Lady with a Tweed Jacket

The soundtrack to my life without a montage

2012-01-22T12:28:00.005Z

I grew up in the last flush of mix tapes, Istill have them tucked away in my bookcase all those hand lettered tracklistings and little drawings and love notes to each other and to the music. Computersbroke albums down into their component parts. We burned our own CDs when wecould, our own playlists and our own soundtracks. I still have a few of thoseas well but they weren’t works of art painstakingly compiled and lettered justso – you only had one chance to get it right. This is what nostalgia lookslike.

All our carefully compiled seguesand titles and hours queuing outside venues in the cold for fourtyfifty perfectminutes of our own movies. Then when I was older private file sharing communities,digital radio, listening for hours and noting down the ones which hit just theright note and then tracking them down.

Visiting Disney World Florida as a youngergirl I was fascinated by the soundtrack playing throughout the park, by the waythey carefully blurred the lines between fiction and reality because that wasall we wanted really. Our own soundtracks. When I was older I appreciated theamount of work that went into creating that (pitch perfect) experience, aroundthe time I stopped thinking of the Disney World music as ambient and startedthinking of it as diegetic. A simplistic explanation would be that music in aperformance (be that film or theater) is considered to be diegetic if it existswithin the world of the characters asmusic rather than being layered on top.

But then we have music created by bands(who exist in the real world) as part of narratives (which do not) releasedunder fictional names. How do we feel about Lily Chou-Chou, the differencebetween Olivia and Olivia inspi’Reira, about Scott Pilgrim and the recursive meta? For that matter what do you do when a fictional author from a tv seriesbecomes a real world best seller?

We are mixed media.

In between typing this up in my room(curtains closed and ambient noise of cars passing, birds singing) I am puttingtogether a playlist which will help me take that first step out of the housetomorrow. Creating a narrative in advance of the situation because the world isonly occasionally co-operative regarding my musical pathetic fallacy and Iprefer not to leave these things to chance.

“The angels all have guns now, the angelsaren’t anyone you’d want to pray to

No-one here has goals like get a job, getmarried, have kids

The ambitions are wake up, breathe, keepbreathing

No desire to get rich, become famous, moveout

The ambitions are wake up, breathe, keepbreathing”

- The Ambitions Are, The Golden Palominos

Vignette

2011-12-03T06:53:00.001Z

It is quiet. Not the quiet of nonoise but the careful muted sound of artificial night, pools of light and padding down the aisle, each person lit by their own screen flickering out action anddrama and romance at each other. I get up every few hours and walk carefully(balls of my feet, weight pushed forward, don’t knock into anyone lolling overthe arm rest) to the toilet so I can lock myself in a small room and stretch(hips then knees then ankles and arms high as they can go, there is no pointtrying any way other than up). In the corner someone eases the blind up afraction and I see a violet dawn. We are a cramped nation of insomniacs, asalone behind our headphones as we ever are at two, three, four in the morningwatching headlights sweep over the ceiling.

Bread and Circuses : A Trailer

2011-11-15T21:13:00.001Z

The Hunger Games is not an original series,it’s appeal lies partly in the pitch perfect timing of it’s view on mass mediaculture and some simple rather than subtle pieces of world building. Panem (etcircenses). It is one of the books which I curl up with to fall asleep, to fallin to, to tear through when the world is pushing down on me a little too muchand I need somewhere else to go even if it’s not the most comforting of places.

Given my long standing love for thesciencefictionfuture and interest in media adaptations, mixed with a healthydash of cynicism left over from my last brush with reality television, I mustadmit to being very interested to see how they would approach the inevitablefilm. Aside from some styalistic points, they’ve gone a bit more technofuturethan I would have expected given I always read it as a hyperauthoritarian statebut who am I to argue with uniform design, I am somewhat pleased that at leastin the trailer they seem to be taking the metafictional aspects of the story to heart.

In the novel we are entirely immersed inthe hunger games once Katniss and Peeta enter the arena, but at the same timewe are watching them (as readers) and being made aware by our narrator of thefiner points of her performance which is at least half of her fight forsurvival. A fight to create a sympathetic narrative which could make herpopular, give her sponsorship and hopefully save her life. Everyone’s workingan angle, everyone’s playing the audience.

In the movie we are the audience. Without thebenefit of a great deal of over dubbed narration it’s going to be difficult to createthe same level in intimacy with our otherwise taciturn heroine. The trailer istelling a story. In the story we are watching Katniss, watching the hungergames in all it’s polished too neat glory. Nothing will drive that home like watching the look on her face when she sees them shoot filler scenes (she's only young), like pages of script, like seeing thelook on his face when he realises the story the producers want to shoot will be pressed down them as well (he's young too, poor lamb, and life doesn't really happen in 45 minute episodes) even from adistance. We are watching through opera glasses, watching on screens, watchingfrom the districts, watching from the sidelines.

I hope that it won’t follow the novel perfectlybecause it could be a very powerful example of the ubiquitousness of mass mediapushed right up against it’s open manipulation of everyone from the contestantsto the viewers to the capital and us. Or maybe we’ll go straight back towatching Big Brother.

Natalie is not a victim

2011-10-28T19:02:00.001Z

Natalie is a genuinely lovely human being, she’s more intelligent than she gives herself credit for, she always gives people the benefit of the doubt, she’s self sufficient, caring and she’s been through some truly awful situations and still come out the other side an optimist. Some times she irritated me with how happy she was, she found that funny.

Natalie told me, voice squeezed tight, that her fiancé had gone through her phone and read her emails and texts again. When he saw that she’d had lunch with a male friend he accused her of cheating on him, insulted her and trashed her flat. This isn’t his first exhibition of controlling behavior, I wish I could say it was even his tenth, this isn’t the first time he’s threatened her or threatened to hurt other people or insulted her or lied to her. This isn’t the first time he’s broken her things.

I sent her some information from domestic violence charities on emotional abuse, I told her about escalation; I told her that I’d be here for her no matter what she wanted to do but that I was scared for her. And I am.

Natalie is not a victim.

She is locked in a prison of his words, of her belief, and I’ve been somewhere like it once and I remember what life is like on that side of the bars oh and the excuses we give. The things we say. “It isn’t always like this” or “it’s the best I can do” or “I’m not going to just give up, relationship take work” or “it was my fault as well”. Something like that would never happen to me. I’m just not that sort of girl. He’s not that sort of guy.

When Natalie’s fiancé first started showing red flags I saw mutual friends tell her to stay with him, tell me that you don’t just give up on a relationship because things get tough. I saw them ignore things like invasions of privacy and gaslighting and insults. Today one her friends called her up to tell her how it was her fault, really, because it would never have happened if she hadn’t had lunch with a guy. As if controlling her was acceptable, threats were acceptable; violence was acceptable no matter what the reason to begin with.

Natalie looks so tired, I barely ever have to complain that she is too happy about anything nowadays.

I don’t know whether or not he’ll hit her but I do know that in every way that counts the violence won’t stop. I feel so helpless against it, I am terrified that if I push her too hard she’ll push back and become even more attached to him because I’ve given her something to defend. No one likes backing down. No one likes being told that they can’t take care of themselves and she can, I know that she can but how do you tell someone that right now that their ability to do so has been crippled? How do you accept that if you’re the one being told?

How do you push back against all those conflicting expectations, from the people who refuse to believe he can hurt you because he’s their friend and their friends don’t behave that way. If he reacted so badly then you must have done something terrible.

All I can think of is light winking across those diamonds and the way that everyone asked “how did he propose?” and “have you set a date?” and “have you picked out a dress?” I wonder if any of them feel the same way that I do, why we don’t have a language to ask these questions without putting everyone on the defensive. I wonder if we can ever build one; if we can ever come out behind the stereotypes, which conceal more than they reveal, and say that this could be anyone. You’re not weak and you’re not irredeemably evil but this is still wrong.

Natalie is listening.

What are we saying?

Civil War

2011-08-09T21:11:00.002Z

The first time I visited a council estate was to go to one of my friends houses when I was in secondary school, I'd grown up in what I less than affectionally referred to as suburban hell but the identikit houses gave me pause. She was a bright, laid back girl but with ambition; she wanted to be a police officer so much. She was self assured enough to buy alcohol whilst underaged at a gig without giving it a second thought, when I asked her why it was that important she gave me the strangest look and said that it was just what she did to relax.

It took me years to put words around that subtle pressure I could see working on her, the feeling that she'd never really leave, that there was no point in trying, that to do so would look like she thought she was better than her family, that what she wanted was a nice dream but she'd only end up in a dead end job making minimum wage. If you lived on the estate, not that you were given any choice, you had another world to navigate from those little houses marching back into the distance that said little about you and less about anyone else other than things like 'practical' and 'unwanted' and 'lazy'.

We say estate when we mean ghetto and we could argue back and forth about the welfare state and whether people deserve free housing wherever they want it when some of us have to earn what we get or if they deserve to be given the dignity to make their own decisions and not be penalized for the crime of poverty or illness.

We could hear yelling from the house next door through the walls of her bedroom. Broken bottles. She had to take care of her mother who wasn't very well and couldn't be left on her own, her brothers had only moved as far away as the next town. She got good A Level results, she never went to university, the last time I spoke to her she was working in a shop. She still lives on the estate.

Chavpikeydolescum.

What I am trying to say in my own inarticulate fashion is that London is bleeding, one protest starts a riot which goes on and on and on. It looks like photos of burning buildings, like frantic messages about doors smashed in, like a sudden U Turn on the part of many people I know towards national service for teenagers, like demanding the army be deployed, like knots of people and tense phone conversations and fragments like “they say that the so called bullet was fired from a police gun” and “all the windows were smashed in” and “bus on fire just a few minutes from where I live” and “family” and “destroyed” and “shooting's too good for them” and “riot” and “riot”.

