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London Riots- My two pennies' worth

2011-08-13T01:08:00.001+01:00

The Police
1.)The police are racist and violent. The Metropolitan police are particularly racist and violent. Maybe I'm cynical, but this was what I said on Sunday morning about Mark Duggan's death:

After two years of hearing every lie in the book trotted out about police murder victim Iam Tomlinson, any thinking person would be criminally stupid to assume that stories of 'a bullet lodged in a police radio' were not a load of the Met's typical evidence invention and fraud. Usually they construct some 'undeniable' piece of crap to get them through the first few weeks while they are under scrutiny. In three weeks, when this has died down, it will be revealed that the bullet was actually 'accidentally' fired by an officer. But by then there'll be loads of fudged interviews and phony witnesses, it will be fully established that Mark Duggan was so bad he was practically asking to be shot, and the relevant officers will have their early retirement package.

2.) A large proportion of London teenagers know the police are racist and violent, and hate and mistrust them accordingly (including my teenage self). They shouldn't know it, because happy children don't know how fucked up the world is, but many of them know it from first-hand violence and humiliation. In Forest Gate, where everyone has been mugged or burgled, everyone hates the police. There were lots of stories on Twitter on Tuesday and Wednesday about Asian boys in Green Street, Forest Gate, defending the local businesses from rioters. My favourite story, unfortunately completely unverifiable, has those boys saying 'We don't want no looters round here. We don't want no cops, either.'

3.) When the Metropolitan police kills someone, from Ian Tomlinson to Mark Duggan, Smiley Culture to Jean Charles de Menezes to Mikey Powell, they have a smooth, practised system for covering it up, lying about it, lying about the lies, and then when really pushed, making sure someone really small and insignificant takes the fall, itself as small and insignificant as possible. Usually this fall is broken by a golden handshake of some kind. This often means releasing false information to the media and then lying about that. Or getting their pals in the Independent Police Complaints Commission to do the same.

4.) On Friday morning, either the police or the IPCC verbally told the media that Mark Duggan had been killed in an exchange of fire, and that a bullet had been fired by Duggan into a police radio. They did not write this on the Metropolitan Police Press bureau website- http://www.met.police.uk slash pressbureau. So either someone cocked up while giving an oral report to the press, or they were deliberately setting up a lie. History will decide (hopefully).

5.) The police's reaction to the riots this last week would have been laughable, except that five people tragically died. And that is really devastating, and sad, and I'm really upset about it. And fuck JD Sports. But the police have their own agenda, facing as they are 20% cuts. I don't know if they were wrong, or self-motivated, or stupid, or just understaffed to let things go so crazy. But Mark Duggan's family heard he was dead from the TV, as the police failed to inform his parents before releasing a press statement. The vigil stood outside Tottenham Police Station for four hours last Saturday and no police officer came out to speak to them. Why not? They did this in 1985, and god knows how many times since. Why not give grieving people a token respect? If only to prevent a riot...

Public Reaction
1.) A lot of people who weren't involved with the riots do not know how fucked up the police service is. A friend thanked me this week, for having taking her to a student protest where we were kettled and charge by horses, saying 'You opened my eyes. If I hadn't been kettled, I would have no way to defend my suspicion of and anger towards the police.'

2.) Many of these people have reacted with shock and horror to the riots. If you live in East or South London and you felt these riots came as a complete surprise, then you have been walking around with your eyes closed. See this insightful article. But you are justified in feeling sad, shocked, worried, scared, horrified and disgusted. That's normal. The riots are a demonstration of collective pain, among other things, and will be a collective trauma for some time to come. If you cannot see that one of the causes of the riots is a country which fucks over poor young people, you are not as well educated or insightful as the young man at the end of this video. Go read some history. Or volunteer at a youth club.

3.) I've been drawn into some pretty pathetic social networking squabbles this week with people who think their own feelings of shock and horror justify completely ahistorical, non-analytical response to the riots, parroting the politicos' comforting mantra of 'mindless criminality'. Well, I'm sorry if I argued with you over this, because I agree that mindless criminality and even "lower levels of a brain chemical that helps keep behaviour under control" are really tidy answers, and reinforce an 'us and them' attitude to crime that does make us feel safe. Sorry for being a patronising twat, random people I don't know on facebook. I think a lot of these heated debates were because lots of us feel sad about this week's events, and need to discuss them. (What is the etiquette for arguments with strangers on mutual friends' threads, btw? I've been told to fuck off twice this week. Is that normal?)

4.) However, the other side to public reactions has been a lot of racists, closeted racists, borderline racists and classist wankers, using the opportunity to disseminate their vile racist bile. Facebook seems to be an ideal breeding ground for this. (I won't link- you can search if you like). The worst thing about this is the thought that many of these people, from David Starkey to the EDL, have ALWAYS been racist. And they have hidden this because it was not socially acceptable to reveal their racism until this week. We have such fragile racial tolerance and multi-cultural values in this country, and we have to try to safeguard them. We have to. And it's the same for generalisations about 'black youth' as it is for 'chavs', 'pikeys', 'scum'.. and so on. The riots are not the opportunity you have been waiting for all your life to justify your vile feelings about young people, poor people, black people, ethnic minorities, criminals, people from inner cities, hoodies, whatever. Do not follow the lead of a racist Tory government in choosing your language.

5.) One more thing about the public response- there is a problem with the way most people understand the criminal justice system in this country. (It's pretty racist too, btw.) We pay for legal aid for all defendants who want it. That includes alleged rapists, alleged serial killers, alleged child abusers... everyone. Legal Aid is necessary to save court time, to allow everyone in the court to roughly understand what is going on, and to prevent the grosser miscarriages of justice. As such, it is a fairly pragmatic thing for the powers that be. It's been upsetting this week to bicker with a self-professed Legal Aid lawyer who implied that young people are not deprived if they can afford Blackberries, and that she had advised clients not to pursue police officers they had accused of brutality. The legal aid system has limitations. (I wouldn't dream of naming her, and I notice she has deleted all of her most outrageous statements now).

6.) We also, with scary limitations, undertake to give social housing to many of the people who need it. We undertake, also with grotesque limitations, to give a small amount of subsistance money to those who are not working, or can't work. That's calld the Welfare State. Like Legal Aid, it did not come into being as a lovely kind, generous out-pouring of love towards the feckless poor and criminal underclasses. It's there because it is necessary not to let poor people die of poverty in this country. It is because we have a system without appropriate jobs or education for everybody, and while it is impossible that every one can work, it is necessary to make a token approach to supporting those who can't contribute. It is not now and has never been an easy path to live off benefits in this country.

7.) So the suggestion that rioters or their families should lose benefits or their homes or be denied legal aid is as horrific as it is ludicrous. I know it happens already; but don't suggest it as a punishment. If you can't have a little human compassion for these desperate people and their families, have a little political pragmatism: it is not good for anyone to have more homeless people. It is useless to have more poor people supporting other poor people financially. It is laughable to have people denied the crappy legal aid that speeds up their processign through the juridicial system.

The Media
1.) The media is a business, and one that needs sensation. It was delighted to paint Mark Duggan as a feckless criminal; it has been delighted to write off rioters as feral thieves. This is because sensation sells.

2.) We've heard stories this week of nasty attacks on reporters and photographers. Rioters smashed up a Sky camera van. Rioters have deeply affronted media workers by refusing to give them sound-bites, refusing to allow them into their hearts, minds, or even the centre of their riots. These rioters just won't cooperate with the press, which is pretty ungrateful considering how much attention the press has paid them this week, and clear evidence that what we're dealing with are feral criminal kids with no political message. Well, Martin Luther King Jr said 'A riot is the language of the unheard.' What does unheard mean? In this case it means ignored and even silenced. And what has been the part of the media in the silencing of our poorer youth? In my opinion, it is guilty. Why would you spend time humouring some dick-head journo who has never paid you the slightest attention, except as a statistic in some bollocks feature about house prices or obesity? You wouldn't. If media response has been overwhelmingly negative, well, the rioters are obviously not particularly skilled in PR. If the affronted journos now want to turn their hands to a little social commentary, well, it probably wouldn't be a bad thing. And when people feel less silenced, they are more powerful. Powerful enough to channel their anger into constructive forms of protest, or to speak their cases to those who will listen. Or foment revolution, that's the only risk.

The Left
1.) Not all the left, of course. Many people have made really interesting interventions about the riots, and my sister has been kindly listing some of them. (Bet you wish you'd just read that first by now.)

2.) Some of the left have revealed that they are really liberals without a cause."We want a revolution, yes- but we never condone criminality!" They basically fall under Public Reaction 2., see above. Nothing much wrong with it. There's nothing wrong with spending an afternoon thinking about stuff, either.

3.) I've been really depressed with the other reaction I've heard recently, as well, which is "Isn't this great!" "Could be the start of the revolution!" I don't think it's wrong to feel a little gleeful tingle about people smashing the whole place up. If I'm completely honest I felt it a bit too, especially at first, on the Saturday, watching rolling coverage on Sky. But it was never really the start of a revolution, was it? Don't forget the wise words of Gil Scott Heron below. So it has been irritating to see the glee with which certain people view the destruction of our crappy chain stores and the inevitable custodial sentences of some of our young people. Understandable, but irritating. Particularly when accompanied with the same sense of affront that Sky news reporters feel (see above, The Media 2.)- "Why won't these kids speak to us or take our literature? Don't the know we're On Their Side?" Lessons to be learnt for the future here- for me as much as anyone else...

4.) I do not wholly condemn the riots, and I would go so far as to say I support many of the rioters. Not all. There's definitely been a significant number of people who have done terrible, shattering things this week, including at least one murder. BUT, despite this limited support, I am sad that they happened. I am sad that they had to happen. Another police killing makes me sad. The cuts to youth services, the scrapping of the EMA, and the new barriers keeping poor kids from higher education also make me sad. The violence makes me sad. The five dead people make me really sad, and I am saddened by the risk of new racial tensions as a result. The homes wrecked and buildings burnt make me sad. (JD Sports, Ladbrokes and Cash-Till-Payday make me a little bit less sad, but then I'm a bitch.) The hundreds of arrests makes me sad, particularly considering many of these people will do time. And the hopeless inevitability of the whole business makes me sad.

This is one of my favourite protest songs, because it is completely affirmative. A fitting song for what the new social awareness that possibly emerge as a positive effect of a terrible week. (Although I'm not particularly optimistic.)

[Afterword. I notice, on rereading this blog, that I come off as a vile, smug know-it-all. I think this is largely because I feel very strongly on the above issues, and so I'm very sorry, but I'm not going to change a word. As usual, though, I'd love to hear responses and criticisms. Racists need not apply.]

[After-afterword. I have worked with young people in Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Waltham Forest for five years now. Expect some thoughts soon about who the hell these kids are and what makes them angry.]

