The north is a foreign country...

Ha! Who says the BBC's not metrocentric? Just look at this slightly unfortunate map at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cumbria/7691893.stm.



Funny, I could have sworn Cumbria was in England.....

Raaaah!

I curse the morons who can't format. Grrrrrrrrrrrr.

Edited to add: Actually, they make me giggle slightly. One of them has just spectacularly mistranslated, 'chez ouam' (verlan for chez moi, meaning 'home/at mine') leading to the sentence:

'I'll call you when I'm at Wham.'

Awesome.

Righteous anger, well-managed

• When I was in Togo, I remember hearing on the BBC World Service that Uganda had ticked some development box that meant it would no longer be eligible for some financial assistance (though I can't remember if it was IMF or World Bank or what) and from the tone of the news reports and the commentators, I got the distinct impression this was meant to be a Very Bad Thing. Which I didn't understand at all. What is the point of development if increasing independence from foreign aid isn't progress?
• "Because self-sufficiency is, as Jeremy Seabrook puts it, 'the opposite of poverty,' it makes it very hard for us to tell what constitutes real poverty. For example, a family that grows virtually all its food and barters for much of what it needs but makes a cash income of only $2 per day and a family that owns no land, lives in a shack on a garbage dump and gets all its food from selling things scavenged from that dump (a way millions of people live) and makes about $2 per day are lumped together among the desperately poor, as though their situations were equivalent." (Sharon Astyk, Depletion and Abundance, pp 58-59)
• I paraphrase some development 'expert' on Costing the Earth a few weeks ago, who said that food insecurity affected farmers in the South* more than city-dwellers because they could have bad harvests and their crops could be affected, so the answer was to move all subsistence farmers into cities and waged jobs in the formal economy. Because, what, then food would just magically appear in cities without anyone to produce it and not be subject to drought, pests or disease?
  
• Raj Patel, when asked after a talk whether eating locally meant you wouldn't be able to have coffee or chocolate again, said (again I paraphrase): 'I'm strongly in favour of allowing the people who grow coffee and cocoa beans to decide whether they'd like to trade with us.'

I'm currently reading Mr Patel's book, Stuffed and Starved, and I feel the righteous anger of my seventeen-year-old self welling up inside me. Righteous anger, well-managed, is a useful tool.

I'm also trawling the internet for video interviews with him, as he is wonderfully irreverent and makes frequent use of the oeuvre of John Cleese to explain how world financial institutions work.


* The global South, that is, not the south of England. Though I daresay, until recently at least, you could draw similar conclusions from comparing farmers and bankers in, say, Kent.

Sour grapes for Galileo

I do not, not, not, not, not understand evangelical atheism. I understand atheism (believe what you like, I don't care, I don't even know what I believe) but the Dawkins Witnesses are utterly mind-boggling in their need to get into little cliques about what you (don't) believe and try and get everyone else to agree with you. It's like having all the crap parts of religion and none of the good music.

I realise I speak from the privileged position of having been taught physics by someone who was married to the bishop of Newcastle and thus realise that science and religion are not, actually, incompatible (design an experiment to prove whether there is a g/God, test it under controlled conditions and repeat it at least three times, publish your results in a peer-reviewed journal and then I will believe that science disproves religion ;-) - also, never trust a scientist who believes it is so easy to prove a negative, or makes sweeping, confident statements like 'there isn't a God' without being able to back it up with anything other than, er, their personal conviction), and while I understand why scientists are annoyed at Christianity (it must have been very annoying not being allowed to cut up dead bodies to advance medical science in case they were needed at the Resurrection, or being told that the sun revolves around the earth when it patently doesn't) I think their loathing of religion is based more on a traditional antipathy and (quite rightly) a profound mistrust of Creationists, rather than actual science. Which is, as we all know, a process not a doctrine.

