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. =)

Heehee

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I just go into the other room and read a book."

I'm not sure 'educating' is a word, but otherwise this Groucho Marx quote will be used to drive Nik to distraction for the rest of our lives together. Muahahaha.


Edited to add: Of course 'educating' is a word. (Depending on how you define word. Now, there was something I thought I'd never have to spend 1500 words debating and then concluding I couldn't do again.) I mean, I'm not sure 'educating' can be used in that sense. We had a word. It was called 'educational'. It was a fine word, that served its purpose very well.

Mmmmm, sloe gin.

Mr Ramsey

Okay, I kind of see where he's coming from, I think people who eat imported strawberries or asparagus in November are mad and I'd certainly never want to pay through the nose for them in a restaurant... and go for it with the bitch-slapping that turncoat Delia... but really.... he's suggesting criminalising serving out-of-season produce. Even I think that's a bit strong.

Linky.

Curly-haired with yoghurt

Well, for the first time, after dalliances with every kind of live yoghurt Waitrose offer, wasting countless pints of milk, and results ranging from the unpalatable to the unchanged to the verging-on-ricotta-cottage-cheese-type-thing that was okay in pasta, or at least better than wasting it, I have actually managed to successfully make yoghurt that looks and tastes pretty much like yoghurt. Woo. The exercise was largely financial (although the challenge of making something new was also welcome) - now we get the veg box and buy meat in bulk, I found I was going to Waitrose just to buy milk and yoghurt and also ending up coming home with 40-odd things I didn't need (special offer crisps are my biggest downfall), so, since I also date my good, fair food obsession roughly from when we stopped getting milk delivered and started getting the watery, homogenised pap from Tesco and have always hankered after the reusable glass bottles, we've taken the very retrograde step of organising a doorstep delivery, which is much more convenient and works out financially if I make yoghurt instead of buying it. After a month and a half of failing miserably and allowing another six months or so to make back the cost of the thermos flask (I'm tempted to use the word 'capex' here), I expect it to pay dividends by Christmas. And the satisfaction I get from being able to make yoghurt (and the thought that if feed prices rocket, the economy crashes, our just-in-time food system breaks down and the milk from the local dairy delivered a short distance to my door continues to be viable, I will be the only person in Wokingham with dairy products) are just a smug foodie bonus.

Barbara Kingsolver (in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a wonderful book, you should read it) has now inspired me to make proper ricotta and mozzarella, and she's lactose intolerant so it must be good!

The latest batch of bread, however, was a disaster - flat, burnt and incredibly dense.


I had my hair cut yesterday. What is it with hairdressers? Why can't they just leave well alone? I gave her a very clear brief (hack off the split ends, leave it easy to manage without an arsenal of styling products, a Level 3 NVQ in hairdressing and the intrinsic advantage of someone else's head being in front of you) and halfway through she said, 'Your hair's really curly, you know?'

Curly? My hair has been described as many things, from 'flat and lifeless on top' via 'so easy to straighten' to 'a total mess, darling, please get a haircut', but never 'curly'.* Curly was new. So, foolishly, swept away by the experience of a stylish stranger massaging my head and paying me compliments, I somehow agreed to let her put some squidgy stuff from a blue bottle on my head, twist my hair painfully through the drying process and then shunt me out onto the street (maybe so she could have a cup of tea before her next client) by telling me it would be much better to let it finish drying naturally.

It didn't really take. Nik, bless him, came home from work and gave me the standard must-remember-to-notice-girlfriend's-had-a-haircut line of 'it looks nice', but when he actually looked at me, he agreed it was somewhat peculiar.

And then he brought a friend home for dinner, whose overriding impression of me will now be as a straw-haired, muddy person who sits upstairs listening to five-second segments of audio over and over again and can't make bread rise.


* Though I did go through a phase at school of sleeping with mini plaits in and having it frizzy in the morning.

Do they not WANT me to vote for them?

We had local elections yesterday (lucky us) and being a good little democratic citizen I trotted off to the polling station, where I was surprised to discover that we did, after all, have a Lib Dem candidate and a Labour candidate.

Now, I'm a bit of a leftie. I don't really ally myself with any particular party, but I general fall somewhere between what Labour should stand for and what the Lib Dems stand for, with the caveat that they can say whatever they want cos they'll never actually get elected. I readily admit that the kinds of changes I am looking to see in the country are waaaay more radical than what any self-respecting candidate would be prepared to actually put in their campaign literature, but I'm pretty realistic and would be happy to be swayed by a convincing candidate of general leftie persuasion, especially in the local elections: in a general election, although you aren't really supposed to, I would tend to vote for a party and a Prime Minister, but in the local elections I would tend to vote for the candidate I felt most confident in. Overall, I generally believe that public services are in principle a good thing, I think we need to do A LOT more for the environment, I think the gap between the rich and the poor is too wide and I'd love to completely overhaul the education system. And I'd vote for anyone who promised more allotments.

