Unexpectedly moved

I was too young to go to Live Aid and also lived a bit too far away. As it turned out, it was also held on the first day of my first ever Saturday job, so I missed the first five hours, though my parents did very kindly tape it for me, and I still have the video. I would have given just about anything to have been there, but it was in no way attainable.

Live8 was a lot more attainable but I was a lot less interested. I'm 20 years older, I've been to a lot more gigs, and I work for an organisation that is part of Make Poverty History. I guess I felt it was something I didn't need to do, even before I got bloody tonsilitis at bloody Glastonbury.

But I've found watching it on TV strangely emotional. The whole Live Aid resonance was unexpectedly nostalgic, and reminded me of Saturdays in the bread shop and, later, nights working in the Queens pub with the Who on repeat on the jukebox. How young we were. Robbie Williams was incredible. So was Annie Lennox. And when Pink Floyd played Wish You Were Here, I found tears rolling down my cheeks, for things past and gone and never coming back. Lord only knows what it would have been like to be there, though I could have been stuck in the toilet queue for any of those moments.

Time I wish there *had* been a toilet queue to be stuck in though: Mariah Carey. What is she *like*? An American size silicone bowl of saccharine gack topped with self-important sprinkles. Ewww. And that bit with the orphans from 'Africa', like Africa is the same size as Chicago or something. You can see why Madge is an Anglophile.

My extreme loathing of Mariah Carey nearly neutralised my general irritation with Jo 'Madonna excelled (sic) my expectations' Whiley. But not quite. Let's just say it was very gratifying when George Michael slapped her.

joella

A perfect moment of bathos

For many years, I was never quite sure what bathos was. It was just one of those words, like schadenfreude and Machiavellian, whose precise meaning hovered just beyond my reach. Maybe you don't get much of it till your 30s.

Last night I had to turn down an offer of two 'golden circle' tickets to Live8 because of my tonsilitis. (No, that's not bathos.) I then had to miss a gig by the Hellset Orchestra, and go to bed just as the party started when everyone got back, also because of my tonsilitis. (Not bathos either).

M was so hungover that I was in the better state this morning, so I cooked breakfast for five, then the resilient young people headed off to enjoy their day, and the invalid and the hungover one retreated to the sofa and huddled under a blanket to watch Live8 on TV.

There was a little frisson when old Bob came rambling out to ramble on a bit, and then, bloody hell, Bill Gates! Now that's impressive. The richest man in the world endorsed the exercise and said some moving things about how we know what to do and we've got the money to do it, now let's just make the decisions that mean it can be done.

Yes! we all cheered. Go Bill! Go us! Make Poverty History!

Thanks, he said. And now... I would like to introduce... Dido.

That was bathos, wasn't it? I said. Oh yes, said M.

joella

Characters for my novel

1. Cynthia: 19 year old black South African with a head full of dreams and a burning desire to make something of herself. Works as a pizza waitress in Pretoria, wants to get a work permit to work in London so she can earn enough money to go to college. Agencies in South Africa want to charge her a fortune for a ticket and a 'job', so she looks for people who live 'over there' who might be able to help her.

Sounds good, no? The thing is Cynthia is a real person. She works at an Italian restaurant in Hatfield, Pretoria, attached to the hotel where I stayed before and after Zambia. She is the single most charming waiter/waitress I have ever encountered. She made me feel that eating alone was normal, she chatted to me as she passed by, she complimented me on my English good manners (understandable in a country where many people are shockingly rude to waiters/waitresses), and remembered my eating (calamari) and drinking (dry red wine) preferences after a whole month - and I hadn't even told her I was coming back.

It was only on the second visit that she told me she wanted to come to the UK. I asked her why. I said the weather was miserable, the tips were miserly and she might be better off in the States. She said 'yes, but everybody wants to earn some pounds'. I said 'Well, I don't know why', but knew as I said it that this was said with the unconscious arrogance of one who has always been paid in hard first world currency.

She never quite went so far as to ask me to help her out (though the first night I was there she very clearly explained to me how it was custom in South Africa to tip 10%). I think about her quite a bit and somehow feel that I should. If I ever do write a novel, she'll be in it. So maybe I should see if I can do anything for her in return.

joella

Revenge of the tonsils

I did feel a bit shit on Monday, but I put it down to post-Glasto fatigue. But by Tuesday it was apparent that I had something altogether bigger and badder.

Possibly I did get it at Glasto: it's hard to do adequate personal hygiene when you have a period in the mud and you're drinking out of whatever bottle of water comes to hand while you're working. But I did use plenty of Antibacterial Hand Gel, so it could just be that my little immune system has decided it needs a few days resting up.

So it inflated my tonsils and chucked a few logs on the fever fire, and as a result I seem to be spending an average of 18 hours a day sleeping and the rest imbibing Lemsip and finishing The Line of Beauty - a wonderful book in a bleak sort of way, and thus one which is a great poorly read.

Today I have made it down to the sofa. While I still have huge tonsils I am less feverish, and in the perfect state (compos mentis but nothing better to do) to indulge in Sudoku -- which arrived in a big way while I was in Zambia and which I am only just discovering. My dad has already won a Times Sudoku competition though, and I am very proud of him.

I also don't know why joella's layout seems to have gone a bit wonk, but I am still too poorly to deal with that one.

joella

Giving it some welly

Collected random Glasto snippets which I couldn't be bothered to blog at the time (blogging by WAP may be possible, but is tedious in the extreme).

1. As the thunder and lightning on Friday morning entered their third hour and I sat gratefully drinking the coffee which M had manfully hunter-gathered on the way back from his even more manful trip to the car to get the wellies, I wondered if it was really safe to be drinking from a tin mug in a tent in the middle of a thunderstorm.

2. Weather forecasts are useless. The only way to be safe is to be prepared for every single weather permutation and combination.

3. She-Pee urinals are the future. I got it wrong twice (once to embarrassingly comic effect as I had wee stains down both trouser legs for the next three hours) but this was more than made up for by the seven times I got it right.

4. Overwhelming: standing in six inches of mud to watch the White Stripes on Friday night. Brian Wilson yesterday. Van the Man's Brown-Eyed Girl encore.

5. Glad I bothered: campaigning for Make Poverty History. Catching the end of the Ozric Tentacles. New Order (but no Blue Monday - why?!). The Midnight's Carnival performance art ghost train. Every trip to the hot spicy cider bus.

6. Wish I hadn't bothered: trying to get back to the Pyramid Stage for Bob Geldof's 'big moment' - got stuck in the mud by the Other Stage and it was miserable.

7. Sorry I missed (too much mud to get there / shift clashes precluded getting there): Tori Amos, Rufus Wainwright, Billy Bragg, Lost Vagueness.

8. Quote of the weekend: Goldie Lookin' Chain saying 'make sure you're here at four o'clock, Bob Marley's going to be on stage making poverty history'.

I had a great time, and I have new respect for my wellies. But god, was it hard work, and I have never been so pleased to take anything off my feet in my entire life...

joella

This train... is coming like a ghost train

The Midnight's Carnival ghost train opens at, er, midnight. We are in the queue. gotta be better than Coldplay... mobile joella

Day 2

Scorchio all day, now sitting by a fire watching Fight Club. Boys are weird. But they can wee standing up, which I have always envied... so I was right up for Water Aid's She Pee Girl's urinals. they come with a kind of cardboard funnel. It's the strangest of experiences... and sadly not one of my most successful. i will try again tomorrow... mobile joella

Build up

It's finally dark and - better - it's finally cool. The gang's all here, there's a massive harvest moon hanging in the sky, and there are Mexican waves of cheers echoing round the farm. Now if only I didn't have to get up at 7 tomorrow... mobile joella

Post-exam litter

 


joella

Glasto double-blogging extravaganza

Tomorrow I am off to Glastonbury, where I will be variously campaigning for Make Poverty History, hanging out in the Green Fields, eating, drinking, sleeping, and catching some tunes.

In preparation for this I have finally worked out how to blog from my mobile phone. My mobile phone is quite old and the Orange website is utterly impenetrable, so this did take many hours of frustrating research and I did nearly give up. But last night I spoke to someone called Craig, who activated my GPRS, told me I would have to use WAP as I don't have POP3 capability, and pointed me at OrangeWorld. I *still* can't use OrangeWorld but I have worked out how to do it via Hotmail.

It's a bit of a shag as you have to log in every time and you can't compose offline (just like real Hotmail, in fact) but hey, it works. Go me!

I had already offered to blog for Generation Why, but it turns out that would require trekking to a laptop held in a safe in a field I am not campaigning in, so I've got them into mobile blogging also, and I will send to both.

I realise that I am probably the only person remotely excited by the prospect of being able to spend ten minutes composing 20 words in a field and have them appear here, but there you go. My little inner geek is feeling groovy.

So. Let's hope it doesn't rain.

joella

Wahey moblog!

This is a test and if it works I will be so impressed with myself... mobile joella

We anoint our gods with Evening Primrose Oil

Still lardy, still premenstrual and it's still too hot, but I do feel better. I put some of this down to having finished a few things off today that had become oppressive, but I also put some of it down to upping my intake of the precious oil of the sacred Evening Primrose.