And I really find that advert deeply patronising. I find the Alpha Course adverts quite irritating too, but only in the way I find all adverts quite irritating. And, on balance, I'd rather be told, 'Here is a Bible verse... I am a Christian... Would you like to be a Christian too? Why not go and look at our website if you're interested?' than, 'The clever people say there probably isn't a g/God - now don't worry your pretty little head about it, dear.' And it's not even as if religious advertising is particularly subtle... compared to, say, adverts for all food and cleaning products which tell me that, as a woman, I should basically never eat, or at least enjoy it, but prove my worth as a human being by feeding my man and my children, get so depressed about it I need to frequently binge on chocolate, and can't expect my boyfriend to use a mop to boot...

That said, I do have plenty of other ideas for similar reassuring campaigns to combat the more sinister incarnations of advertising.

• You probably aren't as fat as you think you are. Now, stop starving yourself and have a decent meal.
• Your house probably doesn't smell. Now, stop buying air freshener and open the windows instead.
• Your penis probably isn't too small. Now, go and talk to women instead of buying a new car.
• You probably have enough toys already. Now, go and ask your parents to spend some time with you instead.

Any more ideas???

Argh!

Please can I just vent my frustration? I have to write up an hour-long meeting in which the chairman pronounces 'griev-ance' as 'griev-i-ance' all the way through.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Thoughts on the National Portrait Gallery

I was in London yesterday and went around the National Portrait Gallery, which suited me quite well, as far as art galleries go as, having no visual imagination whatsover and being congenitally unable to engage with art on any level more sophisticated than, 'that would make a pretty notelet,' or, 'that would (not) look nice on my wall,'* I quite enjoyed being able to go around looking at people I'd heard of. They had all the portraits of the Tudors that I knew from history textbooks, the stock ones of Richard III and Henry VII who glowered at each other across my A-Level classroom and the one of Mary Queen of Scots looking rather shifty that always hung next to the virginal Elizabeth I with her flowing hair and white-silver robes. I enjoyed the 20th century portraits too, and even went so far as to notice that the one of T S Eliot was rather fragmented and disjointed and didn't make sense (in a good way!) rather like his poetry. I also learnt a bit more about Lady Ottoline Morrell, which has retrospectively informed my reading of Life Class by Pat Barker (which is a superb book and everyone should read it).

I was rather dismayed by the unapologetic metrocentricity of it all though. Had I not already known that George/Robert Stephenson (can't remember which the picture was of) came from Newcastle and built the Stockton-Darlington railway and the Liverpool-Manchester railway, I would have thought he/they was/were only famous for building the first railway into London (from Birmingham to Euston, in, I believe, 1837). Similarly, I would have come away under the impression that Isambard Kingdom Brunel was only famous for gaining work experience on the Thames Tunnel with his father and ignorant of the fact that the Beatles came from Liverpool.

Otherwise I rather like London. I'm currently rethinking my life. Suggestions on a postcard please.



* This is my penance for being such a literary snob. Or my salvation. Every time I'm tempted to chastise people who read trash, I remember that my visual faculties are only capable of appreciating the airport novels of the art world (I like realism and don't care about technique!) and that this isn't due to any laziness or lack of academic rigour on my part.

Milk in first

"The recommended way to take tea with milk is to put the milk into the cup first."

So says the incredibly pretentious-seeming tea shop which is conveniently located very close to a tube station on a direct line between where my train gets in and where my parents will park and about equidistant from each.

Quite right too.