Apologies

2011-06-28T22:24:00.002+01:00

After nearly 6 years of blogging, I felt it was time the old blog had a bit of a revamp. Please accept my apologies for any weirdness while works are taking place. Hope to understand HTML a little better soon too!

Don't wash your hands of soaps! [A guest post by Marilyn Monroe]

2011-06-27T14:49:00.021+01:00

Millions of people are glued to soaps – EastEnders alone famously drew in 16.6 million viewers eager to find out who bumped off Archie Mitchell on 19^th February 2010. Yet it is usual for people, whether they know about them or not, to criticise the soap opera harshly for being a “lowbrow” cultural form. There are objections to their sexy yet formulaic sensationalism, their realism, surrealism or escapism, their lack of sophistication, their mind-numbing-ness, or simply a perceived complete lack of artistic merit. Their cultural value is often seen as below interrogation. The people who watch and invest in them are, consequently, passive consumers or idiots – telly addicts, people without lives, deluded into believing the characters are “real” and just not particularly intellectual.

Fans know the soaps they watch are not "real" (Coronation St set)

The thing is, I LOVE soaps, and interact with them in many different ways. Sometimes I tune in to the telly at the familiar times; I watch them online; surf blogs which provide spoilers and chat about the stories in forums; survey the fan fiction (aint gotten round to writing some yet but it is only a matter of time…); flick though the mags; check out the interviews of the soap stars and producers; discuss the storylines with my friends and family. I pride myself for keeping up with, must be, almost a score of soaps from around the world. I am a hardcore soapy.

So am I unintellectual, brainwashed, passive and a loser without a life? Probably… but no more than many non-soapys, and there is, hopefully, more to me that this definition. I like learning, politics, playing music, fiddling around with creative writing, footballing, socialising, travelling and taking on new things. Just, I like soaps as well – not as a dirty indulgence but as an equal part of a pursuit of a well-rounded personality. But why should I feel forced to lay my intellectual credits on the table in order to get you to listen to me? If I wasn’t that person, does that render my experiences and thoughts invalid? Why should I give a damn about what certain people approve as appropriate intellectual pursuits?

There is now an international cultural exchange between soap fans.

Yeah but the thing is, the artistic value assigned to cultural products and practice is exactly about what a certain group of people say. The high art verses low art binary relies having a criteria, in which some people have the authority to rule some stuff good and others just shit. Yet in reality, art has never been undisputedly pinned down. Our modern conceptions regarding art can usually be traced way back to 18^th century philosopher Kant, where in his discussion of beauty he argues that calling something beautiful relates to a certain type of experience – that beauty is not a property of the artwork, but a type of consciousness framed by a kind of interplay between the imagination and understanding. Crucially, this pleasure is more than a sense or urge for gratification – we can’t look to the object to satisfy a physical or emotional need but we have to admire the object for itself - in a state of, what he calls, “disinterestedness”. During the first half of the 20^th century Adorno defended the special status of art as crucial to reflection - criticising the corporate manipulation of mass media designed to pacify audiences.

Adorno showed clear similarities to Kant: art can therefore have this transcendence, almost spiritual, quasi mystical quality. Likewise, Adorno famously observed that the jitterbug, a jerky popular dance in the 1940s, was ritualistic and an act of “compulsive mimicry” whereby people just responded to the music “whirring around like fascinated insects.” Yet neither philosopher really defined art, and behind these arguments are a suspicion of functionalism and the primitive senses of the body which can in some way be aroused by cultural objects. The formalists have argued that art should be discussed in terms of style or “significant form.” There are clear philosophical connections to Kant’s “beauty”, which also stressed on that detachment from other kinds of interest we have in an object. But the suggestion that objects have inherent qualities which evoke certain responses risks being an assertion of essentialism or absolutism. In fact the term aint any easier to understand than “art” – many things have a “form” which we admire.

Flaco and Lalo: gay footballers in Argentinian soap Botineras redefine "high art"

The upshot is that we are confronted with the inability of art and high art to define themselves despite smug claims that high art is better than low because it is more difficult or arouses deeper emotions and that low art is inferior because it is formulaic and encourages passive consumption. At the end of the day, this leaves us with the unsatisfactory position that art is a certain judgement made by certain people – which actually aint such a bad definition after all? Institutionalist philosophers would call these “certain people” the “Art World” or cultural intermediaries – who basically tell us what is or isn’t art. Marxist cultural critic Eagleton argues in Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) that economic, social and political forces not only shape a society's idea about art but artistic judgements are a fundamental to society’s structure. Going back to Kant, Eagleton argues that in this regards aesthetic judgement upholds the prevailing morality and social order. Likewise, assigning value to art and culture is closely connected to debates over censorship and social control. Capital, states and institutions control people’s access and ideas - but this aint just about laws or even commercialism, but about systems of selection, funding, promotion and, of course, constructions of taste.

Basically people are essentially prejudiced towards low forms of culture or art, and not only is this hierarchy related to social class, but social snobbery is inherent in the concept of high art – there can be only high art if there is low art. The idea that art has a special value which cannot be found in mass culture ends in a complete lack of respect for the cultural habits of the masses. And yet culture is an important part of all of our lives - attached strongly to our sense of identity. It is a hell of a thing to tell someone thattheir taste is shit and below discussion. It follows that the consumers of low art are less intelligent, and lower, than those of high art. When people flippantly dismiss soaps, surely they are also dismissing the people to whom soaps are important?

Once we move away from thinking that forms and styles have intrinsic value, many questions arise… Why should a cultural object be difficult and quasi- mystical? Why don’t we pride communication and engagement with working class culture as a skill? Why is it that the less people can access an art the better it is? Isn’t all culture formulaic in some way? Why should there be an art experience that is somehow higher than sensuality? What is wrong with escapism, cartharsis, sensuality or hedonism?

Look, it aint to say that we don’t have a critique of the commercialism and commodification of every part of our lives (for which Adorno is actually useful) nor about who wields power under capitalism. Clearly the denial of working class expression is a part of the dictatorship of capital. But at the end of the day everything is controlled by capital – whether it is bourgeois art or mass culture. The construction of the stupid, ‘tricked’ and passive soap–watcher allows no space for people to express agency. Saying that someone’s culture is crap and less sophisticated is a part of the denial of expression.

Eastenders "baby-swap": viewers' response influenced storyline

Going back more directly to the stuff said against soaps, academic Dorothy Hobson’s work Crossroads: The Drama of a Soap Opera revealed that the concept of the completely passive soap viewer is a myth. Confirming my experiences, she found that soap-viewers’ interaction with the medium is complex. That viewers had a high level of critical awareness, based on a close knowledge of story lines, and rooted in their experience of everyday life. Discussing characters in the soap as if they were real was a ‘game’ they played with one another, well aware of what they were doing

Indeed, as a soapy, I am always conscious of the ‘writer’, “the producer” and “the channel”. Storylines are created in dialogue with the viewer’s mood. There are many examples where storylines have changed directions as a result of the viewer reaction – most recently Ronnie Branning’s ‘baby-swap’ story in EastEnders. It is funny to see what writers/producers attempt to get away with and what they can’t. The development of online fan fiction means that viewers actually take control of the characters as they write scenes which continue the storylines or completely change them. People cut and mix scenes into extremely diverse and creative music video or montages on YouTube. Some people translate soaps and post them, within minutes of them airing, on to online forums for others in different countries to enjoy: for no reason but sheer commitment. Soaps are ‘popular art’ with communal participation and yes, they may offer companionship to people who may be living mainly solitary lives under the alienation of capitalism – what is wrong with this????? Soaps are just a form and style – it is what is done with them that is (or is not) interesting.

'Twisted Love': a fan's creative response to Hollyoaks

I like soaps coz I am fascinated with language, characters (and characterisation), stories (and story telling). I have an intrinsic understanding of the different formulas used by different soaps, aired by different channels in different countries – I know the codes like I know the back of my hand. I assess what I believe to be ‘good’ and ‘bad’ writing or character development. I am interested in not only what they say about a culture, what they say about how cultural intermediaries try to define a culture and to what extend people accept and resist this. I look to soaps for their realism - in that I relate and empathise with characters or grapple with the social issues which they throw up - and their escapism - to play with living the lives of these fantastical characters and events. I like soaps because they challenge me with new ideas and cultures but that they are also familiar and routine. Coz they include me in the many worlds they create (fictional and in terms of viewer communities). Coz they stimulate my consciousness and make me ask questions. Coz they also make me chill out. Coz they are addictive. Coz they give me a buzz and release in a pressurised society. Coz my Grandmother has watched Coronation Street since it began in the 1960s. Coz everyone watched Neighbours at school. Coz EastEnders is gritty and is both like and nothing like the East End. Coz Hollyoaks is fun. Coz they can be hard hitting. Coz they can be ridiculous. Coz they don’t exclude me or make me feel inadequate. Coz they connect me to other people who understand them. I love soaps because I can own them and make them mine in loads of different ways. And I don’t see why doing something you love, if it isn’t hurting anyone else, is wasting your time (something I am often accused of)…

Mercy: fighting deportation. Heather: coping with poverty. Soaps can challenge social problems in a radical way

I am sick of hearing some people dismissing soaps with a smug Guardian reading, independent record label preaching, Radio Four listening, aged furniture loving, Bob Dylan adoring, vintage chic wearing, organic food eating, self-congratulating recycling laugh – as if this means you got everything sorted with the world. Not that I am actually dissing any of these things themselves (most apply to me anyways) but I am just trying to crudely paint a “type”. And/or those who do not watch soaps and do not understand their codification. Those that judge soaps on a pre-prescribed criteria which, of course, is designed to fail them. Those that spout an opinion from ignorance. Those that have made no effort to discover the thoughts and feelings of viewers. Hobson gets it right when she says; “it is false and elitist criticism to ignore what any member of the audience thinks or feels about a programme.”

Do I think all soaps are great? Nah. Do I think that they escape the power constructions and commercialism that surrounds information and culture? Of course not - I may be a soapy but I aint an idiot. And to all those of you who dislike soaps – that’s cool, let's have a discussion. My bone of contention aint with those who engage honestly in thought-out criticism - just don't tell me that something which is an important part of my life is beneath consideration. And in particular, surely any Marxist who dismisses the thoughts and feelings of millions of people is walking on very dangerous ground?

[Many thanks to Marilyn Monroe]

When the Personal becomes Apolitical

2011-06-15T21:02:00.005+01:00

Thanks to Woodscolt for sending me this vapid and annoying contribution to 21st century feminist theory from Caitlin Moran (no, not the cute children's book character, that's Katie. This is the Times columnist who changed her name from Catherine in homage to the feisty Irish teen rebel in Jilly Cooper's 'Rivals'. [Note: surely this is not really true? Query sources])

The evolution of the women's movement: which one would you choose?

