The Show Must Go On

Made a wrong turn once or twice,/Bad decisions, that's alright.

2011-03-15T13:44:00.001Z

I have pretty diverse musical tastes. Top of the list is probably broken punk cabaret with slightly atonal female leads (Amanda Palmer and the Dresden Dolls, Rasputina, Emilie Autumn), but I also listen to a great deal of eighties nonsense (Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adam and the Ants), the folk my father gave me (Norma Waterson, June Tabor, Maddy Prior), the folkrock my mother gave me (The Pogues, The Levellers, New Model Army), and goodness knows what else - Carter USM, Catatonia, My Life Story, Belle and Sebastian. I've been a bit obsessed with David Bowie since I was about thirteen. There's pretty much no genre of music that I don't love at least some of. (My last.fm has been tracking my listening habits for over three years now, and probably has a better idea of what I like even than I do.)

These days, I also listen to a great deal of Radio 1 and XFM. I keep up with chart music. (If any of you are wondering, everything's gone a bit electronic just at the moment.) Nobody's yet asked me to hand in my goth card because of this, but maybe it's just that I haven't yet been caught. (I do actually have a goth card. A friend of mine got a load of them printed up back in the days of the Betty Ford Clinic, a goth club I used to doorbird for at London Bridge.) And the more I listen to the charts, the more irritable I find myself becoming about music snobbery.

Look, here's the thing about snobbery: it isn't funny. It doesn't make you cool or clever or quirky, it just makes you irritating. Of course people have music they don't like, and I wouldn't for a second suggest that they shouldn't. I'm not even saying that they should try the charts out before they dismiss them; there's no reason to give it a go if you don't want to. There are lots of things I'm happy to say I don't like without having ever tried them. But I'm not a better person for it; I don't hold the people who go rock-climbing or eat meat or do maths for fun to a special level of disdain just because I don't share their interests.

So don't listen to the charts if you don't want to. There's some stuff there at the moment that I'd recommend if you were interested, but there's no reason you should be. But please: don't flaunt your ignorance like a badge of honour. It doesn't make you awesome. It just makes you a dick.

(Also, before some smart alek dredges up an ancient post of mine about the terrors of hip-hop to prove what a frightful hypocrite I am, I should point out that I have indeed been guilty of this myself in days gone by. Forgive me, I was young and I knew not what I did. I am a Reformed Sinner. And we all know that the ex-smokers are the worst, right?)

They're slightly radioactive, you know.

