Happy Valencake Day!

February 12, 2013 / / No comments

It’s that time of year! Yes, Valencakes has come round again – that tasty and glorious day when we celebrate our love for the pancake. Traditionally, by making it dinner.

It’s possible that some of you will think you don’t need to make an effort with your pancake. It’s been years, you may reason: individual pancakes may have come and gone, but on an overall, symbolic level, you know that you and the pancake are indissolubly joined in a serious, long-term relationship. Nothing but dieting can part you. So why give in to this one commercially-mandated day when you and your pancake can be together any time? Pancakes, you may argue, aren’t just for Shrove Tuesday. They’re for any time of year. Wrapped up with goat’s cheese and spinach, they make a delectably savoury November snack; decorated with chopped banana and rainbow sprinkles, they are happy to accompany your summer lunch. You pay attention to your pancake all the time, you say: it won’t mind if on this particular Tuesday you decided you fancy a steak instead.

Don’t give in to that voice. Don’t neglect your Shrove Tuesday pancake. It might not seem to matter, but then next year you’ll decided to have a chicken salad, and the year after a burrito, and before you know it you’ll forget when Shrove Tuesday even happens. In a few years’ time you’ll find you’ve forgotten your pancake recipe. And even if you could remember it, you’re out of milk and your flour has weevils in. You shrug, and eat a sandwich instead. And slowly, silently, in a gentle collapse of batter, love dies.

Of course, the method of celebration is up to the individual. I like to send a bouquet of lemons sprinkled with sugar to the most attractive pancake I know. This combines both a romantic gesture and a practical one, since you can then use the bouquet as a delicious topping for your beloved. Other gifts could include chocolate spread – again both thoughtful and deliciously practical – or romantically red strawberry jam. There are few things more appealing than the sight of a shy yet excited pancake covered from end to end in juicy berries, waiting for your knife and fork. For extra romance, spread the jam in a heart shape. Your pancake will appreciate the sweetness, and so will you.

So happy Valencake Day. And make that batter matter.

pancake

Berries are red, berries are blue, you look very sweet, I want to eat you.

 

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Category: events, food, seasonal, see what I did here? /

This is what a feminist looks like

January 22, 2013 / / No comments

A guest blog post by Cat

Let’s get this out in the open – me and feminism haven’t always got on. For a long time we had a far from easy relationship and I preferred to keep it at arm’s length, to the extent that for many years I actually refused to identify as a feminist and preferred to describe myself as an egalitarian. I still describe myself as an egalitarian because I believe that there are groups other than women who are marginalised and deserve equality, but these days I feel able to claim feminism as an identity as well and wear my ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ t-shirt from the Fawcett Society with pride.

My problems with feminism all started back when I was at school. For my sins, of which there have been many, I went to a Catholic all girls school. The school had many failings, some of which have irreparably fucked me up, but one thing it did damn well was persuading us that girls could do anything that boys could do and it was possible to do it better if we wanted. This fitted in with where I saw myself going, and I became something of a fledgling feminist. Anyway, as I said, the school had many failings, one of which was letting the priest from my local parish come in to talk to the girls that belonged to his parish. This was something that happened every few months and would usually result in me having a blazing row with the priest over some matter of dogma or another. On one such occasion when I was 14 or 15  I was arguing that it was wrong that the Catholic church didn’t believe in artificial contraception or abortion. I can’t remember most of the details of the conversation, but I’m pretty sure it was all Vatican-sanctioned shit. The one thing I do clearly remember, however, is him using the phrase ‘When you grow up and become a proper feminist…’ and then going on about how he’d read The Female Eunuch and therefore knew more about being a feminist than I did. Because, somehow, reading The Female Eunuch made belittling me and erasing my identity somehow okay. I remember coming away from this feeling very angry. Angry that he hadn’t listened to me, angry that he’d been so patronising… And also angry with myself for having ever thought that I was a feminist in the first place. I mean, how could I be a feminist if I’d not read The Female Eunuch? He’d read it and he was a man; I was just… kidding myself.

