Lubin Odana: Est. 2002

2012-01-28T17:04:00.003Z

Move Over Magnolia Bakery

I had put aside today to make cupcakes. Having not baked since I was 12 and my mother used to say each Friday night "Make us a Swiss Roll our Paul", I was excited to try it out again, and I wanted to capture some of the Bleecker Street glamour of the cupcake craze (which is now officially dead as I've got on board). What next Bleecker Street?

I got up early, consulted the book of cupcakes which I'd bought on Thursday (£20), and made a list. Luckily, Sainsburys had all the ingredients (£30), even orange blossom water (!). I didn't even mind when I got halfway home and realised I'd forgotten the icing sugar.

My recipe book was full of helpful hints like "weigh out the exact measurements - any deviation will result in disaster etc." so I was glad I had an electronic scale which gets measurements to the nearest micron. However, the batteries weren't working, so that was another trip out. "They cost £9 each," said the man in the jeweller's, rather shamefaced. I had to buy two (£18). Then I realised I'd need some tupperware to put them all in, so made the trip to a kitchen shop, where a special cup-cake holder thing was only £27.

I got home, feeling a bit lighter in the wallet, and by now slightly glum. However, I realised I didn't have one of those special cupcake baking trays. At this point, my fella, seeing my thunderous face, kindly offered to go out to the kitchen shop and buy me one (£11).

After that, it went quite well. I made a batch of banana/chocolate ones, and another batch of orange ones. Here's what the finished product looks like.

They're rather different from the picture in the recipe book. But at least they're edible.

And at roughly £30 a cupcake, they must be of good quality.

2012-01-23T13:32:00.002Z

Born under a bad (street) sign

My mother directed me to a local news story - the boy who lived next door but one to us has just been imprisoned for four years over his involvement in the drug-related death of a young woman. He's not a boy now of course, but that's the way I remember him. Carrying out internet searches of the street where I grew up always makes me miserable - apart from the ultra low cost of houses there (the three bedroom, two bathroom home I grew up in recently sold for £75,000), there are news stories of gang violence, attempted rape and people being set on fire. I can only feel glad that when I left for university in 1990, I vowed never to go back.

It wasn't always like that. My parents, who moved there in the early 1970s, had to pass an interview with the local council. My mother said that being allocated the brand new council house was like "winning the lottery". Next door to us was a manager at the local Fine Fayre supermarket. Across the street was a teacher. Everyone worked. There was a high proportion of young married couples with kids. All of the children played happily in the street together - old-fashioned games like hopscotch and hide and seek. It was idyllic.

Then it went wrong - the unions instigated a series of particularly nasty strikes in the 1970s, resulting in power cuts, bodies not being buried and piles of litter in the streets. The rest of the country had had enough, voted in the Tories and Margaret Thatcher took the tough approach, instigating a number of changes, some which appeared to have the intentional goal of hurting working class people, others which had unintended consequences. The poor got less attention and help - "on your bike" said Norman Tebbit - and if you had the wherewithall to do so, there were opportunities out there. But for those people who found it more difficult to help themselves, their situation worsened.

People lost their jobs, the local miners went on strike for over a year, parents started getting divorced and car crimes and house robberies started to occur (it's depressing how many crimes on council estates often involve poor people robbing other poor people). Removal vans appeared in the street with increasing regularity - the manager and the teacher quietly moved away to buy houses in nicer neighbourhoods, rather than rent in an area that was going downhill. We never saw or heard from them again. And in their place - an increasing number of "problem families" - large numbers of children - some with behavioural difficulties, and different men going in and out. It's always harder to keep relationships going when you don't have any money or any hope.

My parents suffered. My Dad, who worked as a full-time bus-driver found that his pay couldn't keep up with price increases, despite his increasing hours spent doing overtime. So we sold the car and my mother carefully budgeted every meal. His pay became so pitiful that we had to have government assistance, only coming off it when my mother also got a full-time job. The days of mothers staying at home and looking after the children were becoming a fantasy for working-class families.

And then the drug trade appeared. By the 1990s, a policeman was posted at the gates of my old school, to stop the drug dealers from getting to the children. The girl next door used to say that she could get drugs at school any time she wanted. Living on a council estate started to feel less like winning the lottery and more like a prison sentence. So it's not really surprising that my street now comes across as a dystopian nightmare in the news. Thanks Maggie.

2012-01-22T14:25:00.002Z

Six Year Olds Won't Go To Rebab

My fella's niece takes dance classes so last weekend we went over to St Helens to see her (and several hundred other people) performing at their local theatre. It was nice to see so many young people (all girls) involved in "the arts", rather than getting pregnant (which was the main hobby of the girls I went to school with), though it was a shame there were no boys involved. Billy Elliot is still very much the exception. Although towards the end, some of the Dads put on a (comedy) performance. They'd wisely put the little good-looking one front centre. And I'm ashasmed to say that that was my favourite bit.

Who'd be a parent these days - it's so expensive. As well as paying for the weekly classes, all the constumes (some quite complex) had to be paid for, and there were announcements banning photography and mobile phones during the performance, presumably so that professionally done photos could be purchased by family members afterwards. The man sitting next to me had his phone out and ushers asked him twice to turn it off - both times he just hid it under his coat for 10 seconds. (I considered it a personal triumph that I didn't scream "JUST TURN IT OFF!!" at him.) But worryingly, he did not return to his seat for the second half. Maybe the ushers decided to beat him up in the interval, or perhaps he'd had enough.

Whilst the performances were good, some of the song choices were slightly odd. Some of the youngest girls - aged I'm guessing about 6-7, did an Amy Winehouse tribute. This involved them all dressed as Amy Winehouse, complete with huge beehive wigs, and singing "They tried to make me go to rehab, I said 'no, no, no.'" Not exactly age-appropriate. Me and my fella had to restrain laughter during that number. We have been trying to think of good follow-ups for next time - perhaps they could do Sister Morphine or Frankie Says Relax.

There was also liberal (and unnecessary) use of dry ice - one unfortunate ballet dancer was positioned right next to the ice machine and every now and again during one number, a big gust of dry ice would emerge from between her legs, with the machine making a mocking parping sound. Again - we were both jamming our hands into mouths for that dance.

There was a group of older (40+) women who did a few dance numbers. My eldest sister-in-law, who was present, thought they were great and talked about joining them next year. That was until my fella (rather cruelly) referred to them as the Baby Janes. She's gone off the idea now.

I'm not sure we'll be invited back next year.

2012-01-08T20:36:00.002Z

Girls will (now always) be Girls

I've written about my love of Lego, stemming back to my childhood, on this blog before. And this Christmas I enjoyed building Lego spaceships ~~with~~ for my nephews. Every couple of months I receive the Lego catalogue, although this month was a bit surprised to see that there was a pink pull-out section in the middle which was aimed squarely at girls.

This new range, called Lego Friends, features female lego figures who are more shapely, with breasts, big hair and curvy bodies. Each one has a set of interests - one's into animals, another likes singing and dancing, and another one like organising parties. You get the idea. Apart from the one who is a bit of a science geek, they're all stereotypically feminine characters, and the sets come in soft pastel colours. There are no boy figures. But as Lego has been marketed mainly as a boys' toy for years, boys can buy the pirate ships, the space ships, the fire engines and tractors and digggers and so on...

Not everyone wants to be friends with the Lego Friends though. A petition at change.org against Lego Friends currently has just over 3000 signatures. But there are also a lot of people who love the Lego Friends. This blog, called Feminists Freak Out Over Lego Friends, is dedicated to "shedding light on their omissions, skewed facts and images." And at Gizmodo, a cool and very butch-looking space-ship is built out of the Lego Friends blocks. The site claims that "feminists criticising the new Lego Friends sets just don’t get it."

People against Lego Friends argue that the set is restrictive, both to boys and girls. Girls are encouraged to confirm to feminine stereotypes, whereas it would be very difficult for any self-respecting boy to want to play with such a girly Lego set (personally, I would have loved some of the Lego Friends sets when I was a child, as long as there had been male figures to play with as well as the female ones). By narrowly defining what boys and girls are supposed to find interesting and the way they're supposed to play, the Lego Friends set ultimately limit possibilities for children - and potentially will result in a generation of very narrowly gender-defined adults who will have very conservative views about how men and women should act. God forbid it you don't "fit in".

I didn't fit in when I was growing up. I sometimes played with my sister's dolls (and when the two boys I hung out with at school found out, they refused to play with me ever again). I read far too many Enid Blyton books about upper-class girls' schools, and I played ballet music on the piano. I wasn't totally girly - I also had a lot of boy-geek interests - I had books about how to be a spy or detective, I liked reading about the solar system, I had a microscope, and I was into Dungeons and Dragons and writing my own computer games on my Spectrum 48K. And I played with Lego a lot. In the 70s/80s, Lego was still pretty gender neutral - you just bought blocks and created what you wanted. This advert, from the early 80s, shows how Lego wasn't seen as a boys' toy.

So while I did occasionally encounter hostility for not being the most masculine of boys, on the whole, my parents and peers didn't make too much of a big deal about it. I would hate to be a child again in 2012 - because even if you have very accepting parents, society expects boys and girls to act in very different ways from a much earlier age - and it's harder to get away with being gender-neutral or liking things marketed to the opposite sex. I've noticed it myself when shopping for my nephews - most toys are segregated into boys/girls sections in toyshops - and my nephews seemed able from quite an early age to figure out which ones were for them.

In some ways this seems surprising - especially considering that there have been moves to reduce sexism and gender stereotyping in wider society. I don't view the 1970s as a time of sexual equality. I think about sneaking downstairs at night-time to watch the Benny Hill Show and Miss World, and the mad housewife on the Shake and Vac Advert.

Actually though, 2012 doesn't seem to have improved that much.

The sexism and stereotyping of women is still there - for several reasons. First - it's validated by a jokey "lads", ironic stance. Second, men are objectified too (though not as much as women), so that makes it OK apparently. Yay equality!

Third, the left-wing political imperative to reduce sexism, is trumped again and again by capitalism and advertising. Having spent the last week in New York - the home of aggressive advertising, I saw even more adverts featuring idealised, stereotyped male and female bodies than I do in the UK. I always leave NYC feeling a bit inadequate - and part of that is due to the relentless advertising which is designed to make you feel miserable about yourself so you'll buy stuff.

The makers of Lego Friends have argued that the new set is based on anthropological research which examined how boys and girls play - and that they're giving children what they want. Defenders of Lego Friends have also pointed to other toys like Bratz, and My Little Pony - which have a similar aesthetic and are popular with girls. In fact girls' toys
in general have been redesigned to become more girly over time. So it's perhaps not surprising that girls like the Lego Friends - those girls are already growing up in a world where the concepts associated with Lego Friends are already marketed at them, and normalised for them. Imagine that for seven years you mocked a child every time they ate vanilla ice-cream and praised them every time they ate chocolate ice-cream, and then gave them a choice of a vanilla or a chocolate biscuit. Which would they chose?

And market forces dicate that you should sell stuff to people that they will buy. So it's very easy to simply go with the flow - and keep churning out increasingly girly, pink stuff for girls, and violent action figures and spaceships for boys.

I don't believe that children are completely blank slates and we can turn them into anything - I've noticed that my nephews tended to be very interested in trains, diggers and dinosaurs even before they could speak. They are typical little boys. I suspect most children do tend towards gender stereotypes - although I believe that they aren't as far towards the stereotypes as the toymakers would have us believe. My nephews also engaged in less masculine behaviour at various points when they were younger. But most kids generally go with the stereotyped toys, just because it's easier. It's like being ambidextrous or bisexual - you just end up being right-handed or living a heterosexual life - because it's easier that way, and most of us go with the flow.

How do I feel about the Lego Friends? When I saw the Lego Friends set in my catalogue, I thought "Oh Lego, why have you betrayed me!" But my fella (who always plays a great devil's advocate) pointed out that I'd quite happily bought the Star Wars Lego sets for my nephews this Christmas and hadn't complained about gender stereotyping there. My (rather poor) response was that stereotyping when it's done on boys isn't as bad because boys' toys tend to emphasise power - so that'll help to prime them to get powerful positions in society.

But he's right. If I'm going to get annoyed about Lego Friends, I should also be annoyed about all other toys, including the way that the other Lego sets are marketed at boys.

Anyway, I've signed the petition. I doubt it'll change anything. Feminists have such a bad PR these days that even the word "feminist" seems to evoke visions of angry, irrational, man-hating lesbians.

What the Lego Friends represents to me then - is a kind of final rejection of feminism - and a triumph of the New World Order - where men are men, and women are women.

Can I be your friend?

2012-01-06T15:59:00.008Z

Back in the 1990s/early 2000s, before I had a blog, I used to have a website where I posted up reviews of some of my favourite tv programs and films - the trashier and campier the better. The website is long gone, but I still have those reviews on my computer. Here's a review of my favourite Andy Warhol film, Women in Revolt.

Women in Revolt

"This incest has gone on long enough! We've been living in sin darling. And I'm sick of it. Sick and fed up. Of you. And ALL MEN! How do you like THEM apples?"

In 1967 damaged, disenfranchised, groovy, Valerie Solanis wrote the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, and for, her next trick went on to shoot Andy Warhol, thereby earning a lot more than those cliched 15 minutes of fame. The central thesis of the book was that the male is a "biological accident..an incomplete female...a walking abortion". And with the invention of sperm banks, there is no longer any need for men. Valerie gave a copy of her Manifesto (and her play Up Your Ass) to Warhol's crowd of vampires, who had a good laugh and then made sure that she was firmly, irrevocably socially excluded. People have been shot for a lot less.

Three years later, we have "Andy Warhol presents a film by Paul Morrissey", entitled "Women In Revolt". The titular women are actually Warhol's "super-stars" who started life as men: Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn. In the film, the three women are pivotal players in a women's movement, who decide to give up men, become lesbians and abandon their careers. Their group is called PIG (Politically Involved Girls). I have a feeling that this film owes a LOT to the SCUM Manifesto and poor Valerie.

Like all the other Warhol/Morrissey films, it's badly put together, badly acted, with poor sound and film quality. Actually, "acting" is probably an unfair word to use as many of these films seem to have improvised dialogue - which isn't neccesarily a bad thing, when done properly (it isn't here though). In many ways this film is almost unwatchable, especially the first time you view it. But give it a chance, make judicious use of "fast-forward" and you'll be rewarded.

What is it about plotlines that feature three camp women (and my tendency to review them)? First it was Valley of the Dolls, then Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. I even based my own soap opera, Doll Soup around three females. So it seems only fitting that Candy, Jackie and Holly should be featured here. Candy is my favourite. She plays a classy, jaded Long Island socialite who wears a sleek black turban-hat in many of her scenes, and seems to be the only one who is actually acting. (At least she has good diction, meaning that most of her words are easy to understand.) Candy has a strong jawline and perfect poise. She's beautiful. Her tired, laid-back style is perfect, and apart from the scene where she is sexually compromised by a film agent, her scenes are the most fun to watch. Whether it's berating her incestuous brother, lording it over the other members of PIG, or modelling as a "blonde on a bum trip" (or even a bum on a blonde trip as one cast member succinctly puts it), she's the ultimate scene stealer. I love her.

Jackie plays a "frigid, middle-class" woman, with frizzy unattractive hair (long before the invention of conditioner), a habit of talking out of the corner of her mouth, and an earnest, confused way of speaking. She's the lynch-pin of PIG, and eventually the one who will betray them all (by using PIG money to have sex with male prositutes). My favourite Jackie scene is near the beginning of the film where she disgustedly sprays air-freshener onto the arm-pits, crotch and bottom areas of her naked male "slave".

I'm afraid I wasn't too impressed with the trashy character played by Holly Woodlawn, who actually scared me several times. However, her contribution to the film is severely marred by the fact that she is playing a nymphomaniac who often disrupts scenes by attempting to have sex with other characters. Her delivery seems to be full of screamed lines which are hard to understand and apt to induce a headache. When she ended up as a drunken street-person, urinating in doorways and falling over in the snow, I was applauding.

The idea of getting men to play the revolting (in both senses of the word) women is interesting. Like so many of these "art-house" films, the "message", if indeed there is one, is never very clear. Was Warhol having a little joke at the expense of the Women's Movement (the same could even be argued of Solanis)? Or was he subverting the concept of "women" or "the oppressed" by having transvestites (traditionally one of the most oppressed identities in our lovely western society) play the lead roles? There's a scene early on where Jackie tries (unsuccessfully) to explain the "movement" to one of the many anonymous, passive men who litter the film. The camera goes for a close-up and it's a big mistake as everything goes out of focus. Was this merely a case of bad camera work and lazy editing, or it the temporary poor focus supposed to be a commentary on Jackie's ability to make sense of the women's movement? Am I trying to read too much into these things again? I think the answer to all these questions is "yes".

Not a lot actually seems to happen in the film, apart from the women sitting around, complaining about men and exchanging horror stories along the lines of "I was raped when I was two!", "A policeman invaded my house and sucked my toes!" etc. Their most direct protest occurs when two of their group take to the streets and attempt to administer an unwanted enema to a man who's digging up the road. The inevitable comparisons to John Waters always ensue...

I particularly liked Jackie's scene with "Mr America", a muscle-bound young man. When, in the middle of a painful, humiliating sexual encounter Mr America asks if she is coming, Jackie comes back with "I think I'm going". Also amusing is the final sequence with Jackie screaming abuse at her baby, Holly as a falling-down drunk, and Candy, finally having made it all the way to Hollywood, where she gets a grilling from a newspaper reporter which ends in them both scuffling on the floor.

Great Lines
Jackie pulls Candy's hair
Candy: Ow! That is not a wig!

Holly: But women will be FREE!

Candy: So don't tell me where I go and what I do. I'll go to each and every meeting I want to. You've made me old before my time!

Holly: They're gonna think we're lesbians!
Jackie: No! They're not gonna think we're lesbians Holly! A school-teacher and a model? Those are lesbians?

The girls are trying to get a reluctant Candy to join the cause.
Betty: Do you know what happened to me?
Candy: Well, how would I know?

Jackie: Well women's lib says that we should have our say too!
Mr America: Fuck you. That's the whole trouble with you broads. You don't stop talking.

Jackie: Women's Liberation has shown me just WHO I AM and just what I can be!

Holly: Mother-fucker! I hate you! I'm tired of looking at you. Tired! Arsehole! Men! I hate men! You! I hate you!

Candy: I'm young. I want to live. We're rich. We're famous. We're beautiful....and miserable!

2012-01-05T16:14:00.007Z

1930s hats are the next big thing apparently

Back in Lancaster again, which always looks and feels a lot smaller after NYC. Ironically, because Lancaster (population 46,000) has a cathedral, it's a city, whereas Greenwich Village - which has towering residential apartments of many floors, gets to be a village. Everyone wants to be something they ain't.

One disconcerting aspect of being in America for me is that people talk louder than they do in the UK. When my fella and I are out in public, we mumble to each other so that nobody within a mile's distance will be able to hear our conversation and realise how weird we are. Unfortunately, this frequently means that even we can't hear each other, so if anybody did successfully eavsedrop on us, all they'd hear would be "what?"

On the other hand, whenever we hear anybody else say anything audible in public, we quietly make fun of them. NYC is therefore an endless source of opportunity, as everybody is so articulate and interesting - and they all do everything bigger, as if they're in a play and want to ensure that even the people in the back row get their money's worth. They like the attention, and really, it would be churlish of me not to give it to them.

What is weird though is the practice of talking or thinking aloud, which appears to mark out a large difference between British and American people. We passed a man searching for something in his wallet. "Where's my damn money!!" he shouted out loudly, voicing his thoughts. And when my fella was innocently crossing the road, another man shouted "You're all walking into the path of death!" So, sometimes, I felt like I had wandered into an episode of the Twilight Zone having temporarily being granted the ability to hear everybody's thoughts. (One channel was showing a Twilight Zone marathon over the New Year period, and that was actually an episode.)

We spent a lot of time on this holiday walking up and down Bleeker Street, which is full of interesting little shops. I had wanted to see the Magnolia Bakery - which is credited as kicking off the "cupcake craze" which has even got to Lancaster. I was a bit disappointed to see that it looked a bit shabby from the outside - and had net curtains that made it look like a rundown cafe in a British seaside resort.

Another cupcake place called Molly's was nicer - although every time we went in, we had to get take-out as it was so busy (and we went in a lot). And the lady serving kept validating our choices "that's my favourite one!", which is a bit much when all you're buying is a cupcake.

I noticed several shops on Bleeker Street that were selling 1930s style hats, so I suspect that once this trend works it way round the block, that's what I'll be wearing in 2015. Despite liking the hats, I didn't buy one because had I done so, I would have immediately killed the trend.

This sinful billboard was right by where we were staying.

Not of God! Not Christian! Dark-sided!

I saw it and was instantly morally corrupted. I think I saw those two chaps at the gym I used while I was there. In fact, everyone looked like that at my gym (except me). The effect was even more demoralising than usual.

But when I got home I had an email from someone who had seen me in a cafe in Chelsea and recognised me from this blog.

It wasn't Andersen Cooper. But I'm still pleased.

2011-12-30T22:19:00.002Z

Uncruised

I walked past CNN's Anderson Cooper today in the very gay area of Chelsea and he didn't even give me a second look.

2011-12-28T23:19:00.003Z

Little Dogs

I am having my annual post-Christmas in New York week. Rather than staying in a 40 storey hotel in Times Square, we are in an apartment in Greenwich Village. It costs $2000 a week and is basically a corridor with furniture. You could only use the bath if you were appearing in the Wizard of Oz as a Munchkin. No cats will ever be swung in it. It is a very old building and between 5am and 10pm the pipes cry out as if continuously in pain. But it is only a few doors away from the Stonewall Tavern - so I like the feeling that I am walking down the same streets where angry drag queens defiantly did chorus-line kicks and set the birth of Gay Liberation in motion (in America at least - in the UK, it all happened anyway, and with a lot less fuss and excitement, but that's one of the many differences between the two countries).

New York no longer feels unfamilar - this must be my 15th or so trip here, but it always feels different. And one of the things about visiting a place every 12 months, is that it is different slightly from the last time I was here. There was one year when all the men had beards. That fad seems to have died out thankfully (they're so scratchy), but the latest fashion appears to be little dogs. I saw about 10 this morning, most of them being walked by 30 and 40 something gay men.

I hate little dogs - while I like dogs generally, if I was ever to have one, it would have to be capable of killing someone or at least maiming them. All that little dogs can do is annoy and wee themselves with excitement every ten minutes or so. But it's sort of heartening that the gay men of Greenwich Village have all taken it upon themselves to make a commitment to something other than their pectoral muscles. I have a theory that people who get little dogs actually want to have children and settle down. The little dogs are like those little stablising wheels on bikes that children have. And the next stage will be actual long term relationships and real children. So my prediction is that in two years time I'll be coming here and seeing lots of gay men with pushchairs (or strollers in their language).

And there'll be a sad dog pound somewhere in Brooklyn which will reverebrate with the sound of a thousand abandoned little dogs.

2011-12-17T21:41:00.002Z

My first Stephen King novel (in about 20 years)

When I was 13 I joined one of those mail-order book clubs, where you got books at a slightly discounted price, as long as you committed to purchasing 6 a year. The book club sold mystery and horror books, so for the next few years, I fed on a diet of VC Andrews, James Herbert and Stephen King.

Stephen King was my favourite author - speed-reading was my normal pace, so his enormous books kept me busy for at the best part of a weekend. Although I remember one particularly wet Sunday when I hadn't been outside all day, but had read about 400 pages in one sitting. I went into the kitchen to get a drink, then opened my eyes to realise I was lying on the floor. I'd passed out without realising. It was probably a blood pressure thing, and it's the only time that's happened.

The first book I read by him was The Mist - a brilliant, spooky, doomed novella - similar to an HP Lovecraft story, where a group of small-town Americans get trapped in a supermarket when a weird mist full of monsters from another dimension descends over the them. The horror within the supermarket was more disturbing than the horror outside - with the microcosm of society breaking down pretty quickly as the frightened shoppers fell under the thrall of religious fundamentalist Mrs Carmody - who starts demanding EXPIATION! and blood sacrifices. King's talent is in writing about ordinary, recognisable people who are put in bizarre situations. The Mist was made as a film a few years ago - and is one of my top 10 films.

I also enjoyed King's novels that he'd written under the name Richard Bachmann - particularly two that were set in futuristic dystopias and involved game shows where the contestants die (this was the 80s and while we're not there yet, King definitely was onto someting). One was made into an awful film (The Running Man), the other (The Long Walk), probably can't ever be filmed - it's a totally depressing story anyway.

I largely abandoned Stephen King when I went to university. His novels seemed a bit too folksy, at times verging on syrupy, and I didn't have time to read anything but Psychology journal articles anwyay. But I was intrigued by his latest novel 11.22.63 - which is about a man who time travels from the present day to the 1950s - with the aim of preventing the assassination of JFK. It's another massive doorstep of a book (or it would be had I not bought the online version), and it took me a good week to finish. For longstanding King fans, there's a cameo from two characters from one of his most well-known books: It. The story is less horror, but more suspense with a love story, as the hero ends up falling in love with a woman from the 50s. The past is painted as almost idyllic place - apart from the racism and sexism - where cars are better and people are friendlier. The time travel plot device is interesting - it is possible to go back and forward in time through a portal, although every time you return to the 1950s, everything has been reset and you appear at exactly the same moment as before. There's also a weird tramp-like man who seems aware of the time traveller in a way that other people are not. Another interesting aspect of time travel is that the past is "obdurate" - it does not like to be changed, and the more you try to change it, the more events will appear to randomly conspire to stop you. (The past is a bit like my 39 year old body - it wants to be a certain shape and size and will conspire against me if I try to change it too much.)

The hero is further hampered by the conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination. He can't just kill Lee Harvey Oswald at any point, because he may not have been acting alone. So he has to wait until just a few weeks beforehand, living in the past for 5 years until he can be certain he's got the right man. Of course, as we don't know for certain what happened, we have to suspend our disbelief and go along with King's version as being the right one. But if you can buy time travel, then you may as well go along with the rest of it.

Time travel is not a new concept (and King draws on the Ray Bradbury short story "A Sound of Thunder" - where the idea of the "butterfly effect" comes from), but I liked what King did with it. And now I might even give "Under the Dome" a go.

2011-12-04T18:48:00.004Z

Not on CHRISTMAS!

December 1st is Christmas Decorations day, and I fancied a real Christmas tree this year so dragged this mammoth back to the house.

But that night, when I came back from the gym, the tree was lying on the floor in a very undignified position. Meanwhile, the cat was sitting nearby, making a lot of fuss and looking either traumatised or guilty.

I guess I should have bought him those cha-cha heels he was asking for.

2011-12-03T10:51:00.001Z

Mutant

I sometimes put my lack of interest in football to the fact that I missed the first week of term, when presumably the rules were explained, and nobody ever bothered to catch me up. But I doubt things would have been different had I known the rules. It involved several things that I hate - being outdoors for extended periods of time, having to physically compete - where aggression matters, getting dirty, and being part of a team. I would much rather be off doing something solitary inside, like playing the piano.

So I would spend the whole hour hanging around on the sidelines, cold and bored. If teams were picked, I was usually picked last or close to last - a humiliating ritual, designed to establish and fix a hierarchy of masculinity. It always seemed so unfair that it didn't happen in other lessons - where I would have been picked first.

I never understood how all the other boys seemed to instinctively know about the World Cup. When I was about 9, the teacher put up a chart on the wall showing all the World Cup matches that were taking place that summer, and the boys gathered around it excitedly, giving their own opinions about who was going to do well, and who would be knocked out in the first round. It was as if they were talking another language, and even now, when I hear men talking football, I start looking for a fire exit. Because in this country, and probably the world over, you fail as a man if you confess to disliking the national sport.

During another World Cup (I was about 15 by this time), England got into the semi-finals, and then lost to Germany. My Dad, who is not particularly interested in football either, had started following the World Cup that year, as did many people who only bother to get properly onboard when it looks like England might win. He was devastated when England lost the match. I said, with characteristic teenage spite: "I'm glad they lost," and he looked at me in horror as if I'd just announced that I'd killed the Baby Jesus.

But, it turns out that while all my friends were watching other men running around fields in shorts, they were damaging their long-term prospects. The Guardian reports a study suggesting that boys' GCSE results are dented by football tournaments. It's especially true for working-class boys - when a football tournament is on, they perform up to half a grade worse. I would like to think that if my school had known this, that silly World Cup chart would have been ripped down and replaced with a diagram of the solar system - much more interesting. But I doubt it.

My nephew hates football too. So I think there must be a "liking football" gene which we don't have. But maybe it's not so disadvantageous after all.