Next year, I'm gonna grow some.

joella

Scorchio

I am so not into this heat. S'funny, it was this hot for a month while I was in Zambia, and I was fine. But hot countries have lots of shade. And this country doesn't.

I'm also feeling pretty lardy, pretty premenstrual and pretty apprehensive about being off to Glasto this week. I know it will be great once we get there, but everything's just such a huge enormous shag when it's this hot.

Whinge whinge bloody whinge, that's all I ever do at the moment. I think I will shut up before I start boring myself.

joella

We're all slaves to Hallmark and I hate it

It's Father's Day tomorrow, that glorious creation of the greetings card industry that causes those who have lost their fathers to miss them even more than normal, and those fathers who don't live with their children any more to miss them even more than normal. It's a great example of corporate greed increasing the sum of human misery. Nice work.

And those of us who *do* have fathers have to dash out of all day meetings at lunchtime, write cards leaning on litter bins in Cardiff city centre, scrounge stamps from colleagues and search forlornly for postboxes.

My dad is *great*, knows I think so, and has never said that he would be hurt if he didn't get a Father's Day card, but I suspect a tiny irrational part of him would be. So I always try and send one, even though I am disgusted by the whole business and the fact that every single card features a football, a golf ball, a teddy bear or a joke about Dad's wallet. Gack.

I also noted a new trend yesterday, that of the 'you're like a Dad to me' card. This, presumably, has been introduced so that kids with a dad and a stepdad will buy *two* cards, and a whole new cohort of men can be mildly disappointed when there isn't an envelope next to their Frosties tomorrow morning.

I bought the teddy bear card and wrote in it 'Dad, you're like a Dad to me'. Made me laugh, anyway.

joella

Gloomed

Came home from work today in a *vile* mood. For those as are interested, this was mainly because I am supposed to move stuff forward that I don't have the power to move forward, and all the persuasion in the world doesn't make my overloaded colleagues do what I need them to do. It's not that they don't think it's worth doing, it's not that I don't know how it should be done, it's just that what I want them to do is never, ever going to be a priority without a three line whip. And that's not there. So it doesn't happen. And I'm really bored with feeling like that. And I've only been back two days. So the prognosis is not great. On a macro scale, it's like trying to reduce global warming. Hell, handcart, etc.

Try not to care. Try not to care.

Settled in to watch the first episode of Cutting It in advance of second episode tonight, which R had taped for me *without even me even asking* (what a woman). Doorbell rings. It's a woman doing market research on financial products. Do I shut the door? No, I invite her in, and spend the next half hour saying 'no, haven't got one of those', 'no, haven't got one of those either'. Do you meet people who *do* have these things, I ask. Oh yes, she says, this takes twice as long in North Oxford.

So I am now gloomy and also underprepared for what may be imminent financial catastrophe. Great.

But hey, Cutting It. Is Gavin the perfect man or what? (Not counting Zubin Khan).

joella

Bad but not horrid

I am very happy about the Michael Jackson verdict. Clearly he's not a guy you'd ask to babysit, but that's because he's a screaming freak, not because he's a paedophile.

Other uber-celebs, like Victoria Beckham, are not much less screaming freaks, IMHO, but they escape similar persecution because they have Family Values on their side. For now, anyway. In fact, in the hypothetical world where I am looking for a babysitter, would I rather have MJ or VB? I'd probably see if Michael Portillo was free before calling either of them. Though I'd rather see either of them eating my sandwiches and drinking my pop before I'd let Martin Bashir in the house.

joella

Give us a D! Give us an I! Etc.

Cowley Road Carnival is about 'celebrating diversity'. And I was just in the mood for it. Well, except for my mid-afternoon sleep on C's bed, but he lives right on Cowley Road, so it was a bit like going for a little lie down in your tent at Womad.



Spidergirl tries a bit of samba

joella

Struggling with re-entry

I've rediscovered rioja, caperberries, parmesan, hair products, perfume, hot baths, the Guardian, Radio 4 and BBC1.

I've been out to Modern Art Oxford and the Ovada Gallery to look at and listen to art and exhibits about regeneration and the future of the city.

But I haven't slept in my own bed, as it is covered in everything that was on the floor in my bedroom, carefully put there by M while I was away in a lovely tidying the bedroom gesture that just didn't quite reach completion.

I also haven't yet managed to empty my rucksack, I haven't attached my house keys back on to my other keys, and I am still using my travelling purse, with its useless 20 kwacha notes and no stamps in it.

I feel a little bit wobbly in the evenings. I feel like there are some huge feelings lurking in the corners of my mind, but I haven't quite got the energy or the direction to drag them out into the light.

From here, I am heading back to the sofa, to lie under a blanket and watch videos of Doctor Who, and not think about places where there are no sofas and no videos and no blankets.

joella

home again home again

Tell you what, I am *gutted* to have missed both my poppies and my peonies. Remind me to go away in winter next time.

Otherwise, it feels ok to be back, in a will feel better after some sleep sort of a way. Been looking at my safari photos -- lots of animals in the distance, some of them blurred. This is because I am not American and therefore don't have a thousand dollar camera. Hrumph. As the elephant said to the bishop.

joella

A picture which speaks a thousand words

Taken by the roadside just outside Lusaka, Zambia.

joella

Safari toes

I got here ok. Well, I'm not in Zambia yet, I'm in Pretoria for a couple of days first, so what I mean is I got away ok. Had a couple of hours to kill after the night flight before my first meeting, so I had a shower and then sat on the balcony to let my hair dry in the sun. Painted my toenails a satisfying safari browny-green and let them dry in the sun also. Those lions won't spot me now.

joella

May be!

Tomorrow is May the first. Eight years ago it was the dawn of a new political age. Since Marx (is this true?) it has been the day to fete the workers of the world. And, since god knows when, here in Oxford town it has been the day when pubescent choirboys (and latterly girls too) sing in the summer at 6am from the top of Magdalen College.

If you live here, it's the weirdest day of the year -- a cross between all that is posh and all that is populist. Workers of the world are united, and you are eating kedgeree in a ballgown.

Well in fairness I've never done the ballgown bit, but thousands have. And the most important thing is that the pubs are open from 6.30-8.30 am, which is just too fabulous to miss if it falls on a Sunday. Which, lo and behold, tomorrow it does.

I've got to say, right now meeting about 10 people at 5.45 isn't feeling like my favourite thing to do. But sometimes, you just gotta.

joella

From feet to garlic in 10 sentences.

I've got flat feet, which means I walk funny.
I've had a dodgy knee since I did some yoga, and a dodgy ankle since I did some cross country skiiing.
This bears out my theory that exercise is bad for you, but never mind.
I need to get this sorted, and my GP referred me to a podiatrist.
First I got a letter saying you'll be lucky, there's an 18 month waiting list, but today I got a letter saying please come and see us next Thursday.
I had to ring and say I won't be here, I'll be in Zambia, can we rearrange?
This was one of the 32 things on my to-do list pre-departure.
Another was to reply to my host's email about vegetarian food availability in Lusaka, which encouraged me to immediately seek out things I am likely to miss.
One of these is pickled garlic from Fasta Pasta in Oxford's Covered Market.
This I would not want to be without in the long term.

joella

Plate spinning ball juggling etc

Zambia countdown continues. There is now a Zambia blog at zambiajo.blogspot.com: next week joella will go quiet and zambia jo will pipe up.

This is because joella is not widely visited by my colleagues or indeed my family. Or indeed many of my friends. And I like it like that. But more people have an interest in what I am doing over the next month, and I can't be having them all reading about my alcoholic existential angst.

Though I might still bang on a bit here if I've something non-work-safe to say.

joella

Slush puppy white noise full moon mayhem

About fifteen years ago, I tried to make out that I liked science fiction. Perhaps I even *believed* I liked science fiction. I think this was because the men I admired all seemed to be reading it. Anyway, I started lots of sci-fi books, finished almost none of them, and moved back to novels when I realised the pointlessness of this exercise.

But the first line of one of the books I started has remained in my mind ever since. I can't remember the name of the book, but the opener went:

"It was 1986, and the hippies had long since left law school."

All Tomorrow's Parties is the spiritual home of the hippies who never went to law school, and of those from every generation since who never cut their hair and got jobs. They get to come along and perform their weird shit for those who did, but who wonder if they should have. And it all happens in a decaying holiday camp in a part of England that time forgot. It's the perfect setting.

    
    

L-R, top-bottom
1. Lemon yellow chalets as far as the eye can see
2. Japanese noise merchant Merzbow against a mural of can can dancers
3. The Chefette was shut, so we couldn't try the Traditional Indian Curries
4. You can have any colour you like as long as it's neon
5. joella's tongue after one raspberry slush puppy too many (ie one)
6. Everything was Vincent Gallo-branded, including the wristbands

I loved... Merzbow -- I hitched my anxieties, my stress and my period pain to his noise wagon and let him take them all away. *And* he's beautiful. I also loved Polly Harvey, who played solo for the first time in 12 years and brought me to tears, and I loved the slush puppies they sold from the bar as only a someone who grew up immersed in seaside tack can.

