Ski-ing...

I am getting the impression from my Facebook news feed that everyone in the entire world is going or has gone ski-ing except me.

More body issues...

Unfortunately since I've bought underwear that actually fits, some of my clothes fit differently and don't look good, and this, unfortunately, includes all of my formalwear. Bearing in mind that I have no money and common sense suggests purchase of new dress and/or new underwear is unwise, and also that there will be dancing, should I:

a) concoct some cunning arrangement involving double-sided tape and resign myself to having to keep adjusting my clothes all of tomorrow evening and realise that once I'm on the outside of my complementary 1/2 bottle of wine I won't really care;
b) wear something rather frumpy;
c) scour the south-east for new underwear or clothing, expense be damned?

Tbh, if this is the shape of things to come, the last option might not be such a bad idea as at some point in my life I will need to reconcile my underwear and evening wardrobe, but I should wait until at least next month. Also I cannot face the prospect of purchasing under pressure, as I spent more of last week in shopping centres than I would like and want to spend tomorrow on the allotment.

I have been wondering why I so frequently blog about this. I think it must be because I no longer live with other women and Nik's response to any angst over this is, categorically, that he thinks I'm gorgeous so it doesn't matter. This is quite sweet, but not particularly nuanced, leaving me with the impression that he thinks it's all silly, and I don't think he's fully appreciated that, really, dressing up has more to do with female bonding and/or bitchiness than being attractive to men (and that's over and above just liking playing around with colours and fabrics and celebrating your body for your own sake).

Worrying insights into my subconscious

This week I have impulse bought two wedding planning books - 'The Offbeat Bride' and 'The Anti-Bride Guide'* - and 'The Edible Woman'. Freud, eat your heart out...

Also three pairs of boots and one pair of shoes (I returned one of the pairs of boots) and I am still lusting after a pair of purple suede shoes. I lusted after a pair of purple shoes a while ago (they still had them, I nearly splurged). Maybe I should just buy some and realise they don't go with anything and that'll be that. I think all my difficulties buying clothes are totally reversed with shoes - I can go into almost any shoe-shop and try on almost any size 5 shoes and be reasonably assured they'll fit. Doesn't mean they won't be inherently impractical and painful or poorly made, but buying shoes is a joy that buying clothes just isn't.

I've been making progress on sewing this week, though. Livvy rigged up my sewing machine properly in exchange for tea (roll on the economic revolution) and it now works like a dream and I've made more progress on my suit in the past week than I had in the previous year! And I've made curtains and our house looks like a normal house now. Wooo.

(Ooh, my new comfysexy boots would look fab with my suit wot I'm making. Had not considered this.)

Exciting as-yet-unmentionable plans are shaping up nicely - god willing I should soon be able to shape them into something concrete. One slightly depressing up-side of being engaged is that, with the exception of the Happy Few, everyone seems to have totally lost interest in my dissatisfaction with where I live or my professional life (indeed, in anything about me as a unique thinking person rather than a thing to be dressed in white taffeta) and only talks to me about cake and photographs, so hopefully I can slip my rather drastic plans under the radar and then present them as a fait accompli, avoiding much of the anxiety-inducing wrangling over not offending people. And, because everyone assumes that engaged women are all raving lunatics, they will simply assume I am a raving lunatic and not be offended or say anything in case I strangle them with ribbons. Huzzah.

I am going to learn Italian and take up swimming on Wednesdays. Please nag me and hold me to these.



* From the blurb on the back: 'Possible signs you may be an anti-bride: Budget for wedding is less than future down-payment on home; Never gave a thought to china patterns in your life (until now); Recent meeting with caterer made you want to elope.' Oh dear god yes....

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

I thought I would take respite from tax return HELL by writing up my annual triangular winetasting tour of Britain (aka Christmas). It seems to have gone on for a very long time this year and also, oddly, to be only five minutes ago that we left. Before we left, there was a week of carol concerts and services (during which I sated my choral withdrawal by squawking the descants as discreetly as I could), combined with much partying and frantic dalek-knitting. I also seemed to spend most of my free time travelling to London and back, which provided much opportunity for dalek-knitting and also confirmed my suspicions that it would be a more sensible place to live. I concealed my excessive drunkenness until I left the work Christmas party and stayed up until 4 a.m. after Livvy and Sarah's party talking about Deep Things with Livvy and giggling a lot, while Sarah babysat the drunken gatecrashers.

After a premature birthday celebration for Nik with his family, we set off up north, again via home because he'd left the Christmas cakes behind and there was no way we were eating them all on our own until June. Last year we had to go back and set the heating to come on for an hour at night so the pipes didn't burst, but one year we will be able to go from Surrey to Northumberland without a detour.

