What's in an honorific?

In my second year at Cambridge, I shared a set of rooms with my (female) friend E. We had a party, the table (visible in the background in its undamaged state) got damaged, and a repair bill, addressed to Mr L and Mr D, duly arrived from the Clerk of Works. I went into their offices waving it around and demanding an explanation. They had a list of everyone's names, in fact they were the people who painted people's names on their doors at the beginning of the year, and in those days (and possibly still) men were just listed by surname while women were called Miss. So it's not like it would have been *hard* to ascertain that we were in fact women. Well, they explained, we just address all our students as Mr, it's usually right.

I'm not paying it, I said, until you actually address it to me. I'd like to think I flounced out, but I expect I stomped. And, if memory serves, a new bill to Miss L and Miss D was forthcoming.

I didn't have the stamina at that point to challenge the Miss -- I was a Miss when I got there and a Miss when I left and am a Miss to them still, but everywhere else, ever since there have been forms to fill in, I've been ticking the Ms box.

It's great being a Ms. I remember when I opened my first bank account at 15, running my fingers over the MS that was embossed on the cash card, and thinking 'I chose that'. I love it when they ask, as they still SO OFTEN do, 'is that Miss or Mrs?' Neither, I still SO OFTEN enjoy saying, it's Ms. Yeah, I can see some of them thinking, that figures. I don't care. I am happy to be defined by the fact that I won't be defined by my marital status. Make of it what you will, that's why I do it.

And every now and again, especially online, you see a form that just has Mr or Ms as the main options. That, brothers and sisters, is progress. You'd never have seen that in the 80s. Although, now I think about it, it still doesn't leave space for people who identify as neither male nor female. I am not sure they have any option except to get themselves a PhD.

But it's not all progress. As I get older, and have to talk to people about boring grown up things, those who used to default to Miss (which is at least technically accurate) now default to Mrs. What I particularly hate, and I'm sure I'm not alone, is when someone rings up for M, aka Mr D, and I answer instead. "Is that Mrs D?", they say, in that flat monotone that call centre people have.

"There *is* no Mrs D," I say in my scariest voice. "Well, actually, there is, but she's in the attic."

And then yesterday I had the pleasure of calling an anonymous appliance service centre FOUR TIMES, because our cooker is playing up, and I can't get through a recession without a working hob, thank you very much. The whole experience, with the automated menu that doesn't have any of your options, the checking with the kitchen installer to find out where the gas isolation valve might be, the inexplicably getting cut off twice, was so exhausting that I didn't have the energy to disentangle myself from the lazy assumption that only married women might need their burners servicing. Fnarr.

The phone rang this morning and it was the engineer, telling me what time he'd be coming round. 'Is that Mrs L?', he said. Yes, I said. Yes it is.

joella

Know your onions

I get very upset when I stand behind people in supermarkets who are buying those microwavable cheeseburgers already in a bun. Food is one of life's greatest pleasures, and we've never had it so good, but you have to know what to do with it, and millions of people don't.

These days I sometimes go to Sainsburys on a Saturday morning with ex-housemate S and baby Tungsten. She's come a long way from the days when she'd ring me up from the Co-op in Botley and say 'what should I buy?', but she'll still stand there at the meat counter and ask me questions about stew. S, I say, I haven't eaten meat since 1983. I've never cooked the stuff. I have no sodding idea.

Her mother was what used to be called a 'good plain cook'. Her cheese and onion pie was one of the highlights of my late adolescence. But S was the youngest of five, and somehow never learnt. Most of her recipes are mine. Most of *mine* I made up in my early 20s, many of them based on things that the mother of my Significant Ex used to cook on her Aga. When I was living at home, I somehow never learnt either.

I'd never cooked anything till I went to university. My first recipe was pasta with sauce made from a tin of chopped tomatoes mixed with packets of minestrone Cup A Soup. The soup had croutons. It was kind of crunchy. I can't believe I fed this to people. But I worked at it, and these days I am a passable cook. I am best at soups and things which spend a long time in the oven, like roasted vegetables and pasta bakes. I think this must be an Aga throwback thing.

This is a rather long-winded way of admitting that I am again taking my hat off to Jamie Oliver, if as begrudgingly as last time-- he still gets right on my tits. The first episode of the Ministry of Food made me cry. If we lived in a decent social democracy this would be a public health issue the government addressed at its root, as in fact it did during the war, but as we in fact live in a celebrity-obsessed Daily Mail reading dystopia, it's down to Jamie to enrich the lives of those single mothers on benefits. 