I hated... Peaches. There's got to be better ways to be empowered than standing on stage in your bra and pants and pole dancing without a pole. Call me a hairy-pitted old timer, but she ain't no heroine. I also hated Yoko Ono. Get *over* yourself, love. But M loved Yoko, and lots of people loved Peaches, so everyone was a winner.

Most of all I loved having the festival vibe in Pontins -- there's something about that combination of cool and naff which really does it for me. Camber is a one horse place (and that horse isn't very well), but get your friends down on the beach at midnight with a full moon, some wine and some grass, and there's not a lot better in this world.

joella

Pontins revisited

First there was Blackpool Pontins. I never actually went there, but the 11A from Blackpool to Lytham trundled past its near-endless perimeter, and I would always sit on the top deck, which afforded a view over the wall. I would look at the endless chalets and wonder who went on holiday there -- why they would choose it and what they could possibly be like. Many years later my sister got a summer job in the shop there and would tell stories of quivering with fear as she had to ask very large Glaswegians to repeat themselves over and over again as she couldn't understand what brand of cigarettes they were asking for.

Then there was the Pontinental. Housemate S and I got a cheap mini-break to Tenerife one year when she was back on hols from her slightly bizarre job running a casino in Tanzania. It was pot luck on the accommodation, and the Pontinental is where we ended up, although by that time Pontins had given up on it and it was known as the Ten-Bel. We called it Ten-Bel Holiday Hell. My first over-riding memory is of lying on the freezing cold stone floor in the bathroom with period pain and a gargantuan hangover. My second is of being too scared to sneak out of the 'blue' cabaret in case we got picked on by the enormous 'lady' comedian. She wore a flapper dress with rouge on her wrinkly cleavage, into which she pushed the head of a twelve year old boy with a wink at his dad and an 'eh, he's old enough now'. He's probably still in therapy.

But now there is Camber Sands Holiday Village - also previously a Pontins, but now with a new lease of life. For it is home to All Tomorrow's Parties: a music festival celebrating the wild, the weird, the left field and the just plain noisy, where chalets (I am guessing) will be full of Japanese teenagers, avant garde art punk types and, er, us. Ten of us, to be precise, sleeping on under polyester sheets on sofabeds and bunk beds for a long, strange weekend by the sea. I can't quite imagine these worlds colliding, but I am so looking forward to it.

And so to bed. It's been a long, long week, and it ain't over yet.

joella

Going first class

I *have* travelled first class on a train once or twice, but I've never paid for the ticket. My approach as a teenager when the train was packed was to get on in between the two first class carriages and sit on the floor. Sometimes the guard would give you a seat, and even if he didn't, the toilets were better and there was carpet on the floor.

I've never travelled first class on a plane. I've never even travelled business class, and I'm beginning to realise that I probably never will. But that's ok, there's always Valium and flight socks.

But there's one kind of travel where I always go first class, and that's by post. This is because I have a just-in-time life. Who remembers to post anything four days early? Who has two kinds of stamps in their purse?

My family are accepting of the fact that if their birthday is on a weekend, they won't get the card till Monday. My application to vote by proxy will get there in the nick of time, no earlier. I can't decide if this is a hopeless waste of 5p a time, or that I should be proud that I get cards and proxy vote applications out there at all.

joella

glory glory hallelujah

I am working so hard at the moment that I might explode. From a work-life balance point of view it seems fitting that I seem to be living so hard that I might explode too, but from a mental-health-clean-pants-in-the-drawer perspective it's all a little manic.

Returned home from a weekend Up North last night, slightly apprehensive about the week ahead and to a house empty of sustenance. Not only is the dishwasher still bust, the oven has now joined it. So we went out for a curry. And then for a drink. If you don't think about these things, you see, they might fix themselves. Or go away. Honest.

I bought some overpriced beers, and then it was M's turn. What do you want? he said. Oh whatever you're having, I replied. He came back empty-handed. Where are the drinks? Oh, he said he'd bring them over. Weird, I thought. And then I heard the noise of ice shaking against metal.

Are we having *cocktails*? Yes, we were. At 10pm on a Sunday night, we were drinking mojitos. I would never have thought of this as a solution to the Monday Morning Apprehension Blues, but it worked an absolute treat. Slept like a log, got up only a bit late and have worked like a demon all day.

Time to head out for another one.

joella

Competing selves

I can't quite believe how much is going on at the moment. I have had a fantastic time over the last couple of months catching up with friends from Cambridge. A bit like buses, you don't see them for years then three come at once. In fact five. Five people I haven't seen for ages. And it's great. And somehow very reassuring: friendships may lie dormant for many years but they don't often die. I feel warm inside just thinking about it.

And people you have known for 15 years or whatever give you the long view on yourself, you get a good perspective on life. And bottles of sparkling wine keep appearing, just like the old days when we used to refer to it on party invitations as SpWW. I'm knackered though.

Also trying to work out what to do next with my life, trying to get a new mortgage, thinking about what housemate S's imminent departure will mean (beyond the financial, but thinking about the financial as well). Bit existential. Bit stressful. Many awkward conversations. Horrible phone calls to estate agents and financial advisors. Personal shortcomings in sharp relief.

On top of *that* - and there's more hard work hidden in there than might be apparent - I'm going to Zambia for a month in early May. Worky stuff, very exciting, kind of terrifying. And mountainously complex to organise, as I have to prepare for a month away and get everything done that I won't be here to do... *and* try and organise a week's holiday at the end, mad not to, right?

But I'm away this weekend with the parentals, and next weekend at All Tomorrow's Parties. My to do list fills me with panic. I have to have jabs. I have no time for mood swings or hangovers until July.

So if I owe you an email, forgive me. It's all burbling and no sense at the moment. Who am I?

joella

All becomes clear

 


I'm doing quite well at ignoring the news. But I did put the 10 O'Clock News on this evening, because I wanted to watch something after it. And my hackles were raised immediately by the sight and sound of Michael Howard standing on a soap box in Middle England, shaking his puny fist about yobs and foreigners.

What an irritating voice he has, I thought. Who does he remind me of?

And then I realised that he's actually the spit of Montgomery Burns.

Excellent.

joella

As the song goes...

 


...sometimes it snows in April.

*Last* weekend I got sunburnt. Isn't weather great?

joella

Great cheap laugh

One of my lovely colleagues just came in and said, in a Friday-cake-sort-of-way 'do you like chocolate doughnuts?'

Hey, I said, was the Pope Catholic?

My how we laughed.

On that note, thanks to Andy for directing me to Polly Toynbee's fantastic Papal piece in today's Guardian. I couldn't agree more, and I am glad someone's speaking out over the mawkish hypocritical cant that seems to characterise the rest of the media coverage of the Death of the Year.

A snippet:

Still the Vatican turns a blind eye to this most repugnant and damaging of all sexual practices, the suffering little children whose priests come unto them. Yet at the same time it thunders disapproval of sex in every other more innocent circumstance, blighting the lives of millions with its teaching on gays, divorce, abortion and unrealistic self-denial. There is no reckoning how many of the world's poorest women have died giving birth to more children than they can survive; contraception is women's true saviour.

I recommend reading the rest of it, it's good angry stuff.

joella

Something old, something new

 



Well, two things old really. One is the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, and the other is the magnolia tree, which has been around so long, Wikipedia tells me, that it is designed to be pollinated by beetles as it *predates bees*. Not a lot of things can say that.

The new thing, of course, is Spring. It's always been, but it's new every time. We budding (arf) gardeners are loving it like that.

joella

BORED ALREADY

I'm not going to listen to the Today programme or watch the 10 o'clock news until after the election. I can't bear it.

I can't even bear thinking about it.

I went to see Asian Dub Foundation on Monday night. Vote them out, they exhorted us, and we cheered. And if your issues are Iraq and immigration policy, that certainly seems like the thing to do.

But 1. I have other issues too. The 'war on terror' issue is huge - both the war itself and the implications for human rights and civil liberties - and has exposed some frightening realities at the heart of government. But it is not the only thing we are voting on. There are many areas where the Labour government has made big steps in the right direction. Think child poverty targets, think National Minimum Wage, think dropping (some of) the debt of the world's poorest countries, think free museums, think Disability Rights Commission, think citizenship education. Lots of small things that have benefited the more vulnerable and less powerful, who were systematically screwed during the Thatcher years.

Which leads onto 2. If you vote them out, who on earth are you going to vote in? Michael Howard? That pillar of liberalism and tolerance? Yeah, right. I can remember what Tory governments were like, and I don't want another one.

I would like half a vote this time. I know where I would cast half a vote, but I feel very uncomfortable about casting a full one.

But that's all I'm going to say on the matter, before I start boring *myself*.

joella

Topical tiffin

As I reported a few weeks ago, one of my prized Southall purchases was a three-level, stainless steel tiffin tin. It has been much admired, and I love walking into work swinging it jauntily and thinking of lunchtime.

Of course, if I were an Indian office worker rather than me, then my tiffin would be delivered to me at lunchtime, having been made by my wife in the morning.

But no matter. It is open before me now, with split pea dahl in one tin, carrot and cabbage with mustard seeds and chilli in another (both leftovers from a splendid meal M cooked last night) and fruit salad in the top one.

