One of the delights of DIY is the skip. For me, there a few things more satisfying than the arrival of this item in an empty, pristine state and its eventual departure full of your life’s detritus. It’s as good as therapy and a lot less expensive. And whilst is might piss off the neighbours because they can’t park in front of your house, my environmentally correct decision to eschew a car helps me maintain a lofty stance against their muted plaints…
This week a fresh new skip arrived and I keenly await the coming of butch guys with big drills - as you do. I have already spent a couple of hours slashing and devastating the current crop of vegetation that has sprung up in the concrete patch that is my back garden. Today I will progress a little further knowing that by this time next week both unwanted veg and concrete will all be gone. OK, Sleepy I know that it might equally be replaced by police tape sealing off the place as a burial site, but I remain rigidly optimistic.
However, one thing has intrigued me – and I warn readers with a delicate disposition to avoid this paragraph – is the existence of a pile of excrement that seems to have come from a truly large beast. This is not your run of the mill cat poop. I know my cats’ turds (sadly) and these are not their handiwork. And whilst we do now have two rather large tom cats next door, they must have got substantial intestines to produce this sample…Euuuw.
Finally, yesterday ended on a high. I had spent the day battling intellectual demons and a profound sense of failure and depression. This goes with academia I think – I’m not the only one to get like this by a long shot. However, this was substantially lifted by a recital of baroque music at the cathedral which was absolutely stunning. Upon my return I had an email from pugilistic Jimmy and one from my hunnee telling me that Mark L (the sexiest man on the planet, I swear) had commented that I was ‘perfectly formed’. At this rate I might even set some nookie before I die.
Yeehah and on with the rubber gloves.
Saturday, 24 February 2007
Sunday, 18 February 2007
Britney
I feel bound to comment (albeit briefly) on the conduct of Ms Spears. As those close to me know, I have a little penchant for early Britney - well one track when pissed - but this is sufficient for me to have been given the tag of a Britney fan. Well, sometimes you just have to go with the public perception of your tendencies and, as is inevitable, you end up actually engaging with the person you are mistakenly taken to like. So here are my thoughts on the subject of our Brit.
Whilst I have no clue as to the detailed ins and outs of our Brit’s career, one cannot but know some of it because even if you don’t read the tabloids, don’t read the goss mags or any of the lower order shite that is mass produced in the UK every week that focuses on celebrity culture, the broadsheets pick up on it and add their 2 penny-worth anyway – along with yer mates sending you the uncensored version of the ‘commando’ photos (thanks for that Sleepy) to accompany your tea and Cheerios in the morning. There is no escape! Britney is a truly wealthy woman, but consider this, the media she has fed so assiduously over the past decade and her record company have undoubtedly made more money out of her than she will ever make for herself. She also has to deal with the downside of the fame she has sought which is a complete panopticon-style surveillance of her life which seeks to discipline her behaviour in such a way that whatever options she chooses are all wrong. Consider, she focuses on the kids – boring, where is the mileage in that? She does the party circuit, she’s bad Britney, and asked to consider her kids and the example she sets to her young fans. The woman cannot win. Even if she retires and does a Brigit Bardot, it’s difficult to see how she could ever fully escape the telephoto lens because she sells.
One of the reasons why she sells is because her life resembles a car crash and we all know the fascination we have with people whose lives are such. You can’t leave it alone – every aspect, every nuance is scrutinised and discussed; everyone has an angle, a view of the wreckage. It’s actually quite obscene in a way. But if you add her class background into the mix then the heady combination just simply becomes irresistible. And if she falls into the category of ‘trailer trash’ well, you’ve just achieved a state of nirvana.
Arguably one of the features of Britney’s life that seems to get the most exposure is her working class roots. And I have a big problem with that. Not that she is working class, but that her class is used against her. I hate the term ‘trailer trash’ with a vengeance because it is such an easy, savage comment to make about people who – for whatever reason – are enduring a pretty rough life. Think for a while how people might come to live in a trailer park and ask yourself this. How many bad decisions, poor investments, changes to circumstances are you away from the trailer park? Think about how you would cope without all the creature comforts and support you now enjoy, how you would deal with your neighbours who might not be teachers, public servants, self employed entrepreneurs and such…then shut the fuck up and never use the term again.