But if he *can* get people learning how to boil spaghetti, it might just save us all. It's not just poor people who can't cook, I've seen plenty of middle class fridges full of Waitrose ready meals and mouldering bags of salad, but it's mainly poor people who live in such a nutritional desert, with all. The reasons for this stretch back forever, as Felicity Lawrence explains very well, and will stretch forward forever too if we don't do something about it. It's a national tragedy. 

joella

Joe Six Pack And His Slippery Slope To Socialism

You know, I almost feel sorry for George W. First he started a really stupid war by lying about stuff, and as a result we worked out that his 'serious' face was not to be trusted. So the next time he put his serious face on nobody believed him, and as a result he's presiding over the sudden disintegration of global capitalism. What's a cowboy to do?

I don't have any shares and my pension was most of a hill short of a hill of beans anyway, so as long as I have enough of a job to cover my share of the mortgage, and M has enough work coming in to cover his, I reckon we'll work something out. Neither of us has a credit card, and we have learnt how to grow onions, potatoes, broad beans and (tbc) brussels sprouts, so we can move into Austerity Mode at fairly short notice. There's a lot to be said for being low maintenance. As Plumbing S said, while taking a chainsaw to another fallen tree, 'I might be oil-poor but I'm wood-rich'.

On the home front, I have taken Mr B's advice and found a secret weapon in the War Against Brookesalikes. Our new housemate is black and 6'3". I was telling him about the recent shrieking issues. Oh, I'll go round next time, he said. When I ask people to keep the noise down they usually do, for some reason.

I'm almost looking forward to it.

joella

I'm still afraid of America

... which is probably why - instead of being in bed like a sensible person - I'm still drinking vodka, watching the jaw-dropping Twitter Election Feed and wondering if I can stay awake through the televised debate or should go to bed and consume the mediated version in the morning...

joella

Watching the students #1

They've not been so bad yet really. Tonight though there was that noise that you know augers ill. That noise which is largely made up of bad dance music combined with shrieking at a volume that can only be achieved with heightened levels of intoxication, with all the doors and windows open. And it was only 8pm. On a schoolnight.

We were eating where we normally eat, with the back door open because we'd made a lot of smoke cooking, what with my Jewish potato cakes (I am potato rich at the moment) and M's chargrilled broccoli with chilli and garlic. We were relaxed about the noise as we have made this noise ourselves, except with better music. And it was only 8pm, and we were drinking steely ice cold Sauvignon Blanc and generally counting our educational blessings.

But I did wonder how many of them there must be in there to make that much noise, especially when they did assure us faithfully and politely that they would let us know before they had a 'rowdy evening'.

So I stood on my chair to look out of the window at their house. There was definitely a gathering in the back room, but not what you'd really call a party. There was also someone leaning over the sink in the downstairs bathroom, visible through the frosted glass. She was there a while.

I think one of them's chucking up already, I said to M. That's probably a good sign.

She carried on, lifting her head up then going back for more. Then another head appeared from the right. If I remember that bathroom correctly (and I have seen it, as I expressed an interest in the plumbing while the landlords were doing it up), head #2 belonged to someone who must have been sitting on the loo.

How odd, I thought, to chuck up in front of someone else. Especially when there are three toilets in the house.

And then I thought, no, she's not chucking up, she's snorting something.

I bought M a little video camera for his birthday. I am thinking of starting a StudentCam channel on YouTube.

joella

Sun comes up, it's Saturday morning

It's been a weird old week, no? Every morning the Today programme woke me up with more tales of global economic meltdown. I don't understand how banks work -- in fact several of us round a pub table with plenty of maths qualifications between us established that we had no idea what the FTSE numbers actually represent. I've always secretly believed that nobody does really, and indeed that all financial instruments more complicated than a biscuit tin under the bed have something of the Emperors New Clothes about them. And on the evidence of this week, I think I might be right. 

I take no great pleasure in this, of course. I don't want thousands of people who earn honest livings to lose their jobs or homes, and I don't want to wake up one day to find that all our stuff are belong to China. 

It's pretty gloomy at NGO X as well, as we are busy making ourselves fit for the future and that future has people giving less money to NGOs as they need it all to keep the heating on and buy cheese. There are days when I can see why people choose to be doctors or policemen or schoolteachers. *And* the mortgage has just gone up *and* we don't have a lodger at the moment *and* the weather has that 'I'm going to get cold soon' edge to it that normally I love but this year... this year makes me feel poor. 