So, I had been looking forward to all the candidates coming around and asking me what issues were on my mind so I could grill them about their ideas for making Wokingham a more sustainable, resilient and environmentally-friendly place, about how they would follow up on the suggestions Friends of the Earth (of which I am a member) gave them last month and if they would please stop concreting over everything and get rid of all the cars, please, if it isn't too much trouble, thank you. And can I have an allotment before 2015 please?

Now, I work from home and am usually in of an evening, so if anybody had come round canvassing, I would have known. We had leaflets shoved through the door by the Conservatives, UKIP and the BNP, but they ran away immediately afterwards and didn't want to talk to me. Labour and the Lib Dems didn't even bother to do that, let alone actually try and talk to me. It never even entered my mind to vote for UKIP or the BNP (despite the hilarious reply UKIP gave to an email I sent to various MEPs about biofuels), and I didn't really want to vote for the Tory candidate because a) his environmental policies were rubbish (basically: environmental issues begin and end with waste and recycling, and we couldn't ever have alternative weekly collections, never, never, never, never, NEVER, although had he come and asked me what I thought I'd have shown him my bokashi bin) and b) all the material we've ever had from him has contained a big whine about how little funding the Borough gets from central government compared to..... councils where there are lots of poor people. Now, there is a genuine issue about how basing it on averages means the worse off in overall richer areas are even worse off than they would be in poorer areas where there was more central funding, but do they talk about this? No, it's just 'poor us, aren't we hard done by?' never mind that that's how local government funding works or that the reason we don't get as much is because we're all well-off and don't need it - it's like saying, 'Oh, poor stockbrokers, they have to pay more tax than nurses and bin-men.'

So I didn't want to vote for him either.

And so since I knew nothing about the candidates representing the two parties I might have swung between or their policies, I was damned if I was going to vote for them.

So, ladies and gentlemen, since people died so that I could have the right to vote and I did not want to dishonour them by allowing apathy to win the day, I am ashamed to say that I spoilt my ballot. I voted for all the candidates and drew a silly face at the top of the paper for good measure.

Hello again

I've just taken delivery of a swish new curvy, RSI-busting keyboard so I can now do non-essential typing with a clear conscience and working wrists. I might, therefore, start blogging again in moderation.

Today it is raining and I get 15 minutes grace on starting work because I'm recording something and can't work on other audio at the same time. I would go out and plant some more seeds, but it's raining. Instead I shall drink tea, read the Guardian and knit my cardigan. It's getting pretty big now.

Yesterday I got a new bike off Freecycle. Bit of a struggle to get it in the back of Nik's car and it needs a clean, but my word, it's exciting to have a bike with gears that work and that won't get laughed at when I take it in for repair.

Hmmm. What else is interesting? I made a nice frittata at the weekend with . My sewing machine is now working and I made a cushion cover on it. Nik's mum is moving, so we're going down at the weekend to help shift all the stuff Nik has in her loft out of it and into our loft.

Battening down the hatches

Growing up at the bottom of a valley in the North East tends to make you aware that, despite the best efforts of our industrialised, urbanised society to convince us otherwise, we are still, essentially, subject to the vagaries of weather and climate.

We are supposedly preparing for the worst storm ever to hit the UK, although as the BBC seems rather more insistent on this point than the Met Office, I remain sceptical. We should, here, be out of the worst of it anyway (the wee line on the weather map neatly bisects Berkshire) but nonethless, yesterday, I suggested buying a small camping gas ring, as it would be a sorry state of affairs indeed if the power went off and I couldn't have a cup of tea. Nik looked at me as if I was a bit mad, but I did it anyway.

It still looks very sunny, though, and if I've given up an afternoon of pottering around in the garden (it's full of comfrey AGAIN!!) because I didn't want to risk being halfway through turning the compost heap when the force 10 started for nothing, I will be most displeased.

It's very odd - part of me is relishing the prospect of a big storm, I always used to love power cuts and being snowed in and suchlike when I was younger, and part of me is utterly convinced it will be a pathetic Southern affair, where a couple of tiles get blown off a roof and the 24-hour news channels immediately commission half their staff to go over there and dig around for footage of distraught people sifting through the wreckage of their homes, in a manner reminiscent of London during the Blitz. I was trying to point out to Nik yesterday that storms on the magnitude of 1987 happen all the time up north and in Scotland and we just get on with it, nor does everything grind to a muffled halt when more than two flakes of snow fall in the same afternoon, but he just sort of blinked at me and looked a bit confused.

Further witterings of the Hamster

Ack, tis a sorry state of affairs. The fact that I update this so infrequently, and the fact that I have seemingly so little inclination to do so, is a sad testament to the fact that being a grown-up is just not as much fun as being a student.

Ah well.

Nik and I went out for dinner yesterday, and (demonstrating one of the ways in which being a grown-up can be more fun than being a student, at least if you're an actuary) spent approximately four times our weekly food budget on a single meal. I kept looking at the price of my steak and thinking, 'That's two and a half veg boxes! Preposterous!' However, I suppose, the veg box doesn't come with truffle sauce. EVERYTHING on the menu came with truffle sauce (seemingly - one thing came with lentils, so that restricted my options). And it was by far the best food in Wokingham, by quite some way. (I did wonder how Italians have the energy to be so enthusiastic about sex, though, if they eat like that all the time. Maybe it's just an act. Or maybe they normally eat pasta and fresh, seasonal vegetables and go easy on the steak.)