Mammoth catch-up

It's the middle of the day and I'm meant to be working, except that my common sense appears to have vanished and I am without any of the critical faculties (e.g. being able to read and notice things) normally required for proof-reading. I have just tried to write a cheque to pay for the veg box and not only did I almost write 'veg box' after the word 'PAY' instead of 'Eat Organic' but also almost put '22nd December' in the space marked 'DATE', while simultaneously wondering a) how many vegetarians I know, b) how many of them are coming to my barbecue (you know, that thing you do outdoors in the summer, not shortly before Christmas) and c) how many bean-burgers I should make and when I should put the beans on to soak. This is then further complicated by the fact that last time I made burgers, all the people who were supposed to eat the beef-burgers actually wanted bean-burgers cos they were different and funky, so now I have to make enough so that my dead-cow-munching friends can try some without the vegetarians feeling peeved that we ate all their food again. (You know, sometimes I really don't blame them for being smug and self-righteous.) However, it seems as if the vegetarian contingent is solely composed of Anu, who cannot possibly eat more than three burgers, especially if we do vegetable kebabs (ah - must buy vegetables), so I probably needn't worry too much.

I now want to add 'buy vegetables' to my to-do list, but I'll probably end up writing something like 'learn Turkish' and end up actually doing something like 'wander round the house with one shoe on worrying about cobwebs and not end up buying a feather duster'. The only possible explanation I can come up with for this is that I've just been catching up on Zoe Williams's Anti-Natal column in the Guardian and am, in sympathy, functioning rather like I imagine the mother of a newborn might.

Or maybe I just haven't had enough tea.

I had a lovely time at home the other week, only really marred by the fact that I had to come back to Wokingham at the end of it! We had a barbecue, news of which was greeted by almost all members of Nik's family with a combination of surprise and condescending amusement, which is not unusual in people from Surrey, but this lot are (half-)Swedish for heaven's sake and should be vaguely aware that sometimes it is sunny enough to eat outside north of Hertfordshire. We ate out in a wonderful restaurant called The Grainger Rooms which everybody must go to for it is fabulous and fabulously reasonable: a three course menu was only slightly more than the price of a main at the only restaurant in Wokingham of comparable quality (though, admittedly, everything they serve there does come with foie gras and truffle sauce...). I had my hair cut in Corbridge and bought a dress and ran into Sarah's mother, and bonded with my dad in his vegetable patch, where the dog kept trying to eat all the broccoli. I met up with Sarah and heard all about her trip. Charlie made us play Balderdash and Davy kept coming up with wonderfully amusing answers that were far too clever for the makers of the game to have thought of and thus losing rather catastrophically. I am alternately amused and alarmed to notice that my parents appear to have produced:

• one child who turns up her nose at Earl Grey tea made with artificial flavouring rather than proper bergamot flowers;
• one child who scoffs at 'people who go to Radiohead concerts to hear Creep';
• one child who's threatening to turn into a classicist and will thus go through life believing everyone, even people with firsts in Modern Languages from Oxford, to be ever-so-slightly intellectually inferior to himself.
  

Then I went to Paris to visit Gaelle, whom I haven't seen in about four years, and we both later confessed to having been a bit worried lest it was rather awkward, but somehow we found to have enough to say to each other to stay up till 3a.m. both nights. We did very little other than wander, talk and eat (and randomly look at the pictures outside the UNESCO building) but it was much fun. And her boyfriend carried my enormously heavy bag all the way across Paris and lay down on the pavement to take a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night. (Not at the same time. I only took one photo the entire time I was away and it was of the dog. Surprise, surprise.) She told me that she cuts his hair herself, which seems like a win-win arrangement (boyfriend does not have to spend money on haircut; girlfriend does not have to put up with boyfriend looking like ex-convict for three weeks after he finally relents and spends money on haircut), but when I suggested trying it, Nik gave me a rather sceptical look, as if my wielding sharp objects in the general vicinity of his head was not a prospect he greeted with unbounded enthusiasm.