So off I went, and I left my feminist identity on the shelf gathering dust. Having been firmly pro-choice for as long as I remember being aware of abortion, in the following years I then discovered that I liked sex (quite a lot), that I was bisexual, kinky and non-monogamous, pro-sex work and pro-porn and a trans ally. But I still wasn’t a feminist. Yes, I believed in equality for women but I also believed in equality for other marginalised groups and I didn’t see how women’s struggle for equality was more important than any of those other struggles. That, and I still felt deeply uncomfortable with the idea of calling myself a feminist as I clearly couldn’t be a proper one as I still hadn’t read The Female Eunuch.

My next watershed moment with feminism came in my early 20s. I started spending time with women who were mostly lesbians and all identified strongly as feminists. They were strong women, interesting characters and the approval-seeking part of me wanted to be liked and accepted by them. Once again I became interested in feminism and started considering whether or not it was an identity I could claim. It was, but apparently only if I read the work of Sheila Jeffreys who would help me see the error of my ways in being biseuxal and into BDSM. Add to the mix that any prominent feminists I could think of (Bindel, Burchill, Greer) were transphobic, and the fact that apparently all sex work and all porn was bad because it objectified women and… well, quite unsurprisingly, I found myself thinking that there was no way in hell that I could ever be a proper feminist. I liked cock too much, I was kinky and I felt that what women did with their own bodies was their own business as long as they were in a position of empowerment. So I declined the kind offer to be lent a book by Sheila Jeffreys for the purposes of being converted from my wicked ways, and went on my way again.

So what changed? Well, I met other likeminded women in real life and online who were proud to call themselves feminists, and some men as well. It turned out that there was a type of feminism out there which I was hitherto unaware of, that talked about what mattered to me. A feminism that fitted with my beliefs, that didn’t dictate who and what I should be doing in the bedroom.

I discovered that it doesn’t matter what you call yourself – be it first, second or third wave feminist, post-feminist or just plain old feminist. You can identify as male and call yourself a feminist. As long as you believe in equality for women you have the right to call yourself a feminist and don’t let anybody tell you any different. Okay, so some of your beliefs about how the world should work may differ from those of other feminists but at the end of the day the thing we all have in common as feminists is the belief that women should be equal. As my friend Jules put it , ‘I think that being a feminist is simply that you want to make things better for people. It has naff all to do with your window dressing, it is simply wanting to be make the world more excellent.’

It’s taken me the best part of 20 years but I’ve finally discovered in my early 30s that it’s actually okay to call myself a feminist. And guess what? I still haven’t read The Female Eunuch, but these days I’m not beating myself up about it.

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Category: feminism /

The Twilight Division: A Cinematic Proposal

November 20, 2012 / / 2 comments

OK, so I like the Twilight films. The actors and the scenery are pretty, the plot is a perfectly good vampire story, and I like the way Kristen Stewart says everything in a flat monotone (I genuinely do) and the way Robert Pattinson has cute teeth and seems to be taking it all much less seriously than everyone else. Also, Michael Sheen.

I’d like to think that in a few years’ time, this will be roughly the attitude most people have towards the films. At the moment, of course, it’s difficult to fight one’s way through the clouds of obsessive adulation on the one hand and hostile mockery on the other to form any kind of measured opinion; and having managed to achieve one, I intend to guard it carefully, like a fragile glass jar filled with mild but sparkly enjoyment.

All of which is to say that last weekend I went to see Breaking Dawn 2 (The One Where Everything Wraps Up, More Or Less) and liked it. So did the majority of the audience, or at least I assume they did, since they didn’t get up and leave. Well, apart from all the people sitting in my row, who did in fact get up and leave as soon as the film started. But I’m assuming it was either that they were in the wrong screen, or that I have some form of personal problem that someone should have told me about by now. Or it was a form of performance art/creative protest against the Twilight franchise. Or perhaps they’d once been bitten by a snow-covered landscape and found it all too much to take.

Anyway. The point is, Twilight audiences are a sharply divided group, and all their permutations were reflected in my screening. At the back there were quite a lot of very, very excited teenage girls, who cheered and booed and generally really got into it all, which was rather endearing (I felt, in the patronising way of a woman in her late 30s going to see a teen vampire flm on her own). At the front were a handful of people who found the film hilariously worthy of mockery. In the middle were some, like me, who had just come to see a film they expected to enjoy.