I'm currently in the middle of transcribing some DULL financial conference about complaints. Dull, dull, dull, though marginally more fun than the one about financial regulations. Yawn. I really have to go out and get some bits for my dressmaking course, but I'm so tired (woke up at 5 for some reason) I don't know if I can face going to Bracknell this evening, let alone compos mentis enough to operate a sewing machine. While I don't want to start unmitigatedly slagging off Bracknell, as that's far too much of a cliche, it is one of those places that is designed for cars, and is thus impossible to navigate your way round on foot. My first week at the college, I tried to follow the footpath that went in the right direction, and ended up getting shunted round a deserted shopping centre and trying every exit in a labyrinthine underpass in the middle of a roundabout. And, of course, it being designed for cars, nobody else is walking. I never felt particularly unsafe, there were no gangs of youths leering threateningly from doorways, but there was nobody around to ask directions from. Bah. Nearly finished my skirt though. Need a pattern to start next week now (or tonight, if I can drag my weary carcass to John Lewis, back again and out to BRacknell, having done a respectable amount of work).

Parents coming this weekend, sans chien this time. Not that the chien was a particular problem, but we have got bacon curing all over the kitchen, so perhaps it's best she's not sleeping by it. (Yes, my food-buying obsessiveness led me to buy half a pig from the butcher at the farmer's market. We got very funny looks carrying the crate between us through the streets of suburbia. We had the most divine pork chops the other day... and can have them again... and again.... and again..... and again.... till next year! Nik thought we'd been swizzled and been given a whole pig instead of a half, but seeing as we were only charged for a half, it would be the world's worst swizzle...) Have no idea what we're going to do with them. Last time we all got horribly worked up about going to dinner with Nik's family and spent the entire afternoon stressing over a cake, but I don't think any of us is ready to go through that again, so we may be on that never-ending search for entertainment that is far enough away from Wokingham to be interesting, but near enough that my poor beleagured parents, who will be sandwiched between days involving hours spent on the M-sodding-1, won't balk at the idea of travelling to it. Hmm.

Anyhow, must press on with the dull financial conference. A particularly camp bloke is explaining how retired actuaries are really annoying. Yes, I know, but I need to keep body and soul together and all that. Hohumm.

Wrestling with the tax office and a treadle machine

Oof, have just rung the tax office. Been putting it off for... well, until about a week before they'd fine me for not having told them I'm self-employed! And, as ever, the chap on the end of the phone was very helpful, not at all scary and it was all fiiiiine. Don't know why I get so worked up about dealings with the Tax Office - I always get in a tizz and put it off for ages and ages, and then it's never as bad as I think! I shall let that be a lesson....

Been rather busy with work after a downturn over January, when I sorted out all the cupboards in the kitchen and various other worthy and boring things like that. Got called in to do an emergency eleventh-hour translation by the rubbish agency who have never given me any work before (I'm basically so unmarketable as a translator that I've given up responding to their emails), which required me to get up at six in the morning and do it in 'real time' online so someone could proof-read it simultaneously. I felt somewhat naked, sharing my rather idiosyncratic work processes with total strangers who might be judging me and my warped brain.

Still plodding away with my dressmaking course, though, have to pin and press the hem of my skirt for tomorrow and then I should be able to finish it off, with a bit of help. The sewing machine is almost working - I had it at the stage where the mechanism was fine, but I couldn't thread it, and now Nik's mum has shown me how to thread it, and something seems to have gone wrong with the belt.... Grrrr......

The veg box sent us a mixed fruit and veg box instead of just a veg box, which means no sprouting broccoli (one of my favourite vegetables) and a surfeit of bananas this week. Hohumm.

Anyhoo, have hemming and shopping to get on with. I'm having a 'freelancer's weekend' today. We've run out of almost all dry goods imaginable, and I feel rather vulnerable not having a well-stocked cupboard. There might be a nuclear holocaust or something.

Campaign for a free range future

Now, I don't often do this any more. Most food rants are kept on my secret hippie blog nowadays, so you don't have to read me moaning on about raw milk or muddy vegetables, but this is very, very important, so I want you to pay close attention.

If you click on the link above you will be taken to the Chicken Out! campaign website, where you can find out the horrendous facts about the life of a battery chicken. Chickens are supposed to live outdoors, scratching around in the dust and pecking at things on the ground and suchlike. Y'know, normal chickeny things. That's what chickens like doing.

Instead, because we demand cheap animal protein and the supermarkets want to sell us whole chickens for £2 or packs of anaemic chicken breasts for under a fiver, hundreds of chickens, bred to be genetically obese, are crammed into broiler houses, forced to live in spaces smaller than a piece of A4 paper each, reared to slaughter weight in around 39 days - about half the time of an organic chicken.

Chickens that die during the 39 days are just left in the cages until the others go off to slaughter, and many of them do die, because they can't get to their food or water.