I love this city so much, it's agonizing to sit here and watch it tearing itself to pieces and know the only thing I can do is field phone calls from the police when they come to make sure that any of my staff who live in this evenings danger zones are sent home early. It looks like shock, we are all a little more withdrawn today, we all look hurt but some uncontrollable force and say things like “it has to be over soon” and “they should just let the police do their jobs” and “scum”.

“I just don't understand”.

But I do understand, I know exactly why people who have never had any real expectation that they can or should be worth more who are chavpikeydolescum will take what they can get whether that be status or free TVs. Power corrupts. When you feel powerless and worthless and you learn that you can, in fact, take whatever you want and the police can't stop you it will only escalate. It is so complicated, this perfect storm, this little hell brewing in our home made of charcoal and sirens and that feeling that you get in your chest when you see a group of teenagers. Just children really, but you never can tell. Nothing that they are doing is even remotely defensible but oh I can see why they would and it is killing us all.

“So what can we do about it?”

Anyone who gives you an easy answer is lying. My only answer is that I don't know, that I'm terrified both of the riots and what the response to them will be and all I have to offer is my personal civil war of call and response.

People don't riot if they believe have something to lose, people are losing everything because of these riots.

A painting from life

2011-06-11T19:35:00.001Z

I say that while I remember there being life before the internet I'm not convinced that it was real and I am only being facetious half the time at that. I remember waking up to the possibility of this technology in dribs and drabs, an hour or two at my aunts computer learning how to use Yahoo as the search engine of choice at the time, my first tentative forays into newsgroups. For someone as paradoxically misanthropic but attention seeking as I am the internet provides the perfect middle ground where I can reach out to people without having to risk too much contact. I found that in many ways it was easier for me to connect with people through a screen than face to face. I had a series of very dramatic friendships with a number of people from all over the world, many of whom I met through one fannish community or another. Some of these friendships have lasted for years.

I have learned to maintain connections with people who are only sporadically in the country if at all. I know people who I only see at events in Europe, I know people who come to London every few months or even years. My sister left England last year, we have twitter and video chat and email and sometimes it makes me feel as though the distance collapses in on itself, as though it doesn't really matter.

Two good friends of mine will be leaving the country within a year; both are moving, more or less, to the other side of the world for reasons which make perfect sense and both have been large parts of my life. One I knew primarily online for many years, she will never be coming back to live here so the only times we will see each other again will be as and when we visit which makes the commute something of a chore. The other will be coming back in two or three years. Between the two of them I know that we'll keep in contact exactly the same way that we do now, we call, we email, we chat. I'm not afraid of them dropping out of my life but even for someone who prefers to do most of their communication at one remove the thought of them not being physically present makes me rather maudlin.

What does proximity mean nowadays? I almost certainly communicate more with my friends online than I do in person so I am struggling to put words around the difference in taking them out of this cramped square mile that is my life. We are spread so thin that you can see the light through us and though the thought of being able to reach out and talk to my sister in Vancouver, my friend in Australia, my ex in Tokyo is still a great improvement over letters and expensive long distance calls it's not the same, even for me.

I will miss them, even though they are still there, and all my feelings are at one remove.

Lord, I pray with my eyes wide open

2011-04-27T18:21:00.005Z

Oh I was so wrong when I said that “Wake up in the road” was the most honest post I would ever write, this one is like vivisection but I find the act of writing to a format to be helpful in ordering my thoughts.

Since returning to the church I have been engaging with spirituality in a more structured way, while this should sound obvious I’m finding the situation quite awkward. Since I ran from the Conservative Evangelical Church I’ve been more than happy to discuss theology as far as the history of the church and the bible goes, I don’t even mind speculating about the effect of certain aspects of dogma, but describing spiritual experiences nowadays seems unbearably twee. I would imagine that part of this is a reaction to how central generic “spiritual experiences” were supposed to be in the Conservative Evangelical Church, another part of it has something to do with the fact that while I hold tight to the idea that faith is the part that cannot be explained I still think it makes me look a bit silly. And if there’s one thing we know I have a problem letting go of it is pride.

I find it uncomfortable that I have experiences for which I am unable to account, which make me look irrational or deluded or make other people doubt my judgment. But if, as I so often remind others, it is hubris to claim that you could even understand the whole of God why should I understand this? Perhaps it is good for me to have something in my life that I cannot build an argument on, which shifts under me like the sea and sometimes leaves me drowning. Perhaps it is a plan and perhaps it is a side effect and perhaps I am just mad but if prophets are schizophrenics then I am a priestess of the cracked and I can live with that. As a friend said to me the other day, it’s what you make of it that counts.

The roundabout point of this is that when I stumbled over spiritual experiences in the world it was less difficult for me than when I went looking for them.

I took part in a prayer vigil over Holy Week for rather selfish reasons; it was taking place in my church and would likely not involve interaction with other people. I sat in front of the covered crucifix surrounded by flowers and candles with the church settling around us and outside people yelling, wordless (worldless). I thought, “do we have flowers because they’re dying too?” and “oh lord, I pray with my eyes wide open” and it felt like everything dropped away. I came to an understanding of why I do, always, pray with my eyes open now. You close your eyes to shut the world away and wish for things, for me shutting everything out makes prayer dead as it must be worked through objects and actions and I remembered that one of the first real structured spiritual moments I had was in a prayer labyrinth. The vigil was not dissimilar.

Something which was brought into sharp focus for me was the doctrine of Hypostatic Union (contested by a number of proto-orthadox churches) which you may have heard described with the phrase “fully human and fully divine”. One of the things which makes Christianity interesting and I suppose appealing to me on an emotional level is the idea that God became human to suffer as we do. Now this doesn’t mean that we have to flagellate ourselves once a year about how unworthy we must have been for God to stoop so low but that the incomprehensible God of many faces, of which we are a fragment and an echo and a hope, has a profound understanding of desolation and joy. That we can touch the divine in hopelessness and despair and wonder and boredom, we can do this simply through the act of living as God surely felt that living a fully human life was a worthy act.

And while I know that churches and rituals may well have been designed to induce these sorts of experiences it is still mine. And it’s what I make of it that counts.

These things still remain

2011-04-03T20:55:00.005Z

It's been too long since I've subjected you charming people to one of my many diatribes on What I Believe, I fear they may be a byproduct of the need to define all the terms used in each university essay to the point where the introduction could end up something like half the word count. None the less I think that they're important in as far as they require you to be able to explain why you think something (hopefully with supporting evidence) as I do cringe from the view that beliefs should be unchallenged simply because you hold them. That sort of thinking leads to homeopathy or worse, televangelists. This particular subject us something dear to my heart and theoretically the center of Christian faith : the bible. My views in their current form are the product of, in no particular order, one religious ceremony, two theology discussion group meetings, several conversations (one of them not entirely sober), and a number of books which were in no way titled The Bible For Dummies.

I am of the opinion that if you are going to affiliate yourself with a religion as I have done you need to do a reasonable amount of research. This all started when I was trying to pick a translation of the bible to work with and the more I learned about how the bible was put together the more things unraveled. The bible as we know it is a creation of the orthodox church, selected, structured and in many cases altered to put forward a specific set of beliefs about the nature of Jesus and what the Christian faith should be and how it's followers should conduct themselves. It is by no means the only collection of Christian writings from that era, I suggest taking a moment to ponder why the Nicene Creed is so strident about the exact position and nature of Jesus, people never feel the need to be so defensive about positions which are unchallenged. For more information I suggest reading Lost Christianities if for no other reason than to better appreciate Prester John : International Man of Mystery.

What this means for me is that the bible was created by people with an agenda which may well not match up with mine in some significant ways. While I do believe that the ways in which the bible has functioned as (again, theoretically) the heart of Christianity has enhanced it's position as a sacred text it is by no means perfect. It is copies of copies of copies of errors and stories and desperation and hope and faith but it is not literally true in any sense of the word and it has been shaped by the desires of all it's many authors and the cultures in which they lived. What the bible is for me is the starting point for a conversation, which should never end, about what it means to be human and feel the presence of the divine. About how we live and work and fail and believe and survive and the stories which we tell ourselves and each other in the process; how we approach God and what that means to us. It's not any thing so simple as a stick by which we measure ourselves or others.

The idea of mystery or mysticism has been increasingly central to my faith, that God is something of which we cannot speak or ever hope to fully comprehend. This means making space in my life for the knowledge that I will never be able to say that I fully understand the will of God, that there are things which are holy that are hidden to me, that I will never be able to be sure of my own righteousness. It must be acknowledged that we all interpret the bible in our own ways, we all pick and chose the parts we want to listen to and the parts we don't depending on our own circumstances or upbringing or what makes us most comfortable. To suggest that Christians alone have the ability to objectively measure right and wrong using a magic book as an oracle is the worst kind of arrogance. I do understand the desire to have a set of rules to follow to make everything make sense, I was raised in a church which encouraged this, but I can't indulge it. The harm to myself and others is too great.

Full moon thinking

2011-02-06T13:04:00.003Z

So this is what the new year looks like then, all grey skies and wind and sirens.

While I often pride myself on not being superstitious (I'm not sure how that squares with faith but let's move swiftly on shall we) last year pushed me to the limit of my belief in the random nature of events. Things got so terribly farcical that I reached a point where I refused to make any large decisions or take serious action until January the 1^st because I genuinely thought that simply by virtue of having been done in 2010 it would somehow go terribly wrong. I mentioned to a friend of mine (who has the same name as I do so let's call her Other Jane) who happens to be a pagan that in the interests of inter-faith dialogue we should do a joint ritual on New Years Eve just to make sure that 2010 did not attempt to haunt us for another year.

