Avocados on Toast

Spineless economists

2010-12-09T22:42:00.002Z

There are lots of things I want to blog about, which I will do soon... probably. But for now, just thought I'd share something I read today that made me smile. It seems a bit self-indulgent when there are probably still kids being beaten up in Parliament Square as I type, but...

My boss has a bit of a thing about John Ruskin, and organised a seminar for us today on 'Unto This Last', his relatively little-known foray into political economy. Her relentless Ruskin-plugging must be working, since I've borrowed her copy and started reading it on the train home. Here's what he has to say about the idea of the self-interested, maximising individual that underlies much of classical economics:

"Observe, I neither impugn nor doubt the conclusion of the science if its terms are accepted. I am simply uninterested in them, as I should be in those of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons. It might be shown, on that supposition, that it would be advantageous to roll the students up into pellets, flatten them into cakes, or stretch them into cables; and that when these results were effected, the re-insertion of the skeleton would be attended with various inconveniences to their constitution. The reasoning might be admirable, the conclusions true, and the science deficient only in applicability.

"Modern political economy stands on a precisely similar basis. Assuming, not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton, it founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul; and having shown the utmost that may be made of bones, and constructed a number of interesting geometrical figures with death's-head and humeri, successfully proves the inconvenience of the reappearance of a soul among these corpuscular structures. I do not deny the truth of this theory: I simply deny its applicability to the present phase of the world."

Okay Catherine, you've sold me. This guy is clearly awesome.

Some thoughts on the student protests

2010-11-12T20:31:00.004Z

A few mildly unconnected thoughts I've had lately on Wednesday's anti-fees rally, or more accurately on the way it's been reported and discussed:

1) It's annoying that people keep on implying that this is a self-interested protest. Yes, of course it reflects an entirely human preoccupation with your own situation and with people like you who will face that situation, rather than with the state of the world in general. But most of the students protesting will categorically not be affected by these reforms. That's not why they're on the streets. They're there on behalf of the thousands of people who will be affected, and who they know will find it harder to get a degree than they have. This seems blindingly obvious to me, but apparently not to Every Pundit Ever. Besides, as Mark has pointed out: they may not be organising protests against the cuts as a whole, but then neither is Polly Toynbee. Like her, I'm sure a lot of them would turn out for those protests as well. But it's unfair to criticise the National Union of Students for failing to organise them - the clue's sort of in the name...

2) Yes, I have noticed that a couple of days after I whinged at anti-fees campaigners for letting the Tories off the hook, anti-fees campaigners stormed Tory HQ. Ahem. Don't I look silly. Except that again, some pundits appear to have internalised the anti-Lib-Dem focus, citing the target of the invasion as an indication of random destructiveness: I swear one actually said, 'Their whole campaign has been aimed at the Lib Dems, and then they go and invade Tory HQ!' Yeah, what on earth have the Tories got to do with any of this? It's not like Cameron is Prime Minister or anything. Crazy students.

3) Left this till last, but really my deepest unease about this whole thing. Admittedly, this may just be the Evening Standard, as I haven't had a chance to read the other papers yet - but if their coverage is anything to go by, all that was achieved after the G20 protests seems to be crumbling before our eyes. The number of police injured in the 'riots' seems to have magically multipled from 7 to 40 some time between Thursday's paper and Friday's. Phrases like 'eruption of violence' are being bandied around left right and centre (often to imply that people or organisations are condoning violence when in fact they have endorsed non-violent direct action - again, the clue's in the name...) And most worryingly, the finger is directly being pointed at the namby-pamby liberal intelligentsia who 'tied the police's hands' after G20, preventing them from responding effectively to events.

Now, to be clear - I wasn't there on Wednesday, so I don't know what happened or how violent it was. But the way it's been reported is something I've seen many times before to describe protests with no violent intent, where the only injuries caused were a result of scuffles caused by over-zealous policing. To reiterate, I don't know if that's the case this time - but I'm certainly taking the press reports with a generous pinch of salt.

Anyway, regardless of the truth of the reports, I'd still be concerned if this risked undoing the limited progress that was made after last year's G20 protests. The way peaceful protests are policed in this country is utterly unacceptable. I have seen peaceful protesters intimidated, traumatised, attacked without provocation and arrested without due cause. This is not the action of a few bad apples, it's completely endemic. For Christ's sake, have we forgotten that a man died not so long ago? But it seems like at least some people are in danger of forgetting it, and going back to giving the police carte blanche to beat up hippies, all because of a few smashed windows and an idiot with a fire extinguisher. And that really scares me.

What's that? you're angry about housing benefit? I'll just transfer you to my colleague Steve...

2010-11-09T21:29:00.005Z

Just a quick observation as I'm rather tired, but... I noticed with some surprise the other day that Steve Webb, the Minister for Pensions, seems to have been allocated the unenviable responsibility of putting his name to parliamentary answers on housing benefit. What, I ask myself, does housing benefit have to do with pensions? It certainly doesn't feature in his list of ministerial responsibilities, unless you class it under 'pensions and related benefits', which seems like a bit of a stretch. Given the government's rhetoric pitting housing benefit claimants against 'average working families', you'd think it might fit better under 'employment and related benefits', which is Chris Grayling's area.

However, Steve Webb does have one distinguishing feature that Chris Grayling lacks: he's a Lib Dem. Perhaps I'm just being overly cynical, but I can't help wondering if it is quite deliberate that one of the government's most widely-criticised attacks on the welfare state is being fronted by the DWP's only Lib Dem minister. Steve Webb was the party's work and pensions spokesperson before the election, and I'm fairly confident he would have been speaking out against the current changes as strongly as anyone had he still been in opposition. Instead, he's forced to defend them. It does make me wonder whether the widely-noted tactic of pushing Danny Alexander in front of the cameras to announce unpopular things whilst hiding George Osborne in a box extends to other departments as well. I can well imagine the existence of a concerted Tory strategy to make Lib Dems the fall guys as far as possible - with Lib Dem ministers happy to take nominal responsibility for controversial areas in the heady anticipation of having influence.

I can equally well imagine that I'm barking up completely the wrong tree here. But either way, I can't help feeling that the Tories are playing a far cleverer game than the Lib Dems in terms of coalition politics.

UPDATE: Ironic that the day after I wrote this, Nick Clegg is left carrying the can at PMQs on the day of the student fees march, resulting in a predictable 30-minute mauling. Obviously, Cameron has a pretty good alibi, being in China and all. But I can't imagine the Tories being too upset about this. Tuition fees is another area where campaigners and the media seem to have done the Tories' job for them by aiming their fire so exclusively at the Lib Dems. I know it's easy and it's rational, because of the narrative of betrayal, but it's unfortunate that it's led to those who are actually the leading party of government - who never opposed raising fees in the first place and would clearly have done this anyway with or without the Lib Dems - getting off scot free.

A big fat nothing

2010-08-24T21:19:00.008Z

Hello again.

Baffling Question of the Day which has prompted me to break my blogging silence is: why the hell are so many people taking 'the Big Society' so seriously?

From pretty much the first time I heard the phrase, it seemed blindingly obvious that it was nothing more than a fairly pathetic attempt to rebrand Thatcherism. You can almost see the Tory spinners sat in the pub, going "Maybe instead of talking about the 'small state', we should start talking about, I dunno, the 'big... society', or something", as they scribble 'big society?' on the back of a beermat. Sure, some vague policy ideas about devolving power and supporting voluntary organisations have been stuck on or sketched in since, but surely, at bottom, that's really all it is?

Yet working in the charity sector, I am constantly surprised by the number of people having entirely serious discussions about 'what the big society means for us'. Fairly understandably, this is mostly coming from charities involved in delivering services - and to be fair, most people seem to have a healthy cynicism about the contradiction between expecting them to take on the job of the state and cutting the very budgets that fund them. But the other day I swear I saw a discussion thread about the implications of the Big Society agenda for charitable campaigning, which just made me want to shout "NOTHING! THERE AREN'T ANY! The Emperor has no clothes - bloody obviously!"

Now, maybe I'm wrong. One of my pet peeves is political commentary that says 'Ha, you fools - if only you were as clever and enlightened as me' (see pretty much every socialist blogger on Lib Dem voters, although notably only *after* the coalition was formed). I think it's patronising, arrogant and unhelpful. So I really don't want to be one of those people. Also, it's entirely possible that the people having these discussions know more about this than me, rather than less. But I am genuinely baffled at how the voluntary sector seems to be treating the Big Society as a serious policy agenda worthy of consideration, rather than with the contempt it deserves. It seems to me that by doing so, they're giving what is basically Tory propaganda a credibility it doesn't warrant. Why is there such readiness to let them off the hook like that?

"Only the Conservatives..."

2010-04-26T21:08:00.008Z

Having just got back from the hustings for the Lewisham mayoral elections I am feeling all civic minded and thought I would blog about the outrageous graph abuse in the election booklet (not circular) I got in the post for said mayoral election at the weekend.

The booklet helpfully contained a page from each of the candidates on why you should vote for them. In all honesty I was never likely to vote for the Conservative candidate, Simon Nundy, anyway, but I had a scan through his page and my eyes hovered briefly over his obligatory "CAN'T WIN HERE" graph, seen below:

In case you can't quite read, it says "2008 Mayoral election: How Lewisham voted". Apparently, how Lewisham voted was 37% Labour, 24% conservatives and 9% Lib Dems, leading to the logical conclusion that "only the Conservatives can stop Labour on May 6th". Thanks, Mr Nundy!

So, I continued my merry way through the booklet and thought no more about this, until I got to the Lib Dem candidate's page, and saw this graph:

I spent a good minute or so flicking back and forth between these two graphs, reading the small print and trying to find out if there was any possible way they could be reconciled, and eventually gave up in bafflement.

Fortunately, I have my personal research assistant (aka Mark) on hand to solve life's little mysteries. He looked into it today, and it turns out that Lewisham didn't have a mayoral election in 2008. The Conservative candidate's graph was, in fact, a visual representation of 'how Lewisham voted' in the London mayoral election. That's right, folks, in a totally different election. I'm sure the Boris/Ken showdown has some intangible relevance to my vote for Lewisham mayor that I have yet to fathom. That or Simon Nundy is a weaselly duplicitous git.

As it turns out, the Conservatives haven't been in clear second place in Lewisham in any election for some time. The Greens were second in the most recent local elections, and in the last general election, the Lib Dems came second in my constituency, and in the other Lewisham constituency there was very little to choose between the Tories and Lib Dems (both way behind Labour). So the only way for the Tory candidate to suggest that 'only the Conservatives can stop Labour on May 6' is to present us with results from an arbitrarily chosen election in which they did come second.

I know this isn't exactly an unusual tactic, but whenever I've seen someone do it before, they at least tend to own up to the fact that they're showing, say, local election results in a campaign leaflet for the general. This was specifically designed to make you think it was giving you information about the election you were, you know, actually voting in. And if it hadn't been for the Lib Dems' graph (which seems to have been broadly accurate), I might never have realised. In terms of sheer contempt for the electorate I really do think this one takes the biscuit.

But if you try sometimes, you end up looking a bit silly

2010-03-20T23:45:00.003Z

So I recently decided that I needed something to fill the Cbyv-shaped singing hole in my life and joined a 'political choir'. Little did I know it would also fill the ridiculous-things-to-write-about-shaped blogging hole in my life...

For it turns out that, as well as being a place to go and sing good songs with genuinely lovely people, this choir is like being in a particularly brilliant sit-com. It's run collectively, and the decision-making process is basically everything you might imagine would be produced by a well-meaning group of lefties taking certain things a tad too seriously.

To illustrate. Back when I was in Cbyv, we'd learn songs, and then we'd, you know, know those songs. We'd sing them again from time to time, unless they were rubbish, or too hard, in which case they'd be quietly dropped by a sort of tacit consensus.

In this choir, when you learn a new song, a collective decision has to be made on whether to take it into the repertoire. And, inevitably, that decision is preceded by an interminable discussion in which the song is taken apart and over-analysed until you are thoroughly sick of it and never want to sing it again.

A few weeks ago, someone taught us an arrangement of Janis Joplin's 'Mercedes Benz' with the Rolling Stones' 'you can't always get what you want'. It was supposed to be a wry comment on consumerism (ho ho). I thought it was pretty reasonable, if perhaps a little try-hard. But several people in the choir took issue with the final line – which, for those of you not familiar with the Rolling Stones' oeuvre, is 'you can't always get what you want – but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.'

Why, you might reasonably ask, would anyone get exercised about this bland and inoffensive lyric? Because – wait for it – SOME PEOPLE TRY THEIR WHOLE LIVES AND THEY DON'T GET WHAT THEY NEED.

I kid you not – we genuinely had a vote in which several people voted not to 'take the song into the repertoire' as it stood, because they felt that it was making some kind of obnoxious Thatcherite statement to the effect that if the poor only tried a little harder, they'd be alright.

Don't get me wrong – I get on really well with pretty much everyone in the choir and the people making this argument were no exception: they are nice, and I tend to agree with their politics. But really, the only response I can muster to this is '?!?!!'

[I was going to end this by saying I'll keep you posted, but since my blogging record has been patchy at best for the last few years, and the readership has dwindled correspondingly until there isn't really a 'you' to speak of, it seems a bit redundant.]

To change or not to change?

2009-12-01T20:09:00.004Z

Note: having finished this and read it through I realise it probably comes across as a bit self-indulgent. Sorry about that.

Did I mention I'm getting married next June?

This post isn't just an excuse for me to squee about my wedding (I get enough excuses to do that thanks to my lovely friends) - I have a genuine wedding dilemma that I need advice on. Although why I thought posting it on my unread blog would be a good way of doing this, I have no idea. Perhaps I'll cross-post to facebook where someone may actually comment.