As I usually do while eating at my desk (which I do more often than I would like) I was perusing the BBC news website, thinking that not many people seem to have shared my view of the Pope and his archaic stance on condoms. Or maybe they're just better than me at not speaking ill of the dead. Anyway, I was thinking, even Prince Charles might move his wedding, how weird is that.

And then I saw this lovely story about him sending two tiffin carriers from Bombay an all-expenses paid invite, because they sent him gifts after he helped raise the profile of their work.

My heart is warmed. And I think there could be future in tiffin. If schoolchildren are to get fresh food every day, thanks in no small part to Jamie Oliver and his media savvy, then could there not be scope for office workers to get it too? Fresh, affordable lunch every day delivered in your own environmentally-friendly tin? There must be a business opportunity in there somewhere for those of us without wives at home.

joella

See ya, wouldn't like to be ya.

The Pope is dead. Long live the Pope. Kind of.

I'm a born-and-bred lapsed Catholic. I come from a long line of paid-up sinners, where sinning means pretty much anything that involves exercising free will. Especially as a woman.

John Paul II had (as his successor will have) an unprecedented opportunity to improve the lives of the half-billion female Catholics living in the world today... about one 12th of the world's population. But with his medieval adherence to the no birth control dictum, he nailed his colours to the mast of male oppression.

And in a world riddled with sexual violence, often leading to infection with HIV and other STDs before we even get to the issue of unwanted pregnancy, his passing, in my opinion, is not something to be mourned.

I hope his successor has more balls. But I'm not holding my breath.

joella

Whisky is risky

It's funny. Or maybe sad. But I'm either drinking or I'm not, and right now it's post easter, I'm having existential doubts and I'm drinking. Should I go and be a plumber? Or should I make the next move in my so-middle-class-it's-not-even-very-well-paid so-called career? Riddle me that, Riddler!

Can't be done. So instead, here are some nice pictures I took in my house.





Clockwise from top left
1. Mathematician finishes pudding
2. Wooden jigsaw with whimsies
3. Morning after photo: M's home-made Hallowe'en mask and joella's favourite towel
4. Night before photo: how did I manage to take this?

joella

Something fishy in the air

I left the house this morning and could smell fish. Odd. I got a lift to work (lazy, lazy) and when I got out of the car I could smell fish. The air today is cold and damp, but there is no way this could be a sea breeze. Not in Oxfordshire.

Walked into work, smelling fish. Got to my office, no fish. Phew.

Had to go to a meeting, got outside, could smell fish. Ask someone, can you smell fish? No, they couldn't. Could it be I have some fish in my bag? Started surreptitiously sniffing it in the street. Strange looks from people. Have I trodden in some fish? Check shoes. Could *I* be smelling of fish? Go to toilet. Negative.

Forget about it till I go out for lunch. Bugger it, I can smell fish again. I have worked out that I can only smell fish *outside*, and that only I can smell it. On the way back to the office, I ask a colleague to smell my coat -- cue comedy moment while she sniffs at various parts of me and says 'no, no fish'.

Wait, she says, just by my left shoulder. This bit smells a bit fishy. I whip my head round to see if I can smell it, and my hair flips across my face.

Hang on, I think, and grab a handful of it. R, I say, would you smell my hair? She does and says Wow. That's really strong.

We had fish for dinner last night: haddock steamed it over a base of onions, anchovies, fennel and tomatoes. I steamed that smell right into my hair and it seems that every time I go out in the damp it steams itself right back out again. Nice.

I want to go home and scrub my hair and I want to do it now.

joella

Patience is a virtue

I have been getting very bored waiting for my compost bin to actually produce compost. Just how long is it supposed to take?

After the latest in a long line of such rants, M obligingly approached the little door in the bottom of it brandishing a trowel, and brought me a bucketful to dig into the brand new flowerbed. Hmmm, he said, I don't think eggshells were a good idea. Or mango stones.

And to be honest, it was a bit like looking at what we had for dinner 18 months ago.

But in fairness, it smelt a lot better than the organic chicken manure pellets I bought on Saturday, fully expecting that there wouldn't be any compost from the compost bin at all. Why did I think they *wouldn't* smell like chicken shit?

I am also slightly worried that they are organic simply because they are made of shit, rather than because they are made of shit from organically farmed, happy, fluffy, die of natural causes chickens.

You can't even garden without eggshells, bad smells and moral dilemmas these days. I wouldn't mind but I don't even seem to be getting better at it.

joella

Enigmatism

I've just given up on Enigma, still going on in the other room, despite M's charming assertion at its outset that when he grows up he wants to be Kate Winslet.

I gave up on it because I didn't understand the plot. Is that ironic?

Seeing as it's Easter, I shall share a moment of borderline-relevant private shame. When I was 17 I went out with A. Kind of by accident, but that's another story. He was essentially a good person, I think, but he was absolutely no match for me, burning with fury at the injustice of the world while curling my eyelashes, reading Spare Rib with one eye and Cosmopolitan with the other. They were confusing times, but at least I *knew* I didn't make sense.

Anyway. A ended up in hospital for six weeks, also another story. His mother loathed me, and I can kind of see her point, though her love for him was not, in my opinion, of the healthiest kind. I went to visit him every day -- no small effort, as the hospital was a bus or train journey away -- and sometimes, to our mutual great delight and the horror of everyone else on the ward, we drew the curtains round the bed and did rude things. I was however confused by the strange elation I felt at having a boyfriend who was stuck in hospital while I could go wherever I wanted, and I would occasionally turn up at his bedside all dressed up to go out clubbing once visiting was over.

Once he said to me... Jo, why don't I understand you? Ah, I said, because I'm an enigma.

What's an enigma? he said.

I hadn't anticipated that. I thought for a moment and said, well, it's when they stick a tube up your bum and wash it all out. I was shaking with laughter inside at my own cleverness.

I don't think you're an enigma, he said.

What I learnt from that particular relationship was that you should always pick on someone your own size. And with that vaguely Christian moral conclusion, I shall take myself to bed.

joella

Swirling thoughts

I haven't written much this week. There's a lot going on in my head, but it hasn't spun itself into formed thoughts, and it's hard to articulate unformed ones, and also not really my style.

But some examples...

It's Good Friday today, a pretty bleak day if you are a practising Christian, but it's also Holi, a pretty fantastic day if you are a practising Hindu.

I watched a programme about street prostitution which focused on a 21 year old with a bad wig and glasses. Over the half hour we heard pretty much every tragic inch of her story, with each stage silently accompanied by statistics flashed on screen illustrating how widely her tragedies -- sexual abuse from the age of four, heroin and crack addiction, mental health problems, two children before she was 20 which she gave up for adoption -- are shared by others in the same position. She really really wants to stop what she's doing. None of them want to be doing it. Of course they don't fucking want to be doing it. Why can't we protect them better?

I watched another programme about a shop in Birmingham where if you are skint you can take your valuables and draw cash on them. A busker needed to pay his rent so he put in his keyboard for £120, and then paid £156 to get it back. Safer and friendlier than a loan shark, but still a horrendously expensive way for vulnerable people to raise miserable amounts of money.

In thoughts following on from both the above, the Fabian Society has published some research on what the Great British Public really think about the poverty in this country. They say:

By European standards the UK public is uniquely misinformed about the extent of poverty in the UK. We are also much more likely to believe that poverty is caused by behavioural factors – something captured in the strength of negative stereotypes of the poor. A great many people still need to be convinced both that there is real poverty in Britain today, and that it is possible to do something about it. Our research shows that it is hard for many people to believe that poverty exists in the midst of our affluent society. They think there must be something wrong with the parents of children who suffer from material deprivation. They do not know about the government’s commitment to end child poverty. They are startled to discover that other European countries have successfully chosen not to tolerate it.

I *did* know about the government's commitment to end child poverty (which, as the Fabians point out, is a commitment unmatched by any other party), and also that they have achieved some success. I am so angry about Iraq that I'm wondering where to put my X in May, but we need to remember it's not all boys and toys.

I have started drinking again and have been reborn as a bitter drinker. I was hoping to be a better drinker too -- little and often rather than four pints the night before a bank holiday, but I'd forgotten what a whole lot of fun a pub full of congenial drunk people can be when you are a congenial drunk person yourself. Arse and feck.

And finally, if I don't tidy my bedroom this weekend it will start to seriously affect my self esteem.

joella

The rehabilitation of the tinned green bean

Two posh boyfriends in a row combined with three years in Cambridge and more than ten in Oxford have rendered certain legacy eating habits from a northern upbringing pretty much unsustainable.

To be fair, this has overwhelmingly been a good thing. I make my own salad dressings instead of using Heinz salad cream, sometimes I make coffee in a cafetiere instead of drinking instant, I haven't had a kebab since 1989 and I don't think you can make a decent pasta sauce out of tinned tomatoes and minestrone Cup a Soup.

But there are losses too. Getting to understand fresh vegetables was a revelation (in my childhood they were usually frozen at home and tinned at school), but you can have too much of a good thing and sometimes I just want a tin of green beans and a fork.