Firstly, I find it difficult to believe that modern women are so confused about whether they are feminists or not that they would turn to a question-and-answer column in The Stylist, London's most overtly sexist free magazine, to find out. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this morning, the females of the metropolis breathed a collective sigh of relief as they finally learned The Truth about themselves and the world.

1.) Can they like Lady Gaga and still be feminists?
2.) Can they wear high heels without Emmeline Pankhurst rolling uneasily in her tomb?
3.) Can they read trashy magazines without metaphorically spitting in their collective sisters' eye?

At last, these burning questions are solved by Moran, in How To Be A Woman, the twenty-first century's answer to The Second Sex. (I'm not sure if she answered my own burning question, which was 4.) Do I Even Want To Be A Woman Or A Feminist If That's All There Is To It?)

As a teaser, she laid out the basics today in an article entitled "Caitlin Moran's Guide To Being A Modern Feminist."

Briefly, the answers Moran gave, digested and explained. (so you don't have to go there.)

1.) Yes, but not Rihanna. Because Rihanna wears bondage gear and Gaga wears steak, apparently. Proper feminists love steak as it is 'neurotic, damaged, freakish, furious' and hate bondage gear, especially on 22 year-olds who signed records deals when they were 16.
2.) Yes... sometimes. But Moran has done some basic calculations about fuck-me heels and so is now able to estimate that 'our culture “gets sexy” perhaps 40% too much'. Phew. So now we know. Because being sexy 'takes a lot of energy'. Also, high-heels are like, really feminist and all that, but they won't change the world. You know what will? Comfy old flip-flops. In fact they are Moran's justification for saying that 'Feminism is succeeding'. Forget this boring old article in the Grauniad today. Clearly the women in those countries are still wearing stilettos to their awards ceremonies. The sillies.
3.) Yes, backed up with the startling political analysis 'You can actually be quite a shallow feminist if you want...' That's great. I'm really shallow. Do I have to sign something or attend any events? No! Insisting feminists go to feminist events or do feminist stuff is SEXIST! 'After all, it’s not like men are walking around going “I’m only going to declare I’m equal with women when I’ve gone on a march to prevent all war and suffering.”' (I'm not making this shit up. Honest.) How dare men, then, demand the same of us- that we DO SOMETHING before prancing around in our heels to the sound of 'Born This Way' declaring our equal rights in every sphere? You'd almost think that the Patriarchal System LIKED women being downtrodden! What a ridiculous notion! Anyway, I can't march in my Christian Louboutins. You know that. I am wearing them 40% less of the time though. Anything for the cause.

So once again, someone has wasted precious time, energy, computer memory, teabags and fingernail-stubs on composing a comforting accolade to 'Choice Feminism'. Super. Lucky we don't have anything better to read on the way to work or there might be a problem. Moran's article reminded me of Ellie Levenson's 2009 book A Noughtie Girl's Guide To Feminism, which definitely changed my life slightly for the worse. (Read my ancient review reposted here) Then, as now, I criticised the idea that female equality is possible within a basically unjust society. Feminism, then, needs to have a sound political positioning in order to be anything other than a hobby.

I also implied that women may have been fooled into thinking that BUYING SOMETHING can be a feminist act, or that BEING HAPPY is the ultimate feminist goal. That's called Capitalism, folks. I want you to be happy, honest. I even want you to go shopping, no wucking furries. Just don't kid yourself that that's all you can do to change the world. Don't let them tell you that your personal happiness is the most important thing, and that you can achieve that by yourself if you work hard and don't miss a mortgage repayment.

Because you'll never work that out by yourself. Or maybe you will, and then someday you'll have a daughter, or a mother, or even a friend, and her suffering in a sexist society will cause you pain. Honest, it will. I agree that the Personal is Political, but can we just remind ourselves that the Political is also Political for a moment here please?

Why Choice Feminism Is So Popular
What I don't feel I covered in my Levenson review is WHY choice feminism is currently everywhere: in women's magazines, new books, speeches, interviews... Sex And The City mused about the ethics of feminism, high heels and whether to call him first on numerous occasions (and can I just take the opportunity to point out that Carrie is now Happily Married, so somewhere in her wicked, miserable past, she must have done something good.) It is automatically assumed that twenty-somethings are feminists in some way or other at the moment, at least if they're urban, educated, middle class and not too right wing.

This is good in a way, because I don't think that was necessarily the case 15 years ago. (I promise to write something soon about whether feminism is really experiencing a comeback). But I believe that this is partly just a generational coincidence. I always knew I was a feminist, and assumed everyone else was too, because my mother and all her friends were feminists. I grew up seeing the things they did, which seemed important to them; women's discussion groups, pro-choice rallies. They didn't stress about the height of their heels or whether they could read Now magazine. But then, they had hairy legs and read Spare Rib. They moaned a lot about men, to the point where it became rather difficult for me to eavesdrop on them as I always thought my dad was quite nice, and was surprised to learn that he was A Shit.

Obviously, I had no intention of not shaving my legs, and spent a large proportion of my teenage years wondering what other ways I could make myself more attractive to Boys. Why not? Like many in my generation, I took feminism for granted, and it was only after years of casual sexism, workplace discrimination, failed love affairs and the growing realisation that All Was Not Right with the World that I became what I will now rather shamefacedly refer to as a 'practising' feminist. (And I still shave my legs.)

It's only a theory, but I think a lot of these new 'Choice Feminists' are from the same generation as me. I think they, too, wanted silky smooth legs, and to pluck the hairs out of their chins, and a boyfriend like Todd Wilkins from Sweet Valley High. And I think it's been a long road, trying to work out whether we should feel guilty about owning a Gillette Venus or not. My mum was really mean to me for shaving! Should we criticise others who make their bodies even more sexy than we do (up to 40% too sexy)? Should we tell those hairy girls in the dungarees that they, too, are now allowed to devote 5% of their waking hours to 'grooming' and 'pampering'? Probably not, because the hairy girls are likely to tell us to go fuck ourselves. They might even have a sound political position to back this up.

We need to have a 'live and let live' attitude to body image nowadays, because policing women's appearance is one of the things we adamantly reject. So much is clear.

But the step from 'live and let live' to telling women that they can always do anything they like and nothing matters and yes, they are definitely always a feminist, is a fundamentally dishonest one. Despite my dodgy analogy above, feminism is not like catholicism, latent within you for life as long as you repent on your deathbed. It's not a religion at all, it's a political process and an ideology, which contends that we can make the world better by making women equal to men. If you want to do some feminism, get out there and do some. If you don't know how, ask me. Or Wikipedia. Or your mum. Just don't tell women the lie that feminism is there, in your heart, no matter what you do. The choices you make in life are important and they are political, from plucking your eyebrows to chaining yourself to railings. Let's not dismiss them or refuse to acknowledge their importance, just because some of us wear heels and some of us wear flip-flops. We can make choices, a wide variety of nuanced, carefully thought-out choices as well as the odd spur-of-the-moment, ridiculous choice, which are not the same as the choices our neighbour makes. That doesn't mean one of us is a feminist and the other isn't, so don't feel guilty about it. But it does mean that every choice is politically loaded, and to remember the that is to be better armed against the real enemy: the unjust, unfair, patriarchal, imperialist capitalist monster. Oh yeah, you probably forgot all about that one among all the epilation debate, hey?

The Other Reason Choice Feminism is So Popular
Also, these writers are shameless hacks, willing to write any old crap in return for loads of filthy money. Can't blame them for that, I suppose. Now are there any publishers out there for my new work, You're a Feminist when I Say You Are And Not Before? Call me.

Reposted from Elsewhere: Review

2011-06-15T18:43:00.002+01:00

I felt a self-referential phase coming on, so it may be useful for readers who give a flying fuck to read this old review of Ellie Levenson's 2009 seminal work on feminism in the 21st century, previously published only in a magazine so small and inconsequential that I don't believe I even got hold of a copy myself.

Nice to see how I have mellowed since then, and no longer feel obliged to constantly pour out my wrath against my journalist sisters, who are after all guilty only of poor writing and of wanting to make a very fast buck.

Review: ‘The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism’ (from October 2009)

Ellie Levenson combines a Cosmo-magazine-style layout with a frothy, non-confrontational approach in ‘The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism’, aimed at young women with no previous experience of feminism. The overwhelmingly negative reviews of the guide have tended to focus on her more shocking advice, such as this gem – ‘If you have decided you won’t [sleep with him], then why let him buy you dinner in the first place?’[1]- and Levenson’s needlessly provocative and shallow defence of ‘rape jokes’.

However the real danger of the book is in its uninformed and grossly simplified reinterpretation of feminism. Levenson goes so far as to brag about her own complete ignorance of feminist history and theory –‘Wikipedia named sixty-six second wave feminists. I had heard of six.’[2] While it is of course not necessary to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the women’s movement to be a feminist, a beginner’s guide to feminism should at least touch on the subject. Levenson has surely underestimated even her target audience of chick-lit-reading Spice-Girl-loving wannabe feminists in this rambling collection of anecdotes and half-baked analysis which constantly reinforces negative images of old-school bra-burning feminists without offering any solid alternatives.

Instead, Levenson defines feminism as ‘having real choices and demanding equality’, and her book describes a feminism based on capitalist consumer choice. Thus intrinsically flawed from the start, it is no wonder that she is unable to satisfactorily answer any of the questions a young feminist might ask. Her refusal to extend her subject matter outside of her own life experience makes the book useless for anyone who is not a young white married middle-class London-based journalism teacher (and presumably intolerably boring for those who are). An accessible guide to feminism for young women is a great idea but this narrow-minded approach to British women’s experience adds insult to injury. Read this book only if you are self-hating, devoid of all empathy, and think that feminism is something you can pick and choose from the great salad bar of Western patriarchal society.

[1] Levenson, p. 59

[2] Levenson, p. xvi

On free education and the ideal university

2011-06-10T17:35:00.001+01:00

A reaction to today's People's Panel in the Guardian, questions of excellence in education and this whole ridiculous NCH fiasco.

At 19, I stayed in London doing bum jobs for low pay while my friends left for the exciting new challenge of University. This I envisioned as a wonderful free space where wild, uninhibited thinking took the place of manual labour (I was a chambermaid). I imagined my contemporaries sitting in with their lecturers in dark smoky cafés, discussing Sartre and drinking espressos.

Small wonder then that when I went to visit my best pal in Oxford, I was horrified. These people talked rugby incessantly, and had their rooms cleaned for them by middle-aged women! The parties were just like London parties, only with crisper accents and smarter clothes. And coming home from the pub, we met a trio of battered, bloodied, white-tied young men. They had got into a fight, it seemed, with some ‘townies’. These ‘chavs’ had set upon them for ‘no reason’. One of the men was still clutching a champagne bottle.