ANYWAY. My dilemma is this: should I change my name?

When I first started thinking about this, I thought the whole feminist* thing around changing your name when you marry was a bit overdone. My logic was that your maiden name is taken from your dad anyway, so why should it be more feminist to take the name of a man you have chosen than of a man you didn't choose?

But then I thought it over a bit more and realised this was a bit silly: the point is that your name is part of who you are, it's something you've had all your life - and you shouldn't have to change your identity just because you've chosen to enter into a committed relationship with someone. In some ways, taking someone's name *is* a bit like subsuming your identity into their own, and is a relic of a patriarchal system where you became the property of their family.

So, after all that to-ing and fro-ing, I figure the important thing from a feminist point of view is that you have a choice, and choosing to do one thing or the other doesn't inherently make you somehow un-feminist.

This being the case, the pros and cons of either approach seem to me as follows:

TO CHANGE
- I can see myself having Mark's name. This vision is strangely appealing
- It would be quite nice for us to have the same name
- It would probably make various adminny things slightly easier
- But: it would be effort
- I would need to get a new passport
- And learn a new signature
- And I would be C. Taylor, the same as both Mark's parents, which would be weird.

NOT TO CHANGE
- I like being a Berry. I might miss not being a Berry.
- It would be effort-free
- But: I would be Mrs Berry, which would accelerate my transformation into my mother
- Or I would be Ms Berry, and Ms is a bit silly.