Now Other Jane has the same pull towards her particular pantheon as I do towards Christianity however we prefer to worship in similar ways so I was reasonably confident that we could pull it off without compromising ourselves. The process of putting the ritual together was enlightening in and of itself, I adapted a form of the invocation used by The Church as I feel that if I'm making them my spiritual home I should start to work their ideas into my practices. We started out a month or so before the date by tweaking things as serious as wording (because no-one likes to have it implied that they should consider another faith as a duty for them while they're trying to worship their own) and as seemingly inconsequential as the fact that I use salt as the base for my incense coals but as it's sometimes considered a purifier for pagans it would have rendered Other Janes work moot. It gave me an interesting perspective on the way that Christianity is structured to reject anything but itself which I am often uncomfortable with when it is made crudely obvious but perhaps should be paying closer attention to in the smaller things. While I am aware of the historical reasons for this bias and I respect the use of the Bible as it is currently considered not just as a holy text but as a vehicle for the tradition which we live in that's no reason to be sloppy with my analysis.

As to what I feel about this sort of thing, whether you call it a service or a ritual or a prayer or a spell, on a more academic level I'm almost in the “prayer is a way to increase mindfulness and mindfulness is how you effect change” school of thought. I feel that they are a cry for help without a guarantee of assistance or if it does come for it to be unexpected or even unwanted, they are a sacrifice of time and attention and effort not bargains to be struck. In the same way that you should never gamble, invest or lend more than you can afford to lose you shouldn't spend time or mindfulness (there's that word again) begging God to fix a problem when you could be directing that towards working it out yourself. If nothing else they give me space to be calm, to push everything else away, and that can give me time to come up with new insights or to use as a touchstone in times of trial.

Churched

2010-12-19T11:08:00.002Z

A few weeks ago I met up with the Vicar (I shall have to come up with some way to distinguish him from the Other Vicar who was with me through most of the time I was unchurched but whose parish is much too far away for me to consider going on a regular basis) and spoke to him about my reservations about joining a church and also about my lifestyle choices and what could politely be called the churches reservations about them.

It went rather well all things considered, some of the things which would be issues in another church are non-issues here and as for the rest all I asked was that while they may not understand the things that I do that they not consider me to be unchristian because of them. After living in a conservative evangelical environment for years I've been left with a rather low tolerance for spiritual hypocrisy; while I understand that I am often alone at the very edge of some fairly liberal ideas I never want to be in a place where I'm required to lie for two hours a week about who I am and how I think my life should be lived and then ignore it the rest of the time. I also understand that in some cases the leadership are far more liberal than the congregation however, and this may be old fashioned of me, I still consider them to be the spiritual heart of the church and if they're able to cope with my peculiar ways then I will be satisfied with that.

We also discussed how the church was run, what I could and would be able to do as I was choosing to become more involved. There are some things which I find interesting and may want to look at in the future, there are some about which I am dubious about and need more time to consider. In January I shall be putting myself on the electoral roll and we'll see how things go from there.

It will be a difficult time for me as while I have a very strong idea of what it is I'm standing against I'm now having to explore what I'm standing for and what that means for me in more detail. It may not be a comfortable process but it's a necessary one so I expect a spiritual crisis of some sort is looming on the horizon as I tend to trip over them during times of upheaval.

She has designs on Once Upon A Time

2010-11-24T22:01:00.002Z

A whole lifetime ago when I was seventeen and even more pretentious than I am now (if you can believe such a thing to be possible) I used to write. You know, the usual sort of thing, terrible poetry and stories in good need of an editor to remove every second adjective. Every now and again I still feel maudlin enough to (metaphorically) leaf back through the archives of my teenage self importance. I was doing so this evening with more purpose than usual, without wishing to sound too melodramatic I was genuinely unhappy as a child for any number of reasons relating to being the kind of girl who could use words with more than three sylables and loved tweed but some of the worst times were all tied up with the church in one way or another. Trying to be part of a church community again even with the best of intentions is reminding me in a very vivid way what it used to be to feel like that and so I don't think that I should have to suffer alone. Here is one of the least offensive extracts I came across and no I don't know how I made it all the way to adulthood without being giving a clip round the ear either;

"Once upon a time, she thinks, is not a good beginning. It's too indecisive. Is it once upon a time last week? Last year? Years and years ago? When was there ever a time big enough for all of those wicked witches and brave knights and golden apples. Will there ever be a time for them again? More than anything this disasociative time gives the stories liscense to end Happily Ever After. Why, she wonders, did they give us faerie tales. Now we have nothing else to pass on, nothing useful or true.

She spins the world around words, Once Upon A Time there was. Once upon a time there was a. Once upon a time there was a princess. Once upon a time there was a wicked witch. Once upon a time there was a princess who could not stand the sight of apples. They always seem too full, gluttinous little things. They are too obviously openly tempting, shining in crisp autumn colours, in greens and yellows and bright fresh reds. Nothing good has ever come of eating apples, knowledge of good and evil, sleep in a glass coffin. She thinks that from the inside, in the garden, in her head, there must have seemed to be no barriers at all. Once upon a time there was a wicked witch who could not stand the sight of the princess who could not stand the sight of apples. Once upon a time there was an orchard, and safety and peace. Once upon a time there was a king who could refuse his daughter nothing. Once upon a time there were sharp axes, and there was a woman weeping, and blood, and fire and the apples watching slyly. Once upon a time there was grief. Once upon a time there was revenge, and a spindle, and splinters, and a princess who died screaming.

She twists words, similes, metaphors, structure, takes pleasure in sound, baulks at the smell of apples."

Oh dear.

Things that I am grateful for

2010-10-10T19:29:00.003Z

Friends who understand me and to whom I don't have to apologize for what I am.

My partner (see above).

My ability to hold down a job.

A life worth living.

Full bookcases.

Autumn.

Good coffee.

That I have something to give back to the people I care about.

A postcard from the edge

2010-09-29T19:37:00.002Z

I came into a church environment with an awareness of the fact that I will almost certainly disagree with a reasonable proportion of what the congregation or leadership believe about how to live a christian life. My antipathy towards the church as an institution has a solid basis in past experience; while I am experimenting with being part of a christian community being unchurched for so many years not only strengthened my faith but made me very wary of those who claim that belonging to the cultus is a requirement when having the faith. I'm sure that you can all see where I'm heading here.

While I was challenged by some very interesting points about status and symbols in society and the cultus in particular in last weeks homily it unfortunately (for me) veered off into a lecture about how the church and christian community are non-negotiable and that we will never connect with anyone like we do with other Christians. I will admit that my history may be part of what made my balk so hard at this but it's simply not true. I also think that considering the church to be mandatory is frankly dangerous, it leaves you open to all sorts of abuse and petty power plays from people who know you can't escape from people who use the church as a status symbol. And these aren't necessarily monsters, but they are people which means that giving them the idea that anything they do in the service of their vision of the church is righteous never leads anywhere good. Given that a great deal of the church and many Christians are still strongly socially conservative forcing anyone who is queer or transgendered or not sure if they want children or pro-choice or doesn't think that having sex before marriage leads to eternal damnation to stay in an environment where they are forced to lie or be mobbed for their lack of conformity is dangerous to them. It was particularly destructive for me and a number of other Christians I have met. I am also wary of the concept that your social life must revolve around church events as this functions as a threat in it's own right should you chose to disagree with them.

While this left me not so quietly seething I am aware that in a church with a distributed hierarchy not everyone will agree and I suppose I shouldn't expect that those who choose to place themselves in leadership positions to have the same distrust of that sort of authority that I do. It would be counter intuitive.

Shopping around

2010-09-05T17:02:00.003Z

Given that I am trying to lead a more rounded life it has become important to me to shop independently where possible and not to shop with companies who have ethics which I find particularly dubious, retail deal breakers if you will, even or particularly when it inconveniences me. It's as simple as getting lunch from the independent sandwich shop ten minutes away from my office rather than the Starbucks over the road or as complicated as not shopping at Amazon.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that backlash happens. I remember how revolutionary Amazon used to be with it's feisty internet startup credibility and free shipping back when I was a teenager before it was the grocershoeshophomehobby monolith of today, I was thrilled to be able to find music that I would otherwise have to trawl endless record stores for and to purchase books that wouldn't be available in Britain for months. Over the years as they have expanded as a company they have either sacrificed some of their ethics or been shown to have never had them in the first place. The two incidents which lead to my current predicament are QueerFail and MacmillanFail, I suppose you could consider both of them to spring from the entitlement if you were so minded. Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised that, much like the rest of privileged culture, Amazon thought that they would be able to classify any LGBT literature as "adult" and remove them from their sales ranking system (whereas books which talk about heterosexual relationships and issues are of course just self help) but I was seriously disappointed. When they removed all of Macmillans titles because they refused to subsidize the Kindle format, and why should they, I was infuriated all over again. If you are going to be terribly libertarian about it then yes Amazon have a right to do whatever they want with their platform, they can decide that the lives of a minority are obscene because they conflict with a majority, they can cut out an entire publishing house and all their authors because they won't cut their profits to the bone for the privilege of selling through their shop. Amazon can in theory do any damn thing they please, but I don't have to buy from them and it is with great reluctance that I have ceased to do so.

For those of you who are curious I am currently using the Book Depository, the books may take a little longer to arrive but it's almost certainly good for me not to be able to have anything I could want straight away.

Wake up in the road

2010-08-14T15:56:00.003Z

This is as honest as anything I will ever write, the first time I saw an after I had my first aid training I ran away. Ran might sound a little melodramatic to you but it's what happened, I was leaving work and heard something going on behind me and when I turned round I saw a cyclist had been hit by a bus. I panicked and walked off as quickly as I could thinking that there were probably any number of better trained, less fragile people at hand (which is no excuse but an interesting self justification) and had almost got to the station before I managed to slow my breathing and self loathing got the better of me. By the time I'd crept back they were being dealt with and I turned around again and went home. I know I'm not a good person so I would have thought that I had no opinion of myself to lose but everyone likes to think they'll respond well in a crisis and I couldn't get over the feeling of being overruled by the stifling sense of panic telling me that bad things were happening and I needed to leave. I did learn something important about my first responses though and I thought, next time I will do better.