2010-10-01T15:53:00.000+01:00

“Excuse me, ma'am”, says a cheery voice in a navy blue uniform, “but do you have a Tesco Clubcard?”
“Yes,” I reply, trying not to break my stride. “I do.” I'm distinctly relieved that for once they're touting something I can truthfully say I already use.
“Do you use Clubcard Vouchers to pay your gas and electric bills?”
Reluctantly, I give in and stop walking. “I don't, no.”
“Why not?”
“I don't pay the gas and electric.” This is also true, but I know as soon as I say it that I should have gone with 'I don't spend enough in Tesco to cover them' instead. Which is no less true, and would have ended the conversation faster.
“Who does?”, he asks. “Your husband?”
“My father”, I tell him. This too is a mistake. I've shared a personal detail. There's no going back now: we're in this for the long haul.
“Lucky you!”
“Yes”, I agree, hurriedly. I fear I am in for a jovial 'youth of today' rant. “I'm a student.” This detail usually ameliorates some of the embarrassment of the previous revelation. Everybody knows students are broke.
“Oh! What are you studying?”
“English Literature and Creative Writing”, I reply. I know what's coming next.
“Are you a writer, then?”
“Well – I write, yes.”
“Novels?”
“Sometimes.”
“How many have you got published?”
“Er. None. Yet.”
“Oh. You're not very good, then?”
I stammer something nonsensical with a lot of 'um, er, ah'-ing.
“I'm only joking with you!”, he laughs. “What sort of novels?”
“Fantasy, mostly.”
He looks shocked. “What, like” - and here his voice drops to a whisper. “Dirty books?”
“No, no”, I smile. “Magic. Time travel. That sort of thing.”
“Oh!” He looks a little disappointed. “Like Harry Potter?”
“Er. Um. A little bit like that, I suppose. But for grown-ups.” I avoid the word 'adult'. That way madness lies.
“You look a bit Harry Potterish.”
I smile again, feigning ignorance of his point.
“I knew a gothic once. He had a coffin instead of a bed. I thought, that's a bit weird, innit? Isn't that a bit weird?”
“I have a normal bed”, I assure him, and instantly wish I hadn't.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Yes”, I reply, with ringing certainty. It's the first out-and-out lie I've told him, but I refuse to break the golden rule of women conversing with strange men. When that question comes – which it inevitably does – always, always say 'yes'.
“Alright, alright!” He throws his hands up in mock surrender. “I weren't offering.” There is an awkward pause.
“I really must be going,” I say. “I need to find the baked beans.”
“Black ones?”, he asks, grinning broadly. I don't get it for a second. “Is everything you eat black?”
My basket is full of brightly-coloured fruits and vegetables. “Um. No, I just eat...you know. Normal food.”
“Why do you draw your eyebrows on like that?”
“I like the way it looks.”
“Why not just pluck them really thin?”
“Er. Um. I like them like this.”
“Do you need help finding the baked beans?”
“Oh, er, no, thank you. I know where they are. Thank you.”
And then comes Inevitable Question #2: “What's all them scars on your arms?”
I look down with an expression of surprise, as though I'd forgotten they were there. Which I do, most of the time. “Oh, those”, I say. “It's a very long story, and it involves a porcupine and a banana.” He looks at me as though I've gone utterly barmy. “Trust me”, I continue in darkly confidential tones. “Porcupines really don't like bananas. They're slightly radioactive, you know. The bananas, not the porcupines. Not unless they've been eating bananas. And then...” I gesture to my forearms with my eyebrows raised ruefully.

In the ensuing confusion I smile apologetically and take my leave, to spend the rest of my time in the supermarket carefully taking circuitous routes through aisles so as to stay out of his line of sight.

this is all: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn, by Aidan Chambers

2010-06-10T00:02:00.001+01:00

I have just finished reading a book which contains the following passage:

"When I've read a book which I really like, a book which matters, I feel it belongs to me. I mean, the book itself, the copy I've read. It's as if I've poured myself onto the pages as I read them, all my thoughts and emotions, so that by the time I've finished it that copy holds inside it the essence of my reading."

When I read that part, while unable to sleep last night, I thought how true it was, and how I've never thought of it before, and how sad I was that this is a library book, and I am going to have to give it back. I will buy a copy, of course, but it won't be the one I "poured myself onto the pages" of. I will be sad to see this go, and find myself wondering if the library might sell it to me, which is both unlikely and irrational and would cause them to look at me oddly.

Like Cordelia, I adore books and could not be without them. Like Cordelia, I "write to live and live to read". It has been a while since a book has made me cry, made me rethink myself and my life, made me realise things about myself that had never occurred to me before. It has been a while since a book has touched me as deeply as this one has, and it will stay with me for a very long time.

The odd thing is, I wouldn't have borrowed it at all if the library hadn't been closing in ten minutes. I grabbed it off the shelves almost indiscriminately, without thinking or even really looking at it. I am exceptionally glad that I did.

Selling off the family silver

2010-05-14T12:41:00.000+01:00

Fun facts that I have gleaned from LGBTNetwork.eu:

Of the five members of our current Cabinet who were MPs in 1988, every single one of them voted to introduce Section 28 - and only four members of the entire current Cabinet voted to repeal it in 2003. (Interestingly, that four includes three of the original five voters, which is one small glimmer of hope at least.)

Only six of the thirty-one current members voted to allow unmarried couples to adopt, and four to allow gay couples to have IVF treatment. (Oddly, only one of those four was also part of that six.)

Just one member of the Cabinet voted to bring the same-sex age of consent down from 18 to 16, which is the age of consent for heterosexual couples.

We are the goon squad and we're coming to town.

2010-05-07T20:20:00.002+01:00

Clothes have meaning. Images have meaning. People in the public eye don't wear things by accident: if you know that millions of people are going to be looking at your outfit, you make damn sure you know what you're saying with it.