I am currently proof-reading lots of translations, which are getting progressively lewder. In the last few weeks I have learnt more French slang terms for penis, the various orifices into which one might insert said body part and the act of doing so, not to mention derogatory terms for women, than I ever did in 12 years of formal education; which is no mean feat as the French, by and large, like to imagine that they all talk like the immortels of the Academie Francaise (that was a crossword clue recently, which is why I remember that's what they're called) and the existence of, say, an equivalent to Urban Dictionary would a) be incredibly helpful right about now but also b) signify surrender to the malevolent and pernicious forces of Anglo-American cultural imperialism and acknowledgement of the huge, gaping chasm between written and spoken French.* So I am currently using the limited resources available to me to try and work out if 'zoulette' is yet another synonym for penis or yet another less than pleasant term to denote a woman, in particular a woman from la banlieue. I'm hoping it's penis, because otherwise I have to grapple with the different cultural resonances of la banlieue and the suburbs.

I am shocked not so much by the subject matter, but more by the knowledge that real live grown-up people** with respectable jobs actually think and talk about women in this way. It's like they live in this crazy porn-world where sexual pleasure is just about doing more and more outrageous things with a penis, rather than, like, all the other fun stuff. Possibly as a result of all this, I have started reading The F Word on my breaks and actively embracing feminism in a way I never bothered to before because all the good parts were just common sense and all the other parts made people look shiftily at you. I've also reached the conclusion that the opposite of talking about shoes is not talking about Heidegger, it's talking about cars and farting, and so I can knit myself pink cardigans whilst listening to The World Tonight and not feel guilty about one or the other. So I've recently, without any inherent contradiction, used my hard-won economic independence to spend exorbitant amounts of money at Bravissimo and, for the first time in my life, am wearing a bra that actually fits me and own a shirt that doesn't gape! And my other clothes all fit me better too! Oh brave new world, that has such cleavage in it! And I currently think my breasts look rather fabulous and I keep staring at them and not getting anything done. I'm sure the novelty will wear off.***

I have no idea who Barbara Grizzuti Harrison is/was, but this feels rather appropriate right now:

“I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tuna Fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.”

* As someone who has been known to correct 'cascaded' to 'disseminated' while writing up minutes, I appreciate I am on shaky ground here.

** I use the term 'grown-up' loosely, here.

*** I will now be able to gauge who reads this blog and who doesn't by observing who turns up to the barbecue and greets me with, 'Happy birthday, Hannah! Nice boobs!'

Doesn't have to be taxing? Pull the other one...

I just tried to fill in my tax return. It made my head swim. I couldn't find the Self-Employment (short) pages and I think this is discrimination against short, self-employed people. I think being 'a farmer, a market gardener or a creator of literary or artistic works' sounds ideal, but it appears to make the whole damn business more complicated. I now think this is a government ploy to stifle agriculture and art. I'd quite like to move to a cash-free economy, now, please.

I'm going to drink some vodka now. If Nik doesn't get home for dinner soon, that will also make my head swim.

Idiot Wind

Wow.

I have a periodic habit of going to mysupermarket.com and putting in the contents of our veg box or the meat we buy in bulk and being pleasantly surprised that the meat works out about half the price of buying each joint individually and that the veg box works out invariably cheaper than buying organic produce from any supermarket, roughly comparable to the non-organic produce in Waitrose or Sainsbury's and only a pound or so more expensive (depending on what we get - tomatoes and courgettes compare more favourably than cabbage or turnips) than non-organic produce at Tesco or Asda; and frankly, even at the worst estimate, £50 a year is not much to pay (especially when you're saving well over £100 a year on meat) for the convenience of having it delivered to you and the fact that it actually tastes of something and hence probably has some nutritional value too (crazy hippy ideas about it being rather counter-intuitive to render the planet unusable while trying to eke a living from it notwithstanding).

But today is the first time I have gone and put in the contents of this week's veg box and had it come out unequivocally cheaper than Tesco non-organic stuff. It's the exact opposite of how I felt when I went into M&S the other week and bought bread for the first time in about a year. ('How much? I could buy 3kg of flour for that!')

Could it be that the cracks are beginning to show in a food system that is overly dependent on cheap, abundant oil? Might we be slowly starting to see that, really, growing things properly and not covering them in plastic and trucking them halfway around the country is, really, a far more sensible way to feed ourselves?