But I don't turn the radio on on Saturday mornings. Instead I sleep and sleep and sleep until I'm good and ready to wake up. I still have some residual exhaustion (emotional, probably) from the Hot Place, so I wasn't good and ready until nearly 11. M was still asleep too, and we woke up to a sunny, sunny morning, and more silence than you would expect at the end of Freshers Week. 

The allotment needs attention. I'm going to pack up last night's leftover curry, make up a bottle of Ribena (we can still afford high-end cordial), get out the hand tools and go and get dirty. It will all, one way or another, work itself out.

joella

While You Were Out...

Today I have been mostly sleeping, and catching up on the things that happened while I was in the Hot Place. It wasn't that I didn't have internet access, I did... it was just that these things all seemed irrelevant. And probably were.

But they don't feel so here. And so we have:

1. The return of the students.

The neighbourhood is again full of badly parked cars and badly sorted rubbish (I'm thinking of offering lessons in both), and Tesco is again full of young people sporting tiny iPods and huge hair and buying Taboo and Doritos. One lot of our neighbours are mostly the same as last year's, and they were generally ok, but the other side are new. We hated their predecessors, but one ought to show willing, so we went round to introduce ourselves. They assured us that they were 'just five girls', were quiet and hard working, and will be sure to let us know if they have any parties. Splendid, we said. We'll get on fine then. And I hope it's true. In my mind they are already Posh Caroline, Ginger Caroline, Sporty Caroline, Scary Caroline and Baby Caroline.

2. Google Chrome.

I was quite excited about this for a while, as the work laptop I was using only had IE 6 on it (oh, the joys of a 'trailing edge' IT strategy) and I couldn't bear it. So I downloaded it, but gave up on it after a couple of days... a bit like early Gmail and its lack of a Delete option, I found its lack of a 'home' button annoying (I liked that there is no 'homepage' as such, I liked that a lot, but I wanted to be able to get back to that from another page without opening a new tab, and I didn't find a way to do that). The clincher though was that a lot of pages didn't work -- and didn't work in an ugly, flickery, jumpy sort of way -- because I didn't have the "right plug-ins installed". And I couldn't install them without downloading them over my shitty connection and then logging in as an administrator. As these pages worked just fine in IE I didn't *quite* understand what the problem was -- maybe GC doesn't do backwards compatibility -- but I also couldn't be arsed to find out. So I uninstalled it. I thought I might try again when I got home, but then I discovered that Firefox 3 had also happened while I was away, and its Most Visited and site tagging give me some nice new things to play with. So I can't see the 'value added', as they say in local government, of getting my head round GC for the time being. I'll watch this space though.

3. Sarah Palin.

Wow. She's a whole new kind of woman, and I am Very Afraid. I'm not sure what she *is*, but she is *not* a feminist, and I really don't see how she or anyone else can claim otherwise. Having a woman running for high office means there has been feminism, and that that woman has benefited from the achievements of feminism. It does not mean she embodies those values or will promote or even protect them. We had a million years of Thatcher, we should know that by now.

Now, personally, I also don't buy the 'Feminists For Life' thing. I don't think you can be a feminist and not support a woman's right to choose to have an abortion. Not in a world where women don't have the right to choose not to get pregnant, or even in a world where they do, but they don't exercise it, or something goes wrong, or they thought it would be ok, or they don't want to make a fuss, or they didn't or couldn't care about themselves enough to stop it happening. We need to work on all that, for sure, and the best case scenario is a world where no one gets up the stick without wanting to be there. I support all moves in that direction, and if we got there, then abortion, like the Marxist state, would wither away. But while we're, you know, waiting for utopia, any move to outlaw abortion is a misogynist move. In my opinion.

But that's far from my only beef with Ms Moose Hunter. The thing that really sets my teeth on edge is her claim to be "just your average hockey mom". I'm not quite sure what a hockey mom is, but I'm always uncomfortable when women go round defining themselves by their relationships to other people. Especially when, like the Carolines, they use the word 'just'. Feminist it ain't, either, but I think I should move on from that -- my discomfort is more about the passive-aggressive pressure that is put on children when their mother (or father) has a deal of her own identity or self-esteem invested in their prowess.

I think my own mother did me proud in this regard -- though if she *had* had the desire to be a hockey mom she would have been sadly disappointed -- most of the time I was supposed to be playing hockey at school I actually spent hiding in the toilets, and when I couldn't manage to hide I always tried to be Left Half (or is that netball?) as that seemed to be the position where it was easiest to do nothing without getting shouted at. The only time my games teacher noticed me was when she was comparing me to a dead body.