Any thoughts on any of the above? Anyone?

~~~
* I'm going to use the word feminist throughout this blog post - this isn't the place to try and define it or to explain why I do consider myself a feminist, but am more than happy to enter into a discussion with anyone who's uncomfortable with it. Especially with those who, like Kate and Lisa, have too many crappy associations with cod-feminist literary criticism at A-level to engage with it on any meaningful level ;)

Our Top Five Favourite Owl Jokes

2009-11-20T23:49:00.002Z

Q: What's an owl's favourite Archbishop?
A: Desmond Hootu.

Q: What do owls eat in fancy restaurants?
A: Hoot cuisine.

Q: What's an owl's favourite former UN Secretary General?
A: Hootros Hootros Ghali.

Q: What do owls say to other owls when their economy is coming out of a recession?
A: "We're beginning to see the green hoots of recovery."

and finally, the joke that started it all...

Q: What did the owl say to the other owl?
A: Hoot!

What is this 'democracy' of which you speak?

2009-03-28T11:08:00.004Z

Parliament is rubbish.

I've been meaning to write a post along these lines for a little while now, but have been too busy struggling against the crushing rubbishness of parliament at work. Now I finally have some breathing space I feel the need to vent.

After nearly seven months running my MP's Westminster office, the main (and probably rather obvious) conclusion I've come to is this: the notion that the House of Commons is the place where our elected representatives decide on matters of importance through the democratic means of voting is a laughable fiction. In nine out of ten cases, attempting to influence legislation by lobbying your MP to vote a certain way has about as much chance of changing the outcome as putting your faith in the magical legislation fairies.

It's not just the fact that the government's majority means that effectively, the power to defeat them in the Commons rests largely with a few Labour backbenchers - Tories and Lib Dems can whip as hard as they like and shout till they're blue in the face, but without Labour rebels there's nothing doing. You don't really need to work in Parliament to know that that's the case. The thing that's riled me more is realising just how much control the government have over the legislative agenda - to the extent that much of the time, the question of whether there would be enough Labour rebels to defeat the government on a particular issue is largely irrelevant.

If the government thinks they might lose a vote - or even if they just don't want to talk about something, or don't want the embarrassment of being forced to declare an unpopular position - there are a staggering array of ways they can just stop it taking place. They can fiddle the agenda so that the vote has no chance of being reached. They can talk for hours about trivialities and call random votes about nothing in particular to waste time. In the case of Private Member's Bills, all they have to do is make sure the Minister has the floor at the point when the guillotine falls on the debate, and hey presto - no vote. When the government already has a virtual monopoly on deciding what gets discussed and what legislation is debated, you'd think you would need some procedural safeguards to rebalance control over the agenda in a more democratic manner. Instead, the rules do precisely the opposite. Pretty much the only thing obliging the government to allow votes it might lose is political pressure. It's insane.

This post was originally going to be about one or two particularly outrageous examples of this that I've experienced at work, but they really deserve posts in their own right, and this one is already obscenely long. Besides, I've got a feeling this is going to rumble on in almost any work-related blogging I do. So just think of this as useful background to my future rantings.

The point is: this is no way to run a country. Our political system is a sinister joke - and it's got to change.

Parliamentary put-down of the week

2009-02-27T17:08:00.003Z

"I know the honourable gentleman is - but what am I?"

(Courtesy of Mark and inspired by this piece of childishness from the Solicitor-General, who seems to love nothing more than insulting my boss when he's trying to get answers to serious and important questions about government wrongdoing.)

The comeback: older, wiser, boringer

2009-02-27T16:58:00.002Z

So, I’ve been toying with the idea of starting to blog again for a while now, but have failed to do anything about it, mostly because I haven’t really had the internet at home. I still don’t really have the internet at home, but I’ve acquired a new determination to start blogging again (although who knows how long that will last). So much has happened since I last blogged: I’ve graduated, got a job and – yays! – got engaged.* Basically, I have become a Grown Up.

It’s weird how conscious a transition this has been for me. I remember starting to feel like an adult while I was at university – the defining moment being when I was reading my niece a bedtime story and something I said made her stop and say in a puzzled voice, “Auntie Chrissy, how old are you?” When I told her I was twenty she looked a bit shocked and said with deep surprise, “You’re a grown-up!” It was kind of depressing (but mainly just endearing).

Quite a lot of people I know have had defining moments like this, although they seem more often to involve being referred to as a ‘lady’ by strangers than as a ‘grown-up’ by tiny relatives. One of my best friends from college told me about the time when she was having fun in a playground and heard a passing child say, “Mummy, mummy, that lady went down the slide!”, which sounds both hilarious and demoralising. That sort of experience seems like a common first milestone, but more recently, finding myself having conversations about interest rates and the best time to buy a house has been distinctly more terrifying, and made me feel different about myself in a much more fundamental way.

I guess the thought I’m rambling around here is that I’d always assumed growing up was something that just happened to you so gradually that you didn’t really notice it – and certainly too gradually to be able to point to the exact moment you realised you were not in Kansas any more. I guess it’s not surprising that you should feel a sudden step change when you get your first job, rent your first house, go to a school-friend’s wedding and get engaged yourself in the space of a few months. So is it just the fact that everything’s sort of come at once for me, or does this sound familiar to other people too? I’m aware that since I haven’t blogged for about three millennia I’m unlikely to get an answer to this, but I just thought I’d throw it out there…

Oh, and don’t worry, my future posts will be less boring and self-indulgent. Well, hopefully. I can’t make any promises now that I’m apparently all of a sudden a boring old git who thinks discussing mortgages is an acceptable way to behave.

* If there is anyone who I really ought to have told about this but who is forced to find out about it through my blog, I can only grovel. Please forgive me. Next time I see you I will blind you with my sparkly sparkly ring and you will forget your iratitude. Honest.

World Of Magical Awesome Delights

2007-08-02T15:03:00.000Z

Last weekend, Mark and I went to WOMAD with my brother. It took us about six hours to get there since the south west chose that day to flood some more. Half the site was flooded by the time we arrived and the rest was at least ankle-deep in mud. The programme was in complete chaos with almost all stages running late, some by over an hour, and some artists not performing at all. It took about 15 minutes to wade from A to B through the mud, except on those occasions where you got stuck in a particularly nasty spot (the soil was clay and so by Saturday evening resembled quicksand) and managed to heave your foot free only to find you'd left your welly behind and were flailing around desperately on one leg trying not to topple over into the mud. Admittedly this only happened to me once, but really I feel once was enough. By the end of the weekend the mud was so sticky that once you'd made it to a stage, further movement was restricted to the Stuck Dance (Mark: "Everybody pivot!") I have rarely been muddier. And it was absolutely fucking awesome.

My main recommendations for this year, should anyone be interested, are Mariza - a Portuguese fado singer with a staggeringly incredible voice; Lila Downs - a funky Mexican singer who is my new favourite lady; Samba Mapangala & Orchestre Virunga - an East African band who make you feel like dancing is really what life is all about; Guo Yue - one of the world's most awesome flute players; and the Imagined Village - a project which reimagines English folk music, released in September.

Apart from this lot, my festival highlight was probably Young Zulu Warriors, an incredible group of South African kids, mostly AIDS orphans. While we were waiting outside the Little Big Top for them to come on, a tractor came ploughing through the mud pulling a trailer behind it and, as it stopped outside the tent, we heard this amazing a capella Zulu harmony singing coming out of the trailer. Couple of minutes later the choir bounced out of it into the tent and carried on singing and dancing - it was so infectious the crowd was totally in the moment. Having not been to the Little Big Top before it took me a minute or so to realise that not only were they not on the stage, the stage was still being set up and their set wouldn't actually officially start for another five or ten minutes. They were utterly irrepressible and it was magic.

The moral of this story is that WOMAD is absurdly ace and the God of Farce and Calamity which follows me around, much to his irritation no doubt, cannot prevent it from being ace no matter what he throws at it.

Spammers Are Weird

2007-06-24T20:38:00.000Z

Some great spam I just found whilst trawling my inbox for mislabelled non-spam:

"Hello my friend!

I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices here ([link]) are bad.

Look, the site and call me 1-800 if its wrong..

My dog and I are still alive :)"

Yes, yes I am bored. Mark and most of my friends have gone home, I'm in Cambridge for another two weeks, I have lots of boring work/jobs/meetings to do, and I'm going down with a cold. Self-pitying is my middle name. If anyone fancies relieving the tedium by providing exciting diversions, talking to me, or even visiting Cambridge, you're more than welcome... even if you're a spammer, apparently.

This is a box, a musical box, wound up and ready to play

2007-05-27T15:19:00.001Z

Geoff. Martyn. Is. Ace.

Latest song on there - Weight of the World - is a beautiful little thing. I shed a tear. Go listen to it.

Recommending Geoff Martyn songs to people whilst attempting to revise seems to be becoming something of a tradition on this blog.

This week, I have been mostly outraged by...

2007-05-06T21:05:00.000Z

Wow, it's been a while. Sorry about that. Things have been rather manic here, what with organising a big but ultimately somewhat anti-climactic demo against college arms investments (photos here and here) and the resulting avalanche of piled-up work to catch up on. Anyway.

A plausible candidate for outrage of the week is today's election of Nicholas Sarkozy in France, the guy who suggested that delinquents were 'scum' and that anyway deviant behaviour is genetic, so rehabilitation is pointless, and who apparently is taking his election as a mandate to radically reform France's 'over-regulated' [read: progressive] welfare state. However, this has more upset than outraged me - today I am too tired for outrage, and anyway, despite spending a week in France during the election campaign I am still too under-informed about French politics to blog about it with any degree of intelligence. I feel somewhat guilty about this, but there we go.

So, I can practically feel your desperation to know just what has been offending my socialist/environmentalist/generally self-righteous sensibilities this week. If it's not Sarkozy, I hear you cry, then what is it? Well... it's revision.

This is not as petty or selfish as it might at first appear. See, this week I have been revising the Rwandan genocide. It's not a happy topic. In fact, it's a singularly depressing topic guaranteed to destroy your faith in humanity. Surprisingly enough, this is not principally because it involves thousands of people who were willing to go out and kill hundreds of thousands of others with machetes just because they were Tutsi. Much more outrageous than this is the international complicity in what went on.

Pick a country, any country. Unless you picked New Zealand or Nigeria, it's pretty much guaranteed your country of choice either ignored the genocide, supplied arms to the perpetrators or actively campaigned to stop the UN doing anything about it for entirely selfish reasons. If you picked the US or Britain, award yourself an extra ten points, because there's pretty good evidence they knew full well what was going on and their first response was not 'my god, how can we use our tremendous wealth, power and influence to stop these people being massacred', but 'my god, how can we sabotage UN intervention to make sure they don't try and get us involved somewhere down the line'.

If you picked France, you win, because France's action throughout the genocide was utterly disgusting. It had been arming the perpetrators for years, and there's good evidence it kept arming them throughout the genocide. It consistently argued against UN intervention and supported pulling out the woefully under-resourced UN mission that was already in Rwanda. And when the Tutsi rebel leaders captured a major city, it suddenly decided it had a conscience and immediately snapped into action, sending a mission into Rwanda which saved some lives, generally made it look nice and cuddly, and, er, helped fly a lot of genocidaires out the country.

This is all just background to Outrage of the Week, but I'm not very good at being succinct about Rwanda right now because the whole thing just angers me so much. Anyone who studies the actions of the powerful states during the genocide can't possibly ever sneer at cynics or conspiracy theorists (well, except the really silly ones) again. If you look into this in any depth, you'll maybe understand a bit better why there's absolutely nothing I wouldn't believe of governments like America. People think I'm cynical, but there's no way I could be cynical enough for this world. Outrage of the Week intends to make you, too, that little bit more cynical. It's a little quote from a declassified document entitled 'Discussion Paper - Rwanda' which gives some insight into American thinking during the crisis.

"Issues for discussion.

1. Genocide investigation. Language that calls for an international investigation of human rights abuses and possible violations of the genocide convention.
Be Careful. Legal at State was worried about this yesterday -- genocide finding could commit US Government to actually 'do something.'"

If this does not enrage you, I may just never be able to speak to you again.

One small step for man, one giant bugger-all for womankind

2006-12-19T22:49:00.000Z

So, over the past few days I've been reading Foundation by Isaac Asimov. A classic in science-fiction, apparently. I can't say it thrilled me overly; perhaps because it is almost entirely humourless and emotionless. (I hadn't quite realised this was why I found it faintly dissatisfying until my dad, an ex-maths teacher, said he'd always liked Asimov because his novels were so logical.)

But anyway, this is not the point of this post. The point of this post is that although Asimov is able to imagine space-travel and atomic force-fields, video-phones and three-dimensional visual recorders, and so on and so forth, he seems entirely incapable of comprehending the notion that women could ever have any significant role in society. I counted precisely three references to women in the entire 200-page book. One was only mentioned in passing as the daughter of a male character, alongside six sons, and was never heard of again, and so she doesn't really count. One was some kind of servant who was called in by the male ruler so the male trader could demonstrate some pretty jewellry on her. The other was the wife of said male ruler, who appeared twice in the novel, bitched at her husband for a while and was then shut up by being presented with said pretty jewellry. And this in a book which spans several generations and therefore has many, many characters living in various societies on various worlds at various times. The women in all these societies, at all these times, are virtually invisible. The only thing a woman actually does in the entire bloody book is wear jewellry.

Now, I'm not trying to be militant here. I fully understand that Asimov was writing in the 1950s and was a product of his time. I just find it a bit sad that a science-fiction writer, whose job it is to be able to see beyond his time, to imagine other possible worlds, still can't seem to grasp the concept of a society that's anything less than wholly patriarchal.

And now, to sit back and wait for the wails of grief from Kate and Lis at all the terrible memories I have brought back of feminist literary criticism at A-level... you know you loved it!

A confusion cleared up is a blog-readership disappointed

2006-12-19T22:40:00.000Z

Yes, I know, I'm rubbish, again. I'm sorry. But I am making up for it (sort of) by posting the explanation here where it is easier to find, instead of as a comment. This has the added advantage of making it look like I'm posting more.

Anyway, the explanation is not very interesting. 'Twould seem that pointless anti-climaxes are this blog's speciality. Essentially, Mark left some plasticine in my pigeonhole at uni as a pleasant surprise. Couple of days later, I had a party (burritos and chocolate fondue, in case you were wondering). Whilst we were sitting in my room drinking wine I handed round plasticine so the people who had been drawing faces on balloons had something to do when they ran out of balloons. Someone (I'm still not quite sure who, but I suspect it may have been Natalie, who most of you probably don't know anyway) made me a little duck-billed platypus. It was very cute. It had a green bobble-hat and everything.

Fast-forward to a few days later when, in a fit of clumsiness, I put down a mug (or similar, I can't quite remember) on the duck billed platypus and squashed him. He is still sitting on my shelf with the rest of my plasticine menagerie (Wally the Whale King, Pierre the Dinosaur Chef, Turtle the Turtle with No Distinguishing Features and the Tiny Blue Pig). Only now he is somewhat less ... three-dimensional. Oh, and he still doesn't have a name; feel free to suggest one. It's the least I can do for him after the squashing incident.