Or is it just that the veg box are worried that if they put their prices up in the current economic climate they'll lose customers, so they're swallowing the price increases (i.e. actually swallowing it, not just hiding it by charging more for DVDs) and narrowing their margins and eventually going to go out of business?



I refer you to the inimitable Homer Simpson at the end of Homer the Vigilante when several townspeople are stuck in a rather deep hole they've dug:

"I know, we'll dig our way out!"

A brief respite from being a sociopath

Oof, well, I have been very busy lately! This must be what it's like being a normal person instead of a sociopath!

Nik's friends decided they wanted to go punting, so accordingly we got one of those uber-cheap-group-deals on the train, went to Oxford, dispersed in the covered market to visit the particular purveyor of fine sandwiches that we each remembered with nostalgic fondness and a small collection of tame LMH alumni talked the lodge into entrusting us with the punts for an afternoon and we set off. Unfortunately we had a rather uneven distribution of people who could punt between the two boats. This resulted in the actual work of conveying us along the river falling squarely on the shoulders of my boat and we lashed the two boats together in convoy (which also made sharing of Pimm's and strawberries from the PYO easier) and made a more-or-less straight course north. After having gone quite a long way north, it started tipping it down. Guess who was the muggins who punted as fast as they could all the way back? Yep, that's right, the one with RSI in their wrists. ;-)

But I only hit two trees.

I then went to visit Holly and James. I love their flat, because it's so grown-up. They have decanters of what looks like port and sherry and apologised for the 'chaos' although it was significantly less chaotic than what passes for tidy chez moi. Living like a student is a state of mind. I had a restoring cup of tea and tried not to deposit too much punting grime on their sofa. We talked about linguistics and I had that funny feeling of missing it all and feeling like my life is rather unstimulating intellectually, but not enough to actually want to go and study anything more.

I then met up with Nik and his friends and made them all sit around and watch me eat. We went to a restaurant, dubiously named 'Gourmet Burger Kitchen' but actually quite acceptable (good chips, though 'gourmet' would be a bit of a stretch - it's rather depressing that something can be called 'gourmet' when it's really just 'decent', and that 'decent' is something worth shouting about rather than taken as read when you're paying over the odds for eating in a restaurant anyway... must not moan about our unhealthy national food culture...), and then dragged my rather full and weary and damp self back to the station and knitted on the train and fielded all sorts of peculiar questions about our crazy hippy lifestyle. ;-) Nice, interested questions though. Not, 'ugh, you freak!' questions.

Sunday was a bit distressing. I had to find a dress to wear to Wellers's wedding next weekend, because I am a singer and a misery-guts and hence virtually all my formal-wear is black and I didn't feel this would be appropriate somehow. To cut a long story short, my body shape (that's a euphimism) doesn't match up with what people who design clothes think it should be, and while I appear to have attained some kind of feminine nirvana and didn't stand in front of all the mirrors in my underwear hating myself and feeling inadequtae, externalising my rage and directing it at the (no doubt male-dominated) world of high-street fashion doesn't help me, on a purely practical level (at least while my sewing skills are rather basic), actually find clothes that fit. (Clothes that fit my breasts, I mean.) I appear to have a choice of looking like a slag in too-tight clothes that, however, fit around the arms and waist, or looking pregnant and wearing a tent. Hmph. And after trying on virtually every dress in Reading and finally finding one that flattered because of rather than despite my shape, I was exhausted and lonely and the man at the station wouldn't let me on the rail replacement bus and I burst into tears. Oops.

So far this week, I've let some guy interview me about my accent for his book (and stupidly forgot to tell him about the talking-into-the-tubes incident in first year), had a horrific bout of insomnia and been to see The Marriage of Figaro on a big screen in Trafalgar Square. Those big multinational oil companies do have their uses, y'know... It was fab. Livvy brought food and I brought my gripes about the world and some chocolate beetroot cake which doesn't really taste of beetroot and we sat around having a wine-cheese-and-opera-fest and it was soooo warm I only put my cardigan on when I got on the train home. And Sarah got promoted and is getting a BlackBerry (pl BlackBerrys, how counter-intuitive) and was power-dressing slightly. I'm now entertaining diverse and unrealistic visions of (alternately) being an opera singer, making cheese and moving to France.