2011-12-01T20:44:00.006Z

Things that made me sad

When I'm in a supermarket queue and I see a nice old lady in front of me buying a copy of the Express or the Mail. I want to slap it out of her hand and say "Don't you know this newspaper is toxic? It's brainwashing you to be hateful?"

Similarly, when I see that Jeremy Clarkson's latest book is selling well in the book charts. Who is buying it? Why do people agree with him? Why is he on tv so much? He seems to occupy an Alternative Britain to me - one which takes all the nastiness and smallmindedness of the 1950s but filters it through a mocking, ironic modern viewpoint. I can't stand the man, and I always switch off the television when he comes on. He's like a very spoilt child who revels in the attention he gets from behaving badly. Whenever he's in polite company he'll try to shock the adults by saying "willy" and "bum". It's altogether best to ignore him.

And yesterday, when he was invited on The One Show - the marvellously anodyne early evening magazine program - a program which is the equivalent of a visit to grandma's house, he didn't disappoint. Here he is, commenting on what to do with the people striking about public sector pay.

"I'd have them all shot!"

Clarkson has since apologised, although thousands of people have complained. On YouTube and other sites, there seem to be slightly more people defending Clarkson than those who are complaining about him though. As I said, a lot of people are buying his books.

One argument is that he was joking. Another is that we need to consider the context. Earlier Clarkson had said that the strikes had made it easy to "whizz around" London and that shops had been empty. So he seemed to be implying that for him at least, there were benefits to the strike. But then he made the point that because it's the BBC "you have to balance this", and then he made the extreme comment. So it could be seen that none of what he was saying was actually his point of view, but that he was simply stating two sides of an argument.

I agree that it's important to consider context. However, I'm aruging from the other side. Had Clarkson said his "joke" on a satirical late-night programme like "Have I Got News For You", then it would have still annoyed people who don't like him, but it's likely to have been understood as a joke. But he said it on a popular, family primetime slot, where children will been watching.

Here's an example of a conversation I had last week with my 8 year old nephew on the telephone.

Me: Hi, what are you doing?
Nephew: Oh? Ummm. (long pause) I'm talking to you on the telephone.
Me: No, I meant what were doing just before you started talking to me.
Nephew: Oh, I was playing cards with grand-dad.

Children have a tendency to take things literally, and so when Clarkson starts saying that he'd have all the strikers taken out in front of their families and shot, it's at the least going to get some kids asking why Clarkson wants to shoot mummy for going on strike.

Telling jokes is a skill. That's why professional comedians get paid to do it. And one of the skills you learn is comic timing. You need to know that your audience will "get" the joke. And if your joke results in thousands of people complaining about you, then the joke has failed.

And, more cynically, we might ask. Was he really joking? Nobody knows what goes on in his head, or what he'd do if he was suddenly given absolute power to rule the UK. I'm afraid I've heard "It's only a joke" far too many times as an excuse from people who were behaving badly and then they try to shrug it off when challenged. People often use jokes as a way of saying something that's taboo or to test the waters. I've sat quietly in pubs or gyms and overheard conversations start with an offhand jokey comment about gays or Muslims, and after the laughter shows that everyone's onboard, the jokes can quickly get followed up by rather more nasty comments.

So I never fully buy "It was a joke!" It's the sort of argument I started hearing school bullies saying when I was 12, and that's really the level of argument that it brings you down to.

And even if it was a joke, it works both ways. The obvious retort is "Fine! Jeremy Clarkson, you should be shot in front of your family. And so should George Osbourne and David Cameron, and all the bankers who got the country into this mess etc etc.." Cameron himself has tried to downplay Clarkson's comments by referring to them as silly. But then, they're friends.

So, if you want to degrade public debate by bringing in jokes about killing your opponents in, then you have to allow your opponents to do the same. And of course, everyone will swear that they're joking, right up until they pull the trigger.

American political debate started using the language and imagery of violence in recent months, particularly in the language coming from the Republicans and their media. Remember Sarah Palin's infamous "crosshairs" target list map of the US.

And then this happened to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Because you might be joking. I might know you're joking. But not everyone is going to get the joke.

2011-11-29T17:13:00.005Z

A perfect tv show for the 99%

"Look our Paul, money doesn't make you happy!" said my mother, almost every Saturday night in the 1980s, as my whole family (big butch Dad included) settled down to watch Dallas or Dynasty.

In hindsight, I can tell you that she was wrong. Money actually does make you happy, and unlike Blake Carrington off Dynasty, most rich people do not have their wives replaced with a body double, have their whole family gunned down during a wedding in an invented East European nation state, lose their memory and regress back to being in love with their evil first wife, be falsely accused of murder and accidentally kill their son's gay lover. Instead rich people just have a lot of very long nice holidays in expensive hotels, travel business class everywhere, and whenever they have a problem, they close their eyes and throw money towards it, until it goes away. At worst, they may spend too much time commuting or working late, neglecting their children and partners, or they may get a bit tubby, as they eat at restaurants too much. But those things don't make for good soap operas.

So now you know the truth, you may as well just try to become an investment banker.

But if you like watching unhappy rich people, then you will love Revenge, a campy drama set in "the Hamptons", a series of well-heeled villages in Long Island, New York. The series is a very loose reworking of The Count of Monte Cristo, and involves the patient machinations of a mysterious young woman who goes by the name of Emily Thorne. She's out to get revenge on the ENTIRE Hamptons, because many years ago, they were all involved in a plot which caused the death of her father. Every episode she targets a new person and manages to destroy their life in some sort of clever way. For example, in episode 1 it involves soup, while in episode 2 she puts on some white gloves and types a password into someone's computer. After that she puts a big red cross through their face in a handy photograph she has of all the people who have done her wrong. She's saving up her bestest revenge though for the main villains - the Graysons who live in the beach house next door. When I say " beach house" I actually mean Disgustingly Enormous Palace of Decadence.

Oh this little thing?

Mrs Grayson (played chillingly by Madeline Stowe) seems to spend most of her time glaring at Emily from her turret room. The Queen of the Hamptons, Mrs Grayson has an over-botoxed forehead and too much loose neck tissue. She emits a series of wintery smiles and ambiguous platitutes which are actually all threats. To cross her is instant social death.

Emily's scheme for the Graysons involves their hottie son who must be seduced.

Well, no-one said Revenge would be easy.

2011-11-26T18:26:00.002Z

Murder For Introverts

On Christmas Eve, when I was 9, ITV showed Murder is Easy - an adaption of an Agatha Christie film set in a quaint English village starring Bill Bixby (from the Hulk) as the hero, and Olivia De Havilland as Mrs Waynefleet - the old lady murderer who always wore black gloves. From my council estate it all seemed impossibly glamorous, and I thus began an intense love affair with Mrs Christie which went on for the next six years. Every Saturday I would traipse to the only book shop in Peterlee town centre (it was actually a newsagent that had a tiny section which sold books), and I'd buy 2 Agatha Christie paperbacks with my pocket money (they were £1.50 each). I never solved the murder before Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple did, and I never noticed how hackneyed her stories were, how stereotyped her characters were or how her writing style was unremarkably plain, to the point of feeling like you were reading instructions to work a washing machine at times.

But it was a world of upper and middle class people (mainly southerners or Londonders), mixing with exotic foreigners in exciting places like Egypt. I thought the strange revenge mystery "And Then There Were None" (which had a racist original title), was the cleverest and most chilling piece of writing ever, while I became so addicted to Death on the Nile that I forced my eight year old sister to read it, and when she became confused by the fact that there were too many characters in it, I made her keep a record sheet with names of all the suspects. I'm sure she was grateful. I would scour the TV Times and Radio Times each Thursday to see if there'd be any Agatha Christie films that week - Christmas editions were also especially productive, as sometimes there'd be a whole season of them. When the BBC showed a series of Miss Marple, with Joan Hickson as the lead, my Friday nights were almost orgasmic.

I never told any of my friends about my Agatha Christie addiction - even the nerdy ones who liked Dungeons and Dragons or programming computers, or even doing jigsaws, because I knew that there was no way that it could be explained without me losing what little teenage "cool" status that I had. And these days, I only read them very rarely, and in a much more critical, ironic way. If anyone tells me that they like Agatha Christie, I'm afraid I look down on them a little bit (although I do have a special fondness for the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple films and the potty harpiscord music).

Agatha Christie novels are to introverts what extreme sports are to extroverts. Introverts like to stay indoors, don't like socialising too much and hate taking risks. The novels are a form of "safe danger" which is just about manageble for introverts and their over-sensitive imaginations. Unlike modern murder dramas like CSI, all of the murders in Agatha Christie novels are anti-septic with no nasty realism to make you want to look away. Mrs Christie never lingers over the gruesome forensic details of the crime, there are no rooms spattered in blood and guts, instead it's all glossed over in favour of the Sudoko-like puzzle of who had the motive, means and opportunity. And quite often, the people who get murdered are implied to be slightly rotten types who probably deserved it anyway. By the end, we rarely end up feeling particularly sorry for them, and Christie usually gets us to focus our emotional attentions on a budding romance between a mousey secretary type and a dashing young man with shiny black hair called Harry.

But Agatha Christie taught me how to be British, and also, how to be approximate a kind of fictional "middle-class" identity, which eventually came in handy when I left my council estate and was suddenly expected to interact successfully with the sorts of people who went to restaurants and went on holidays abroad. More importantly, those books were one of the few resources I had which helped me cope with my particularly difficult teenage years. And for that, whenever I'm channel-surfing and see one of her films, I silently thank her.

2011-11-08T17:51:00.002Z

It's 1938!

Gay rights campaigners have been given the label Gaystapo and compared to Nazis by Alan Craig, a former east London councillor writing in the Church of England newspaper. Craig writes:

Having forcibly – and understandably – rectified the Versailles-type injustices and humiliations foisted on the homosexual community, the UK's victorious Gaystapo are now on a roll. Their gay-rights stormtroopers take no prisoners as they annex our wider culture, and hotel owners, registrars, magistrates, doctors, counsellors, and foster parents … find themselves crushed under the pink jackboot.

"Thanks especially to the green light from a permissive New Labour government, the gay Wehrmacht is on its long march through the institutions and has already occupied the Sudetenland social uplands of the Home Office, the educational establishment, the politically-correct police. Following a plethora of equalities legislation, homosexuals are now protected and privileged by sexual orientation regulations and have achieved legal equality by way of civil partnerships. But it's only 1938 and Nazi expansionist ambitions are far from sated."

Poor Alan must have slept through Remedial History, because wasn't it the Nazis who put gay people in concentration camps? How confusing!

As a fully paid up member of the Gaystapo, all I can say is "Oh no! She's got us rumbled!" I guess we'd better bring forward the attack - Offizieranwärter PinkPants - deploy the queer gas cannisters all over the UK! Stabshauptmann Candyass - unleash Lady Gaga on the strategically placed tannoys! Hauptmann Bitchqueen - airdrop our queer propaganda (vintage muscle mags) across football stadiums and building sites!

Anyone who disagrees with our message of acceptance will be herded off to Bigotry Camps by our Special Lesbian Unit and forced to watch episodes of Glee until they break down.

Here are the rest of our Gaystapo Demands.

1) From now on, the pronouns "he" and "she" are to be switched around. Also, everyone must start every sentence with "OOooh Girl!" and end it with "You bitch!"

2) Everyone will wear face glitter.

3) Madonna will be crowned Queen of England, and we shall all Praise Her.

4) Organised sports will be banned, unless the (male) players do it naked.

5) Heterosexual marriage will also be banned because it's just sick and disgusting what those hetties do with their bits. We don't want to know! Uggggh

Long Live the Glorious Queer Revolution

2011-11-05T18:14:00.005Z

Meaner Girls

I blogged a few months ago about the awful A List New York series, which followed the lives of a bunch of so-called A-list gay men in Manhattan. The show proved to be naggingly addictive, mainly due to its car-crash nature. I hated myself for laughing at the use of subtitles for EFL Rodiney - a Brazilian bisexual who lovingly mangled the English language.

I wished I didn't care about the on-off "friendship" of drunk southern, "fat" Austen and skinny, judgemental, orange Derek. I pitied poor Reichen - the hapless central wheel of the program who was first in an ill-judged off-off Broadway show, then tried to record an even iller-judged hit song - his reedy voice struggling to approximate the top notes. And I just plain hated Ryan, whose plump, botoxed face emitted waves of serenity while he contrived situations of conflict for his own pleasure - a 21st century Iago, or in plain-speak, a nasty little shit-stirrer. The introduction of Nyassha (I think that's how it's spelt), a female female impersonator whose insane, haughty, spiteful and unreasonable presence made the other characters appear grounded and shy, was a step too far for me. Not that it matters a jot, but none of these people are "A-List" by any stretch of the imagination, except for perhaps photgrapher Mike Ruiz, who got the least airtime and managed to come across (or edited at least) as kindly, sensible and normal. His only vice appeared to be excessive vanity (even his boyfriend looked like a clone of himself).

So I was glad when season 2 came to an end, as the storylines seemed to spiral in on themselves, appearing more and more contrived and silly. In real life, when people hate each other, they simply avoid meeting. But in this show, despite all the hatred, they kept bumping into each other - at parties and social events - even arranging to meet in public places so they could "clear the air" which always ended in someone storming out and mirroring futile "talk to the hand" gestures at each other. The final show, which involved the Meanest Girls conspiring to split up Austen from his Yorkshire boyfriend (who also required subtitles) by refusing to attend his bachelor party, then revealing that they'd heard that the boyfriend had been unfaithful, felt like something out of a 1960s daytime soap. Enough! You people are all dead to me, and if there's a season 3, I won't be watching. And if I bump into any of you while I'm in Greenwich village in January, I will cross the street. Except for Austen maybe.

Perhaps sensing that the A List New York needs a rest, the action has moved to Dallas, where a new coterie of unrepresentative non-role models for gay men have agreed to pretend to know each other and be filmed ad libbing storylines for noteriety and money. I was hoping that with a new town, things would be different. But after watching one episode, it looks like The A List Dallas is just The A List New York with cowboy hats and big belt buckles. Instead of Mean Girl shit-stirrer Ryan, there's Mean Girl shit-stirrer Philip. Instead of drunk Austen, there's drunk James. And instead of "hot" Reichen, there's "hot" Levi (Reichen in a cowboy hat). The similarities go further. In A List NY, Reichen is the subject of a jealous little love triangle as Austen and Rodiney tussle over him, while in A List Dallas, Levi is fought over by James and Taylor (and possibly Chase). While A List NY had delusional fag-hag Nyassha, A List Dallas has delusional fag-hag Ashley, who when asked to wash the asparagus responds with "With soap?".

At the start of season 2 of A List NY, the internet buzzed with the scandal that Reichen had been caught sending naked pictures of himself online. This was even addressed in a gruesome scene where he had to confess it to his mother. But look, history's repeating itself, and now similar naked pictures of Reichen #2, Levi are also circulating. And it all feels a bit too much like a publicity stunt. Viewers should not make the mistake of thinking that any of this is "real". It's not. It's like when members of the judging panel on X Factor started throwing glasses of water over each other. It's all decided upon in advance. Like wrestling.

It's kind of depressing that these programs perform a great disservice to gay men, by simply rearticulating a bunch of negative stereotypes - gay men as catty, slutty, substance abusers, materialistic, vain, shallow, silly and unsupportive of one another. Clearly, such gay men exist, but to base a whole series (twice) around people who embody the stereotype seems wilful. Gay people are still under-represented in the media, and these programs seem like a step backwards rather than forwards. With shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, while I was kind of annoyed that gay men were only viewed as good at stereotypically feminine things like fashion, interior design, hair styling etc, at least they were trying to improve people's lives and tended to come across as reasonably grounded and functioning. Anyone who doesn't know any gay people and switches on The A List, is likely to have all their worst prejudices confirmed. Had my teenage self watched this show, I'd have been horrified, and would have probably decided to stay in the closet. The program takes the "It gets better" message and rips it up in your face. It doesn't get better. It gets worser. Thankyou Logo.

2011-10-30T12:12:00.002Z

Autumn means new tv

The Staghorn Sumac tree in my garden has gone bright red, while the apple tree's leaves have fallen off. The clocks just went back (for the last time if the government manage to convince Scotland to stay on BST all year round), and everyone I know has flu. It's autumn again.

At least it means better tv, as we all retreat indoors. I'm watching the second season of The Walking Dead - having been to Atlanta a couple of weeks ago, and seen where it was filmed (and the street where a poor horse got mauled by a zombie horde), it helps to add a frisson of realism. My fella (always a strategist) watches it scornfully, mocking the poor decision making and lack of an overall plan of the main characters. If there was ever a zombie virus, I'm sticking by him.

He can't stomach American Horror Story though, declaring it to be "sick" after one episode. So I have to watch it alone. Just as the Walking Dead takes a film convention (zombies) and stretches it out into a long-running series with proper character development, American Horror Story takes the "family move into Haunted House film" and serialises it. Every previous tenant of the home (and there have been many) met with a sticky end, and so back they come (in lovely period costume) to shake their chains and go bump in the night. Actually, as my mother used to say "It's not the dead you should be afraid of, it's the living", and much of the horror doesn't come from the ghosts. As expected, the family are full of angst and issues (lots of guilt over a miscarriage and an affair), the teenage daughter is a surly emo and in episode 2, a group of murder re-enactment fans invade the home, wanting to restage a murder that took place in the 1960s. The ghosts rather kindly help to see them off. The best character is a weird next-door neighbour played by Jessica Lange, who steals things, makes inappropriate remarks and gives gifts of poisoned cupcakes. She has a previous relationship with the maid of the house, who she once killed and threatens to do so again. And it seems that the male lead has it written it into his contract that he must appear shirtless for at least three full minutes.

That contractual clause seems to be quite common at the moment - the Dad in new sci fi drama Terra Nova also takes his shirt off a lot. Terra Nova is even sillier than American Horror Story, charting the adventures of a sickeningly all-American family who flee the pollution and strict rules of the 22nd century to go back to an Earth of dinosaur times. We are supposed to be sympathetic to the family because they have been persecuted for having a third child which is against the law. However, it's never explained why they get to break the rules, and when Daddy gets broken out of prison and then illegally manages to get to Dinosaur World, there's no punishment waiting for him at the end other end. The message seems to be that as long as you have a square jaw, a big chest and an urge to procreate, then you can do what you like. And there's also a British scientist who talks in clever-jargon speak and is marked out as the villain. Actually, it's not very good. When does Summer happen?

2011-10-22T15:57:00.001Z

The Black Lizard

My fella has glandular fever and has been signed off work for a month. Poor him - he's tired all the time, has no appetite (he's lost half a stone already) and alternatively hot and cold. It's no fun for him being stuck inside for a month. Fortunately, I am on hand to provide painkillers and cups of tea, and the cat seems to be strangely aware that something is amiss and refuses to leave his side. I think I had glandular fever when I was 18 (I vaguely recall feeling rotten in my first year at university for weeks but not really knowing why). I don't seem to have caught anything from him yet anyway.

We watched The Black Lizard last night (on youtube).

It's a 1968 Japanese cult film about a drag queen night-club singer who is also a jewel thief and kidnapper. She kidnaps beautiful people in order to get jewels, then kills them anyway and spirits them away to her Pacific island lair where she turns them into sex-dolls. The screen play was written by Yukio Mishima, a prolific bisexual Japanese writer who became infamous for a failed coup in 1970. He then committed ritual suicide. He has a brief cameo in the film as a body-building sex-doll (he was also in a relationship with the drag queen black lizard in real life). The film is strange enough, but the off-screen lives of those involves sounds even weirder.

The film doesn't seem to be easily available on DVD, and the youtube version is rather dark (though watchable). A great version of the theme tune is available from Itunes, by Pink Martini. The Black Lizard herself (Akihiro Maruyama) is the best thing in the film. She's completely mad and a slave to overwhelming campy emotions (it doesn't help matters when you fall in love with the detective who is trying to capture you). And she manages to evade capture by simply switching gender when she has to.

2011-10-13T16:10:00.006Z

Back from Atlanta

With the conference ended, I had a day in Alanta, although it started raining and as I didn't have a coat, I ended up stuck at the airport for rather longer than I was expecting. The journey home seemed designed to test my patience at every stage, and by the time I arrived through the door, almost 20 hours after setting out, I wasn't feeling very good.

Here are some of the photos I took anyway.

Graffiti wall

Street market

Martin Luther King eternal flame momument

We are the 99% protest camp

Grid-iron building

2011-10-08T12:03:00.004Z

(Conference) Friends

I am in Atlanta, Georgia for a conference. I gave my talk yesterday so can enjoy the rest of it without having to feel much pressure to perform. I always get exhausted by conferences - I can assume the personality of an extrovert, but it's hard work, like holding my breathe, and I usually need to lie down with the curtains drawn afterwards.

I quite like having Conference Friends though. These are people who you meet at a conference and end up hanging out with for a few days. Then you leave and they're out of your life apart from an occasional email, until the next time you see them. Sometimes you never see them again. It gives you a chance to reinvent yourself, and if you screw up socially it doesn't matter because it's not long-term. So after the conference ended for the day, I ended up with a new bunch of Conference Friends and we went for a meal at a Turkish restaurant. (We had been invited to an "after party" which involved a hookah, but none of my Conference Friends wanted to go.) We sat outside the restaurant - because we could. (I often wonder if I would be a more gregarious person if I lived somewhere with better weather.) There were six of us and I felt like I had been cast in an American sitcom. There was a very hip black straight Canadian man, a beautiful Jordanian/American woman with strong opinions, a football-loving gay man from the same place where the southern camp vampire tv series True Blood is filmed, a very liberal straight guy from a place called Hicksville (literally) and his wife. And I was the British One. We made an unlikely set and the lively conversation felt like there had been a team of script-writers behind it.

And just over the road from the restaurant in a small park, a group of people had gathered, holding placards and chanting. And suddenly we were in a fully-fledged demonstration. It was one of the 99% protests which are taking place all over the US at the moment. There was a celebratory atmosphere, people honked their horns (presumably in support) as they drove by. Someone got a banjo out (it is the South after all), and even by American standards there was a sense of cameraderie and willingness to talk to complete strangers which I always find faintly horrific.

The protest carried on for some hours, and I was woken up from my hotel room to the sound of police sirens in the night and shouting. There was a loud crowd of people outside my hotel, the police had closed off roads and were telling people to disperse through a loud-speaker. I wondered whether the crowd had turned nasty (like in the British riots), and deeming my hotel to be home to the hated 1%, had decided to burn it down.

But I was very jet-lagged, and managed to get to sleep, even as I heard the loud-speakers shouting "Move on! Move on!".

2011-10-06T13:21:00.002Z

My new hobby?

My fella was away in Ireland on an annual teaching thing that he does. He'd taken the car with him so he could stay in some isloated cottage in the countryside and look at stars through his telescope without having light pollution. He's very good at "hobbies". I don't really have the personality for them. I always dropped out of university hobby societies after the second week. The people in them tend to talk obsessively about that one thing they're doing (photography, being LGBT etc).

But after five days of just talking to the cat (who does his best but isn't as witty as my fella), I was getting a bit (stir) crazy, so accepted an offer from a friend to go bell-ringing. I live about a minute's walk away from the local church, and know a couple of people who do it.

My friend is a "key-holder" to the local church, and he picked me up early so he could show me around. Have you ever been in a deserted church at night-time when there are no lights on? I kept expecting Evette Fielding to jump out at me while screaming about ghosts. We climbed a windy staircase then went up a ladder, then another staircase, then another ladder until we were in the bell tower, and I saw my home town from a different perspective. I don't know why the church doesn't get a lift fitted and then they could charge people a fiver to go up there and look at the view.

But just as I was enjoying things, the bells all chimed bong at once, and I practically fell over. Then the other bell-ringers started to arrive. There were two distinct groups - the experts, who were mainly men in their 50s and 60s with beards and not a lot of conversation. And the beginniners, who were mainly women and younger men, some of whom were in a state of anxiety about bell ringing.

Because I learnt it is very complicated. It's not just a matter of pulling a rope willy-nilly. The ropes have to be pulled in various complicated sequences. And also (and I probably understood this wrong), first, the ropes had to be pulled in a certain way so that the bells were all upside down, balancing precariously the wrong way round. This was called "bringing the bells up". Each round of bell ringing had to end with them being upside down, and this could be difficult to acheive as you had to give the rope exactly the right amount of pull. One poor woman couldn't get it and she was stuck there for ages, trying and trying.

I had a brief lesson from the Head bell ringer. I am not a quick learner, and I often confuse left and right if I'm in company, so I looked like an idiot when he said things like "grip the rope with your left hand as high up as you can and then put your right hand above the left". He had to say it about ten times before I even got that bit right. Then I had to pull the rope. And not look up. "You're doing it too hard" he said on the first two goes. Then I either got it right, or he gave up.

My friend said afterwards that I seemed to be picking it up more quickly than everyone else he'd seen. But I think he was just being kind.

I don't know if I'll do it again. Someone told me about a beginner's class at another place, and I was invited to go along. Do I have the personality for a hobby though? And does it matter that I'm a screaming atheist? I think they kept the believing in God thing a bit on the DL, but I noticed that the one good-looking man there had a Christian fish tattoo on his wrist. I'm sure they won't mind me being gay (apparently the vicar is gay too), but being a filthy heathen? I'm not so sure.

2011-10-04T13:28:00.002Z

Why I hate buses

When I was much younger, and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I used to say "a bus driver". My Dad was one, and children tend to copy what they see. Gradually that ambition morphed into lawyer then journalist then lecturer then retire as early as possible. Seeing my Dad get up at 4 in the morning to start the early shift, or getting in after midnight, upset because various drunks had threatened him and refused to pay, was enough to put me off.

These days I try to avoid buses as much as possible. We didn't have a car when we were growing up, so we went everywhere by bus, and I've had more than my fair share of riding on them. But today, my fella had the car so I had to catch one to work. I always dread those rare days because I never know the rules and invariably end up humilating myself. Last time the driver refused to let me on because I tried to pay with a £10 note. This time, the humiliation began when I got on the bus with a Cafe Nero drink. I put it on the ledge by the window as I fished the correct change out of my wallet.

"That had better not be a hot drink!" the driver scolded. "You're not allowed to put it there."

So I had to pick it up and then use one hand to get my money out. The driver scowled at me the whole time, drunk on power. Everyone else glared at me, as I held up the queue. I wanted to give her some sort of passive-aggressive parting shot like making an allusion to insane health and safety laws or the Third Reich, but knew that she'd throw me off for insubordination, so I just skulked to the first empty seat in shame.

Apparently I got off lightly - some drivers won't let anyone on the bus if they have coffee.

Then the other aspect of buses that I hate kicked in. All these people I know from work got on, and then we all pretended that we didn't see each other so we wouldn't have to make polite conversation the whole way. At least I didn't have to face Lancaster's new scourge which has been reported in our local newspaper - religious militants getting on the bus, sitting next to people and then trapping them into conversations where they try to brainwash you.

As the bus lurched off the main route to enter a confusing housing estate, adding another ten minutes to the journey, a hand tapped me on the shoulder from behind. I looked round. A wizened face wearing a rainhat (it wasn't raining) beamed at me.

"Are you a lecturer?"

"Yes," I said. Everyone looked at me again.

"So am I!" said the face.

"That's nice," I replied.

That was the extent of our conversation, although about ten minutes later I heard and felt him give a terrific disease-ridden cough onto my neck.

My fella actually likes getting the bus. This is one area where we are very different.

2011-09-28T15:47:00.001Z

It's Special

Not a very productive month for me in terms of blogging. I often wish I could blog more and look fondly back on the period around 1998-2001 when I had much more of an internet presence and used to make people laugh. Over the last decade, paid work has tended to drain all of the energy and creativity out of me. I have done a lot of writing this month, but it's been for work, not the blog.

Here's Nancy Sinatra, singing "Who Will Buy" in a "Special" from 1968, which has kept me amused lately. I don't know why they filmed this in a deserted amusement park.

I love television specials. BBC4 showed a Doris Day one from 1970 recently. She had all of her dogs in it (!), and there was a gratituous sequence with her dressed up in lots of different outfits, which even by the standards of the time were outrageous. Perry Como showed up of course, as did Rock Hudson, wearing a lot of facial hair. Beards all round. This clip has a great background and she has two camp male dancers wearing tight trousers.

We showed the whole thing to my fella's parents on Sunday when they visited. My father-in-law poked fun at it all the way through. My mother-in-law tends to like these sorts of things unironically and got annoyed. Apparently, on the way home, she told him off, claiming that I had been irritated by him.

I've ordered to Nancy Sinatra special for them, so that should take care of the next visit.