She did me proud in other regards too though: when I was the same age as Bristol Palin (and a year younger than the "young man she will marry"), she walked into the room where I was doing my chemistry homework, closed the door and leaned back against it, and said 'I think you should get fitted for a diaphragm'. I remember looking down at the long carbon-based equation I was drawing out on my narrow-lined page, putting down my pencil, and saying 'I do know about Durex you know'. (We didn't call them condoms in those days, that all came with AIDS).

No, she said, you need something you take care of yourself. I'm not sure she'd call herself a feminist even now, but that was a remarkable thing to say to your 17 year old daughter. And so I went off on my own (I don't think I asked her to come with me, and I don't think she offered) to the anachronistically named Family Planning Clinic, to have an Amazonian woman in a white coat stick half her hand up me and say 'oooh, more room than I thought, let's try a 70!'. I emerged feeling small and invaded, bearing a large plastic box with my new diaphragm and a large tube of spermicidal gel which I would, in time, come to work out that I was allergic to.

But that box was as important to me as my first car. Thanks, non-hockey mom.

God, I take myself seriously at the moment, don't I? Let me get my alcohol intake back up and I'm sure normal service will be resumed shortly.

joella

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Socialism*

So... I am back from the Hot Place. I missed a night's sleep in the process and am going through that weird not-quite-jetlag conflict-zone thing where you are fine for most of the day then fall heavily asleep at a random time and wake up in the middle of the night disoriented, thirsty and tearful.

Off and on, there and here and in between, I have been thinking about tomato's razor-sharp post on disaster tourism.

So... why did I go? The short answer is because they asked me to. There isn't much I can say about the specifics, but there are some serious information management 'challenges' (quite how serious I had no idea till I got there, to be honest).

Did I make any difference? Yeah, a bit. And could make more if a) I follow a few things up from here with the high-ups and the techies, and b) I go back early next year to do a bit more work with people there. I represent reasonable value for money. You get a lot out of me.

But those are the easy questions. I thought about some of the harder ones as well.

Why was I there to be asked? Mmm. Because I have more or less worked out what I'm good at, and I have more or less worked out that a) I need to be doing it -- ie that indolence is not good for me -- and that b) the end result of my labours needs to be convergent. I'm not an artist, I'm not a capitalist. But I'm not an altruist either. My motivations are as selfish as the next person's, but maybe less realistic: I think the best chance we have is via a fairer world. But I don't go out literally feeding the poor or negotiating with the G8. I'm an applied egalitarian. It's a bit weak, when you look at it hard. Unless you can be sure that good information management changes the world.

Which of course you can't. The biggest question of all is... should well-meaning organisations intervene in times of conflict, famine and flood (or is it true, as John Cage might say, and M points out from time to time, that if you try to improve the world you only make it worse)? There is no such thing as a neutral intervention, and even those with the most benign intentions can have, over decades, over centuries, potentially catastrophic unforeseeable consequences. The road to hell etc.

On the other other other hand...
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. (George Orwell)
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. (Mohandas Gandhi)
All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men (sic) to do nothing. (Edmund Burke)

What's a girl to do?

joella

* with apologies to Max Weber, who, in his way, changed my life.

All fur coat and no knickers

You don't have to know me very well to know how important water is to me. I think about it all the time. I carry it with me everywhere. I have a qualification in its supply and removal. Clean water is life's first essential, but also one of life's greatest luxuries. There's not enough of it around and it's unforgivable to waste it.

So rubbish plumbing Really Pisses Me Off. 

The bathrooms in the guest house here in the Hot Place were recently 'refurbished'. The walls and floors are tiled, the toilets are those swanky looking back to the wall numbers with push button flushes, there are mixer taps on the basins and showers. There are towel rails and toothbrush holders galore. 

But the place leaks like a sieve. I first got here in the early hours of the morning, having travelled all day, and tried to go for a shower. No water came out. I investigated, and found a tap coming out of the wall that seemed to control the supply to all the cold taps (there are hot taps too, but I can't see much call for them -- the cold water is never cold and we are always hot). I turned it on and the toilet cistern started filling, which was reassuring. Then I realised why it was turned off: the joints to the shower taps, which come straight out of the wall, were leaking a steady stream of water. It just runs straight down the wall. This also robs the shower of some of its already fairly feeble pressure. Not that you can easily stand under it, as the holder for the shower head has broken off. Everything, in fact, that is screwed into the tiles can be pulled straight out. 