Also, have you ever seen a chicken with those black marks on its legs, like the one in the picture? Those are called hock burns, and they are a result of ammonia - i.e. because of the chicken walking around in its own droppings.

If you want more information, Compassion in World Farming have a good page here.

Your personal views on meat are probably varied and diverse (and I would love to talk about them more if you want to leave a comment or email me), but I firmly believe that if we have decided it's okay to eat an animal, we owe it to that animal to make sure it has as good a life as possible and is as happy and healthy as it can be.

Free range (or ideally organic) chicken is more readily available than ever, and it does cost more, which can be offputting, but that cost reflects the fact that they cost more to produce - because they are raised more humanely - and the superior quality of the meat.

If money is an issue, buy chickens whole (ask your butcher to joint them if you prefer) as you get much better value for money that way - Nik and I bought an organic, free range chicken for only £8.50 the other week, and roasted it (2 portions), made a risotto (2 portions) and made 3 lots of curry to freeze (6 portions), then made stock from the carcass (easy as pie - in fact easier, cos pastry's a faff, while bunging some chicken bones, an onion and a carrot and some herbs in a pan is dead simple), enabling me to make 3 lots of soup/risotto/stew (i.e. another 6 portions of something else). That's 85p a portion, not including the stock, or slightly more than 50p a portion if you count the stock. I am more than happy to post lots of recipes for risotto/casserole/curry if you like.

So, please, go the the Chicken Out! website, watch Hugh's Chicken Run on the 8th, 9th and 10th of January at 9 p.m. on C4 (and Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay when they're on as well), and, please, sign the petition, but remember that signing the petition is a completely, utterly, totally empty gesture, unless you think next time you're in the poultry aisle at the supermarket, and buy free range instead of that 'oh-so-tempting' £2 bird.

I would love you to sign the petition, and I would love you to leave me a comment saying that you've signed it, but I would love it even more if you promise me you are never, ever going to buy a battery chicken again. (Unless you're a vegetarian, in which case it's irrelevant, and you probably care deeply about animal welfare already and only buy free range eggs anyway.) If you feel even slightly uncomfortable at the thought of battery chickens, don't be a hypocrite - remember that you can make the choice to buy something else.


Next week: what the .tv suffix has to do with global warming.

In which the Hamster descends further into middle age

Dear lord, I feel frightfully grown up!

And also frightfully cold. Am sitting here typing with fingerless mittens on and feeling like I should be being more organised about Christmas. I think one of the signs of being an adult is that you no longer look forward to Christmas with unadulterated excitement but also start to dread it. I refuse to go that far, but signs of the 'it's such a faff' feeling are starting to make themselves felt.

Mostly because I unfortunately succumbed to Nik's cold this week. I had felt myself coming down with it last week and successfully fought it off, and went round feeling smug and waxing lyrical about the healing powers of echinacea, zinc, onion soup and sheer bloody-mindedness. I was then cruelly struck down last weekend, limped through to my deadline, decided I would be healthy on Tuesday and do all the things that needed to be done (ordering Christmas decoration kits from ebay, putting finishing touches to presents, learning how to do ribbing so I can make gloves and hats etc, writing cards, buying paint and making the cheapie recycled brown paper I'm wrapping things in more exciting, etc etc) and felt distinctly unhealthy on Tuesday after all. My eyes were streaming, as per usual, and I couldn't actually see to focus on anything long enough to read, knit, write cards, cross stitch, look at the computer etc etc and consequently I spent the day either in a foul mood or asleep.

On Wednesday, I dragged myself to London very much against my better judgement to put in an appearance at the Sustain Christmas party. After a couple of glasses of local, organic cider in a plastic container that could be returned to the producer, I suddenly felt much better, and found myself on the penultimate train home and crawling into bed at 1 a.m. with extremely cold feet.

Yesterday I had a 1950s housewife day, and made carrot cake and used up one of the peculiar joints that we got when we ordered half a lamb. This required excessive quantities of stuffing and slow roasting to make it palatable. I also boned it out myself, which made me feel very thrifty, esp as am now going to make stock! My hero, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, had a very exciting looking recipe, but it involved storing things overnight in jam jars, so I refrained from going down that road.

My garden is full of pigeons and a grey squirrel. Vile, southern, urban wildlife. Had a fox once, too, that came right up to the window. Have pathological fear of urban foxes, creepy unnatural things that they are. Foxes should not be that tame!

Also had a robin once. I can deal with that! Am quite pleased, in theory, that despite being paved over my garden can still be part of a wildlife corridor. I wonder if I can encourage 'good' wildlife without encouraging ugly, scroungy things though...

Maybe I should write to 'Feedback'...

Oh, oh, oh, PEOPLE! The reason I listen to Radio 4 at 2 a.m. is because I can't sleep. While I am really very sad that Stockhausen died, broadcasting a tribute to him at that time is not very conducive to sleep and restfulness!!!

Urgh, it's only 8 a.m. Why am I up so early on a Saturday?

Cross stitch, carbon footprints and Broadmoor

Right, I am going to get into the habit of updating this again, even though my life is really boring, because Rob just reminded me that he actually reads this and now I feel bad. If you read this too, I promise to write more random drivel to distract you from work/study.