A month or two ago the weather was nice enough so I decided to get out of the underground and walk for a while. I heard a cyclist getting hit by a car before I saw him on the ground, it's a sound I remember from when it happened to me and over the years I'd managed to convince myself that I was exaggerating but I could hear it through my headphones and it's just as sickening as before. This time I channeled the sick feeling into more useful action and ran across the road¹ to try and do something. I wouldn't describe myself as calm or competent, more like flustered and the only available option, but I'd checked to see that the driver had stopped and desperately tried to remember the most useful parts of my grand total of four days of training.

I forgot things, I made mistakes, I wasn't able to keep the driver who was also in a bit of a state from crowding the cyclist and didn't remember why I should stop him drinking water. I managed to get him to try and stay still twice, answer some basic questions, not touch any of the open wounds and keep him at the scene until the paramedics turned up. He was wearing a helmet so I suspect it was just scrapes, shock and a possible concussion but I wasn't willing to risk it. By that time I was starting to get very vivid reminders of exactly what being hit by a car felt like so as he was safe with the actual professionals I gave my details to the driver and left.

Horrible though it may sound to get experience at the expense of someone else being injured I know more now and next time I hope to do better.

1. And yes I looked both ways first.

In which I outline a managable goal

2010-08-09T20:21:00.003Z

What I failed to talk about in my last tl:dr post about Christianity is that for a number of entirely predictable reasons when you have a spirituality like mine I hadn't been to church for a while. Up until a few weeks ago it had been somewhere in the region of four to five years. I had always been a little suspicious of people who referred to non church going Christians as being "in the wilderness" or offered trite predictions about a lapse of faith however with the church as an institution only driving me further away from any reasonable relationship with my faith it was the only course of action I could see other than sacrificing what remained of that in exchange for religion as socialisation which is not one of my preferred pastimes. Church more like a breakfast meeting than anything meaningful.

Recently I have been reading more intensely about biblical translation and the creation of the New Testament. I came to the conclusion that as I have a basic distrust for the choices made by the Council of Nicaea there was no reason that I had to restrict what I considered to be my spiritual texts to a King James translation of the approved books. Right now my shelf includes the Oxford Annotated Study Bible (New Revised Standard Edition), the JPS translation of the Tanakh, Misquoting Jesus, Lost Christianities and Eves Bible.

A month or so ago I was having dinner with Father and we were once again discussing my dearth of church attendance. He made the unfortunately good point that my observations are no good to anyone else unless I share them and as my friends nowadays are almost entirely atheist and pagan they wouldn't be able to offer much assistance as far as improving my arguments went. He knows me quite well and as this slowly sunk home over the next week so I decided, to hell with it (so to speak), I'd give church a try once more. I had already saved a list of likely churches against the day I might need them and flicked through looking for one which matched what I wanted best while being a reasonable distance from the house as even I with all my good intentions am not too keen on traveling too far on a Sunday.

And here we are ladies and gentlemen, attending church once more although I don't feel that my obviously reduced expectations of what a church can or will provide will be a barrier to getting something useful out of it. I have managed to order my life in such a way that I only spend time with people that I have something in common with outside of work and I'm paying for it now as I have little to no idea how to cope with people who don't. I am trying to make the smallest number of compromises necessary, I don't expect to find a group of people who enjoy occupying the far edges of Christianity but I do expect them to not make me so angry that it drives me further away from my faith.

Manageable goals, that's the ticket. I'll let you know how it goes.

Is this thing still on?

2010-08-08T20:06:00.002Z

Apparently so. This year I have been experimenting with going to the gym, learning how to cook and finally heading back to church after looking long and hard for one that won't make me so angry I get chest pains. I hope to go into some of these new developments in more detail later this week.

The Inside (Out)

2008-07-22T17:24:00.001Z

This wasn’t the post I was going to write, but seeing as I’ve utterly forgotten what it was meant to be this will have to do.

“And once it everts, then there isn’t any cyberspace, is there? There never was, if you want to look at it that way. It was a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction” – Spook Country, William Gibson

I’ve written briefly before about the idea of everting cyberspace as described by William Gibson in Spook Country not my favourite of his books but I find that it grows on me. I’ve been keeping an eye on technology, often with social networking applications that are their primary use, with this in mind. If you will allow me a slightly bizarre tangent, as humans we have been thinking and writing about the breaking or trauma of “real space” for goodness only knows how long. Fairy tales and their like often revolve around places in time or space where the mundane is fundamentally torn in an unspecified way. In light of this it’d perhaps not surprising that when we create, or attempt to, technologies or platforms that run along side and break into real space we think about them in similar ways. Science fiction could be considered fantasy with computers; the same basic drive but a different expression. But enough of my over educated posturing. Hopefully you can all understand why I was more than a little excited when I saw this :

"Attendees receive RFID badges that uniquely identify and track them across the conference space. Location information is incredibly accurate—visitors' exact locations and movements are monitored in real time, and used to drive revolutionary social networking features which completely change the conference experience.

The AMD social networking site lets visitors "tag" themselves based on a diverse set of interests."

I am looking forward to seeing how this works at the conference, indeed it’s the ideal place for this sort of thing to work. I am unsure of the wider potential for long term use but would love to see it being used in clubs, munches, festivals and other semi-closed/semi-public environments.

Jane : tweed/literary theory/academic fan/feminist/coffee addict

Sell the sky

2008-06-03T12:23:00.001Z

Things have been somewhat intense for the past few months and as tends to happen I fell out of the habbit of blogging. Again. Never fear, dear reader(s), I have a number of posts in mind as soon as I finish this cup of coffee. Or maybe next week.

Losing my religion and finding my spirituality

2008-02-16T21:10:00.004Z

A small warning, this post is going to contain the phrase "I believe" quite a bit because it is about my religion and my response to the institution built up around it (for those of you who don't want to read any further, it's mostly negative).

I often say I've been a Christian all my life but this isn't strictly accurate, I was raised to Christianity and then after a few secret years of Not Being Christian I chose it for myself as a teenager. As such I have an interesting perspective of the church tempered by a certain amount of over exposure to its workings. I do not get on well with the church. On the whole I believe that although the church is a natural if regrettable extension of the organization of Christianity (for simplicities sake lets say that Christianity is the spirituality and the church is the organization or cultus if we're going very Andrew Rilstone) like any organization it has twisted to strive for control and simplicity in its message, two things which go directly against the founding tenants of Christianity. My personal belief is that Christianity is a spirituality by the marginalized for the marginalized, something to help to free us and give us the chance to be whole as people. I am aware that my views are not shared by the church. I also have an understanding of the bible in context, not just as an artifact of its time but as twisted by translation and institutional agendas many of which I do not trust. I believe that the insistence on utterly literal readings of the bible and clinging to certain passages are therefore not merely unwise but actively work against the intentions of Christianity. You can therefore understand as a feminist how I react to the abstinence only movement and its place in the church. I, for the record, have had sex whilst unmarried and being as I have no desire to get married will almost certainly continue to do so. I went through a brief period of believing in not having sex before marriage myself and so am not perhaps as enlightened as I could be but eventually after a certain amount of exposure to the negative side effects of it's practical application I changed my mind.

This week being as I've had some time on my hands I've been posting on the Midwest Teen Sex Show website, a fine piece of work by the way and I encourage all of you to take a look. A video response had been posted on Youtube to their abstinence only show and I, fool that I am, browsed through the comments until I unshockingly came upon a number of Christian responses that I felt could use a little perspective. The response to my response was rather interesting, I was informed by one Scott after a small lesson in etymology (a presumption that I was unaware of what the word Christian meant) that as I had opinions which differed from the current general understanding of the bible by the church I was in fact not a Christian at all and this is what this tangent strewn post is mostly about. I have some rather more moderate comments from Rachel on debate in Christianity but this is what I'd like to focus on.
It is a given that the modern day church is focusing on a small number of "sins" and elevating them whilst glossing over or ignoring others. Their motives are suspect in that these "sins" also seem to correlate nicely with the dominant social, and patriarchal, agenda. However what I find deeply ironic is that, as Scott and the rest of the Church are happily doing, in claiming to understand the whole of and be enforcing Gods plan they are in fact committing a much larger sin than the one they accuse me of. This appears to go unnoticed by many Christians. Quite frankly if they're going to try to enforce values from the early Church I'd much rather they looked into having female leaders and holding their goods in common.

Those silly women

2008-01-20T13:13:00.000Z

Even though Tasers have only recently been introduced the the UK police force, our very first Taser related death was only recently, and they're being kept away from our civilians I read enough US based blogs to be reasonably well informed of the growing fears about Taser abuse (I'm not capping up that damn word or putting an ® after it each time, it looks silly). Although I am obviously not in any danger of getting my charming hands on one and therefore realize this is not aimed at me, I sometimes just have to be impressed at the sheer horror of some marketing ploys. I am of course referring to the leopard print Taser/MP3 player which less famously is also "available in four designer colors". Against my better instincts to not seek out things that will put up my blood pressure I wandered over the the website to take a look at this for myself and was confronted with some rather interesting ads at the top of the screen where the slogans are colour coded to the Tasers. Needless to say they are very American in a big button pushing sort of way, I shall include a brief rundown of some of my favourites below.
Fashion With A Bite - Leopard print. A simple leopard fur background with the slogan on top, because when looking for a substitute for lethal force we all know that women want something their friends can envy (you don't seriously think that's aimed at men do you?) I feel that I should make some sort of witty remark about how I might buy a tweed print Taser here but no, I really wouldn't.
Police Proven - Black. This gem shows a police officer in a tshirt leaning against a patrol car, sadly he isn't actually Tasering anyone in the shot but I suspect that might be a little less "consumer friendly" even if more accurate. Indeed none of these show the Taser in action.
I Will Control My Own Destiny - Purple. A professional looking women superimposed on a busy slightly faded street with blurred cars and people in the background. She stares directly out with what I can only assume is a "fuck you all, I've got a Taser" look. Whilst I appreciate that they're trying to push the whole power for women part it's slightly over ridden by the fact that the underlying message is that to 'control your own destiny' you are so beset from all sides by dangerous men that you need to carry a Taser with you at all times or learn to accept the fact that you can never leave your house without an escort. It could be worse I suppose, they could have made it pink.
There When I Can't Be - Blue. A man standing at an airport with what are presumably pictures of his wife and children shown next to him. I'm not sure if they thought that having a voice screaming "fear for the lives of your family when you must leave them in the hands of women, fear, fear" was overkill and so went for this instead, but I like to think so.