For a while I used to buy them surreptitiously, but I am more sensitive to food snobbery than I would like to be and I quickly stopped. Until I went to see the Lizard the other week, and she made me a salad which included tinned artichoke hearts (acceptable, who's got access to fresh artichokes on a regular basis?) and - gasp - tinned green beans. And you know what, it was bloody lovely.

I copied the salad wholesale the following week and it went down very well. And tonight I had them with chickpeas, olive oil, anchovies, chilli, garlic and parsley, and that was bloody lovely as well.

So. I am encouraged. Next: Branston pickle.

joella

Drunk in Devon

 


It was never going to be possible to stay sober this weekend.

We spent it visiting R&P in their lovely new house in very sunny Topsham, and when I said er, we're mostly dry at the moment, I got a very stern look from P followed by a large glass of posh white wine. So we went with the flow, and I will treasure the hazy memory of R filling tiny shot glasses out of a bottle of Becherovka so big it counts as a work of art.

Other outsize pleasures included proper seaside fish and chips, accompanied in my case by the most splendid gherkin (pictured above) I have seen in many a year.

On both counts I have been paying the price today, but in a definitely-worth-it sort of way.

joella

Know your enemy

I watched a few episodes of Nathan Barley -- Friday nights in happen more often when it's cold outside and you're sober.

Some of it's funny. Chris Morris has a bleak and sharp sense of humour, and does the almost-unwatchable very well.

But with its Rape magazine and its gratuitous nasty porn, it's moved into completely unwatchable. It's like being slapped round the face with Loaded magazine. Dark, ironic misogyny is still misogyny. I forgot that for a while, but I've remembered it again.

joella

Big pleasure from small things

Southall is a shopping paradise if you have a thing about stainless steel kitchenware (or copper, or cast iron), pulses Tesco have never heard of (by the kilo) and jingly jangly jewellery at impossibly low prices. I now have a tiffin carrier, lots of sandalwood joss sticks, a bottle of rose water (what for?) and some earrings that I can see while I'm wearing them. Cool.



It is also the friendliest place I have visited in the south of England, and the only place I have visited in all of Britain where there are hardly any white people. It reminded me of the smarter parts of Delhi, which I guess is to be expected, and I was struck again by a forlorn wish that I could carry off a salwar kameez every day, because they are truly splendid garments and I have never seen so many to choose from.



We also had two fantastic meals, in Chandni Chowk and Brilliant (which lives up to its name) and a couple of pints in the Glassy Junction, the only pub in the country, so they say, which will take rupees for beer. Not many women in there, it has to be said, but no macho atmosphere either. It was a Great Day Out and I recommend it. Just wish we'd timed it better for the Bollywood cinema...

joella

Didn't we have a lovely time...

... the day we went to



Yes we did. And more on that when I have had more sleep.

joella

Happy International Women's Day

... for yesterday. I tried to take this photo myself but failed miserably, so thanks due to the man of the house.

We had cake at work, which seemed fitting. And one of our volunteers left: she is from Cameroon, and made a beautiful impromptu speech about how much she'd enjoyed working with so many women (we have four men in a team of about 25). I've worked with women before, she said, but never with so many as educated and emancipated as you are. It gave us pause for thought.

Some good IWD photos on the BBC website.

joella

Get your tits out!

I have been mightily cheered this morning by the story of Prince Charles being greeted by a bare breasted protest in New Zealand.

Apparently the scheduled visit of a mobile breast cancer screening unit was cancelled because the Prince was in town. One of the protesters wrote "Get your colonial shame off my breasts" on her body.

How many people can say they've had an opportunity to do that? I think it rocks.

joella

If I ruled the world...

... I would obviously be a very benevolent dictator. But certain categories of people would automatically be banished to the salt mines of Siberia, no appeal, no return.

And clear front-runners would be anyone who owns (or whose husband owns) one of those BMW 4x4s. Round my place of work, these road hogging gas guzzling MONSTERS are usually silver, and driven badly by yummy mummies with platinum blonde hair and pokers up their ashtangaed arses.

Round my place of residence they are usually black, and driven badly by young men in baseball caps with someone riding shotgun who might actually *have* a shotgun.

I applaud BMW for coming up with a vehicle with appeal to such a diverse range of selfish human beings, and making it so easy to do the first cull come the revolution.

joella

Longest cold in Christendom

This time last week I was out in the garden, trying (and failing) to dig up the roots of a bush I've been trying to finish off for at least two years. It was cold and I was muddy, but generally pleased with myself.

Then I came in and had a bath. All of a sudden I felt shaky and weird, and I retreated under my duvet in disgust.

And if I didn't need to feed myself and earn a living, I'd have been there ever since. Every day I've been waking up with a head full of gunk and a pain behind the eyes, hitting the Lemsip (or generic Boots version thereof), going to work, feeling shite and coming home early. I've been heavy on the garlic, vitamin C and echinacea, reasonably good about early nights and haven't done anything I didn't have to do.

But I'm Still Not Better And It's Not Fair.

I know I just need to be patient, but I'm finding it awfully hard. Keeping me sane at night is Otrivine Nasal Spray. My mother disapproves deeply of such things so I never discovered it until I was an adult, and it's the business. I don't know how it does it, but it turns a blocked up nose into a open airway in a matter of minutes, with only a nasty amphetamine-flavoured drip down the back of the throat and gummy yellow stuff in your balsam Kleenex as side effects.

Okay, maybe this indicates that my mother is right (wouldn't be the first time) but sometimes you'll do anything to get a decent night's sleep, even if it does cost you your nostril lining.

joella

Irritating git becomes hero

I never thought this would happen, but I take back everything bad I have ever said about Jamie Oliver. And there's a lot of it.

But the man deserves a medal for making Jamie's School Dinners, even if (or should that be especially because?) he has no intention of subjecting his own children to the underfunded nutritional hell of the 21st century state school lunch.

I guess I still thought school dinners were about comfort veg, like in the 1970s. I have fond memories of tinned green beans, mashed carrot and swede (we called it pig food, but we hoovered it up) and pickled red cabbage. Lots of sponge and custard too, and let's not forget tapioca with a lump of jam, but on the whole it was pretty good stuff I reckon.

No more, apparently, never no more. If you eat at school these days you get Turkey Twizzlers (30% turkey, 70% crap), chicken nuggets and chips chips chips. There's fizzy pop to drink and the kids that bring their own have Dairylea Lunchables (which look like pre-formed mechanically recovered meat) and chocolate bars.

Exposing this, and the potential long term effects of this, is really important. Nutritionists have been trying for years -- we heard from a woman who ran constipation clinics for seven year olds -- but nobody's been listening. But here's someone who can make people listen, and can show us that kids in primary schools in deprived areas, who may only get one full meal a day, don't know what a leek is, or rhubarb, or corn on the cob.

And there was a hearbreaking scene where he took a bunch of them to a pick your own farm, and there was a little boy holding a big strawberry, looking at it and saying 'I don't dare taste it'. A *strawberry*. How, in a country where strawberries grow wild, can there be kids who don't know what they taste like?

He struggles with the kids' resistance to anything that look like a vegetable, and he struggles with the catering companies (outsourced, of course) that feed them on a budget of 35p each a day. And he works with parents on cutting down sugar at home, and is as shocked as they are at the immediate reduction in hyperactivity and aggressive behaviour.

All in all it's great political television and it might just make a difference.

There's still no excuse for inflicting the insufferable Jools on us, mind.

joella

If you pay peanuts, you get MRSA

Back in the glorious days of Thatcherism, it was decided that it would be cheaper and more efficient for councils, hospitals, schools etc to 'outsource' their ancillary services -- cleaning, catering and so on. No longer would the state be responsible for employing and managing all these people.

We all know what happened: the same people got paid less to do more work, as new private companies fought to undercut each other to get contracts.

And it's got worse. I heard a fascinating but horrifying talk last week about how many of the people doing these essential jobs are actually part of our huge 'informal economy'. The companies providing, say, cleaning services to hospitals often aren't even employing their own staff: instead they get them from agencies, whose working practices may be dubious as hell but who provide that much vaunted 'flexible workforce'. You want three people today but only one tomorrow? No problem, we'll just send two of them home.

So what do you get? You get hospital cleaners with no secure contracts working for appalling pay and in terrible conditions. Some of them don't get paid sick leave, and some of them lose their jobs if they are sick. So what do they do if they are sick? They come into work, because they can't afford not to. Not everyone in this brave new outsourced world gets to stay home with Lemsip and Heat magazine.

Sick people cleaning hospitals. Now isn't that ironic?

joella

Vile noodle experience

Every now and again, I worry that I've run out of things to say. Last week, I was a bit short of words. Not of thoughts, but of words: there are some things joella doesn't talk about.

But fortunately, yesterday I had a lunch so spectacularly shite that I feel compelled to share the experience. This is particularly for the benefit of Oxford-based readers, so that they may sidestep the trap into which I fell.

About ten years ago, my Australian half-uncle, then based in London, introduced me to the joys of wagamama. I'd never seen or tasted anything like it and I absolutely loved it. I still go there whenever I can, and have a yasai chilli men or a yasai yaki soba, some gyoza and some miso soup and pickles, washed down with a raw juice *and* a Asahi Super Dry.

The Lexington St branch, the second to open and the one I have been to most often, is looking a bit faded now (I knew those hands-free taps were a bad idea), but there are any number of shiny new branches, many of them outside London.