So, what have I done that isn't really boring.....?

I made a massive cross stitch sampler for my parents' wedding anniversary, which you can see on the right. Their anniversary was in September and I finished it last week.... Ahem....

I have booked myself onto a dressmaking course for next term, so I can learn how to use my beautiful new sewing machine. Hurrah.

I have made excellent progress on my Sustain project today. Need to chase a few more people, but am feeling more confident that I'll get it done for Christmas.

I calculated my carbon footprint tonight, on the government website thingy. We're doing pretty well, given as we're renting and aren't allowed to faff around with solar panels, switch electricity suppliers or bung fluffy stuff in the loft. I can't believe we did so well compared with the national average. Who are these people who actually boil a full kettle of water just for one cup or leave their mobile charger plugged in? Do they really exist?

Work is going well. I quite enjoy getting to sit around arranging words on a page all day, and I have a far wider range of good quality teas than any office. (Except maybe if I worked at Whittard's...) I think it's making me a bit agoraphobic, though. Or a sociopath. I don't know if it's my inner anti-consumerist reacting to the time of year, but I find going out a less and less attractive prospect.... Hmm. There is the Sustain party next week which I am looking forward to. Anyone else's office party sounds dire, though! I think it's partly to do with my insomnia earlier in the year. I managed to 'cure' it by getting into a bedtime routine, but the trade-off is that when I want to stay up later, I can't, so I'm pretty rubbish at anything exciting and eveningy...

Oh, and I found out what the air-raid siren is. It isn't an air-raid siren (or it is, but it doesn't mean there's an air-raid), it's the escape alarm at Broadmoor! They test it every Monday at 10. If you go here you can read lots of people's memories of it going off. All the schools have specific procedures to follow in the event of an escape. Pretty scary stuff.... Oh, I do like being smug and telling people I've been inside!

Another moment of perplexity

Cor, there's some odd stuff available on ebay. Why on earth would anyone buy bright orange curtains?

So, to summarise the last month

Gaaaah, sorry, have been absolutely terrible at updating recently. Apologies.

Well, to summarise the last month...

The house is very cold. I've been running round it periodically doing crazy energy-saving measures. We have tinfoil behind the radiators, scrunched up newspaper up the chimney, a draught-excluder lying in wait ready to trip over anyone who comes in the door...

Employment prospects are looking better. With any luck (assuming I haven't screwed up the test!) I should be doing some freelance report-writing, transcripts and possibly translation, and eventually might get to be official translation hander-outer-er. But let's not get carried away. This is, incidentally, all thanks to my cousin. Nepotism and telecommuting, that's what we like! I now have to tidy the study, but this is preferable to working in an ethically questionable organisation as I thought I'd otherwise have to.

Wokingham has gone down in my estimation. Previously, I used say in a rather droll, slightly tongue-in-cheek fashion, 'oh, the only thing it has going for it is the salsa dancing classes'. They've recently moved the salsa dancing classes to Twyford, and I've decided I want to move to London, so perhaps the was something in it.

Meh. I want to live in the middle of London or the middle of nowhere. Suburbia sucks.

Foodie project goes well. Have been talking to some very helpful and some rather obstreperous catering managers, and very much enjoying working in an office where people talk about things like the Soil Assoc report on imported organic food, and where there are 400 varieties of coffee in the fridge!

Am also becoming even more middle aged. Spent ages on Wednesday trying to tidy the garden up, as it was covered in weeds and depressing me. Looking much clearer now, but I did manage to lock myself out of the house without any shoes on. Oops.

Randomness

Ooh, how scary. There's just been what sounds like an air raid siren going off. I wondered if it was the four-minute warning, and was briefly confronted with the terrifying possibility that I might die, unemployed, playing spider solitaire in my pyjamas at 10 o'clock.

So, yes, the summer was fun, Portugal was fun, the house is nice and now mostly furnished, and I'm still unemployed. I did work briefly as a battery chicken, but then had a spectacular bout of career indecision, burnt my boats (it was boring as hell, but at least it paid), subsequently decided I didn't want to be a speech therapist after all, but have ended up working (sporadically) with people with learning disabilities in order to become one, which doesn't pay well and isn't very regular, and nobody else wants to employ me.

Bugger.

There's a few things I'm waiting to hear about, though, and I have a very exciting internship, so it's not all doom and gloom. I just feel like I've moved to some provincial backwater to sponge off my boyfriend, which defies all my feminist principles. It's also rather depressing not knowing anyone or having anything to do a lot of the time. Meh.

Ah well. Am keeping myself occupied baking and cross stitching and stuff, which I'll doubtless miss tremendously as soon as I am working. Anyway, I have to go and collect a drill from someone so I can continue with my plan to grow spinach in a box, so I shall have to leave this here. Probably just as well, no-one wants to read my self-indulgent moaning!

"Nothing suppresses the exercise of conscience as effectively as the words, 'Buy one get one free'."

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Argh!

I was minutes away from telling a prospective employer that I have excellent 'communicational skills'.