While noting all this, I had a thought. You know how cinema listings these days often give you a choice of screening types? There are Over 18 screenings. (I initially assumed these were films with sex and swearing specially added for your viewing pleasure, but I think they’re probably just the same film with no under-18s admitted. Bah.) There are Parent and Baby screenings. And of course there’s 3D and IMAX. But there are important demographics being ignored here, and with modern culture becoming increasingly customised and tailored to niche markets, I think it’s time we got a few more options. This should be called The Twilight Division in honour of the founding franchise, and in the case of Breaking Dawn II, the screenings we needed were, at the very least:

  • Twilight (Mocking)
  • Twilight (Fan)

These two categories are in effect watching two completely different films, and should be treated as such. Let the fans enjoy themselves in their own way; let the mockers have fun in theirs. Putting the two together can only lead to friction, shouting and possibly some kind of West Side Story-type riot afterwards.

And yet, is this binary division enough? Some mockers like the films but find their enjoyment enhanced with a bit of laughter. Some genuinely just want to make fun of the entire enterprise (and are prepared to pay good money to do so, apparently). Some fans want to appreciate Bella and Edward/Jacob in reverent silence, some want to cheer every time Tayler Lautner displays any skin whatsoever. Some fall outside the binary altogether. So we need to subdivide. For example:

  • Twilight (Mocking: Affectionate)
  • Twilight (Mocking: Hostile)
  • Twilight (Fan: Quiet)
  • Twilight (Fan: Excited)
  • Twilight (Fan: Screaming Uncontrollably Throughout)
  • Twilight (In Wrong Screen, Meant To See Skyfall)
  • Twilight (Just Likes The Pretty Trees, Yes OK And Also Topless Jacob Is OK I Guess But Don’t Tell Anyone I Said So)

And even this ignores the various factions within each subdivision. Given a big enough set of screens, you could easily provide for:

  • Twilight (Mocking: Affectionate: Secretly Team Edward)
  • Twilight (Mocking: Affectionate: Secretly Team Jacob)
  • Twilight (Mocking: Affectionate: Secretly Team Bella)
  • Twilight (Mocking: Affectionate: Secretly Team Alice)
  • Twilight (Mocking: Affectionate: Secretly Team Michael Sheen’s Character, Whatever His Name Is)
  • Twilight (Mocking: Affectionate: Secretly Team Jessica And Very Disappointed in Breaking Dawn II)
  • Twilight (Mocking: Affectionate: Actually Genuinely Loves The Franchise But Can’t Admit It To Their Friends)
  • Twilight (Mocking: Affectionate: Owns All The Merchandise But Definitely In An Ironic Way)

And so on.

Alternatively, of course, you could have one big screen, but make it like a silent disco: everyone gets noise-cancelling headphones so they can’t hear anyone else’s reaction. Yes, you lose some of the cinema-going experience. But at least the Mocking, Affectionate: Secretly Team Bella and the Mocking, Affectionate: Secretly Team Alice factions won’t end up in a choreographed fist-fight. Or maybe that’s actually a downside. My money’s on the Alices.

(Made with MakeBeliefsComicx)

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Category: advice, films, great ideas of our time /

Feminine Power: No Thanks!

October 5, 2012 / / No comments

A friend was recently sent a link to an event taking place next weekend, called The Keys to Feminine Power – Awakening the Three Power Bases of the New Co-Creative Feminine. (I know, right?) I am fascinated by this. I don’t know if I’m more annoyed by the muddled thinking, the jargon-filled expression of the thinking, or the anti-feminism, but I’m fairly sure all of them are annoying me quite a lot.

So what is this thing? It’s ‘a free global online seminar and gathering for awakening women’ and the premise is that women ‘are on the brink of an evolutionary shift with the power to alter the course of history’. So far, so meaningless. The only thing I’m awakening to is the sound of people uttering meaningless platitudes while trying to sell merchandise. But in an attempt (mostly doomed, I have to warn you) at objectivity, let’s see what the rest of the website has to say.

There is feminine and there is masculine power,  apparently. Masculine power is ‘the power to create things that can be controlled’, and the feminine version is ‘the power to manifest that which is beyond our control’. Such as intimacy and creative expression.