This is especially true of women. David Cameron's wife Samantha had an outfit last night that sent a very clear message: the emphasis on her pregnancy indicates David's youth, his traditional family values, his 'everyman' image. (It also, of course, sends a hideously sexist message about the role of women, but if I start in on that I'll be here all day.) Men have it harder. Black suit white shirt is what you have to wear in these situations, and there's almost no room for maneuver in there. Except for one thing.

Ties.

There is an entire politics of ties. Ties is where formally-dressed men get to pin their colours to their chest, and I think it would be a mistake to underestimate the thought that goes into them. David Cameron by and large stays out of tie politics, and does it the only way he can: he always wears a blue tie. Gordon Brown's ties read as confused and fumbling, and often a bit wrong - for the first Leader's Debate his tie was pink (the people's tie is deepest pink, anyone?), and I cannot help but wonder if it is possible that he thought it was red and nobody remembered to point it out to him. Today, on this most peculiar of days, he is wearing a tie in a rather fetching shade of lilac. I think this probably shows an uncertainty, a reluctance to nail his colours to the mast, that is also coming across in the speeches he has been giving stood in front of the door to Number Ten. This is in contrast to last night, when it was a shiny socialist scarlet, matching his wife's coat.

Nick Clegg, however, is the really interesting one here. For the two Leader's Debates I saw (I missed the third, I was in the pub) he wore a gold tie: yellow-orange, the colour of his party, but with a Look At Me twist. Gold is regal, gold is imperial, gold is trying to get people's attention. It's a bit self-aggrandising, a bit presumptuous. Today, however, in the light of his party's failure to live up to expectations, as the BBC news brands him 'kingmaker' and David Cameron's puppy-dog eyes plead to him from the podium, his tie is red. Bright red. Maybe it doesn't mean anything. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. But you bet your arse it isn't a mere coincidence - he thought about that, he made a conscious decision knowing that all eyes were on him. That is not an accidental tie.

In lieu of con report, because I always mean to write one and never actually do

2010-04-08T00:40:00.003+01:00

Good things about Eastercon:

Journey there and back being entirely non-expensive on account of how it was in London
Having a big, shiny hotel room with a wall-mounted flatscreen television and a huge bed and a massive window and a lovely bathroom (I absolutely adore staying in hotels)
Not being so hideously broke that I couldn't afford to eat anything other than pot noodles ever (there was a certain amount of pot noodle action, but on a whole three separate occasions I bought con food)
Being on a panel about alternative sexuality in SF with Roz Kaveney; flattering to be asked and fun to do
Moderating the Bad Sex panel, which was the most fun I had all weekend
Being on programme in general, in fact - I had four panels plus the cabaret. I really do love being on programme at cons
Spending time with lots of people I don't see very often
The cabaret being over, people having enjoyed it, and all the compliments I got on my singing
Feeling like I looked genuinely fabulous in several of my outfits
Church service on Sunday morning led by Douglas
Acquiring lovely new-to-me clothes from Sue
Having a shitload of groats to spend in the bar at the dead dog party
Impromptu chatting, drinking and chips before leaving on Tuesday

Slightly less good things about Eastercon:

Being siphoned off into different room for breakfast every morning but one and as a result having much less good breakfast every morning but one
Missing the vast majority of the programme items that I had wanted to get to
Not being funny enough while MCing the cabaret
Gin and tonic six quid for a single
Bar running out of nice cider on afternoon of second day (though this does always happen at every con)
Discovering toward end of con that the connecting door from my hotel room to the next one had been unlocked all weekend
Being so catatonically tired all the time and not really understanding why (much more so than usual, and I certainly wasn't getting less sleep than normal for me at cons)
Feeling a bit flat and vaguely depressed about a lot of the things I was involved in, and as though I hadn't done them as well as I usually do - this is almost certainly closely related to the above

Strange and notable but non-value-judged things about Eastercon:

Discovering that my tastebuds have altered to the extent that I am capable of enjoying real ale, in moderation (I only had one pint all weekend, but I did like it. This is odd but apparently very common in early twenties)
Being asked on several occasions by several different people if I had lost weight (I haven't, and I'm not sure why I looked like I had, and being congratulated on it felt odd and was slightly annoying - both for feminist fat-positive reasons and because despite these reasons I found it made me feel pleased anyway)

To Trial Or Not To Trial?