Young people these days!

Blimmin' 'eck, what's with all this Facebook/proctors/trashing malarky? I've had about 400 emails from OUSU in the last few days, blatantly up in arms about the whole thing, but I can't really see why. We get countless emails and letters from the proctors, right through Trinity term, saying that we're not allowed to throw disgusting things at people and that we shouldn't do it - I hardly believe anyone hurling octopodes on Queen's Lane hasn't heard yet. I suppose it's possible there are a few muppets out there who haven't yet realised that Facebook is public and lots of people have access to your personal details, but, honestly, anyone who persists in this so-called tradition* knows full well that it's against the rules, and if your misguided sense of humour and/or anarchy leads you to break them and you subsequently get caught, then I fail to see why anyone should feel morally indignant about it.



*Do you know how they really used to celebrate finishing Finals in the old days? They used to go and sit in the quad with a bottle of sherry, and invite their tutors.

I repeat, July my arse

Changed my mind, don't want to move to Berkshire anymore, it's all underwater. Think I'll stay up north, where there's lots of hills.

(Picture from BBC)


Damn global warming...

Whinge, whinge, whinge...

Wish it would stop bloody raining.

July my arse.

"Dignity is the one thing that can't be preserved in alcohol"

I'm supposed to be applying for jobs. Two admin jobs on the Reading Uni website finish this week and I would be more than happy to do either of them. Just put off by the scary form-filling. What's quite annoying is that I have actually been offered a job, but it's in Oxford, and it's teaching, so can't/won't do it.

Meh.

When I'm prime minister, I would pass a law that all jobs are to be applied for by means of CV and covering letter only, none of these stupid 10-page forms.


In other news....
We have the house!! Hurrah!!

Went down on Friday to visit the only house left on our list (all the others had gone during the week) and both really liked it. Cue a weekend of nailbiting while we waited to hear if the landlord was happy to take us with a guarantor (in absentia job and salary) , but the agency called first thing today and said yes!!

It's so, so cool and I'm massively excited about it. It's a wee Victorian terrace, two-up two-down, with a funky wooden staircase and a kitchen at the back of the house (gas hob!!). It's really light and airy, fortunately there aren't any hideous carpets or curtains we have to put up with, and there's a long, thin garden (all patio) where we can have barbecues. It's unfurnished, which is a pain, esp as we have to find a fridge and a washing machine from somewhere, but various family members seem to be keen to push furniture off on us, so we'll probably get useful things (like a bed and a sofa) from Nik's mum, and a handful of old clocks and ornaments from my antique-collector of a grandfather. My dad has promised to buy me some pots as a moving-in present, so I can start growing herbs and vegetables and things. Hurrah. Have also acquired Gaby's slow cooker which I am extremely pleased about.

Had a lovely last few days. Incredibly washed out barbecue on Saturday, which saw me and Jo holding umbrellas over the barbecues while Nik heroically flipped burgers, and a bunch of incredibly damp people huddled in the boathouse. Inspired by the relative dryness of Sunday, I dragged Nik, Catherine, Rob and Mairi to Minster Lovell (on the suggestion, two years ago, of my mother) which was an incredibly cool ruined hall near Witney. Aside from getting rather lost and the unsuitably-clad Catherine stepping in a cowpat, it was a most successful expedition. I also have a new contender for 'oddest utterance ever':

"I'm not following you. I've got some crayfish in a bag and they're trying to escape. You see, my dog just learnt to swim today."

This was from a lady at Minster Lovell whose numerous tanned children were splashing around in the stream. I want to be the kind of cool parent who lets their kids do that kind of thing (though don't want to engage strangers in peculiar conversations).

I'll post some photos of the day out and the house tomorrow.

Today, Nik took various bits of paperwork to the estate agents en route to home, and I've been faffing about filling in job applications. Actually, I've filled in one (my target was three), though the other Reading one should be easier now I've done the boring bits of the form and only have to write the 'why I'm fab' bit. I always agonise over them, and then get into it right at the end and write something utterly preposterous and arse-licking. I have, however, started packing. My room is full of boxes and piles of things and I'm missing a teaspoon, a glass and a plate. Damn communal kitchens.

Crikey!

"The alleged phenomenon of the Bridezilla spawned numerous newspaper articles that recounted her exploits with gleeful censure. There was one bride who demanded that her attendants all colour their hair the same shade of blonde; another who procured a swatch of the purple wallpaper from the hotel suite in which she would be spending her wedding night so her florist could find blooms that were an exact match; and another who insisted, before a barefoot beach wedding, that her husband's groomsmen all endure a pedicure."

...

"Thanks to the inspiration of Gerety - who never herself married - the imperative for a diamond engagement ring is today so well established that current De Beers' marketing campaigns have focused not simply upon the necessity of a diamond, but the necessity of a really, really big diamond. (One recent US advertisement shows a large stone and a smaller one side by side, with the caption under the smaller reading, "Where'd you get that diamond?" while the caption under the larger reads, "Where'd you get that man?") The convention that a man should spend two months' salary on his bride's ring was also created by the jewellery industry, and the De Beers website, adiamondisforever.com, provides a handy calculator for figuring out two months' salary from an annual wage, helpful for any would-be groom who can't divide by six. (Where'd you get that man, indeed.)"