My parents, thanks to having been flooded back in September, are currently in a rented house which is Much Fun. It is enormous and old - it has a cellar, a cupboard where you could smoke things, many, many outbuildings and a moat (of sorts). Nik and I were having many fantasies about living somewhere similarly exciting. I made it into town to do something sociable and had brief drinks with Sarah and Thomas before a wonderful meal at the Grainger Rooms. The following day we had another wonderful meal at the pub in my village (which is now no longer in walking distance and we had to pile six of us into one car) - I find it deeply unsettling to think that this tiny village in the middle of nowhere is now a beacon of culinary excellence, but it is, so there. All you need is a pretentious arty cinema and there is no need to live in a town! It was astonishingly cheap as well - my dad and I can't decide if this is wonderful, as it brings good food to the masses and proves that it needn't be expensive, or foolish, as you could easily charge twice as much and you'll never make any money selling a fab 3-course meal for £15 a head...

Nik became the same age as me again, which is always reassuring, cooked a spectacular Swedish banquet (minus the traditional cabbage) on Christmas Eve, which impressed my parents greatly, and has apparently retracted everything he said about weddings being pointless and unnecessary. *grins*

On Christmas day, my dad, possibly feeling the need to compete with this wonderful, competent 'new man', cooked beef Wellington, which was excellent (though there was a lot more attention-seeking stress) and we are petitioning him to instate it as an annual tradition, finances permitting. He and Nik went shooting on Boxing Day, and came back with a pheasant, a proud fiance and a new cocktail. The 'Backworth Shandy', my friends, is a Northumbrian concoction, consisting of sloe gin and sparkling wine. It is positively lethal and utterly delicious. Some southern ponces apparently call it a 'Sloe Royale'.

Then we came back down south, where it was much colder, and drank more obscene quantities of bubbly with Nik's family and he proudly told everyone that we were engaged... AND, he shot a PHEASANT!!! *rolls eyes* Granny turned 80 and there was more fizz. I fear permanent damage to my stomach lining.

And then we got home and some thieving scumbags had broken into our house and left mud all over our carpets and stolen Nik's family jewellery, among other things, and I now feel somewhat deflated.

D'oh

Oh, dear, apparently I was wrong and 'The 12 Days of Christmas' is not a coded reference to symbols of the Christian faith. That'll teach me to try to impress my fellow diners before checking my facts.

http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/music/12days.asp

Ah well.

I wonder if this was a (post-)Victorian fiction designed to make people believe that there was some deep spiritual significance to all the feasting and revelling, when actually Christmas has always been about booze and dancing.

May you all have an intellectually honest Christmas!

Right, I have shedloads to do today (I even made a list) and it's 11.10 and I'm still in my pyjamas. This is not a promising sign.

Jeans

Once upon a time (in first year) I bought a pair of jeans. They were, truly, the most wonderful pair of jeans in the world, they had a funky embroidered sun/flames thing on the back pocket and they made my legs fab. I first wore them on the night when, for the first time, I fully felt that I was over my git of an ex and I think the combination of the fab legs and the glow of independence made me feel rather confident and sexy. In typical first-year fashion, then, I proceeded to flirt with an awful lot of people the first few occasions on which I wore these jeans. These wonderful jeans, therefore, became known as my Flirting Jeans.

About a year later, I met some other bloke with whom I somehow ended up climbing over a wall that had anti-climb paint sprayed on it. My jeans thus met an untimely end. I went out to buy a replacement pair and, because I was in such a good mood, I ended up buying the first pair I tried on that fitted, regardless of whether or not I actually liked them. They had naff bits of designer distressed crap on them. They became known as my Serious Relationship Jeans.

They too have now worn through in a place I don't particularly want a hole and, since I already have several pairs of 'gardening jeans', there seemed little point patching them, so I sent them to the textile bank and I now have a new pair of jeans.

I wonder what they shall be called.

Yet more sexism in the media...

I feel like such a humourless feminist banging on about this all the time, but it annoys me soooo much I'm going to anyway!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/7763260.stm

The headline is 'Mother guilty over Shannon kidnap' and the article begins 'Karen Matthews, the mother of nine-year-old Shannon, has been convicted of kidnapping her own daughter'. The first line of the main text body is 'Matthews, 33, and her co-accused Michael Donovan, 40, were found guilty of kidnap, false imprisonment and perverting the course of justice'. [my bold] So they were both found guilty then?? But who do they focus on??

It's like that bizarre case of the canoeist who disappeared and turned up again - by all accounts the husband and wife were in it together, but when they were both found guilty, it was her whose actions were described as 'despicable'.

Harrumph.