A problem shared is a blog-readership confused

2006-11-22T10:16:00.000Z

I just squished my duck-billed platypus.

Cry cry cry cry cry.

You've got entirely nonsensical mail!

2006-11-20T21:13:00.000Z

Yes, I know, I haven't posted in many moons, I'm a terrible person, etc etc. But now I have been shaken out of my complacency by sheer bafflement. Last week, I received a brown University of Cambridge envelope in my pigeonhole by internal mail. Ever since I went to Education Not For Sale's radical teach-in, to which the proctors turned up in their silly hats and gowns and took a list of our names, I've been expecting notice of disciplinary action every time I get one of these. As ever, it wasn't that, but I'm now so confused I almost wish it had been.

What was inside the envelope was what I can only describe (since Mark suggested it - I'm just not that original myself) as a self-assembly ransom note. Somebody had sent me a double page spread from Varsity, one of the student papers, with absolutely nothing on it of any relevance to me (unless you count the fact that the gossip column had a story in it about something that happened in King's of which I had no knowledge whatsoever). Nothing was ringed or marked, there was no note, and unless somebody's worried I'm anorexic or perhaps not fashionable enough, there was no reason why any of the features should have been particularly brought to my attention.

I am baffled.

The worst thing is, the handwriting on the envelope is quite distinctively atrocious - both Mark and I are sure we recognise it, but I just can't think whose it is. I may have to give in to Facebook's stupid notes feature purely in an attempt to try and find out what the hell this was all about. It must be a student that sent it; I mean, yes, Cambridge fellows are eccentric, but not that eccentric. Although it did come in a University of Cambridge envelope...

Any creative suggestions as to what the bleedin' Nora this could mean are very much welcome (apart from anything else, they will distract me from my two looming 5,000-word-essay deadlines...)

Lyric of the indeterminate time period

2006-09-26T22:41:00.001Z

It's come to my attention that I haven't updated in quite a while, again. And as it's a bit late and I'm tired*, right now it's going to have to be just another nice little quote that I've just come across and thought was cool. (I'll try and do a proper post tomorrow, promise.) This one's from Stanley Accrington, a singer-songwriter in the same vein as Billy Bragg, who is also the brother of an awesome family friend, Wendy Pratt. (Neither of them are awesome only for their hilarious names. Also, Stanley Accrington is not Stanley's real name but a stage name based on an amusing inversion of the popular football team. Obviously.)

Anyway, any more preamble and I'm setting myself up for yet another blogly anti-climax, so here's the lyric:

"Reality is not as real as it may seem
You pay and you pay but you're giving your life away

So you can say that I'm crazy
You can say I'm quite insane
It never ceases to amaze me
How people will conform
It's no insult that you've hurled
Only madmen change the world
So you can call me crazy
I don't mind."

I'm really only in this for the first and antepenultimate lines (and of course for the chance to use the word antepenultimate), which just struck some kind of chord with me, but they didn't make sense out of context so I thought I'd treat you to the whole bridge/chorus caboodle. If you liked it, visit this in-all-probability-very-out-of-date website to find out more.

* this was true when I wrote it, but bloody Blogger thwarted my efforts to publish last night, because it is Mean.

Wise words

2006-08-26T21:26:00.000Z

No catch-up post today, just a great quote from the novel I'm reading - 'A Dry White Season' by Andre Brink, which is awesome:

"There are only two kinds of madness one should guard against, Ben. One is the belief that we can do everything. The other is the belief that we can do nothing."

-- Prof Phil Bruwer

It's not exactly original or revolutionary, but it touched me because it's so true, and it says it so well and so clearly. A motto for activists everywhere. Amen to that.

Guantanamo - The American Way

2006-08-12T10:32:00.000Z

Hmm, I feel a political rant coming on (and a rather lengthy one at that - sorry). But it’s not going to be about Lebanon – right now, I feel like anything I could say about that whole mess would be both obvious and fruitless. Instead, I’m going to dredge up a subject I intended to blog about when it was in the news but never got round to, and which I’ve felt strongly about for years – Guantanamo Bay. A while back, it received a flurry of public attention and calls for closure, the US administration managed to ride it out until the media lost interest, and now it’s been left to continue its human rights violations in peace. Back to business as usual in the gulags. And this is why I felt it was still worth blogging about now – because the country that preaches and moralises, interferes and invades, assassinates and bombs in the name of freedom and democracy cannot be allowed to get away with this.

The trigger for the most recent scandal around Guantanamo was, of course, the first successful suicides. To me, it wasn’t just the fact that the suicides took place, and the regime it implied, that was totally unacceptable. Even more sickening was the US reaction to it. The first thing to come out of the US camp was that the suicides were “not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” The fact that they refused to make public the details of the men’s suicide notes cast some doubt on their evidence for this, but there we go. The second thing to come out of the US camp was that the suicides were “a great PR move”. A great PR move?! Let’s just think through the implications of this for a moment.

Firstly, a great PR move for whom? Obviously not for the individuals involved, because they are now dead. The clear implication is that the suicides were good PR for Them – the mysterious and threatening Muslim terrorist entity that wants to kill us all. I find this insinuation absolutely outrageous. These people have not been convicted, or even bloody charged, with any crime; in fact, one of them was due to be released shortly, although he didn’t know it – a fact the Americans conveniently chose to ignore when painting him as a dangerous Islamic extremist. Innocent until proven guilty goes out the window, and it’s simply stated as fact that the suicides of men who’d been kept indefinitely in conditions which contravene human rights law and have been ruled tantamount to torture were ‘not acts of desperation, but of war’.

To me, the ‘great PR move’ comment actually translates as: “This was a terrible PR move for us, and we’re going to try and cover it up by turning the situation around and portraying the victims as perpetrators. Hell, ‘suicide’ sounds a bit like ‘suicide bomber’ – it shouldn’t be too hard to pull off.” The most appalling thing was that these unsubstantiated accusations pretty much substituted for any expression of regret, condolence or recognition that, one way or another, American policies in Guantanamo had led to the deaths of quite possibly innocent people. These people, apparently, were terrorists, and therefore their lives had no value - their deaths did not require regret. Camp Commander Rear Admiral Harris (responsible for the ‘asymmetric warfare’ comment) came out with this little gem in the days following the suicides: “They are smart, they are creative, they are committed. They have no regard for life, either ours or their own.” No regard for life? Maybe I’m missing something, but to me, the only people who this whole episode exposed as having a flagrant disregard for life and human dignity are the Americans.

A world in your ear

2006-08-04T11:38:00.000Z

So, in beginning my long catch-up, as any sensible person would do I'm going to start at the end - with WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance), a world music festival I went to last weekend with my brother. It's freshest in my mind and the thing I'm most enthusiastic about on my list of Things I Need To Blog About, and plus it means I get to make a very satisfyingly naff pun in the title. Also, it is Awesome. There is music you can dance to and people who will not judge you for your crazy/exuberant/downright bad dancing. There is tasty, tasty food from all corners of the culinary world. There are small children everywhere you turn bopping about on their parents' shoulders or running around with funky facepaint on. And there is international solidarity, which is always nice.

Everyone in the world should go to WOMAD, and that includes all of you. It's a plan that can't fail to rock - apart from the logistical problems of getting six billion people into the site at Rivermead, but I'm sure we'll avoid crossing that bridge when we inevitably don't come to it. Sorry, I appear to be rambling.

Anyway. The real purpose of blogging about WOMAD is to big up the exciting, er, world of world music which it's led me to discover. As me and my brother were discussing in the car on the way home, it seems strange that 'world music' is seen as a marginalised, minority-interest genre when it covers about 95% of the music humanity produces. Hell, when you look at it like that (and when you start to see the ridiculously huge diversity within it) it seems mad that it's even a genre at all. Stuff I saw last weekend under the banner of 'world music' ranged from soul to funk to jazz to ska to hip hop to reggae to drumming to folk to salsa to classical and beyond. The fact that all this is lumped together into a genre which collectively gets about as much shelf space in record stores as the 'A' section of Rock&Pop demonstrates its chronic marginalisation.

So. Rant over, time for recommendations. You should all listen to some world music, even if you think it's not your thing. One of my best friends from uni came to a day of WOMAD on a spare ticket; she thought it wasn't her thing too, and ended up going away with a t-shirt and the conclusion 'best day ever'. If I know you well it's likely that I'll be bestowing a compilation CD on you in the near future featuring lots of lovely world music; in the meantime, here's my pick of Bands You Really Should Check Out.

1. Emmanuel Jal - this guy was a child soldier in Sudan and now raps in four different languages about his experiences and the need for peace. If you thought condemnation of war and danceability didn't exactly go together, now's the time for a rethink.

2. Salsa Celtica - It's Scottish! And Latino! At the same time! Listen to 'Esperanza' on their MySpace, or there will forever be a little tiny hole in your life.

3. Mahotella Queens - these three ladies from South Africa are 60-odd year old grandmas who've been playing together for 40 years, through resistance and freedom, and still dance about like mad things on stage and make music that compels you to do the same. [This link isn't to their best album or anything, but it's the only one I could find that would actually let you check out their music.]

4. Salif Keita - He's dead famous in some circles, y'know. Also royalty. At least, he was until he decided that making music (a lower-caste thing) was more important to him. A mighty dude indeed.

5. Ivo Papasov and His Wedding Band - quite, quite mad.

Of course, there are gazillions more, but I could never remember them all now (I saw 43 bands last weekend, all awesome) and this blog entry is quite long enough as it is. If you manage to get all the way to the end of it, check out at least one of the above bands, and leave a comment to prove it, I will be a very happy lady.

Long time no blog

2006-08-02T15:47:00.000Z

Oh my God! I can't believe I haven't updated since May! I am officially rubbish. In fairness, I did start to write a mammoth blog entry just after my exams, as an update on all that had happened since I'd last blogged, but because there was so much I couldn't do it all in one sitting and then I forgot to save it and it all got lost... boo.

Anyway, this is really just a marker point to confirm that I'm still alive and avoid the ridiculously long absence getting any longer. (Do you now begin to understand why I felt that naming this blog 'Constant Reading' would be tantamount to false advertising?) After so long away it's hard to know where to start - there's lots of political rants I wanted to have that never happened, about things like the Guantanamo suicides and the Lebanese mess, but they'll have to wait for another day. Maybe some time I'll also entertain you with the trials and tribulations of looking after hyperactive Scouse kids for a week with Campus Children's Holidays. But for now I think something a bit shorter and less... content-ful is required.

Nope, sorry, can't think of anything. At least now I'm in line for Most Disappointing Comeback Ever. I guess I'll just have to make up for it by trying to post lots over the next week or so and catch up on all that's happened. But judging by my past record, I wouldn't hold your breath.

Song of the moment

2006-05-27T10:01:00.000Z

I am listening to Cinnamon Clouds by Geoff Martyn, and I just got an uncontrollable urge to share it with you all (admittedly partly because I am doing boring revision and any distraction is welcome, but mostly because it is bloody ace). You can listen or download it here, and, well, you just better had. Otherwise you will look Foolish. And you should also buy his album, Something Good, because despite his best efforts to convince you of the contrary, it is also Bloody Ace. Ah, Geoff Martyn.

Right, back to hyperglobalisers and sceptics and the demise of the nation-state... but at least I have pretty music to keep me going...

Photo of the week

2006-05-18T14:39:00.000Z

Because I haven't updated for a while, and I enjoy embarrassing Mark. Note the spangly bag. Classy.

Quote of the day

2006-05-03T19:56:00.000Z

Dr Baert, explaining in a revision class why it's bad and wrong to repeat large chunks of stuff between essays in the exam:

"You don't want to plagiarise based on your own work."

How to waste paper in four easy steps

2006-04-27T12:49:00.000Z

I've been meaning to blog about this for ages, because it bugs me every time I print anything, but I just never seemed to get round to it. And in many ways, this is a silly time to do it, as I've had a migraine all morning and I should be working. Ah well, that's procrastination for you. It's a fickle mistress, as they say.

Anyway. The printer that came with my laptop has a nice shiny feature to make double-sided printing really easy. Which is nice. All you have to do is click "I Want To... print on both sides of the paper", and it sorts it all out for you. All you have to do is reload the paper half way through to print on the other side.

This brings me on to my one gripe with this otherwise lovely feature. Maybe it's just me and my tree-hugging ways, but surely the reason most people want to print on both sides of the paper is because it, well, saves paper? It's so obvious it doesn't really need stating. So why, in God's name, does it assume that unless you explicitly un-tick the box, you want it to 'print instruction page to assist in reloading'? I mean, I can understand that working out which way the paper has to go back in might be tricky. But anyone who has problems on that front is very well provided for by the helpful little dialogue box that pops up on the screen showing you exactly how to reload the paper. Now, I don't know what the instruction page says, because I've never printed it, but I can't imagine it says anything substantially different from what's already on the screen. So why is it there, other than because it would be quite nicely ironic if it wasn't so bloody annoying? Why??

Ridiculous Signs of Stratford-upon-Avon

2006-04-13T20:38:00.000Z

Well, after a long absence broken only by a token post prompted largely by a mini-whine from David at the Lion King Party, I'm finally blogging properly at last. All cheer, etc. And just to say sorry for my recent rubbishness, I thought I'd bring you the Avocados-on-Toast exclusive guide to the many ridiculous signs of Stratford-upon-Avon, where I've been on holiday with Mark for the past few days.

I suppose normal people on holiday in Stratford would take lots of photos of pretty riverside scenes and Shakespeareyness, and in fairness, we did quite a bit of that. But a probably-larger-than-sane proportion of our holiday photos consist of the various hilarious and/or foolish signs we saw whilst out and about, mostly on our ten-mile hike along the Avon, undertaken backwards from a twenty-year-old guide book (but that's another post). And thanks to the wonders of modern technology, here they are for your entertainment. (You might need to click to see the enlarged versions to fully appreciate / actually read the signs - I can't be bothered to resize them now.)

In case you can't see from the photo, this fence is plainly not electrified. In fact, it is made of some kind of bandage-like material, and was in fact knotted together in a few places.

Never mind a bull in a china shop, this is just a recipe for disaster...

Please drive carefully, children...

Keep out of where, exactly? I think this sign is even better than this one (hilarious 'no fishing' signs seem to just follow us around).

This is plainly the best name for a fencing company ever.

...And this is plainly the best name for a take-away pizza place ever.

Well, that's all for now, folks. Join us again for more hilarious signs next time me and Mark go on holiday together - for some reason they tend to gravitate towards us...

Men are from Mars...

2006-03-26T12:31:00.000Z

I've been told off for not updating my blog for ages, so I'm left with no choice but to blog about the not-particularly-amusing misprint from my psychology paper guide, which I'd meant to do ages ago. It's going to be the biggest anti-climax ever; I can only apologise.

So anyway, the last psychology essay I did was about gender. It was all about whether gender differences are all just social constructions which arise out of sex-role stereotypes and socialisation and such and such. So it was kind of ironic that the question was misprinted to read "People are not born male or female, but become mean or women in the course of their development - discuss." Well, either that or someone at the SPS office has a sense of humour.

Warning: rant ahead

2006-02-11T10:28:00.000Z

For the first time in yonks, I'm actually going to write something political in my blog, because I'm really irritated by something I've just read whilst browsing Google News and I wish to rant.

So, this is Tony Blair, talking the other day to a group of business leaders who might want to take over academies when he finally manages to ram his school reform through:

“Any of you who have ever put through a change programme either in your business or in your organisation or your school knows that, basically, it’s hell while it’s happening. But if it is the right thing to do, then it’s amazing how afterwards people actually settle down and wonder what all the fuss was about.”

Now, I've been spending too long writing politics essays on what constitutes responsible leadership and whether democracy is really democratic for this not to piss me off.

Firstly, this endless talk about 'the right thing to do' is a perfect example of what David Runciman (my favourite politics lecturer) calls 'the politics of good intentions'. I'm not going to reproduce my Weber essay here (though it's available on request in the unlikely event you're interested). But basically, this kind of politics is irresponsible, because it justifies whatever Blair does by reference to his good intentions. He thinks he's doing the right thing, and that's his justification for ignoring public opposition. He thought he was doing the right thing, and that's his justification when it all goes horribly wrong (see Iraq). Nowhere is there provision for him actually to be held accountable for anything he does.

Secondly, the idea that after he's managed to force his programme through people will "settle down and wonder what all the fuss was about" strikes me as immensely patronising. It implies that he, as our wise and beneficent leader, knows best, and eventually, parliament and the general public will realise that he was right all along. That's not how democracy's supposed to work! To me, if you're having 'hell' getting reforms accepted even by your own party, then that should tell you something - and something other than 'People are so stupid'. And this is one of the problems with parliamentary democracy. Okay, so the fact that the government has to get its bills through parliament does sometimes force it to make concessions - maybe even quite major ones (see the anti-terror legislation). But, in some form or another, the bill almost always gets through, even if it was initially opposed not only by all the other parties (who generally represent more than half the electorate) but also by a substantial proportion of the party in government - and even if this opposition was based on having fundamental problems with the principles on which the bill was based (eroding civil rights, privatisation, etc).

Of course, there are some people who would argue that this is exactly how democracy should be, but forgive me if I'm not willing to accept that just yet. Still, maybe when Blair passes an Enabling Act and solves all his problems at a stroke, I'll look back on 2006 nostalgically as the golden age of democracy...

Living up to my name

2006-01-29T15:40:00.000Z

I went and bought an avocado from Sainsbury's today, so tomorrow I will be able to have real genuine avocados on toast! I also bought cream cheese, because I am too cheap to buy goats cheese. Mmm, tasty.

I don't really have anything else to say right now, and what I just said really wasn't very interesting, but I felt the need to procrastinate from the constant (albeit interesting) reading, so there we go.

Consider the changes rung

2006-01-16T11:35:00.000Z

I got bored waiting for people to suggest more ideas, so I've renamed my blog Avocados on Toast. I feel I should point out that this isn't favouritism on my part because it was Mark's idea - I just really like avocados. And toast. And particularly avocados on toast. (Very nice with goats cheese, a tasty and not at all pretentious snack.)

Today I have also learnt that 'avocados' is one of those words that very quickly starts to look really odd when you type it too many times.

FAO David

2006-01-15T23:59:00.000Z

What are you doing calling my boyfriend a Sexy Beast?! I could have you dismantled for this! (Sorry, I really don't know where that threat came from - Red Dwarf, possibly? I dunno, it's late and I'm very tired. Please feel free to ignore it.)

While I'm on the subject, I feel it's only right to point the rest of you in the direction of The Crazy Dance - mainly because Lisa found the original Crazy Dance so hilarious it'd just be mean to deprive her of more crazy dancing joy, and also because you get to Watch Mark Dance and point and laugh (or lust, apparently, if you are of David's persuasion).

Oh, and also, I'm back in Cambridge. So far I rate my term as Excellent, but that is probably mainly because it hasn't started yet and so I don't have any work, so I can sit around and drink tea and watch films and discuss lion names all day.

I have just realised that the title of this post bears no relation to any but the first bit of it. Well, that's what you get with late-night ramblings, I suppose. Yawn.

Getting your priorities right

2006-01-11T12:58:00.000Z

From the chapter on methodology in my Social Psychology textbook:

"Other social psychologists have sometimes been lucky enough or perceptive enough to be in the right time and place to study fascinating phenomena such as a riot."

Now, call me crazy, but if I suddenly found myself in the middle of a riot, my first thought would not be, 'Ooh, lucky me! What a fantastic research opportunity!' But then, I guess that's why I'm not a scientist.

Still ringing the changes

2006-01-10T21:46:00.000Z

Happy new year, all! I'm sorry I haven't updated in A Very Long Time. Look at everything that's happened since then! I've met Pat Sharpe of Funhouse fame; it's been Christmas; I've been to Ireland; it's been New Year; I've sunk in Irish peat bog up to my ankles; I've written an essay; Charles Kennedy is no more (well, no more leader of the Lib Dems; he is still alive, bless him).

Anyway, I digress. I've been meaning to update for a while now (partly because I have a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that my last post counts as Christmas decorations and I will get bad luck all year for not updating it away before the 6th), but after an eventful absence it's always hard to know quite what to say. So, my answer to this problem is to not say anything new at all!

Instead, I am going to give you an overview of the names I've had suggested so far for the great blog-renaming exercise.

1. "Constant Reading" - I quite like this one, but I have a vague feeling that using it would be misleading, as my blog generally provides anything but constant reading. (Maybe 'patchy and erratic reading' would be better... much less catchy, though.)
2. "Something about nuns" - That isn't an actual suggested name you understand, just a vague idea courtesy of Lisa. Although I suppose 'There's something about nuns' could work. (Any more specific nun ideas are, of course, welcomed.)
3. "So..." - I feel this is a bit short and would look funny in the taskbar. Also, it reminds me of my inarticulacy. (Is inarticulacy a word? Dear me.)

Anyway, three suggestions from two people is, I feel, a bit of a poor showing. It's not like you haven't had long enough to mull. Not that they aren't good suggestions, of course; but I'm going to keep it open a bit longer in the vain hope that someone will provide a bit more competition. Competition is healthy, except when it's not.

...fa la la la la la la la la

2005-12-14T11:21:00.000Z

It has been brought to my attention that I haven't updated my blog in aaaages.

I don't really have anything to say (although I suppose I should mention that I'm back in Birmingham now, and technically on holiday, though I am in the midst of an essay on exchange and reciprocity among the Yanomamo and the Trobrianders) - so I thought I might as well share with you my newfound discovery of the fantastic adaptability of the carol "Oh Tannenbaum". Allow me to demonstrate:

#Oh Christmas tree, Oh Christmas tree, how lovely is my Christmas tree!#
[to be sung on putting up your Christmas tree]

#Oh Christmas tea, Oh Christmas tea, how lovely is my Christmas tea!#
[to be sung on drinking your Christmas tea]

#Oh Christmas pie, Oh Christmas pie, how lovely is my Christmas pie!#
[to be sung on eating your tasty mince pie]

#Oh Christmas joy, Oh Christmas joy, how lovely is my Christmas joy!#
[to be sung in anticipation of Christmas joy]

You get the picture.

Feel free to post any other pleasant variations that spring to your mind in the comments section. Let's all share the Christmas joy!

(Y'see, this is what you get when I'm wheedled into updating without having anything interesting to say. You've got no-one but Mark to blame.)

Tis the season to write essays

2005-12-01T11:23:00.001Z

Happy 1st of December, everyone!

Ooh, that reminds me, I have to go out and buy an advent calendar! Oxfam'd better still have some of those fairtrade ones, or I will be uber-gutted.

Oh, also, my term is now officially Over. Yay! Well, theoretically - I have a meeting with my Director of Studies today, a supervision tomorrow and four essays to do over Christmas. Holiday? What's a holiday? Anyway, I'm staying here an extra week to deck King's with boughs of holly. And look after frightened interview candidates. And get started on those essays. But after that, I'll be all yours, whoever you may be, unless I don't know you, in which case I won't. That'd just be weird.

Yay! Advent!

Ringing the changes

2005-11-29T11:30:00.000Z

Brrr, it's cold. My excuse for posting to my blog now is that I won't be able to start on my essay until my hands have warmed up a bit anyway. So. I've decided that I'm bored of my blog's name and wish to change it, but I'm not imaginative enough to come up with anything (maybe the cold has numbed my creative capacities). So it's down to you, my beloved readership. Come on, it's not hard to come up with something better than what I've got now, which exists mainly because I created this blog late at night and couldn't be bothered to sit there and think up a decent name because I wanted to get to bed.

Any ideas?

What a week...

2005-11-27T21:45:00.000Z

Well, lots of fun and exciting things have happened since I last blogged, and I'm uber-busy as usual, so again it's going to have to be a mere list of fun and exciting things. Just imagine each one is an extensive blog entry.

- Last Sunday, I played cello in Beethoven's 9th Symphony in King's College Chapel. Ooh, it was awesome. I couldn't play the damn thing to save my life, but it was awesome. And I managed to ward off indigestion pains just in time to not spend the concert doubled up in agony, which is always handy.

- Last Wednesday, I went to Thanksgiving Superhall (superhalls are super-good King's formal halls). Ooh, it was tasty. There was turkey with chestnut and apricot stuffing, and pumpkin pie, and warm mulled cider. My God, it was tasty. And there was a ceilidh afterwards, which means much Scottish-dancing fun for all! Yay!

- On Friday, it was Cambridge Christmas (25th November), and it snowed! It was just icing-sugar and it didn't settle at all, but in my book it's still a White Christmas and nobody can tell me otherwise! Also, there was a big party in Emma's room with a Christmas tree and mulled wine and carols out in the corridor (accompanied by various people who produced violas and flutes and things out of nowhere), to which about half the block turned up. The only explanation I can think of for it not getting closed down by the porters despite going on till about 5am is that everyone for many rooms around was there, so there was nobody left to complain.

- Yesterday, I rowed in Clare Novices, my first and quite possibly last boat race for King's. We lost, of course, due to having only rowed as an eight about four times and therefore being quite rubbish. But in fairness, we were racing Newnham, who have about three times as many girls to choose from as we do. Anyway, it was lots of fun, and losing meant we could go back to the boathouse and eat chocolate instead of having to race in the next round, by which time it had started pouring with rain, so I think we got the best deal.

- Also yesterday, Mark won National Novel Writing Month for the second year in a row! Woo! (Well, if he's not going to blog about it, someone has to.) Look at his funky winner's icon here, and his funky wordcount-graph here! And ignore the silly photo! (That hat's mine, by the way, which is why it looks so foolish.)

Ah, blogging's so great. I hadn't realised what an ace week it had been until just now.

It's time, Jim, but not as we know it

2005-11-18T16:02:00.000Z

Cambridge is an odd place. Not just because of the weird university-bubble you exist in, or the strange archaic customs (if you get a first you can legally challenge someone to a duel on King's Bridge, apparently), or the fact that you eat your Sunday brunch in a massive Harry Potter-style hall with oil paintings glaring down at you. Oh no, the bizarreness of Cambridge goes much deeper than such trivialities. Cambridge actually has its own system of time.

Weeks go from Thursday to Wednesday. Do not ask me why; I'm sure there was a reason once. At first, this was just needlessly confusing - week two becomes week three on Thursday, rather than on Sunday or Monday as it would for any normal person. It made deciphering our lecture timetables from the Cambridge Reporter a nightmare which gave me brainache unmatched by any actual work we've had to do since (well, except maybe reading Marx). But this week, the up-side has emerged! See, we've just finished one course of Sociology lectures, which was on Friday afternoons, and are about to start another course, which are on Wednesday afternoons. We had our last lecture with Dr Baert (sob!) last Friday, but because this Wednesday was technically part of that same Cambridgey week, our next Sociology lecture isn't till next Wednesday. (Are you still with me?) In any normal person's calendar, this effectively means we get a week off Sociology lectures. Yay!

But wait, there's more! Cambridge hours go from five past the hour to five to the hour. Together with the closeness of King's to my lecture halls, this puts me in the fantastic position of being able to be still doing my laundry, or talking to Jess on MSN, or having my lunch, at 2 o'clock, and still make it on time for a 2 o'clock lecture. Ah, it's great.

So, I suppose the moral of the story is that stupid fossilised traditions that are only kept up to maintain a general aura of academic eccentricity do have their uses. Which is reassuring.

Things can only get better...

2005-11-04T19:30:00.000Z

According to Facebook, I now have 6 friends at Cambridge. Woo!

In other news, Crazy Dr Weinberg said my Marx essay was "excellent" (though that may be because he is Crazy), which almost made it worth the endless brain-crushing reading about alienation and the species-being. Woo!

Oh, also, I did a silly thing on Wednesday - I stood for Ethical Investment Officer at CUSU. And I won! Woo? (I am ambivalent about this because it's an amazing opportunity to start a huge campaign for an ethical investment policy, but I have a suspicion it will a) eat my life, b) stress me out no end, and c) disillusion me greatly. I have been told by my college dad, Luke, that working for CUSU is "soul-sucking". But hey, no pain, no gain, right?)

Anyways, I'd best toddle off now, I have to finish reading The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism before 9pm, when there's an Arabian Nights Bop at the Union...

Chrissy No-Mates

2005-10-31T17:36:00.000Z

I have just signed up to Facebook, some kind of meet-people-in-your-uni-over-the-net-because-you're-too-lazy-to-get-out-and-see-them-in-the-real-world shebang, because someone said I should (I forget who). Anyway, I just logged in to look at my profile, which obviously has nothing in it yet because I've just signed up, and there's a section headed "Friends at Cambridge", with a cheery little message underneath it saying "Christine has no friends at Cambridge."

Well, that's as may be, but I'd rather not have my face rubbed in it by a stupid networking website, thanks very much.

Grrrrr. Ooh, I know what will cheer me up - going back to work on my stupid Marx essay!

No, that didn't work.

Guess who's coming tomorrow?

2005-10-27T14:43:00.000Z

And guess who's desperately trying to procrastinate from her Marx Essay of Doom?

The sock monster strikes again

2005-10-25T14:12:00.000Z

This is getting ridiculous.

After losing two socks last time I did my laundry, this time I made a point of checking round everywhere scrupulously at every stage of the laundry process - as the load went into the washing machine, on its perilous journey between the washing machine and the dryer, etc. And I still managed to end up with two odd socks.

The difference this time was that these socks weren't even mine! I have never seen these socks before. They're very nice though - I'd probably be tempted to just keep them if they weren't odd and therefore completely useless. Perhaps I'll take them back to the laundry room and leave them somewhere as an offering to appease the sock monsters.

But for now, it's back to Marx I go... (Incidentally, I think it's a mark of the circles I move in that when I complained my brain was hurting from reading Marx yesterday the guy I was talking to said, "Is this for work or for pleasure?")

I am bored!

2005-10-18T15:47:00.000Z

Bored to the extent that I'm writing entirely pointless blog posts in a vague attempt to procrastinate from my stupid Psychology essay (an essay I would have finished by now if I hadn't spent the last week being ill). Grrrr!

The worst part is, I really need to use this afternoon productively to catch up on this darn essay and get it finished so I can concentrate on getting ahead before next weekend, so I can't afford to procrastinate at all. Perhaps I'll get something to eat, bang my head against a wall for a while and then come back refreshed and with a new (possibly slightly concussed) perspective on the whole thing.

Bye-bye!

A series of unfortunate events

2005-10-13T21:23:00.000Z

Oh yes, those Baudelaire brats have nothing on me.

I think I already mentioned my knackered laptop. After a drying out period, it started working again, aside from a few start-up issues and a complete lack of working spacebar. The fact that I'm able to type a coherent blog entry from the comfort of my room is down to the lovely Mark, who managed to find a program that would let me swap the functions of keys, thus using the Ctrl key as a spacebar. (This is proving confusing when I use other computers and wonder why the spacebar isn't working.) Anyway, I rang up Dell, who after an hour on the phone duly promised to send me a new keyboard by courier, which they would then instruct me how to exchange for the old one. To this end, I had to go to Maplin's and buy screwdrivers.

This was on Monday, if my memory serves me correctly; by Monday afternoon, my minor cold had turned into a major, nasty, rotten cold and I felt rubbish. I decided to get a super-early night to get rid of it, and went to bed at about 9.30pm. After two and a half hours lying awake, half an hour on the phone to Mark doing extensive whingeing and half an hour reading Jasper Fforde, I finally got to sleep at about 1.30am. Predictably, I woke up the next day feeling rubbish.