 

Just for the sake of it, I’m going to take a moment to try to understand this. When men create things, those things can be controlled. OK. Here are the first five things I can think of that I’m fairly certain were created by men: Shakespeare’s plays, the telephone, aeroplanes, the song Happy Birthday To Me, the Mona Lisa. Mentally I am trying to apply the concept of ‘can be controlled’ to these five things, and I’m not getting anywhere: my brain is just bouncing off the words without being able to connect to anything. Nor do they seem to have anything much in common with each other. But perhaps I just thought of the wrong five things. Maybe my feminine ability to intuit the meaning of this concept has taken a well-deserved day off

Right then, let’s have a go at feminine power being able to manifest things which are beyond our control. I don’t think this is about inventions created by women: it’s about how woman create relationships, I think? And babies? There’s no actual mention of babies that I’ve noticed, but I can only assume it’s implied, since that often seem to the basis for claiming that women are more creative than men because we can make babies.
Which is an odd idea when you think about it. The problem lies in conflating two different meanings of the word ’create’. Having babies is an act of creation, but it is not a creative act as such. (Unless you view your pregnancy and labour as a work of extended performance art – an idea I wish I’d had earlier when I could have tried to make money out of it.) Similarly, successful relationships and intimacy with other people are a good thing, if that’s what you want to do, but is achieving them actually creative? I’d have said it was more of an acquired skill, or a craft like DIY, than like writing a sonnet.
At this point I think I should acknowledge the massive elephant in the corner of my blog post before it actually tramples me with its great big gendered feet. Intimacy, relationships, creative expression, creating things that can’t be controlled (and why is that such a great idea anyway?) – well, I hate to break it to the ladies of The Keys to Feminine Power, but actually, men can manage those things too. And lots of women can’t, or don’t, or don’t want to. And women can create things that can be controlled (again, why is that a bad thing?) and lots of men don’t. The entire concept of there being certain types of creative power accessible only to women is frankly weird. Where would it reside? Do trans people gain or lose it if they transition? Should women who don’t feel particularly creative in any of the above senses just give up on any hope of achieving true womanhood? Shall we have a conversation about binary gender, by the way?
And now, let’s talk about this sentence. “For all the amazing benefits that feminism has brought us, its fruits have not necessarily included personal or spiritual fulfulment’. The suggestion being that we’ve been ‘cultivating a masculine version of power’.
Now, there is the germ of an actual idea here, and one which feminists do discuss: how far woman have to buy into existing patriarchal power structures in order to succeed, how traditionally feminine qualities can become undervalued by feminists themselves as well as by society, and so on.
The trouble is, I can’t tell what exactly the Feminine Power event is proposing as the solution to this, except for the claim that ‘feminine power’ itself is the answer. And since I still don’t really know what feminine power consists of, that’s not a lot of help. Talk about campaigning for decent maternity pay (which I gather the US mostly lacks) and putting more women into government, and I’m all ears. Tell me that I have the power to change my life and my destiny (wait, aren’t those basically the same thing?) and the world, and you haven’t told me anything I don’t already know
But those things have nothing to do with my gender. Feminism may not have provided me with instant personal fulfilment (because that’s not its job) but it has, thankfully, allowed me to develop the ability to tell when someone is taking a lot of words to say nothing in particular. I’ll take that over feminine power any day.
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Category: feminism /

The Tiger Lillies’ Hamlet

September 21, 2012 / / No comments

So, Hamlet. Hamlet’s great, of course. Lots of words. Lots of characters to say the lots of words. But you know what’s even better? When you take Hamlet, strip off its clothing, melt off the flesh, boil the bones down to their constituent parts, then take that basic DNA of sex and death and use it to grow a new body. Which is a musical.

In other words, and I appreciate other words might be required here, the music troupe the Tiger Lillies and the Danish theatre company Republique have a production of Hamlet on at the South Bank Centre. It started on Tuesday and it finishes tonight, so reviewing it is mostly pointless, and yet I’m doing it anyway when I’ve failed to review so many other shows. Because it’s just too beautiful not to.