And tomorrow I'm going to York and Wellers is getting married on Saturday and I get to see all my AV friends and it's all terribly exciting. =) And I still have to find a white bag that doesn't look really cheap. Arse.

But meanwhile, I have to contain my bafflement and frustration at, variously, people whose job is ultimately to produce good, readable, accurate English who cannot punctuate direct speech or tell the difference between 'its' and 'it's' or 'their' and 'there', and whoever could translate, 'C'est un coup qui etait ou* avant?' as, 'It's a coup that was or before?'



* with an accent on the 'u', can't do accents on the internet

Counteracting

I've now gone and bought a water butt.

That will either balance out the effect of buying garden furniture, or the vengeful weather pixies will be so unable to decide whether to punish us with drought or flood that it will cause a rift in the cosmos and the universe will become unstable and implode...

Oops

Well, we had a deafening thunderstorm that caused Nik's entire office building to shake and car alarms all over Wokingham to go off and it's set to pee it down all week according to the BBC.

I apologise profusely for buying garden furniture.

The curse of Squeezyjet infects the railways

Oof, cheeky beggars! The glory that was the GNER East Coast mainline is now charging you for first class postage to send your tickets or even just to pick them up from the machines! Bet this is the corrupting influence of National Express - offer 'em cheap tickets, sucker 'em in, then whack on some extortionate charges for anything else you can think of and hope the punters are seduced by the advertising. Honestly, if I wanted to be treated like a battery chicken and pay for the privilege of being able to take a change of underwear, I'd have flown, or at least gone with Mr Branson, which is much the same (poor service, bright colours to try and distract you from it).

Bet they don't use the word 'alight' in their announcements any more, either.

What is the world coming to?

Barbara Kingsolver

Please ignore the previous self-indulgent screed.

Barbara Kingsolver is talented, successful, principled, happily married, a mother and a gardener. Hah! Found one! Please say 'Barbara Kingsolver' to me whenever I complain from now on. And, if you haven't already, go and read The Poisonwood Bible and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

It has nothing to do with suburbia, feminism, the education system or the corporate world. I just need to sodding get on and do something. Argh, why is sitting in the sun talking about myself so much more appealing than weeding?

------

Incidentally, I think Barthes should be taught in primary school. I'm soooo sick of people using silly arguments like, 'Well, what if the writer didn't want you to think that? What if s/he just wrote it?' as an argument for the worthlessness of the entire practice of teaching literature. BOLLOCKS! Please, someone tell them about the death of the author.

Do what you love or love what you do

"All children are artists. The trick is remaining one when you grow up."

I've just had my gap year friends to stay. Everyone arrived and said, 'Is Si still a vegetarian?' rolling their eyes, and then in the same breath, 'Ooh, those bean-burgers look nice, can I have one of them too?' I dyed my lips with a little too much red wine and was a little too frank about my job.

One of the side-effects of having gone through quite an intense experience together is that you don't grow apart in the same way. There's never any of the awkwardness as when you meet people from school that you haven't missed in the three years you haven't seen them. To some, crucial extent our friendship is based on experience, rather than character, and experience doesn't change as you get older. So even though we have changed and are doing very different things, it somehow doesn't matter, because it never mattered. In the nicest possible way, we were lumped together and made the best of it.

--------

A girl whose blog I read has just had an article published in a magazine. Her writing was among the best in it, and I don't think I'll be buying the magazine again, but I had two simultaneous and contradicting emotions: 'oh, she's so lucky, that will never happen to me' and 'huh, I could do that'. There was nothing in the magazine that struck me as shockingly bad (like, for instance, this series of House) but some of it was distinctly mediocre (if that isn't an oxymoron). Bad writing irks me; I feel that if other people are making a living from bad writing, I should be able to make a living from the half-finished scribblings on my hard drive.