The day after that (Wednesday) I woke up feeling even more rubbish, and my eyes were all gunky, so I decided to go and see the college nurse, on the off-chance that this wasn't just a symptom of my evil cold. The nurse (who was very nice) told me I had conjunctivitis. I cried. She gave me tissues. She told me off for using the same tissue to blow my nose and wipe my eyes, saying it was exactly this kind of behaviour that had got me conjunctivitis. I went to my room and spent the day being ill, trying not to get too behind by reading Hobbes and Marx. Now, this was the level of cold that's fantastic when you're at school (those of you still at school can feel smug now), because you're ill enough to take the day off, but not too ill to read books and watch Disney videos and generally have a pleasant day relaxing at home. However, in this instance, I had to go to lectures, because other people's lecture notes are incomprehensible to anyone but them, and I'm damned if I'm getting behind in the first week. I had to make my own honey & lemon. I had to make my own hot water bottle. I even had to make my own bed! (Being sheltered is so much more fun than being independent.)

Anyway, some time in the afternoon, Dell rang to help me set up my new computer. I got out my shiny new screwdrivers, and proceeded to fail entirely to unscrew the little screws that hold the keyboard into the laptop. (I'm weak, alright?) The Dell Man was a bit stumped by this. Not knowing what else to do, I ran downstairs to my friend Chris (who, fantastically, lives in Room 101) and said something to the effect of "Help!" We both dashed back up to my room and he proceeded to fail entirely to unscrew the little bastard screws. Eventually we gave up, apologised to the Dell Man and rang off.

All in all, it's been a dandy start to my university career.

Oh, and one more thing: how is it that even when I'm doing my own laundry and there are nobody's clothes in the load except mine, I still manage to end up with two odd socks?

And they say water is life-giving...

2005-10-05T08:25:00.000Z

Well, I'm at Cambridge, all is great, except I've spilled water on my laptop, it appears to be knackered, and I am waiting for it to dry out praying it'll fix it and I won't have to claim on the insurance and do my first few essays in the smelly Turing computer room. So my chances of actually updating my blog are even slimmer than before (she says, as she updates her blog...) Anyway, I'm not really sure what the point of this post is, and I have to go and meet the other SPSers to go to this introductory lecture thingy now, so toodle pip...

Misquote of the week

2005-09-26T23:18:00.000Z

"The poor do not seek parity, they seek justice."

Another one from those old G8 newspapers. I can't actually be sure this is a misquote, but it seems more likely to me that Scotland on Sunday misheard or mistyped a variation on the slogan "justice, not charity" than that Cardinal Keith O'Brien, leader of the Catholic Church in Scotland and one of the keynote speakers at the rally, just got the wrong end of the stick.

Quote of the week #2

2005-09-26T23:11:00.000Z

"I'm showing I care, and I'm showing that actions count more than words. I'm putting my feet where my mouth is, if you see what I mean."

I found this little gem whilst looking through old newspapers from the day after the Make Poverty History rally in Edinburgh to find good examples of media response to take to the talk I'm giving on Wednesday. It's from Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, who'd travelled over from somewhere or other (I've a hunch it may be Ireland, though I can't imagine why) for the march, and I just thought it was amusing. Bless.

Quote of the week #1

2005-09-26T22:30:00.000Z

"That train's only ever been on time once in all the times I've been getting it. And even then it was a bit late."

Brought to you by my mum a couple of days ago, whilst moaning about the uselessness of the trains to her Italian class.

The ambassador's last stand

2005-09-21T19:02:00.000Z

I've just watched the BBC programme The Ambassador's Last Stand. If I'd found out about it earlier I'd probably have urged you all to watch it, but as I didn't I'll just have to hope that some of you watched it anyway, because it was really really good.

The programme was about Craig Murray; I'm guessing most of you won't know who he is, so here's a quick summary. (If you're really lazy, go here for a quicker one.) Craig Murray used to be the British ambassador to Uzbekistan, and he spent a lot of his time kicking up a fuss about the regime's use of torture (even if you don't recognise the guy's name, you might remember hearing something about the Uzbeki government boiling dissidents alive; it's not the kind of thing you forget, really, is it?) He brought this to the attention of the British government, who were using information obtained under torture from the Uzbeki secret police, assuming that once they realised what was going on they'd change the policy.

Instead, they did the decent thing and got Craig Murray suspended on no less than eighteen trumped-up charges. Although they were all later disproved, in the end he was forced to resign anyway after a systematic campaign to undermine him by the Foreign Office. Now, having had his career destroyed because he stood up for what was right, Murray was understandably pissed off. So he decided to stand against Jack Straw in the general election. The Ambassador's Last Stand followed his campaign; of course, he didn't win, but he managed to garner a few thousand votes and drive around in a Green Goddess sounding off about the government quite a lot.

Okay, so maybe that wasn't all that brief, but it was important. Anyway, for me this whole thing is deeply depressing on two counts:

1. Our government seemingly has no regard for human rights whatsoever. I remember it being reported last year that evidence obtained by torture had been ruled to be alright as long as it wasn't British people doing the torturing. But of course, the government is still strongly opposed to torture in all its forms. The sheer hypocrisy of it all just makes me want to throw things at other things (particularly cabinet ministers). In case you didn't know, Uzbekistan is a major ally in the war on terror, which is why, like America, it gets away with doing whatever the hell it likes to political dissidents and the government turns a blind eye. The more astute among you might have noticed a huge and horrible irony there.

2. The way politics and diplomacy really works is deeply, deeply scary. All this stuff about the Foreign Office desperately trying to come up with ways to shut Craig Murray up, no matter how fraudulent they might be, is very reminiscent of a brilliant John Le Carre book I once read called The Constant Gardener. The corruption, the lies, the way the establishment tries to get rid of people who speak out against injustice... I'm aware that I sound like a far-out conspiracy theorist just saying all this stuff, and that's why it scares me even more that it's all true. People don't want to believe that this is how our democracy works, but all the evidence suggests it is.

To be honest, I think America and Britain need to take a good look at themselves before they can claim the gun-toting moral high ground against supposed 'rogue states'. Well, we all knew that already, I suppose. I'm aware this is nothing new, but I just felt the need to vent at length about the soul-crushing rubbishness of the global order. It eases the frustration of sitting around feeling helpless a tiny bit. Lordy, sometimes I feel like I'm living in a George Orwell novel. Sigh.

Right, those of you who managed to wade this far through my rantings shall be rewarded with this link, which takes you to a groovy song about the Craig Murray debacle. I promise I'm not joking.

(Oh, by the way, I'm back from Europe.)

Hilarious junkmail is back!

2005-08-29T21:37:00.000Z

At last, I've finally started getting amusing junkmail again! The other day Monty Sprague advised me rather scarily to "melt your fat like butter explode" (as if he called me fat, how rude), and Sterling Fountain boldly cried "cellulite be gone comma". Bette Mcginnis apparently mistook me for a character in Bored of the Rings and sent me an email titled "anytime is good arrowroot". But the best bit is that my various bits of spam have actually started having conversations with each other! For instance, today my junk inbox looked a bit like this:

Kirby Boyer - "hows it going"
Grinberg - "It could always be MUCH better, buddy!"

Well, at least they're having fun. I guess it must be a lonely life being spam.

By the way, I'm off to France and Barcelona tomorrow with Lailah (not at the same time, obviously) so I probably won't be updating for a while. Sob! I'll send you a postcard. Maybe.

So, I was looking back through my blog...

2005-08-25T18:16:00.000Z

I have just realised that four out of my last five blog entries (discounting that one about the coriander seeds for reasons best known to nobody) begin "So,...".

Dearie me. Does this make me really unimaginative or really inarticulate or really annoying or some combination of the three?

It's like a big "aaagh" in your mouth

2005-08-25T18:11:00.000Z

Yesterday, I found ten coriander seeds in my ratatouille. Ten!

Today, I found ten coriander seeds in my ratatouille. Ten!

Something suspicious is going on here. Maybe someone really inept is trying to poison me...

Compare and contrast

2005-08-22T22:03:00.000Z

So, having finally realised how little time I have left to get through at least some proportion of my Hefty Cambridge Reading List, I've started doing some reading. I foolishly thought it would be a good idea to invest in Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future by John Dunn, which I finished this morning (not very much the wiser) and which goes down as one of the most incomprehensible books I've ever read (behind Nietzche: A Very Short Introduction). While I'm offering out special prizes, a prize will also go to anyone who can decipher the following paragraph for me:

"If the civil liberties and substantive pluralism of capitalist democracies are thoroughly established, if notably untranscendent, goods, it may be proper to take a fairly sardonic line about these, indicating tartly, historically speaking where they got on and morally speaking where they get off. But if they are wholly historically contingent, in no way guaranteed, embellishments of the human political future, then the terms of trade between cultural fastidiousness and political commitment ought perhaps to shift rather sharply and the culturally exigent come to adopt a more modest tone."

A large proportion of the bloody book was like this. It was a shame, really, because I got the feeling it would have been very interesting if it wasn't like wading through treacle.

Now, the book I've just finished making notes on, Durkheim by Anthony Giddens, is another matter entirely. Ah, it was so interesting. And so very much better written. See, I think that big long words and big long sentences are a sign of bad writing rather than cleverness. Academia annoys me sometimes. Anyway, here is my favourite bit from the lovely book, to compare with the extract above:

"A democratic society is one in which the state is independent and strong enough to accomplish these tasks, but is nevertheless in close communication with the ideas of the mass of the population. A democracy is a 'political system by which the society can achieve a consciousness of itself in its purest form. The more that deliberation and reflection and a critical spirit play a considerable part in the course of public affairs, the more democratic the nation. It is the less democratic to the degree that lack of consciousness, uncharted customs, obscure sentiments and prejudices that escape enquiry, predominate.'"

So, according to Durkheim, the society we live in today is way off democratic, because public opinion is largely driven by a mass media with little or no concern for projecting the facts in an unbiased way, and seemingly every concern with perpetuating "prejudices that escape enquiry" (case in point, asylum seekers and the Daily Mail). Well, I just found that interesting. Incidentally, anyone bored enough to write me an essay comparing and contrasting those two paragraphs is free to do so. I promise to mark it and everything.

Also, sorry about the ridiculous length of my last two blog entries. Anyone who got to the end of this one deserves a prize, at any rate.

Unmissable links of the week

2005-08-20T16:23:00.000Z

So, I was at my MP's surgery this morning harrassing him about climate change, and They Work For You came up in conversation. I realised that I've never plugged this fantastic website on my blog before, or its sister site, The Public Whip, and now seemed as good a time to do so as any. (Actually, right before the election would have been a significantly better time, but not much I can do about that now.)

These sites are run by (among some other people who I don't know and who are therefore less interesting) a guy called Francis who's a friend of my brother's and one of the coolest people I've ever met. Basically through establishing these websites he's trying to use the internet to make democracy work properly in new and exciting ways (well, exciting if you're me, which I am). What they do is empower you with all the information you need to hold your elected representatives to account - cutting through the media and party-political spin that makes it so difficult to get to the facts in politics. (The websites themselves don't have any kind of agenda, other than making democracy more participatory, and I reckon that's their biggest strength.)

Among other things, you can search and read transcripts of parliamentary debates, so you know straight from the horse's mouth exactly what everybody's been saying (so for instance, you can read Charles Clarke's speeches on terrorism, or find out what questions your MP's been asking on your behalf in parliament). You can also find out how your MP (or anyone else for that matter) voted on issues which interest you - and if you're not happy with what you see, there are links to sites which let you fax or email them and let them know you're onto them.

They Work For You has already won a few awards and, if it carries on growing, could really revolutionise the way we think about politics. In an age where politicians seem to be getting more and more distant and less and less accountable, when turnouts are so low that only 20% of the population actually voted for the present government, I just hope that it can do something to re-engage people with the political process. (Obviously, in my opinion many more fundamental reforms are necessary, such as Lords Reform and electoral reform, but that's another matter.)

Whether or not you voted for your MP, their job is to represent you in government, so please take a look at these sites and find out what they're up to. After all, if you don't hold them to account, who will?

[PS: Anyone who follows these links and reports back to me that they've used them constructively to get actively involved in politics will win a super-special and as yet unidentified prize. Promise.]

Pencils: an update

2005-08-19T09:59:00.000Z

Those of you who can stretch your minds back to Pencil Anecdote of the Day way back in the mists of time (well, June-ish) will no doubt be very excited to learn that on a recent trip to the Lake District, I visited the Cumberland Pencil Museum! Next to this masterpiece of pencilly joy, all other museums seem suddenly pointless (oh dear, an inadvertant and terrible pun... argh, I hate those). If you're ever in Keswick, I strongly recommend that you visit the Pencil Museum, or face the consequences. (These consequences include: missing out on the Pencil Museum; suffering eternal regret that you missed out on the Pencil Museum; facing the scorn and ridicule of your friends for missing out on the Pencil Museum.)

As the sign outside proclaims, the Cumberland Pencil Museum is "an all-weather attraction". Fortunately, it was pissing down with rain when we went, so we didn't have to test this claim - I'm sceptical of whether many people would spurn rowing on Derwentwater, tea gardens and pleasant walks for a day inside the Pencil Museum if it was gloriously sunny. (Fools.)

So, what did you see inside the Pencil Museum, I hear you cry. Well, for a start, we saw those funky prisoner-escape wartime pencils that were in the Pencil Anecdote - complete with detailed maps of Germany and tiny compasses. I can honestly say that this was one of the most brilliant museum exhibits I have ever encountered. We also saw several outsize pencils (when I finally get my hands on a data cable and things, I'll upload photos of Mark next to the World's Largest, and a slightly smaller one with a sign next to it saying "This is me at the Cumberland Pencil Museum"). Verily, it was the Grooviest Museum Ever.

I don't want to spoil the many pencilly surprises that await you in the Pencil Museum in case you ever go, but just in case you're not yet convinced that this is a funky place for a day out, I'll leave you with the text from one of the little information board thingies in the exhibition about the history of pencil making.

"1751 - REDCOATS ARE STATIONED AT BORROWDALE MINE FOR ITS PROTECTION.
PENCILS ARE S C A R C E."

Darn it, I'm going to be a southerner

2005-08-18T18:06:00.000Z

So, before I start trawling through the events of the past two months, I feel I should acknowledge the fact that I got my A-level results today. I got four As (in spite of the Nightmare Psychology Coursework and the History Exam from Hell - take that, evil-being-who's-behind-all-this-stuff!) This means I am going to Cambridge in October! Hooray!

On the downside, as Char just helpfully pointed out to me, this means that I too will be a southerner, and hence can no longer mock her about her new home in Surrey - sorry, Hampshire. (Just to clear this up, Birmingham is not southern - it's in the Midlands.) Still, I think I can live with that if it means three years of the Red Bar and punting and the best course in the world. Yay!

Ooh, also, Mark got six As in his AS-levels! Six! All applaud, etc. Is it wrong that this excites me more than my own results?

Technology hates me

2005-08-18T16:02:00.000Z

So, for the benefit of those who didn't know (which is most likely nobody), the reason my blog has gone through the whole of July and most of August gathering dust and looking neglected is that immediately after my exams finished, my computer mysteriously died (possibly as a result of a lightning strike), and only today have I succeeded in regaining access to an internet connection. (The computer's still bust, but I have a shiny new laptop to play with - hooray!)