Well, I say reviewing; I’m not really in a position to review it. I spent most of the evening in a state of dreamy, druggy half-hypnosis. In fact, I remained in it to the extent that afterwards, when I bought a CD and went to get it signed by the Tiger Lillies, I was unable to speak and merely gazed at them with a huge involuntary grin, like someone who was about to give up their job, hollow out their brains with a spoon and follow the band around the world, twice. However, in the interests of nodding vaguely in the direction of an actual review, a brief description of the show seems called for: it’s the story of Hamlet told with about half-a-dozen actors and only the highlights of the plot. If Hamlet were the sea, this would be the stone bouncing over it, except that the stone is covered in wings and glitter.

I am finding analogies weird today.

Anyway. It starts with Martyn Jacques singing about sin. There is dancing and flying and a giant puppet, and the best way of depicting a ghost that I’ve seen. There’s a set that mostly consists of a large wooden wall with windows in it – reminding us that at court, you never know who’s listening. Cool things happen with the wall, including one point where I genuinely wasn’t sure if someone had inadvertently been crushed. The Queen and King looked (to me) like a youngish Laura Dern and an elderly Michael Keaton  reprising his role from Beetlejuice. Ophelia was too graceful to actually have been a human actor: I suspect elf heritage. In the middle of it all, Hamlet gives a relatively straight and also excellent performance of the title role.

But, unusually for the play, Hamlet isn’t the star. That’s the narrator, fool, voiceover, guardian angel, genie – whatever is the right word for what Martyn Jacques and his cohorts are doing. He wanders round the stage singing at people. Not complicated songs. Singsong ditties, like a cross between a jingle and a dirge, about what’s going on. He has an accordion and a piano, but the play itself is his instrument, and he wrings every drop of beauty out of it. (No, you can’t wring drops out of an instrument. Shh.) It’s literally dreamlike; it’s as though the characters are dreaming or hallucinating their own commentary. (Indeed, there seemed to be a suggestion during Ophelia’s mad scene that the madder she got, the more aware she became of the band’s presence.)

This isn’t everyone’s cup of poisoned tea. It was very much mine, though. From now on the only productions of Hamlet I want to see are ones where Martyn Jacques pops up next to a post-soliloquy Hamlet to trill “You’re going mad!” at him with the voice of a demented angel.

 

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Category: beautiful things, musicals, reviews, theatre /

My Imaginary Student: how to feel old in one easy step

September 18, 2012 / / 2 comments

The new university year is about to start. This is completely irrelevant to me at the moment. I graduated from college in 1996, and my oldest child is eight. And yet it’s been on my mind, and I think this is because this year’s 18-year-olds were born in 1994.

1994!

I was 19 in 1994. My first year at college was 1993-1994. I met my husband in 1994. And there’s a quantum universe somewhere where I accidentally got pregnant in 1994 and now have an 18-year-old who is about to start university.

A legal adult who’s also my child is a terrifying thought and one which, in this universe, I thankfully don’t have to contemplate for another decade. (Hello 2022! You’re scary!). But I’m fascinated by the idea of my imaginary student. Let’s call her Henrietta, because in 1994, I might well have thought that was a good name. Here are some disconcerting (to me at least) things about Henrietta:

She’s too young to remember John Major, let alone Margaret Thatcher – in fact, she doesn’t remember a standalone Tory government at all, since the last one was defeated in 1997.

She’s probably never made a phone call from a phone box.

She does not remember Kit Kats having silver foil wrapping (and the strangely sensual pleasure of sliding a thumb along the gap to rip open the foil).

She was a year old when the first Bridget Jones column was published.

She was three years old when Princess Diana and Mother Theresa died.

You know how the Spice Girls and Take That both recently reformed? Henrietta doesn’t remember them from the first time round.

She has always been able to get to France by train.

Snickers have always been Snickers, since well before she was born. (Not that I mind what they’re called. They contain peanuts, the food of evil.)

She was born the year Four Weddings and a Funeral was released. It is to her what The Rocky Horror Picture Show is to me. (In that Rocky Horror was released in the year of my birth. I’m not implying that today’s teens dress up in wedding outfits, pretend to be embarrassed posh men and recite “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” to each other. Although I now think they should.)

The first Harry Potter book was published when she was three years old. She was seven when the first film came out. She may well have spent her teen years reading Snarry fan fiction on the internet. (If you don’t know, you probably don’t want to.)