The difference between this girl and me, though, is not that she can do it and I can't, but that she has done it and I haven't.

I get incredibly envious, but, as my dad repeatedly told me (probably so I wouldn't accuse him of passing on bad genes) genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration or, to update it for the computer age, 1% inspiration, 99% not being distracted by the internet. I could, of course, write an article about my experiences container gardening, pitch it to a similar magazine and possibly earn a modest sum for it. I had to attend an extremely dull AGM the other week, and I was too much in view of everybody to knit or get my book out, so I read through some of the things I used to write and smugly thought some of them were quite decent. There is nothing stopping me finishing them or starting something else and finishing that, except the fact that I have made certain choices that mean after a day of translating corporate guff into proper English (I changed 'cascaded' to 'disseminated' the other day - descriptive linguist my arse) I no longer feel like thinking about words.

I used to say the same about my degree, I'd write in the holidays but not during term. During fourth year, I didn't even do that. I did my dissertation in the Christmas holidays, then I sent myself slightly mad and baked cakes in the Easter holidays, occasionally punctuated by half-hearted revision, and wrote a poem over the summer and a couple of paragraphs of my novel and that was it. When I think of how obsessively I wrote that screenplay in second year or how intricately I wove that plot-that-never-came-alive in first year, the contrast is obvious - one was a refuge, a passion and one was a poor attempt to fulfil some self-imposed obligation and prove I wasn't a hypocrite for berating Nik about giving up on becoming a film producer.

But now, since I came back from Africa, since the world fell into place and I've started to carve out a place in it (it involves baking cakes and growing tomatoes), something seems to have snapped. I feel a strange sense of contentment I never felt as a troubled teenager or an anxious Oxford second-year. I once talked to Nik about it, asking him to name me a published, respected, successful female writer who had children and was happy. He thought for a long time and I threw around names of extremely talented and extremely miserable people (Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Jane Austen, the Brontes) and (in what I assume was a bid to stop me leaving him and going to starve in a garret turning my shocking cruelty and self-imposed broken heart into wonderful poetry) he feebly tried J.K. Rowling. I scoffed, muttering about 'unimaginative prose' and 'selling out'. (Any other suggestions?) I don't even think it's being happy in a relationship that's done it, it's the sense of purpose I felt since my food/environment obsession came on. They say the greatest enemy of creativity is the pram in the hall; I used to think this was because babies were noisy and time-consuming and cried a lot and stopped you concentrating on what you were writing. I said I wanted to write and publish a novel before having children. I now realise that Western feminism has been 'had', and that (to paraphrase four years of studying 20th century literature) we need a new pie, not a bigger piece of the old one, that I should stop trying to be a man, and decided that actually it's because being a parent is generally engaging, absorbing and purposeful,* not that I'm comparing gardening to motherhood (though both are messy and never-ending, you can read four books by experts and get five different opinions and it's terribly difficult to allow your babies to go out into the world and fend for themselves).**

So I keep making excuses: no-one can be creative in suburbia, didn't you read The Hours; I don't want to write after a day churning out words for the corporate world; my brain needs to recover after my degree; I'm blogging, and the internet has really changed how we see and use language, don'cha know... And yet, I feel horribly close to becoming one of those boring people who's always knocking where they live and doesn't move, or always complaining about their job and doesn't look for a new one, or listens to Choral Evensong and tuts at the poorly enunciated psalms but can't rub along with any of the choirs they could actually sing with, or says, 'I always wanted to be a writer... I was quite good, you know...' and hasn't actually done anything to make it happen. In short, one of those people who was at Oxford and once upon a time felt terribly clever and terribly special and nothing since has quite lived up to it, for the world feels full of identikit houses and identikit jobs and education seems like a ruse to turn you into a good little capitalist (starting out with £13,000 of debt'll do that to you).