Frustratingly, a pile of exciting and/or important stuff has happened in the time I've been offline - I've missed the chance to blog about Live 8 and the London bombings, as well as to share with you the joys of People & Planet samba parties and the Cumberland Pencil Museum. So my plan is to upload rants and raves about all these things as and when I feel like it over the next week or so. They'll probably be absurdly out of date and of no interest to anyone, but I feel I should make some effort to make up for my 2-month absence from the joys of blogging.

Merry August, everybody! Ah, it's good to be back.

Letter of the week

2005-06-22T10:30:00.000Z

From today's Guardian letters page:

I am saddened by the unhelpful attitude of John Simpson, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, for declining to take on board the concerns of the British Potato Council, campaigning for the removal of the term 'couch potato' from the dictionary - which is deterring people from making more use of this nutritious vegetable ('Couch potato label gives veg a bad name', June 20).
As one who has spent much of his life in the fruit and vegetable business, I can vouch for the fact that there are a great many terms in the English language that give needless pain to the sensitive greengrocer. We deplore derogatory descriptions such as 'cabbage head', 'prune face', 'cauliflower ears'. These have a negative impact on our business by making all such produce unattractive. Who is going to buy raspberries if people insist on blowing them?
Even seemingly innocuous terms like 'fruity' and 'nutty' give grave offence to vegans such as myself. People should show more sensitivity and refrain from all such loose talk.

Jeremy Hart,
Buckfastleigh, Devon

I'm still trying to work out if this guy is being entirely serious. The worrying thing is, I get the feeling he is. Although of course, I could just be missing something. Answers on a postcard... (Incidentally, I have to say I have never heard anyone use 'prune face' as an insult. Suddenly, it seems like there's been a huge hole in my life all these years.)

The Exam from Hell

2005-06-21T21:52:00.000Z

Yesterday (as the title of this post may have suggested to the intelligent amongst you), I sat the Exam from Hell. It was several hours after it ended before I was finally convinced that if it was a nightmare I'd have woken up by now, and therefore I must actually be awake. (Incidentally, am I the only one who gets that feeling sometimes where you seriously believe you may be dreaming? It's scary, because you don't know if anything's real! Argh, the uncertainty!) Anyway, since then I have been to sleep, woken up and subsequently spoken to several people who have the same memories of the same nightmareish exam as me, so I'm working on the assumption that it was real. (Grrr.)

Weirdly, I had a feeling that the t-shirt I was wearing (my funky nun t-shirt, no less) might bring me bad luck, even though there's really no good reason why it shouldn't bring the best of luck. Well, other than the fact that the transfer had cracked, and as we all know, a cracked nun brings seven years' bad luck! (Oh, wait, that's mirrors. Hurrah!) Nonetheless, I told myself I was being silly and tried to persuade myself the nun would watch over me like a benificent angel, ensuring the long-dreaded History paper went smoothly. But oh no. Where was my guardian nun when I needed her? Laughing at my pain, no doubt. Bitch.

Our troubles began when we opened the first of the two History papers we were sitting that day and realised something was up. The exam board had decided - just for a laugh - to completely change around the format of the exam and the style of the questions, without telling us of this before hand. Oh, AQA, you are a card. (Bastards.) Now, as anyone who's taken AQA History to any level knows, the scariest thing about the exams is timing, because they always set the time limit for the exam at roughly half the time you would sensibly need to answer all the questions properly without setting fire to your hand. So having your carefully-drilled-into-you timing structure for answering the paper turned upside down is not the most helpful thing that can happen at the beginning of your A-level. Not only that, but the first question was a usefulness question. A usefulness question! I hadn't done one of those since GCSE, so I dredged up vague memories of provenance and relevance and cobbled together a half-baked answer, which rambled on for about twice as long as I usually spend on 10-mark questions.

Panicking at how behind I already was, I rushed on to the second question, the more familiar crazy three-regime, four-source essay, which is hard enough at the best of times without the title being something confusing about "conflict and antagonism". I got halfway through my answer to this question (which was a load of old bobbins because my mind was all in a flap) before realising that not only had I not made reference to any of the source material (which you need to do to get anything over half marks) - I hadn't even read two of the sources! As this realisation dawned on me, there was a beautiful moment when I thought, "Ah, I see what's happening, this is a nightmare! This is all going too absurdly wrong to be real. It's a panic dream and I'm about to wake up. Thank God for that." As the moments lengthened and I remained stubbornly sat in Room Bloody 14 with the Exam from Hell still in front of me, I realised that I was most probably awake and should get on with the exam rather than waiting to wake up.

Eventually, I finished my hashed-up second essay and moved on to the Stalin essay (which I now had just over 20 minutes to write, as opposed to the recommended 45.) The annoying thing with that was that it was a really easy title and one that I'd written a really good essay on quite recently, but I was unable to answer it properly because it was the most I could do to make it legible and looking vaguely like an essay before the time ran out. Argh.

The second paper was less hellish, barring an entire source covering a period we hadn't studied, but I am now very glad I didn't take History to degree level. The residual trauma of that exam could have ruined my university career.

(I realise that I've gone on and on and on about something very very boring, but I felt the need to vent, and what are blogs for if not for venting?)

Quote of the week

2005-06-18T22:05:00.000Z

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

- Anatole France

Three down, seven to go

2005-06-15T22:40:00.000Z

So, my exams started today - English Literature and General Studies. I'm not really sure how they went, but I suppose "as well as could be expected" is about fair. And I managed to work the words "bokeler", "forpined" and "ercedekene's" into my Chaucer essay, not to mention crowbarring four random names into my Rover essay despite having next to no idea who any of them were (Anne Marshall Quin, Lady Castlemaine, William Wycherly and John Dryden, just for the record), so I'm counting it as a victory. Well, except the bit in the General Studies 'Science, Mathematics & Technology' paper where they started throwing crazy science words at me, like 'angular mean speed' and 'hyperbolic' and 'parabolic', and I realised that two years without any science have made any science-related knowledge I may ever have possessed trickle slowly out of my head, never to return. This saddened me briefly, but then I realised that I have now sat the exam which probably constitutes the last time I would need such knowledge in my everyday life (and even then, 'need' is a bit inaccurate, considering that my General Studies grade in no way affects whether I meet the conditions for my university offers). So, in summary, all is well. Well, except for the imminent Psychology exam and associated frantic learning of crazy names like 'Jellinek' and 'Abey-Wickrama', but as a wise man once told me, "It can't all be strawberries."

It's not rocket science

2005-06-08T23:24:00.000Z

According to the website of Mensa UK,

"1 in 50 people have an IQ in the top 2% that makes them eligible to join Mensa."

I've sat here thinking long and hard to try and come up with some kind of mocking comment that could make this astounding insight any more hilarious than it already is, but really, it does it all by itself.

Nuns: the verdict

2005-06-08T23:12:00.000Z

Since I acquired a t-shirt sporting the legend "nuns are our friends" and a rather snazzy cartoon nun (I've just realised I never blogged about my shirt in the first place! How shocking!) I have had the following responses whilst wearing it out and about:

"I thought nuns were evil" (x2)
"Nuns are cool" (x2)
"I'm scared" (x1)
Pervy looks from strange men (x2)

Now that I come to add them up, it would seem that there is no clear overall positive verdict here. I suppose it all depends on whether you count pervy looks as a positive response, and to be honest, I don't. Nevertheless, I'm hopeful that if I continue wearing it, the word of groovy nuns will be spread such that the scared, unenlightened or pervy will see the error of their ways.

Now, in the words not quite of Shakespeare, get thee to a nunniness!

Public service broadcasting

2005-06-07T05:32:00.000Z

Now, it's very easy (not to mention fun) to mock Channel 5 for being naff and tacky and so forth. But if I'm going to do that, I feel it's only right to give it credit where credit's due, and it seems that credit is, at the moment, most certainly due. I'm talking about the new series Big Ideas That Changed The World, in which, well, big ideas - like capitalism, Christianity, democracy and environmentalism - are explained by leading experts in that subject. And when I say leading experts, I don't mean some beardy bloke from a university, I mean people you've actually heard of - Desmond Tutu, Tony Benn, Josef Stiglitz (okay, most of you probably haven't heard of him, but I have) and so on.

Now, this is the kind of thing that gets me really, really excited, which is no doubt very loserish, but hey - that's why I'm doing Social and Political Sciences at uni when most of you probably wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. Still, I think you should watch Big Ideas That Changed The World, because it looks truly, truly ace. Frankly, I think the BBC should be ashamed of itself, using public money to make rubbishy reality shows and Out-Take TV while Channel 5 - I mean, come on, Channel 5 - are trying to explain things that really matter in a 45-minute slot at 7.15pm on Tuesdays (that's 7.15pm on Tuesdays - put it in your diary).

I'm deeply irritated that I missed the first one (Communism, narrated by Mikhail Gorbachev - Gorbachev, for Christ's sake! Am I the only one who's hugely impressed by that?), so I thought to make up for it I would plug the series on my blog and hope some people listened. Tomorrow's is feminism with Germaine Greer, and I intend to watch it despite having several good reasons not to (namely, I find Germaine Greer faintly irritating, I'm not all that interested in feminism and I have truckloads of revision to do). You should too.

You never know, you might learn something.

Thou shalt have a fishy on a little dishy...

2005-06-01T01:24:00.000Z

Oh my Lord.

My cat has just eaten one of the fish.

Well, "eaten" isn't really an accurate word. He certainly caught a fish out of the pond, although God knows how. But "half-eaten" would probably be a more accurate description of what he's done with it. (Those with a nervous disposition or a sensitive stomach - I'm thinking of Lisa here - may wish to stop reading at this point.) You see, he's kindly left a chunk of it behind as evidence of his dastardly deed.

I suppose you're asking for it when you have a fishpond in close proximity to a cat, really. But still, on the return home from a pleasant and successful shopping trip, that doesn't make the sight of a mangled fish torso (I don't know if fishes technically have torsos, but in my traumatised state I can't think of a better word) awaiting you at the bottom of the stairs any less distressing. Yes, that's right, no head, no tail, just a fish body and some scales. I don't even want to think about the implications of that.

Ugh.

Pencil Anecdote of the Day

2005-05-29T01:14:00.000Z

Today, Gmail's usually-rubbish little targeted links thingy, in a sudden stroke of genius, directed me to this fantastic story in the Orlando Sentinel about the Cumberland Pencil Museum. As well as brightening my day and leading to a new resolution to visit said Pencil Museum when we go to the Lake District this summer, this provided me with a really groovy Pencil Anecdote to share with my beloved readers of my slightly-less-beloved blog! (Is there no end to the joy this little escapade provides?) Anyway, I suppose I should get on to the Pencil Anecdote - because let's face it, if I didn't you'd only skip ahead anyway, what with Pencil Anecdotes being so irresistably exciting and all. (I'm choosing to ignore the fact that most people will probably have read it already, as I so conveniently provided a link. Silly me.)

Pencils with a Point*

"During World War II, a small group of Cumberland pencil factory employees were enlisted to work on a top-secret project: They made special pencils to be delivered to Allied prisoners of war in Nazi POW camps.

Hidden under the ferrule -- the crimped metal tube that holds the eraser -- was a tiny but functional compass. Rolled tightly inside the pencil was a tissue-paper map to aid any prisoners able to escape.

Oh, and you could also write with it. It was a pencil, after all."

* Please note I accept no responsibility for that awful, awful pun. It was the subheading on the article in question, and any complaints about the quality of the pun should be directed to Mr John Kelly of the Washington Post, whoever he may be.

Nuns Are Our Friends

2005-05-27T07:35:00.000Z

The three best nun-related websites on the internet (or at least, that small corner of it that Kate and I managed to scour in our quest for information about the oozing properties of nuns. I'm coming to realise that late-night conversations with Kate are severely detrimental to my sanity.) Let nobody say my blog doesn't provide a useful service...

1. Papal Bowling - The best game on the web?
2. Frightfully Decent Nuns - "This is a little offering showing some of the great times to be had if you keep a nun handy." Far less dodgy than I've just realised that sounds.
3. Rapping Nuns - No, really. They're real. Really.

Ah, memories...

2005-05-24T05:48:00.000Z

So, I was reading through some old diaries this evening (see how productively I use my study leave?) and I came across the entry for the Day of Farce with the comedy bus driver. And it occurred to me that I'd meant to put it up on my blog but just never got round to it, so now it's just an entry in the list of Things I Would Have Blogged About If I Wasn't So Busy And Lazy, and frankly it deserves better. So I decided there was no harm in it going up retrospectively and giving me a nice bit of reminiscence into the bargain. I can't be bothered to re-tell it, so I'm just going to type up my entire entry for that day, because it was quite a comical day, in many ways. (Having typed it all out, it's got quite ridiculously long, so if anyone does manage to stay awake till the end, please do comment so I know it wasn't all in vain.)

Wednesday 9th March 2005

The events of this morning have led me to conclude that my life is a comedy farce existing solely for the enjoyment of some Beings in some parallel universe or something (like the Trumann Show, which I've never actually seen). It all started this morning when I got on a private-bus-company bus, even though it meant paying and I have a bus pass, because I thought I was going to be late for school. The bus driver, seemingly from some Eastern European country (possibly Poland) didn't understand much of what I said, but eventually sold me a ticket to Kings' Heath for 50p.

So far, so good. But at Acocks Green, he stopped the bus and started rambling at me at great length in his native language and gesticulating oddly. When I told him I didn't understand, he offered "No speak English". Fucking hell. This isn't real!

We eventually established that the bus was terminating and I had to get off. Whereupon I got a bit annoyed. I calmly pointed out that I'd paid for a ticket to Kings' Heath, which he had happily sold me, neglecting to mention that his stupid bus was not, in fact, going to Kings' Heath. I further noted that the sign on the front of his bloody bus said "Perry Barr", which is miles past Acocks Green. He looked puzzled, said "Perry Barr?" in a comedy dimwit sort of a way, and opened up the little sign compartment thingy to prove me wrong. On realising I was right, he threw up his hands and cried "Oi-yoi-yoi!", much in the manner of the bumblebee man from The Simpsons. At this point I knew he must be a joke bus driver, so I gave up and got off the bus. At least I got my 50p back.

I started walking back to the bus stop (he didn't even have the decency to drop me at a sodding bus stop, just in the middle of the road) and of course, as I was walking the bus came up the road towards me. I started running comically, whereupon the bottom dropped out of my bag, depositing my lunch on the pavement. I missed the bus.

Amusing Incident of the Day Involving No Farcical Inconvenience to Me happened in History and went something like this:
Mrs Mann [with trepidation]: So, what have you been doing in the lessons I've been away?
Me: Well, on Wednesday, we had a discussion about lemmings, and on Monday, we read out the sources on that sheet you left us in various humorous accents.
Mrs Mann: Oh God, it's worse than I thought.

Well, I suppose when you've been driven insane by Imbecile Polish Bus Drivers, anything amuses you. Anyway, at lunchtime there were no forks in the canteen, so I was forced to eat my lunch with a spoon. I mention this only because forks then miraculously appeared, so I decided to eat my yoghurt with one, just to give the Beings in the parallel universe something suitably ridiculous to watch.

I think I may, in fact, be going crazy.

Back in business

2005-05-22T05:12:00.000Z

Hurrah, it worked! Thanks go to Mark "I love it when my plans actually work" Taylor for suggesting republishing and thereby rescuing my blog from eternal (or perhaps temporary, who knows) obscurity, so that it can continue to be read and enjoyed by absolutely nobody.

It's a mini-adventure!

Are you sure, sir? It does mean changing the bulb...

2005-05-22T05:07:00.000Z

Okay, this post is a Red Alert. We are on Red Alert because Blogger seems to have decided my blog no longer exists. While I'm sure this won't be a great loss to anybody, it does make me rather distressed considering all the time and energy I've put into pointlessly rambling on here. Strangely enough, Blogger Help doesn't have an FAQ that says "My blog has fallen into a rip in the space-time continuum. What should I do?", so I'm hoping that posting this carefully-crafted little bit of rubbish and republishing will bring it back.