Whilst I have no clue as to the detailed ins and outs of our Brit’s career, one cannot but know some of it because even if you don’t read the tabloids, don’t read the goss mags or any of the lower order shite that is mass produced in the UK every week that focuses on celebrity culture, the broadsheets pick up on it and add their 2 penny-worth anyway – along with yer mates sending you the uncensored version of the ‘commando’ photos (thanks for that Sleepy) to accompany your tea and Cheerios in the morning. There is no escape! Britney is a truly wealthy woman, but consider this, the media she has fed so assiduously over the past decade and her record company have undoubtedly made more money out of her than she will ever make for herself. She also has to deal with the downside of the fame she has sought which is a complete panopticon-style surveillance of her life which seeks to discipline her behaviour in such a way that whatever options she chooses are all wrong. Consider, she focuses on the kids – boring, where is the mileage in that? She does the party circuit, she’s bad Britney, and asked to consider her kids and the example she sets to her young fans. The woman cannot win. Even if she retires and does a Brigit Bardot, it’s difficult to see how she could ever fully escape the telephoto lens because she sells.
One of the reasons why she sells is because her life resembles a car crash and we all know the fascination we have with people whose lives are such. You can’t leave it alone – every aspect, every nuance is scrutinised and discussed; everyone has an angle, a view of the wreckage. It’s actually quite obscene in a way. But if you add her class background into the mix then the heady combination just simply becomes irresistible. And if she falls into the category of ‘trailer trash’ well, you’ve just achieved a state of nirvana.
Arguably one of the features of Britney’s life that seems to get the most exposure is her working class roots. And I have a big problem with that. Not that she is working class, but that her class is used against her. I hate the term ‘trailer trash’ with a vengeance because it is such an easy, savage comment to make about people who – for whatever reason – are enduring a pretty rough life. Think for a while how people might come to live in a trailer park and ask yourself this. How many bad decisions, poor investments, changes to circumstances are you away from the trailer park? Think about how you would cope without all the creature comforts and support you now enjoy, how you would deal with your neighbours who might not be teachers, public servants, self employed entrepreneurs and such…then shut the fuck up and never use the term again.
Wednesday, 14 February 2007
The magic of the cup
Today my loverly Bolton boys play Arsenal for a place in the next round of the FA Cup. When the old Wembley Stadium was opened in 1923, it was in time for that year’s FA Cup Final and over 100,000 people were estimated to have attended by fair means or by cramming. One of the iconic images of football originates from that Final and shows a big white police horse and its mount trying to nudge the crowds back behind the line markings of the pitch.
It was a game Bolton won and given that this coming FA Cup Final will be played at the new Wembley, I feel that history needs repeating and that the Whites need to be one of the teams in contention on the day. And whilst commercial factors determine so many of the outcomes of the Premier League these days (as well as the Champions League), there are still spaces where there is a possibility for the underdog to bark its presence and the FA Cup is one of them.
West Ham did it last year and although they did not win, they gave such a good account of their prowess that many people noted it was the best Final for many years. I have watched my boys grow for over 3 years now and have been privileged to see their progress at very close quarters. They are my family and I am part of theirs (so they tell me) nudging their way into a highly guarded heart.
Go Bolton!
It was a game Bolton won and given that this coming FA Cup Final will be played at the new Wembley, I feel that history needs repeating and that the Whites need to be one of the teams in contention on the day. And whilst commercial factors determine so many of the outcomes of the Premier League these days (as well as the Champions League), there are still spaces where there is a possibility for the underdog to bark its presence and the FA Cup is one of them.
West Ham did it last year and although they did not win, they gave such a good account of their prowess that many people noted it was the best Final for many years. I have watched my boys grow for over 3 years now and have been privileged to see their progress at very close quarters. They are my family and I am part of theirs (so they tell me) nudging their way into a highly guarded heart.
Go Bolton!
Tuesday, 13 February 2007
People say…
‘No pain no gain’
‘Better to have lost in love than never to have loved at all’
‘That which does not kill me makes me strong’
‘You learn from your mistakes’
And I have said them too, although today I am looking at myself (metaphorically) and these old saws and shaking my head in disbelief for being had. This is a temporary state of affairs. I am someone who has been strongly influenced by Freudian theories and by what’s often termed ‘The British School’ of psychoanalysis which would accept the importance of disappointment in terms of the structuring of the psyche – and I am in agreement.
But just not today. I’ll be back to my old self tomorrow or even later on this evening, but right now a pox on all this bollocks. I am sick and tired of the struggle life is. I am bored rigid with my job and cannot cope with the silliness of it and the small-mindedness of many of the people I work with. People who think that a strategic plan is a list of things to do over a certain period but who never open their eyes to look at the big environmental picture, the competition, the changing basis upon which we work, the challenges posed by funding changes and so on.