However, Oxford hasn't got one. What we have instead is a copycat Noodle Bar. It claims to offer Chinese rather than Japanese food, but that's no excuse for the execrable quality of its cuisine.

The concept is good: it offers four different kinds of noodle, which you can have fried or in soup with a range of different ingredients. There are also rice dishes and lots of side dishes. You sit at long shared tables, wagamama style, and dishes come out as they are ready, also wagamama style.

But there the similarity ends. I had fried mai fun noodles with mixed Chinese vegetables. M had ho fun noodles in soup with chicken. We ordered seared vegetable dumplings and salt and pepper squid on the side. We also had jasmine tea, which came very fast, but then it doesn't take long to put a single teabag in a pot (and charge £2 for it).

Mine came first. What's the cheapest vegetable you can think of? Onion. What's the nastiest? Green pepper. Which two vegetables were present in large, slightly undercooked quantities? Exactly. M's soup was watery and insipid, with some chicken and some noodles present but not much else.

The squid was evil: tough as boots and in the kind of batter I last tasted at 2am in a bad fish and chip shop in Harlesden. I would put money on it not just being frozen squid, but frozen batter as well. Which is pretty inexcusable. And the dumplings almost didn't come at all, and when they did the dough wasn't cooked through. Seared they were not.

In fairness, when we complained about the dumplings they were taken off the bill and the very competent hostess made sure to come and apologise. The service was actually very good, and though the food was shit, we did leave a tip. And then legged it - I was dying for a coffee to take the taste of onion away.

I think they should be ashamed of themselves: the main dishes are very cheap but the sides and extras aren't (eg a 60p charge for chilli oil) and it's clear there's no cost left uncut in the quest for profit. Bleurgh.

Round the corner from the Noodle Bar is the fantastic Cafe Orient, and for delightful Japanese food in the middle(ish) of town there is edamame. Never will I darken the Noodle Bar's door again, and I am grateful that I know that this is not what Chinese food tastes like. But judging by its popularity, it looks like most of Oxford doesn't.

joella

Six hours on a train

... with no caffeine, no alcohol, no crisps, no music, no crossword, no novel and only one celeb mag, courtesy of my colleague S.

Manchester and back in a day for a team meeting. Only weirdos and workaholics would attempt this. I knew it was happening and I could have prepared better, but I turned the alarm off at 6 and it was only thanks to M waking me at 6.30 that I made the train (at 7) at all.

I found a seat, did my skincare, tried to make my hair look less like a combination of bed head and hat hair, and then realised I had nothing but work to distract me all the way there and all the way back. Bleat.

Still Sober Girl, but I tell you, when I got home tonight, if there'd been a bottle of white wine in the fridge I'd have drunk at least half of it by now.

joella

Go Ken!

I've been following the Ken Livingstone / Evening Standard reporter saga with some interest. Unreconstructed he may be, but Mr Livingstone is a proper socialist and I do admire him for that.

And he has the guts to take on what can seem like unwinnable fights. A bit like the McLibel Two: you know you're right, and you might lose in the end but so many people will see you die trying that the other side will look pretty stupid and wish they'd never started it.

Today he has splendidly announced that he has thought about it really really hard and decided that he still isn't going to apologise to the Daily Mail Group.

I quote:

"No one in Britain is less qualified to complain about anti-Semitism. In truth, those papers were the leading advocate of anti-Semitism in the country for half a century."

He said that while it is true the Daily Mail has moved on from anti-Semitism, it now targets asylum seekers and Muslims.

"For the Mail group the victims may change but the intolerance, hatred and fear pervade every issue of the papers."

I second that emotion.

An aside, the Hebrew word for 'yes' is pronounced 'ken'. The first time we went to Israel, my mum kept looking around and saying 'who is this bloke Ken they keep talking about?'

joella

Feeling shirty

I don't need Skinny Trinny to tell me that short sleeved shirts suit me. And they are comfortable, practical and the shops are full of them. So I should be happy, right?

Wrong. Because they are All For Men. If you are a man, or I suppose a woman about six inches taller than me with a flat chest and no waist, there are any number of groovy short sleeved shirts in the shops that will make you feel spring-like and funky.

But if you are a woman, nothing. Well, okay, a few, a very few, but they are all tiny. I stood in Zara in Reading on Saturday and roared with frustration as an XL shirt's poppers gaped. I am not XL. Really, there are many many women more L than me. I have a broad ribcage and big breasts, and so do lots of other people. Why can't anyone make shirts to fit us?

I want to buy girls' clothes, I really do, but I just know I'm going to be buying boys' shirts this year. Again. They will be too long and too straight, and I will look like a lump. Again. Oh well.

joella

Gardening by fire

Last year's gardening project went a long way, but it stalled in September, when we ran out of a) summer, b) energy and c) money. There are unlaid paths, heaps of clay, rampant weeds (both alive and dead) and bits of brick and general building crap everywhere.

There's still very little of a) and c) in evidence, but M and I scraped together a bit of b), wrapped ourselves up warm and ventured out to assess the situation.

The tools were accessible because I had already tidied up the shed, formally marking the beginning of the gardening year, but it was nigh on impossible to work out what to do with them.

So we started with things that weren't diggable. M rather manfully volunteered to take all the rubble to the tip, and I started wrestling with the girly lattice bits installed on the top of each fence panel by our predecessor that have slowly but surely been falling off for (I imagine) the last decade.

And then I decided to burn them in the firebowl. And what a fantastic idea that was: they were dry as a bone so they burnt like a dream. I worked my way down the garden pulling old nails out with the hammer, wrenching the bits of wood apart, dragging them through the ivy / honeysuckle / brambles that were holding them in place and carrying them down to the fire to break up and burn.

Three hours outside in February and still toasty warm, if rather smoky by the end of it. Fantastic. I saved some of the wood for next Sunday so I can be warm while I am weeding.

joella

Off to see the Lizard

I am blessed with some lovely friends and a generally pretty cool social life, though as I discussed yesterday with Mr B, I am increasingly valuing my non-procreational friends even as they diminish in number.

You get different things from different people, though, and what I love about the Lizard is that she is undeniably, incontrovertibly good for me. I don't see her very often but when I do we have a riot. We laugh till we wet our pants but we also get right to the heart of things, where we are at, where we want to be at, what's right, what's wrong.

She used to live in a mobile home near Aldermaston, and would give directions including the classic line 'turn left at the bomb factory'.

Tomorrow we have a whole day together. I cannot wait.

joella

Spring is coming

Sunshine through satsuma peel. Evidence of a) sunshine and b) satsumas. Things are looking up.

joella

Valentine's Day is over

... and thank heavens for that.

Tonight I was honoured, as a non-single person, to be invited to R's Single and Cynical evening in a very nice pub in town. It was quite a big pub, and every table bar one (well, bar three all pushed together) had a lone couple sitting at it, holding hands, staring at their hands or wringing their hands, depending on the stage in the relationship.

The noisy tables in the corner were ours, and we all moved round every time someone went to the toilet, expertly directed by R, who decided who we should all be sitting next to. I haven't had so much fun on a Monday night in ages. What a splendid idea that was.

joella

How Wikipedia does it

I am a huge fan of Wikipedia, though I have never contributed. I don't think it replaces Britannica and its ilk -- we will always need formal reference works. No, I think it is something else entirely, and a something which makes me feel all warm inside about the internet.

Anyway if, like me, you've ever wondered how entries develop (the culture of it, rather than the process, which is clearly explained on Wikipedia itself) check out this splendid screencast - you need sound - on the evolution of the entry for Heavy Metal Umlaut. Class.

joella

Revisiting past humiliations

I got a letter this week inviting me to a meeting of (and suggesting I might like to join) the Oxfordshire branch of the Cambridge Society.

Now yes, I went to Cambridge. I loved it (though not everyone does), and I got a lot from it and still do. They really are formative years, and I feel very lucky to have spent them in such an amazing place.

However, it doesn't have its elitist reputation for nothing. If you are one who arrives there relatively "loud, poor and northern" (to use the words of an ex-boyfriend), you don't half get reminded of it sometimes.

I think Cambridge is at its worst when in the process of actually celebrating its own existence. My very favourite example is something that happened to me during Commemoration Feast: an annual event to mark the founding of Trinity College by Henry VIII in 1546. This is an invitation-only event: as an undergraduates you are invited if you got a first in your exams the previous year (when you are known as a Scholar), if you are on the College students union committee, or if your tutor puts you forward as an all round good egg. In my second year I was Women's Officer, a TCU post, so I duly got an invite, which I accepted.

To my delight I was placed next to R, a friend of mine also on TCU, but the man sitting opposite me was rather less delightful. What follows Really Happened.

So, he said, what are you reading? SPS, I said [Social and Political Sciences]. Well, he said, I didn't realise they *gave* firsts in SPS. Well they do, I said, but as it happens I didn't get one. So why are you here? he said. I'm on the TCU committee, I said. Ah, he said, so we could call you a social scholar. I suppose you could, I said, and turned to talk to R in mild discomfort.

