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.