2010-02-26T13:56:00.001Z

Have you all seen this from rosefox? No? You probably should. It's alright, I'll wait here while you read it. Right, done that? Good.

One of the things this has brought up is the question of taking rape and sexual assault cases to trial. Lots of women don't. Lots of people think they should, and think less of them for not doing so. There are a lot of reasons why women don't, many of which are spoken about here in The Scotch Diary. There's one, though, which that post doesn't mention, that I'd like to bring up.

If I was raped, my rapist would almost certainly not be convicted.

I genuinely believe this to be true. If I was raped, I expect that a jury would decide - if not that I was lying, then at least that they couldn't prove beyond reasonable doubt that I wasn't. I would feel, throughout, as though I was more on trial than my rapist was. I would end the case having gained nothing, having caused anyone else who doubted me to begin with to think of me as no more than a liar, and with the knowledge that somewhere out there, scott-free and angry and vindicated, was the man who had raped me.

You know why I'm so sure of this? It's precisely because I am an honest and open person about my life and the way I chose to live it. I am bisexual, I am polyamorous, I am a practitioner of BDSM, and I am promiscuous with it. You only have to google me and all this is right there. No matter what people say, rape trails are pretty much character trials - and it's not the perpetrator's personality they're interested in.

We know you pretty much have to be Snow White for this to not come up in a rape trial. We know this. The clearest most recent example was this crock of shit reported by the BBC, where a judge described a woman's credibility as "shot to pieces" because it turned out she had group sex fantasies. If her case was blown out of the water because of this, what chance would mine have?

I don't know that I'd be willing to put myself through that, especially not at a time when I'd be traumatised and ill anyway. No woman should ever be pressured to put herself through that.

Which reminds me...

2009-10-05T22:51:00.000+01:00

I got called a "cocktease slag¹" today. I was standing outside Oakwood station with an unlit cigarette in my mouth, fumbling fruitlessly through my enormous handbag for a lighter (there are at LEAST five in there and I can NEVER find one). A man who had been standing nearby, also indulging in a pre-tube smoke, wandered over and offered me one. I accepted, thanked him, smiled, handed the lighter back. There was a pause. "You're very sexy." I said nothing. "Do you have a boyfriend? You've got great tits." I rolled my eyes, said "Fuck's sake. Thanks for the light, yeah?" (somewhat sarcastically, I confess) and slipped into the midst of a gaggle of people waiting at the nearby bus stop, leaving him to yell after me. I sat there till I could be pretty sure he'd have finished his fag, gone down to the platform and got on a train before I went to get one myself.

I do wonder, when things like this happen - which is often, extremely often - when did I commit the heinous crime of cockteasing? Was it when I thanked him and smiled? Was it when I accepted the light? Was it when I put on a v-neck top and a pair of heels this morning? Was it, perhaps, when I chose to perpetrate the shocking act of being Female In Public?

¹Which is a bit of a contradiction in terms, surely?

A woman's right to choose...

2009-09-04T10:11:00.004+01:00

Anyone who has ever read or participated in an online (or offline, though IME it tends to happen more often on the internet) discussion, flamewar or comment thread about obesity will have come across someone saying that "being fat is a choice". It's the ultimate argument, and people trot it out all the time: you can fix this whenever you want. You made this decision, took this choice all by yourself. It's your choice not to change it.

Do me a favour and imagine something for a moment. Imagine that you are a small child, and you realise that your body looks different to those of the other children you know. You don't know why, but even at the age of three or four you have somehow picked up that this is a Bad Thing. You start school, and they don't know why you're fat any more than you do. They know that being fat is bad, though, because they've picked that much up already from parents and adverts and 'headless fattie' news reports. So they start teasing you, all of these children whose bodies are smaller than yours, even before either of you understand why.

By six or seven, you've worked out what the key to this whole fat thing is: food. It seems ridiculous at first, that something so simple and insignificant can cause such trauma, but eventually you realise that it must be the case. You've picked up the idea of what is 'good' food and what is 'bad' food already and sit down one afternoon after school and make a list of all the things you aren't allowed to eat any more. Sweets, chocolate, crisps, jam, marmalade. At six, of course, you don't actually understand nutrition so really what the list is of is foods you think taste good; peas and bananas and raisins are on there alongside everything else. It doesn't help that the children at school have worked this out also - the teasing escalates to proper verbal and physical bullying. Already you've picked up that this problem is above all *embarrassing*. Food becomes linked to shame, to bullying, to unhappiness, and you're not at all sure what you can do about it.