2011-09-11T19:36:00.004Z

Let's hope the next decade is a better one

Around ten years ago, I flew back from Athens with my parents on a late night flight. It wasn't a very nice journey - lots of turbulence, and there were some drunken, loud British men who kept walking up and down the aisles, talking and shouting to each other. I was so glad when we finally got off the plane. My fella, who'd been on holiday with us, had to go to work in Poland, so he'd caught a different flight. I was due to spend the rest of the week pretty much alone until he came back.

The next afternoon, I decided to leave work early and go into town to buy a tv. It was a blazing hot clear day with a gorgeous blue sky, and I remember thinking how nice it was that we were still getting days like this in September. A crowd of people were gathered outside the windows of Dixons. I assumed they were watching the climax of some sporting event that I knew nothing about because I didn't follow sport, but there was something weird about how quiet and still they all were. I took a glance at the televisions in the windows and saw what looked like a disaster movie - the Twin Towers with great yellow plumes of smoke coming from them. It was the yellow that sticks in my head, even now.

My brain didn't process it properly. I walked back to my car, got in it and turned on the radio to hear that there had been a terrorist attack on Manhattan. I remembered how a month earlier I'd been down by the World Trade Centre during a summer holiday. We'd caught a boat over to the Statue of Liberty. Now those familar towers weren't there any more.

I didn't buy a tv. Instead I went home and spent a weird evening, alone, watching tv and phoning my family. My fella phoned from Poland, worried he might be stuck there. He had some choice words to say about the news footage of a particular owl-like woman in Pakistan who was shown whooping with delight.

Two days later I went to Manchester with my parents to receive the laser surgery that I'd been scheduled to have on my left eye. A cute Australian eye doctor gave me valium and kept saying my name over and over as I reclined onto the operating table. He scraped my eye with a knife before switching the laser on. I smelt my own eye burning. It smelt like meat cooking.

As my Dad drove me home in the rain, we stopped to get chips, and the anasethetic wore off. I crushed my mother's hand with mine as an insistent unstoppable pain went through me. I spent the next 24 hours in bed, mostly sleeping, while my mother ironed all my shirts and exclaimed over and over that we had so many, while my Dad sat around bored. We didn't watch much tv.

A couple of days later, while sitting in the bath, I realised how sharply into focus everything had become. I'd needed glasses since the age of 16. Now I could see properly. The world would never look the same again.

Life went on. A couple of days after that, I had my PhD viva. With my eye still recovering from the surgery, the main thing I was worried about was whether or not it would be sensitive to the outside lights, so I asked if I could sit with my back to the window. The viva lasted 2 and a half hours and afterwards I was told I was a doctor.

It was one of the most eventful weeks of my life - I experienced pain, shock, fear, anxiety, elation and relief. At the time, it was difficult to understand the ramifications of that week, both personal and global. And I'm glad weeks like that are rare.

2011-09-04T14:36:00.007Z

Ignore that this is an advert for a shopping centre opening in East London next week, and appreciate the century where clothing, hair, dance and music styles went far too quickly. Unless you're very young, this video can't help to inspire a flashback to your own youth. For me the part from 1.15 to 1.20 was when I was hitting nightclubs every other night, and even now, a large part of me is "stuck" there.

It's cleverly done, even down to the evocative backdrops of each period, and the little wave that the 1940s woman gives as the man goes off to war. I love the little Bob Fosse neck dance at 0.53 too and my parents totally looked like 1.00.

If I had my quibble hat on I'd say that the 1950s music doesn't sound right, and that punk came after disco, but it's a reminder of 100 years where nothing stayed the same except for change, which is signalled by that wistful little whistle at the end. Maybe that's a blessing in some ways. The 60s-80s look particularly bonkers now, although there's a general rule that anything from about 30 years ago tends to be viewed as naff, but eventually it gets rehabilitated as retro, then vintage, then beautiful.

I wish some of the style had hung around longer - those 1930s hats and jackets would have so suited me.

2011-08-30T16:46:00.005Z

Some of My Best Friends Are... 40

Little-seen film "Some of My Best Friends Are..." is 40 this year (download it here, and the soundtrack here). Set almost exclusively in the confines of a Greenwich Village gay bar called The Bluejay (actually real-life bar The Zodiac), the action happens over the course of Christmas Eve 1971, as the lives of the patrons and staff of the bar dramatically intersect.

The film could be seen as a companion piece to another film, The Boys in the Band, which features a birthday party at a gay man's apartment around the same time. Both have a party atmosphere, campy characters, a violent attack from a homophobe, a sympathetic black man and anguished queers coming to terms with their sexuality. Of the two, I prefer Some of My Best Friends Are... Boys in the Band has a depressing tone and ends in a downbeat way. In Some of My Best Friends... there is a better sense of a cohesive gay community, along with happy endings for most of the nicer characters. It also features a number of casting delights including, Rue McClanahan (who achieved fame as Blanche in the Golden Girls). Here she plays a bitchier younger version of Blanche.

There's also Gil Gerard (Buck Rogers) in the role of a gay butch pilot who Rue's character jealously lusts over.

And best of all is Warhol regular, Candy Darling, giving the most serious, strange and nuanced role of her career. Candy is one of the other girls who goes to the bar, and her storyline involves two important twists as it progresses. She also gets many of the good lines in the film: "They all heard him say I was beautiful! Prettier than she is. But I can't dance with them all!" and "Has anyone found a contact lens?"

There's a huge cast of characters, from all walks of life - a priest, a ski instructor, a perfume counter queen, a hustler, assorted actors, a frightened newbie, business men. One odd fish, referred to only as Miss Untouchable, arrives in a cape and never speaks, but manages to inject a lot of humour into giving archly prissy looks at everyone.

Another is called Giggling Gertie due to the fact that he finds everything hilarious. When someone accidently spills a Bloody Mary in his lap, he shrieks "Thank heavens! I'm not pregnant after all!" There are plots and sub-plots and characters who just seem to be there to add colour. As gay life increasingly happens online now, where it's easier to check out someone's profile and reject them if they don't match what you're looking for, I wonder how long the gay bar as an equalising all-in-it melting-pot will last.

The film has a great soundtrack, with two title songs - one is a down-and-dirty funk number by Novella Nelson called "The Bar", the other a plaintive lament called "Where do you go?" which plays at the start as the key characters are set up.

A few of the scenes seem to mingle shots of real-life patrons with the cast, and as a piece of history documenting New York's early '70s gay scene, the film is priceless. As with the orignal Stonewall Inn, the bar is owned by a small-time Mafiosa who regularly gives envelopes of cash to a corrupt cop so it won't get raided. A sign on the wall (mostly ignored) says that boys can dance in a straight line but not facing each other. At one point someone's mother turns up and publicy disowns him for being gay. Times have changed, though the types haven't.

2011-08-21T11:56:00.007Z

My Best Friends Wedding Proposal

A few years ago I was invited to give a talk at another university and the lady who invited me offered to put me up for the night. That night, as I settled down on her sofabed, I looked through her DVD tower by the tv. All of her DVDs seemed to heavily feature the colour pink, with pictures of male-female couples, often in contrived silly poses and I realised her terrible secret - she was a romcom addict.

I shouldn't feel superior about anyone's film choices. I've pretty much lost count of the number of times I've shown one of my favourite films to someone at the start of a friendship, which has ensured they never invite me round again. Just coming out of the closet ? The self-hating gay men of Boys in The Band will send you right back in again! Fancy a fun lesbian romance? How about the kidnapping and religious rancour of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit? Are you recently pregnant? Well I'm sure you'll enjoy the abortion jokes in drag queen epic Girls Will Be Girls. Do you hate horror films? Well don't worry, retro-cult movie The House of the Devil isn't that scary at all. I'm sure you'll like it and not go upstairs halfway through, never to return.

It's only when I watch such films through the eyes of my friends that I realise that awful scenes of people being horrible to each other are not necessarily "read" as camp and hilarious but can be quite upsetting.

And actually, I'm not that picky when it comes to films. Despite a natural liking for some of the films I've listed above, as well as lowbrow nasties like Faster Pussycat Kill Kill, I'm also happy to watch something in Italian with subtitles, a rousing war film, a spaghetti western, a Disney film, a Bond film or even a romcom.

Although with romcoms they have to be enjoyed on two levels - first, as the creators would have you watch them - getting swept along by the story, caring for the characters and shedding a few tears when they finally get together. But also on a much more cynical, detatched, look how they are manipulating me level. All romcoms follow a formula - which can be reduced to: a heterosexual couple encounter various obstacles to love, then get over it and live happily ever afer.

My favourite romcom is 27 Dresses. As Stefon from SNL would say "It has everything!" I think it might be the most perfect romcom ever. You can tick off the bits of the formula.

A heroine who lives in New York and has a glamorous job (Katherine Heigl is Jane, a wedding planner.

A gorgeous leading man who despite his obviously contrived flaws that any normal person would be prepared to overlook, it will take the heroine the WHOLE FILM to realise she loves him. In this case it is James Marsden who is a bit grumpy and writes a slightly mocking article about the heroine. My personal favourite is Ryan Reynolds (Definitely Maybe, The Proposal).

A Distractor Male. This is usually a less famous actor who the heroine will think she is in love with but actually isn't. In 27 Dresses it's Edward Burns (who?)

A sassy "supportive/supporting role" best friend who hangs around on the sidelines and doesn't really have much to do except act as a cheerleader, make witticisms and be quirky. Margaret Cho sums up this character well in one of her routines "Hey, I can't get a man, but I got a lot of good advice!" The character has been around forever - Eve Arden made the wise-cracks to Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce, while Corale Browne did it for Rosalind Russell in Aunt Mame. In 27 Dresses, it's Casey, played by Judy Greer. In one scene, on seeing Jane, she tells her "Ooh, you clean up good. *I* might even be into you." But towards the end of the film, when Jane has humiliated her OWN SISTER by revealing her to be a meat-eating, dog-hating slut at her wedding rehearsal in front of the groom (and now "the wedding's off"), Casey tells Jane "You could have told him face-to-face. I mean, I know my moral compass doesn't exactly point due north, but... if I say something's wrong, something's wrong... What you did was unleash twenty years of repressed feelings in one night. It was entertaining, don't get me wrong, but if it was the right thing to do, you'd feel better right now. Do you feel better right now?" Oh the wisdom of the sassy best friend.

A love rival. Jane has her trashy sister Tess (Malin Akerman) who may as well be the devil in this film. Her most serious crime? She pretends to be a vegetarian to get Edward Burns into bed. Seriously - who hasn't told a few lies in the name of love? If we didn't hide all of the negative aspects of our personality at the start of a relationship, the human race would have died out long ago.

A musical number. At some point, the main characters will give a pitch-perfect rendition of a slightly naff pop song. In My Best Friend's Wedding the whole cast suddenly started in on "Say a Little Prayer" with no warning at all. Here, they sing Benny and the Jets by Elton John.

Declarations of love in public. Because these films are American, where everyone shouts and there is no concept of "private", nothing really counts or means anything unless it has been witnessed by a group of complete strangers and all of your friends. Therefore, romcoms frequently feature large parties where someone will grab a microphone, climb onto a stage and spontaneously announce that they loved Mary-Sue all along. Then everyone will go "ahh", smile and applaud, and the couple will have a passionate kiss, smug in the fact that they are the centre of attention, now and always. My favourite take on the public declaration of love is in "Failure To Launch" when, somehow, the crucial love scene plays out while the main characters are being watched on webcam by an entire COFFEE SHOP of hip Americans.

There can be variations on a theme - poor old Julia Roberts ends up all alone (apart from her sassy (gay) best friend Rupert Everett in My Best Friends Wedding (there's two variations for you!) And I always like it when the romcom does "foreign" which means that the American characters wind up in London (as happens to Debra Messing when she hires a handsome male escort in The Wedding Date). It's a London that I have no experience of - everyone live in huge houses, goes to even huger country houses for the weekend, the males are all sporty and ruddy (sometimes they play rugby and wear rugby shirts constantly), it never rains and there are no poor people or black people anywhere. But really, Jane Austen wrote the original romcom - and give or take something disastorous happening with a pair of big pants, the winning formula hasn't changed since then.

2011-08-13T09:50:00.004Z

Is your life so interesting you should write a novel?

Thanks to the accessibility of the internet, I recently read a novel that I enjoyed, found the writer's website, emailed him to tell him how much I'd liked it, and a couple of weeks later spent a nice afternoon in a Cafe Nero in London chatting to him about all sorts of things. I'm guessing that not all writers are as friendly towards random people. The guy already vaguely knew of me, due to the fact that the historical setting of his book was something I've written about in the past also, though, being a stuffy academic, my books are always non-fiction. Writing in academic style is something which you partly pick up as you go along, being improved if you do a PhD and have a good supervisor. The first time I submitted an academic paper, back in 1995, the reviewer, who was a very prickly old man, said something like "The content is fine but it needs to be edited by someone who can write English." He had a reputation for being a bit of a bitch, but I'm sure that if I was to read some of my earlier stuff, I'd cringe at it.

One of the questions that my novelist friend asked me was "Have you ever considered writing a novel yourself?" I lied and said I hadn't.

During 1990 and 1991 I wrote a novel, using my mother's type-writer. I don't remember very much about it, except that it was set in Blackpool and involved a group of teenage friends who felt superior to everyone else around them. It descended into violence and tragedy at the end. I had only ever been to Blackpool twice and had no experience of violence, so having finished it, I had the vague feeling that it was awful, and I put all the pages in a green folder, relegated it to a box in the attic and have never looked at it since.

On and off, I've attempted to write novels or short stories since then, with varying degrees of failure. My most fruitful attempt, still ongoing, is 40,000 words - and is set in the early 1990s, loosely based on a summer I spent in London when I worked for a down-market gay magazine.

If I had a penny for the number of times I'd heard someone say "My life is so interesting, I should write a book about it," I'd have about 37p. I freely admit that my life is not interesting at all (and is getting less interesting the older I get), and that one summer was the peak of excitement in the life of a person who has never taken any risks, normally tried to do the right thing, and at the age of 20, opted for quiet domesticity in a small, respectable town in northern England.

The story is narrated by the rather mean-spirited best friend of the main character. He is not an "unreliable author" (which recently seems to have been a fashionable device) but he is a spiteful author and is often critical of the main character. Unlike earlier attempts, it is based on events and people who I have experience of, and that probably makes it more authentic. It is also fun writing about that period before the internet and mobile phones. However, I am unlikely to try to get it published because I don't have a very good writing style for fiction. When I read it back it sounds like it's written by Enid Blyton. I read a lot of Enid Blyton between the ages of 6 and 13, and her moralising, simplistic style has become indelibly imprinted upon me. Even when I am writing a sex scene, it comes across as Enid Blyton. This was also a problem when I worked on the gay magazine and was asked to write erotic stories. All of the characters in them spoke like they were in The Famous Five. Worse still, I am hopeless at providing descriptions. My novel is all about plot, character development and things happening. I rarely bother to take the time to describe what a room looks like, or put in stuff about what someone is thinking as they're walking down the street. When I write dialogue, it ends up looking more like a play. The characters seem to stop what they're doing and only use their mouths. Proper novellists manage to let us know what characters are doing as they're speaking, and the really good ones are clever in that their actions or objects that they're holding are somehow symbolic of their emotions at that time. It's all too clever for me.

Even if I was able to resolve the problems with my writing, I don't think I'd be able to publish it anyway - the subject matter is so personal that I would never be able to show up at work every again.

2011-08-09T10:40:00.012Z

London's burning

Watching London burn while rioters break windows in shops and loot sports clothes, blingy watches and widescreen tvs, you can't help feeling that you're watching some sort of dystopic film about civil breakdown. Unfortunately, this is one bad movie we can't switch off.

What the riots seem to be teaching me, is who, among my Facebook friends, is right-wing and who is left-wing. Some of my friends are calling for the rioters to be neutered so they can't have any more children. Some are wanting the army to be brought back from Afghanistan to deal with the rioters in the most violent way possible. Some are writing about "lazy benefit grabbing sloth". Others are blaming poverty, inequality, institutional racism, the police, the cuts. Some people are blaming the Lib-Dems, or Mrs Thatcher, saying it all started in the 1980s. Others are blaming the Labour Party, either for being too free and easy with giving out benefits to "scroungers", or for furthering the inequality program which Mrs Thatcher started. Some people are blaming all the political parties (that's about as left-wing as you can get).

Attempts to explain the riots and looting largely fall into two camps - there's the view that the looters are mindless scum - a kind of essentalist argument. It's their own fault, they are bad, evil even. There is no point in reasoning with them, they must simply be locked up or met with even greater violence. The opposite argument, often heavily prefaced with the view that violence is never justified or a successful strategy, then goes on to look at the wider social context, pointing out the widening inequality gap between rich and poor, especially in large cities. For example, the website poverty.org.uk gives the following facts about UK inequality from 2009.

•The gini coefficient measure of overall income inequality in the United Kingdom is now higher than at any previous time in the last thirty years. 1
•Inner London has by far the highest proportion of people on a low income (29% in the poorest fifth) but also a high proportion of people on a high income (28% in the richest fifth).

This argument points out that if you see rich people all around you, yet you know you will never be able to get a job and better yourself, then what do you have to lose.

I guess I'm more inclined to fall into the latter camp. I'm from a working-class background - one of the poorest areas in the UK. All through the 1980s, I felt I was missing out somehow, especially when I watched tv and saw southerners in nice big houses, but because everyone around me was also poor, it was a very intangible abstract sense of inequality. I also had it drummed into me that education was the answer to success - my aspirational mother paid for piano lessons, a set of encyclopaedias and lots of books. Duly enough, I was shown a track to a better life, pass lots of exams, don't get involved in crime, and you'll be OK. And it worked.

But I was one of the very few kids on my council estate who took that path. Two doors away, from the house where I spent the first 18 years of my life, a young girl died of a drug overdose recently. In my street, disputes were "resolved" by a brick through a neighbour's window in the early hours of the morning. There were plenty of problem families, break-ins and drugs. It is one of the few areas where it is easy to afford a house, because nobody rich wants to live there. Had I not been the sort of kid who likes reading, and had a mother who encouraged it, I wonder whether I would ever have left that world.

And when I see people looting on the tv, I wonder if, I had had their upbringing and life experiences - that sense of failure, that nothing you do will ever change anything, whether I would join in. And I think I probably would. Because I don't think most people are born especially good or bad, but they can be made good or bad by the things that happen to them.

What's ironic is that the rioters and looters are attacking their own patch. They are helping to make their own areas worse than they already are. Shop-keepers and the upwardly mobile will move out, house prices will go down, the price of insurance will go up. If the rioters were educated, if they had a proper understanding of the wider picture, of some of the reasons behind their own social inequality, they wouldn't be attacking Tottenham, they'd be going over to Belgravia, Chelsea and Hampstead and setting fire to a Waitrose. But if they were educated they wouldn't be rioting in the first place, because they'd have been able to take the traditional route to success.

And as for the view that violence is never justified or never solves anything - I suspect that politicians are so eager to tell us this precisely because it is untrue. Violence was clearly justified and was the only effective solution during World War II. Riots have been occurring all over the Middle East, and have been effective in changing Egypt's political structure. And it is also ironic that government ministers tell us that violence isn't the answer while they conduct a war in Afghanistan. The votes for women's movement began with acts of violence - and perhaps it was not the violence itself which acheived women's suffrage, it certainly got them noticed. The violence of the Stonewall riots was a trigger which coalesced into the American gay rights movement. The horrible truth is that violence sometimes is the answer.

Is the violence justified or effective this time? I don't know. The rioters' goal seems to be simply to get stuff. Which seems to be exactly the message which everyone in Britain has been told for the past 30 years.

And rather than this being an opportunity to make Britain a better place, I suspect we will all just lurch even further to the right. Bring out the hoses!

2011-08-01T20:05:00.000Z

Goodbye Habitat

Passing through Bristol last week, I stopped into the Habitat at the top of Park Street. When I lived in Bristol, I loved Park Street - there is a lovely quality of light there just before dusk, when all the buildings look especially Italiante and sepia-toned. Sometimes, after going to the posh gym, I would hang out at the Starbucks in Borders Books, then browse the DVDs and books. Borders closed last year and is now opening as a Wilcos. I guess it's better that it opens as something, but there's no fun in browsing a Wilcos. I should know - I used to work nights stacking shelves in the Preston branch, back in 1992. And apart from being the fastest (price)-gun in the (north)west, it was the most dreary job I've ever held. You could never really shift the smell of the place off you, and during Christmas, I must have heard Johnny Mathis's When A Child Is Born hundreds of times. Which tested even my love of irony and kitsch to its breaking point.

To make Park Street even sadder, the Habitat right at top of the street has "closing down sale" signs over everything. All over the country, the Habitats are closing down. Where will the 20 and 30 somethings from social class AB shop now?

I've been shopping in Habitat for the last twenty years. I bought my first lot of proper plates and stuff (the Nil range which still seems to be going strong). I've had a Habitat bed (blue metallic thing which looked like a hospital bed), Habitat garden furniture (not very good quality), Habitat modular sofa (still in my office), Habitat rugs (not good quality), Habitat pictures (Chinese poster for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof also in my office at work), Habitat dining room table and chairs (twice). I think Habitat's success is probably down to me buying all my stuff there, and it's because I switched to John Lewis in 2008 that it's closing down.

With the news showing massive job losses every night, while the cost of living goes up and up, I can only feel hugely lucky that my own experience of the recession is to do with losing some of my favourite shops. And I wish that was the experience of everyone else.

2011-07-19T09:32:00.002Z

Set dial to desired level of unease

The Rejuvenique Electric Facial Mask is a ridiculous 1990s beauty treatment which involves putting a scary, serial killer mask over your face and then receiving little electric "impulses" (shocks) from various points over the mask. Even the use of the fluffiest woman in the world - Linda Evans (Krystal Carrington from Dynasty) in the promotional advert doesn't hide the fact that this is an INSTRUMENT OF TORTURE. I'm guessing that she has been kidnapped and forced into saying those lines - the pink scarf round her neck is obscuring the collar-bomb which will explode if she screams "HELP ME!"

Is it even possible to parody such a thing? Fortunately, yes - meet the RapeFear FantasMask. After you've applied the Fet-i-Gel to required "gelmancy levels", wearing the mask takes you into a disturbing alternative reality. And don't forget to turn the dial down to "real" when finished.

The sinister Exorcist music and bizarre text ("They should have listened") are a perfect accompaniment to something which never should have been created in the first place.

2011-07-18T19:22:00.005Z

The Ten Worst Things that My Cat has Done

Larry, my cat is 15 and shows no sign of letting up. He is the Boss of the household.

1. Made me cancel a Christmas holiday to Brighton in 2005 by yowling mournfully in the back of the car when I was taking him to the cattery for a week. "I can't leave him!" I cried. "Oh, just drive us all home" snapped my fella in a resigned tone.

2. Went out, caught a mouse, brought it in the house, chewed off its head and then plopped the remains in front of us when we were had a particularly delicate friend round for dinner for the first time.

3. Waited until we'd had our shiny expensive ensuite bathroom put in, then, while we were out buying new towels, crept into the bathroom, climbed into the bath and christened it by scratching the surface. Irrevocably. Before anyone had had a chance to use it.

4. Contrived a kidney disease two years ago, then sitting on my lap and pissing all over me and the John Lewis chair I'd bought the year before. Do you know how long it takes for the smell of diseased cat wee to disippate from furniture? The answer is never. Not really.

5. Reacted well to the kidney disease medication, costing me an extra £50 a month to keep him alive.

6. Vomitted on a cream carpet. Many many times. You can never really shift the stain.

7. Watched as I'm eating a meal, then reached his head through my arm and brazenly attempted to take my food from my plate.

8. Pretended to neighbours that he is not fed, and wailed pitifully outside their house so that they fed him - giving us the reputation of neglectful pet owners and candidates for a BBC exposé documentaries.

9. Climbed on a sideboard and swished his enormous life-of-its-own tail, knocking off an antique clock and smashing it into bits. Repeat with several other ornaments at regular intervals.

10. Ruined every piece of knitwear I have ever owned by slinking up to me affectionately, climbing on my lap, then catching multiple claws in my clothes and not letting go.

It is probably just as well I don't have children.

2011-07-18T16:46:00.008Z

Will the phone hacking scandal make Britain any better?

Inbetween researching my family tree, I've been watching the news turn on itself over the last couple of weeks, with a mouting sense of liberal glee and schaudenfraude as the Murdoch empire collapses like a soggy souffle.

It's surprising to see how quickly the Murdoch house of cards has come tumbling down, but also kind of depressing that politicians have had to wait until a clearly awful scandal in order to start fighting back. Nobody could have seen that the abduction of a teenage girl would have had such far-reaching repercussions. Yet nobody who followed news and politics is surprised at the relevations about the amount of political influence that Murdoch and his friends have wielded since the 1980s - because it's been common knowledge. It is pathetic to see how successive governments have toadied around this descipable man, frightened of what would happen if they upset him. Particularly sad is how Gordon Brown had to swallow his feelings when The Sun published information about his son's cystic fibrosis, and then suck up to Rebekah Brooks afterwards. That is the real tragedy of this story - that us Brits have not lived in a properly functioning democracy for over 30 years. Instead, we've lived under a media kingmaker who has controlled politicians through fear. It is not surprising that Murdoch's newspapers have almost always supported the winner of every election since 1979.

I hope that the scandal ushers in a new era of media honesty, and that newspaper editors decide to stick to reporting the news, rather than manipulating readers. But I doubt it. Just as the bankers scandal appeared to change everything for a few weeks, before long it was business and bonuses as usual. Even if the Murdoch Empire is finally vanquished from British shores, there'll be plenty of slimy characters ready to fill his shoes, and politicians will continue to want to be represented in the best possible light in the media.

I have no sympathy for Rebekah Brooks - an intelligent, ambitious woman who panders to the lowest common denominator, whipping up moral panics over paeophiles as well as being homophobic. Yesterday, when she "presented herself" to be arrested, the news showed the few clips they have of her on a loop, which had the effect of making her look as if she was walking around London in a big circle, forever.

However, this is my favourite clip of the scandal so far - "dodgy geezer" Andy Hayman, who was in charge of the initial inquiry into the News of the World's phone hacking, and then went to work for News International as a columnist. Here he responds in an dramtic, bordering on camp, fashion to allegations that he received payment.

He's like a character in a 1970s sitcom. It would be called "Dodgy Geezer". He would drive a white van, work in a scrapyard, have an Irish sidekick called Chalkie, be married to a shrewish, constantly suspiscious Yootha Joyce and have Anita Dobson as his mistress. He'd pacify both women by giving them boxes of Black Magic of course and each episode would end with him being pursued up and down hills, Benny Hill-style by the whole town. But by the next episode, the "reset" button would be pressed. There'd be no character development, no change in anyone's situation. Just a laugh-track fading into a theme tune by Chas N Dave.

And here's my second favourite clip, whistle-blower Chris Bryant, asking for an apology from vile Kay Burley of Sky News. Every gay man needs a High Camp villain with whom to trade catty insults, and the interactions between Chris and Kay are deliciously E.F. Benson.

He'll get his apology from Kay when there are No More Dalmation Puppies left in Hell for her to turn into fur coats, but I'm glad he brought it up.

Chris is no stranger to media bullying, having had a picture of himself in only his underpants, which he naively posted on the hookup site gaydar, plastered all over the trashier media. But just like the Stephen Sondheim song: "good times, bad times, I've seen em' all, and I'm still here", he rode it out and is having the last laugh. I've seen the picture, and all I can say is, he has nothing to be ashamed of. Except his taste in underpants.

2011-07-03T09:46:00.013Z

Internet solves sixty year old mystery in three seconds

I grew up with three grandparents not four. The missing one was my Dad's father, who disappeared into Darkest Wales in 1949, abandoning his wife and two children (it was one of those probably rash marriages that happened at the end of WWII). My Dad, now 64, has no memories of him, and no interest in finding out what happened. The only remnant of him is his surname (Baker), which is also my surname and two of three wedding photographs which only surfaced when my grandmother died.

The two people sitting down are presumably my great-grandparents. The tallest man is my grandfather. Facially, my father looked very similar to him at the same age. I don't resemble him facially, but I do have the tall thin body. I probably look more similar in terms of face and hair to the chap on the left, who was a brother.

Every so often he comes up in conversation, and so yesterday, my fella typed in his name and the word Wales into Google. And there he was. Ten years ago he choked to death on his food in a nursing home, aged 80. He never left the small mining village he grew up in, although he seems to have married again in 1964. There's a tiny chance it's not him, but he has a fairly rare name, and the middle name matches up also.

Having found out, I felt a bit stunned. I wonder if he had any other children (do I have a half-uncle or aunt?) We had assumed he wouldn't have lived long, so it's surprising to find out he was the last of my grandparents to have died. I was also surprised at how easy it was to find the information, and how it had been there for years, if only someone had thought to look for it.