Why, I wondered, was Oxford (and it’s not the only one) ridden with this animosity between students and townsfolk? Shouldn’t local people be happy that the university was there to do their thinking for them? Now, after five years of study, I know. ‘Townies’ need to think for themselves, and probably do (hence the fight). And students need to change their own sheets and clean their own toilets. Education needs to round people, not force them into a limited, prejudiced academic circle of upper class intellectual masturbation.

This is not to say that we need to force people who are gifted at philosophy into plumbing, or vice versa. But my ideal university would be open to everyone, for evening classes, public lectures, discussion groups. The division between cleaning and teaching staff would be blurred as much as possible. Students would be encouraged to produce original thought, but thought itself would not be idealised or used to sort the wheat from the chaff. Free and accessible education at every age is an essential part of this, as is ensuring that universities remain fully accountable and under public control.

Universities must work to integrate themselves into the communities that host them, and outreach into schools, adult education, workplaces, must be multiplied. Maybe then, a culture of discussing philosophy could be cherished rather than mocked by outsiders, as it would no longer be the symptom of a cheap class distinction.
Maybe, as well, those posh kids could avoid having their eyes blacked.

Inclusivity and SlutWalk

2011-06-08T22:25:00.004+01:00

So do many of us, it seems.

SlutWalk is still interesting. Why? Because it represents a crossroads between different kinds of feminism: radical, liberal, all kinds of left-wing, and what we sometimes fall into the trap of calling The Rest of the World. For example, my Tory friend, who I shamelessly abuse as a barometer of opinions outside of my East London, middle class, left-wing world, responded with ‘Perhaps for the first time ever, I agree. You are completely right.’ when I reposted the SlutWalk Toronto page on Facebook. It’s refreshing to be thinking about a march that appeals to a wide range of people, from different walks of life, if only because feminism in London is awfully divided, claustrophobic, and even cliquey.

All kinds of people want to see action taken against rape, and everyone (I hope so anyway) agrees that blaming women for rape has got to end. I can’t wait to see if this translates into a mixed, exciting march, and even a wider forum for debate on women’s bodies, women’s right to consent to sex, and how sexual violence fits into a wider framework of repression and institutionalised violence.

Yet it is not so simple. Women are protesting their exclusion from SlutWalk across the blogosphere, notably women of different 'races', transgender people and those who simply feel alienated from the word ‘slut’. The march in Toronto and the march in Chicago have been criticised for not being racially representative of local communities and for creating exclusive spaces that do nothing to welcome women from different ethnic groups. Photos in the press all reflect SlutWalk as very white, largely young, fairly glamorous (in a Tank Girl kind of way) and wearing very little clothing on the whole. Clearly not something every woman can do, or wants to do, or feels comfortable doing.

Furthermore, blogs such as musingsandmoans and tothecurb have reflected on the racial elements of words such as ‘slut’. Sexually loaded words such as ‘slut’ become even more problematic when applied to communities who have suffered extreme, racially-based sexual objectification and attack. At a recent (and very successful) meeting to discuss the politics of SlutWalk, I felt that we came up against a bit of a brick wall when it came to addressing these problems. No one really wanted to defend SlutWalk as not racially problematic.

Well, they were right. Because SlutWalk is racially problematic. Unfortunately, so is feminism, the feminist left, and society in general. I’m not necessarily saying ‘racist’. I feel I have yet to understand the complex hierarchisation and racist underpinnings of society that means there are certain spheres where black people are simply not adequately represented. No one I work with politically is racist in any normally accepted sense of the word. But most of them are white, educated and middle-class. And at that meeting we were faced with the problem that is often present when it comes to inclusivity. Do we, as mostly white, middle-class women, attempt to fix this problem by openly inviting women of other 'races' to join us? Or do we hope that they will decide to do so of their own accord, leave the door open in case they turn up, and thus avoid playing God with our white privilege?

Neither solution is perfect, and really, for SlutWalk, neither is very necessary. The women at the meeting were not the organisers, and have little control over who comes to the event. If you agree with SlutWalk, you should go, and if you don’t, then don’t. Rape is a universal problem and that’s that. Black Women Agianst Rape have just released a statement on why they will be attending:

SlutWalk is a much needed occasion to break down divisions and strengthen everyone’s right to protection and justice, no matter who we are, where we were raped or who raped us...We want to make visible the women of colour everywhere who are fighting for justice after reporting attacks by men in positions of authority. Like the placards at the Paris SlutWalk march referring to the Black refugee housekeeper who has accused the ex-head of the IMF of attempted rape: ‘We are all chamber maids’.

Hopefully there will be a good mix of different people there. Possibly there won’t. As the London event seems to have been organised by a loose collection of young women on Facebook, it’s pretty impossible (if not inappropriate) to challenge them directly, and I feel sure the Canada lot are getting pretty fed up of answering to challenges from around the world.

But more generally, this is a big question for left-wing feminists. Most politically engaged women have gendered experiences of rejection or silencing within mixed-gender political circles. These range from direct violence and overt sexism to more esoteric experience of male-dominated culture, non-acceptance, stereotyping and challenges along gendered lines. Not to mention a lack of crèches. As a Marxist feminist, I reject all gendered attacks, both the visible and the invisible. Nonetheless, many are hard to describe and even harder to combat.

When it comes to feminism and 'race', it is necessary to take the same things into account. 91% of the UK is of white British origin. In London this drops to less than 70% (Wikipedia, bien sur). I have no experience of seeing 30% non-white people at any political event in London, yet this should be a long-tern goal. We must create a space where women of all backgrounds, identities, sexualities and ages are able to speak freely. If this is possible, it will probably challenge us in ways that we don’t want to be challenged. Yet it must be attempted. Nonetheless, we have to accept that different women organise in different ways, and may not ‘need’ us to ‘save’ them. Thus alliances with other organisations, such as black women’s groups, may be a better way to move forward than cross-examining ourselves and extending gracious invitations. It’s a long road and there are no easy answers.

There is a racist structure within our society. In general in the UK, it’s pretty connected to the class system, but in no way interchangeable with it. And while we live in a racist system, we are going to be affected by it. This means, to some extent, that everyone is racist. As we know, until everyone is free, no one is free. For SlutWalk, we should think about 'race', but then we should go and march on the streets because demonstrations are a far more open and accepting tactic than closed meetings or private lists. For life, and the political struggle ahead, we do need to think - and talk - about this more.

Urban Garden, May 2011

2011-06-08T16:09:00.000+01:00

Claims and Counter-claims [a guest post by Elvis Presley]

2011-06-04T15:20:00.007+01:00

I have been thinking a lot about 'reclaiming' words. The only conclusion I have come to is that the 'reclaiming' of "nigger" and "queer" are totally different phenomena which were only linked afterwards. Now they are reinterpreted as having been consciously 'reclaimed' but this did not happen. There was also a change of meaning in both cases is not the case with other conscious attempts at 'reclaiming', where there is often no change in meaning. Which is maybe why they don't work.

I think that 'nigger' was first used by gangsta hiphop and others not to have a diferent meaning from its white racist meaning (which itself had followed its original, neutral meaning which simply meant 'black'/'slave' interchangeably). As used in gangsta hiphop, 'nigger' was a black person, but within a context that completely acknowledged a racist society. Hence why it could not be used by anyone white or with a stake in that racist society. Using the word means that the speaker is not in denial about the racist nature of society.

Why do I call myself a nigger they ask me/Cause everywhere I go police wanna harass me...Why do I call myself a nigger they ask me/Guess it's just the way shit has to be. NWA - Niggaz for life

You might as well call yourself 'nigger' since whether or not you do you will still be considered a 'nigger'. This is the 'reclaiming' step that other groups have sought to emulate. However what has often been ignored or misunderstood is this - this process did not attempt to use 'nigger' in a positive sense. The negative sense was used in a different context, but the meaning did not change.

There is some reaction to this. This includes the development of a new use of the word - one that separates those black people that will call themselves 'niggers' and those that won't. A use of the racist white word by black people - not to refer to themselves but to refer to other black people. This was of course made famous by the Chris Rock routine:

Who's more racist, black people or white people? It's black people! You know why? Because we hate black people too! Everything white people don't like about black people, black people really don't like about black people, and there's two sides, there's black people and there's niggas. The niggas have got to go.[...] When I go to the money machine tonight, alright, I ain't looking over my back for the media: I'm looking for niggas! Chris Rock, from "Bring The Pain"

The next development is actually the unexpected, radical one, and brings a new meaning to the work. 'Nigger' becomes normative. It is used by black people living in a racist apartheid society, but because of the nature of this society, it now means 'person'. A white person is a 'white man', 'white boy', 'white lady' etc, but any other person, including someone hypothetical, of indeterminate race etc, can be referred to as 'nigger'. Of course, this only applies to a limited number of speakers, those who really do live in a milieu where you can assume that someone whose race you don't know is black.

That's good. That's like a forty degree day. Ain't nobody got nuttin to say about a forty degree day. Fifty? Bring a smile to your face. Sixty? Shit, niggas are damn near barbecuing that mothafucka. Go down to twenty? Niggas get they bitch on. Get they blood complainin... but forty? Nobody give a FUCK about forty. Nobody remember forty, and ya'll niggas is giving me way too many forty degree days. Stringer Bell

(Note the first two usages.) The thing about the normative usage is that it totally reverses the classic form that racism/colonialism takes in language. One of the most important tools of the language of domination is the fact that being the oppressor is normative. There are lots of examples of this, I can't think of an other example of it being reversed like it is in this situation.

This is a very important step. As the new word comes to mean 'black', from a 'black perspective', it can be used much more universally by black people, to refer to each other, but simply to mean 'person' in a particular mode of speech. Of course, general 'reclaiming' attempts like 'crip' to mean disabled can not in general do what is done here. At least to me, it doesn't seem plausible. The only possible (but unlikely) analogous development might be normative terms for 'female' instead of for 'male'.

Now, 'queer' does not have the two steps of development. I think that from the outset, 'queer', rather than be reclaimed, was simply used with a new meaning, one for which there was no word previously. An obvious difference between the homophobic meaning and the new meaning is that the old meaning was a noun, used to refer to a person, sometimes used in an adjectival form. The new meaning is an adjective rarely used as a noun. The political implications of 'queer' do not, I think, correspond to either of the meanings of 'nigger' that I suggested above. It's actually much closer to 'black', since historically 'colored' was used in a context where the aims of anti-racism were to achieve 'color-blindness' where whether or not you were 'white' or 'colored' would, it was hoped, become of no consequence. 'Black' went hand in hand with 'black and proud' and 'black is beautiful', at a point where blackness was supposed to become a positive rather than something to be subtracted and ignored.