By eight or nine you're making genuine attempts at dieting. You read every weight-loss article in your mother's magazines with a keen interest, you stare at your body in the mirror and poke at the bits that wobble. You look at your profile and think that your stomach - your nine year old stomach - sticks out and is revolting. But no kid of that age has much in the way of willpower, your attention span is short and what's more, you have little or no control over what you actually eat. You can't suddenly declare that you want to eat nothing but cabbage soup for the rest of your life. At ten, eleven you're making grandiose diet plans: you write out charts of how many calories you're allowed to eat in any given day, what exercise you should do, and stick them on your bedroom wall. When your parents see them there you want to die of shame. This is something that you can't even talk about with your own family. Perhaps there's one lone schoolfriend, probably one of only a very few you have, to whom you once said “do you ever think that maybe...you might want to get a bit thinner?” with pounding heart and drying mouth, lest they should laugh and never talk to you again. The relief when they agree if profound, though the subject rarely comes up.

At eleven you start secondary school. You have more autonomy now, more freedom. Everyone else buys crisps and sweets and chocolate and chips on the way to and from school, you can for the first time go into newsagents without parents and spend the few pounds you have on whatever you like. The bullying, of course, has grown up with your peers: playground shoving turns into real punches and kicks, verbal insults grow deeper and more painful. Your desperation to fit in leads you to do ridiculous things: you skip breakfast and lunch and then get so hungry that you eat crisps and chocolate, and then so angry with yourself for 'being weak' that you eat anything and everything you can get your hands on. You flinch every time you hear the word 'fat' in any context at all, and can't force yourself to say aloud. Writing it down, in secret diaries, is a way of punishing yourself - you write it over and over, that forbidden word, in scrawls and capitals and corpulent, blobular bubble letters.

Your secondary school life continues. The bullying gets worse. You learn to hate yourself: you learn that being fat means you are weak and unlovable, unattractive and disgusting. The evidence of these things is right there on your body, plain for all to see, and try as you might you can't hide it. You get better at starving yourself - you can go three or four days without eating at all now, though you have to practice some serious tricks and deception to get this past your parents. Other days you turn to food and wallow in it in despair, you go into every newsagent on your way to school and buy as many snacks as you think you can get away with in each. You know that the man behind the counter thinks you're disgusting too, and try to alter your route so that you can use different shops.

As you get better and better at starving yourself, you also become more and more likely to cut loose and binge. All of this is done in the utmost secrecy, you understand: you never finish any one package and you re-arrange biscuits in tins to look as though none have been taken. You bury packaging at the bottom of the bin and hide it in all sorts of places in your bedroom. You cry yourself to sleep at night. You are filled with loathing and disgust every time you look in the mirror or take a bath. You love the act of starving yourself, because you are doing something about this hideous and shameful deformity that you seem to have acquired through no fault of your own. Something drastic: at thirteen the idea of slow progress over several years is meaningless. Several years is a whole lifetime away and you will be a different person by then. A thin person. You hate yourself for binging, further proof that you have no willpower, that you deserve the insults and taunts.

One day it suddenly occurs to you that if you were to throw up after you've eaten, you won't digest everything you've binged on. This feels like freedom. You've been released from your shackles: no longer must you panic about everything that goes into your mouth, because it'll come out of it again before long. Getting this past your family is easier than you might think: run a shower while you're in the bathroom, play music to cover the noise, clean the toilet when nobody's looking. It's disgusting to read about because it's disgusting to do. Your eyes water, your teeth hurt, your throat aches. But it's worth it to you, just then, because you're *doing something about it*.