I am fed up with builders, sick of DIY and the ways in which my house has sucked up the resources I don’t have be they mental, physical or financial. And I am totally bored with being in this strange state where I’m not really broke, but I have a very large mortgage, some credit card owings and an overdraft. That which does not kill me isn’t making me strong right now, it’s making me very tired and depressed.
Which makes for a decidedly cheery blog!
One of the things I have noticed, tho’, is that when I say no and stick by it (especially at work) people get rather agitated and then often see my point of view (I’m always nice when I do this…) and then resolve whatever it was that led to the ‘no’. Interestingly, I am one of the few people I know who does this and I think this probably means that I have a ‘reputation’ – which is fair enuf as far as I am concerned. If I was a bloke saying this, I’d be heralded as a great and glorious leader, being female, saying ‘no’ makes me scary and troublesome. Maybe we should eschew the ‘hard’ road for once, refuse the unreasonable, the stupid (or troublesome or plain inconvenient). I don’t want my life and its learnings to be a summation of hard knocks, difficulties and failures I trenchantly (and allegedly) learn from.
Let’s hear it for learning from pleasure, sensuality, mystery and beauty.
‘Better to have lost in love than never to have loved at all’
‘That which does not kill me makes me strong’
‘You learn from your mistakes’
And I have said them too, although today I am looking at myself (metaphorically) and these old saws and shaking my head in disbelief for being had. This is a temporary state of affairs. I am someone who has been strongly influenced by Freudian theories and by what’s often termed ‘The British School’ of psychoanalysis which would accept the importance of disappointment in terms of the structuring of the psyche – and I am in agreement.
But just not today. I’ll be back to my old self tomorrow or even later on this evening, but right now a pox on all this bollocks. I am sick and tired of the struggle life is. I am bored rigid with my job and cannot cope with the silliness of it and the small-mindedness of many of the people I work with. People who think that a strategic plan is a list of things to do over a certain period but who never open their eyes to look at the big environmental picture, the competition, the changing basis upon which we work, the challenges posed by funding changes and so on.
I am fed up with builders, sick of DIY and the ways in which my house has sucked up the resources I don’t have be they mental, physical or financial. And I am totally bored with being in this strange state where I’m not really broke, but I have a very large mortgage, some credit card owings and an overdraft. That which does not kill me isn’t making me strong right now, it’s making me very tired and depressed.
Which makes for a decidedly cheery blog!
One of the things I have noticed, tho’, is that when I say no and stick by it (especially at work) people get rather agitated and then often see my point of view (I’m always nice when I do this…) and then resolve whatever it was that led to the ‘no’. Interestingly, I am one of the few people I know who does this and I think this probably means that I have a ‘reputation’ – which is fair enuf as far as I am concerned. If I was a bloke saying this, I’d be heralded as a great and glorious leader, being female, saying ‘no’ makes me scary and troublesome. Maybe we should eschew the ‘hard’ road for once, refuse the unreasonable, the stupid (or troublesome or plain inconvenient). I don’t want my life and its learnings to be a summation of hard knocks, difficulties and failures I trenchantly (and allegedly) learn from.
Let’s hear it for learning from pleasure, sensuality, mystery and beauty.
Sunday, 11 February 2007
Shane
As I type, it looks as though England might yet win another sporting contest. This time, it is in a one-day international cricket series against the Australians. The Aussies have dominated cricket in all its various forms for a seriously long time and there are very good reasons as to why this is so. One of them lies in their excellent cricketing infrastructure which means that they are able to chuck out sensational players with monotonous regularity. But only a few ever reach the heights of Shane. The quixotic, mercurial and inspirational Shane Warne. Pain in the ass, bad boy Shane. Articulate, passionate and probably the best bowler the world has ever seen. A flawed individual, he’s instantly recognisable – spawning a generation of spin bowlers with blond highlights – and it’s that flawed humanity that makes him so appealing. You can’t help but bond with a guy who’s struggled with his weight and got banned from the game because he took a diuretic women take to deal with pre-menstrual bloat (on the advice of his mother). Yup, he’s not exactly faithful – in fact you could probably say he’s a skirt chaser – but I am personally long since thinking that this is a crime. I don’t go out with men like that, but equally I’m not hung up on sexual fidelity either.