I'll still be here when the last poor soul has left the room

2007-12-23T08:57:00.000Z

I realize this may be unfashionable but I have a sad sort of affection for many of the secular and pagan influenced trappings of Christmas, yule having been appropriated so many times it's difficult to trace all of the traditions any more. I was rather more pleased than I will readily admit to discover that the place that I will be spending Christmas has a formal dresscode for all of it's meals and I half suspect for leaving the room. I have risen to the challenge, although with a number of non-standard dresses, only to realize with horror that I was short of seamed holdups so off I set to Agent Provocateur with only a few days left. Upon entering the shop for once the first thing to draw my eye was the fairly epic que of 10 odd people, all men. Oh dear. Now I realize that I don't seem the type, or quite frankly the shape, to indulge in what I like to think of as proper underwear and you certainly can't tell from what I wear over it but I do have something of weakness. Nor must you think that I dislike having partners buy it for me. I realize that I am, as mentioned, something of an awkward shape and that others may have less trouble but the thing about Agent Provocateur is that they have a number of different designers do their rather wonderful stock and as such how and how well the underwear fits can vary wildly and should really be dealt with in person not by a panicked boyfriend or husband desperately scrolling through his phone looking for your measurements. And, well, buying your partner underwear for Christmas has always seemed a little tacky to me. Who knows, maybe I'm looking at this entirely wrong tinged with a mild irritation at having to be the only lady in a long que of visibly uncomfortable men. All things considered it could be much worse, they could be buying diamonds.

The future starts today

2007-11-19T15:20:00.000Z

Last week I was at a launch party and on the way in I was given a jigsaw piece which I was informed was a "passport to the future". As it turned out the future was an art installation of sorts with trees and leaves in a large room and a small glass house, "if this is the future" I proclaimed doing my best to gesture with a half full champagne glass whilst in a corset "where's my fucking jetpack". Those of you of a certain persuasion will recognise my base plagiarism as working from a number of sources, the most notable being a Threadless shirt and the slogans integration into the new Warren Ellis project Doktor Sleepless. The future as we are told is now, and this has never been pushed home more directly in literature than with William Gibsons shift from writing the vague future to the very carefully dated present. The first time I read Pattern Recognition many years ago I fell in love, the book (not my own) was then whisked out of the country and I embarked on a long but worthwhile hunt to track down my own copy in what turned out to be the dry period between the first and second prints runs. It's not just because it's a book about fandom, although it is and should not be underestimated as such, but it's a consideration of what technology can do now, what cyberpunk can be now from the author who invented it. Spook Country continued in this vein much to my delight and functions as a sort of sequel without simply repeating the first one. The reason that I find this new directions resonates with me is that it's possible, now, all of his concepts are possible and somehow seem just around the corner should we pull ourselves together and work on it.
How can we cause cyberspace to evert in London (or anywhere else for that matter) and what would we do if we did?

The perils of healthcare

2007-10-17T16:19:00.000Z

This may be something of an unusual opinion but I do love the NHS. Yes I know they have waiting lists and more waiting lists and entire departments sucking up our tax money to deal with the waiting lists and no-one really likes doctors a great deal but I firmly believe in the concept and occasionally the execution. The mere thought of private health care and the desperate state of medical insurance, as demonstrated by the Americans, makes me shudder. This doesn't mean to say that I'm against private health care as an option but that I certainly don't think it should be standard.

Walk In Centers are to my mind the perfect example of what the NHS is doing right, although I don't think I've ever been in and out of one in under an hour and a half it's still more convenient than a doctors appointment and much less hassle than A&E. For the past week I've been suffering with a mild infection, nothing life threatening but as a responsible woman I felt that I should speak to a trained professional. After two hours in the waiting room on chairs fractionally more comfortable than your standard NHS equipment (I suppose it was Soho) I was called in to speak to a nurse practitioner. I always find it a little difficult to tell the difference in examinations between, yes that hurts and yes that hurts because you just prodded me in the side but none the less I soldiered on and was soon sent off with a course of antibiotics. Sadly this is where my tale takes a turn for the worse. The building was covered in posters reminding the errant public that antibiotics are not to be taken for flu or sore throats, and they should stop being such pansies. I don't understand why people seem so eager to put themselves through the always hilarious side effects rather than simply wait it out as for me antibiotics are something to be taken only as a last resort. The sad reason is that they make me rather ill in and of themselves, it's not uncommon for me to have severe stomach cramps and nausea and of course occasionally they actually make the origional problem worse. As such I have spent today feeling progressively awful and plan to spend tomorrow curled up in bed with my laptop and some uncomplicated literature.

The other one

2007-09-27T14:00:00.000Z

For those of you who have arrived recently or have been fooled by my otherwise flawless facade let me assure you I am as neurotic as someone who can fail to think of an adequate comparison for fear of seeming too neurotic. Having not so recently gone through an interesting and not entirely amicable breakup this causes a certain amount of trouble for me as my neurosis must be kept under a careful watch until either such time as they cannot be attributed to this, or make me look too desperate. That is to say, more desperate than usual. Now while there is very little space left in modern dialogue to discuss being a neurotic female at the end of a relationship without someone comparing you to Bridget Jones Diary, which I may be forced at swordpoint to admit that I don't utterly hate, I must presume that my readership will be of a slightly higher caliber and take for granted that I don't count calories, dither over what to wear for more than five minutes (black or tweed) or wander through life being charmingly clumsy. When the unfortunate occasion comes I am simply aggressively clumsy, I never really mastered charming. The same rule applies in the context of the art of breakups, in particular with the social ramifications.

Given that the majority of your personal neurosis will have been presumably directed at or dealt with by your suddenly ex partner you have a small window of time in which those around you will expect you to be a mess before they realise that perhaps this comes as standard. At this stage you can either admit to your friends that yes, your hair does always look like this, or go for my personally favoured approach of distraction mixed with polite social untruths. At times like this, when your behaviour is being closely monitored by those around it it's important to remember these simple guidelines :
Do not keep a secret tally of who prefers you to your ex and figure out whether or not you are winning, it's below you and people will start to wonder why you're cackling.
Do not start to wear pink lipstick, or indeed any makeup at all, in an attempt to project a put together persona, at best you will confuse people.
Most importantly never claim to be sane as this will only encourage people to point out the many ways in which you are not, instead admit to a carefully selected series of failings and try not to deviate from them in public.

Of course, it is entirely possible that I over think these things.

Invasion of the Straight White Men

2007-08-22T10:40:00.001Z

A little while ago I attended a rather fascinating fan conference revolving around a Certain Children's Series as I am something of a Henry Jenkins fangirl, to put it mildly. One of the most interesting talks, and one which is very relevant to the wider world, was a discussion on the use of queer cosplay to introduce non-heterocentric principles to an audience. Yes. I promise. However through the talk, which was about and hour and a half, an argument ran between the organizers and various sections of the audience as to the nature of public space (the event under discussion had happened in a cinema). I am sad to say this trod at times rather close to Won't Somebody Think Of The Children. For those of you who are familiar with fandom in general it will not shock you to know that the audience was overwhelmingly female with two exceptions, one of whom was sitting two seats across from me looking increasingly agitated as the talk continued. Unable to contain himself any longer he threw his opinion into the ring with the look of someone pulling out a trump card of sorts. His view was that, stripped clean of his protests of tolerance, he didn't want to have to see that queer stuff going on in his space because it made him uncomfortable, and no-one else should have to see it if they don't want to. This effortless and utterly unself-reflexive possession of the public space is a sadly typical view of Straight White Men, which runs close to the concept that there needs to be some sort of Men Rights movement to deal with feminism. This is because as straight, in a heteronormative society, white in a western dominant society and male in what is still a patriarchal society they have the largest amount of privilege. As such Straight White Men are also, although in many respects lovely people I'm sure, the ones who have to work hardest in order to let go of there own feelings of presumption. In this case, despite having it explained to him several times in very small words, this man was unable to let go of the idea that he was entitled to only see what reflected himself in public space (which belonged to him as a Straight White Man) and react against anything that didn't. In short, when it comes to feminism and queer theory Straight White Men need to learn to be seen and not heard for a while. I had an interesting conversation with my father explaining to him about street harassment for women, the idea that men seem to feel entitled to go up to women and comment about their appearance or mood in public is something which he found genuinely hard to understand dealing with on a personal level. Women get these comments for the same reasons that same-sex couples get shouted at for kissing in the street, there is a basic understanding that they do not belong there. And this is the problem, Straight White Men do need to start looking at the kinds of unconscious privileges they have every day as when it's pointed out to them the first reaction tends to be one based in anger and suspicion. 'But Jane!', I hear you cry as a hypothetical foil for my argument, 'isn't it at least a good thing that they're trying to understand? If we're to mean to them then maybe they'll conclude that we're all evil bitches like Those Women Over There and be lost to feminism for ever.' My reply of course is no, until I see evidence of whatever man in question working to understand how what he takes for granted negatively impacts women I don't really care about bruising his delicate ego by pointing out that he's wrong. If Joss Whedon can deal with it then what on earth is their problem.