Shortly thereafter, the main courses arrived. As the vegetarian option, mine was something spectacularly (and predictably) uninspiring. But R's looked very good, it was meat of some kind in (if memory serves) a redcurrant sauce. Can I try your sauce, I said. Yes, go ahead, she said. And I daubed my finger in the edge of it and then licked the sauce off.

At which point I again caught the eye of the Scholar sitting opposite me. He looked me straight in the eye and said 'How are you going to tempt me into abject submission if you behave like that?'

I was invited to the same feast the following year, and had no hesitation in ticking the 'I am unable to attend' box. Why put yourself through it? I was speechless at the time, and have still never managed to come up with the perfect comeback. In fact I have enabled comments specially, in case anyone can think of one.

R didn't go to the college ten year reunion because she didn't want to put herself through it. I did go, and while I was freaked out (not to mention hungover) for a good few days afterwards, I did have a really good time. But there was still that status thing hanging in the air.

It was a black tie dinner (of course), and I don't think I had been to a single black tie function in the intervening decade. After a slightly panicked wardrobe rummage I decided on a long black dress and my dad's old dinner jacket. I thought I looked passable. I am not sure most people noticed or cared either way, but while I was sipping whisky after dinner in the Master's Lodge a woman came up to me and said Nice dress. Monsoon, about four years ago? Er yes, I said. And the jacket's my dad's.

So to summarise: do I want to get together with a bunch of people who, by being the kind of people who wish to define themselves by their elitist education, may likely also be the kind of people who make me feel provincial, underachieving and socially inadequate? No, I don't think I do.

joella

Hooray for the Mid-East!

... as it seems to be called all of a sudden on the BBC website. What was wrong with good old Middle East? Have they got an American writing the headlines or something? They'll be using commas instead of the word 'and' next. Weirdos.

Anyway, I am very happy. Partly of course because it's the best chance for peace in years etc, but mainly because it's got Ellen bloody MacArthur out of the headlines. I Am So Sick Of Hearing About Her. Not very sisterly, I know. But true. As housemate S might say, Ellen, you're boring us now.

A couple of years ago I went to an acoustic night with four or five solo performers. One of them was a lovely young man who sang a song about mid 20s underachievement anxiety called "Look what Ellen MacArthur's done". I bet he's having a really bad day.

joella

Black pepper baths, a walk in the park and Posh Dinner

A lovely weekend of belated birthday celebrations, by myself and with two Rs who both have the same birthday as me.

Highlights included

- my first musically accompanied walk into town in many years (I used to live with a Walkman on, but this fell by the wayside when I stopped making / receiving compilation tapes sometime around the millennium)
- a lovely solo visit to MOMA cafe, the only place in town where you really can curl up with the papers
- lovely dinner with R&T *and* finding their house with no problems at all thanks to Wendy the GPS
- spending Sunday morning finishing the gorgeous Norwegian Wood in a super-hot bath with bubbles and black pepper oil
- walking in the park at sunset with M, S and puppy S, with proper tea and cakes after
- posh dinner with R&J at the surprisingly empty Cherwell Boat House. Ok, it's dark on Sundays in February, but it's still a beautiful spot.

For the first time this year I feel pretty much ready to take the working week on. Go me!

joella

Why am I always on a plane or a fast train?

I don't buy nearly as much music as I used to. I spend a lot less time listening to it than I used to as well... and what I do listen to is more often old and familiar than new. I don't know what I do with the time that I used to spend on listening to new stuff to the point where it became familiar stuff, I just know it's not there anymore.

But every now and again, an album comes along that I fall for. Maybe they hit me at a time when I am receptive, and maybe the time after a holiday is a receptive time. Whatever, I am currently slightly obsessed with Want One, by Rufus Wainwright, a birthday present from my lovely boyfriend.

Specifically, I am taken with the opening track, which is lyrically so simple, but says so much and which is big and crashy and has room for all kinds of feelings. I have already been caught waving wooden spoons round the kitchen to it while washing up. (Still no dishwasher...)

joella

Just a couple more

1. Birthday snowsuit



2. Big big shadows



...okay I'll stop now. I've got caffeine withdrawal headache *and* period pain today, *and* I've spent it proofreading, so all in all my outdoorsy alter ego is taking a good pasting.

joella

My snow trousers smell of campfire

Did I ever think I'd be saying such a thing? No. Which is one of the great things about adulthood, I think. You can keep surprising yourself. But they do: the campfire in question was built in the snow by a man I quite fell for, who also showed us how to cook sausages and (pictured) little cakes on long sticks. I don't eat sausages so he showed me how to cook a banana instead.

He also taught us about cross-country ski-ing (murderously hard work), snowshoeing (incredible fun: you can walk up anything!) and ice fishing (which I thought would be standing round a hole in the ice with a rod, but turned out to be a lot more complicated).

Other people took us snowmobiling (which I fancy I was quite good at) and husky dog sledding (which I think I was quite bad at), and still others cooked us lots of food, and gave us saunas and shots of Finlandia to warm us up. I still can't believe I went on a winter activity holiday (or any holiday with the word 'activity' in the title) but I am feeling hale and hearty and clean and serene. I'm not going to think about the pointlessness of existence, my impending middle age or the simultaneous packing up of all our white goods until at least next week.

joella

Backski

Actually, backski says it all really, I did a lot of falling over. Finland is great, it is wild and woolly and vast and empty, but friendly and has saunas. Which is a good job, because it is also Bastard Cold.

joella

Finland, Finland, Finland

You're so near to Russia,
So far from Japan.
Quite a long way from Cairo,
Lots of miles from Vietnam.

I have wanted to visit Finland for a while. I put this down partly to the song, partly to the Moomins (especially the Snork Maiden), partly to its groovy wallpaper and textile designs, partly to its mixture of Scandinavian and Soviet influences and independence of character. And partly to its Arctic proximity, delivering Aurora Borealis possibilities in the winter.

Adding these things up, a holiday in Finland seemed like a splendid way to celebrate my birthday, which is next Thursday, so that is where M and I are off tomorrow. There may be a slight break in sobriety (23 days so far) but another reason for going is the vodka. And the saunas. And the huskies.

Anyway. Back in a week, all being well.

joella

Down tools

Never have I seen hard hats look so pretty.

joella

Salad days

My mother is a nurse and has never worked in an office. I once showed her where I worked and she looked around her in wonder and bemusement. All those people just sitting at computers all day, she said. What on earth are they doing?

A very good question. One of the things they are doing is using stationery. There is a fantastic sign on a cupboard door downstairs, begging for a photo but I would need to sneak in after everyone's gone home. It says: This is the new stationery cupboard. Whatever is not in here is in the old stationery cupboard. Right.

Another is putting up Christmas decorations. There were six geese a-laying on our corridor (part of the twelve days of Christmas competition). What they were laying was balloons called things like 'critical thinking' and 'valuing diversity', and best of all they were pinned to the ceiling right next to the 'Danger: Asbestos. Do not Disturb Under Any Circumstances' stickers.

Finally, of course, is having meetings. If there are enough of you in the meeting, it involves sufficiently senior people and some of those people are Visitors, then you get sandwiches in for lunch. These are uniformly awful but you eat them anyway, and what's left you put out in the office for the less fortunate.

And eventually you are left with a tray of garnish. Which you put on the floor by the recycling bin and leave for people to make pretty shapes out of. I saw one of them doing it with my very own eyes.

Beats working for a living.

joella

Technology blues revisited

The iPod is working fine. The iPod is *great*. Apart from the things which are deliberately a bit awkward so that you buy accessories to make them easier. That's evil, but to be expected. But it does what it should and it does it very well.

No, it's fucking iTunes that's the problem.

Until I got an iPod, I used Windows Media Player, with very few problems. But Windows Media Player won't synchronise with iPods, because they are made by Apple and Microsoft hate them.

So I invested hours and hours of valuable sobriety in getting everything into the iTunes library in the right format (it won't take wma files because they are made by Microsoft and Apple hate them) and setting up preferences etc.

Plugged in my iPod and yes, glory be, it synchronised like a dream. Great, I thought, let's get some more music on there.

Ah. iTunes won't rip CDs on our PC. It should, but it doesn't. Occasionally it pretends to, but all you actually get if you play the track is a sad beep beep sound. So I have to rip CDs using Windows Media Player. And then go back to iTunes and add the new folder to the iTunes library as it doesn't automatically pick it up because it's made by Apple etc.

I've set up some great iPod playlists, and I thought I would burn a CD for someone as a birthday present. I spent ages playing with the order of the tracks, getting the exact right length for a CD, setting iTunes to burn them all at the same volume.

But it wouldn't burn via iTunes (should have guessed really). And I can't import the playlist into Windows Media Player as... etc. And now in the Windows Media Player library I have two versions of most tracks as there's the wma version and the mp3 version and I couldn't find a way of seeing all the information I needed by tiling windows so I was reduced to PRINTING THE PLAYLIST OFF so I could reassemble it. Except I didn't reassemble it. It was one kick in the head too far. Bastards.

This would never happen in the Culture.

joella

Bish bash Bosch

What I was planning to write about today was my impressive fruit and veg consumption, following a) the arrival in the house of a food processor and b) my setting up an extremely grown up and middle class arrangement with Abel & Cole, whereby they bring us organic avocados and celeriac every week (well, and more prosaic things like onions) and we pay by direct debit so it's not even like spending real money.