Everything you do, every moment of your life, is defined by being fat. You can't sit down without grabbing a cushion to hide your stomach. You practice yawning and coughing in front of the mirror so you know how to do it without accentuating your rounded cheeks and double chin. Shopping for clothes is a nightmare, eating in front of other people is unthinkable. Therapists and counsellors want you to tell them exactly what you've eaten in a binge, and you can't bring yourself to and just sit in their office crying instead. A program about eating disorders comes on the television one evening and you can't bear to with and watch it with your parents, but know that running out of the room would be too obvious. Someone yells an insult at you on the street and rather than retort you just walk by faster, head down, knowing in the pit of your stomach that they must be right.

And so if, after all this, you one day realise that perhaps you're not so disgusting after all, that perhaps you might even be quite attractive, that maybe one day there will be a light at the end of the tunnel that doesn't need starving and binging and purging and starving and binging and purging, why is it such a terrible thing to try to cling on to that? Why is is such a terrible thing to acknowledge that at no point did I make a choice to end up with this body, that I didn't choose my fatness any more than I chose my annoyingly short neck and pleasantly-shaped calves?

When did I choose to be fat, and who the fuck are they to tell me that I should choose this inescapable insanity over looking the way that I do?

Vegetarians Taste Better

2009-06-29T18:13:00.001+01:00

(originally posted elsewhere on Sep 30th 2008)

Here’s a thing that had never occurred to me until I was talking about it with a friend on Friday night: I have never really thought about the fact that I am a vegetarian. Well, of course I’ve thought about it, but I’ve never thought about it – not in the way that one thinks about one’s religious beliefs or political views. I just am. I am a vegetarian because I have always been a vegetarian; I have never eaten meat. My mother turned veggie when she was eighteen, so my sister and I were both brought up vegetarian. I don’t know anything about meat, I don’t know how to cook it or even really what the various different types look like.

Once, in a French lesson at school when I was about twelve, as part of learning different kinds of vocabulary we were given a list of French names of different kinds of food and a pile of little pictures to match them up to. You know the sort of thing, you find the little picture of an ice cream and pritt-stick it next to ‘une glace’ on the worksheet. I couldn’t finish it. I could translate ‘jambon’ as ‘ham’ and ‘boeuf’ as ‘beef’ just fine, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out which of the drawings was supposed to represent ham and which beef (and which steak, and which pork, and which chicken). In the end, I wrote the English words down on the worksheet next to the French ones and left all my little squares of paper in a pile, which confused my teacher no end. (Being French and something of a foodie herself, she had a terribly hard time comprehending my explanation when I gave it to her!)

My mother always offered me a choice, I was never forced not to eat meat. It’s never appealed to me, though, and truth be told I find the whole idea rather disgusting. I don’t mind that other people do it, of course, but the whole idea of eating a corpse turns my stomach whichever way you put it. The tiny handful of ‘accidents’ I’ve had (when I was about fourteen my nan once got confused about which plate of mini quiches was which and I had a mouthful before we noticed her mistake, and a couple of years ago a shop once gave me a meat pasty when I’d ordered a veggie one and I took a huge bite out of it before realising) have all left me feeling extremely queasy, and I can’t say the taste appealed in the slightest.

It didn’t occur to me until I noticed that my aforementioned friend sounded slightly surprised that it was something I ought to have thought about at all, to be honest. I find the notion of actual me consuming actual meat with my actual mouth completely unthinkable, in the same way that while I do indeed possess the physical capability to go and get on a bus stark naked while singing ABBA songs at the top of my voice, the real, genuine act of doing so isn’t very high up on my To-Do list.

nature vs nurture

2009-06-29T18:06:00.001+01:00

This article is very interesting - a Swedish couple are refusing to reveal the biological gender of their two-and-a-half year old child to anybody, the only people who know the nature of the toddler's genitals being those few who have bathed sie or changed hir nappy. I hope it doesn't all end in tears, though I suppose there's a very good chance that it will. My favourite comment, though many of them were predictably irritating, was this:

"I willingly admit that when I first read the article, my hetero bias took control and lead me down the path of, "these parents are very peculiar. Thank you to those brave enough to share your points of view. You have expanded my opinion and I no longer think the parents are bananas."

Eeeeee! Sensible person was wrong, realised why they were wrong, and changed their mind! LOVEIT.

My other favourite thing about it was the fact that they don't seem to have fallen foul of the most obvious fallacy: the kid sometimes wears skirts and dresses, not always just trousers. That struck me as both surprising and brilliant.