And then I had a dilemma. Who do I tell? It has always been a bit of a sore point with my father, so should I tell him? Or should I tell my sister and my aunt. In the end I decided to volunteer that I had information and would tell more if asked, or else not mention it again. So we had the strangest conversation. I told my own father that his father is dead. And he reacted as if I'd announced that it was raining outside.

I spent the rest of the evening trying to find out more information about that side of the family. Oddly enough, it turns out that the actor Stanley Baker (from Zulu) grew up in the next village along, about a mile away. I wonder if he's a distant relation.

Any resemblance?

2011-06-21T16:27:00.002Z

The most dangerous woman in America

I find cooking shows boring generally, although I'm sure there is a sociology thesis out there on how different cooking shows reflect trends in societies. British chefs have a tendency towards autocracy, right from snobby fish-face Fanny Craddock, admonishing housewives to keep up with their neighbours, and pulling contorted sneery faces at poor working-class women, to Gordon Ramsay (Fanny in male drag) - the dictionary definition of a foul-mouthed, dead-eyed work-place bully. Even nice Jamie Oliver gets all didactic and tells us what we can and can't eat although it's for our own good.

Still, I'd take well-meaning Jamie over some of the American tv chefs any day. Take Paula Deen for example - with her Georgia folksy "hi y'all" demeanor, huge white hair-helmet and filthy laugh, Deen is a living Hanna Barbera cartoon right out of the Perils of Penelope Pitstop. She believes that "exercise kills" and seems intent on getting her audience to eat food that is going to significantly shorten their life-spans. Liquid butter features heavily in most of her receipes. Here's a typical one, for deep-fried cheesecake. Yes, cheesecake.

Stick with it to the end. Having fried her cheesecake, Deen decides it's "not sweet enough", then covers it in powdered sugar. But that's only the start. She then covers it in chocolate glaze AND strawberry glaze. Then more powdered sugar. Then a huge dollop of fresh cream. The woman's arteries could be used to hold up sky-scrapers.

Deen has what's kindly described as a "bubbly personality". The more unhealthy her recipes are, the more she gurgles and giggles and takes impish glee in them. It's easier to see why she's popular. She appeals to two distinct audiences - people with bad diets who feel validated by her, and those who find her appalling yet camp. This has resulted in many bizarre edits and commentaries of her show.

This one refers to her "Diarrehea apple pie" for example:

Whereas this one (my favorite) has slowed down the video and put on a creepy soundtrack, which helps to bring out the druggy, scary and sexual nuances in the show. The food makes disgusting slopping noises as it's slapped down on the counter, whereas Paula sounds like an animal when she eats it. Look out for the image of a ghoul at one point.

And Deen is one of those people who seems to attract attention wherever she goes. She made headlines when delivering hams in a charity event, and got one thrown in her face (prompting a "pigs might fly" headline which wrote itself).

In this clip, her trousers randomly fall down, revealing her not-very-attractive bottom, during a public event.

And if you want an even more surreal experience, check out the website Paula Deen riding things.

Deen is a horrific example of a society which places too much emphasis on "rights" while completely ignoring responsibilites. Ignore her at your peril. Yet she is also the gift who keeps on giving. Aren't you a little bit interested in trying out one of her buttery, disgusting, sugary concoctions? Just to see?

2011-06-17T17:40:00.004Z

One of these is a parody

And one isn't. Which is which?

I'm so pleased that Varla, Evie and Coco are getting back together 10 years later to make Girls Will Be Girls 2012.

2011-06-14T17:37:00.002Z

Lesbians, Lies and Blogs

I have been following the recent furore surrounding the "outing" (or "inning") of the writer of the blog A Gay Girl in Damascus. This blogger, who claimed to be a lesbian living in Syria called Amina Arraf, was reported to have been kidnapped, but turned out to be a 40 year old married male American postgraduate student living in the UK. Even more bizarrely, another lesbian blogger, who reportedly flirted with "Amina", has also turned out to be a heterosexual man. I've heard of "lesbian invisibility", but this is ridiculous.

LGBT and Syrian activists are understandably upset, feeling that Amina's blog, now exposed as a lie, does little to help real people who experience oppression in Syria. The writers of these blogs have apologised, but argued that they wanted to help the LGBT cause but felt that they would not have been listened to due to their status as heterosexual men.

If that claim is true then it's a shame. Personally, I'd love to see more straight men sticking up for LGBT issues, and when heterosexual rugby union player Ben Cohen recently set up a Foundation to combat homophobia and bullying, he was widely applauded. Here's a gratutious picture (which will probably triple the number of readers of this blog).

So, if you're a straight man who cares about LGBT people, really, you don't need to pose as a lesbian to "get heard". But I wonder if such bloggers had other reasons for assuming lesbian identities - more to do with sexual excitement.

I don't want to judge though. I've taken on the guise of a range of different characters over my long and undistinguished internet history, which began all the way back in the early 1990s when the internet was mainly used by academics (and was a much politer place as a result). I can at least safely say that it was never with political intent or to get a sexual thrill, but merely for the purpose of making other people amused.

Back in the 90s, when the web was a very different place - no videos, fewer pictures - I used to read the Usenet groups quite often (they're still out there - the internet equivalent of Ceefax), and I assumed a couple of "personas". The first was an angry woman called Bessie who was very upset at the amount of swearing and sexual content on television. Inspired by Mary Whitehouse, she was always interrupting threads to complain, and was regularly organising marches to London to picket television studios. Her attitudes were so obviously Victorian and hysterical that she didn't fool anyone thankfully, and I got bored of her quite quickly as she became a bit of a one-note pony. I retired her, and then started up a more interesting persona called Shirley.

Shirley was a much more complex character. Clearly a fantasist, she claimed she had been a make-up lady on a popular television programme, and had many hilarious and clearly untrue stories about the cast members and off-screen dramas. She claimed a long-standing feud with one of the nicest cast members, and would regularly paint pictures of actors which were the exact opposite of the characters they played. She claimed one very butch actor had a collection of antique dolls for example.

She was now retired, crippled with arthritis and housebound - only able to use the computer by holding a stick in her mouth and pressing the keys with it. She was hideously ignorant of many topics (she thought Romeo and Tybalt were characters from Crossroads), jealous of anyone who'd had an education, and had strong opinions on almost everything. She quickly polarised the Usenet group she posted to - some members were "in" on the joke and started fake feuds with her, or claimed to have met her, thus validating her existence further. Others guessed she was a fake but found her hilarious and were happy to have her around. But another group also doubted her veracity and were angry that she was disrupting the group. Shirley responded to all her critics with disarming self-deprecation. She would simply agree with everything that her detractors said, flattering them while pulling herself down "Oh, I'm just a stupid old woman with no qualifications... everything you've said is exactly right and now I've considered it I promise to think more carefully before posting..." which usually had the effect of winning them over or stunning them into silence. It was impossible to hurt her because she was too ignorant to understand that she was being insulted - when someone called her a moron, she mistook it as a compliment. Because many internet users thrive on escalating conflict, they had never met anyone like Shirley who took nothing personally because she wasn't real.

Her crazy postings are still out there - co-incidentally, I came across them by accident a few weeks ago, and reread them all. I don't remember writing any of them, but I'm quite proud of some of them - she was my Edna Welthorpe, and I'm kind of sorry I retired her when I did.

My third (and last, honest!) internet persona is Jamie4U, who was probably the most sophisticated attempt I've had at constructing an online persona. Although also clearly fake, Jamie had his own blog, complete with photos of himself (actually pictures of me dressed up) and all of his friends (or freinds as Jamie spelt it). Jamie is a shallow, narcissistic, idiotic young gay man, enjoying the dubious status of top-dog in a small northern town. He has an on-off relationship with an older man called Brian, who he treats terribly, and catalogues the petty dramas of a small circle of friends - Miss Thang - a frightening drag queen with no morals; Barbara - a drunken middle-aged lesbian, Keith (aka Mavis) - the plain-Jane "friend" who Jamie constantly deserts; Debbie - an overweight, often violent, faghag. Jamie's relationships never last, and whenever he tries to better himself, he always ends up snapping back to type. A lot of the humour is based on the disjunct between Jamie's self-image and how others actually perceive him, particularly when he leaves his closed world and ventures out to the larger cities like Manchester and London. Jamie once published a rude message at Alistair Appleton's website. Alistair Appleton is an attractive gay tv presenter, whose website tends to produce lots of gushing praise from men who are in love with him. Jamie was typically dismissive, and his posting contained an obvious mathematical error regarding Alistair's age (a sore point). Naturally, many of Alistair's fans jumped to his defense. Sadly, Alistair never got in touch with Jamie's haughty offer to be his boyfriend.

I guess you could say that Lubin Odana is an identity - although it's the one that's closest to me. Lubin is much more opinionated than you would find me in real life - where I tend just to keep my mouth shut. But I think my days of being someone else are long gone. It was something I associate with doing in my 20s mainly, and possibly a sign of immaturity. Or maybe I'm just not very funny any more.

2011-06-08T19:44:00.002Z

You're not my hero

In Belfast again for a few days (work). I was staying in a Premier Inn as it was the only hotel I could find in the area, and although I turned my nose up at it, it ended up being rather nice. Unlike certain other hotels, you got all the tv channels, rather than 5 channels and a menu of films that you then have to pay for if you want to watch anything decent.

On the first night I woke up and felt someone or something pulling the sheets off my bed. I started shouting out, and then woke up properly. It was just a weird dream, except it felt so real that I had to turn the light on to check that someone hadn't sneaked in and was hiding at the bottom of the bed.

Had I been rather weak-minded, I probably would have thought the room was haunted. But I don't believe in ghosts, or the tooth fairy or auras or horoscopes or magic crystals or the Loch Ness Monster or God. When I encounter anyone who does believe in any of those things I am always kind and respectful to their faces, while secretly my estimation of them plummets. So now you know.

I'm unlike Richard Dawkins who isn't cowardly and two-faced like me - he's very open about his atheism and seems to enjoy the cut and thrust of public battle. I, who take everything personally, have the mantra of avoiding conflict at any cost, which is why I resort to keeping most of my opinions to myself (or spouting the more objectionable ones under a psuedonym in a blog that a handful of people read).

So Dawkins is my hero - someone who agrees with me, and is even fighting that particular battle in the limelight and with all the controversy that it brings.

I was a bit dismayed then, to find out that in other ways, he is not my hero at all, but an advocate of something I hate. The New College of the Humanities is a private London-based elite college, fronted by academic celebrities. It will charge £18,000 a year (twice as much as the highest fees for non-private universities). Students will get a Rolls Royce treatment, getting face-time with the very best academics in the country. Small class sizes, the chance to learn from the best, and of course to make connections with other elites. How wonderful it would be if your parents could find £18,000 a year. Dawkins is one of the famous names who will be lecturing. I feel like I found out that Santa Claus is into S&M.

The New College of the Humanities stands for everything I hate. It lets an already-elite pay to ensure and enhance their elite status. Students will not pay for those degrees themselves - their rich parents will pay for them. And while there will be financial help for some students - making the whole enterprise seem fair and kind, for the vast majority, this will not be the case.

Education is the key to everything. It is the one thing that wealthy elites wish to control because if they can do it, they can keep the status quo. My mother, born to a miner, realised this early on and spent every last penny she had on books for me. My earliest memory is of her tucking me up in bed, surrounded by dozens of Ladybird books covering the bed, and her saying "which one shall I read to you?" and me saying "All of them!" and her saying "Alright then." If I ever showed a hint of not being top of the class, she turned into a Tiger Mother and cajoled me into working harder. It wasn't always easy, but the sacrifices and arguments paid off. And I changed social classes - to find myself in a new class with people who had been to Cambridge and Oxford, who had had a very different, much more priviliged upbringing to me. Perfectly lovely people - rich people usually are very lovely and have lovely manners, because they've had lovely lives, generally get what they want and people are nice to them. It's easy to be lovely under those circumstances.

I believe that people should have equality of opportunity - and those who try harder, or who have natural talents, should be reasonably rewarded. Otherwise there's little urge to try. But it needs to be within reason, and everyone should get a fair chance. That's why I hate it when rich people buy better educations for their children, because they are cheating the system and ensuring that their kids will get the best advantages, the connections, the best jobs, and so it will go on forever.

And kids from poorer backgrounds, who may have exceptional gifts - are much less likely to have those gifts nurtured and encouraged. If they do go to university, their parents probably won't know which one is a good one. Their funny northern accents will probably mark them out as different. They will probably have to take on extra jobs to help see them through university. They will continue to be disadvantaged in all sorts of ways. And that's even if they get to university.

There is a quote from Wuthering Heights which puts me in mind of the consequences of a free market education system, describing perfectly how gifted-poor kids will be passed over while dim-rich kids will get the best of things: “one is gold put to the use of paving-stones, and the other is tin polished to ape a service of silver." Puts me in mind of some of our current Tory and Liberal politicians.

Looking at Dawkins' biography, it is perhaps understandable why he would support the New College of the Humanities. His father was in the colonial civil service, he was born in Kenya, went to a school that was founded in 1556 and then on Oxford. He's never known anything other than the very best of everything. He's mixed with people very much like him. He can't know what it must be like to be really poor, to be hopeless and helpless. What's perhaps remarkable is that he's questioned an institution (religion) which is very much part of maintaining the status quo. Otherwise, his support of the NCH is depressingly predictable.

Well I've been poor, and I've been rich (or comfortable at least). And if you're in any doubt, being rich is infinitely preferable. And even though I'm not poor now, in arguments like this, I will always back the poor - because the rich are more than capable not only of cheating the system, but of creating the system to make themselves win.

And with the creation of the NCH, they just tipped the balance that little bit more in their favour.

2011-05-31T22:19:00.002Z

The future I imagined is finally here

Back in 1979, when I was about 7, my Dad told me about a wonderful invention called a video. "It lets you watch any tv program whenever you want," he said. I imagined that this would be a human-sized box, with a keyboard inside, like a typewriter, with a tv screen. You would climb inside, type in the name of any tv program or film, and instantly be shown that program.

I imagined the day when I could watch my favourite tv programs - The Phoenix and the Carpet, or the Enchanted Garden, whenever I wanted.

When we finally got a video player, a few years later, renting it from the Redifusion store, I was quite disappointed to find out that my imagination of what a video was like, was rather optimistic. Instead, you had to rent a cassette from a limited choice. As most of my favourite tv shows never came out on video, I never got to see The Phonenix and The Carpet again.

And now, finally, the future has caught up with my 7 year old imagination.

You type in the words, and there it is. The only thing I got wrong was that you had to climb inside a box to do it.

Having not seen this in 32 years, it's quite a strange experience revisiting it. I remember being particularly terrified at the end of episode 1 when the children use up their three wishes and end up trapped at the bottom of a tower in France. It all worked out OK in episode 2, but I had a week of worry about it. It's reassuring to know that the future arrived. Now all I need is a holiday on Mars.

2011-05-26T10:49:00.004Z

How far can a Geordie go?

How lovely to see President Obama enjoying a barbecue at Downing Street (I'm sure they timed their visit in late May to get the best chance of reasonably good weather). I like how "the special relationship" has been redefined as "the essential relationship". It's almost like the two countries reluctantly saying, "well, we're stuck with each other because there's nothing better going", reminding me of a very late-night hook-up in a rather dowdy singles bar.

I always like to see photos of Michelle Obama towering over our Queen, and yesterday's news was full of how she's so inspirational, telling young girls from a range of backgrounds who are trying to get into Oxford University that “success is not about the background you’re from but the effort you put in".

This made me smile, because it reminded me of my own "journey" to university, which began, back in 1989 when I was filling in application forms. Neither me, nor any of my friends at my working-class A Level college, even considered going to a university. Instead we accepted low offers from local polytechnics. We didn't consider the reputations of different places. I picked one place because my aunty lived there, and another because it was close to Blackpool where I'd been on holiday. We had low expectations - most of us were the first in our families to consider higher education, and the lecturers at my 6th form college didn't really seem that knowledgable either (with hindsight, some of them should have been sacked for being rubbish at their jobs).

One of my friends was even courted by one of the universities after she got better-than-expected grades, and she turned it down, preferring to go to her original choice of poly - even though they were both in the same city.

I went to an even worse poly and it was only after getting into the system and then falling in with a set of older and more socially savvy gay men that I even considered that I'd be good enough to go to a university to do a postgraduate degree. It was sex that moved me up in the world. Hard work was not enough. And at the end of my second year I moved out of my damp, messy, ugly student house and into a proper grown-up flat, which had pictures in frames rather than blu-tacked on the walls. The first time I went shopping with my fella, some 8 years older than me in years, and 80 years older in social years, I put a 4-pack of "micro(wave) chips" in the trolley. He put it back on the shelf: "You're not eating that muck," he said. It wasn't the first time my "common" food choices were ridiculed by my new social set of aspirational queens. A few months earlier, I'd mentioned in passing how I'd had Findus Crispy Pancakes for lunch. "Oh Paul," sighed Julian (I don't need to describe him any further - he was called Julian). "I wish you'd get a class-lift".

Really, if it wasn't for the fact that I attracted (and wanted) the attention of certain older men, I'd probably be working in some numbing middle-management job, getting paid half as much and still eating Findus Crispy Pancakes. Although I wasn't really aware of it at the time, being a gay teenager gave me a leg-up, helping to cancel out the unfortunate circumstance of being born in one of the least fashionable parts of the UK (the eastern part of County Durham where all the pits used to be until they got closed down in the 1980s - think Billy Elliot) to parents who were loving but had little knowledge of the world beyond the end of their street.

Two decades later, someone told me last week that I sound like Ricky Gervais. A southerner! My north-eastern cadence vanished at some point in the mid-1990s, and is now only vaguely there, like an echo. I still say "bath" rather than "barth" but that's about it.

And I wonder, just how far can you go with a Geordie accent these days? Look at Cheryl Cole who has been "axed" from the US X-factor. Before she was axed, I'd read articles about how she might have to have training to reduce her accent. The Guardian article says "There had also been concerns how American viewers would take to Cole's Geordie accent." New York magazine asks "Was Cheryl's Geordie accent too difficult to understand, or did something else go down behind the scenes?"

It's hard to know whether the accent was the problem, or whether she upset someone important or just didn't want the job. I'd bet that the accent was a factor though. And I do wonder if Michelle Obama's point about "success is not about the background you’re from but the effort you put in" perhaps needs to be modified somewhat: "success is not about the background you’re from but the effort you put in to hide it".

And if you need any further evidence, here's a clip of new MTV show Geordie Shore. It takes the most stereotypically awful specimens of Geordies you can find, throws them altogether and confirms everyone's prejudices.

Obsessed with the size of their breasts (both male and female), buying clothes, promiscuous sex, and banal chatter, the only degree that these dullards have is in "pulling women". They make Ant and Dec look like Noel Coward.

So, the depressing message seems to be that if you're from a part of the world where the stereotype is that you're uncultured, and you want to make more money you should either, play it up and get on a reality show, or play it right down - use whatever assets you have, but change your voice and stop eating Findus Crispy Pancakes. Cos if you don't, like Cheryl, you'll be sent right back home.

2011-05-25T17:52:00.002Z

That's so....

The adorable Lauren Potter from Glee wants us to stop saying "that's retarded".

I couldn't agree more. It's sad that so many of the generic put-downs in the English language pick on groups of people who are already either in a minority and/or are stigmatised in some way. "That's gay" became popular about 15 years ago, and it's only until quite recently that people have started arguing that it shouldn't be used. It's a case of re-reclaiming the word gay to make it mean something bad. Even when I saw it being re-re-reclaimed (my university's LGBT group used to have a poster which said "Homphobia is gay" - kind of an own goal), it felt wrong. I've lost count of the number of arguments I've had about "that's gay". However, that's not to say that I'm not above similar criticism. I've unthinkingly described things as "lame" before - not really considering that the term does exactly as the same for people who use wheelchairs or crutches to get around.

Another term "that's so old", to mean "boring", is also problematic, particularly in our youth-obsessed culture. While "old" doesn't necessary mean "old people", there's an association with getting old as being bad.

One problem though, is if we cut out all of these terms, how do we express disapproval? Is it OK to say "that's stupid" because being stupid isn't a trait you're born with, but due to intellectual laziness, lack of education etc? Or could we even argue that "that's stupid" discriminates against people who haven't been lucky enough to have a good education, or because their brains don't work as fast as other people?

I suggest a new put-down - "that's so Ayn Rand". She won't mind because she's dead. Rand was the strange writer of a number of awful books about greedy rich people who got their own way. Her most famous book Atlas Shrugged was about all the rich and talented people going off in a sulk to start their own society because the state wouldn't let them do what they wanted. It reminds me of those famous dolts like Andrew Lloyd Webber and Paul Daniels who claim that they'll leave the UK if Labour get in. I always want to say "Please go, I'll help you back your bags. You have entertained us long enough." Rand invented her own amoral philosophy which was based upon being selfish.

Rand only achieved cult status in the 1950s and 1960s, surrounding herself with a small number of fanatics, but by the 1980s Atlas Shrugged was the second most influential book in America (after the Bible, naturally) and helped to influence the increasingly right-wing direction that America has gone in.

So I think it would be fitting if we decided to label bad things as Ayn Rand.

2011-05-23T20:09:00.006Z

Happy Birthday Old Man

I was listening to one of those shows aimed at people over 60 on Radio 2 last night.

I am 39 today but have been over 60 since I was 15 and my mother complained "Why do you never go outside, why do you just sit in the house watching old black and white films, you're like an old man!"

This article by the Guardian's Lucy Mangan, about children who are old beyond their years, also made me smile in self recognition.

"if you are mature for your age, you are likely to turn to books for solace. And although this, again, has unsought, largely academic, advantages, books age you, too. They render it even harder to live in the moment. It is difficult to surrender to an adolescent crush or a first love when you have already experienced a million of them secondhand.

If I had been at school with Lucy Mangan, I would have been best friends with her - we would have read Enid Blyton books together (probably competitively), even though I secretly would have wanted to be friends with cooler Victoria Coren who smokes and gambles and still gets the best grades in the class).

Anyway, back to Radio 2. I love this song about an insufferable couple who "when they died and went to heaven all the angels moved to hell".

I know a few couples that would apply to.

2011-05-22T11:12:00.002Z

I do not get the Divided States of America

How do you go about making sense of can a country which has the Folsom Street Fair and Harold Camping's (failed) prediction of the rapture?

Other countries have their internal conflicts but none so much as the DSA. Maybe it's because it's so big. Maybe it's because the people who founded it were all the bolshy ones from Europe who refused to compromise their values and "make do" and so they passed on their bolshy DNA and memes down the generations. Maybe it's all the extreme weather. As someone born into a cramped, damp nation whose glum inhabitants mainly muddle along in a haze of irony and detachment, refusing to take anything too seriously, the fervour of Americans, whether it's for gay marriage, Krispy Creme, the Knicks or Sarah Palin, produces a mixture of fear, distaste and envy in me.

The whole country feels like it's in a giagantic tug of war. Witness the "don't say gay" bill approved by the Tennessee Senate Committee to ban discussion of homsexuality in the classroom.

A similar bonkers bill was passed in the UK back in the 1980s - mainly as a result of moral panic around AIDS. There was a smallish backlash, but this was very much a bullying conservative majority picking on an already beleagured minority.

The situation in America now is different - the country is making strides towards equality, gay people regularly appear on tv shows, for many people it is no big deal. While Britain slowly, grudgingly and incrementally has edged towards equality and acceptance, America looks more like a battle-ground.

Star Trek's George Takei suggests an obvious solution to the Orwellian "don't say gay" bill - which implicitly acknowledges de Saussure's sign theory - meaning is made up of a word (the signifier) and what it means (the signified). So, you just change the signifer to another word but keep the signified. (Nasty American teenagers did the opposite when they started calling things they didn't like "gay". They kept the signifer, the word "gay" but changed what it signified.)

Ultimately, I think Tennessee is fighting a losing battle - Orwell's fascists in 1984 may have thought you could change ideology by deleting words and concepts from people's minds, but they didn't realise that the situation was more complex than that - words exist in a symbiotic relationship to ideology - it's not a one-way street. And people will still feel sexual desires, even if there are no words to describe those desires. To paraphrase everyone who has ever being sexually incontinent - we don't just think with the brains in our heads.

2011-05-14T17:49:00.002Z

I wish we'd all been readdyyyyyyy

Are you rapture-ready? According to God's representative on earth Harold Camping (89), the rapture is practically upon us. It's May 21st (two days before my birthday - talk about bad luck! I'll be eating all my cake on the 20th just so you know).

I LOVE anything to do with the rapture - unfortunately I'm a teensy bit atheist and don't have a very good attention span, but bear with me - this is what I've gleaned from my extensive rapture research (mostly on the internet). The rapture is the day when God comes back to earth and judges everyone. All the good people (e.g. gullible people who give all their money to sketchy preachers) get sucked up to Heaven in a magic elevator, while all the bad people get left behind. Then the Devil comes back (in the guise of the United Nations) and there's a huge war. People who join up with the Devil get a 666 tattoo (even though tattoos are so 1998). Those who remain get persecuted and suffer horribly. Then God comes back again and kills everyone. The End.

Are you excited yet? I CAN NOT WAIT! I'm planning my rapture outfit as we speak. I'm thinking full make-up and lots of sequins so God won't be able to miss me. However, I suspect I'll be one of the 98% who Harold Camping predicts will be "left behind". I wonder if there's still time. Perhaps if I donate all my money to Mr Camping, he'll put in a good word for me with God.

But don't pack your suitcases just yet. Mr Camping's been wrong before. He predicted The Second Coming on 6 September 1994 - but sadly all that happened that day was Michael Jackson won an MTV award that day. Spooky yet wrong!

Still, I'm digging out my old copies of the Thief in the Night quadrilogy, just to get a rapture-refresher course. I'm practising running along railway tracks, screaming and hiding from helicopters.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

2011-05-13T19:02:00.000Z

The Six of us have been Friends forever...

Bored, last weekend, I watched a couple of episodes of the new Friends clone Happy Endings. Perhaps it was the fact that I had very low expectations, but I enjoyed it. New York magazine reluctantly admits that "it's pretty funny". The only differences from Friends is that a) it's set in Chicago b) Joey is now a chubby gay slacker - he looks "like if Paul Rudd gave up" c) Ross is now black. It is a bit edgier than Friends - "Who hooked up last night?" asks Chandler Bing-alike Dave, and everyone raises their hands. One character remarks that dating has changed in the last 10 years and now "a text message at midnight is bascially a romantic dinner for two". One of the characters gets a new room-mate who runs a pay-to-view webcam from inside their house and is constantly getting them to have pillow fights.

Hyper-controlling Jane and gay Max spend one episode arguing about how would survive a zombie apocalypse and set up lots of little contests to test each other. One involves them seeing who can sit still the longest, but just before it begins, Max purposefully knocks a bottle of beer over the coffee table (he wins as Jane's cleaning OCD kicks in). This merges into another storyline involving one character who has becoming embroiled in a community of "hipsters" who end up chasing everyone down the road like zombies at the end.

My favourite character is Penny (played by Casey Wilson who starred on SNL for a while a few years ago). She's annoying, loud and single, and in episode 2 complains that gay Max isn't gay enough for her. She wants someone who can go to Farmers markets with her and "brunch it up", so Max sets her up with a flamboyant acquaintance who calls everyone "sluts", does the splits at random points and screams "DRAMA!" like a Greek chorus in almost every scene. Penny ends up hating him and eventually accepts that she doesn't need a gay man because she is one herself. However, she's so desperate to get a man that she's constantly making bad choices and worrying that she's going to "die alone in a light up Christmas sweater talking to a menagerie of parrots."

Here's the Pilot, judge for yourself.

2011-04-30T13:38:00.002Z

Why vote?

Our local Green councillor is just what a councillor should be. When we asked if we could get some bollards put outside out house (to stop cars illegally parking on the curb), he got it sorted for us. He knocked on our door the other day and asked if there were any issues that concerned us. We told him we'd already voted for him, and then asked if he could get the double-yellow lines repainted in our area, and whether the council could do anything about a number of unoccupied shops (perhaps lowering the rents so they could get filled up). He listened, and I'm sure he'll try to do something about it. He's probably the first and only example I've ever had where politics appears to work.

