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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Daily Mail

Sleepy kindly sent me an article from the Daily Mail (not usually a paper I subscribe to) which set me thinking. For those who would not have read it, it was an interesting piece focusing on the life of a woman whose plight was highlighted in Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech. In it he spoke of a constituent in Wolverhampton whose neighbourhood was being taken over by West Indian and Asian families to the extent that in her road, only she and another family were left as ‘indigenous’ members of the community. Powell spoke of the victimisation she suffered: excrement through her letterbox, claims of racism because she refused to let out rooms to non-whites and continual harassment from children.

Actually, the truth was somewhat different to the claims made by Powell. He kept her identity secret in his speech, and the Mail only ran the story because the lady in question had recently died. Given the scenario outlined, you would expect to find that the woman had moved from her street – in fact she stayed in the same house until she died. Amongst the flowers at her funeral were several bouquets from local West Indian families, suggesting that at least some connection existed between her and her neighbours. The claims of excrement being placed through her letter box were inaccurate – the truth being that this happened to her next door neighbours who were involved in a local feud (not racially motivated) which escalated alarmingly with a dead dog carcass being thrown through their window. A fact that was also featured incorrectly in Powell’s tirade.

One thing that seems to me to be good about serious journalists is that they would have not just trusted Powell’s account but would have taken some time to find the woman concerned – just as the Mail’s correspondent seemed to have done. There is something to be said for doing your research and not relying on assertion. Given Powell’s allegedly superior intelligence and intellect, you might expect that sources would have been checked before such a story was promulgated in a key note speech – one he knew would cause controversy. But, hey, don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story or justification for action by the state – ask Tony and George.

Another thought of mine was how evocative the piece was. I can vaguely remember the very racist nature of British society when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s where it was not uncommon to find notices in shop windows advertising accommodation – with the caveat of ‘no blacks or Irish’. Ah yes, the Irish! One of the things that give me hope is that within my lifetime, we seem to have rid ourselves of anti-Irish racism (I say ‘seem’ deliberately – it might not be the case, but certainly there are very few manifestations of it in the ways that there used to be). To give you a flavour of how deeply rooted that form of racism was, my dad’s family were Irish in origin and it ain’t too long ago that we were hanging out in Cork. But even he had no time for the country he came from and would use plenty of opportunities to denigrate them – to such an extent that my mother pointed out (quite bravely) that his vitriol seemed misplaced.

I would like to be an optimist today and hope that if we can come this far that there is hope for the future. It seems to me, from working in an institution which is genuinely a league of nations, that we are becoming simultaneously less and more tolerant of diversity. The classes I teach have a genuinely diverse mix of ethnicities and races – let alone creeds. The staff mix, whilst still predominately white, is changing quite profoundly with a lot of new hires being Chinese, Asian and Indian. We have our courses running all over the world and partner with great people who do a good job. Yes, I get worried about the hold extremist views are exerting over young people, but I think that this can be overcome through dialogue and a change in certain foreign policies (i.e. the Middle East). As I type, I am watching Spurs play Man U. the teams have players from all over the world, a manager who’s a Scot and another who’s Dutch. Both are highly respected within the football world. Clubs now do all they can to ensure that those players from overseas find their feet. OK, there is a shrewd business rationale behind this as well as a welfare one, but I’ll take it. Years ago, the black players on the pitch would have been greeted by monkey noises from opposing fans. Today, such demonstrations would see the supporters ejected and their season tickets confiscated. It’s not perfect and there is a long way to go, but the Daily Mail article prompted me to think that we’ve come a hell of a long way.