This, however, made me laugh:

"This is cruel on the child I think, it will haunt them later in life. The parents will prob be complaining when their child is gay, they are asking for it now tho!!...Sounds pretty gay to me!! Poor kid!"

AHAHAHHA STUPID PERSON IS STUPID.

Now, though, I'm wondering if hir actual biological gender made any difference to the parent's decision. I can see some very good arguments for a person being more likely to do this with a born-male child than with a born-female child, and also a couple the other way round.

Hmm. Further thoughts of the effect of socialisation on gender presentation to follow, I think. I must first call my mother...

these strange and foreign lands

2009-06-23T07:43:00.000+01:00

When I was a child, my favourite way to spend time (besides reading) was by what I called Doing A Story. This involved making up a story in my head and acting it out, complete with voices and scenery and props and costumes. I had an excellent dressing-up box that consisted of elaborate scarves and bits of lace that I assume my mother wore during her New Romantics phase some fifteen years earlier. Being an only child (my sister wasn't born till I was almost ten, and was of course A Baby for some years after that - she's only eleven now) and rather friendless for most of my childhood I spent hours this way, both in my bedroom and in the playground at school. There was a vast plethora of characters in these stories - rather a lot of princesses, as is only to be expected, but also not a few tavern wenches, creakingly glamorous millionairesses in their fifties (think Death Becomes Her or Joanna Lumley) and spunky rag-clad Victorian orphans.

The honest truth is that I never stopped. At some point - possibly when I started secondary school - they stayed entirely in my head and I didn't act them out or speak the words aloud any longer, but I still Do A Story to this day. I suspect the form first changed at the start of secondary school because that brought with it a mile-long walk either way, and to occupy myself during this time I would go somewhere in my head. Still I do this whenever I'm walking anywhere alone; I begin to set the scene as soon as I set foot outside of the front door and by the time I get wherever I'm going I have to haul myself back into the real world again and try to remember what I left the house for in the first place.

They have gone through phases, of course. In my early teens they were all long and vaguely eventless chronicles of my future life as a devoted wife (to a tall, dark-haired man called Richard Roseley), beloved mother to four children (the eldest of whom was a blonde, blue-eyed girl called Elizabeth) and excellent secondary school History teacher beloved by all her students (yes, this is truly what I wanted to do with my life when I was thirteen, fourteen - more than absolutely anything else. Ridiculous, I know!)

There are also recurring characters. Elisaveta is my ten year old mispronunciation and misspelling of the name of a European princess in a Chalet School novel who became the blonde-haired blue-eyed Mary Sue of every piece of fiction I wrote in my last year of primary school (of which there were many, we did a lot of Creative Writing in school that year). Diana is a black-haired American who appeared when they were building a new house in our road when I was about twelve. I walked past it every day on my journeys to and from school and installed a family there, Diana being the girl slightly older than myself who became by bosom best friend. I told everyone at school about her, and occasionally used to pretend to be her on the phone to people, using the NYC accent that either I was much better at then than I am now or, more likely, they were all too young to spot instantly as a terrible fake. I have no memory of when Ruby, the bombastic redheaded nurse from Yorkshire who calls everyone 'duck' and makes tea all the time, first made an appearance but I suspect I was six or seven and she particuarly has stayed with me in various ways ever since.

I'm sure I can't be the only one who did this as a child, nor the only one who has carried it with them into adulthood. These games and stories shaped me and molded me, fed my fertile imagination and gave me an oft-needed escape. I hope I shall always have them, and always have the ability to write about them afterwards.

Partito di Rifondazione Comunista - Partito dei Comunisti Italiani

2009-06-03T17:08:00.001+01:00

That, my friends, is the rather promising-sounding name of the single political party in Europe running in tomorrow's elections who, according to this excellent profiler, most closely match my own opinions. At least I know who I'd vote for if I was Italian. People have told me that I look a bit Italian...

As it is, however, I don't have an Italian bone in my body¹ and will have to choose one of our sorry lot instead. The Internet keeps telling me I want to vote Green (as did that profiler, when I restricted the answers to England only). I've never thought of myself as a Green, but perhaps I should reconsider. I'm certainly having a fair amount of trouble finding any good solid Reds.