Importantly however, 'queerness' becomes something different from being 'gay', 'homosexual', 'lesbian', 'transsexual', etc. It's purpose is not to make the negative positive but to redefine the categories, something like 'person of color' (which of course isn't reclaimed).

Anyway, here I haven't said anything about whether or not it is possible to change the meaning and usage of a word deliberately by choosing to use it in a different way. I believe that for these two examples it was not done in that way. However my point is really that even if it were possible, attempts at 'reclaiming' misunderstand what exactly happened with these two words, missing some aspects, and inventing some similarities that are not real.

This whole argument is separate from what Woodscolt said about the actual nature and meaning of the word 'slut'. I was just trying to become clear about what the expression 'to reclaim' means, and these were my conclusions.

[Many thanks to Elvis Presley]

Reclaim the lexis? (continued from yesterday)

2011-05-20T20:34:00.005+01:00

‘I am what I am, and what I am needs no excuses’ (Lyrics by Jerry Herman)

The debate about SlutWalk’s use of the word ‘slut’ seems to be largely centred around ‘reclaiming’ words and whether it is possible to ‘reclaim’ the word ‘slut’. I think it is not possible. But let’s just think a little about how words are ‘reclaimed’ and why that is not a useful term for this particular action.

Language is fluid, and changing. Words that meant one thing fifty years ago (‘queen’, ‘fuck’, ‘housewife’) now are used in a completely different way. Language reflects the dominant discourse yet is constantly subject to reinterpretation, subjectivity and subversion. And semiology has shown us that while the word itself may remain constant, its meaning can change each time it is used, for different people, registers and contexts. Nonetheless, to use a word in its generally accepted way is to wield the power of that word’s meaning. Thus the word ‘immigrant’ currently carries negative connotations which reflect the power of anti-immigration politics and a racist media.

‘I am my own special creation’
So can words be reclaimed? Well, to reclaim something it has to once have been yours. A good example of this is the word ‘communism’, a word which many of SlutWalk’s critics wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. Tainted by Stalinism and perceived as outdated since the collapse of the Soviet Union, ‘communism’ has become a negative word for many. An acquaintance from Lithuania once scolded my friend for wearing a badge advocating communism, saying ‘If you grew up like I did, you wouldn’t want to advertise communism’. But communism is older than Marx and Engels, and has undergone many changes in meaning. Yes, it’s semantics, but the three main organisations still daring to use the word in the UK today differ largely in when they choose to cement the evolution of the word: at which point they feel its meaning was hijacked by ‘non-communists’. (An interesting subject about which I have no intention of blogging in the near future) It’s impossible to freeze the evolution of language, but it is possible to reclaim a word by defining it yourself against the dominant discourse. You also have to remember that our Lithuanian friend’s experience of the word and its meaning retains a certain validity, because what he experienced was called ‘communism’. The only way to prove him wrong is to not just reclaim but rebuild the meaning of communism. And I for one would like to see a revival of the word which takes into account that communism is not repression and mass-murder in Soviet Russia, just as Islam is not terrorism and savings are not cuts.

‘Feminism’ has undergone a still more complex process of reclamation, one where no immediate resolution seems likely, as it has become possible to identify politically as a feminist from positions across the whole political spectrum. How to solve this? Well, because of the constantly changing and layered nature of meaning in language there is no easy answer. Instead, we have to define our terms carefully, respect others even when they are wrong, and hope like hell to be able to use our word constructively before it becomes reabsorbed into the discourse by those same bastards who want to constrict women’s rights and silence their voices. Unfortunately, this means inevitable conflict with radical feminism, liberal feminism and most difficult of all, ‘choice’ feminism, a fascinating new way of removing all theory whatsoever from the meaning of the word feminism in order to let women (or at least, those wealthy and fortunate enough to do so) enjoy their choice to wear high-heels, to get married, to drink chardonnay and to diet. ‘Choice’ feminism is a great example of how a word can be politically neutralised.

‘It’s my world, that I want to have a little pride in’
So far so good: reclamation is possible, though loaded and risky. But it is not the same for all words: for example a word that never belonged to you in the first place. Yesterday I thought of ‘bitch’ and ‘nigger’, both words that historically described one group of people, became extremely derogatory, and have been used in different ways by the people they describe as a positive action towards changing the meaning. Let’s just think about ‘bitch’.

Joke:
Q: What’s the difference between a ‘bitch’ and a ‘slut’?
A: You’re a bitch.

Offended? If you know me, you’re probably not. Because within my limited circle, the person who uses the last milk is a bitch. The person who jumps up to make their partner a cup of tea (male or female) is often jokingly called their bitch. Long, considerate conversations about our friend’s problems between my best friend and me were commented on by her mother: ‘Bitch, bitch, bitch. Don’t you girls have anything nice to talk about?’ I can see problems with the word bitch, but I use it frequently and I’d be a liar if I said otherwise.
Since yesterday, Woodscolt suggested:

I think a word like bitch is worth reclaiming because it's so often used by sexists to condemn positive, desirable qualities like being an angry woman or an outspoken woman.

I think she’s got a point, but I differ with her in one way: semantics again. We’re not reclaiming. We’re using the word in a number of satirical and subversive ways. On one hand we subvert it by mocking it, and by applying it equally to men and women. And on the other hand, even when we’re subverting it we are also reaffirming its dominant meaning, because we have to acknowledge that meaning in order to use it in a funny way. But as Woodscolt suggests, ‘bitch’ is loaded with good and bad things. If I criticise my man, I’m a bitch. If I speak up in a situation where women are supposed to be silent, I’m a bitch. If I’m a fighter, I’m a bitch. That’s great, and positive. But I don’t think you can reclaim something you never had, and don’t necessarily particularly want. Rather I would call this subversion, because it plays on the word’s established meaning in order to question it.

'Slut' does not carry this rebellious side. Rather, it’s often used in porn titles to convey a kind of highly sexualised submission. (I just googled porn and slut so you don’t have to: sample title ‘Watch Porn Slut Melanie Big Breasted Cocktease’.) At the same time, although I’ve heard lots of ‘slapper’ jokes, even about my own sexual behaviour - ‘Ask Francie, she’s a big fat slapper’ (I can’t recall finding that offensive, btw) – I only ever hear 'slut' about real people in an extremely derogatory or extremely sexual context. Woodscolt is right: there is no reason to ‘reclaim’ this deeply offensive word.

‘And so what if I love each sparkle and each spangle’
‘Slut’ (like slapper, slag, tart and many other similar words) also buys into the whore/virgin dichotomy (in brief: there are some girls you fuck and others you marry), which is at least as old as the three Marys in the New Testament. I reject this dichotomy as one of the most harmful to women in society, especially to their right to express their sexuality and to choose their family life not based on this. This harmful dichotomy is preserved by the policing of what women wear and how they act in public and private. And it’s this lie that leads idiots like the police officer who started this whole debate to say

“Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”

For him, women are either dressed like sluts or not. They are either likely to be raped or not. They are either ‘whores’, essentially, or ‘virgins’.

So we need to reject the dichotomy entirely. Especially since it doesn’t allow a clear view or a reclamation of these words that are so bound up with it. We can’t take back ‘slut’; nor do we wish to. Even within the feminist criticism of SlutWalk, there’s difference of opinion about what it means and how we can relate it to ourselves. One person talks about sexuality:

I can’t be a slut because I sleep with women, not men, so I don’t have that relationship with sexualising my appearance according to heterosexual norms,

and another connects it to how women dress and view their bodies:

I don’t identify with reclaiming the word ‘slut’ not because I am not sexual or believe that women should not have the space to express their sexuality, but instead, because, I have never been called a slut, nor would be perceived as one, because my body and sexuality is a ‘failure’ in these terms.

So even within the feminist debate, and with the reservation that we are discussing wrong external perceptions, there is an idea that it is possible to decide who would be a successful slut and who wouldn’t.

We can’t reclaim ‘slut’, but we can struggle for an end to this harmful division. Part of this means readdressing the way women perceive each other. Every day I become more and more certain that ‘choice feminism’ has caused harm by claiming there are no controls and no limits on feminist women’s appearance and social behaviour. We shouldn’t police each other. But we shouldn’t forget that our clothing choices, body image and social behaviour always carry meaning and messages, whether we like it or not. It is up to us to extract what parts of this are useful and affirming, and what are dangerous, socially imposed and dishonest. So I welcome more debate about these things, sometimes seen as no longer relevant within feminism: how much can we stop being judged by our social appearance and image? How much does it matter? Are there certain practices we should reject or criticise (I can’t think of any)? And how can we create an open space for women to debate how they look and what they do in their own language, not the language of ‘sluts and virgins’?

‘Why not try to see things from a different angle’
Nonetheless, I think the use of the word ‘slut’ for this demonstration was the right thing to do, and should continue to be used. Again, we are not reclaiming, but subverting, and subversion brings out the irony in the whole ‘Don’t dress like a slut/ don’t get raped’ paradox. It’s ridiculous! It’s nonsensical! It’s madness! And it has victims every day, not just in Toronto but everywhere. These are not just people who are raped, but people who are unfairly treated because they fall into either the ‘slut’ or the ‘virgin’ pigeonhole: or like my friend above, they are unfairly treated because they fall into neither. We can use this demonstration to call attention to the glaring injustice that props up the patriarchal system, and the name SlutWalk highlights the contradictory nature of this system.

In the student demonstrations of May ’68, the slogan ‘Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands’ (We are all German Jews) had a mixed reception. The post-war generation was insisting that they too were victims of the Holocaust. They had grown up twenty-five years later, in a world that refused to acknowledge it or accept guilt for having created it. They saw that nothing had fundamentally changed in the societies that allowed the Holocaust to happen.

And then certain rightwing critics said the students were dishonouring the six million Jews who were murdered. I say they weren’t: I say this was a striking means of demonstrating solidarity, and understanding that respect for victims is best expressed through struggle for change. Until we can get rid of ‘sluts’ (and virgins) let us shove ‘slut’ back in their faces until they too are filled with shame at the violence and spite contained within its meaning. Let’s shout it loud: ‘If we are sluts, that is because you perceive us as sluts. But we are going to change all of that soon, so don’t get too comfortable.'

Tomorrow: Open to all Comers: SlutWalk and Inclusion.

You’re slutting yourself go, dear

2011-05-19T14:35:00.002+01:00

When I heard about the Canadian demonstration SlutWalk, my first reaction was ‘How nice. Like Reclaim the Night, only more inclusive and less bitchy.’ It seemed like a festival against objectification, specifically concentrating on how women are pigeonholed by their appearance: the primary concern obviously being the slut/virgin dichotomy. Can it be subverted? I thought so. I’ll come back to this initial reaction, because it’s important.