So I have developed a routine: enter the bathroom, turn on the water. Go to the loo. Fill basin (using my own travel plug, as the pop up waste pops neither holds water not pops up, so I have hoiked it out), wash bra and pants (we can get our washing done, but they will not do 'ladies underwear'). Leave them to soak, get in the shower. Get out of shower. flush loo (not done before shower to protect shower pressure, also sometimes the push button sticks, so the water just keeps pouring down the loo). Rinse underwear. Brush teeth (using bottled water, the stuff out of the tap smells funny and is sometimes a strange colour) while cistern is refilling, in case I need to go in the night. Turn off water. Go to bed. Repeat loo, shower and teeth part in the morning.

*This* morning, I turned on the water. No reassuring rushing noise. Turn on shower. Nothing. Turn on basin tap: feeble dribble. Swear a lot. It's 38 degrees outside and I am bleeding.

I went searching for a jug and a bucket, a perfectly effective washing method in much of the world, but no joy -- we do not have a jug and a bucket here, we have a shiny but USELESS bathroom. So I ended up standing by the basin, chucking water over myself with a coffee mug. I assumed that the water would make its way to the drain down by the toilet, but no, that would have required the floor to have been laid by someone competent. And it wasn't. 

It's enough to drive you to drink. But there isn't any of that either. 

joella

On the first day of Ramadan...

... I was woken up at 2am by a text from my colleague, who is staying on the second floor. 'R U awake? My place full of sand.' I had been vaguely aware that there was something going on outside, but my place was not full of sand and I had not investigated further. But it didn't sound good, so I called her.

Turns out that there was a massive sandstorm happening. Trees and powerlines were coming down -- one of the reasons I hadn't heard anything was because my room is right next to the generator, and when that's going you can't really hear anything else. 

And it is also on the ground floor, the smallest and gloomiest one, at the back -- probably because I'm not staying long. But this saved me from my colleague's sandblasting -- the top floor is a sort of hasty add-on, and the windows blow open and let in whatever's going around. As she is Muslim and had to get up before sunrise to eat, and everything in her kitchen was an inch deep in sand, her Ramadan didn't get off to the best start. As I didn't have to get up before sunrise, and indeed have given up on breakfast altogether, all I had to contend with was a gritty bathroom. It was a bit of a mudfest by the time I'd finished. 

We all got picked up at eight as usual, but it was like driving through a ghost town. There are no shops or food places open during the day, so I'd been warned to bring my lunch. Which I did, but I wasn't sure where to eat it. In the end I shut myself in an empty office. By the early afternoon people were yawning (I was also advised not to try and have any meetings after 11am), and the local staff left at 3 -- I can see why, but it can't make for the most productive month. We hung on, but nearly missed the lift home, which also runs earlier, just nobody told us. 

Returned to find half the guesthouse still with no power. The guards gave a sort of *you* try finding an electrician during Ramadan shrug. My room was one of the lucky ones (I am getting fonder of it by the day) but the ground floor kitchen was not. This meant that the fridge had been off for about 20 hours... which in 40 degrees is not pleasant. I held the milk and various other things at arms length while pouring them away, and discovered that my pan of leftover spaghetti, which had been destined for the next day's lunch, was full of oily cold water from the rapidly defrosting ice box. It was dark by this time, but my Kenyan colleague bravely cooked dinner for us, wearing my plumbing head torch, which luckily I had the foresight to bring. Me, I was too hot and premenstrual to do anything but feel oppressed, read an ancient copy of OK magazine that I found in a cupboard, and eat Cheetos. With extra sand. 

Around 10pm someone twiddled the right wire and everything came back but the TV receiver and the top floor. L moved down a floor for the night and the day closed.  

joella

Arriving in the Hot Place

It was a ten hour flight, in two legs, broken in the Middle East. When we touched down there, nearly everyone got off. I waited for the new people to get on, but only two or three of them did. When the plane took off again it had about fifteen passengers. On an Airbus A321.

 

About halfway through the second leg, I thought sod it, I'm having a drink. I wasn't going to, as the Hot Place is also dry. But there was a drawer full of wine, and nobody else to drink it, so I had one. The stewardess was happy to have something to do. 'All alcohol must be consumed on board', she said. 'Right you are,' I said. 'Can I have another?'.

 

We 'deplaned' in no time, obviously, down the steps into a hot moist night and onto a bus. Three fat men sprawled across the only seats, under a sign which said 'Seating reserved for women and children'. I decided not to make a point. It was a short and badly lit journey to the terminal, past big white UN planes that loomed suddenly out of the darkness.