It is, after all, not a pleasant thing we are trying to tell the Straight White Men in the same way that it isn't pleasant to look at white privilege but it is at the same time very necessary. If for no other reason than to stop my interesting lectures being interrupted by clueless idiots.

Oh, the horror

2007-08-17T09:30:00.000Z

For reasons that are still a little obscure to me and will require far to much dull detail for you last week I ended up in a casting with A Revived Horror Studio That Shall Not Be Named for a role described as "sultry female vampire" as I roughly fit the physical profile. Perhaps they felt that horror could do with more tweed, I'm not entirely sure. This is much less exciting than it sounds as I haven't done any acting for simply years now and I have an unfortunate tendencies to be a little confused by strangers and inspect the walls a lot.

After sitting in the waiting room for half an hour while a tall gorgeous creature stood, sat, did dramatic reading and showed them her website I was less than convinced as to my chances¹. Never the less when the glass doors opened, somewhat redundantly, I sidled through. After jugging my bag from hand to hand in an effort to great all of the to my mind unnecessarily large panel of staff and being directed to a chair that was sufficiently exposed I was handed a copy of the script. No details of it will be given here, as I have no wish to tempt the wrath of Revived Horror Studio That Shall Not Be Named, but suffice to say that the part I was auditioning for lived up to it's description. Sadly, I have never been particularly talented at being sultry. After reading through all the requisite scenes the director himself prompted me to do the one thing I feared the most even when I was in practice, improvisation.
It was around the time that it was politely and quite seriously suggested that I should describe my favourite methods of killing my victims, as a 500 year old vampire, that I remembered why I stopped acting in the first place. I stumbled through a brief and not particularly inspired monologue and fled for the hills.

1. A fact which cuts me to the bone, you may be assured.

I may have been gone some time

2007-07-18T15:57:00.001Z

Goodness me. You know I'd almost forgotten about this thing, I am clearly something of an absent blogger.

Actual content to follow as soon as I remember how to write it.

All I ask for is a little common decency

2006-10-29T12:23:00.000Z

I understand the need to throw house parties on a Saturday night, goodness knows. And it is true that being as I have had very little sleep for the past few days for one reason and another I was not at my best. However when I can hear and feel the pounding bass line in my room from a party that was at least two streets away at one in the morning you can understand that my patience would have been all but exhausted. I crawled into the spare room and passed out for a good twelve hours on the sofa bed waking up with a desire to exploit my council contacts to discover the address of the perpetrator's and send them a stiff letter.

To add insult to injury the music was utterly appalling.

A review of sorts

2006-08-24T17:25:00.000Z

It is time for me to make another confession : I have something of a penchant for high fantasy literature. I highly suspect I may be able to blame this on my strange childhood attachment to almost anything written by Brain Jacques. To this very day you will see me wandering the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section of any bookstore I may come across staring at the glossy, utterly unbelievable covers (back in my day we had air brushing and were happy with it, none of this computer generated nonsense) and increasingly silly titles.
I am sad to admit then my first exposure to Heir to Autumn was over the glorious trainwreck that is the cover art. Scantily clad woman? Check. Mysterious Fantasy City Background No. 3? Check. Fire, for no discernible reason? Check. Proportions which whilst not being terribly out of whack are none the less wrong enough to make your eyes water slightly? Check. After all of this, I presumed, the writing had to be some improvement and upon reading the first chapter I was pleasantly surprised and had great hopes for the poor thing.

Unfortunately upon further venturing into the book I discovered that I should have taken my cue from the cover after all. It's not that the ideas are bad, per se, indeed some of them are rather intriguing and the scenery is on the whole quite good. But The characters are so very lifeless that it's practically parody, they have actions which have absolutely no consistency and are dragged from one place to another with only the screaming melodrama giving me any semblance of interest. I suspect that the authors wished to give the impression that the characters were larger than life at the same time as being just like everyone else, but ended up giving them ridiculous weaknesses and unbelievable strengths. The book itself seems to hinge on a series of unbelievable events, breaking out of unbreakable prisons and such like, which can be forgiven if used once or twice but in this case seem to comprise the entire plot.

I cannot recall being so disappointed in a book for a long while.

Although I am loath indeed to just throw books away I am unsure as to any other course of action. I can't give it away as I have no particular desire to inflict this upon any of my acquaintances, nor can I leave it on the tube for some other passenger to discover (it must be an improvement on the Daily Mail, and replacing that is practically a public service) as it would in all probability be construed as some sort of explosive device causing mass hysteria and more delays.

Alack and alas

2006-08-03T19:48:00.000Z

There are a number of things which I fear I am yet too young to get away with, tweed skirts and stockings on a regular basis for example, or using Thatcher or inflation as a topic of conversation. I should certainly be considered too young to be moaning about my back but I seem to have put it out in a rather awkward fashion. I suspect work to be the culprit as I distinctly remember twisting round to reach for something and feeling it give, wincing in anticipation of the oncoming days of mild annoyance. Today I have scorned my earlier fears by using power tools and sitting in uncomfortable positions, however I fear my cover has been blown by my house mate who discovered me attempting to turn the gas on whilst clutching my back. Offering to do it himself I gave him the most injured glare I could muster and informed him that I was not yet a cripple despite some fairly obvious evidence to the contrary.

If nothing else this puts me in mind of an incident a month or so ago when upon answering the door I was met by a delivery man who took one good look at me and inquired as to whether there was anyone else at home, clearly meaning someone male. Balking at this I claimed that I was much stronger than I looked and that I seriously doubted that my gender would get in the way of lifting the delivery. I cursed my bravado all the way to the door as I helped to carry a cast iron stove which even my landlord had difficulties with.

My back was perfectly fine then, I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that my body is as utterly contrary as I am.

Dangerous habits

2006-06-27T17:43:00.000Z

Whilst I am residing in America I feel, as did my dear companions, that it was necessary to make a reasonable attempt at doing cultural things. Museums and the like. We had learned our lesson the previous day wandering around the White House Circle in the blazing heat for an hour or so before being forced to retire to one of the few obvious places with air conditioning : the mall. The memory of the paroxysm of terror I was sent into upon discovery that America seems to be filled with fake American 50's dinners (and what that seemed to symbolize at the time in terms of worrying nostalgia for previous ideas of the future) ruled out any similar activity.
At a loss after visiting the National Air and Space Museum for something to do, we eventually settled on the National Archive which houses the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution amongst other bits of paper work. It seams as though the Americans have just as many ques as the English, they just have far less patients with them, as such with some diligent waiting it was possible to reach the front fairly quickly. We swiftly ascended to the gallery set aside for all of the important American documents as the only available food option seamed to be McDonalds. Get in, get cultured, get out. The Magna Carta was a mere sideshow next to another large que, it's a little like Disney land but with greater educational value. It was at the point we had defeated the Japanese tourists that we realized a basic built in contradiction, the lighting has to be incredibly low in order to preserve the parchment, so low in fact that all you can see is a blur of calligraphy. "Your huddled masses yearning to be free - unless they happen to be Mexican".

I may have mentioned previously that I don't travel too well.

Clear the air

2006-06-11T18:31:00.000Z

Much to my disappointment I will be unable to participate in the London Streetwars event. Despite being lured in by the thrill of late nights spent stalking my target in the hopes of a moment of watery triumph, I will be out of the country for the first few days of the tournament and thus would be unable to collect my assignment personally from the Shadow Government. All that is left for me now is to bully at least one of my dear friends into participating and assassinate vicariously.

I must therefore find other ways to channel my ever growing aggression stemming from the need to wear skirts (or alternatively suffer heat stroke) through what seems as though it will almost certainly be a long and unpleasantly warm summer. Alas, I also tend to flush rather impressively in the heat, and so am never quite sure whether or not I have managed to burn (despite my religious daily covering of factor 30) and so must prod my arm experimentally on public transport, receiving strange looks from those around me.
Although my preferred form of amusement is denied to me, I would hope that as a lady of at least moderate resource I will be able to find a few pleasant alternatives to keep me distracted.

The BBC have promised me thunderstorms, and as I sit here in the lightest dress I own attempting to balance my laptop in a position in which it has the best WiFi signal with as little of it touching me as possible, I hope they come soon.

Somebody has to shine for me

2006-05-28T13:14:00.000Z

I was standing on a walkway of rather suspicious construction precariously perched above a 30ft deep cooling pond and quite literally shaking with fear when my charming male dining companion asked me what was wrong. Alas, I fear that I don't so much have a fear of heights as much as I do one of falling and drowning or being thrown out of the restaurant before our entries were served. I must admit though, it is one of the loveliest views of London I've seen.
Hearing the tell tale clanging on the staircase up to the roof we scuttled back as fast as we could but were too late, another couple had clearly decided to take advantage of the night and were studiously ignoring our very unwise little escapade. I nodded to the lady in question as I hauled myself over, using the very large and noticeable 'Do not go past this point' sign to wedge my shoes into for balance. I smiled at them and commented on the view whilst my dear friends made their way over with as nonchalant a manner as they could manage given the circumstances. I looked down at her choice of footwear and remarked "However it may not be the best thing to attempt in heels".

We beat a hasty retreat to stifled laughter all round.

We who are about to buy salute you

2006-05-23T11:25:00.000Z

When I was a mere young slip of a thing I, much like every other teenager, had a brief flirtation with a rather revolutionary counter culture group. This particular one was focused on advertising and the corpolitcal, and it was about this time that I discovered that I was far more interested in how advertising worked than I was in adbusting. To this very day I find it intriguing and will often spend the swathes of my life spent commuting trying to figure out what the advertisements are meant to be doing to me in order to convince me that I must have $misc_product this very minute.