So here’s to you Shane, you glorious creature you: one team, one dream, nothing is impossible.
So here’s to you Shane, you glorious creature you: one team, one dream, nothing is impossible.
Zero intolerance
London fashion week begins tomorrow and I, for one, am waiting with less than baited breath. Whilst I really enjoy looking at lovely clothes, bags and shoes, it isn’t one of my great obsessions (no, honestly). I don’t buy fashion mags and I don’t make any great effort to keep up with trends. In fact, I gave up reading women’s magazines many years ago because they did very little for my self-esteem. Now, we are talking decades ago here when I was in my mid twenties. Since that time it seems to me that the tenor of these offerings has got worse – especially given the advent of the gossip glossies. Whilst I don’t buy them and when I flick through them in the doctor’s surgery or at a friend’s I often end up feeling decidedly seedy; that I have engaged in an act of voyeurism concerning people I don’t even know.
An additional outcome of these nasty mags is an increase in female bitching about other women and the way they look. Why do we do this to each other? Why the obsession with Victoria Beckham, an individual it seems to me, more need of sympathy and support than the endless bitching and sycophancy about her figure, her marriage, her clothes and her career. What does this dreadful fare do to its large teenage readership? Please don’t tell me that these are sophisticated young women who are much more in a position to make sensible evaluations about what they read, because the evidence suggests that this is not the case. And I am referring here to the worrying rise in eating disorders. A horrible confluence of forces exists here whereby everyone blames everyone else for the advent of the size zero model, but in fact the answer is actually very simple. We should stop buying fashion mags or any other magazine that uses skinny models to sell its produces or is used by advertisers. These magazines have it within their power to say to designers that they won’t accept the samples sent to them if they are for size zero’s and that the models they will use are a size 10 (minimum) with a tendency towards ‘plus sizes’ (size 12 upwards) and the sizes that reflect the actual figures of the female population.
Many women won’t like this because we have become so brain-washed by the skinny ideal. But if you go back 50 years, models to my mind looked so much more gorgeous and were slightly shorter and a good 36, 24, 36 which is a little more like it. Mind you, I’ve got a 26 waist, so how you get down to a 24 is anyone’s guess! What I feel is that the gains of feminism are being lost and have been eroded since the early to mid 1990s. I’d like to see more public sisterhood and a healthy relationship to our bodies and their use as signifiers. I’d like us to appreciate good women more and bitch about the ‘bimbos’ less. Just ignore them, they’ll eventually go away.
An additional outcome of these nasty mags is an increase in female bitching about other women and the way they look. Why do we do this to each other? Why the obsession with Victoria Beckham, an individual it seems to me, more need of sympathy and support than the endless bitching and sycophancy about her figure, her marriage, her clothes and her career. What does this dreadful fare do to its large teenage readership? Please don’t tell me that these are sophisticated young women who are much more in a position to make sensible evaluations about what they read, because the evidence suggests that this is not the case. And I am referring here to the worrying rise in eating disorders. A horrible confluence of forces exists here whereby everyone blames everyone else for the advent of the size zero model, but in fact the answer is actually very simple. We should stop buying fashion mags or any other magazine that uses skinny models to sell its produces or is used by advertisers. These magazines have it within their power to say to designers that they won’t accept the samples sent to them if they are for size zero’s and that the models they will use are a size 10 (minimum) with a tendency towards ‘plus sizes’ (size 12 upwards) and the sizes that reflect the actual figures of the female population.
Many women won’t like this because we have become so brain-washed by the skinny ideal. But if you go back 50 years, models to my mind looked so much more gorgeous and were slightly shorter and a good 36, 24, 36 which is a little more like it. Mind you, I’ve got a 26 waist, so how you get down to a 24 is anyone’s guess! What I feel is that the gains of feminism are being lost and have been eroded since the early to mid 1990s. I’d like to see more public sisterhood and a healthy relationship to our bodies and their use as signifiers. I’d like us to appreciate good women more and bitch about the ‘bimbos’ less. Just ignore them, they’ll eventually go away.
Sunday, 4 February 2007
29 into 12 don't go...
As Sleepy noted in her most excellent blog, much mirth was had by us about an American paedophile who managed to pass himself off to school authorities and other paedophiles as being 12 years old...when he was in fact 29. Few things make me laugh out loud on the TV - usually it's Cristiano Ronaldo claiming a dive, that's always good for a giggle - but this was a classic.
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