 

I'm far from the world's worst flyer, but there's always something to worry about. Will they remember my vegetarian meal? (They did on the first leg, but not on the second, but they kindly picked the sausage off the pizza for me). Will my luggage arrive? (Yes, it did -- it was strangely comforting to see my bright pink case emerge, I'd imagined it being flung around an empty hold, scattering pants and instant noodles all over the place). Will there be anyone there to meet me?

 

Er, no. There wasn't. Now *that's* never happened before, and I didn't particularly want my first experience of it to be after midnight in a near deserted entrance way populated by a few rangy taxi drivers and a few mangy cats. And a man asleep on a bench.

 

Thanks to a roaming mobile and good paperwork, I could call the duty driver. His English wasn't up to much but I got the impression that he was 'coming'. Thanks to half a bottle of red wine, I didn't get scared. I just sat down away from the sleeping man, ignored the taxi drivers, got out my Moleskine and pencil and started writing this.

 

joella

Shape shifting

I am packing for the Hot Place. It is very difficult. I have been to hot places before, though not this one, and I have been places before where women need to cover themselves up. But I have never been to a hot place where women need to cover themselves up *and* look on the tidy side of presentable.

'Hot and smart?' I said to the person briefing me. That might be a challenge. You just wait, she said. Everyone looks immaculate all the time. I don't know how they do it.

Normally, I would take baggy-ish T-shirts. But these won't do. Most of my T-shirts feature holes, paint splatters or political slogans, and I sense that none of these will be acceptable. Man-made fibre is also not recommended, because of the heat, which rules out my super-easy-care travelling shirts. I try one on anyway, but my bosom is clearly discernible. This is also bad form.

So I have gathered together every flowing cotton garment I can find. I don't know if I can 100% avoid elbow and decolletage exposure, but I think most bases are covered.

joella

My dreams are so unoriginal

I don't really like remembering them, they are always anxious. It's a miracle I've got any teeth left at all.

Usually it's a relief to wake up thinking 'it's all right, I didn't really kill him'. But this time, I just told everybody he'd died. It seemed the only way out of the situation.

But it became unsustainable, because he was actually still very much alive. His mum was all upset, and it was my fault. There were job complications. Tax returns. He wasn't going to stay not-dead.

So he went home, and I went round wearing a bright orange T-shirt which said, Wire-style, MY BAD. *This * morning, it was a relief to wake up thinking 'it's all right, I didn't really not kill him'.

My *real* day went downhill from there. Let's just say I'm almost looking foward to spending the next fortnight in a place where the weather forecast looks like this:



joella

Stories from the lake #2: getting the hang of things

Shot plus sky plus lake
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

This is one of those stories best told with a photo.

joella

Stories from the lake #1: Team Antinranta

The weekend before we went away, I read an article in the Guardian about how you should never, ever go on holiday with your friends. I began to worry.

We were:

• Me: first most likely to sauna au naturel, eighth most likely to eat blood sausage and jam*.
  
• M, braver of cold lakes, lighter of fires, cooker of breakfasts. Usually in that order.
  
• Mr B, who has all the moves, including the ones that make the boat go in a straight line. He was oarsome.
  
• H, who brought glamour and intrigue: her continued presence was decided by Turkey's Constitutional Court.
  
• K, aka Sauna Girl. Löyly, vihta, implausible bikini, vodka. Repeat to fade.
  
• Dr A, researcher of indigenous foods and expounder of obscure philosophies.
  
• L, growing fast to fill the space where the Old Testament stops and pear cider starts.
  
• J, half boy, half biscuit. All about the show that must go on.
  

Me, Mr B and Dr A were all at university together. K was there too, though my orbit and hers never intersected at the time. There are few people I have known and loved for longer. What a ridiculous thing to jeopardise, I thought, while wading through mucus the week before we left. What made me think that a fortnight in rural Finland with *other people* and *other people's children* was ever going to be a good idea?

I don't know what made me think it, or even if it was me who thought it first, (though I seem to remember that alcohol was involved) but having done it, I say shame on you, Guardian Family Section. Find the right people and set them by the right lake in the right Scandinavian country, and you will have just about the best holiday imaginable.

joella

* This is not a Germaine Greer-style euphemism. That, I'd be much higher up the list for.