From The Guardian.

Shiny, happy people holding champagne...

Right.

Time for a proper update I think, since I now have some time.

Well, finals were... finals happened. All my diligently colour-coordinated linguistics notes were utterly redundant as none of the papers had any questions on anything I knew about and I had to blag extensively. My supposedly best literature paper was rubbish, again no questions on anything I knew about, and it's easier to blag based on prelims/general knowledge of linguistics than it is when you haven't read any texts for a literature topic!! The three papers I had been most afeared of were actually the ones I felt went best - special authors, syntax and language essay. Though syntax would have been dire had Holly and I not learnt one side of lecture notes that was then expanded into the basis of an entire essay for both of us!! And I hope whoever marks my language essay is Belgian...

Anyway, after two weeks of exams, long cycle rides, sleep deprivation and patronising such fine establishments as Mamma Mia, the Dew Drop and the Summertown Wine Cafe on a regular basis, finals were over. Nik and Catherine gallantly trekked up north to meet me. Catherine brought some lovely flowers that smell gorgeous and made my room look pretty. Nik sprayed champagne in my eyes and I spent my first ten minutes of freedom hopping around outside M&S going 'Argh! Aaargh! I can't see!' Catherine went off to play squash with Mairi and Nik and I went to have lunch at the Oak (whose burgers are AMAZING) and we then all met up again in Chequers, Thomas arrived, I went to choir, I came home and collapsed in a sleepy heap and listened to the News Quiz and then dragged a posse of lovely people to the Grand Cafe for cheap cocktails. Hurrah.

I spent the weekend pottering. I like pottering. I made dinner for people on Saturday: chicken cacciatore (?sp), quite successful. I really want a Le Creuset casserole now. More than anything in the world. (I wanted one before, but I want one even more now I've borrowed Pete's.) My friends are heroic washer-uppers. Thank you! Sunday was Catherine's birthday and she was being flautatious for most of the day, but had a girly cream tea at the Rose and more cocktails at the Grand Cafe.

Incidentally, I thought I was doing so well not getting very worked up about finals. Since finishing, I realise that while I never had extreme moments of tension, I've been carrying around a residual level of tension for some time and I've been horribly antisocial and grumpy and not really been aware of it. Anyway, I'm very sorry and will now endeavour to be sunny and cheerful.

Last night was Schools Dinner and I was extremely cheerful, in large part thanks to the vast quantities of wine I consumed, and also because everyone's so lovely, all the other linguists, all our tutors. Lord, I'm getting soppy in my old age! But, meh, we all felt a bit soppy, and we got an email from Prof. Pearson this morning thanking us for our gifts (among which a pen with 'I [heart] Mallarme' on it!!) and I did have a bit of a cry. Also, never would have guessed in first year that I'd end up happily sitting with Mrs Williams discussing where babies come from!! And that was when I was relatively sober! There weren't too many questions about what on earth the void of the future will be filled with (everyone tactfully asked what we were doing 'in the summer') and Ruth very firmly told me that my woolly liberal desire to do something socially useful is 'not vague and not naive'. Hurrah! I extolled the virtues of facebook to Prof. Pearson and Ruth, thanked Charlie (the German tutor) 'for letting me in in the first place, even if I defected', went to Escape with Francois and stayed up till 4 a.m. eating cake and talking about god knows what. Apologies if I talked bollocks at anyone! And you're all a lovely bunch. I will make you another cake soon!

Hmm, maybe I should change my MSN from 'us linguists is working terrible hard' to something more appropriate.

I refer you to facebook for more photos!

Between now and the end of 9th week I am going to:

• go to the History of Science museum
• go to the Natural History/Pitt Rivers museum
• go to Blenheim Palace
• go to Minster Lovell
• go for a couple of long walks in the Cotswolds
• get some shoes for the ball
• make more lists
  
• read some more books FOR FUN and FOR THE PLOT

Anyone who wants to be included in any of the above (except the books one, cos I get territorial and solitary when reading) please contact me in some way!

I just filled in my vac res application form and had to write 'n/a' in the 'I would like to come into residence' section.

Happiness

Finals are over and 'I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue' is back on the radio.

Hurrah.

Typical...

Only on a French website, could you search for a casserole dish and be offered the DVD of 'Chicken Run'.

Shock horror!

A very satisfactory weekend.

Rather unexpectedly, I think this has been one of the nicest weekends I've ever spent in Oxford. Aside, of course, from feeling like I'm coming down with a nasty cold (TIMING! immune system, what were you thinking??!!!), this morning, for the first time in days, I got out of bed feeling like I'd had enough sleep! What wonder is this?!

I've mostly been pottering. Have done a little light work, mostly re-reading notes for Wednesday and cribbing parts of Holly's gender essay (thank you!), but otherwise I have read the paper, faffed about on the internet, been to the covered market and M&S Food, had a proper chat with Livvy, been to a pub with real people, made myself a massive lasagne and risotto so I can eat proper, nutritious food throughout the week without expending any more effort than popping a plate in the microwave, finished a cross stitch bookmark and gone on a lovely walk.