At the national level though, I have little hope. Next week, as well as voting in council elections, we have the opportunity to vote about the way that we vote in future elections. We can replace our "First Past the Post" system with one which requires the winner to have 50% of the votes, and if no-one gets 50% then we take the second choices of the people who voted for the last-place candidate, and so on until someone gets 50%. I've voted for the Alternative Vote, because I don't feel that the current system accurately reflects society's views. We are a mainly left-of-centre country, but the left vote tends to get split between Labour and Liberal-Democrat, which means that the Conservatives can sometimes scoop first place because the Left can't agree. This certainly happened in my own constituency, where many of my ultra-lefty friends voted Lib-Dem: "I just can't vote Labour because of Iraq" they said with self-righteous idealism. And of course, their refusal to compromise meant that Labour went a few hundred votes short and the Tory chap got in. My kindly Lib-Dem friends have been very quiet about politics since the election. Isn't it horrible when your well-meaning intentions produce the exact opposite effect of what you wanted (£9000 a year university tuition fees, cuts to SureStart, the privitisation of the NHS and the education system etc etc)?

If you are at all unsure how to vote and find all the arguments pro and against AV too tedious or complicated to follow, then bear in mind this simple fact - David Cameron (and the vast majority of Tories) don't want it. They don't want it because they know their party will suffer. And if you are against David Cameron you should be for AV. It's as simple as that. Yes, we may end up with coalitions, and yes, coalitions can be annoying - but I'd rather have a coalition government (most likely made up of left-leaning politicians) than a single-party right-wing government every other time.

Yet it's unlikely that AV will pass. Most people don't seem to know what it is or care. And those who do are more likely to vote to keep the status quo. Others want to punish the Lib-Dems by voting against it (once again, thinking with their hearts not their heads). Even if by some strange chance it passes, it's likely that the Conservatives will put a stop to it, arguing that only a minority of people wanted it (which ironically is exactly what our current First-Past-The-Post voting system allows).

The vote has the potential to change British politics and ultimately, to make the UK a fairer, kinder place. If AV passes, the right-wing will have proportionally less power overall. We will become more like Europe and less like America. However, I don't think that is the path that we are on.

For the first three quarters of the 20th century there appeared to be a move in many countries towards increased equality and a kinder, fairer society. The gap between rich and poor was smaller than it was in the 19th century. Society found ways to look after people who were unfortunate, and in the UK the government incorporated progressive structures like pensions, universal education and the National Health service. All of this was made possible by making people pay tax - the richer you are, the more tax you pay.

But around about 1980, the rich people got clever - they started to find new ways to get their own way. Many rich people don't like paying tax - they don't see why they should have to look after people who are less fortunate than themselves. Their goals are simple - to earn more and more money, so they can pass it on to their children. And for them to get richer, everyone else must get poorer. This has resulted in political systems whereby rich people pay enormous dontations to political parties (usually right-wing parties, but often rich people hedge their bets and donate to every potential winner), especially helping to fund their political campaigns. When a party wins, it then needs to look favourably on its rich benefactors, passing laws that mean they pay less tax or making it easier for them to make profits. As a result, winning political parties will always put the needs of rich people first.

In rich western societies, we look at the elections that happen in much poorer, unstable countries like Zimbabwe and Iran and we snigger when we see how corrupt they are - when the votes are clearly rigged. We pity countries like China and North Korea that don't even have a proper democracy. Yet are western democracies really so much better when political campaigns are funded by the donations of a few extremely rich people with vested interests who then call in favours?

In the 18th and 19th centuries, very few people had the vote. Women certainly didn't, and it tended to be the province of rich men. Now we have a situation where we think we have the vote, but we can only vote for a narrow range of options, and the winners will not put our interests first anyway. It is somehow ironic that we are made to think we live in free societies, and that elections matter. The reality is that the people in control have simply become much better at hiding it.

2011-04-30T12:56:00.003Z

Opting out

I'm not much for Royal events. In 1977 (for the Silver Jubliee) I caught measles aged 5 and missed the only street party I could have attended. While everyone else in the street had fun outside in the blaring late 70s summer, I was tucked up on the sofa with a blanket over me and the curtains closed. One of the kindlier neighbours came in and hung some bunting across the ceiling for me, but for the majority of the day I was left alone, desolate and mortified. I'm sure that day was crucial in developing a self-fulfilling sense of expectance of exclusion which has continued throughout my life.

I have little memory of the 1981 Royal Wedding - as I've mentioned elsewhere, the 1980s were a decade-long depression for me, and this wedding is a useful marker of the start of it. Sham wedding - sham decade. Even the wedding photos lied. Diana was the same height as Charles.

He is totally standing on a box.

Coming back from a nice holiday in Italy, with no internet or tv for a week to saturate my palate, I was prepared to give the Kate/William wedding a chance, but after watching the news the day before, and seeing screaming Royalist American tourists, whipping themselves into a frenzy of hysteria, along with the sycophantic, endless media coverage, I decided enough was enough, and made the choice to switch off. This was not going to be 1977 all over again. I was going to opt out of our National ~~genuflecting~~ Love-in on my own terms.

So while half the country was rapt in front of the television, watching how Kate Middleton was "now no longer a commoner" (in the exact words of one broadcaster), me and my husband drove the car out to the middle of nowhere and climbed a great big hill (Nicky Nook Fell), then ate a bar of chocolate when we got to the top as a reward. We'd expected to be alone, but you'd be surprised at how many other people seemed to have had the same idea. Whole families of people who didn't care that much about the Royal Family, escaping society for a few hours.

By the time we got back it was all over.

My husband told me that one of his friends was in the ironic situation of being given the day off work to watch the Royal Wedding, but he'll also have all the days after that off work too. He's been made redundant as of today due to the cuts.

I expect William and Kate will have an absolutely lovely life. No cuts there.

2011-04-27T20:43:00.005Z

Inadequate in Italy

Finally got my PC out of the repair shop, with a new non-sticky keyboard. That was the most expensive smoothie I (didn't) ever drink. The one bright side was that while it was being repaired, I was on holiday in Southern Italy. We'd meant to go there back in 2003 but due to British Airways and their threats of strikes, we'd cancelled it and gone to Brighton instead. So 8 years later, and finally we get there, and made the most of the week by going to Naples, Sorrento, Pompei and Capri. We had heard lots of scare stories about Naples, but it proved to be charming, if a little dirty. It seems to have a little problem with litter collection and graffiti, which is a shame.

Capri was full of bored-looking women with bad face-lifts carrying designer handbags. There were a couple of over-crowded touristy bits, so we decided to go and visit Tiberius's villa instead, which was up on a cliff-top and well away from shops selling designer clothes. As a result, we had a nice, if exhausting visit. It would have been hideous otherwise.

In Pompei I had the ignominy of being told off by an Italian tour guide for allegedly trying to jump a queue to look at one of the rooms in an old building. Considering I had spent the week in a state of shock at how Italians do not seem to know how to queue (the "queue" for the boat I got to Naples was 26 people wide - I counted), this felt particularly unfair - and I wasn't even trying to queue-jump. Fortunately, my husband is more quick-witted (and sharp-tongued) than me, so leapt to my protection. Anyway, here are some of the poor bodies of Pompei.

The food all week was sumptious. Strawberries were bigger, sweeter and redder than anything I've eaten before. The bread functioned as a meal in itself. The Mozarella cheese was a revelation - it actually tasted of something. And their ice-cream and coffee made ours seem like a pathetic approximation. The British have copied an American trick of trying to make up for the lack of quality by just giving you more of everything. I saw no fast food places, no American chains. Such places would be given short shrift.

Italian people are generally better dressed than English people, and wear better fitting clothes. I felt dowdy all week, I needed a hair cut, and every time I took my cap off, my hair had flattened into an unflattering non-style which have rendered all photographs unprintable. So it was a consolation to come back to England this afternoon and resume my rightful place among all those lumpy red faces wearing sacks and gorging themselves on McDonalds. We may not be a very stylish nation, and our food is generally a terrible (expensive) disappointment. But at least we know how to queue.

2011-04-05T16:41:00.003Z

Sticky keys

I regret buying a Marks and Spencers strawberry and banana flavour smoothie drink on Thursday for lunch. I had set it down next to my laptop.. you know what's coming next... when as a result of a weird body spasm, my hand flung itself out involuntarily, and I knocked the bottle (opened of course), sideways. It gratefully emptied itself all over the keyboard.

I had a little cry and then set about trying to mop up the mess. Fortunately it didn't cause the laptop to explode or anything, but I wasn't able to get out much of the goopy stuff that had slid in the gaps at the edges of the keys.

The next day, my laptop felt OK, though some of the keys felt a little old. However, after a few hours, the heat melted all the congealed smoothie drink, creating a kind of evil paste under my keys. Some keys now pressed down in slow motion, like old lady's skin.

I tried removing the J key to clean underneath, but I haven't been able to put it on properly. It's on, but not fully on. I've only had this laptop for a year. I can't predict whether I'll a) live with it b) see if I can pay to get it cleaned or c) buy another one.

And it's an expensive lesson, but I won't be leaving any smoothie drinks near it again.

2011-04-04T10:12:00.002Z

Weekend in Holland

A glamorous university friend who has spent his life moving between the UK, Vancouver and Holland is now in Rotterdam so we went there for the weekend. It is always nice when someone knows the area and can drive, as you get to see so much more than when you are a regular tourist. We spent Friday in Amsterdam, Saturday in Rotterdam and Sunday in Delft, then back to Amsterdam.

Dutch people (and Europeans in general) feel very "foreign" to me. Even though they are geographically very close, I feel that I understand Americans much more (though understanding doesn't neccesarily mean "approving"). It's probably due to the shared language and the fact that so much American tv and film is drip-fed to British people from an early age. Europeans though - I can't make them out, and it's not just the language. I can look at a Brit (and to a lesser extent, American) and instantly be able to make numerous judgements about their social class and their values. But with Europeans, I come up against a blank wall. I can't tell who's rich and who's poor (there don't seem to be any poor people - at least, not ones I can tell - maybe it's due to the higher taxes they all pay, resulting in wealth being more evenly distributed). And they all have weird fashions and hair - including the men. A lot of them look old-fashioned - sometimes as if they've stepped out of the 1950s. While others look futuristic.

Amsterdam is especially disconcerting. I am always terrifed of the trams and bicycles, which seem to share pavement space with pedestrians. The fact that they drive on the other side of the road means that I sometimes don't even realise they are coming, and that ringing sound is a tram/bike which is on a collision course.

Actually it wasn't transport that I needed to worry about this time. It was blue cheese. On Friday evening I had a blue cheese salad. Then on Saturday we walked across a bridge in Rotterdam (past a man surrounded by police who was in the middle of a suicide attempt, with ghoulish people taking photos of him) and visited these houses in Rotterdam.

At first I thought it was the funny angles, but once we came out of one of them, I started feeling ill and getting stomach cramps. I ended up having to urgently use the loo in a random gym. I felt a bit better after that, and we spent the rest of the afternoon on Rotterdam's gay beach, warding off interested nudists (I took my t-shirt off to meet them halfway but that was as much as I could offer).

In the evening we had a meal in an Italian restuarant and I had pasta with a blue cheese sauce. About halfway through I started choking. Somehow, the blue cheese sauce had glued itself to my throat and was blocking my windpipe. I tried coughing, but it wouldn't clear. Apparently I was turning purple. I suddenly felt rather odd, like I was slipping out of consciousness, like someone was turning the volume down on the world around me. It felt sort of nice, and I wondered whether that was what people who do auto-erotic asphyxiation are trying to achieve.

Everyone around me looked panicked, and luckily at that point I managed to dislodge whatever was at the back of my throat, and things went back to normal. I've seen people choking in restaurants a couple of times, and always felt sorry for them - as it's physically painful, but also socially rather embarrassing. I'm glad I survived it. Death as a result of blue cheese does seem to be a rather silly way to go.

2011-03-27T19:15:00.010Z

Sunset at Morecambe

The clocks having gone forward finally, me and the husband took an evening stroll in Morecambe. Apart from a few recalcitrant teenagers, we had the whole place to ourselves as dusk fell.

Morecambe feels like an elderly, occasionally incontinent, much-loved relative who I feel guilty for not visiting enough. I have long stopped wishing that it could have a snazzy regeneration and turn into a hip and happening place. Instead, visiting it feels like walking through a huge open-air musuem. I think everyone who lives there should be made to dress in inter-war year clothing, and Gracie Fields should be piped from loud-speakers on every street corner.

And yes, if you look at that first picture, you will see the inspiration for the name of this blog. If you are ever in Morecambe, do visit it.

2011-03-27T19:08:00.005Z

Garden

I never know what's going to appear in my garden from one month to the next.

2011-03-24T17:16:00.003Z

Goodbye Kaz

One of the people who commented on my blog was Kaz (Carol), a retired teacher from the Manchester area who had her own blog called Youngest Pensioner. She started blogging in 2005 when she turned 60, although I always felt that "youngest pensioner" described her outlook on life. Her blog profile was Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous.

Her postings became less frequent in 2010 and she reported that she had cancer. She remained upbeat and funny throughout this time, always responding to her many readers with humour and kindness.

Sadly, Kaz died in February.

She will be greatly missed.

2011-03-23T18:01:00.008Z

My new celebrity boyfriend

Matt Baker - wholesome Blue Peter presenter (now presenter of The One Show - basically Blue Peter for adults), celebrity farmer, celebrity dancer.

He (not Anne Widdicombe) was the reason I tuned in every week to Strictly Come Dancing.

Dancing the Charleston to 42nd Street, wearing a fake moustache and slicking down his hair into a kiss curl... I'm ashamed to say, he had me at the unicycle.

And now... Matt Baker: sneaky political interviewer, putting the question to David Cameron that even Jeremy Paxman would have shied away from.

I'm from the same place as Matt (we were born in the same hospital), and one thing I always notice about people from the north-east of England (apart from their aversion to Conservative politics) is their frankness (sometimes disarming, sometimes disturbing). Matt, like The One Show, is well on the way to becoming a British institution.

2011-03-23T17:33:00.013Z

Big

When I was growing up, my Dad got me a load of second-hand Marvel comics. I found them a bit soap-opera-y and complicated to be honest, so I could never really appreciate them (there go my gay geek credentials), but I always found the adverts to be interesting.

I was a skinny teen who grew upwards rather than outwards. My parents were the type of people who simply name their children after pop stars, so I was called Paul after Paul McCartney (I guess it could have been worse - had I been born in 1991 I would have been probably called Vanilla Ice). There were always lots of Pauls in my class at school (more unimaginative parents), and teachers would sometimes find other ways to distinguish us. My best friend (also Paul), was called "Broad-shouldered Paul" by one teacher (who sometimes got a little inappropriate - that's another blog entry). But I always heard this with a sense of irritation that my shoulders were not broad enough to get this monicker. I was "Skinny Paul" by implication.

My skinniness came to a kind of peak around 1992 when, as a student, I had a terrible vegetarian diet (mainly cheese sandwiches) and took on a full-time summer job in a nursing home, lugging around obese pensioners. By the end of the summer, there was practically nothing left of me at 10 stone (140 pounds).

I moved in with my husband at the end of that summer (another blog entry), who professed it his goal to "fatten me up". He did a reasonable job. I've never really had to cook for myself (he claims he enjoys it), and I'm 14 stone. Now, in my late 30s, I can still easily lose weight, but I can put it on just as easily also - so it's a balancing act. I have long ago accepted that I will never have a Charles Atlas body, I'm happy to have "just" a healthy, reasonably toned body that works properly - and I sometimes feel a little sad when I see younger guys at my gym, their backs covered in spots, their skin all shiny, and their muscles out of control, clearly on steroids. Is it really that important to be huge? Even though I felt pressure as a teenager to be big, that is nothing compared to what boys nowadays have to face. Check out this advert for Captain America - the latest hunk-fest with Chris Evans.

I would love to see a film where a big muscle-bound lug goes into one of these machines and comes out with his muscles all shrunken away, but he now has this amazing personality and great intellect. He resolves world conflicts through his great diplomacy and wisdom, and counters global problems like world hunger by inventing new technologies. He even stops an asteroid smashing into the planet with one of his inventions.

And while many people, myself included, will find Chris Evans very attractive, it's a shame that so many Hollywood films foreground physical attractiveness and strength over other positive qualities.

2011-03-23T17:24:00.003Z

My strange addiction

My new laptop came with some "free" games on it. Actually they weren't free at all. You got to play them for 30 minutes for free, then a little message came up saying "To continue you have to purchase the game.." I love that their business model is from drug-pushers. And after 30 minutes, I was addicted, so I had to buy the whole game.

The game in question was called Mystery Case Files: Prime Suspect. It's a "hidden object" game. You are presented with a complicated, confusing picture like this:

And you have to click on the objects in the little side-menu, while a clock counts down the time you have left. When you have found all the objects, you are given another picture, then another and another. This is all tied around the flimsiest of storylines, and sometimes, rather than a hidden object picture you have to play one of those sliding tiles games to make a picture or something similar. But that's almost irrelevant - it's the hidden picture which I get addicted to. It is best played as part of a team, alongside someone else.

My first thought on seeing one of these bizarre rooms was "How untidy! This must be the home of someone with mental health issues - a horder who cannot throw anything away." As you start to play the game though, you focus less on the weird clutter and more on appreciating how many objects are cleverly hidden in the picture. Left with just a harpoon and a surgical clamp to find, as time runs out, you are overcome with a mounting sense of anxiety. Your eyes scan the same bit of screen for the twentieth time, until finally, you realise that the innocent-looking chair you're looking at is not so innocent at all. That smudge your brain told you to ignore is actually a harpoon, tucked into one of the chair legs. You click on it, feeling mentally exhausted yet relieved, only to be told that you ran out of time and have to do the whole thing all over again, with new objects.

I finally finished Mystery Case Files and am now playing another of these stupid games, set on the Titanic. And that familiar sense of panic is returning. Where is the clown doll? Where?

2011-03-02T21:24:00.000Z

My Big Fat Gypsy Parents

Two men at my gym last night were talking about ethnographic/car-crash tv show My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. It's one of those prurient Channel 4 documentaries which feels a bit like a Victorian Freak Show. You're encouraged to goggle at women in kitschy wedding dresses, who make Jordan look shy and retiring.

I'm not really sure what I think about gypsies - I don't know any so I don't feel qualified to comment. I'm glad I'm not one, because I don't think they have much opportunity for career advancement, and gender stereotyping seems to be quite prelevant in gypsy culture. But apart from that, I say live and let live. However, these men were saying things that were more than a bit prejudiced. According to them, gypsies were thieves who took drugs and caused fights... "My friend bought a horse from a gypsy at Appleby Fair," said one man. "It was very docile when she bought it, but when she got it home it went wild. Turned out that the gypsies had drugged it, and she couldn't get a refund because the gypsies had all left by that point." Not really very nice, even if it was true.

Then one of them turned to me and said "You're not a gypsy are you?"

I thought, "Do I look like a gypsy?" So I said "Yes, actually, I'm very offended!" and then we laughed, and I thought nothing more of it.

I didn't know it, but it was a portent.

My parents phoned me this evening and said "We've got something to tell you." The something, is that they're moving to a caravan park. To all intents and purposes, I am now from a gypsy family.

Actually I'm not. It's a respectable caravan park, which doesn't allow children, and is mainly for retired people. There are peacocks, and the caravans are more like bungalows, rather than gaily coloured things that you can hook up to horses (drugged or otherwise). It is true that the site is in the middle of nowhere, and my mother will be a virtual prisoner there for several days a week when my Dad is at work (the nearest bus-stop is a mile away), but I can't see her doing a gypsy jig round a campfire, or selling lucky heather or anything.

But perhaps I should learn a few words of Romany, incase this is just the start.

And I can't get away from the fact that I feel like I just became a character in a sitcom - ultra middle-class snobby gay son and his even more middle-class, even snobbier, even more high-maintenance partner have to cope with parents whose recession down-sizing leads right to a trailer park. Maybe Channel 4 will be interested...

2011-02-26T19:31:00.007Z

Another week in Hong Kong

Back from my 7th (I think) trip to Hong Kong. This one was relatively uneventful. Here's a photo I took of ChungKing Mansions, which I am still slightly obsessed with and scared of.

I don't know about you, but I think that the word "Mansions" got mistranslated along the way. A more accurate description might be "ChungKing Warren-like LSD hallucinations".

Hong Kong centre has had a slight make-over in the two years since I was last there. Some of the tattier-looking buildings have been painted, various road-works schemes finally finished (some have been there for so many years that I'd concluded they were permanent), and in place of the building site opposite my hotel (an unglamorous Holiday Inn which resembles something governmental out of the novel 1984), there's now a swanky shopping mall, full of advertising billboards displaying gorgeous westerners. I love being a giagantic Gweilo - a Chinese word meaning "ghost man" which is used, rather derogatorily to refer to white people. Beautiful gweilos are everywhere in Hong Kong. If they're not staring down at you from the adverts, they're walking the streets. Kowloon (the mainland part) tends to have tourists - respectable upper-middle class families who wouldn't be seen dead in tacky resorts, and are instead on some sort of Eat, Pray, Love mission.

You can always tell the new ones because they stop and reply to the ubiquitous men selling "copy watch" and "fake rolex". I am always tempted to say "Honey, there ain't nothing fake about me!" but it really is best just to carry on your conversation rather than acknowledging them in any way. I made that mistake on my first visit, and somehow a polite "no" ended up with being given a tour of someone's shop.

While Kowloon is a bit scruffy in places, Hong Kong island, which houses the alien-looking, hostile skyscrapers, is a much swankier affair. Late one night, suffering from jetlag, we ended up aimlessly wandering around the Soho district round Hollywood Street, and found a weird conglomeration of high-end bars, catering to dead-eyed banker Gweilos wearing expensive suits. I'd never seen anything like it before. They looked like they'd fallen off the advertising hoardings and onto the street. Like every aspect of people who work in the banking sector, these people had turned having a relaxing drink into an aggressive competition, and there was a scary tension in their shrieking laughter and loud proclamations as they seemed to fight to win the title of "Banker Wearing the Most Expensive Watch Having the Most Fun." There were also some ladies who were not wearing many clothes (it was quite a warm night), and the smell of cannabis wafted out onto the street. Rather than the hokey nonsense of Eat, Pray, Love, these people were Grab, Screw, Sniff.

Of course, being a product of a council estate, and working now in the Liberal Arts, my first instinct was unmitigated fury and disgust, as I realised that some of these people just earned my entire year's salary that very afternoon. They were laughing it up like the global recession never happened. I'm sure that some of them are nice when you get to know them, but they throw the "undeserving welfare cheats" of Britain into sharp perspective. Try as I could, I couldn't get their laughter out of my head for the rest of the evening.

2011-02-13T11:00:00.003Z

Mr Naidoo! This is the cha cha cha!"

The 1978 film Shalimar stars Rex Harrison, John Saxon and Sylvia Miles, and has a preposterous plot involving a millionairre who invites a number of master criminals to his island retreat, challenging them all to take his place if they can steal the fabulous Shalimar diamond. It's like a mixture of a Bollywood film, a heist film, an Agatha Christie murder film and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It came to my attention when I heard the opening music, a kitschy addictive number called One Two Cha Cha Cha, which mixed disco and Bollywood in equal measures.

A few years ago I obtained Shalimar on DVD, just for that opening number, but was annoyed to find that it had been completely cut from the English language version. However, someone has kindly put it on youtube, so I've finally been able to see it, after all these years. And it exceeds my expectations.

So welcome to Ferguson's dance studio, where a very motivated and bilingual teacher is going to teach us all the cha-cha-cha...

I think this clip might have taken over from the opening sequence of Jaan Pehechaan Ho as my favourite old Bollywood dance sequence of all time.

2011-02-10T18:58:00.008Z

We Welcome you to the Chyrmorvah Hotel

About 15 years ago, at a conference in Dublin, me, my partner and a couple of other colleagues stayed at a small B+B, run by a ferocious old lady called Mrs Casey. There was a Catholic kitsch shrine on the landing, and if you wanted to take a bath you had to ask Mrs Casey for the plug, which she kept on her person at all times. We had booked two rooms, and Mrs Casey was horrified at the prospect that the two colleagues I was with (a man and a woman) intended to sleep in the same room, as they were clearly not married. She grudgingly gave them the room with two single beds, while me and my partner were given the double bed. How we all laughed, thinking that she would have been even more horrified that she was unwittingly faciliating homosexual activity under her own roof.

While the trip provided us with endless amusement (my husband still makes me laugh with his comedy impersonation of her - for some reason when he impersonates her, she's always complaining about Sinead O'Connor "Shave her head! She has NITS! Get out the Gentian Violet!"), it kind of put us off staying in little B+Bs, which is why when we go on holiday we tend to go for large impersonal hotels who don't care about who sleeps with who, as long as your money is good.

Which brings me back (again) to the Chyrmorvah hotel, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. On that posting, one of my commenters advised me to look at the reviews of the Chyrmorvah, so I went over to TripAdvisor - which is something of a guilty pleasure for me anyway. I love reading negative reviews of hotels for a number of reasons. First, there is the rather uncharitable sense of schadenfreude I experience when someone has an unpleasant stay in a hotel. If someone else isn't enjoying themselves (even on holiday), then I experience a sense of relief that it didn't happen to me. Second, I suspect that people who bother to write negative hotel reviews actually enjoy writing them, and derive pleasure from complaining. So I take pleasure in their delicious vitriol. Third, I love it when people who have obviously too-high expectations start ranting in a clearly unreasonable way. It says so much more about them, than the hotel they've stayed in. For these people, nothing is ever right. They must be a nightmare to know. Imagine being stuck with them for two weeks in a holiday resort. "There was no brown bread for the toast!", "The towels were the wrong colour" etc. The ability of people to find fault, when they should be relaxing, never ceases to amaze me. They certainly didn't have parents like my mother, who would instantly quash my complaining with "Think yourself lucky. People are starving in Africa." Compared to the starving of Africa, my mother felt that everyone in the UK should be dancing around with a permanent grin on their faces, as if they're starring in a Hollywood musical. We've all hit life's jackpot. Ding ding ding! So shut up and think yourselves lucky!

Many of the reviews of the Chymorvah are positive, even gushing. Pamperpam raves about the "lovely cream tea, in beautiful surroundings" whereas ajgadd says that "the owners are always hospitable and friendly. We will certainly be back." But ajgadd is from Grimsby, so is maybe starting from a low baseline. Let's move on to the nasty reviews, as they are much more fun.

"Go somewhere else!" screams Lasasson, who elaborates: "As there were many plants on the outside wall, the room let spiders in, small and .. a very big one, which more or less ruined the following morning." Now Peter and Hazelmary Bull are not my favourite people, but I do think that if you're the sort of person who lets a big spider "more or less" ruin your morning, then you probably would be better suited to a padded room in a large Victorian building where you are kept permanently sedated and your occasional panic attacks are distracted with a heavy program of basket weaving.

I am more sympathetic to Brit_married2Lucian who had a bit of a problem with what seems to be an attempt by the owners to brainwash their poor guests into a cult of extreme Christianity: "Ghastly! Run by Religious Fanatics... I suppose I should have realised from the website that stated that as they were committed Christians, they wouldn't allow anyone not married to share a bed. As I was on my own this didn't matter, but the place is full of religious texts, bibles all over the place - very freaky and uncomfortable." The word "ghastly" is very under-used these days, so I appreciate Brit_married2Lucian's attempt at a revival.

CHRIST CHRIST CHRIST CHRIST CHRIST CHRIST CHRIST

Heather5515 has also noticed that "The hotel in general is very tired, chintzy and has lots of religous texts and notices in the public areas. I felt it was a bit over the top especially when I noticed the mosaic on the reception desk which had the word Christ repeated across the top." Perhaps they unfairly say that "Staff were very uncommunicative and we got the feeling that if we offered an opinion it would not have been well recieved." This complaint would have come across better if they actually had offered an opinion. heather5515, I think we can do better than hypothetical complaints.

The theme of the religous texts continues with another bad review by Dowager: "The welcome was hardly warm and that set the tone for the time we were there. Decoration is tired and well out of date in the public rooms as well as in the bedroom and ensuite. Grout needed renewing in the shower and as for pictures of the Andrex puppy - that was weird! And I have never before seen a nailbrush with a hotel name sticker on it! I appreciate that the owners obviously have firm religious views but I think religious tracts and prayers left in the ensuite is taking it a bit far."

Dirty grout! Andrex Puppies! Labelled nailbrushes! Who are these people?

Snaiseybelle88, who appears to be an assertive, sassy sort of character (I would like to have her as my new best friend) begins by alluding to the recent controversy: "The proprietors, who we have recently discovered have been in trouble with the police for their treatment of guests (the way that place is generally run is certainly tantamount to a crime) were incredibly rude and tried to move us from our room halfway through our stay as someone had requested it."