Oh yes, the internet. Which is possibly the single biggest difference between my childhood and Henrietta’s – and between my childhood and those of my actual children. I have a friend ten years younger than me who learnt about sex from internet fan fiction. (Gay sex. She didn’t find out there was another kind till about a year afterwards.) Henrietta grew up in a tumult of constantly changing technology: cassettes becoming CDs becoming minidiscs (remember them?) becoming MP3s; videos becoming DVDs becoming Netflix and video recorders transmuting though DVD recorders into TV-on-demand, like bulky black caterpillars into pretty programmable butterflies.

And of course Henrietta’s smartphone replaces about 25 of the things I lugged to and fro from college. Once you start being able to print your own clothing from your iPhone, luggage will be eliminated altogether and suitcases will become merely a folk memory. Much like Marathons, letter writing and finding out about sex the proper way – from dictionaries, whispered gossip and Judy Blume’s Forever. Now I feel old.

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Category: ...and I feel fine, things that did not actually happen, time is waiting in the wings /

Angilt and Other Emotional Cocktails

August 28, 2012 / / 5 comments

Babies only seem to have room for one emotion. It’s as though joy or hurt or hunger literally takes up so much room inside them that another feeling can’t get in till the first one’s gone. Distract a crying child with a sweet and the scream can change to a happy gurgle in an instant: there are few things as satisfying as the sound of “WAAAAA – ooh!”

As they get older, children start having room for two or three emotions at once until, by the time they get to be teenagers, they can simultaneously manage any combination of anger, lust, misery, unfocused excitement and existential dread without even blinking.

‘This is a pretty flower. Why am I inside it?’ This child is experiencing hapfusion, also known as confusiness.

And then you get to your 30s, and you realise that while you haven’t quite lost the ability to feel a single pure emotion, the majority of them are now mixed: layered on top of each other like Baileys and schapps, or just shaken together like a margarita. And then you realise that some of the combinations are so familiar that, like cocktails, they now deserve their own name*. I therefore present some of my personal emotional cocktails.

Angilt. Ingredients: anger + guilt. A very common combination, whose name handily sounds like some kind of elvish currency. Can be felt in situations where, for example, you’ve upset an annoying friend. Or at work, if you’re being blamed for something you didn’t do but you know you’ve screwed up something else that your manager doesn’t know about yet. Or if your partner’s bought you something expensive for your birthday that you specifically told them you didn’t want.

Creavoidance. Ingredients: creativity plus avoidance. When the only thing on earth that you want to do is sit down and write (or paint or make music) and yet you’ll do anything at all to put it off, down to and including cleaning out the drains. These two go together surprisingly often, and thanks to Twitter you don’t even need drains any more.

Dislight. Ingredients: disgust + delight. For example, getting a big sloppy wet kiss from your adorable child, or being licked by a cute puppy. (Or you can probably think of some examples to do with various icky bodily things but I’m ok not hearing about them.)

Hungitation. Ingredients: hunger plus irritation. When you’re in need of food but feel it’s being denied to you for some reason, e.g. other people are being too slow about choosing a restaurant, or the oven is wilfully refusing to have your meal ready. Aka Irrational Irrihunger (unless it’s Rational Irrihunger, which is entirely possible.)

Perijoy. Ingredients: peril + joy. As experienced by the Doctor, James Bond, and similar: the more difficult things get, the happier they are. Can be experienced in milder form by ordinary humans when faced with the Guardian cryptic crossword.

Reliefgrief. Ingredients: self-explanatory. For example, at the end of a relationship that had become very difficult to cope with, but you still love them. Or, more frivolously, if you’ve finally finished that DVD box set you’ve been compulsively watching all weekend and are now free to do something else with your life.

Tingleterror. Ingredients: tingliness + terror, obviously. Commonly felt at the start of a promising blind date or when just about to give a presentation that could decide your career. Or when you’re on a wedge in Trivial Pursuit and you’re fairly sure, but not completely sure, that the answer to the question is ‘Truro’.

Wheetigo. Ingredients: ‘wheeee!’ plus vertigo. Experienced when looking down from a cliff or tall building, it is the sensation of feeling simultaneously terrified of falling and somehow convinced that you can fly. Basically a literal version of tingleterror.

Any other suggestions?