It's my favourite Oxford walk, but I was feeling especially attentive and thoughtful today. I went down past the station and walked up the Thames Path from Botley Road to Portmeadow. As I joined the path a canal barge went under the bridge, and I walked past all the little terraced cottages that back onto the river, and the allotments on the other side, with the sound of strimming and the glint of greenhouses.


As I crossed the next bridge, a train went past nearby. It was like a walking history tour of Industrial Britain. I carried on up the path, picking wild flowers and taking pictures of ducks. I even heard a cuckoo! I've always wondered why cuckoos are associated with springlike, cheerful things when they're nasty, sneaky, vicious birds. Ah well.

I crossed Portmeadow, and came back along the towpath from Jericho, peering nosily into the barges that were moored, thinking how homely they looked, with the plants growing on the roofs, Radio 4 playing, little models in the windows, a letterbox with a number on it, a woman standing on the deck doing her make-up in a hand mirror...

Also, the gardens of the houses alongside the canal, with dinghies tied up at the bottom of the lawn, cast iron tables and chairs under the willow trees. The graffiti on the barrier around where the boatyard used to be: GIVE IT BACK.

And, more faintly, ETHNIC CLEANSING. (Or, maybe, CLEANING. It was hard to read.)

I came back via a different route. A very Roberson walk.


Solitude, sometimes, is bliss.

Hmm

I must be getting old. On the way to college the other day, I was waiting to cross the road, when a bus went past and I looked at the driver and thought: 'He looks far too young to be driving a bus!'

Hehehehe

She wants to have my babies!!

Just got this email, which amused me no end!


Hello, gentleman

I want you to know that I had different relations with different men. I have
not got married one time, I decided that it was true love, but it was fatal
mistake of my life.
You may imagine how my heart is broken and it has painful scars. But
nevertheless I don't give up and I  continue looking for my love, happiness.
I understood that I could not find it there, in my native country, in
Ukraine. I had too much disappointments here. That is why I put a full stop
at the attempts to build love  in Ukraine. I feel lonely among thousands of
people.
I don't have native soul which would want to create family with me, give
birth to children, to build our home. So, I can't be happy in Ukraine,
although it is my native land.
I think that happiness will present me its smile abroad where I will find a
good, descent man who will share my interests and desire to create family.
You do were the first who attracted my attention and rose my interest. You
have something special if I decided to write you.
I hope that after reading my letter, you will be interested to get
acquainted with me too and write me  here http://inetfeelings.com/shy

Looking forward to get a letter from you

Olenka

BRING BACK PRELIMS

ALL IS FORGIVEN.

Madness!

Yesterday, in M&S food, I saw somebody with one of these:

















using it as a handbag and putting her shopping in one of these:











No, really.

Crazy finalist alert!

So, there I was, obscenely early for my tute as per usual and sitting by the water cooler in the linguistics faculty, listening to these two Chinese students talking. (As in students of Chinese, rather than students of Chinese nationality, but that's a different crazy finalist story.) I could tell they were first years because they both looked very clean. And because they were so idealistic and enthusiastic. They were talking about how many Chinese characters they had (about 1000) and about a book one of them had ordered to read over the summer. Then a girl walked in, who looked about 15, with an immaculate tan and a short white skirt, followed by her friend, who then bragged about how she'd only had 2 hours' sleep. The girl in the white skirt said something like, 'Yeah, I was going to go clubbing, but I was too drunk to walk' and the boys said they'd gone to Portmeadow 'but it was full of drunk hippies sitting round a bonfire'.

'Wow,' I thought, 'what interesting lives they must all lead.'

Then I remembered it was May Day.

Quotations

These have been sitting in my drafts folder on Gmail for ages (for want of a better place to put them) so I thought I'd share:

The chief reason for drinking is the desire to behave in a certain way, and to be able to blame it on alcohol. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

If only it was as easy to banish hunger by rubbing the belly as it is to masturbate. ~Diogenes the Cynic

Seethe, seethe, seethe...

Being the peculiar person I am, I have been following with alternate amusement and distress the furore about weekly/fortnightly bin collections. (Yes. The processes at work in the evolution of French vocabulary are really that dull.) And, apparently*, ASDA have now decided to allow shoppers to leave their excess packaging at the shops, and then pass it on to the suppliers.

Ohhhh. So it's the suppliers' fault is it. Never mind that supermarkets insist on farmers using a certain type of packaging and making them pay for it themselves. Never mind that most fruit and veg is pre-packaged because it makes it easier for the person on the checkout to scan a barcode than to weigh loose apricots in a paper bag, and because it encourages the consumers to buy more.

Nope, must be those pesky suppliers, who, as we all know, have for years been exploiting those poor supermarkets and forcing them to comply with their ridiculous demands...


I think I might go and live on an island somewhere and keep goats.

*Though I can't actually find a more reliable source than the Mail or the Evening Standard, so it might all be b*llocks.