So far so good

Everything here works. Nobody is rude and there is a ridiculous amount of space. There are rollercoasters in lakeside woodland and gherkins with every meal. Also vodka. Ace. joella

Offline alert

I'm going to be quiet for a bit. Not that I've had too much to say recently. I *am* feeling better though, and look forward to letting thoughts settle like leaves and form new things to say. Shortly. With maybe some photos too. Meanwhile wherever you are I hope the weather is clement and the gods are smiling.

joella

Big is... um

I share several significant dimensions (not height, sadly) with the first 'big girl' to reach the final of Miss England. Not sure how I feel about this. Anything that means fewer teenage girls (or indeed grown women) hate their bodies has to be good, so I salute her role model curves. And she's only seventeen -- and wants to be Miss England -- so it would be unfair to expect her to have too much in-depth awareness of body fascism.

But the bit about beauty coming from within is squidged rather breathlessly into the last five seconds, like someone mouthed it at her from behind the camera. Maybe I should send her a copy of the Beauty Myth. With a Post-it note pointing out not to feel bad if she never reads it -- the beauty myth is harder to shake off than Catholicism. Heroin has nothing on it.

joella

In which I emerge from the gloom of sinusitis...

... with an increasing sense of smell, a reducing Kleenex consumption, and a gradually recovering ability to take an interest in anything beyond the end of my nose.

Two such things as examples:

1. The over 60s nationwide bus pass. What a wonderful initiative. My parents came at the weekend and we got the bus into town with them. My mum got out her bus pass, and it worked! In Oxford! All the way from Lancashire! I couldn't get over it. My dad also has a bus pass, but he hadn't actually been on a bus since 1969 so he hadn't brought it with him.

2. Freecycle. One of the best things the internet has ever made possible. M managed to blow up the food processor. There were flames coming out of it and everything. We got a new one (it was a Kenwood and he'd always secretly wanted a Magimix, what with them being French. They hum more discreetly and chop more stylishly). So we had a million attachments for a lump of melted plastic, but I couldn't bear to throw them out. So I put them on Freecycle, and someone replied within about three minutes, and was round to pick them up within half an hour. I initially figured she must be taking them to sell as spares on eBay -- not that I would have minded, better that than landfill -- but it was a much lovelier story. Turned out her mum had died three years ago, and ever since she'd had her mum's Kenwood food processor in the cupboard *with no attachments*. She just happened to log on as my message came up, in fact her husband had recently said she should get rid of the base as it was taking up space and she was coming round to agreeing with him, but feeling sad about it. So I made her very happy, and she made me very happy. And M is making Thai curry paste like there's no tomorrow, so everyone's a winner.

I hold these small things up as proof that the world gets better in some ways even as it melts down in others. Somewhere in between there's a DRM free music download site that will sell me Enter Sandman.

And so to bed.

joella

10 reasons why it doesn't pay to check your blog stats

1. You find out that you are the top hit on Google for the phrase 'aubergine insertion babe'.

Actually, I don't need any more reasons than that.

joella

Smell-o-vision

A long, long time ago I had one of my first proper attacks of the munchies. I sat in a corner on my own, stoned out of my tree and working my way carefully through a packet of chicken flavour crisps.

Every now and again I would look up and say 'but they're so... *chickeny*!' Nobody was listening to me, they were all listening to Frank Zappa instead. Or possibly Captain Beefheart. I had a lot of nights like that a long, long time ago.

I was reminded of the chicken flavour crisps yesterday, when I got out of the car at the New Building (I have been going to work, but I have not been cycling there, I am exhausted at the end of the day as it is). Just before I got out of the car I gave my nose a good blow, then I cleared up the resulting mess -- there is still a ridiculous amount of it -- and set off across the car park. Halfway to the door there was a gust of wind, and it stopped me in my tracks.

I could smell the air! It smelt amazing! Salty and damp and fresh and amazing. I leant against the wall and breathed and breathed and breathed. Then I went inside and I could smell even more things, toast and carpet tiles and printers. Sadly, by the time I got my coffee, my sense of smell had gone again, but it comes back sporadically, in brief bursts. I get to smell the inside of a tissue. Or the ends of my fingers. Things that don't normally have a smell. While food, perfume, wine, flowers are still largely lost to me.

It's the weirdest thing. I was in olfactory heaven in a car park by a ring road. Who knows what the seaside would have done to me.

joella

For those about to rant, we salute you

I've been too ill to do any ranting of late, though as soon as I get to post 'Jo woke up and smelt the coffee' as my Facebook status I intend to get straight back to it. It can only be a matter of days now, I got a hint of Vicks Vaporub last night and a tiny burst of sandalwood this morning. The second course of antibiotics is maybe taking hold. Either that or my sinuses have been served with an Asbo and decided to turn themselves around.