 

*Names are important, especially when creating a new thing from existing ingredients. I bet the coalition wishes it had simply named itself Libtory rather than having the label ConDems pinned on it, for example – it might have had a slightly better chance of not coming across as evil. (Or perhaps not.)

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Category: creation, great ideas of our time, how people work, random lists /

The Useful Anxiety of Narrative Thinking

July 10, 2012 / / 4 comments

I think about being kidnapped far too much.

It should not be high up my list of things to worry about. There is no obvious reason why I should get kidnapped. I am not famous. I am not related to anyone famous. (The late Mo Mowlam was my husband’s father’s stepbrother’s wife’s sister, but so far this hasn’t resulted in a demand for autographs or threats of violence.)

And yet I spend a certain amount of time, on a regular basis, planning what I would say to my husband when the kidnappers let me speak to him, to establish that it was really me. (I’m not telling you what it is, in case the kidnappers read this.) I agonise about what would happen if I had a cold and my nose was blocked, and they gagged me, and I suffocated to death.

More recently,I get stressed because the kidnappers would be unlikely to provide for my mandatory gluten-free diet. Perhaps I should carry even more gluten-free snacks in my bag, enough for a week or so? Would the kidnappers let me eat them, or would they force wheat down my throat, cackling with glee? How long would I be there, anyway? How much could my family raise quickly for my ransom? What if they killed me anyway? Ransoms never seem to work in fiction – there’s always a standoff or a cheat or something, and half the time more or less everyone ends up in a gunfight.

Perhaps I should buy a gun. On the black market. And learn to shoot it. And carry it in my bag ready to shoot the kidnappers before they shoot me. And arrange a phrase with my husband that means “Someone has stolen me! Please do something immediately!” And get a doctor’s letter explaining about the coeliac thing. And agree a maximum amount of ransom beyond which my family should just let me die. (I’m quite frugal.)

No. I shouldn’t. That would be ridiculous. Why am I allowing myself to have trains of thought that lead to guns and pre-arranged ransom limits?

Because of narrative. Stupid, addictive, delightful narrative, constantly telling stories in my brain, trying to fit my life into the patterns of fiction. We all do it. (Don’t we? I assume we all do it.) It’s a variation on believing in fate or karma (or arguably religion, but that may be more controversial than I feel like getting into right now). If someone calls me it’s because I dreamed about them recently; if I get offered a book deal my cat will get run over; if I leave home with my zip undone something hilarious and farcical will inevitably occur and I’ll end up naked in a pool of custard in front of my boss. Evil will be punished, good will be rewarded, true love will win through and the heroine will always come out of the kitchen and be whisked off by a shoe-wielding prince. The patterns you develop depend on what stories you’ve imbibed, but there are similar themes: conflict followed by resolution, happiness then despair and then happiness (and then despair, depending on which genres you go for).

Mostly, I’m pleased about this. I know the patterns are something my mind is arranging for me and I’m usually able to take a step back far enough to look at them. And I can hack myself: I can read/watch the genres that will be most useful for me. I know I need to avoid very realistic stories about bad things happening to children, because my brain grabs onto them like a masochistic limpet and replays them over and over with the eyelids of my mind pinned open. (I declare this the best mixed metaphor ever, by the way.) And I know I like stories where the obvious ending doesn’t happen, because they remind me that life has multiple right – or at least interesting – answers. (The heroine might run off with the prince’s manservant or one of the ugly sisters, or decide to open a shoe shop.)

I think what I’ve learned from thinking about narrative thinking is twofold. Firstly, don’t use the word ‘think’ three times in one sentence or it will lose all meaning for you. Secondly, the best thing to do with mind-patterns is to take control of them. Don’t let other people’s stories take over; take the bits you need, adapt them, create your own story. Much, much easier said than done, of course. But at least it might mean I don’t have to buy a gun.

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Category: creation, how people work /

Feel the Brixton Book Jam and Do it Anyway

July 2, 2012 / / No comments

Tonight I am going to be one of the writers at the Brixton Book Jam - at the Hootananny pub in Brixton, 7pm onwards, free entry - and will be reading an extract from James Eyre and Other Genderswitched Stories. The idea is that a series of writers do brief readings or talks, then there’s a panel discussion. And there will be drinks, and books for sale, and exciting new people to meet. I’m looking forward to it.