¹Any responses of "would you like one?" will receive a look of utter disdain, obviously.

Standing up for my right to be a fattie

2009-01-14T14:38:00.002Z

"They're not talking about me, are they, in that fatty campaign thingy, the one done by the Wallace & Gromit people? I'm not obese. This new government weight campaign, the one with the Stone Age people modernising and growing flabby, is for the fatties, isn't it, and we all know who they are. It's not going to work either, is it? Because the very people the campaign is aimed at will ignore it, won't they?
Well, yes, probably. Because the people it is aimed at really is you and me. Public-health campaigns such as Change4Life, launched last week, have the greatest effect if a large number of low-risk people change their behaviour; far greater than if the smaller number of high-risk people do. So, yes, it is you and me they are talking to."

So said Alice Miles in The Times a few days ago. "You and me"? Cor blimey, Alice, anyone could start to suspect that in your eyes, "the fatties" aren't real people. "The fatties" aren't you and me, are they - they're that nameless, faceless other, the headless torso that wobbles over our television screens every night on the ten o' clock news.

I've got news for you, Alice. The fatties are real. They're your next door neighbor, the person who sells you your sexist right-wing magazines at the co-op and the teacher in your children's classroom. They are reading this article and agreeing with it because they too think of the fatties as 'them' rather than 'us', or crying over it because they can't bear the awfulness of being 'them', or raging with fury at your utter ignorance of the realities of 'obesity'.

She's not as bad as some of her commenters, mind. Rick Hepner of Salt Lake City, USA, adds that the "best use of government funds in this campaign is to put up full-length mirrors everywhere." Because obviously, fat people don't know that they're fat, because if they did they'd be thin. Obviously, the way to 'cure' somebody of something that they feel embarrased and ashamed of is to embarrass and shame them even further. I'll tell you what, Rick Hepner of Salt Lake City, USA, if people could be bullied into being thin I'd have been a beanpole from the age of five.

She finishes with the gloriously comforting line "Ministers should be ready to legislate to force a change in behaviour. Smoking only dipped sharply when it was banned in public places. Strict food labelling, sugar tax, treadmills...I don't know. The makers of Wallace & Gromit might be able to come up with an idea or two. Gromit doesn't have a mouth."

I shall look forward to being banned from eating on the street and having my mouth gaffer-taped shut by my GP. It's for the best, anyway - otherwise good, honest, hard-working thin people might see me eating and feel sick!

Christ. There really is no hope for the world. Even Susie Orbach's sold out.

"No-ternity"? No thanks...

2009-01-14T11:27:00.002Z

Mme Dati, the French Justice minister, returned to work just five days after giving birth by cesarean section, the Daily Heil tells me. Anne Diamond frowns and tells her horror story of doing the same four times over, Laura Tenison cheers her on and regales us with rose-tinted memories of her own one-day maternity breaks.

Few think to entertain the radical notion that perhaps women should be allowed to make their own decisions about what is and isn't good for them. As she delivered by c-section I'd worry that perhaps one shouldn't be running around being a high-profile high-heeled politician quite so enthusiastically this soon after major abdominal surgery, but were a man to do the same he would be lauded for his dedication. Well, unless he too was doing it in high heels, which would give the Mail something else to boggle over and thus me something else to rant about.

I know nothing about this woman. I do not know if her politics are on the side of light, if she is going to enjoy motherhood or not, if she has left her baby with a husband or a nanny or a creche. What I do know about the undoubtedly chic Mme Dati, however, is that she is a woman and a human being and a politician and has, like any woman, the right to run her life howsoever she may choose - something that both the concerned Diamond *and* the congratulatory Tenison seem to have forgotten. The fact of her now being a mother does not make her body public property nor ought it to put her behavior up to even closer scrutiny than ever before. One you have conceived a child, it seems, your body and actions are there for all to poke, prod and comment upon. On behalf of Rachida Dati, would you all please kindly fuck off.

As a side note, one of the comments to the article made me laugh:
"Has anybody a thought for the baby? Where is the bonding? Where is the breastfeeding? Women give birth to humans, not cats."
Which is a terrible shame, really, as if the latter were true I'd probably be a lot more enthusiastic about the idea.