I just need to stop feeling sorry for myself and take responsibility for the fact that I'm not writing.

Or write.

I need to accept this might be called 'growing out of it' and that I don't have to be a troubled artist in order not to be boring and ordinary, that I might be channelling my revolt into something I can eat instead of into words, and that that's fine, I just need to stop whinging about it. Or, I need to just sit down and bash out, say, 500 words a day, every day and see what happens. In first year, my incredibly tall General Linguistics tutor told me he wrote 500 words a day of his DPhil Monday to Thursday and edited it on Fridays, which seemed terribly calculated and soulless to my 19-year-old mind, but now, as the kind of person who can no longer stay up all night to meet a deadline, I can admire the sheer discipline it must take. Maybe I should do the same, stop expecting it to absorb me and try and absorb myself in it and hope it will rub off, like pretending not to be shy.

In short I should do what I love, either in the evenings or by finding a job that doesn't involve sitting at a laptop herding words around the page so I free up the mental space I need; or, I should grow old with dignity and start being more positive about my boring job and this suburban hellhole. After all, you don't want to be the boring old sod who's always banging on about what might have been; one way or the other, you needs to be.

Anyway, as Voltaire said, Il faut cultiver notre jardin. No, il really faut. There is weeding to do, and planting out, and turning the greenhouse back into the sitting room, and when I'm indoors I feel the constant need for music, Radio 4 or conversation, but outdoors there is a strimmer, a sander, the occasional train and the horrid realisation I no longer notice the constant murmur of the London Road.

I wonder if you can be a writer and live in the moment.


*Take note, all you teenagers who think you are stronger than your biological instincts. One day you will turn 23 and you'll be horribly broody. You think it won't happen to you, but it will. Survival and reproduction, that's all we're here for, you'll all turn into broody gardeners one day, you mark my words....

** If, after all, gardening is like motherhood, I sincerely hope children are more like tomatoes, lettuces and pumpkins, which are sturdy and resilient to all my incompetent attempts at nurture, and less like peppers, which have a death wish, and pak choi, which got eaten by slugs.

If you were my sub-fusc, where would you be hiding?

Oxford, I thought you were strange when I found myself celebrating Christmas before the start of Advent, but this is odder by far. Summoning us back to your dreaming spires, after a year spent realising that 'real' life lacks rigour and the constant search for truth, a year of letting your brain atrohpy but not enough not to regret it... Long enough to forget where I put my sub fusc hat and naff ribbon (ultimate proof of how sexist Oxford is - we'll let women in, but on all important occasions men will look sexily splendiferous while women will all look very silly) - I mean, it's not the kind of thing that has an obvious place in your new house.

Maybe this is why Oxford people are so dogmatically nostalgic, far more so than Tabs (we are also just infinitely more poetic) - because we get summoned back just as the prospect of spending all summer and every summer for the rest of our active lives in an office makes itself real...

World's gone mad

Heehee. The other day I saw an advert for Sky+ boasting, 'It remembers so you don't have to,' or something. About 200 yards further on, I saw an advert for one of those strange 'train your brain' gadgets.

World's gone mad.


Last week we got the first strawberries off my plants. Five whole ones now. Orgasmic.

I've also knitted 3/4 of a sock. Progress.

Huh?

I'm currently sitting in a cafe in Canary Wharf being all corporate. But woo, free wifi!

Is this not just the oddest sentence, though?

From the Guardian:
"I didn't know any women who were working at that time [the 1970s], unless they were childminding or starting up a nursery."

Whose children were they minding then?

I love...

... working from home.

For lunch today, I had pork chops braised in red wine with caramelised onions and herby-garlicky-ness, with a wee French-sized glass of red wine, followed by a few slivers of cheese and a pot of coffee and a home-made nutty brownie.

So civilised. =)