Like many people, I have a complicated relationship with public speaking. At school it was probably my worst fear, along with hockey and being made to dance in public. I basically didn’t want to be either hurt or publically humiliated, which when I think of it like that doesn’t seem unreasonable. As an adult, I still can’t play hockey, but I can both dance and speak in front of strangers, so two out of three is broadly acceptable, as Meatloaf might have said if he were English and didn’t mind his lyrics not scanning.

In the end, my public speaking fears were overcome by a variety of life experiences, mostly a combination of alcohol and having no choice in the matter. The turning point was probably my friend Richard’s wedding, at which I was best (wo)man and had to make a speech: it took place in the USA and I didn’t know most of the guests, but it turned out that an English accent of vaguely RP origins goes a long way with Americans. They liked me, and they laughed where they were supposed to, and I learned two valuable lessons. First, just because you dread something doesn’t necessarily mean you’re terrible at it – in fact, you might end up enjoying yourself. Secondly, you can’t actually die from fright. (Probably. I have not consulted any medical professionals about this.)

I am therefore pleased to announce that, at the age of 37, I have achieved the stage where I would pick speaking in public over, say, touching a spider, and where I can utter recognisable words in front of a group of people I don’t know and expect at least some of them to make sense. Of course, by writing this I have clearly jinxed myself for this evening and will end up tripping over the microphone, forgetting how to read, or suddenly finding myself improvising anchovy-themed haikus on stage. Why not come along to find out which?

 

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Category: events, me, publishing, updates /

Father’s Day Feminism

June 16, 2012 / / 2 comments

It’s Father’s Day this weekend. It may be a manufactured holiday but I celebrate it anyway, so I’m in a shop trying to find a card for my dad in the three minutes before the toddler starts wanting to get out the buggy and start destroying things.* I scan the shelves, sigh, and give up.

In all the years that I’ve been buying Father’s Day cards for my father, I don’t think I have ever bought one from the Father’s Day section. My father is not into football, beer, fast cars or jokes about bodily functions, so that cuts out 90% of the options. And if I bought him a card with a message – or worse, a poem – about what a great father he is, that would feel weird. Not because he isn’t a great father, but because it doesn’t need saying. Or at least it doesn’t need saying in rhyme.

It’s all very blue.

It’s odd really. In some ways – perhaps as a response to the waning of the industry – there’s now more choice in cards than ever. You can buy serious cards, funny cards, sentimental cards, cards with badges, 3D cards, addressed to Dad, Daddy, Father, Stepdad, Grandad or Great-Grandad. But in other ways, the choice is tellingly limited. Colours, for example. If you can find me a Father’s Day card that’s pink, I’ll buy you a pint of raspberry beer. And if you can find one that references opera or painting, which are my dad’s two major interests, I’ll buy you an entire yard of it, if raspberry beer comes in yards, which I doubt. A card that features musicals or Dickens novels would be even better, since those are interests we have in common. I’ll be over here, holding my breath.

So what do Father’s Day cards tell us about the current perception of masculine parenting, as filtered through the imagination of the card industry?  Well, there’s not much about the parenting part. What fathers do, in this version of fatherhood, is play sports with their sons, address their daughters as ‘princess’, and earn the money. It’s a depressing vision. And what are children’s images of their dads? Apparently they’re unshaven, overweight lumps in string vests and boxer shorts. Nothing wrong with being any of those things, but again, it’s a bit limiting. Is the assumption that Father’s Day cards only appeal to an extremely specific and stereotypical working-class market? Why?

And yes, this is a feminist issue, of course it is. The perception of fathers and the perception of mothers are all tied in together, and so are the wider perceptions of What Men Are Like and What Women Are Like. Fix one and you start to fix the other**. In the meantime, I’ve bought my dad a card from the general section, with a picture of a giant rubber duck sailing up the Thames. At least it’s interesting.

 

*I am unfairly maligning her here, by the way. I let her wander around Boots the other day and she began tidying up the shelves. I should start charging shops to let her in.

**I could also write an entire post about how many of my daughter’s birthday cards I buy from the boys’ section. Because while she likes princesses and fairies, she especially likes football and computer games and Dr Who. This should not be weird to anyone.

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Category: feminism, gender, parenthood /
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