Things go from bad to worse for poor Snaiseybelle88. The service is "Appalling. I don't know what the hell was wrong with that woman but she alone is the reason I will never set foot in that place again. I didn't really notice her the first time we stayed as it was the husband who we saw most but she has no concept of customer service at all. Very rude, surly and demanding. Unwilling to help and was rude about the mess in our room. Excuse me, but when I am living out of a suitcase for a week I am not going to worry about how it looks!" Good for you Snaisybelle88 - know your rights. You deserve a holiday and if you want to leave your knickers on the floor then it's your business.

"Pick up your knickers you WHORE!"

My hunger for criticism is not sated, so I find another review wesbite, laterooms.com, which has some corkers. Anna M signifies her disgust at having to share a table with... strangers... "The restaurant staff made little effort and asked us to sit with some strangers for breakfast so as not to dirty an empty table. The cooked breakfast was unedible, cold and disgusting, I suspect it was dangerous to eat it and made us feel nauseaus just looking at it."

ChristopherC returns to the crime of the moudly bathroom: "the room smelled of mildew and there was mould around the tub and tiles in the bathroom. The decor was a bit shabby; wallpaper was splitting and such". I hope you love it as much as me when people write "and such".

The best bad review of all is from J Clark whose review is so perfect that I am going to quote the whole thing in full... It should be used as a "teaching text" on how to write negative reviews.

"Si, Si Mr Faulty. We arrived to be told "yes you are a tad early", not "We're sorry the room is not ready until 2pm". No reception desk either - just a table. We BOTH then had to complete separate registration cards, apparently the law! But collecting much more personal information than needed, we assume to market pensioner holidays to us or sell details on. We then found out this was a holiday firm hotel (aqnd the old reps were nice enough) but hotel is not geared up to independent travellers. At breakfast, a forceful “Sybil” told us where to sit, i.e. large communal tables only with groups of 8 pensioners all sat around who are all on walking or painting holidays. Breakfast with strangers, just what you want on your birthday. Breakfast very good though but to cap it all – no TV in the room (is this the 21st century) and the extractor fan in the cupboard/ shower that screamed like a banshee. This is our first ever negative hotel room as you tend to get what you pay for, so we do not moan but this is all true, our advice is pay more and stay elsewhere."

This review contains all of my favourite elements of a negative review - caps-lock, excitable metaphors, stakes being raised due to someone's birthday... I love the bit about how there is "no reception desk - just a table" - how did they COPE? And then the riff about being marketed pensioner holidays (again, conjecture). As with Anna M, this reviewer seems to have a dislike of other people and resents being made to "Breakfast with strangers." Suddenly my own antisocial sentiments are thrown firmly into perspective - there are people out there who are much worse than me. Hurrah!

2011-02-07T17:53:00.001Z

Byebye Pussycat

Tura Santana, who played my favourite pussycat Varla in Russ Meyer's kitschy morality-tale Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! has died aged 72.

I could go on about how Santana was a postmodern feminist icon, how she challenged traditional notions of femininity, how she combined iconography from The Adams Family, burlesqe and S/M, but instead I'll just say that she was great and it will be impossible to ever parody this film or better it.

Tura, I hope that wherever you are, you're breaking the speed limit and beating up All-American he-men. If you think that you can tame her, well just you try-y.

2011-01-24T18:06:00.007Z

Scream if you're losing

When civil partners, Steven Preddy and Martin Hall tried to check into a rather dreary looking b+b called the Chymorvah Private Hotel in Cornwall in 2008, they were not expecting to get involved in a ground-breaking legal case regarding gay rights. But the owners, Peter and Hazelmary Bull refused to let them share a double bed, pointing out that only married couples were allowed to do this.

Because sex before marriage is a sin isn't it. And the Baby Jesus told them to hate gay people. Or something.

Unfortunately, the law didn't see it that way, and the Bulls lost the case.

Actually, I keep having visions of the Baby Jesus at the moment. He keeps appearing to me, just when I'm on the loo. "Lubin!" he snaps. "I want you to hate Peter and Hazelmary Bull. Those fuckers have completely misinterpreted My Message and have twisted it round for their own evil ends. Honestly, send them hate mail. Make an effigy of their faces and burn it. Devote your life to hating them. It'll please me. Go on. Do it. Do it!"

I wouldn't be surprised if you said "You're crazy" but actually, you MUST accept this admittedly bizarre account because I say it's true, and the Baby Jesus wants you to have faith, not ask difficult questions or look for proof. However, actually, what's more surprising is my response to the Baby Jesus. I always say "Look Baby Jesus, you can try and get me to hate people all you want, but it's not going to happen, because I know it's wrong, and frankly, I don't want anything to do with you, if that's your game. So go away, even if you ARE real, I'd rather not bother thanks. Oh and close the door on your way out."

Sadly, the writers of several of Britain's most spiteful newspapers must have their own hate-mongering version of Baby Jesus visiting them, as there has been a sudden surge of putrefaction in the past week. First The Mail published this cartoon:

I've had to shrink the cartoon down to fit the page but one of those scary gay skinheads has a SWASTIKA tattooed on his arm. That's particularly low seeing that so many gay people were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. If the Daily Mail had a record of writing about gay people which was more balanced, instead of consistently painting them as violent, scary, flamboyant, liars, child prosyletisers/molestors, strident, shameless and promiscuous, then this cartoon might not be so bad. But it's just more of the same. You'd think they'd learnt their lesson after Jan Moir's tasteless and judgemental attack on dead Stephen Gatley and all gay people everywhere. But no, they're now claiming gay people are Nazis.

Then James Delingpole, writes in Telegraph Why on earth shouldn't hotel owners be free to turn away gay couples? This piece is illustrated with a picture from Tom of Finland (just the one on the right of course).

I can freely admit that I've probably met more than my fair share of gay men over the last 20 years. And the number of them who look like the swastika skinheads, or even Tom's leather-man, I can count on one hand. Instead, when I think of all of the gay men I've met, all I see are normal-looking men, maybe a fraction skinnier or beefier than straight men, maybe with a bit more hair product, maybe slightly more fashionably dressed, maybe smiling a bit more than straight men. But no leather. No swastika tattoos. No caps. No mohawks. Boring actually.

Just to throw a bit of balance on the debate, I'm going to write the word "Christian" in a minute, and then illustrate it with a picture. Not of a nice Christian like Thora Hird in Songs of Praise, but this one..

Here's a picture of any old Christian

There you go. Now I've brainwashed you a little bit into thinking that all Christians have hideous split ends, witchy hair, giant foreheads, insane leering eyes and a hunch.

See - we can all resort to nasty unrepresentative stereotypes to put a cruel point across.

Here's nice Thora instead, enjoying a glass of wine while she listens to "All Things Bright and Beautiful". Not all Christians are horrible.

The bed and breakfast ruling isn't going away though. Today there's an article by uber-hater Melanie Philips (again in The Mail), grudingly titled Yes, gays have often been the victims of prejudice. But they now risk becoming the new McCarthyites. Philips seems to have gotten her knickers in a twist because "schoolchildren are to be bombarded with homosexual references in maths, geography and science lessons as part of a Government-backed drive to promote the gay agenda."

Note the casual ticking off of The Daily Mail's own homophobic, bullying agenda. Use of the word "homosexual" rather than "gay" - tick. Reference to children - tick. Reference to the "gay agenda" - tick tick tick. (Honey, we do have an agenda, and it's to get you to do something with your hair.)

I gave a talk about the Daily Mail's homophobia at a conference last year, and bizarrely, in the audience was a woman who admitted (rather ruefully) that her husband worked for The Mail. She claimed that they weren't all raging homophobes, but quite nice people really. I wobble from thinking that Melanie Philips doesn't believe a word of what she writes, but she's just doing it because she knows that a particularly ignorant and glum sort of person laps up that sort of tripe, and she wants to keep her job, and thinking that she's a Tool of Satan.

Whatever her motivations, it mustn't be much fun being Melanie.

"I can see your dirty pillows!"

I often suspect that other people are having more fun than me. But Melanie's the one person I know who isn't. Instead, she's sitting at home, slapping herself and pulling her hair, like Carrie's Mother, furious that somebody, somewhere, might be enoying themselves "All that dirty touching!.. The cheap roadhouse whiskey on his breath! First comes the blood, then comes the boys! No Mama!" Slap!

So, even though the Baby Jesus wants me to hate Melanie Philips, and people like her. I know that hate is wrong. So I'm just going to feel sorry for them instead. Sorry because they're losing. And it's not kind to gloat. Sorry because life is so much nicer for people whose main drive is based on love rather than hate. Sorry because I suspect that something went very wrong in her life, and it's too late to fix it. Sorry Melanie. I'd say better luck next time. But this is the only go you get. Sorry.

2011-01-23T23:02:00.005Z

Generation Bod

I sometimes feel sorry for the children in my extended family who will never experience the freedom that I had. When I was a child, I used to vanish for hours on my bicycle, a Commando which looked exactly like this.

I used to save the coloured plastic tags that kept bags of (white) bread fastened up, and put them on the wires that led down to the break pads. There was a small tear in the seat of the bike, and as I got older and bigger, the tear responded by growing in equal measures, until eventually one day half of the seat fell off, and no amount of superglue would ever put it right again. After then I graduated to a Chopper.

I would cycle through several streets (Cotswold, Furness, Quantock, Hambledon, Polden, Snowden, Pentland), alone or with friends, to the local "Minimart", to buy ten pence mix ups and abridged children's versions of classic books like Little Women and Robinson Crusoe (50p each), sometimes going the long way through a wooded area which had a particularly perilous ridge to ride your bike off, whilst pretending to be Eval Kineval. On one occasion, I timed the jump wrong and ended up flying over the handlebars, and landing on the ground, face first. My parents knew nothing of this, nor did they know about the time me and other boys in Class T2A sneaked out of school one wintery lunch time and went skating on "Jack's Pond", stopping only when we heard and saw the ice start cracking onimously beneath our feet. They did not know that I used to run across the A19, a dual carriage way on the edge of town, which bordered Castle Eden Dene, a densely isolated woodland where I used to play. I guess it was the 70s/80s and all children had more freedom in those days. We did not know what a "child-seat" for a car was, and I never wore a rear seat-belt. Once, I sat in the back of my Dad's flat top truck as he drove home (immense fun and horribly dangerous), while I also got to ride on the back of his motorbike on a number of occasions (until my mother said she would smash it up with a hammer unless he got rid of it).

Except for the fall off the bicycle, I didn't come to any harm, but in spite of this, if I had a child, he or she would never be allowed to do most of the things I did, and would spend almost all of his/her time watching tv (supervised). There wasn't much kids tv in the 1970s, so this is probably why my parents (along with everyone else) were simply relieved when children announced they were going to "play out", and then vanished for hours at a time, only to return when they were hungry.

Children's tv consisted of about an hour at lunch time, then a couple of hours after school. Repeats were much in force, and due to the general sparsity of all kids tv, I would often end up watching stuff that was completely age inappropriate. I would think nothing of watching pre-school stuff like Bagpuss when I was 14 and staying off school with some feigned illness or other.

I loved Bod, mainly due to the splendid voice of John Le Mesurier. Bod (for those of you who haven't had the pleasure), was a surreal pre-school animation show, about a non-gendered skin-head midget in a yellow dress and his friends.

It has great music (especially the theme tune and the sexy slinky saxophone that introduces Aunt Flo), and there's something very zen about the storylines, but it's that rich mellow voice that I love the most.

John Le Mesurier appeared in last week's BBC4 dramatisation Hattie - another of those film-length "based on true events" shows, which takes a much-loved comedy character from the 1960s or 1970s, and then shows how miserable and twisted they were in real life, to a backdrop of lurid wallpaper, people wearing baby doll nighties while smoking indoors next to Tretchikoff pictures.

Hattie (Jacques), who played the "frigid silly fat one" in the endless Carry-On series, was married to John Le Mesurier, although it turned out, she had an affair with her hunky much younger driver, and moved him in to the guest room. When Le Mesurier caught them in bed, he apologised to them and then resignedly moved himself into the guest room, swapping places with the chaueffeur. Along with that voice, it's his faultless good manners, unflappable nature and desire to "rub along" which makes him one of my role models.

2011-01-22T17:36:00.002Z

We buy from the children of dead people

One reason why I love the films of Nicole Holofcener is that they always star Catherine Keener as the main character. Keener is one of my favourite actresses, ever since I saw her as prickly, angry Terri in Your Friends and Neighbours. She's great when she's playing sweet (as in The Forty Year Old Virgin), and great when she's playing a bitch (as in Being John Malcovich), but in Holofcener's films she tends to play more complex, nuanced roles which are more difficult to define. She appears more real somehow. Holofcener's quartet of films, Walking and Talking (1996), Lovely & Amazing (2001), Friends With Money (2006) and Please Give (2010), made roughly five years apart, are like having glimpses of Holofcener's obsessions, as well as showing snapshots of Keener as she grows older (and gets better).

Holofcener's films are not blockbusters. There are no explosions or kidnappings. If people experience amazing moments of self-revelation, it often happens quietly, and is achieved by a slight alteration of a facial expression. Storylines are often not completley resolved. In Please Give, Kate (Keener) has a husband who has an affair. At one brief point we are led to suspect that she might suspect that something is going on, but she never pursues it. The affair ends. There is no loud confrontation. No break-up. Life continues and the film ends. As in real life, what is not said and what does not happen is often much more important, although can be harder to portray cinematically. These are not films you should watch while updating your Facebook profile.

The people in Holofcener's films are completely ordinary, American and frequently well-off. They have neuroses that often appear credible, particularly to educated middle-class people who think/worry too much. Middle-class guilt is a recurrent theme. In Friends With Money, Christine (Keener) and her husband are getting an extra level added to their home, although when Christine discovers that this is going to ruin the view of her neighbours, making her the local social pariah, she tells the Latino workers to down tools, incurring the fury of her husband. Guilt is explored more fully in Please Give, where Kate and her husband run a retro furniture shop, buying up recently inherited kitsch furniture from the children of dead people and then selling it on to hipsters in their trendy New York store at a fantastic mark-up. Meanwhile, the couple have purchased the next door apartment from a 91 year old cranky neighbour (played with delicious spite by Ann Morgan Guilbert), and are now waiting for her to die so they can knock through and extend. All of this gradually overwhelms Kate, and she spends her time over-compensating by giving large amounts of money and food to the "45 homeless people who live on my street", including, in one embarrassing scene, a black man who she mistakenly thinks is homeless, but is just waiting to get into a restaurant. She also attempts to do volunteer work, first at an elderly centre, then at a school for children with special needs, but she gets overcome with pity for the children and starts crying in front of them.

The other emotion which is prelevant in Holofcener's films is (repressed) anger. Often, quite ordinary scenes involving service encounters or friends can turn nasty in seconds, resulting in polite characters trading increasingly shocking insults in public spaces. In Friends With Money, Jane (Frances McDormand), has a particularly unpleasant incident involving queue-jumpers in an Old Navy store, which ends up with her breaking her nose, while in Lovely and Amazing Michelle (Keener again) finds difficulty selling her bizarre home-made knick-knacks in various chi-chi shops "I'm TRYING to sell my art!", and ends up having an escalating encounter when one shop-owner tries to reject her.

It's easy to compare Holofcener's films to Sex in The City, and indeed, she directed a few of the early episodes, but her films are like a version of Sex in The City which doesn't insult your intelligence and isn't obsessed with shoes and labels. With this winter dragging on and on, her films are a great way to pass away a few hours (and bars of chocolate).

2011-01-13T21:29:00.010Z

On Ena

My relationship with Britain's longest soap opera, Coronation Street has waxed and waned over the years. In the 1970s I would sneak out of my bed and go downstairs when my mother was flossing her teeth in the bathroom (a task that would take about 90 minutes - say what you like about OCD perfectionists, but they always have lovely gleaming teeth). I would then watch Coronation Street with the sound turned right down, while sitting up close to the tv so I wouldn't be discovered. One storyline particularly affected me - when Deirdre Barlow left a pram containing baby Tracy Barlow outside the Rovers' Return, and then a lorry crashed into it. Deirdre thought Tracy had been killed, and almost threw herself off a viaduct, but it all ended happily, as a neighbour had taken the pram off for a walk without telling anyone. Although a) if you leave your baby in an unattended pram while you go in a pub then you're kind of asking for trouble and b) considering that Tracy turned into one of the street's biggest villains, a different outcome may have been happier for some people.

During the 1990s, when the internet was just taking off, I was the scourge of the newsgroup rec.arts.tv.uk.coronation-street (or ratucs as the "in-crowd" called it). I was one of those obsessive contributors, posting several messages a day (sometimes an hour), and being a central figure in an "online community". We felt so cutting-edge, that we were living in a futuristic virtual society (this was long before Facebook and Youtube). I had a kindly stalker who used to visit me at work occasionally, and I conducted an "online marriage" with a lady from Canada, which caused controversy and
threatened to wreck the group. I ran little competitions and actually sent out prizes to winners (!) And I even posted up mocking updates of the show, where I referred to Deirdre as Dreary, Rita as the Big Red Wig and Ivy as Pope Ivy. One of my fella members of ratucs, Glenda, took over the updates, and runs her own Corrie site, as well as the site Flaming Nora.

As I took on more responsiblity at work, and developed a busy social life for a brief period, it became increasingly difficult to keep up. I've watched Corrie on and off since then, but more off than on. To be truthful, the increasing reliance on murders, dramatic accidents, big fights at weddings, fires etc, have put me off it a bit. After a time they become predictable and I've always enjoyed the gentle humour and characterisation the most, not the cliff-hangers. If Coronation Street was real, would any of the characters ever be able to get life insurance or even car insurance. Imagine them phoning "Go Compare" and saying "I live at 9 Coronation Street, can I have some life insurance please!". A klaxon would probably start buzzing in the call centre, as their little computer worked out that statistically, you have a 20% chance of being murdered within the next 10 years, a 30% chance of being in a car which crashes into a canal, a 86% chance of getting married to Steve McDonald at some point in your life and a 112% chance of your partner cheating on you and your baby actually being someone else's.

Long-suffering Steve McDonald: my ideal man, which is just as well, as statistically everyone will end up being married to him at some point in their lives

A boxed set of episodes from the 1960s have been released recently, and I'm enjoying them much more than the current storylines. There is the added bonus that they can be viewed as both social history and as entertainment. It's fascinating seeing the insides of people's homes in the 1960s (even if they are fake homes). The production values are much more austere (we rarely see outside, and the outdoors sets are clearly painted backdrops of streets), while the fact that episodes were filmed live means that actors occasionally fluff their lines but nobody seems to mind. The stories tend to be character driven - Ken Barlow's intellectual snobbery featuring heavily in early episodes. Like many of the early characters in Coronation Street, I see little glimpses of myself - particularly Ken (though Annie Walker and Elsie Tanner (see below) also contribute).

On the whole, people are kinder to each other and there is a strong sense of community, exemplified in an episode where a coach trip to Blackpool feels like the characters are going to the other side of the planet. Rather than milking every storyline for maximum drama, it instead goes for an understated approach, which is actually more effective. So when Ida Barlow is killed in a road accident, we learn about it via a series of business-like conversations in a police station. We don't see the accident, and even when the police tell the family the bad news, we are not shown this scene, but are left to imagine how Ken and his father will react, off-camera. Had Ida Barlow been run over now, there would have been a giant close-up on her face as a car hit her and she died, then the car would veer off the road and fall into a canal, then it would explode, killing everyone in it. Then we'd switch to a close-up of the shocked faces of her entire family who had witnessed the crash. Then a tram would crash off a bridge on top of them all, and they would all die too.

Three characters stand out in the early years, all women: Annie Walker, Elsie Tanner and Ena Sharpes. Annie Walker (played by Margaret Thatcher before she became Prime Minister) is the Queen of the Street, being a terrifying dragon figure to her husband, and engaging in petty bourgeoisie snobbery whenever she can, she has a wonderful way of giving people dirty looks while sounding nice.

Elsie is the most likeable and fun character, a brassy red-head and good-time girl who's now a bit "past it". She is supposed to represent the "common family", with a son who's been in prison (and is clearly gay, although written as if straight). Nowadays she'd be viewed as respectable and having old-fashioned values. Elsie has a heart of gold and genuinely likes and understands men, even if they continually let her down. I don't know a great deal about how her character develops, but it's clear she's going to suffer again and again.

But it's Ena Sharples who, for me, is the true star of Coronation Street. Perhaps the closest thing to a villain, Ena is a ferocious battleaxe in a huge trenchcoat with a hairnet helmet permenantly glued to her head. She's the sort of woman who isn't afraid to speak her mind, who views conflict as oxygen, who dominates her hapless friends vinegary Martha and vague Minnie, is casually racist (see second clip below), but also extremely clever and manipulative, often using religious piety or her age ("I'm just an old pensioner") to gain the undeserving moral high ground. Many of Ena's storylines involve her precarious position as caretaker of the Glad Tidings Mission, where she gets to live at the vestry for free. To Ena, the vestry has the same status and importance as Southfork in Dallas or Denver-Carrington Oil in Dynasty. She will do anything to keep it.

In the first episode, Ena introduces herself to timid Florrie Lindley, who has just taken over the corner shop. "I'm Mrs Sharples. I'm a neighbour, you a widow woman?" she says. She then interrogates Florrie on what church she goes to and where she's going to be buried (death is one of Ena's favourite subjects), and asks for half a dozen fancies ("no eclairs, I said NO ECLAIRS").

This clip of Ena, while in hospital is notable for her racist outburst "I had three doctors round me this afternoon and one of them was as black as a chinmey bag. Oh he was clean you could tell, his face shone like black leading", and the disturbing close-up of her face right into the camera at the end of her accusoratory rant. It is as if she is about to emerge out of the television and attack the viewer. Can you imagine Coronation Street doing anything so avante guarde these days?

Despite Ena's rather challenging personality, it is easy to see how she quickly became one of the most popular characters, and her "wisdom" is currently much impersonated in the Odana household. Well, not the racist stuff.

2011-01-10T16:35:00.007Z

The death of You're welcome

Emotional Labour is a phenomenon (mid-late 20th century) of westernised societies, whereby workers have to manage their emotions during service encounters, or at least appear to be experiencing various emotions, such as pleasure at serving someone. Like most things in our culture, it's aimed at getting you to buy more stuff. It was first noticed by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild, and is exemplified by the fixed smile on flight attendants, along with phrases like "Have a nice day." It's a very American thing - on my first visits to the US, I was always thrown by the "greeter" of a store, who would say hi and ask you how you are. British shop service tends to be lukewarm, much like the rest of British culture. Servers rarely approach you and if they must be engaged, both parties try to get it over with as quickly as possible.

Another Emotional Labour phrase is "You're welcome", which seems to be quintessentially American - I've never heard anyone in Britain utter it, ever. It is heard in shops, for example, when you say thank you after a server hands you change, but it is so widespread that it occurs in non-service encounters, like after you say thank you to someone for holding the lift for you. (The British equivalent, if there is one, seems to be "That's OK". It's taken me ages to get used to "You're welcome". It's one of those phrases that seems to backfire a bit, often coming across as rather curt, especially as it seems to be recited without any real thought or emotion. It's just something you say.

But on this trip to America, nobody said "You're welcome" to me at all. Just when you get used to an aspect of a foreign culture, they go and change the rules. Now, when you say "thank you", the American person says "Mm hm" back to you. Sometimes it sounds sassy in a RuPaul type of way.

"Mm hmm honey!"

Sometimes it's barely audible and involves no eye contact. It's the barest acknowledgement, even more perfunctory than the sleep-talking, rote-learnt "You're welcome". And it comes across as surly. Perhaps it's the recession. I never thought I would say it, but I miss "You're welcome."

Still, I come back from the US even more enamoured with Manhattan than ever before. People often ask me "Why do you go to New York?" and when I say "To be a tourist", they look at me with scorn or sympathy, as "tourism" is such a degraded concept these days. However, I love being a tourist. That's what being on holiday is about. I want to be able to spend money freely, see plays, musicals and films that are not available where I normally live, traipse around museums or walk everywhere and take multiple random detours just to explore new neighbourhoods, wake up late, have my bed made for me, eat a three course meal in a different restaurant each evening and spend every waking moment with my husband. If tourism is wrong, then I don't want to be right.

Added to this is the fact that my Britishness, a quality so dreary in almost every other context, is the equivalent of a starburst filter and a facelift to American eyes and ears. Even the crippling social awkwardness that is my British heritage comes across as exotic and glamorous - I am Hugh Grant or Colin Firth in a classy Britcom, rather than the result of a diffident education which despised success (show-offs). Even when I hear my own voice, drowned out by all those loud drawls, I think I sound cleverer and posher than I actually am. I like myself better as a foreigner.

My new favourite part of Manhattan is Greenwich Village, specifically Christopher Street. I so want to live on Christopher Street. Once the birthplace of the modern gay identity - and the location of the famous Stonewall riots, it's housed Dick Francis, Yoko Ono and Amy Sedaris. It's now a lot quieter than it was in the 1970s, when gay men would promenade up and down it all hours of the day and night, and Greenwich, having become all gentrified and expensive, is no longer such a hub of the avante guarde and culturally innovative. One of its latest claims to fame was that it kicked off the world's current obsession with cupcakes, thanks to the Magnolia Bakery on Bleeker Street.

I guess cupcakes don't exactly have the same bohemian edge as say, Jack Kerouac.

Around mid-2011, I'm due a long sabbatical. So if things go according to plan you'll find me in Greenwich Village, eating cupcakes and saying "mm hmm", or whatever has replaced it by then.

***

Perhaps I have just alienated everybody ("it's his personality unfortunately"), but judging by the lack of comments on recent posts, nobody seems to be reading blogs (or at least, this blog). I don't mind really. The blog acts as a useful reminder to me, so that when I have senile dementia, people can read out bits of it back to me and see a flicker of recognition.

But after months in obscurity. I am back on Facebook. Hopefully I can figure out how to organise my friends into groups better this time, so my work colleagues won't see photos of my grown up nephew in Borat fancy dress.

2011-01-01T13:35:00.004Z

Camels in Manhattan

I am in New York to see in the New Year. Fortunately, almost all of the snow has melted away now, and the temperatures are reasonable for this time of year. The day we arrived, we went to see the Rockettes performance at Radio City Music Hall. RCMH is my favourite theatre ever. It's an art deco cathedral, which was lovingly restored back to 1930s glamour about a decade ago. The toilets are huger and more opulent than any I've ever seen - and that's just the toilets.

The Rockettes are a troupe of dancers who are well-known for their high kicking, synchronised dance routines. They've been performing since the 1930s (with many cast changes since), but still do some of the original dances, like one where they're dressed as toy soldiers. The Christmas spectaculor was about the most high production show I've seen. It seemed to have been choreographed by Steven Hawking, being hyper-complicated and ultra-precise. However, it was an odd mix of different things, some of which seemed a bit strange when taken out of context. For example, the show began with a voice intoning all of the different commercial sponsers who had been involved in the production. After this list, each one was given its own little advert - and bizarrely, at the end of all of this the audience actually applauded. Commercialism was threaded through much of the show, with an impressive cinematic Santa sledge ride through Manhattan involving going through a digitised Times Square, complete with bill-boards advertising the products of the sponsers. And at the end, as we were leaving, ladies were handed free Maybelline lipsticks. I guess all of this extra sponser-money was what helped to make this an amazing show, but I think I'd have still been impressed with less razzamatazz and no ads. I expect we'll be getting more of this sort of thing (if you're British), as the government are allowing product placement in tv and radio programmes now. In fact, this blog posting was brought to you by Vomilex - Britain's number one vomit suppressant: Don't retch! Take Vomilex!

Amidst these efforts to secure loyal customers, was a little tacked on bit at the end about the True Meaning of Christmas (not shopping after all), but the birth of Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. A montage of carols was hurriedly dashed out, and then a few sheep and camels were led across the stage. Having been on a tour of Radio City Musical Hall a couple of years ago, I'd seen the pens were animals were kept backstage, but it was still amazing (and not in an especially good way) to see camels in Manhattan - in mid-winter, indoors, with music blaring at rock concert levels. Again, it looked lovely, but I expect they'd be happier off in more natural surroundings.

Despite nods to "innovation" in entertainment such as 3D (not really an innovation, but a repacking of an old and naff idea), it was the Rockettes who were the main draw of the show, and performed best. Of the Rockettes, all were female, tall, leggy, beautiful, young, and most were white. Had I been a heterosexual man, I would have probably had a rather different reaction to this display of loveliness on stage. As it was, I had to make do with revelling in the kitchness of it all, and wishing that there were a few equally athletic chaps to do those high kicks in the line-up. Although the Rockettes are sold as wholesome, this oddly accentuates their desirability and sexuality - and I wonder what rich gentlemen in the 1930s would have made of them.

So it was an odd performance - the hard-sell of rampant commericalism, the technical wizardy of 3D, old fashioned songs and values, kitschy glamour, sexy-pure heterosexual fantasy machines, and a dash of religious fevour at the end. For aliens who want a crash course in American values, they could do a lot worse than the Rockettes Christmas show.