Whilst on the train contemplating something shallow and meaningless today I noticed a new campaign has begun, the poster itself was a rather unoriginal picture of a sheep with the apple headphones and a link to iDon't.com. It is not selling anything at face value, although it is blindingly obvious that it must have been set up by a company who have a similar product. I just couldn't resist.

The website opens with the sheep turning into an "edgy" stencil graffiti design meant to capitalize, if I am not wrong, on Banksy's commercial success. The first page is the buzzword manifesto where "free thinkers" stands for anyone who buys into this companies manifesto not anothers, "iTatership" is neither big nor clever it is however obvious and a little silly. Let us all "break free" show our "self-expression" and "independent spirits", this being short hand for buy our product, not theirs for no real reason other than capitalizing on Apple's popularity in some sort of bizarre corporate counter culture marketing attempt.

Next we have the unsurprising list of links to other revolutionaries with exactly the same ideas of what brands to buy in order to be an 'individual', it's not just us we swear. Then comes the merchandise because heaven knows that come the revolution the first thing on our minds will be stickers, t-shirts, posters and so forth. They're vital tools for the proletariat. No. Really. I am both shocked and horrified that they think that anyone would actually believe that a product with enough money behind it for this little sideshow is somehow not a part of the mainstream.

Finally I reach my goal, which company has grown so desperate that they wish to market there product solely as an alternative to the iPod? Ladies and gentlemen I present to you the Sansa e200 along with perhaps my favorite part of the whole experience;

"It's just not in our style to be pushy, cheesy, sales hacks."

God forbid.

Do my eyes deceive me

2006-05-19T21:18:00.000Z

In the past year or so my quality of sleep has degraded quite seriously, so you must forgive me if I am no longer much of a morning person. Where I would once bound out of bed at an utterly unhealthy hour of the morning ready to great the day, you're now lucky to get anything out of me before my first hit of coffee kicks in and I great the day with a pickaxe. As those of you who are regularly sleep deprived will know, with enough of this you will start to hallucinate mildly. The reason for this rather bitter exposition will become clear, I promise you.

Picture this, if you will. A rather grim looking young lady trudging down the street this overcast and very English morning alternatively engrossed in staring at the pavement as if with some sort of grudge and glancing suspiciously at strangers. The road I was walking towards was blocked almost solid with rush hour traffic, a sight which I am sad to admit warms the cockles of my vengeful little heart, when a darling matched pair of black horses walk sedately into view pulling a glass carriage. None of my fellow straggling commuters seemed to be looking directly at it, the drivers whilst clearly wishing painful death upon each other have yet to yell any sort of insults. All was made clear however, when they pulled up next to the Co-op Funeral Parlor. I must admit to being sadly behind the times when it comes to funeral planning, but I didn't realized that this was still an option.

I fear, dear reader, that I must prepare for a funeral of my own this Monday. I doubt there will be a carriage.

Empty promises

2006-05-11T10:20:00.000Z

I realize that I have been neglecting you all terribly. I promise it is but another week or so until my looming deadlines are vanquished and I may safely return to posting without the overwhelming fear that writing something that isn't directly deadline related is draining vital intelligence that I should be directing towards my actual work.

I stare at the page as if by mere will power I can write something meaningful, after a few minutes I realize I am in fact gazing wistfully at the computer. I get up, check my email, and return to working. After a few more minutes of picking up the various open books around me and reading a paragraph or two I remember something amusing which happened to me during the past few days which I was planning to blog. I return to working. My gaze wanders back to the computer again. I open blogger, start a new post and type a sentence or two (maybe even an attempt at a witty title) before the crushing guilt sets in. I delete the writing, close the window, and return to my work with a renewed sense of responsibility. Repeat.

These things do happen

2006-04-13T13:03:00.000Z

I fear, dear reader, that if you have come to this for something substantial you must be sorely disappointed. Instead of social commentary and what I am assured is the great importance of the Gospel of Judas I am distracted entirely by trivia. How much I dislike school holidays for example (parents have no train etiquette), or whether or not I will need to wear a coat out in the spring weather, or even the mild irritation of last minute packing.
For you see I shall be off to Whitby next weekend, by accident I fear, and am steeling myself for a weekend of inhospitable weather, endless meals of fish, and the ever vexing issue of skirt length. Those of you who have visited this charming seaside town, and most importantly walked around it, will appreciate my dilemma in that practical footwear is for sissies and girls. These unfortunate events shall be interspersed, if I am working on last years templates, with some truly decedent evenings and if I am lucky a late night excursion to the Abbey.

I fear that all of my ability to write about serious things must be directed at another project for but a little while. I shall try not to be too silly.

All things in moderation

2006-03-30T15:33:00.000Z

I dislike tourists and strongly believe that the majority of them should not be allowed on the Underground until they've passed some sort of suitable test, possibly even multiple choice. I can see it including vital real life scenarios;

Under what circumstances is it correct to stop directly at the entrance to the platform and block it for all the other commuters?
a) Never.
b) When you think you may be a little bit lost because you where too bloody stupid to check the many other maps conveniently positioned at the entrance to the station.
c) When ever you damn well feel like it.

There is however a rather worrying downside to this traditional sneering, this being that whenever I enter a foreign country I am nigh paralyzed with the fear of my own potential stupidity. There are so many new things for me to get wrong, so many ways for me to be unintentionally offensive, which often leads me to hide obscure travel guides in my bag and spend a good portion of time pouring over public transport maps. I refuse point blank to carry any sort of neon waterproof with me (however practical) and will skulk round museums and galleries attempting desperately not to look too closely at any of the exhibits. I take pictures only under duress and attempt to conjure up the same familiar contempt for foreign national monuments that I have for our own. In short, dear reader, I do not travel well.

No good can come of this

2006-03-18T19:48:00.000Z

Yesterday I was making my way to see the rather marvelous Tiger Lillies Lovecraft production when, having been working diligently for the day, I was exposed to one of the more horrendous things I have seen being worn out in public. I feel that right here and now I should state that I have almost no tolerance for large comedy hats of any sort. A well made bowler or top hat will always be appreciated in good company but beyond that I am rarely impressed. Taking this into account you may rightly assumed that I think that there is absolutely nothing which would excuse the giant Guinness shamrock hats. The first one I witnessed was being worn with apparent pride and a certain amount of menace by a skinhead with an oversized black puffer jacket. It only went downhill from there on.

In shock and aesthetic horror I scanned the rest of the carriage and was delighted to see that many of the other commuters where taking this abomination in the same way that I was, however my reprieve lasted merely until I wandered gently into the main concourse of Waterloo. I think I take it worse when the men wearing them are in suits. Surely they should know better. All was made marginally clearer to me when I was told that to obtain one the unfortunate citizen must buy four pints of Guinness.

May I say, ladies and gentlemen, that there is no excuse for this sort of behavior and drinking Guinness is nothing to be proud of.

Would they lie to you?

2006-03-01T20:59:00.000Z

Contrary to popular opinion and that snappy quote that makes you look so very jaded at the same time as being utterly down with the $trendy_group, there are a few more certainties to life than simply death and taxes. One of these is the unfortunate fact that large groups of people are only as smart as the one in the back who believes every single word printed in the Daily Mail. Despite this, I must state that I am both confused and mildly irritated by this trying to kick Ken Livingstone out of office business. Whether or not I personally believe he should be is another matter entirely, and not one for this particular post I feel, but that a small group of people are attempting to claim that they understand what's best for everyone else and so will overturn the result of a vote is somewhat disturbing to my mind.

In other slightly more amusing news, whilst I was browsing Post Secret I came across a rather intriguing post card with the following note underneath emailed in by a concerned reader.

Kafka intended Gregor to be a giant dung beetle, some translations are not very specific. So if you have a roach problem, get an exterminator if you need one - the existentialists would approve.

I realize that taking advice from complete strangers on the internet is not always the most sensible thing to do, but I feel that just this once perhaps an exception should be made.

Home is the congestion charge

2006-02-22T17:16:00.000Z

I find it singularly irritating driving back into town. It seems that as soon as I reach civilization, mobile signal and the ability to check my bank balance all the tension comes creeping back into my life cackling with the maniacal glee of someone who knows just where all of my money has gone. I greatly dislike banks.
As such I have only now (whilst working slowly though the infernal backlog) been introduced to Joss Whedon vs. Warren Ellis1. I must admit, it did make me feel a little better.

1 I am required to at least make some sort of Warren Ellis reference every three posts to keep up my Trendy Pop Culture quota, otherwise they take my blog away from me.

No news is good news

2006-02-11T11:21:00.000Z

Every now and again I see bits of news that I mean to give some sort of opinion about, but the more I think on them the more unmotivated and unimpressed with the general state of the world I become. The Liberal Democrats Are Gay scandal for a start (I was less than amused, as I glanced at a discarded copy of The Sun, to see that they'd reported it as "Another one bites the pillow, pages 4,5 and 7" or some such), or Those Bloody Cartoons, although I was rather intrigued to see that Tshirt Hell managed to go from international news to witty shirt in about three days. Their reactions times are getting even faster, soon I expect them to start bringing the shirts out before the news is even announced. They will be the oracles of the modern age, vast shall be their temples and bloodsoaked shall be their sacrifices, all hail!
I shall instead direct you to this rather lovely piece at Tailors Today on the Intructions for Configuring the Glorious Mind Control Chip

NOTE: Improper spelling or use of case could result
     in the creation of an underclass that is
     invisible to electronic scanners and
     thus must live in secret, using their wits and
      banding together into a sort of proto-democracy
     that might one day rebel against the Emporer.
 Check for typos before saving!

I for one am always happy to see our fine upstanding citizen class coming out the other side of today's rather irritating pseudo-Orwellian "There's a lot that government don't tell us, you know" followed by either vast and slightly silly conspiracy theory or direct channeling of Michael Moore. I am mildly disgusted to see how many people seem to think that believing everything they are told by a single source counts as thinking for themselves merely because they're told that to not do so is more proof that they're being controlled by the Government.