Meanwhile, may I recommend Jeremy on the Guardian on wasting food, and Ben on various Christian factions on women bishops. I was hoping for a good one on this pile of wank, though he's done a fairly good job of digging his own hole.

joella

Even more too much information

Yes, it's still all about me. I did in the end burden the NHS, and am now on my second course of antibiotics, as the first lot didn't do anything except give me the runs. Around the same time, I came on, and the first tears of self-pity rolled down my cheeks. I didn't have enough hands to staunch all my flows. If my ears start leaking, I said to M, I really will be losing stuff from every orifice.

Also, I am slightly worried that, like the dog with no nose, I must smell revolting. Do I smell of poo? I asked. Well, he said, it's hard to tell, since you've been honking of fish for a week.

I threw a box of tissues at his head.

joella

Teething problems

Sight is the only one of my facial senses that is currently working properly. As a result I am still utterly miserable and have nothing of interest to say, except that I went to the dentist (which is an interesting experience when you can't breathe through your nose) to get my canines built up. This was one of the alternatives offered to having braces -- the idea is that if my canines are bigger and fatter they deflect the grinding that my inner fury otherwise inflicts on my increasingly fragile incisors.

I was impressed with the results -- basically, this is what celebrities get done, though for aesthetic rather than existential reasons. It's like Botox for teeth. But the left one did not even survive two days: there was an ominous crack upon its first encounter with a packet of Walkers smoky bacon, and half of my celebrity tooth fell out.

I haven't even got the bill yet. Arse.

joella

Farewell feminine mystique

I was lying in bed this afternoon, surfing the web for mucus management strategies. I tried a bottle of Otrivine that I found in the bathroom cabinet, but it tastes (and burns) a bit like speed when it hits the back of your nose, and that can't be good for anyone. I tried a little acupressure: nada. Then I came across nasal irrigation. I am a fan, nay evangelist, of at least one other kind of irrigation, and I wondered, frankly, why it hadn't occurred to me before.

I don't have a neti pot, which seems to be the accessory of choice for those who wish to wash their noses out. The other suggested approach involved a 10 ml syringe "without needle" (like, duh). None of those either. I put the bath on, and then headed downstairs in search of inspiration.

About half an hour later, M walked into the bathroom and yelped. I hadn't warned him that I would be leaning naked over the sink with a turkey baster up one nostril.

I made a terrible mess (I figured I would, that's why I didn't have any clothes on): I don't think anyone needs the details -- M is still recovering -- but let's just say I did not come across nearly as elegant as the nice lady who does the neti pot demo on YouTube. But it did clear my nose, kind of. I briefly had dual nostril function, and have had it sporadically since.

But I can't smell a damn thing - I made sardine and chilli pasta for dinner, and got not the tiniest hint of fishiness. I'm beginning to wonder if normal nasal service will ever be restored. Is this what it's like having hay fever? Shit, have I got late-onset hay fever?

Still, it's meant I have been able to spend the weekend on the sofa watching Glasto entirely without guilt. I got ninety nine problems but the mud ain't one.

joella

Mucus Pocus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

Eternal phlegm

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

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

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

joella

In the wars

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

Are you all right? I said to M.

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

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

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

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

joella

Show me epic

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

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

joella

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

June Z Chorley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

Q is for the apparatus of state*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

*title inspired by Nonstop Tango's Dictionary.

The gender politics of insertion

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

A *what*? I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

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

The undulation of an Oxford weekend

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

Stork talk

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

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

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

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

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

joella

Don't you bring me down today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

If it ain't broke

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

joella

GirlonaBus*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

*(with apologies to Beth)

A reassuring glimpse of sanity

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

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

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

joella

The difficult seventh decade

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of us do.

joella

Loving The Eels

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

My favourite line is from I Like Birds:

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

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

joella

Boris: a momentary lapse of reason?

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

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

joella

Just when I thought I could not be stopped

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

Ah. What the 80s did for us.

joella

Humankind?

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

joella

To Barbie or not to Barbie?

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

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

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

Still, I am torn.

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

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

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

joella

Home run, ballerina!

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

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

joella

Britannica for bloggers

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

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

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

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

joella

Filling my spud-shaped hole

One man and his clay
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

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

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

How did I get here?

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

joella

This is the modern world

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

Girl orders taxi, gets cupboard

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

joella

Modern gender relations

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

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

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

joella

Cultural capital

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

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

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

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

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

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

What? I said. He wasn't black!

No, she said, but he was vaguely brown.

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

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

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

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

joella

Can't sleep, bed's on fire

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

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

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

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

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

joella

ART SQUAT!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

I do not want what I haven't got

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




Genius. Unquestionably.

joella