Living well is the best revenge

Well, mostly it is. Just to make sure, I'm still writing to my MP and even going on the climate march this weekend, but we had a little inspirational talk at Slow Food on Monday about how we were part of a revolution and, I must say, I prefer a revolution that has toffee apples for pudding.

I don't want to join your revolution if I can't dance.

Apparently Emma Goldman never actually said that, (see here under Living my Life, 1931) but "the sentiment is consistent with Goldman's insistence that revolutionary anarchism was not inconsistent with pursuits of beauty and the pleasures of life".

I don't know what she'd have said about plucking a pheasant in your party frock. One of the more surreal moments of my life by quite some way.

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The Word spell-checker frustrates me more and more each week. Current number one irritating feature is its dogmatic insistence that 'staff' should be singular.

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I have been organised and worked hard and achieved something when I said I would. Hopefully this is a step towards becoming a happier person who takes pleasure in things again and doesn't drink too much. I will give more details at some point, but not yet ;-).

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I watched an interesting documentary on forced marriage that was on BBC2 the other day, which is available for five more days here. I don't really know enough about the issue to have anything particularly intelligent to say about it beyond, 'how sad,' but one thing that really struck me was the fact that many of these forced marriages were a way of allowing other family members to get UK visas, essentially of spreading wealth and opportunity around. The portrayal of forced marriage by the British press usually capitalises on ideas about 'honour' and 'tradition', more often than not bound up with religion, or harps on about 'lack of integration' and the 'failure of multiculturalism'. It seems it's easier to respond to such horrific practices by characterising them as primordial tribal customs rather than as the product of specific economic circumstances. I'd wondered before if there was a more nuanced explanation, less reliant on a perception of Islam as 'other', so it was interesting to hear it articulated.

I also watched a 'documentary' on GM food on BBC2 the other day, which was so disgustingly biased I spat feathers for two days before being able to compose myself enough to write and complain. I would rant about this more, but I've had my curiosity piqued and am now going to finish writing this and go and research the origin of the phrase 'spit feathers' instead!

Corporate b*ll*cks of the week

This is possibly the best bit of jargon I've come across in quite some time.

Labour arbitrage - n. Shifting lots of jobs to e.g. a call centre in Eastern Europe because it's cheaper than paying people in the UK.

Random

Muahaha, I've discovered The Daily Mash. It's quite like The Onion, but UK-based so I understand more of what they write about.

Think this is my current favourite: Flower was asking for it, says bee. =)

Or this one: Ryanair to offer £8 transatlantic shitfest.


I'm desperately trying to think of something to say about my life that doesn't involve a) ranting about food or b) talking about things that have been going on in other people's lives that they probably wouldn't appreciate me talking about.

Hmm.

I made Christmas cakes. But you know that from Facebook.

Too many books...

I am quite fed up of hearing about John Sergeant.

I am generally in favour of people who are good at things winning and of like seeing humility, self-knowledge and self-sacrifice in public figures, but I can't help feeling that if you allow the public to vote in these things you do effectively forfeit your right to ensure that the most talented people win. If you're going to let the public vote decide these things, then you have to expect that they'll pick the personable ones. If you want talented people to win the competition, then have a proper competition, judged by professionals, rather than an entertainment programme with phone-in voting, dammit....

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It has been a week of very odd events. Nick Griffin claiming a breach of human rights legislation. Now I've seen everything. I've been ghoulishly fascinated by it all, I must admit.

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I feel I am regressing to my 17-year-old self. I was killing time in London the other week and was tempted to buy all sorts of things by Naomi Klein and George Monbiot in the Current Affairs section in Waterstones. I managed to resist and have spent too much money in an Oxfam bookshop instead. I have an enormous pile of books on food politics and world affairs which I am never going to get through... There are too many books in the world.....

I've also managed to get a winter coat, (of which I am sure Ms Klein would not approve) the good news being someone makes a coat for women who don't have the figure of a fourteen-year-old boy, the bad news being that it's Jigsaw and I can't really afford to shop in Jigsaw. (I feel I'm in danger of turning into one of those women with rich partners who says things like, 'I love wearing natural fibres... like cashmere...' but that's another story.) I also have jeans that are not covered in mud and don't have holes in and which I can wear in front of people who are not allotmenteers. And Jen made dinner for some of us and we had a lovely evening.

I think...

... that I might be getting a bit carried away with this food thing. I was wondering how seriously to take Doritos' claim that their crisps are 'made the traditional Mexican way' and scouring the pack for an ingredients list, and suddenly realised I'd eaten half the pack. Oops.

I wonder if the corn is grown in 'the traditional Mexican way', though....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/nov/30/foodanddrink.highereducation

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!'