Well, here goes nothing...

Psychology Joke of the Day

2005-05-18T05:34:00.000Z

(This posted in celebration/mourning - I still can't quite decide which - of the fact that I never have another Psychology lesson again, ever!)

Q: When is a family tree not a family tree?
A: When it's a crowd analysis model!

(On reflection, even I don't find it funny. Possibly Chantal does. Who can say?)

Of innocence and experience

2005-05-10T23:25:00.000Z

Since acquiring the very funky Innocent Little Book of Drinks, I've been making a point of making smoothies as often as I can. The other day, I made an important discovery. If you use manky brown fruit, you will get manky brown smoothies. I feel this is a valuable lesson learned on my road to smoothie-making expertise (or so I'm telling myself to minimise the disappointment of a manky brown smoothie). You learn by experience, etcetera, etcetera.

In itself, this isn't a particularly interesting or pointful story (I suppose I could argue that I'm warning others away from making the same mistake I did, but to be honest it's fairly obvious and I was pretty thick to make the mistake in the first place), but I'm putting it on my blog because it gives me an excuse to big up Innocent smoothies, which it seems a startling number of people have yet to experience. Innocent smoothies are the best thing since sliced bread. (Actually, they're not, because sliced bread is pretty rubbish and Innocent smoothies are absolutely fab.) They're fruity and tasty and healthy and the bottles have cute pictures and amusing ramblings on them. Really, you'd be selling yourself short if you didn't go here, here and here to find out more about them (and play lots of fun games and things too).

Isn't democracy great?

2005-05-06T08:08:00.000Z

I voted today! At my old primary school, no less. It was highly exciting. Although the guy who gave me my ballot paper was the ticket man at my local train station, so unless he's just really unobservant it looks like my days of paying child-fare are over. Ah well, it was good while it lasted.

Anyway, I could go on a big political rant here, but it's 12.30am and I'm really just whiling away time while the results come through and Peter Snow wets himself over his latest swingometer. And I'm not very good at multitasking, so if I try and say anything meaningful or interesting on my blog whilst simultaneously doing various other things, my brain might explode. And there's not much point having a blog if you don't have a functioning brain. (I could get in a joke there about stupid ignorant people, or maybe even Tory-boys, but it'd be mean and I'm not awake enough to come up with anything.)

Anyway, having marked the historic occasion of my first largely pointless vote (just so you know, if I'd gone on a rant, the subject of it would probably have been how we should have proportional representation), I'm going to get back to waiting for Boris Johnson to reappear on my screen (or rather, the funky little BBC online election coverage window).

Up the Lib Dems!

Blimey, it's been a while!

2005-05-04T04:33:00.000Z

So, Blogger tells me that the last time I posted was at the end of February, which is frankly disgraceful. So much has happened! The gigs! The birthdays! The imbecile Polish bus drivers! It saddens me that these escapades have not been recorded for posterity on That Internet, so to make myself feel better about it I am going to provide a summary of Things I Probably Would Have Blogged About Over The Past Few Months If I Hadn't Been So Busy And Lazy. (Could that be the least catchy title for a list ever?)

Anyway. Since last updating, I have (in roughly chronological order):
- Sung with CBYV in Buckingham Palace
- Read the jokes off Penguin wrappers in Buckingham Palace
- Been served chipolatas roasted in honey by impossibly posh butlery people in Buckingham Palace
- Chatted to Prince Philip in Buckingham Palace
- Been blanked by the Queen in Buckingham Palace
- Helped make one of the tenors look ridiculously camp using a leather jacket and a pink scarf in Buckingham Palace
- Had a farcical bus journey with an imbecile Polish bus driver who didn't speak English and said "Oi-yoi-yoi!" like the bumble-bee man from the Simpsons
- Been forced to eat lasagne with a spoon and yoghurt with a fork due to the canteen's ridiculous lack of cutlery
- Concluded that my life was a farce being played out for the enjoyment of somebody somewhere
- Watched the Truman Show
- Become convinced my life was the Truman Show
- Become unconvinced my life was the Truman Show
- Acquired a deeply wonderful boyfriend
- Discovered that Digbeth coach station is, in fact, a shithole
- Discovered the coolest dog ever (it is made from mop-heads and I want one)
- Discovered the coolest word ever ('flub': to botch or bungle)
- Applied in writing to play the grand piano in Borders in Leeds
- Played the grand piano in Borders in Leeds
- Been thrown out of Borders in Leeds by a pleasant Australian security guard
- Stayed up all night for the Wake Up To Trade Justice protest in London
- Blown out candles at the midnight candlelit vigil at said protest because it was my birthday
- Turned 18
- Been to see the rather wonderful Willy Mason at the Academy (photos here)
- Discovered the genius that is Kid Carpet

Well, that's all I have time for just now, but I'm sure I'll remember a whole bunch of other stuff that I really should have included but forgot about. Still, this post is quite long enough as it is, so away with my tedious ramblings! Goodnight!

Roll up, roll up for the world's unfunniest joke

2005-02-28T03:44:00.000Z

Yesterday, the choir I'm in was in a Songs of Praise concert which was filmed for TV. At least, that's what we were told, but I have a strong suspicion that it was in fact a joke show. There's really no other explanation for the shocking disorganisation and uselessness which characterised the whole day.

First, we were rushed out of our first CBYV rehearsal to Hall 9, where we were apparently needed for a massed choirs rehearsal. Except it turned out we'd been called down 25 minutes early, so we all had to stand in the cold being shouted at for making a noise because there was a competition taking place in the hall we were supposed to be rehearsing in.

When we finally got into the rehearsal, it lasted about 15 minutes and consisted of the conductor giving vague and confusing instructions and then moaning when they weren't followed correctly. It was at roughly this point that we decided the conductor was the biggest git ever. On top of which, he was wearing a stupid shirt.

Because Stupid Git Man's Stupid Rehearsal over-ran, we only got a half-hour lunch break before we were ushered back into Symphony Hall for a camera rehearsal, in which we promptly commenced doing absolutely nothing for about 45 minutes. We then did very little for a further hour or so, learning that our solo in Siya Hamba (the Worst Arrangement Ever courtesy of Stupid Git Man) had been cut, because the director didn't know we were doing it and wanted to know why the other choirs his cameras were pointing at weren't singing.

By this point we'd pretty much decided that the day was a joke, a sham of a mockery and a mockery of a sham. But if any further proof were needed, we got it when we were called on for the performance, Mike beside himself because we were late onstage. He needn't have worried, though; the seating arrangements for the audience were in such chaos that the show didn't start for a further 25 minutes. Finally, to complete the whole fiasco, we were 2 minutes into our break backstage at the interval when Mike came beetling in to tell us we weren't supposed to have gone off at all and had to get straight back on stage. This we did, only for a primary school teacher to start moaning at us because her children needed to sit in our seats. A highly amusing game of musical chairs ensued, ending up with us all sitting in exactly the same place we started.

This is a ridiculously long post, and I don't know why I bothered relating it all, but I felt the detail was necessary to really convey the shambolic mess that, according to Mike, was the 2nd Worst Organised Day in the History of the World. To cap it all, I had a party to get to afterwards, so I couldn't even stick around to meet Aled Jones. For shame.

"Snow joke" - the worst snow-based pun ever?

2005-02-26T05:11:00.000Z

Well, looks like the snow's over for now. Sniff. For the last two days we've had rubbish snow which didn't settle at all, so to all intents and purposes it was actually raining. It was like the worst of rain and the worst of snow in one horrible perverse package. Meh. Meanwhile, I hear that Yorkshire is knee-deep in fluffy white stuff (although Neil and Mark are the only ones who can really confirm or deny this), so I'm quite jealous.

While we're on the subject of snow, there can be few more pathetic sights than swarms of under-15s trying in vain to have snowball fights with an icing-sugar dusting of snow. It really is like watching starving children fighting over a grain of rice. On top of which, these apparently harmless antics actually stop further snow from settling, which is why we're in the sorry snow-lacking state we are now (well, probably not, but I'm blaming them anyway, because I can). Still, if they hadn't been doing it, I would have missed out on Sousan shouting at bemused year 7s, "PUT THE SNOW BACK!"

It's a snowy tragi-comedy!

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...

2005-02-24T00:17:00.000Z

Yay! It's snowing! Well, not right now this minute (at least not in Birmingham) - but it has been, blizzards and hail and sleet and ice and all types of snowy goodness! Fingers crossed for a Snow Day... I was on the bus watching it snowing outside yesterday (well, it wouldn't really be snowing inside would it now) and I saw a snowflake land on the window and just sort of shrivel and melt into a drop of water... I found it weird that the drop of water was like the corpse of the snowflake, but maybe that's just me. And then I starting thinking about how ephemeral everything is, but then I stopped, because these are all sad and/or nasty thoughts and snow is pretty and joyous!

Anyway, to make up for marring your enjoyment of the pretty snow with crazy ramblings, I'm going to share with you this snowy link where you can make your own snowflake out of virtual paper! Yay for snow!

Three is a magic number

2005-02-21T00:50:00.000Z

Today is my niece, Ebony Connor,'s third birthday. (I know the punctuation there is completely up the spout, but it seemed to make sense.) I don't really have anything to say about this (other than "yay!" and "bloody hell, how time flies" and "they grow up so quickly" - okay, three things then) but I thought I ought to acknowledge it.

The many adventures of Hamish McKilt

2005-02-18T06:48:00.000Z

So, I just got back from Wales with Chantal. We were visiting her family friends Eddie & Jenny - they have the most amazing house in the whole world ever! It's all giant and sort of higgledy-piggledy, in that there are probably at least 5 different ways of getting from any given room to another. It's like Alice in Wonderland and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe all rolled into one! Well, I suppose technically it's not really like that at all, but in my head it makes sense.

Anyway... most of our time in Wales seemed to be spent on two immensely productive activities:
1. Writing the lyrics for "You Let Them Get Piers, Don't Let Them Get Me" - a song for Chantal's friend's musical about Edward II (her favourite king), to be sung by his lover Hugh de Spenser. So, you know, if ever a musical based on the life of Edward II makes it big, it's highly likely that I had a hand in it. (I don't imagine many musicals get written about medieval kings.) Woo!

2. Producing the traditional evening entertainment for everybody - this time a murder mystery with world-famous detectives Hamish McKilt (me) and Paddy O'Shamrock (Chantal). I was planning to put this on my blog because we had so much hilarity doing it that it seemed to come under the category of 'amusing incidents I ought to share', but having started I've realised that there's really no way to convey the hilarity, which makes me kind of sad. Still, we're planning to write up the script some time, so feel free to request a copy. If nothing else, it's done wonders for my Scottish accent.

So, after that largely pointlesss ramble, the lesson for today is: if ever you need help with a medieval musical or a fake Scottish accent, you know who to call. I'm sure you'll agree that's a lesson well learned.

In this week's Spectator: spontaneous combustion in three easy steps!

2005-02-12T04:59:00.000Z

It's funny, I've been reading the Spectator online for a while now, and was surprised to find that it was reasonable, interesting and thought-provoking. Having subscribed to the paper edition, it's suddenly morphed into the maddening right-wing rag I'd expected it to be. Now, don't get me wrong, I have nothing against people being right-wing - in fact, reading the Spectator was partly an attempt to guard against me becoming a narrow-minded left-wing bigot (they do exist). But... well, maybe if I give a summary of the articles I've read so far in today's edition, you'll understand why it's made me want to beat my head against a brick wall.

1. Rod Liddle - "Make naivety history". We shouldn't cancel third world debt, because poverty isn't our fault at all - it's those nasty African dictators that are doing it, and we don't want to encourage them by writing off their debt repayments, do we now?

2. Michael Henderson - "Time to rescue BBC English". Why does nobody pronounce things properly any more? Verily, it is leading inexorably to the collapse of civilisation as we know it. [My problem with this one wasn't so much the argument as the fact that he had nothing better to write about.]

3. Mark Steyn - "Bush will not be mocked". All you English Tories should start supporting the war on terror, because if you don't, the ever-increasing Muslim population will take over the world! [Direct quote: the war on terror is "really about" the fact that there are "more Muslims, and more of those Muslims are radicalised...at a certain point, they won't need to release dirty nukes, because Islamification will be so advanced that many countries will simply find a way to accommodate it."]

Those summaries may sound like exaggerated parodies - but to be honest, these articles parody themselves. Seriously, what I've written above is a pretty fair summary of their arguments. If you don't believe me, you can read them yourselves at www.spectator.com.

Excuse me while I go and practise that spontaneous combustion thingy. Let nobody say the Spectator isn't educational...

Cheap at one-third the price

2005-02-12T04:35:00.000Z

A while back, it dawned on Lailah and I that nobody checks your tickets at the screen doors in cinemas, so technically, once you'd bought a ticket, you could just stay in the cinema all day and see every good film going. Now, to most people, I suppose this would have remained a hypothetical scenario, but we were actually sad enough to plan an all-day Movie Marathon.

We couldn't make it the mammoth event we'd envisaged, because Lailah had other stuff to do (it's reassuring to know that at least one of us has a life), but we did turn up at the cinema armed with pizza, pasta, Pringles and other alliterative foods at 12.30pm today, and we did stay till 7pm. We managed to get in three films (Ocean's Twelve, The Magic Roundabout and The Sea Inside), without attracting so much as a suspicious glance, which I think is fairly good going. To be honest, it was probably a good thing we only had time for three, because we may have developed deep-vein thrombosis if we'd stayed there any longer. Still, three films for £3 can't be bad. You should try it some time.

Hopefully, we'll be doing another one at Easter (on an Orange Wednesday, just to really take the piss) - so if anyone feels like joining us for one or more films throughout the day, feel free to get in touch.

Amusing Incident of the Day (well, Friday)

2005-02-08T02:06:00.000Z

I just realised I didn't yet put my Hilarious Spectator Story in my blog. It's probably un-necessary, as I've told most of the people I know who are likely to get it, but hey. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin...

A few weeks back we decided to subsribe to the Spectator, you know, because I'm going to study Politics etc and I thought I should broaden my mind and read the rantings of right-wing journalists for a change. So, on Friday we got the standard "Congratulations, welcome to the Spectator, the best magazine in the world ever" letter. First Point that amused me was that it was signed by Kimberley Quinn. Second Point that made me laugh out loud into my breakfast was that the last sentence of the letter was "I hope this is the start of a long relationship."

The question now is, are the good people at the Spectator in on the joke, or is it all the Merest Accident?

The things people throw away...

2005-02-06T21:26:00.000Z

Before I start, I know the end of the last post contains a sort of contradiction. Being lazy, I decided to publish it anyway.

Anyway anyway; the following is a list of bizarre things I came across whilst spending my Sunday morning litter-picking with Cole Valley Conservation Volunteers:

A pair of trousers
A spoon
Some guttering
An old sock
A carpet
An unidentifiable loudspeaker-shaped electrical device
A fireguard
A golf ball
A nail brush
Some butterfly clips
A broken mirror
An empty jar of baby food

Well, I think that's enough to demonstrate the startling irresponsibility and downright daftness of the people in my area. Lordy loo, what is the world coming to?

What is it with me and sci-fi related names?

2005-02-06T07:28:00.000Z

So, I got a blog. I'm not entirely sure why. It's not as though I have lots of time on my hands, or anything interesting to say. But hey.
So, I called my blog "The X-Files". Just to clear this up, the fact that I use the name 'Obi-wan Kenobi' on the Travis message board doesn't mean I'm a Star Wars nutter, and the fact that this blog is called the X-Files doesn't mean I sit in fields wearing tin-foil hats waiting for UFOs. Yes, the name is in fact just a really awful pun, and not a reference to sci-fi in any way. I'd like to say I make no apologies for the pun, but I really, really do - it was just the only name I could think of. It seemed like a good idea at the time, even though only about two people still call me X, and it is rather late and I'm sure in the morning it'll just look like the Worst Pun In the World. In fact, I'm less than happy with anything about this blog so far, so it's looking highly unlikely any of this will ever be read by anyone except me. Hmm, talking to myself. Maybe I am a sci-fi nutter after all.