2010-12-21T19:54:00.005Z

Bewitched, Bewildered and Vajazzled

From the middlebrow pleasures of Downton Abbey, I turn now to The Only Way is Essex - another "staged reality" programme, which seems to be Britain's answer to Jersey Shore. Essex, a county to the east of London, has long had a reputation for siring boorish, uneducated, flashy men and stupid, promiscuous, vulgar women. On the few occasions that I've visited Essex, I've found it just like the rest of Britain, with no fewer or more of those sorts of lazy stereotypes than anywhere else in the country. But the caricature sticks, mainly due to the media giving special attention to people from that part of the country who fit the stereotype - inasmuch the same way as the only openly gay men allowed on tv have to be ultra-feminine.

My husband walked in halfway through last night's "Best of The Only Way is Essex" and ended up spluttering in incoherent rage when he realised what vajazzling was (it involves women glueing tiny jewels onto their pubic regions). When I explained it to him, he thought I'd invented it, as a kind of parody of what fashion-conscious young people might do. But it's real alright.

The people in The Only Way is Essex are all very gendered. The Alpha-male is Mark, who describes himself as Mr Essex. Mark is a very cocky 23 year old who embodies the word swagger.

Do my eyes look dead in this?

There is a Beta-male called James, who wants to be Mark, and may be secretly a bit in love with him. Another Beta-male is called Kirk, who also looks like James and Mark.

The girls are even harder to tell apart than the males. Lauren is Mark's on/off girlfriend, while Mark's sister Jessica is a model, though for a long time I thought she was Amy, a beautician and bejazzling "professional". There is one very very camp and skinny gay man called Harry, who is "fab" and "glam". His special skill is that he can do the splits at a moment's notice, and unlike the other characters, he is desexualised, his main role being as cheerleader and shopping companion to the girls, as well as incidentally making the heterosexual men appear more masculine.

Not much of consequence happens. The characters' beauty regimes take up a lot of their time. When they are not getting fresh vajazzles, they get spray-tanned, or have sun-beds ('beds). Sometimes they sit in one of those jazzucis with little flesh-eating fish in them that appear to have suddenly sprung up all over Britain. Beauty regimes occur before modelling auditions, which come prior to visits to nighclubs or exclusive parties, where the characters get even more dressed up and then have furious encounters where they confront each other for sexual indiscretions, real or imagined. Dialogue generally consists of a series of randomly generated cliches, all made famous from shows like Big Brother: "Shat up!", "At the end of the day, right!", "Aw Babe!"... Occasionally, someone will have a "blonde moment", such as identifying an elephant as a rhino, or not knowing where North London is. To describe this state of intellectual desolation as a "moment" is perhaps the show's only under-statement. Such "moments" appear to be several years in length. It would be more accurate to note the rare points where characters are not ignorant, as them having a "normal moment".

Their ignorance aside, I admire these people for their irrepressible confidence. But I do worry for them. A rather cruel aphorism is "Beauty fades, stupid is forever", and I am reminded of Jodie Marsh - another Essex girl, who only a few years ago helped to pave the way for the current crop. After being voted first off Big Brother, having a false feud with Jordan aka Katie Price, releasing an unintentionally hilarious autobiography and blog (a bit like an extended Alan Bennett monologue), Jodie seems to have sunk back into obscurity. The shelf-life of an Essex girl (or boy) is only slightly longer than a bag of frozen peas. Mark and co - stay off those 'beds.

2010-12-19T14:42:00.004Z

Do Ask, Do Tell

America lumbered further towards its grudging equalisation of gay people yesterday, when its Senate voted to repeal unfair "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", which stops openly gay people from serving in the armed forces. The law, a perfidious compromise by Bill Clinton, basically stated - "It's fine for you to risk your life for your country but don't carry pictures of your partner in your wallet. In fact, don't have a partner. We find you disgusting." While I am happy for them, I wish we didn't live in a world where armies had to exist. Or if they did exist, it would only be in order to help people during floods etc. So I feel a bit like how I felt when one of my friends got a job as a footman at Buckingham Palace. I was everso pleased for him, but at the same time, I'd make the Royal Family live on a council estate, and turn Buckingham Palace into a glorious home for orphaned children or children with severe disabilites.

While America was once a role model for gay liberation, it has increasing appeared anachronistic and callous, as more socially progressive countries have first caught up with then surpassed it. Of the 26 NATO countries, at least 22 allow gays and lesbians to serve in the military. Ten countries allow same-sex marriage, including Argentina, South Africa and Spain (not countries you'd necessarily expect to be more tolerant than the US), and a further 18 or so have recognition of civil unions, including Uruguay, Slovenia, Ecador, Hungary and Ireland. (Where America does excel, of course, is in commericalising gay culture, so that you can only belong if you buy stuff.)

Part of all of this sphincter-retracting homophobia is mainstream America's rather dreary obsession with appearing macho, which runs through almost every aspect of its culture. Take Star Trek for example. Beefy, swaggering Captain Kirk got to be the hero, shooting from the hip and bedding green-skinned alien beauties. Over in the UK, we got nerdy Dr Who, who talks science-babble and eschews violence. Another part of it is religion (I do hope that George W Bush dies painfully from a disease that could have been cured had he allowed stem cell research to take place when he was president). Even with a Democrat government, the pace towards repeal of DADT has been so fraught and slow that it has been like watching a snail race - with the snails blindfolded.

At least it seems to be getting a move on finally - compare slow progress to the no progress that would have happened in the twisted Parallel Univerise where John McCain and Sarah Palin won the presidency. McCain's response to the repeal says it all: "Today's a very sad day. They will do what is asked of them but don't think there won't be a great cost." (My response to McCain - "You are a cunt." - he might be a poor loser, but I'm an even worse winner - and I'm gloating gloating gloating on air.)

And if any sexy American sailors or marines have been reading my blog in secret, and would like a well-spoken British penpal with impeccable manners - then do get in touch. I won't even have to say your secret is safe with me, which is just as well, as I'm hopeless at keeping secrets.

2010-12-19T10:15:00.007Z

What, exactly, IS a weekend?

I should be in Tunisia, but my flight and connecting flight were both cancelled yesterday, so I didn't even bother showing up at the airport - which, from news reports sounds like it has turned into a scary dystopic society with trapped angry drunk people now living in shanty towns in the ticketing queues. In the rare event that a flight does manage to take off, then passengers have to engage in a death-match to get on it. It's British Airways Thunderdrome!

Instead, I'm watching Downton Abbey on DVD, ITV's expensive period drama/soap about rich people and their servants 100 years ago. Rob James-Collier (Liam from Coronation Street) plays Thomas - a naughty gay footman who likes to seduce all of the young gentlemen he's supposed to be looking after. But the best role is Maggie Smith's Dowager Countess, Violet. She carries an expression of disapproving hauteur which makes her seem as if she's permanently sat on a thistle covered in dog-shit, and if anyone speaks to her, her eyes swivel in pained disgust and then her mouth opens and out comes a sardonic put-down that would render the most fierce and spiteful drag queen inarticulate for ten minutes.

Period dramas must be back because the BBC have responded by resuccisitating Upstairs Downstairs - which covers pretty much the same ground. While I enjoy historical dramas about rich people, I wonder if this is subtle "nudge" propaganda - a way of getting us to accept the ConDem's shock treatment of cuts cuts cuts, which will disproportionately affect women, the poor, the young, northerners and people living in Labour consituencies. When people complain that the ConDem's don't care about social mobility they are WRONG. The ConDems want social mobility alright. But they want the poor to move further downward and the rich to move upward. In essence, they want to recreate the world of Downton Abbey, where a few fragrant and pampered rich families live in enormous mansions, while the rest of us slave away under the stairs to make sure that they never have to dress themselves or think an unhappy thought ever again. Maggie Smith's Violet is so out-of-touch with the lives of ordinary people that she hasn't even heard of the concept of a "weekend". Why would she? She's never had to work or do anything normal. "What IS a weekend?" she asks in distate, when someone uses the word. It's hilarious and shocking all at once.

While Downton Abbey could be written as a kind of critique of the British class system, it is actually quite jolly about it all. The Lord of the Manor is represented as a kindly fellow who cares for his servants and loves Donwton Abbey so much. The lowly male relative who is going to inherit the lot at first struggles when his assigned butler wants to do up his collar, but within one episode, he accepts that everyone has their role and function in this world, and who is he to deprive someone of that. And some of the servants are presented as thoroughly rotten. No, the key message here is not that this is an unfair system - it's that there are good and bad people everywhere. Scenes of hunting is accompanied by jolly gallopy music and shots of everyone looking happy. We don't see the bit where dogs rip a terrified fox to bits and everyone licks their lips in sadistic glee.

And like they used to say on Battlestar Galactica, this has happened before. I recall the 1980s (with Dowager-like disgust), where our council estate was like a ghost town on Saturday nights at 8pm, when we all settled round to watch the immensely wealthy people on Dallas and Dynasty, sipping champagne and eating breakfast next to their outdoor swimming pools. We were meant to identify with their problems, to care about these rich characters and want the nice ones to succeed, even though our own lives were immeasurably different from them.

My mother used to say "Look! Money doesn't bring happiness after all - we're better off than them!" when Blake and Krystal and Bobby and Pam were shown to suffer. But she didn't realise that these were FICTIONAL CHARACTERS and in reality the rich live much nicer lives than the poor, and in the odd cases where they do have problems, they can just throw lots of money at the problem and it tends to go away.

So I think Downton Abbey is going to prepare us for a new Britain. If you're young and you don't already own a massive house, you may as well start practising how to carry a silver tray full of wine glasses. Because that's the best you're going to manage. Even with your degree.

2010-12-08T22:24:00.009Z

Glad you voted Liberal?

Tomorrow, the British parliament votes on whether to raise undergraduate fees to up to £9000. As a lecturer at a "top 10 UK" university, I've been following the debate with interest. My university may raise fees to the maximum £9000. This means us lecturers can all rest easy, particularly the Arts and Humanities lecturers, as we are having our funding decimated. This government doesn't like people who do Arts and Humanities because these tend to be subjects that attract Socialists, Marxists and Feminists (stroppy, difficult people in other words) and it thinks that we don't contribute enough money to society - unlike all those people who teach Business, Economics and Management theory (and somehow failed to predict the recession).

I'm against the fee rise because I think it will deter teenagers from poorer families from going to university. Even though they won't have to pay the fees until they start earning a wage, I still think £9000 a year is too high particularly when house prices have gone up so much that most young people won't be able to afford mortgages unless their parents help them out. I think the fee increase will further the rich/poor divide in the country and reduce social mobility, which is already going down. As someone from a council estate who's Dad was a bus driver, going to university in 1990 was difficult enough, and I was lucky not to have to pay any fees, but instead get a grant of £800 a term. Even then I had to work two jobs to pay the rent. But at least when I'd finished, I had no debts and was able to borrow £5000 to do an MSc - which is what helped me get a job during the last recession. I'm a Tory nightmare - the kid from the poor family who broke out of the poverty trap despite having the odds stacked against me, and although now I'm a relatively high earner, I still stubbornly refuse to embrace self-serving Tory (rich person) values. Tax the rich until they bleed. Increase the minimum wage. And if the rich get in a huff and want to go and live somewhere else, then I'll pack their cases for them. Missing you already!

Making the rich richer and the poor poorer is exactly what the Conservative Party want. So it's hardly suprising that so many of their policies will do just that. What's more disappointing is that the Liberal Democrats made an election campaign promise to oppose fee raises. Many people, including first-time voters, voted Liberal precisely for this reason. This sense of betrayal, coming only months after the Liberals managed to gain office through forming a coalition with the Conservatives, is unlikely to ever be overcome. Indeed, the LibDems have gone from being the party of choice for people jaded with the shadiness of New Labour spin and its "end of boom and bust" rhetoric to the party of hypocrisy and lies. I almost fell for Nick Clegg's nicey-nice above-the-sleaze persona that he projected during the election debates in May. When the Tories failed to achieve a majority, I expected that the Liberals would offer to support them on some things, but would draw the line on fees. But after so many decades in the political wilderness, that novel taste of power must be like blood to a starving vampire. They can't risk losing it.

First time voters have had a wonderful lesson in politics - no matter what the party, those in power will lie, sell out and betray you to stay in power. The Liberal Democrats are to be credited for politicising a whole generation of young people - people who will be voters and campaigners for a very long time to come. And who are unlikely to believe a thing that the Liberal Democrats say again. That's a shame, because there are some very decent and honorable Liberal Democrat MPs - like Tim Farron, who won't be voting for the fee increase. And while much of the anger is directed at the Liberal Democrat liars, we miss the point that it is the Tories, who did not gain a majority of votes, are putting forward a series of economic and social changes to this country, which make Maragaret Thatcher look like a socialist. The Liberal Democrats act as a lightening-rod, taking pressure off those who really have the power.

But ultimately, the message from all this is a depressing nihlistic one. There was no "good choice" at the last election. Just a series of increasingly bad choices. None of the three leaders (Brown, Cameron, Clegg) deserved to govern this country. I wish I could have ticked a box saying "Sack all three leaders and hold another election when you've found some better people, or some better parties even."

One thing about left-wing people, is that they seem to have all the criticisms, but rarely seem able to come up with any answers. My answer would be to link fees more closely to ability to pay. Fees should be on a sliding scale, based on the social class and earning power of a teenager's parents or guardians. For the children of bankers, I'd make the fees £300,000 a year. It'd only take a couple of annual bonuses to cover the cost of them. For children of road sweepers - they'd get grants to go to university rather than have to pay fees.

I'd also reduce most undergraduate degrees to two years. As I said, I teach at a university. The first year is mainly a doss. Your results don't count towards your final grade, and on many courses students only have a few hours of teaching a week. The rest of the time is spent hanging around, getting drunk, staying up all night and sleeping in late. They do this because they can. I and almost everyone in my year did it because we could. If students were given a more intensive education, then costs would go down. And students would go to university because they wanted the education, not because they wanted an easy three years or to delay their entry into the real world. It'd also make them much more prepared for the world of work.

And I'd put limits on the numbers of people allowed to study certain subjects. Business, Management and Economics degrees that place emphasis on teaching people to persuade others to buy things, to manipulate people into doing what you want, and into making maximum profit without caring for ecology or human suffering - it's those subjects which got us into the recession mess in the first place. They have no place in universities, just as Nick Clegg has no place in this government.

2010-12-08T17:02:00.009Z

The aliens are coming

At Everything Is Terrible I've been laughing at video clips of The Unarians, an unbelievably flamboyant and kitchsy cult which believes in reincarnation and space aliens. It appears to have taken its fashion guides from Liberace, John Waters films and 1960s episodes of Star Trek. Its leader/founder, Archangel Uriel, aka "Ruth Norman" looks and sounds like an insane old lady drag queen.

Among others, Ruth claims to have been Poseidon (founding Atlantis), Socrates, Mary Magdalen, the Dalai Lama, King Arthur and Peter the Great. That's what's great about the Unarians - not only are they reincarnation royalty - but they are reincarnations of people WHO DIDN'T EVEN EXIST IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Like many cults, the Unarians have predicted several times that there will be a Great Event that will change life on Earth forever. The last one was supposed to be 2001, when we would make inter-planetary contact with 32 alien races. Wrong much? Never mind, get out your flags, put on your cloaks and rainbow sash and get in that car park, where it's time to parade around a model spaceship...

Unarius from Airwave Ranger on Vimeo.

Over at the Unarian's blog (of course they have a blog), there is a rather depressing story about someone who underwent "past life therapy", and claims to have been an evil alien in a planet in the Orion Empire. She/he helped to create viruses as part of an aggressive inter-planetary expansionist policy. She/he is now been punished for such past crimes, by suffering from "several kidney and bladder infections, numerous digestive tract problems, and rheumatic fever due to strep throat, which caused minor damage to one of my heart valves."

While it's very easy to laugh at the Unarians, I'm not sure what makes them any different from any other religion (other than a slightly more kitsch sense of style). What's more believeable? - 32 space-ships are heading for Earth (perhaps delayed - maybe Jupiter has some really good shopping outlets) or there's an invisible super-being creator who knows when you've been good or bad so be good for goodness sake!

And while cults like this are hilarious, ultimately, they make me very depressed. It's another example of how humans are so completely delusional, uncritical and flawed. After seeing their nonsense, I almost wish that 32 alien spaceships would come to Earth - and wipe the lot of us out. Because really, if even a few of us are we are capable of believing crap like this - then there's no hope.

2010-12-08T15:13:00.001Z

The 13cm rule

1) Is it me, or are Christmas cards shrinking? This year I have received cards so small that I could barely make out the writing on them. They seem to have been made for and by tiny elves. I normally have three "levels" of Christmas cards, which are sent to people depending on how much I love them. So close family members get huge luxury cards, friends who I don't see much get smaller ones, and people from work get smaller ones still. But I have a limit. I won't send anyone a card that is less than 13cm in height and width. It's a passive-aggressive message of hatred. Or at least it is in my eyes. Why bother giving someone something if it's crap?

However, a small Christmas card pales in comparison to these other Christmas communication disgraces:

2) Not sending anyone a card but sending a mass email to everyone you know saying you have donated money to charity. That's just lazy and misses a crucial point about Christmas - which is about showing you care enough about someone to write a few words to them, lick a stamp and walk to a post office. Not acceptable.

3) Sending an e-card. I hate to break it to you but the 1990s are over. What might have appeared novel when done once, now just comes across as churlish and again LAZY. You can't hang an e-card on your mantlepiece. Sending them just makes you look cheap. Even cheaper than the "I've donated money to charity instead of sending you a card" person. So don't do it.

4) Sending a family newsletter. Arrrrrgh. This is the worst sin of Christmas. It basically says "I can't be bothered to acknolwedge you directly - so I'm going to send you the equivalent of Christmas junk mail - a mass produced missive to all my non-friends, just to let you know how far down in the friendship pecking order you have gone." If you hate someone so much that you can't even PRETEND to send them a personalised message, by cutting and pasting bits and pieces of a newsletter-type-email, and starting and ending it with a couple of paragraphs that have been crafted with an individual person in mind, then ask yourself - why are you contacting this person at all? Why not simply call it a day and delete them from your memory.

Because, in fact, family newsletters aren't really about showing that you care about someone at all. They are instead about boasting. One I recently received was almost like a parody of a family newsletter. It boasted about fabulous holidays spent with friends (all of whom probably got proper Christmas cards from the sender, and not an impersonal mass communication), amazing achievements (charity runs, grade 4 oboe - that sort of thing) and the amazing acheivements of their children (gifted of course and in the very best schools).

Christmas has gradually become degraded with negative qualities over the past few decades - commercialised, expensive, tacky, dragged out longer and longer, excessive. I am not religious at all, but the one thing about Christmas which I do appreciate is about being nice to people and showing them that you care. So send someone a proper card (13 centimeters!)

2010-12-05T15:18:00.001Z

Eye Fizz

My husband had Laser treatment on one of his eyes on Friday afternoon. We booked a 6th floor corner room in a nearby hotel, where he was to recuperate that evening. I'd had my own laser eye surgery almost a decade ago (date: September 12th, 2001 - talk about opening your eyes to a "whole new world"), and have enjoyed great vision ever since, so he was quite excited about "eye fizz day".

After the operation, he put on a massive pair of sunglasses and we emerged into the snow of Manchester, walking through a German Christmas market to get to the hotel. He can't have been in that much pain because the first thing he did was insist on getting Starbucks. I think that if people have had surgery, they should at least be indulged afterwards, so I'd bought some chocolates from Selfridges and he had a nice mixture of various ganaches and pain-killers while tucked up in bed.

Laser eye surgery has come a long way since I had it. He has been given a complicated regime of four different types of eye-drops, that have to be adminstered at different points (about every 30 minutes on average). So that's what I'll be doing for the next month. And unfortunately, I have discovered that there is no way that a man can give another man eye-drops on a crowded train platform, without drawing attention to himself. Still, he's experienced no pain at all, unlike me - who was transformed into a crouching, shrieking bitch within an hour, once the pain-killer wore off.

That night, television was out of the question so we did the crossword in the Manchester Evening News, then he asked me to entertain him by reading out the most depressing stories - there was a particularly tragi-comic one about a man who had kicked his partner with his wooden leg after flying into a rage when he'd misplaced his tobacco box. The fact that the police had been called out 67 times already, and that "she still loved him", made it verge on the tragic rather than comic.

We then listened to a CD of a Radio 4 Agatha Christie dramatisation called "Towards Zero", which I last read aged 13 and had no memory of. I am getting quite good at working out how Agatha Christie's brain works, and guessed "She always makes you suspect it's the most obvious person, then it turns out they have an alibi so attention goes elsewhere, but by the end it turns out it was the most obvious person after all." We ended up having a long disagreement over whether one of the murders actually was a murder. It involved an elderly and frail judge who had a heart attack upon climbing a staircase as the "murderer" had put a sign on a lift saying "out of order". My husband said it was a clear-cut case of murder, but I pointed out that nobody had put a gun to the judge's head and forced him to climb the stairs. Agatha Christie - still providing controversy in the 21st century.

I had been intending to look out of the window that evening and claim to have seen a wonderful display of celestial fireworks (as in Day of the Triffids). Then, in the morning I was going to pretend that the world had ended and he was the only person to have survived. My friend Tim had even suggested that I rub two cabbages together, in order to emulate the noise of Triffids outside in the corridor. But he woke up with perfect vision, so instead he tested his new eye by successfully reading all of the signs on the buildings opposite.

Now that I have a partner with good eyes, I am slightly worried that he will noticed that I am no longer in my 20s. You can get away with quite a lot when you know that you look like a post-impressionist print. Now that I'm in HDTV maybe I should start a moisturising regime...

2010-11-29T20:06:00.009Z

What's your superhero skill?

I am currently a "Reader" at work. "What does that mean?" asked my mother. "I thought you write books, not read them!" I don't know why it's called that either, but it means that I have one more promotion to go and then I'll be a professor. One reason why I want to be a professor is that I've become a bit tired of saying "That's Dr Bitch to you!", when people call me a bitch. Saying "That's Professor Bitch to you!" sounds so much more original.

Actually, the real and only reason is the £10,000 pay increase which comes with it. Even with the chunks of tax, pension and NI that'll come out of it. That's an awful lot of big bars of Galaxy.

I work in a very large university department which has loads of professors so they're very commonplace in my life. I could walk out of my office, spit and hit ten of them without trying to. I'm often the only non-professor at dinner-parties. I've always seemed to work and socialise with people who are much more advanced than me, in all sorts of ways. I guess that's one way to keep you grounded and stops you from thinking too highly of yourself.

Even when I was in infants school and so proud to be on the "top table" for the geek children who did best in the weekly test, I was in awe of Kathryn - a seven year old virtuoso pianist with a computerised brain. I think she'd now be called "gifted". All I knew was that during lunchtime she would make enormous lists of all of the past participle verbs that she knew. And once, during art lesson, I was quite pleased at my drawing of Mr Tickle. She on the other hand had drawn "a picture of Kate Bush in an inflatable space suit". None of those words or concepts meant anything to me.

And she used to tease my obsession with the Mr Men by pretending to have read new Mr Man books that didn't actually exist "Oh, have you read Mr Star? It's great!"

When I got a bit older I discovered Helen Cresswell's "Bagthorpe saga" - about a family of three genius children, and one normal child, Ordinary Jack. I identified with Ordinary Jack.

This association with much brainer people than myself has carried over into my adult life. My husband has been a professor for ages. He's 8 years older than me and makes my achievements look pitiful. He's always done everything first and usually better. So I'm very used to playing second fiddle. Gay relationships in particular can become quite competitive, and although it's toxic to keep score, it's sometimes difficult not to. Especially if you're in a job which attracts competitive people and then further incentivises competitiveness. They don't say Publish or Perish for nothing. I think I realised that I was dating a scary genius years ago when I watched him playing that computer game Civilisation. While I struggled to keep about six cities on the go, he had about fifty all running simultaneously and effectively, while conducting ongoing and highly successful wars against the other computer players. He has the brain of Professor Xavier from the X-men. He knows everything, and his other special skill is that he can impersonate anybody, which has always kept me laughing.

At least I can console myself that I'm the pretty one. My special skill is my hair.

So my bete noir is Professor Brian Cox (born 1968, only four years older than me, with his own tv and radio programs and even a pop career in his past). Unlike most other professors, he still has a full head of hair, and doesn't seem to suffer from those levelling personality disorders that Mother Nature has seen fit to award people who are very clever at one academic subject. To my knowledge he doesn't have debiliting shyness, any facial or sexual tics or an inflated ego which manifests itself in pomposity, pontificating and primadonna-ish behaviour. My sister-in-law thinks he is gorgeous, but as a gay man with much higher standards for male beauty, I think that's going a bit too far. I will concede though, that he would be a difficult person to be in a relationship with. Clever people are supposed to be freaks. That's just the way things are. By being so normal, Brian Cox throws up the possibility that real X-Men can actually exist. He's part of a mutant super-race and must be stopped!

2010-11-25T19:46:00.003Z

Witchy

I may have found a rival to my favourite weird 70s Euro group Shocking Blue. Meet The Rattles, a German group whose biggest hit was The Witch. Their pop video is like the Blair Witch Project and the Evil Dead. I especially like the blindfolded people reading German newspapers, although I'm also quite partial to the man pretending to be the Statue of Liberty standing in a pool. What does it all mean?

2010-11-22T19:03:00.003Z

What would Rolf Harris do

I have been befriended by a group of artists recently. They operate out of an old warehouse in Manchester, and use words like "space", "installation" and "interactive". They are all terribly nice, and I don't want to spoil everything by saying "You know who's a good artist? Rolf Harris!"

Rolf is the anthithesis of contemporary art. I saw some of Rolf's wares in the "art" section of Fenwick's department store in Newcastle recently. A picture of a lion was on sale for £700. And it actually looked like a lion. Afterwards I went to the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. It is a huge space, formally an old flour mill on the River Tyne, which houses all the best most cutting-edgest contemporary art. There was a big dead palm tree on the floor of one room. I had no idea what it was about, but I wanted to scream "Rolf Harris" and fill that massive empty, silly space with the name of someone I consider to be a good artist.

Last week I went to the National Portrait Gallery and saw the Photographic Portrait Prize 2010. There were a wide range of photographs, and to be honest, I was a little shocked at a couple of them. One in particular was entitled Portrait of My British Wife (google it, go on, just don't do it at work) and showed a picture of a young women, not wearing any trouser bottoms. It won second prize and £3000. Faced with this picture, I suddenly came over all Mary Whitehouse and started thinking "But what about the children!" This article in The Guardian, a couple of weeks ago, sums up how I felt. Actually, forget the children. I didn't like seeing it. I like to be able to choose when I see a vagina. And I didn't fancy seeing one that day thanks. At least a verbal warning would have been nice.

I don't like art that tries to be shocking or challenging. It just makes me bored and turned off. It's so dreary and glum. And I don't like it when artists simply want to get a reaction out of someone, and they say "Oh, everything's a valid response!" So even my boredom is labelled as a valid reaction in itself and therefore a success for the artist who succeeded in getting a rise out of the audience. Even a non-response is a response. How clever and post-modern! I also don't like it when shocking art is used as a way to bring attention and fame to the artist. So someone pushes a boundary, puts a vagina where you weren't expecting to see it, someone else gets a bit flustered and complains, and then before you know it - success! Debate and controvesy occur, the gallery gets a lot more visitors and everyone wins apart from the person who complained, who now looks like a prudish twat. (I used the word twat here to show that I'm not prudish, and also as a "clever" reference to the piece of art itself).

So I don't get a lot of contemporary art. I keep going to the galleries. I read the descriptions of what the artist was trying to do. I try to think about the range of possible responses and all the different things that the art could mean. I can see how I'm supposed to get it. But it just comes across as trying too hard to be clever and challenging.

I think a lot of people don't like to say that because they're afraid they'll come across as thick. I'm quite happy to be called thick. I can quote Foucault, Derrida, Bordieu - all of them until you scream at me to stop. I can do "clever".

Yet I don't buy it. It all comes across as a big fake and I don't think that even the artist has a clue half the time what they're supposed to be doing. It just comes across as lazy and like the artist is taking the piss and then taking the money. Would that Portrait of My Wife have won second prize if the wife had been wearing trouser bottoms? Is the picture technically that good? Or did it get awarded because of that brave, controversial vagina? It looks like blagging, frankly, and you wouldn't be able to get away with it in most other fields.

I guess the artists don't care. What I've said is just another valid response to them. Someone could even make a piece of art by copying all of the words in this blog posting onto a giant canvas - and perhaps writing them in shit - just to make it all the more symbolic. But I wouldn't be impressed with that either.