Now SlutWalk is coming to London. After a couple of other demonstrations in the States, I have identified three main problems within the debate about SlutWalk, although I feel they are all connected. The first is the issue of reclaiming a word: can it (always) work? What about words such as ‘nigger’ and ‘bitch’? Does it depend on the word? And are there even benefits to reclaiming a word?

The second problem arises from criticism of the SlutWalk marches since their conception: that they are not inclusive. The problem revolves largely around race in American criticism, but Aura Blogando makes this point, which raises wider questions about diversity and privilege:

If SlutWalk has proven anything, it is that liberal white women are perfectly comfortable parading their privilege, absorbing every speck of airtime celebrating their audacity, and ignoring women of color.

Thus it is not merely a problem of black and white representation, but one which encompasses may social groups, divided by class, sexuality, background education as well as race.

The third problem, of course, is ‘What shall I wear?’ The media has charmingly chosen to exclusively feature pictures of young women in their early 20s, dressed in bikini tops and Tank Girl hotpants and looking devastatingly attractive in a radical, green-haired kinda way. I like wearing low-cut clothes and dressing sexy, but I’m not sure I want to strip down for a public place. Usually I like to demonstrate in jeans. Is that showing enough Slut-solidarity? And a friend has drawn my attention to the SlutWalk website’s response to this problem, which is unfortunately

Whether a fellow slut or simply an ally, you don’t have to wear your sexual proclivities on your sleeve, we just ask that you come.

Has the slut/virgin dichotomy become the slut/ally dichotomy?

Anyway, there’s much food for thought here, so I’ll address each of the three problems over the next three days. Meanwhile, there's a lot of food for thought here. Might probably go, though. Looks fun.

One more poem... while I'm too busy revising to write.

2011-05-19T13:21:00.003+01:00

Billy Collins: nailed it. He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York and has been the USA Poet Laureate. The guy understands the trauma of teaching poetry to unwilling students!
Interestingly, AQA used this poem as an example of the unseen poetry question in their practice paper for the new spec English Literature GCSE. Who says they don't have a sense of humour: that meant that I was actually forced to teach this poem to kids. Sample remark: 'Is "Like a colour slide" a metaphor, miss?' And of course I don't give a shit about whether it's a metaphor or not. Not as long as they are incapable of telling me in one sentence what the poem is about, or who 'I' is, and who 'Them' is is the poem. Bless Their hearts.

Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Duffy is queen of Object-Subject identity crises

2011-05-02T15:17:00.001+01:00

Although while trying to teach this poem to resistant 16-year-old, I realised I'm the only person who likes it. Nobody's memory is wrong, kids! Just the way people use/abuse those memories. But you're too young to appreciate that.

We Remember Your Childhood Well by Carol Ann Duffy

Nobody hurt you. Nobody turned off the light and argued
with somebody else all night. The bad man on the moors
was only a movie you saw. Nobody locked the door.

Your questions were answered fully. No. That didn't occur.
You couldn't sing anyway, cared less. The moment's a blur, a Film Fun
laughing itself to death in the coal fire. Anyone's guess.

Nobody forced you. You wanted to go that day. Begged. You chose
the dress. Here are the pictures, look at you. Look at us all,
smiling and waving, younger. The whole thing is inside your head.

What you recall are impressions; we have the facts. We called the tune.
The secret police of your childhood were older and wiser than you, bigger
than you. Call back the sound of their voices. Boom. Boom. Boom.

Nobody sent you away. That was an extra holiday, with people
you seemed to like. They were firm, there was nothing to fear.
There was none but yourself to blame if it ended in tears.

What does it matter now? No, no, nobody left the skidmarks of sin
on your soul and laid you wide open for Hell. You were loved.
Always. We did what was best. We remember your childhood well.

How to plan and write an essay

2011-04-25T13:13:00.000+01:00

Essay Plan
Deadline: six weeks (42 days)

Day 1 and 2 Two days of reading really hard, filled with ideas and enthusiasm. It won't be like last time. I'm going to get this one done in plenty of time.
Day 3 One day in the library, finding that all the books I wanted are on loan and therefore borrowing a load of random ones that have 'India' in the title and so must have some relevance to Dalit literature.
Day 4 to 18 Two weeks of self-satisfied chilling out, safe in the knowledge that there are still 5 weeks left. Well, three and a half.
Day 19 and 20 Two self-consciously busy days, spent putting all the books into piles, opening some of them then closing them again, using a lot of post-it notes and in general thinking about anything other than Dalit literature. Books now fully colour-coded and still completely unread.
Day 21 Time for a break. One lovely day in the park, watching boys play football though half-closed eyes.
Day 22 Darn, when I had my break yesterday I completely forgot that today I have a social engagement I can't possibly miss. Engagement party starts at 4, a ridiculous time for a party to start on a weekday. What, it's Saturday? Well, by the time I'm dressed and made-up I have to leave the house straight away. Will make my excuses at 8pm and work all night.
Day 23 That was a very long trip back home from West London on the bus this morning, broken only by an extremely necessary milkshake and fries in McDonalds on the way. I can't possibly work with this hangover. Maybe after a quick nap...
Day 24 The urgency is mounting. One day spent making a rough plan of the essay, and even considering what I might say. Sadly, the urgency has not yet mounted enough for me to read any texts other than the Guardian online, several London cyclist blogs and Twitter.
Day 25 A brainwave: study club! I invite half a dozen friends who are also writing essays over to work. Study club turns into luncheon club. Someone brings a baby who is unsurprisingly rather more interesting than Dalit literature. We break at four for Martinis.
Day 26 Have set aside this week for serious reading. No point getting out of bed or changing out of my pyjamas. This would be a needless distraction. I make a cosy nest with all my books inside my duvet. The books are beginning to feel like old friends. I still have plenty of time so I start at page one of 'From Stigma to Assertion, Untouchability, Identity and Politics in Modern India.' Page two... I suppress a yawn. Page three begins to look blurry. Paaaage foooo... When I wake up there is some dribble on page four and marks from the ink pressed into my cheek.
Day 27 I decide to start from the beginning of 'From Stigma to Assertion, Untouchability, Identity and Politics in Modern India' again.
Day 28 I realise I remember nothing from 'From Stigma to Assertion, Untouchability, Identity and Politics in Modern India' I read it again, this time making notes.
Day 29 I come to the realisation that 'From Stigma to Assertion, Untouchability, Identity and Politics in Modern India' is completely irrelevant to what I'm writing about. It may also be deeply politically dubious.
Day 30 Back to the library to change the books. I discover the library is now closed until the day my essay is due. I have lunch with a friend, then hit Waterstones and Foyles to buy some books. After limited success I also hit TK Maxx and some other classy boutiques. I feel guilty when I get home at 6, so I stay up until 3am actually doing some work. Then I set my alarm for 8am to punish myself for my laziness.
Day 31 and 32 Suddenly think of four really important things that I must blog about this instant. Write 3,000 words on each of them very quickly, stopping only for roll-ups and tuna sandwiches. I'm sitting in my duvet-and-books nest again though, so I'm probably absorbing something.
Day 33 I have theatre tickets, so I knock off early - shortly after breakfast - to reread the play while trying on all my dresses with different lipsticks.
Day 34 This is a good day for working. I write a real, detailed plan, throwing my old one in the bin. Now,instead of reading all the texts first and then coming up with an argument, I use plan B- look for quotes to match an opinionated rant I delivered on the subject last night after three glasses of wine. This plan has never failed me yet.
Day 35, 36, 37 Write furiously, only in nouns and unconjugated verbs. At the end of three days, I find I have 7,000 words of notes, none of it readable to anyone except me. Feeling suddenly depressed and demoralised, I phone my mother, who suggests I should quit university and become a teacher. I cry a little into my wine.
Day 38 When I switch on my laptop, it doesn't come on. A day of panic, trying it again and again, pushing all the buttons and phoning all the techies I know. At 9pm, I try it again and it lights cheerfully up, unaware of the nightmare it has caused me.
Day 39 and 40 During these days I usually embark on a beautiful adventure of discovery, researching a lot of things I never knew before and broadening my arguments to include a complete history of India, a geological survey of the Kerala region, several reams of Postmodern literary theory and a lot of other beautiful knowledge about the universe that fills my heart with joy. I can use none of this, not least because most of it came off Wikipedia.
Day 41 I realise that the paragraph on gender and the paragraph on incest are actually exactly the same paragraph, in almost the same words. I also notice I haven't cited the primary text once in the whole essay. I angrily delete the paragraph in which I used the word 'furthermore' six times. I revise the order of the whole essay, moving the paragraphs around as though I was trying to complete a verbal Rubik's cube. Anything so that the section on the village runs smoothly into the section on Marxism.
Day 42 Hang on, it is day 42! Goodbye.

Thoughts on Poems for a Royal Wedding

2011-04-23T18:55:00.001+01:00

Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy today gave us a list of poems based on wedding vows. I didn't really want to bother with the pile of tax-funded clap-trap that is this non-event, but since my favourite poem from this category was conspicuous by its absence, here it is.

Liebeslied from the Dreigroschenoper by Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht

Und gibt's auch kein Schriftstuck vom Standestamt
Und keine Blume auf die Altar
Und weiss ich auch nicht woher dein Brautkleid stammt
Und ist keine Myrte im Haar-
Der Teller, von welchem du issest dein Brot
Schau ihn nicht lang an, wirf ihn fort!
Die Liebe dauert oder dauert nicht
An dem oder jenem Ort.

Love Song from the Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht

And though there's no seal from the registrar
And no orange-blossom on the altar
And though I don't know where you got your wedding-dress
And though there's no veil for your hair-
Just drink- let us drink, and then throw the glass down
Don't look at it: look at me!
For love will last, or it will not last
Wherever we both may be.

That's what I call a wedding vow. Now let's all get on with our lives.

All the world's a stage

2011-04-19T10:57:00.004+01:00

We had the kind of night out that only tourists really do: an ice-cream in the sunshine in Trafalgar Square, dinner at Planet Hollywood and then a West End Show. It seems I barely leave the house any more except to go to Wilkinson in Stratford; this excursion was the cause of much excitement for me. It's long been one of my favourite films, and Kander and Ebb's music is always wonderful, although much of their shows are pretty much unheard of these days. (I really want to see a revival of Flora, the Red Menace though!) The two that survive, Cabaret and Chicago, both provide Brechtian social commentary through the filter of a meta-dramatical show within a show.

When I mentioned how much I loved Chicago to a friend, she was taken aback that a feminist would enjoy such a sexist musical. It is true that all the characters, male and female, are dressed only in transparent black underwear throughout, except Mama Morton, the prison warden, Billy Flynn the lawyer and Amos, the cuckolded husband. For two of these, their clothes mark the power and status they enjoy over the other characters, mostly criminals from Prohibition-era Chicago's seedy jazz-men-and-booze-ridden underworld. For Amos, his cardigan is a reminder of his utter boringness and near-invisibility.