On buttons and Firefox

2006-02-01T15:35:00.000Z

In the never ending trawl through the links posted by various people of my acquaintance I was rather amused to discover this little darling, Explorer Destroyer. The premise being that using a combination of sparkling wit, and Googles offer of $1 for every person who changes, you encourage people to switch to Firefox using a cunning little program available for download on the aforementioned page. There are three settings, a gentle prod at the top of the respective webpage, a splash page encouraging you to sally forth under the banner of open source, and blocking anyone from Internet Explorer with extreme prejudice.

Buttons (e.g. ) are classy, but most people need more of a push before they try something new. I mean, if your friend was dating a really obnoxious guy who smelled bad and slept around, you wouldn't just put a button on your livejournal and expect the problem to get solved. That'd be practically passive aggressive.

In conjunction with Kill Bills Browser this represents a new and amusingly aggressive step in the campaign to spread a browser that, amongst other things, doesn't crash constantly and I heartily approve. However I am sorry to say that I will personally not be adopting this rather lovely little program simply because adverts of all shapes and sizes irritating the living hell out of me.
After all, if you're reading this in Internet Explorer then you probably have enough problems in your life already.

Clap your hands if you believe in J.T. LeRoy

2006-01-20T22:40:00.000Z

Whilst staring blankly at a can of some sort of caffeinated beverage this morning, listening to the gentle noise of my brain doing an excellent impression of a sleep deprived bee, I realized that I had no idea of what to post next. Merely not posting is for amateurs you understand, and I with my many years of experience in another Blog Which Shall Not Be Named could surely do better than that. Then it came to me: quote some-one quoting some-one else. It's faintly amusing in a post-modern sort of way, despite the fact that on the whole I cannot stand the post-modernists, far too pretentious and too little realization that pretention done wrong leaves you looking like a bit of a twat (although that's a post for another time I feel, one where I'm not gently hallucinating). It also fills my trendy pop-culture requirements for the day, so I proudly present to you Warren Ellis blogging William Gibson.

I guess this is the literary equivalent of phantom limb syndrome, but now that I'm pretty much convinced that J.T. Leroy never existed, I catch myself regretting never having met him. I think that might mean that he was America's first idoru, in the fullest Japanese sense, paradoxically manifesting mainly on our oldest mass-media platform, the printed word.

Not having read this particular author I feel that I have very little to bring to this debate, I am filing this little incident away however for the next time someone tries to expound to me about the Death Of The Author. I shall laugh at them and drink more champagne.

Today is a glorious day for the revolution

2006-01-16T14:56:00.000Z

I had my first, rather minor, piercings only a few months ago and am now considering what else I can have done to my body. Whether or not I will ever get around to any other modifications is another question entirely, but in the mean time I have been delving deeper into BME and came across something rather interesting, magnetic implants. The thing about these is that they seem to enable the people in question to detect magnetic fields of differing kinds, creating an entire new sense.

It’s hard to exactly describe what it feels like — it’s definitely not as simple as “I can feel the implant vibrating under my skin”, which is true, but I am completely unaware of the presence of the magnets... It’s more like being able to “touch” the EM field. It’s very tangible, and the best way I can describe it is a combination of vibrating air and a strong sense of static electricity.

However the risk is as extreme as with any new procedure, particularly given that the magnetic material itself is poisonous and the silicone coating used to protect the skin around it tears easily. I don't wish to overstate the possibilities of this particular idea but even at it's most basic level it's rather exiting, being able to open your senses up to an entire new level of experience.

Unfortunately, being the overly cautious girl that I am I doubt that I would even think about getting them.

In which I am unimpressed to say the least

2006-01-09T13:45:00.000Z

I boarded the train with no small amount of trepidation this morning due to the second RMT strike. You will forgive me if I am not particularly sympathetic towards the plight of those poor tube workers who are striking in horror at their 35 hour a week contracts which include 52 days of holiday a year. Doubtless I would be inspired to greater hights of irritation had it not been that, much like the New Years Eve strike, it was almost completely ineffectual. The Northern Line may be delayed, but to be quite frank I don't think that's much of a difference.
I alighted at my station to find a single poster tacked to one of the walls of the underpass and a lonely discarded sign proclaimed that this was an "Official RMT Picket". If they're going to go to all of the trouble of striking you think that they could manage something a little more interesting.

Perhaps my standards are unusually high harking back to the good old days of teacher strikes, at least when they did things with a certain amount of style. Having a few members of station staff half heartedly wandering off home will never quite manage to top the idea that you were getting a whole day away from school because the teachers weren't going to turn up. I remember being faintly shocked at the thought that anyone who would willingly place themselves in a position to be around badly trained adolescents for most of their week would have the good sense to form such a union in the first place.

Conversation over afternoon tea

2006-01-05T17:05:00.000Z

Well it's a bright and glorious New Year filled with hope, fluffy bunnies and the Religious Right attempting to take over the world with the cunning usage of a Jesus theme park. It's the sort of thing that makes you want to raise a genteel eyebrow over afternoon tea and bend forward to whisper "now that's just uncivilized" to your equally unsettled guests. But alas there is little I can do to force good taste upon those who are still of the firm opinion that crude, threatening pickets are a perfectly jolly way of getting their messages across to the public. This sort of mindless stupidity has fast eclipsed the works of more reasonable people, I would like to point you all in the direction of the wonderful Jesus Would Be Ashamed Of You for a precise view of my opinions on this.

I personally feel the heart of that matter is, why can they get a theme park when I wasn't even allowed a pony?

A singular workout experience

2006-01-03T12:19:00.000Z

Ah, dear reader, I know that it's difficult to try to stay in shape when we're surrounded by the devilish temptations of chocolate in bright and shiny packaging, "fast food" (I hear all the kids are doing it these days) and public transport. Wouldn't it be nice, I'm sure we've always thought, if we had a little bit more motivation? Thank goodness the lovely Miss Candy has anticipated this latest gap in the market for personal training.

Imagine that you’re in the gym getting ready to do a set of pushups. You think back to your last session with me, with my heel pushing you to the floor and the promise that if you do just two more, you’ll be able to express your gratitude… don’t you think you’d work a little bit harder? I think so too.

I couldn't have put it better myself, I wonder if I can find lycra with a tweed print.

Pride, anger and tinsel

2005-12-30T22:31:00.000Z

The festive season has shifted smoothly into the final stage, that of spending all of the money and/or vouchers you were given on all of the things you wanted but couldn't buy because you were getting presents for everyone else. Or as those of us who are focused around retail prefer to think of it : Dante's Inferno In Tinsel. I strongly dislike having to explain to uppity customers that we are not, in fact, a market and that attempting to barter is therefore frowned upon by the management.

I took the opportunity to go on one of the lovely outdoor skating rings that have appeared around London in a haze of arm breaking expensive entrance fees and blister inducing boots. It was, none the less, a rather picturesque experience. I was informed by a helpful member of my party that falling was merely an outward manifestation of pride leaving my body. I did not fall. I never was that good at humility.

The British quite frankly do not want to know your name

2005-12-23T19:12:00.000Z

"Most anthropologists go off to remote parts of the world to live among exotic tribes, observe their behavior and ask endless questions in order to understand and explain their strange customs. In 1992, the BLRA asked the experienced social scientists at SIRC to apply the same research techniques in the British pub."

And thus begins the guide to British Pub etiquette for tourists, a rather intriguing (if at times condescending) look at the unspoken social rules of drinking. Most importantly it discusses the Invisible Que, or why you should stop trying to distract the bar staff when they're pouring my gin and tonic, bloody tourists.
It's a lovely idea, but unfortunately leaves me with the incredible urge to assault the authors with a rusty fork, although that could just be my reaction to patronizing academic writing as a whole.

Transmutational Mathmatics is the new Intelligent Design

2005-12-21T16:55:00.000Z

I seem to have caught a rather nasty bug and as such have spent most of my day making the arduous journey between the bed and the computer, moving from one to the other as my needs for warmth and information alternately make themselves known. The good news is that we can start to think about saying hopeful things about the tide rolling back from the fundamentalist crazies as Intelligent Design is banned in a town in Pennsylvania. But don't say it quite yet or I'm sure they'll counter with bringing back stoning.

We absolutely have to stop this "Students need to be taught both sides of the story" nonsense where it is. Intelligent Design is Creationism for people without even the courage of there convictions, but most importantly it is religious, not scientific. It's something akin to saying that (to steal liberally from George Orwell) two plus two really do make five, but the number is mysteriously transmuted into four by an unseen power. How do we know? Well, we don't exactly have any proof that is does, indeed all rational evidence points towards this being rather silly thing to believe, but we don't exactly have any proof that it doesn't either. We demand that this alternative be taught in Maths classes across the country so that students can make up their own minds about the truth.

Deck the halls with socially acceptable environmentally friendly plant matter

2005-12-20T17:09:00.000Z

Today saw me spending a good deal of time pushing my way through the bulging store branded bags of people who are making up for being unsure what present will make the receiver transcendently happy by buying as much as they can carry. I am neither the first nor the last person to note the slightly disturbing Cult of the Present which inevitably leads to teaching children, and adults (who should know better but rarely do), that their life is over if they aren't given exactly what they want. Christmas is neither a cause or a symptom, think of it as a product of it's environment. A boil that burst on the 25th in a wave of disappointment and drunken family arguments over who got the wrong type of batteries whilst Tiny Tim wails like a civil defense siren because he can't play with his toys right now.

Or at least that's what I would be saying if I was filled with socially acceptable Christmas Hate. Alas, I fear I will never be able to keep up with what the cool kids are doing these days.

A point of interest may be that on the tube today I witnessed an old lady, and a fellow tweed wearer, in a powder blue anti-pollution mask. I didn't know they came in a choice of pastels.