If I had £700, I would have bought that Rolf Harris picture. It was pretty good.

2010-11-22T18:17:00.001Z

A Truce, of Sorts, With My Hair

My hairstyle fluctuates. For almost all of my childhood it was a brushed forward look, designed by my mother and modelled on The Beatles "mop-top". Not content with naming me after TWO of the Beatles, my mother was determined that I would also look like them - all at once.

I had tried to cut it myself at 12 - got it tragically wrong and ended up having the whole lot shaved off (you try being the swot with a skinhead at school - thank goodness it grew back in about two weeks). I didn't dare do anything else with it until 15, when I gave myself a daring side-parting. People pointed at me during school assembly and whispered comments, but oddly one by one, all of the boys I hung out with copied my new "do" over the course of the week. For the first (and possibly only) time, I was a Fashion Leader.

By the time I got to university, the side parting had turned into a gigantic, out-of-control quiff, which added an extra 8 inches onto my height. I had been inspired by the boys of Beverly Hills 90210 and the lead singer of REM, who in turn had probably been inspired by James Dean. I cultivated the sideburns and Luke Perry's non-existent top lip. "Why are you doing that weird thing with your mouth" my friend used to say when he saw me looking in the mirror. It was unconscious, and humiliating to have it pointed out.

Around about ten years ago, the quiff got shorter and shorter, and I tried to get my hair to resemble Paul Clarke on Big Brother 2. This otherwise banal contestant spent hours applying bits of styling putty to his hair in order to give it what was known as the "Hoxton fin". This picture of him doesn't really do it justice, but you can see the rather toxic-looking amount of product in it.

It wasn't the sort of look that really let you lean back against soft furnishings without leaving an imprint, and it took ages to create. After about a week of putting stuff in my hair by the name of "Goop" or "Sticky Fish" or whatever, my hair would rebel and then refuse to do anything at all. It would stick up in all the wrong places. I kind of hated it. The only thing it had going for it was that it resolved the cow-lick that I have on the right side of my face, by making it almost non-existent.

Now I'm in my late 30s, it seems futile to even try to follow hair fashion any more. I see much younger males walking around with longer hair, all swept forward, in a kind of emo-Bieber-style. A nice thing about being so old that it no longer matters what you look like, is that there is a kind of freedom in that. So I've gone back to the old side parting. On a good day my hair now resembles the middle-aged lead of Any Human Heart. Or a Tory politician.

It doesn't need any product (hurrah!), and is long enough so that it doesn't stick up by itself at the back until about 4pm, as I found when I've tried shorter styles. And when I go into my recently remodelled art-deco inspired ensuite guest room, I actually feel like I'm a character in a lavish 1930s costume drama.

And sometimes, I've started wearing old man hats. "I am pleased", said my husband. "That other hat you used to wear, the 'cool' one, made you look a bit simple!"

2010-11-12T19:57:00.006Z

Back to Back to the Future

In 1981 my parents rented a video player from the Rediffusion Store.

Did you have one of these in your house? We did.

However, my Dad (a bus driver) found his pay eroded over the course of that year (that's privitisation for you), and we had to send the video player back to the shop after our 12 month contract on it ran out. I was pretty devastated. Those next few years were like something out of a Dolly Parton song. My mother still reminds me of how during one particularly cash-strapped Christmas, when we couldn't afford presents, I told everyone "Don't worry, we'll just enter into the spirit of Christmas instead." (Are you crying yet?)

It wasn't until my mother got a job 6 years later that we were able to afford another video player. The first film we watched on it was Back to The Future. And none of us noticed the irony in the title.

That film made me obsessed with time travel. I couldn't wait to grow up and get out. I would make lists of things that I wanted my life to be like in the 21st century (with its shiny enormous wallscreens and even shinier people wearing silver clothes). The future couldn't come fast enough.

I did not like the 1980s. Being northern, working-class, poor, gay and an introverted swot, the country declared war on me in numerous ways, some which I wasn't even aware of until much later on. There was very little that was produced culturally during that decade that spoke to me (The Golden Girls being an exception). And I've spent the 20 years after the 1980s trying to ensure that if the 1980s comes back, it can never get me again. I am prepared.

But I've been getting sinister glimpses of the 1980s all year. Have you? Revivals used to come in 20 year cycles, but I think they've been getting faster and faster over the last decade, so now it's like we experience every decade all at once in a wave of multi-fluctuating retrotacity (I just made that word up).

But it's the 1980s that I keep seeing, out of the corner of my eye. It's almost like that hateful decade is a villain that was vanquished at the end of a horror film, I now feel like I'm at the start of the (less ground-breaking) sequel film (The 1980s Part 2), and the 1980s has somehow found a way to come back. 1980s cultists (The Tory Party) have invoked its spirit, and it's found a way back into our dimension. Again, it's the poor and the northerners who are going to be hit the hardest. All those public sector jobs in Newcastle, Liverpool and Manchester are going to be swept away. But don't think you can just sit around on benefits - they'll be taken off you also. And don't even think of going back to university, unless you fancy getting £50,000 in debt. Even yesterday's tuition fees riots felt like a rerun. And my own university has anarchists crawling out of the woodwork - they never really went away, they were just waiting, waiting for their moment.

Come to think of it, horror film sequels were a very 1980s thing anyway - so there it is again, seeping back into my consciousness, no matter how hard I try to make it go away.

Even Back to The Future is back again, celebrating its 25th anniversary. I keep seeing it everywhere.

This morning, as I turned on the car radio on the way to work, this was being played...

OK, so it was first released in 1978. But that saxophone refrain, heard so many times in the following decade, and inspiring of so many other saxophone inserts into 80s pop,
has come to represent a kind of short-hand for everything wrong about that accursed fucking decade - flashy, unironic and just plain naff.

And as it seared into my ears, I screamed, as if a serial killer had crawled into the back of the car.

Am I the only person who has a phobia of an entire decade?

2010-11-10T13:24:00.003Z

Clever Clogs

Hurrah for BBC4 - Britain's best (and only) channel for intellectuals. Its quiz show "Only Connect" prides itself on being horrifically difficult. It is hosted by Victoria Coren, professional poker player and broadcaster who writes articles about feminism in The Guardian (she doesn't like cheerleading, "They aren't doing sport. They are waggling their arses near boys who are doing sport"). She is like the scary school-teacher that you always want to impress, but generally fail to do so, no matter how hard you try.

In the game, contestants are presented with a wall of sixteen words or phrases and then have to put them into groups of four, based on what their connections to other words are. For example, "blue, red, yellow and green" are colours. But don't expect anything as facile as that to feature in Only Connect. You're more likely to be asked to figure out that four words are the surnames of villains in 19th century French literature (and discount another two words that are also villains in 19th century French literature but also refer to ditransitive verbs), or that all four words are palindromes or something.

My husband and me try to play along. We generally get zero points. Afterwards my husband (who's a professor) hangs his head in shame and shuffles off upstairs saying "That was a humbling experience!" If you want to be humbled too, you can play the online version, and get Victoria commiserating when you get zero.

2010-10-28T18:05:00.004Z

Paradise Drive

I saw the 1968 film Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush which has been released on blu-ray by the British Film Insitute. The BFI have released a lot of rare 1960s films over the last couple of years, and they've provided a nice opportunity to wallow in the shopping centres and cityscapes of another era on Saturday evenings in the Odana household. Often, these films aren't actually very good, so the fun comes from noting small background details like type-faces in shop signs or hair-styles of passers-by. These films can often evoke painful feelings of nostalgia in me. The Mulberry Bush film was set in Stevenage, one of the "new towns" that was built in the 1950s as a result of the New Towns Act of 1946. I grew up in Peterlee - another new town, and Stevenage town centre looked very similar - boxy buildings, lots of open spaces, pedestrian walkways under roads and minimalist white fencing. There was something utopian about growing up in one of these new towns - apparently the area where I lived was nicknamed "Paradise Drive" by local councillors. Then came 1979 and the area suffered heavily from unemployment, drugs and crime. Thank you Mrs Thatcher. I won't be sending you any flowers when you die.

An extra level of nostalgia is provided by the lead in Mulberry Bush - Barry Evans, who played the teacher in the racially sterotyping sitcom Mind Your Language. Evans plays a sex-mad A Level student who spends most of the film trying to get women to go out with him. Later he graduated to the more explicit film "Adventures of a Taxi Driver". But he found it hard to get work after Mind Your Language, and actually became a taxi driver himself in the 1990s. He was found dead in 1997 at the age of 53, and although a teenager was arrested for his death, the charge was later dropped. Evans - so vibrant and full of life in 1968, seems almost emblematic of the way that some British new towns went wrong.

2010-10-16T17:21:00.003Z

Just like an episode of Sex in the City

I had a holiday in Jordan recently and got to fulfil a childhood ambition by swimming in the Dead Sea. It's a weird experience - the normal rules about being in water don't apply, and you feel weightless. It's very difficult to make your body horizontal. Because the water is so full of salt, it's imperative that you don't get any in your eyes, and if you do, you must resist the urge to rub your eyes - as it just makes it worse.

There were a large number of American marines at the hotel resort when we were there, wearing only swimming trunks (it felt like a scene from a particularly trite episode of Sex and The City and I kept expecting Samantha Jones to show up and say "Oh! Fucking!". I'm guessing they were on leave or on route to Iraq. One of them ducked his head under the water in the Dead Sea and was then blinded by the salt water and couldn't get out. "I hate the fucking Dead Sea!" he bellowed. His buddy said "Watch your language!" I like respectable marines.

Speaking of Sex in the City, I saw Kim Cattrall in Antony and Cleopatra last night at the Liverpool Playhouse. She managed to play the part without appearing like Samantha (she even had dark hair) - although quite a lot of the women in the audience had made their own special tribute to Samantha and had dressed (in)appropriately for the theatre. I love that Kim Cattrall is from Liverpool - my Scouse sister-in-law Alison is very similar to her in fact. During the break, I noticed a tiny round person, who looked like the psychic lady Tangina from the 1980s Poltergeist movies.

Tangina was asking staff whether Kim would be exiting via the stage door, and when the play was over, we saw her hanging around at the stage door, hoping to meet her idol. I hope the resulting meeting wasn't too traumatic for either of them.

I am watching the A-List New York, a rather toxic yet compelling American reality series about so-called A-Gays in New York. It centres around Reichen, a square jawed ex-military man and winner of another reality show The Amazing Race. Reichen is dating a Brazilian bisexual model called Rodiney (!) who speaks in broken English. However, there's an ambitious ex back on the scene (also a model - in the red-t-shirt above), who is now disgraced and fat (which means thin by the standards of everyone who's not caught up in this vapid world). There's also a celebrity hair-dresser and a celebrity photographer, and someone whose claim to A-List fame I can't figure out, other than he stands around sucking his cheeks in and being absolutey horrible and jaded about everyone in sight. He's 26 and I bet he has a hideous picture of himself in his attic. The whole thing is tediously contrived and the joke is that none of them are actually A-Gays - real A-Gays would never demean themselves by going on reality tv. It's very hard to write about the show without coming across as equally catty and bitchy as the partipants. Although the location is glamorous, the people themselves are completely commonplace, all recognisable types from my own, much more dull youth spent occasionally on various provinical gay scenes in the UK. It's somewhat reassuring to know that no matter where you go, the people don't change.

2010-10-01T19:46:00.007Z

It gets better

Whenever I read about a gay teenager being bullied or hurt, I go a bit insane. I want to put on a superhero costume, swoop down on the bullies and kick them into outer-space. The recent spate of suicides of gay teenagers in America is shocking yet hardly surprising. The US still refuses to let gay people serve in the army, and most states don't have any formal recognition of same sex partnerships. Teenagers routinely use the word "gay" to refer to anything lame. American gay teens who are just discovering their sexuality don't even have a word to label their experience that hasn't been tainted with negative connotations.

The latest suicide is particularly depressing. Student Tyler Clementi jumped to his death from a bridge after his room-mate videoed him allegedly having sex with a man, and then streamed the footage on the internet.

Yet while the internet can be used for acts of evil, it can also be used for good. A project called It Gets Better is designed to give gay teenagers support and encouragement - people post up videos of their personal experiences, telling the teens not to give up, not to let the bullies win, and that their lives will get better. When I was 14, I felt completely on my own, and I wish there had been something like that project for me. So here's my video.

2010-09-18T09:38:00.006Z

Evacuated

The husband was away last night, so I had bottle of beer and too many Pringles. I fell asleep while watching tv, so decided to have an early night. At 10.50pm as I closed the curtains I noticed a big police van parked outside the house. I ignored it. Men have been resurfacing the road nearby and they've been closing off access, so I just assumed it was to do with that. When you live in a town centre you quickly learn to ignore a lot of things. Or you move to the countryside.

At 11.30 there was a loud knock at the front door, waking me up. It was the police. I remembered something my mother said years ago "If the police knock at your door at night, it's never good news."

"How many people are in the house?" asked the policeman.

"Just me." I said.

Things then went surreal. "There's a car parked up the road from you and we suspect there's a bomb in it, so we're asking all the residents to leave their homes for their own safety until we've been able to disable it."

I am naturally stroppy and difficult. "Are you forcing me to leave my house?" I asked.

"No, but we are strongly advising it."

"Oh alright." I grumped.

I dragged on my clothes and went outside. The street was full of bustle, with police and army running all over the place and communicating on walkie talkies. Someone had cordoned off the area with that plastic tape stuff. I had to duck under it to get to the "evacuee zone". Which was my local pub.

My area is mainly occupied by respectable elderly folk, so it was hardly suprising that I was the first one to arrive. Gradually the pub started to fill up. There was a jovial atmosphere. I exchanged emails with the husband and drank beer. At 1.30 am the policeman came back and said we could leave.

"Was there a bomb then?" I asked him.

He looked embarrassed. "No, but we had a lot of evidence that there was."

The bomb disposal robot traipsed down the hill. It looked a bit like a giant version of WALL-E. I took a photo of it and went to bed.

Turned out it was a car battery

2010-09-16T17:53:00.003Z

Pope off!

Child abuse is a terrible thing - and the Catholic church is guilty on two counts - acting as a paedophile ring for decades, and filling impressionable young minds with absolute nonsense about an invisible superbeing who can read your mind and will send you to hell when you die if you don't do everything his so-called representatives on earth tell you to do.

As you can imagine, I am hardly taken with the Pope's state visit to the UK. As Stephen Fry and others have argued, he's welcome to fork out for an EasyJet flight himself and pay for a National Express coach up to Scotland and back to London if he fancies - there are plenty of people who I don't like, but as long as they're spending their own money, there's not much I can do about it. But I do resent having my own tax money spent so he and his entourage can get gold star treatment. In fact, I took half an hour off work this afternoon as a protest.

I would much rather the money be spent on giving out free condoms to people. Or towards youth services for LGBT people. Or counselling for people who were abused by members of the Catholic church.

And as for your sidekick, Cardinal Walter Kasper, who compared Britain to a 3rd World Country - someone give him his own reality tv show. He's Secularism's new Best Friend. With people like that speaking on behalf of the Pope, atheists like me can put their feet up and have a Kitkat. Cardinal Kasper has been bumped from the visit, although the official story is that his gout is playing up. Gout? Are people still getting that? (Are people still using terms like "third world" for that matter?) I guess if you're stuffing your face so much that you have gout, then even a relatively rich country like the UK will look a bit "third world" to you.

2010-09-08T21:06:00.006Z

I'm Just a Disco Baby

In the camply amusing film Throughly Modern Millie, Carol Channing sings the song "I'm just a Jazz Baby", where she describes how her parents where jazz musicians. However, as the film is set in the 1920s, and Carol is at least 80, she has clearly misrembered her childhood - she should have sung a song called "I'm just a Brahms Baby".

I, on the other hand, was born in the 1970s, and I am a Disco Baby. My favourite LP when growing up was this one.

I don't know why my parents bought it. They hardly ever listened to it. It had all the hits of 1977, and I played it endlessly. I thought that Baccara sounded impossibly sophisticated, glamorous and foreign, a bit like the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp.

I had an early homosexual awakening when David Soul sang Silver Lady. I had no idea what the "Indiana wind and rain" or "seedy motels" were, but he sounded so angst-ridden and down on his luck that I wanted to give him a cuddle and tell him to forget all about his silver lady.

And me and my sister used to run up and down the sitting room, dancing to The Brotherhood of Man's "Angelo". It was probably just as well that I didn't understand that it was about a suicide pact.

When the 1980s happened, I fell out of love with pop music. I didn't get electopop and all of the men either looked like Lady Di or had dour Scottish accents and seemed so cross.

It was like Margaret Thatcher was the Queen of Narnia and had taken all of my disco away. I think I spent the entire decade in a depression.

But thanks to the magic of the internet, it's possible to download the entire Disco Fever album onto my Iphone, one song at a time. Disco never really Died. It was just having a nap.

2010-09-01T18:04:00.011Z

Nothing has been proved

This new government has only been in power for a few months, and there have already been three (yes three) "homosexual scandals". You can count on the Tories to be all repressed and hypocritical about sex, and after all those years of unimaginative, dour and shameless New Labour types, it's like a flashback to the 1980s. As the Pet Shop Boys lisped "Thcandal! Thuch a Thcandal!"

First was David Laws, who is technically Liberal Democrat. He resigned after three seconds when it turned out that he had claimed £40,000 expenses for renting rooms from his male partner. Then, it was Crispin Blunt (a name which sounds like a fictional flamboyant 1950s Cambridge spy) who has dropped the BOMBSHELL that he is gay (turns out his niece is Emily Blunt who was so camply wonderful in The Devil Wears Prada - I wonder if she can get him Meryl Streep's autograph?).

And even as the ink was drying on the Daily Mail over Blunt, there were onimous rumours that last Sunday's papers were going to reveal another huge gay Tory scandal. It was pretty easy to learn online that it was William Hague. I won't repeat some of the gossip I read about him, but it did raise my eyebrows (and as Divine said in Hairspray - I won't have to take my appetite suppressant tonight).

Today, the scandal unfolds. It turns out that Hague (49, bald) and his "special advisor", Chris Myers (25, attractive, thin, full head of hair) have been sharing hotel rooms together during campaigns. Here's a recent photo of them together. Do you think they make a lovely couple?

I must say, from a distance it almost looks like a picture of me and my husband (OK, so I haven't seen my 20s in a long time, but I said from a distance you bitch). I have no idea if either of them are gay, but Myers posture pings my gaydar (as does Hague's jeans - not very 49 year old Tory MP). They look like two A-Gays on their way to Waitrose to buy oranges for juicing for a fabulous dinner party (see my last posting).

Stranger still, Myers has resigned his position, citing "untrue and malicious allegations". Now, if the allegations are untrue, why would you feel the need to resign? Surely, you would hold your head up high, demand that the scurrilous rumour-mongers come up with proof, perhaps talk about suing them, and continue as normal. To resign... well it only raises further questions.

Hague has released a statement denying an "improper relationship", and pointing out that he and his wife Fion are doing very well, and have been trying for a child, despite her miscarriages.

There seem to have been a spate of stories about closeted men in the public eye recently - most of whom are in their 40s and 50s. As I said before, I have no idea if Hague is gay or not. But I wish these stories would just go away. If you are a closeted gay man in the public eye - for Chrissakes - just come out already. It's 2010. You are being very dreary. There is NOTHING to be ashamed of.

2010-08-31T19:08:00.000Z

18 years of wedded bliss

My husband and I have been living together for 18 years. You'd think that after all this time we would have resolved all issues and problems and never argue about anything. Think again. Last weekend we had some friends visiting for the weekend. It was lovely to see them again and when we'd last visited them in Birmingham they'd cooked us a lovely meal, so I wanted to return the favour. We got in a range of different breakfast stuff - croissants, toast, cereals, juicing oranges, filter coffee etc. In the end, all they had was some cornflakes. That evening I commented on this to my husband and asked him "It's odd - did you offer them everything? Did you offer them the croissants?

Him: "Yes."

Me: "Did you offer them juice?"

Him: "Yes, I offered them juice."

Me: "Did you say it was freshly squeezed orange juice?"

Him: "No, I just said orange juice."

Me: "Whaaat? Why didn't you say freshly squeezed orange juice. No wonder they didn't want it. Nobody likes shop-bought orange juice.

Him: "That's ridiculous. It wouldn't have made any difference if I'd said it was freshly squeezed or not."

Me: "No! If you buy oranges for juicing, you should let people know about it. It's a way of making them feel extra special!"

Him: "No it isn't."

Me: "It is. You're hopeless."

Him: "You are deranged."

And so on.

Here's to the next 18 years.

2010-08-29T22:01:00.004Z

What's the secret?

I don't buy gay magazines (or any magazines for that matter) because they are the mental equivalent of poison ivy. They are filled with images of happy-looking, young male models with zero body fat and once they've got you both titillated and feeling bad about yourself, there are then pages and pages of adverts, info-adverts, reviews of stuff you can buy (so more adverts really) and adverts - all also featuring the same happy male models enjoying the products that you didn't even know about and don't need. But now buying them will scratch the dissatisfaction itch and stop you from feeling like such an old, fat, ugly, boring, suburban loser (never mind that someone in China just died after working another 17 hour day and the world is steadily getting hotter).

However, a game I sometimes play in newsagents is to check whether they sell gay magazines (even though I don't buy them), and if they don't, whether they sell straight porn magazines. So I normally get to see the front covers of gay magazines for free - which is probably all you really need.

This month Attitude magazine says it's found the "secret to being gay and happy. A new way of thinking that could change your life."

As I haven't bought the magazine, I don't know what this secret is. But I'm simply desperate to know. Until a nice reader spills the details, I can only imagine. Here are my 5 guesses - bearing in mind that this is Attitude's mental health issue.

1) Kill yourself when you're 30.
2) Have plastic surgery and move to London (technically two secrets)
3) Stop reading magazines (how did that get in there?)
4) Stay in the closet, become a Tory MP, have a lifetime of heterosexual privilege and then "come out" in 2010 by which point nobody except The Daily Mail really cares.
5) Madonna

2010-08-20T11:27:00.003Z

It's So Cheap

Here is the schedule for BBC1 this Monday morning:

9.15 Heir Hunters
10.00 Homes under the Hammer
11.00 To Buy or Not to Buy
11.25 Cash in the Attic
12.15 Bargain Hunt

That's almost four hours of programmes (daily) devoted to buying and selling houses or bits of tat. These programmes are toxic. The line-up looks like it has been written by a 1960s science-fiction writer's view of a dystopian future where Britain has become a nation of profit-hungry golems. But unfortunately it's true. This is the world. These shows both construct and encourage Britons to be money-obsessed bargain-hunters, desperate to make a few pounds. As the channel which is supposed to best represent what Britain is about, they give off a message that the most important thing in your life should be to follow the capitalist dream of making money. We are a long way from Lord Reith's notion that the BBC should educate, inform and entertain.

Considering that the potential audience for these shows are people who are not working, they represent a wasted opportunity. The BBC should be making programs which engage with communities, address social issues and encourage people to try new things. It doesn't have to be depressing or expliotative like the Jeremy Kyle show over on ITV, and it doesn't need to be overly worthy and inaccessible either. But the lack of choice in daytime tv, on a channel that we have to pay a licence for is pitiful. Daytime tv producers - I'd sack the lot of ya.

2010-08-17T18:36:00.005Z

Obsessed with the Mitford Sisters

I've been reading The Mitford Girls by Mary S Lovell, a biography of the six Mitford sisters - a set of remarkable, beautiful, perplexing women from an aristocratic eccentric British family who were friends with "all society" and got themselves embroiled in British politics in various ways and caused scandal after scandal as well as becoming famous writers. Their father famously said "I am normal, my wife is normal, but each of my daughters is more foolish than the last" (He actually was only half right - he and his wife weren't particularly normal either).

It is pure soap opera, and if you don't know about them, it's well worth a read. The eldest, Nancy, perhaps became most well-known, as she wrote a series of funny "anti-romance" novels which were loosely based on her own family. I'd read these books a few years ago, but the antics that Nancy's characters get up to are tame compared to their real lives. Nancy was a terrible tease by all accounts and was always upsetting people, although her level of annoyance was nothing compared to some of her other sisters.

Diana, for example, was the most beautiful Mitford sister. Having left her first husband (in itself a scandal in repressed inter-war Britain) she then married Oswald Mosley - chief facist of Britain. At the outset of WWII, Nancy - outraged by her sister's facism, wrote to the government warning that the pair were a security risk, and that they ought to be imprisoned. Subsequently, Diana and Mosley were arrested and spent most of the war locked up in squalid conditions.

Unity - the Hitler groupie

Another sister, Unity, was perhaps the most extreme of all - born in the American town of Swastika and with a middle name of Valkerie, it was perhaps fate that she became obsessed with Hitler and travelled to Germany before WWII where she spent months stalking him until he eventually befriended her. She was the perhaps the only person in the world who was on good terms with Churchill and Hitler at the same time - and what happened to her is absolutely shocking (there have even been rumours that she gave birth to Hitler's baby). The equivalent today would have been if someone like Jade Goody had married Saddam Hussein.

Diana and Unity - scandlous!

Not all of the sisters were into left-wing politics though. One of the younger sisters, Jessica (known as Decca) became a card-carrying Communist and eloped off to America with her rabble-rousing beau, who was a nephew of Churchill. She then got involved in the American civil rights movement. I ended up feeling a bit sorry for Pam - who was relatively normal in comparison to the others, who made fun of her, calling her "Woman" because she was fairly domesticated. There was a brother too, Tom, who had the famous Mitford good looks and bad luck. In his later years he was sought after by women, although at public school he was popular with some of boys, causing all the sisters to burst out laughing when mother asked him if he minded sharing a bed with his school friend who was visiting for the holidays.

The sisters have all died (except Deborah I think), but there must be something about their family. Diana's son Max Mosley has recently been in the papers over claims (refuted) about a story involving prostitutes and what the tabloids labelled a "sick Nazi orgy". It's a shame Nancy isn't still around - there's definitely material for another one of her books there.

2010-08-17T11:38:00.001Z

I watched football

I have always referred to my partner as "my fella" on this blog. However, I've decided to start calling him "my husband". We've had a civil partnership and frankly, it's not good enough. I want full, equal-to-straights marriage - and if the law insists on being a slow-coach and won't give it, I'm just going to go ahead and call him husband anyway.

Anyhow, me and my husband are noted in our families as not showing any interest in football (or other sports). I know we are in the minority. My local news covers football extensively and will make a big deal out of the fate of various teams and "interviewing" fans (because their opinions count as news round these parts). And after some in-depth story about the transfer of some player to another team, the announcer will unironically say "And now, sports news..." I am always reminded of little Christina in the awful film biography of Joan Crawford (Mommie Dearest), seething "I (pause) am (pause) not (pause) one (pause) of (pause) your (pause) FANS!"

My side of the family have the highly strung sensibilities and occupations of delicate Edwardian lords and ladies, and would never watch a football match anyway. But my husband's side are a hearty, wholesome (slightly terrifying) lot, who follow matches and show a vicious team loyalty which is simply incomprehensible to me. I don't even know what team they support because most of my brain shuts down when they start discussing the details, but I do know that they take their supporting very seriously, it is very full and noisy, and I'm sure the footballers are grateful for it.

So it came as a source of amusement to them when I admitted to have watched some of Match of the Day on Saturday night. My husband was otherwise indisposed (in the garden with a telescope, looking for Jupiter), the internet had broken and there was nothing else on tv. Then I heard a familiar tv jingle and I was transported back to Saturday Night of 1978, which was when I last watched Match of The Day. (I remember that evening was a double failure - not only did I not "get" any of the football, I disgraced myself by being unable to whistle. I guess my parents should have just bought me a copy of Stephen Sondheim's Greatest Hits then and there).

Apparently, a local team (Blackpool) were doing very well, having scored four goals, and the Blackpool fans were going insane with glee in a way that would have made Kim Il Jung wish that he was able to inspire such feverish emotion and delicious over-reaction. Every now and then the camera would do a close-up on one fan, who looked like someone had said "I'll give you a million pounds if you act as excited as you can."

As for the other team (Wigan I think?) - well their fans were so incensed and disappointed, that dozens of them were shown filing out of the grounds, their heads hung low, even before the match had ended. As much of a hater I am, even I can see how very unsports(wo)manlike that is. That's another reason why I don't understand football. I like supporting losers - there's so much more pathos and understanding of the human condition if you watch the losers. Fans these days only seem to care if their teams are winning. I don't like to be the bitch here, but maybe if they worked a little bit harder at being successful in their own lives, then they wouldn't feel the need to vicariously experience victories through a group of overpaid men who Generally Don't Have A Levels. I'm just saying.