While I tend for some reason to rather enjoy all the near-naked dancers, I wouldn't be so crass as to uphold them as a model of progressive feminism. When I think about why they need to all wear body stockings, I come up with this: to uphold the comparison that is constantly drawn between the real world and life on the vaudeville stage. Murder, prison, the trial: all are presented as showpieces with a different music-hall audience each time. The famous 'Razzle-Dazzle 'Em', Billy Flynn's advice to the murderer (all the murderers are females who have killed men) facing Death Row, is the key to the whole musical.

Give 'em the old three ring circus
Stun and stagger 'em
When you're in trouble, go into your dance
Though you are stiffer than a girder
They'll let you get away with murder
Razzle dazzle 'em
And you've got a romance

Do wear your silver shoes; do start crying and have to be passed a handkerchief; do ham it up for the jury. And of course Roxie and Velma, two budding stars who are willing to follow Billy's advice and put on a bit of a show, are both found Not Guilty. The nearest the show comes to a moral about crime and the justice system is through the only accused murderer who consistently appears innocent: the Hungarian, whose faith in Uncle Sam's justice leads her straight to the hangman's noose.

It's an immensely satisfying experience to watch a show that laughingly accepts the world for just as corrupt, money-grubbing and violent as you experience it yourself. The depiction of the gutter press could have come straight from a blog like Angry Mob. No one is what they seem, and judge, jury, murder victim and murderers alike are all stripped bare to their fishnet. What you say no longer matters, just the way in which you say it. And the glitter you spread around. Well, that can't be a new concept to many of our politicians. Think, for example of US former Ambassador and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who would wear a different brooch to accompany different speeches. What was she doing, if not giving 'em the old razzle-dazzle?

How else is Chicago important for women? Well, it's about women. Women and the men they use - Amos - and the men they are used by - Billy Flynn. So it consistently problematises male-female relations, taking the view that all relationships are primarily materialistic (see All I Care About is Love). Except in Chicago, when men outlive their usefulness, you shoot them in the head with a sub-machine gun. Roxie and Velma use men to get to the top, but they are both eventually let down by them; not in the 'usual' way, but because everyone in Chacago is interested in one thing only: fame. When another, more exciting murderer comes along and grabs the headlines, the two stars find themselves having to turn to each other to keep their show-biz careers alive. This is no beautiful proto-feminist reconciliation: they have already highlighted their reluctance to rely on anyone else in a little number:

I play in a game where I make the rules
And rule number one from here to the end
Is 'I am my own best friend'

I don't want to present Chicago as a miracle of modern feminism. Like all art, it is deeply marked by the society that produced it, and it certainly doesn't harm ticket sales that there are a lot of near-naked dancing boys and girls. But it has to be remembered it is a play about the devious, dishonest things women have to do to succeed in a male-dominated society. As the ultimate amoral characters, Roxie and Velma achieve a Brechtian detachment from the audience: we are unable to empathise with them and so they are able to teach us something, unhindered by any feelings of kinship or psychological understanding. This detachment is crucial to what Brecht perceived as 'radicalising' theatre: the actors are giving the audience a message, not creating a safe space in which we can all share our feelings. The message is not didactic: we can choose how we respond. It could even be summed up by Brecht himself:

Ein guter Mensch sein? Ja, wer waer's nicht gern?
Doch leider sind auf diesem Sterne eben
Die Mittel kaerglich und die Menschen roh
Wer moechte nicht in Fried und Eintracht leben?
Doch die Verhaeltnisse, sie sind nicht so!

And having brought us this message through a couple of hours of amazing dancing, humour and song, leaving the audience as razzle-dazzled as the jury, Chicago goes out with a bang. as Roxie and Velma do their big number. They have succeeded in their dream: but audience are fickle and we don't know how long the dream will last. One thing Kander and Ebb love is the circular narrative. And one thing we know is that the Chicago underworld and its avid press reporters will remain completely unchanged by the events of the show. The question is, will we?

My favourite line from the show comes from the finale, a celebration of the ridiculous and permissive nature of modernity, 'Nowadays'.

You can like the life you're living
You can live the life you like
You can even marry Harry
But mess around with Ike

Here at last, Velma and Roxie have put aside their differences to focus on what the have in common: a shared interest in fame and money. The musical thus presents the sisterhood as having been formed through contingency not solidarity: and while we might not want to believe this as young, positive idealists, there is certainly some food for thought there.

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings...

2011-04-08T20:29:00.000+01:00

a response to THAT INTERVIEW with Jemima Khan in the NewStatesman.

Save Newham Academy of Music from closure

2011-04-06T13:55:00.002+01:00

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When we started in the Teddy-Bears recorder class in the mid-eighties, everything was free. One of England's poorest boroughs offered weekly lessons in every conceivable instrument to every child that wanted them, absolutely free of charge. Needless to say, that did not last long. Fees were gradually introduced. But low-income and large families remained protected, and the ethos of the Academy was not fundamentally altered. They worked with schools and communities, they provided music lessons for disabled and behaviour-challenged children, they performed concerts in old folks homes and sang carols in the High Street.

For 13 years - the whole of my school education - I enjoyed recorder class every Tuesday, viola lessons at my school, recorder ensemble on Monday nights (well, 'enjoyed' might be the wrong word for recorder ensemble). And on Saturday mornings, hundreds of children would assemble in the gorgeous, shabby old red-brick building in East Ham, to spend three or four hours of their weekend rehearsing orchestras, brass bands, choirs and generally hanging out. As a small child, the weekly visit to their fantastic Tuck Shop was my favourite treat: back in the days when Penny Sweets still were Penny Sweets. On winter evenings we would play chase around the rambling staircases.

Years later, the academy became a social hub for me. We would roll each other cigarettes, sitting on the steps at the front of the building, grumble about our hangovers, and flirt constantly. Those were the days of the Youth Orchestra, led by the memorable Mr Sibley. Through 'Sibelius' boundless enthusiasm we were introduced to the magic of playing Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Debussy. Although the horns didn't always come in on time and in the viola section we often only played only one note in four, (a useful skill in itself) the energy and the passion in the rehearsal hall would be electric. The feeling of being a small part of a big orchestra is unlike anything else, and every child should have the opportunity to experience it. With 'Sibelius' and others; the wry Ms Carr, the mellow Ms Mason, the enchantingly camp Mr Rudell with his side-splitting and often filthy stories of touring with a big orchestra, the gorgeous Mr Goff; I was introduced to a world of classical music, composers and theory. More importantly, it was a world where the importance of music within every part of life and society was recognised, which didn't necessarily happen at school.

For me, and no doubt many others, my musical training didn't end in a career. For others it did: we all remember the outstanding musicians who awed us; the gifted violinists, the young composers and conductors. A classic Academy story (I may have partly misremembered it) told to me by Ms Mason was that of a young Eastern European boy with an extraordinary gift for the piano. After his family sought asylum in England and he came to live in East Ham, he spent nights practising the piano on a keyboard his mother had painted onto the kitchen table, until a school teacher got in touch with the Academy who were able to help him. I wonder where he is now?

I never had the discipline or the raw talent. We were advised to practise for half an hour a day: for me this was probably more like an hour a week. Now I love karaoke and sing-songs and I played viola in my university orchestra. That's as far as it goes. But the confidence I gained, the ability to stand up in front of everyone and sing - or speak- the unyielding belief in the magic that the arts can perform; these will never leave me. They've made me more employable, more socialised, more attentive to detail, braver in my choice of career. And this is what they have done for thousands of Newham children, year after year.

As well as termly concerts at the Academy and in churches and community centres around the borough, I ws lucky enough to perform twice with the massed orchestras and choirs of the whole borough in the Albert Hall as part of the huge Newham Goes To Town venture. No amateur night, this was a huge performance, and I played the recorder in a spectacular rendition of Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde. Not only did we raise the roof on the Albert Hall, but for many performers and spectators this was the first time they had seen the inside of the impressive building.

And this reveals a side to the Newham Academy of Music that is even more impressive, and shows that we must protect it at all costs: the relationship between culture, class and social mobility. I now tutor kids from Newham and the surrounding boroughs for a living. They're as smart as any other kids. Smarter, even: they amaze me with their knowledge and wit. But they will be faced with a handicap when they apply to Oxbridge, when they want to become doctors and lawyers and architects and MPs. And a large part of this handicap is cultural. Now I'm no fan of grammar schools. I don't think we should be changing the ways that poor kids talk or behave in order to play the public school children at their own game. But it has long been documented that sports can be a route for disadvantaged children to gain the skills, confidence and solidarity they will need to overcome social barriers. Newham Academy of Music has taught me that music can help not just to overcome these barriers but to question them. In addition to the useful cultural knowledge that we just don't provide to Newham kids in any other context, music is an equalising force in society. The Newham Academy of Music is an outlet for artistic talent and energy, a source of the crucial skills that will allow our kids to make the most of all their talents, musical and otherwise. As such, it is one of the main things that makes me proud to come from Newham, and its closure would be a catastrophe for the entire community, and a betrayal of the highest order.

Sign the petition at http://www.petitiononline.co.uk/petition/save-the-newham-academy-of-music/2650
and join the Facebook Group at http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_214767008540496.

Also, please write to Newham mayor Robin Wales at mayor@newham.gov.uk

Sir Robin Wales
London Borough of Newham
Newham Dockside
1000 Dockside Road
London
E16 2QU

http://www.newham-music.org.uk/

The State on Trial?

2011-04-06T13:32:00.001+01:00

During the second week of the Ian Tomlinson inquest, almost exactly two years since his death on April 1st, 2009, media attention has been focused on the testimony of the officer who struck him with a baton and pushed him to the floor, almost certainly causing his death. After a long-running media campaign beginning with the Guardian’s release of video footage from the attack, it seems the IPCC and Metropolitan Police cover-up campaign will no longer be able to protect PC Simon Harwood. The family’s public grief, the media attention and the huge amount of new evidence volunteered by bystanders and protesters have made mincemeat of the original network of lies released by the police. Harwood’s own testimony on Monday and Tuesday of this week has led to his admitting at least half a dozen untruths in his story. While it may be too late to prosecute him, he is now being set up to take the fall - and the flak.

Ian Tomlinson’s death
Ian Tomlinson was a precariously-homed casual Evening Standard seller, usually based at Monument Station and living in Smithfield. His customary walk home took him directly through the Bank of England area. On the evening of the 1st April, this meant going directly through the ‘kettled’ area, or as it has now been described by the Met, the ‘Breach of the Peace Bubble’. It seems he may have doubled back on himself several times in the streets between Monument and Bank as he found his way blocked, and at one point was moved on by riot police, who ‘nudged’ him with a van.

