of Goth, but I don't think that would begin to cover it.

She sings of love, of despair, of death, of bleakness, of grief, of injustice. She does this in three languages and over three octaves. When singing isn't enough, she screams. I went with A, who has been waiting to see her live for 21 years, and his friend J, who said afterwards 'I can see why they made us drink out of plastic. She'd have shattered every glass in the place'.

I spent most of the set grinning like an idiot. Halfway through, A said 'is this *really* what it's like inside your head?'. Yeah, I said. Sometimes.

Her new album is called Guilty Guilty Guilty. Let's just say that as a lapsed Catholic, on Maundy Thursday, I could relate to that.

Right, I'm off for a shriek.

joella

Girls and boys

1. Boys.
I enjoyed David Baddiel's Whatever Love Means far more than I expected to. He's overtly a) alpha, b) Oxbridge, and c) Jewish, and I've never found that a particularly sympathetic combination in men, even though it's not so far from my own. On those grounds, I'd never normally have borrowed the book from the library, but I was in a tearing hurry and it was on the 'If You're In a Tearing Hurry' stand by the door, next to the books in Polish.

And it is a good book, especially if you remember the time and the place (which I do), and if you have ever been in a relationship with someone whose behaviour has baffled you unless you take a really uncharitable view of men (which I have).

So next time I was in there, in slightly less of a tearing hurry, I borrowed Time for Bed. I've read about half of it, and decided (and this is rare for me) that I won't finish it. I found someone else's bookmark in it, which is a sign that I am not the first person to make this decision.

Basically, it's the porn, and the porn-driven sex. I don't like either of these things, and reading about them in this level of detail makes me feel bleak. I feel this way about a lot of Hanif "there are some fucks for which a man would have his wife and children drown in a freezing sea" Kureishi, not to mention a fair amount of early Martin Amis. And I don't think what he's saying is important or interesting enough to wade through the wanking and arse-fucking, frankly.

M is slightly further ahead in the book than me (we sometimes end up reading the same copy of the same book at the same time which annoys both of us but does mean you get to talk about it quicker). I don't like what this book says about men, I said. I don't think it's true. Surely it's not true.

Er, um, well it is a bit, he said. But you don't have a collection of hardcore DVDs! I said. You don't have major pubic hair issues! You don't negotiate interactions with women like they come from another planet! Do you?

Well no, he said. But then I live with you. And you've always said yourself that you can't help what's in your head, you can only help what you do with it. Which left me simultaneously flattered and disappointed. V postmodern. You finish it, I said, then tell me whether you think I should. And we left it at that.

2. Girls.
I might be hard work, but I'm low maintenance. I'm a cheap date, I carry a bag big enough for all my stuff, I don't sulk much, and I provide a detailed list of what I want for my birthday (which these days can mostly be sourced from the Screwfix catalogue).

I've been getting my legs waxed every four weeks since I was about 25, because I can't bear to shave but I can't bear to leave them either, and I've been dying my hair every 12 weeks since I was about 30, because I had developed a Mallen streak and it wasn't a good look. I exfoliate because it makes me feel clean, and I've been moisturising since my sister bought me some for Christmas a few years ago, but apart from that, nothing. No nails, no highlights, no perming, no straightening, no tanning, no bleaching, no Brazilians, no working out, no tooth whitening, no Botox, no foundation, no implants, no chucking up. This is partly a political stance (beauty fascism = bad), partly because I can't afford it, partly because even if I could I'm not sure it would make *that* much difference except to people whose opinion I like to think I don't value, and partly because I Just Can't Be Arsed.

And so it was with significant misgiving that I went out on Friday to get my eyebrows shaped. I've never done it because it's another thing to keep on top of, but I've realised of late that a) pretty much every woman in the world has "managed eyebrows", plus quite a few men, and b) the older you get, the less straggliness you can get away with. I've had beauticians offer to do it for free, I've had my mother on at me about it for years, I've had friends mention it 'in passing'. I've ignored them all, but then I saw this photo of me at Jeremy's clocks-forward-barbecue. Shit, I thought, I look very sweet and all but I have *got* to sort my eyebrows out.

And on Friday, I did.

What do you normally do, asked the nice lady, get them waxed or have them plucked? They've never been touched, I said. What, she said, NEVER? Nope, I said (not strictly true, I got them plucked once as a teenager but they've been au naturel since c1984), do your worst.

She did something involving both waxing and plucking. It hurt. I look weird. But better, I think. And either I get better at inflicting pain on myself, or that's another ten quid a month on personal grooming. M didn't notice, bless him. Or my haircut. But that's so much better than the other way round. You do it to yourself, you do.

joella