But instead I got home to find the dishwasher was bust. Kaput. On the fritz. Etc. Properly: we scooped all the water out of it, I sucked on various bits of pipework (through a tea towel, like *that's* going to stop me catching anything) and blasted various holes with my hole blaster thing, but we came finally to the conclusion that there was no blockage: the pump has gone.

Now I am deeply, some would say unhealthily, attached to my dishwasher, but the fact remains that it is ten years old, and I am not sure what to do. M thinks we should get it repaired as he comes from a make do and mend generation. I support this in theory but find it hard to believe Bosch are still servicing machines that are this old in anything like an economical way.

It will be ok. Of course it will. But in the meantime I feel overwhelmed by crud and complexity. It feels so much bigger than it is.

We had pasta and salad for tea, as it was gone 8.30 before we surrendered, soggy-kneed and smelly handed. The swede, leeks and parsnips stared at me accusingly from the side. And forget about juicing: even looking at the food processor generates a ton of washing up.

I'm off to watch Desperate Housewives. They don't have these kinds of problems.

joella

Another man done gone

As a nine year old, I learnt to play the flute at an after-school music club run at the local Catholic comprehensive school, now doing pretty well I hear but at the time a terrifying place with echo-ey corridors, scarred linoleum and endless teenage pregnancy rumours circulating in rooms with multiple near-identical projects about the Pope stuck on walls of institution green. I was scared. There were some friendly people there though, and one of them was a gentle boy a couple of years older than me, who was better than me but never made a point of it.

Nine years later, we were working together in a restaurant. I was on the bar, he was washing up. We got on. There was a work night out just as acid house hit Blackpool: nightclubs which weeks previously had been playing Whitney Houston and the Timewarp were suddenly home to gurning, sweating hordes in smiley T-shirts with whistles. We were all a bit bemused. We danced together and if I remember rightly he made a gentle pass at me, which I hope I gently rebuffed, though I was not known for my gentleness as a teenager.

I lost track of him for a while, but his mother and mine are great friends, so I heard about him from time to time, bumped into him occasionally in the pub when I went home to visit, and then more often when he started working in the local fishmonger's. The last time I saw him M was buying smoked haddock, and I wandered down the shop to say hello.

On Saturday, he died of meningitis.

I knew he was in hospital, and then I knew he was in intensive care, and then I knew he was on life support, so I at least had some idea, but I arrived in Lytham this weekend to find my mother looking very small and white, and telling me he'd gone. I went out in the evening and found myself telling a whole table full of people who didn't even know he was ill, but who all knew him, who had all known him all their lives. The next day, I found myself telling N&D, who were up for the day with baby C and who knew him too.

He was a lovely guy - quiet, but there in the fabric of the lives of a whole generation of kids who grew up together in a small town. And now gone, too quickly and far too young. It feels like we were all lined up against a wall and one of us taken out at random. It leaves you disoriented, a bit fearful and very, very sad.

joella

Gender in the city

A queue experience in M&S has just reminded me of a perfect illustration of the difference between sex and gender. Which I shall now share, as hey, that's part of my job.

M and I were in Sainsbury's the other week, and it was heaving. We were trying to find the best queue to join. I picked one where most of the trolleys weren't too full, but then moved down one when I saw that the cashier was a man. Always choose a woman, I said. That's a bit sexist of you, said M.

Ah no, I said. That is gender aware of me.

Supermarket checkout jobs pay badly - often not much more than minimum wage - and are often part time. These sorts of jobs are usually taken by women, who are more likely to have childcare responsibilities (early years, after school, school holidays). They need a job which they can fit round their other commitments. There aren't that many employers who will be that flexible, so options are limited.

Whereas men, if they are in work, are usually in full time work. They are much less likely to have a caring role during the standard working week, so they have far more choice of jobs. They are also much less likely to have taken a career break, and more likely to seek a senior position -- often because they are the main breadwinner in a family. So they tend to work more hours, and they get paid more per hour.

So a woman on the checkout in the supermarket is fairly likely to be capable of doing a far more sophisticated, better paid job, she just isn't. She may well also have been doing the job for a while, she knows it inside out, knows what to do when the till roll runs out and what the difference is between a Danish pastry and a Chelsea bun. She can also often scan significantly faster than you can pack, and she keeps an ultra-beady eye on the pen so it doesn't walk.

There are far fewer men, and the ones you see tend to be either teenage boys waiting for their lives to start and chronically lacking in social skills, or friendly but awkward adult men who seem to have learnt how to interact from a book, make well-intentioned but desperately inappropriate comments, and whom you can't quite imagine surviving in a less rule-bound enviroment. It's my guess that either way, most of them live with their mothers. Who are quite possibly working on the next till along.

These are of course generalisations. My ex-local supermarket was staffed seven days a week by a woman with no neck who went purple with anger if anything happened that she wasn't expecting and hadn't personally authorised. And the middle eastern supermarket down the road is staffed solely by men who have the price of everything in their heads and weigh things in their hands.

But following the law of averages, if you find yourself in a hurry in a supermarket, choose a till with a woman on it. This is nothing to do with biology, and everything to do with sociology.

joella

Paradigm shifting

Two things I have had to get my head round recently that the average twelve year old will probably take for granted.

1. Not deleting stuff. Who needs to, when you've got Google search technology? Chuck it all in a bucket and then look for what you want when you want it. You'll never need it again? No big deal. Space is cheaper than time.

2. Not having a stop button. iPods don't need one, there's nothing to wear our or stretch. You pause it, or you turn it off. I looked through the user guide seventeen times before this finally occurred to me. And it still feels weird.

joella

Spam bemusement

Viagra, I can see the point of, I suppose. In certain circumstances. Similarly, while I can't really believe it could actually a) work or b) improve likelihood of successful relationships with women, I can see why a man might want a longer penis.

But every other message I am getting at the moment is exhorting me to 'increase the volume of my ejaculation'. What on earth's the point of that? Bigger wet patch? A brief (and admittedly non-random) survey of women of my acquaintance confirms that less is definitely more.

So either I'm missing something, or this is a classic case of nobody bothering to ask the ultimate target market whether they actually want this product. Which may not stop men buying it, but the average woman is likely to be as pleased as my mum was the time my dad bought her a four slice toaster for Christmas.

joella

Supercharging

In the Guardian magazine on a Saturday they have a little profile section, where they ask people questions like 'do you believe in monogamy?' and 'what is your favourite smell?'.

Another is 'what single thing would improve the quality of your life?'. You're supposed to think 'world peace', or 'collective ownership of the means of production' or something, but right now the single thing that would improve the quality of my life is a universal recharging device.

Ten years ago, I had no recharging devices in my life at all. Then I got a mobile phone, which had a battery that lasted about eight hours (unless you actually made a phone call, in which case it lasted nearly as long as you needed to talk for). Enter carrying a recharger around all the time.

It got better a couple of years later as phones improved, and now I only have to charge my phone about once a week. But then a year ago I got a digital camera, transforming and life-improving in many ways but which has a battery that needs charging every few days if you use it a lot, and every few weeks if you don't.

And then for Christmas I got a pocket GPS machine, which has *two* chargers, and a mini iPod, which has just the one, but it's not like anything else you've ever seen. Both the above (and the camera, come to think of it) also have other leads to attach them to PCs.

I should not complain, as I am very lucky indeed to be a girl with so many gadgets. But my question is this: all these things need to charge from the mains. So why can't they all use the same kind of charger? Then everyone would have one. And offices and public places could have charging points.

Ten years ago I needed a pocket full of change for the phone, new Duracell in my Walkman, an A-Z and maybe a spare film for the camera. Now I need a bag full of bespoke black and white spaghetti. And of course the one thing that dies is the thing you don't have/can't find the charger for. I have no idea where my camera battery charger is. All I do know is that if I need to buy a new one it will cost me a screaming fortune and I am Not Happy.

That's before I even start on wma and aac music formats and their refusal to acknowledge each other's existence. Technology companies are all bastards.

joella

Still dry. Reflective.

Six days. Last time I did this it was the first time I had done it. I expected to become a bouncy morning person with an appetite for physical exercise and unmatchable joie de vivre. In January. While giving up smoking. And starting a new job. Yeah, RIGHT.

This time round it's much the same. I can't wake up to save my life. I feel like I am sleeping off an 18 month hangover. Which might well be true.

But I feel quite calm, which is an unusual feeling for me. I am usually wired and anxious after anything that reminds me how fragile we are, how much of my happiness and security is happenstance, and how temporary it could all turn out to be.

I think natural disasters are easier to process than conflicts or terrorism, even ones on this scale. At some level, there's nothing you can do: some people would have died no matter what kind of world we had created. At another, you can get angry: most of the people who died were poor, and living vulnerable lives in vulnerable places. *That* we could do something about. And we fucking well better.

Last night I was home alone. I sat in our newly minimalist living room (no tree, no coffee table) under a blanket, drank a pot of camomile tea and watched the fantastic Desperate Housewives. I felt peaceful. It was a welcome feeling.

joella