Behind the Bank of England, between Cornhill and Threadneedle Street, is the alleyway known as Royal Exchange Buildings, where Ian Tomlinson encountered the officers who would cause his death. In video footage he appears to be walking away from a small cluster of officers and dog handlers, hands in his pockets, looking down and showing no signs that the officers had addressed him. An officer in riot gear and balaclava, with no visible numbers on his yellow jacket quickly advances from behind a dog handler and strikes Tomlinson from behind with his baton, raising the baton to head-height before bringing it down. Almost immediately afterwards the officer pushes Tomlinson with both hands, causing him to fall to the ground. Tomlinson puts his hands out too late and lies on the ground until he is helped up by a masked protester. None of the dozen or so police officers in the video make any attempt to help him. Half an hour later Tomlinson was dead, having staggered back along Cornhill. An ITV cameraman and a medical student tried to offer medical assistance but were pushed back by the police. The initial botched post-mortem suggested he died of cardiac arrest unrelated to any physical contact. This, of course, was before The Guardian released its video. Later it was revealed that the cause of death was internal bleeding caused by force from a blunt object, probably aggravated by Tomlinson’s cirrhosis of the liver.

PC Harwood
PC Simon Harwood, 43, had served in the Metropolitan and Surrey Police Forces for at least 15 years. Following an investigation into an aggressive attack on a driver in the late 1990s, he retired on medical grounds the day before his hearing for misconduct. Days later he was rehired in a desk job. According to the Telegraph he was later investigated for a second violent misconduct. After the release of the Guardian video showing Ian Tomlinson’s death Harwood apparently told his superior that he believed himself to be the man in the video. The Met and the IPCC decided an internal investigation would suffice, despite Harwood’s previous record and the fact that his act had resulted in the death of a ‘civilian’. Had the first post-mortem not been ridiculously botched by Dr Freddy ‘Incompetent’ Patel, a manslaughter charge might have been possible, though highly unlikely. By the time public and media demands forced the police to act, the six-month time-limit on assault charges had elapsed. (A more detailed and fairly-well referenced account of the events following Tomlinson’s death can be found on Wikipedia , along with links to a plethora of news outlet coverage.) Finally an inquest has become necessary, due to the strange unwillingness of the Tomlinson family and their supporters to forgive or forget either the death or the cover-up. Now it remains to be seen who will shoulder the blame- if anyone?

‘Robust’ Policing
There are two kinds of police violence seen at protests, although they are not unconnected. Firstly the is the kind of planned, mass violence that we have seen recently at student demonstrations: group police intimidation, threatening behaviour, violent crowd control and top-down orders to use ‘robust’ or ‘active’ policing tactics. With this come the orders to use disproportionate numbers of officers, dogs and horses, and the authorisation of kettles, road-blocks and mass arrests. It’s very often difficult to trace the orders to ‘manage’ demonstrations like this back to its source: the police commissioner? The Home Office? The Prime Minister? After Tomlinson’s death, for example, ‘kettles’ were frowned on for a while. However after Milbank they were reauthorized, apparently by the Tory government who obviously wanted to discourage protesters from joining the Anti-Cuts movement.

But secondly there is the tacit acceptance throughout the force that if thuggish or pepped-up officers want to use the cover of these operations to get their kicks, they will be protected by the force. Seasoned protesters will already have come to the conclusion that the Met turns a blind eye to the significant proportion of police officers who see policing a demonstration as a great day out - a chance to get up close and personal with the great unwashed, to get baton-happy on the kids, safe in the knowledge that their violence will not be followed up. We’ve all seen the officer who steps out of ranks to use his baton on a bystander, the ones who take turns to kick protesters on the floor, the one who makes no attempt to hide the pleasure he derives from his own power. Then there are the officers who are merely scared, inexperienced, badly briefed or trained, and who react violently to difficult situations, left to do so by their superiors. After all, what are the chances of repercussion, particularly when the victims are students, lefties, hippies, crusties or ethnic minorities? Furthermore, these rogue officers actually serve a purpose for the Met: easily deniable, they perform on-the-ground intimidation that cannot be officially sanctioned, but which divides demonstrations into those who will rise to their bait and those who prefer to remain peaceful and are likely to either be scared to return or feel distanced from groups of more forward even aggressive protesters. Hence the protest is split, as perfectly illustrated by the March 26th demonstration, a culmination of the police’s after-dark dividing tactics.

Rogue police officer Simon Harwood appears to have enjoyed a lovely day out during the London G20. He was assigned to drive a carrier van. Told to stay in the van, which was parked with several others, he wandered off to ‘attempt the arrest’ of a protester spraying graffiti. Although he failed to complete the arrest he did manage to slam the protester’s head into a door. Then instead of returning to his van, he continued in search of adventure. His next victim was an ITV cameraman, whom he pushed to the ground, later alleging he ‘did not see the camera’. Though in mobile phone communication with his colleagues he was not with any particular group of officers, apparently just intervening where he thought his help was needed. Coming to Royal Exchange Buildings, he hit a man on the shoulder for asking to leave the cordon and swung his coat at another. Next came the encounter with Tomlinson, which apparently caused him no concern until weeks afterwards, Tomlinson having managed to walk away from the scene of the attack.

By the end of the second day of Harwood’s testimony, his story was not looking good. After he claimed to have been ‘in fear of his life’ as protesters hurled missiles, videos shown in court revealed an empty sky. Other videos and pictures shown to the jury proved he was not wearing his number, that he attacked the BBC cameraman unprovoked, and that in attacking Tomlinson he raised his baton high over his head to put his full force behind the blow. Under questioning from the Tomlinson family lawyer, he defined reasonable force as ‘if an officer believes force is reasonable, it is reasonable’. By the end of the day much of his original story had come apart, forcing him to admit that he did not fall down, that he did not lose his baton, that he never received a blow to the head, and that at the time of Tomlinson’s death there were not ‘violent and dangerous confrontations’ all around him, as he had originally claimed.

Justice
So it seems that whether or not Harwood does any actual time (and this writer would be more than happy to see him behind bars), the end result of the inquest will at least strongly imply his guilt. Well, he is guilty, so that is all very well. Everybody likes to see a bad man being caught and punished. Thank goodness for camera phones and YouTube, and next time you get on the wrong side of a police boot, make sure that your neighbour gets his i-phone out. The positive effects of new media on effective demonstrating have been lauded time and time again, and that is as it should be.

However, it would be rash to see this in any way as justice being served. Instead, the Ian Tomlinson murder will slot onto a long string of police attacks on the working class, leading at best to minor reforms within the service and never to the real decision-makers being punished. The Stephen Lawrence case, with the attention it drew to institutionalised racism in the force, is another example of this. While reforms have been made, racism is still rife in the police force. When it comes to policing demonstrations, the decisions are effectively taken even higher up. And had Ian Tomlinson not been a ‘civilian bystander’, a tax-payer with no connection to the movement, his case might never have even come this far. Policing the police is still extremely difficult, and extremely hit-and-miss. The IPCC, the independent inquiries, the legal courts and the government will not tolerate attacks on the force which protects and maintains them without a struggle. And to get real justice for Ian Tomlinson, the culpability of all of these must be investigated.

Of course, the police are people too, and in any revolutionary situation, a major step towards victory will come when they are won over to our side. With this in mind, it is necessary to support the Police Federation in their campaign to protect police jobs threatened by the cuts. Nonetheless, in a time of increased political activity and with more demonstrations predicted, we must bear in mind that the police are the instruments of a repressive state, and will act against us not only in open and direct ways, but through an all-pervasive structure of open and concealed violence, which seeks to disguise itself as the acts of a minority but is condoned, protected and sometimes even organised by the UK policing system.

Murderer Simon Harwood at Ian Tomlinson Inquest

2011-04-05T11:32:00.000+01:00

What we've learnt from Simon Harwood's testimony so far: after leaving the van he had been assigned to drive for no reason, he spent the day wandering around looking for a fight with an enthusiasm to rival the most sporting Black Bloc member.

Before he even saw Ian Tomlinson he had smashed a protester's head into a van door, knocked a BBC cameraman (he 'didn't see' the camera) to the ground and hit someone in the shoulder for asking to leave the cordon. his confusion led him to believe that protesters were throwing things (not caught on camera, strangely) from behind him while he was standing with his back to a building.

Though he was only at the Royal Exchange and was in telephonic communication with the rest of his team, he was too lost to return to the van he should have been looking after. Instead, he joined a roving gang of officers and (!?) dog handlers, looking for a fight.

'Generation Angry'

2011-03-24T15:03:00.001Z

I've started revision in earnest now, so suddenly the desire to blog has returned, sparking massive anxiety about time-wasting and the possibility of failing all my exams. Hell.

New wave of University Occupations
UCL went back into occupation this week, and have been dogged by threats of CCTV monitoring and the punishment of individual students by management. On the positive side they've taken over a fantastic space: a corridor of administrative offices on the ground floor of the South side of the main quad, off Gower Street. If you have a connection with UCL, do protest against the attempt by management to penalise individuals for a collective movement. Sign their petition here, or email the mega-rich provost Malcolm Grant at malcolm.grant@ucl.ac.uk. Rex Knight, UCL's Senior Administrative Officer, is also involved in the legal action be threatened against occupiers: his email is rex.knight@ucl.ac.uk.

Goldsmith University started their occupation of Deptford Town Hall, a particularly swish university administrative building near New Cross Station, on Monday night. Send them messages of support to

And SOAS went into occupation last night in the Faber Building off Russell Square. SOAS management are already moving in to threaten and undermine their actions: Donald Beaton, Registrar and Secretary, just sent round a universal mail to staff and students promising to kick the occupation out asap- the legality of this move is still to be established. If you have a SOAS link, email him to say you support the occupation at his email available on the SOAS site to current staff or students. Follow this occupation on Twitter @soasoccupation .

Why the new actions?
Well, lecturers and teachers in UCU have been on strike this week to protect their pensions. Younger lecturers and those with no pension plans as yet stand to lose up to £350,000 over their retirement according to proposed changes. I was on the picket lines in Russell Square on Tuesday where it was great to see students and lecturers showing solidarity for each other, which is essential for either to succeed in their campaigns.
Meanwhile, although we didn't succeed in stopping the law being passed allowing universities to charge up to £9,000 fees per year, it is imperative to keep up the pressure on the management of universities, who still have a choice as to how far they bump up their fees- and we have already seen from Manchester, Liverpool, Imperial, Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Exeter and even Essex that most universities won't balk at demanding the massive sum, and are not interested in any attempt to demand funding from the government, not from the nation's 18-year-olds. So it up to students and lecturers to act now!

Cosmopolitan and the Credit Crunch.
I know, I should just not buy it. But sometimes I just don't want to read about Japanese theatre on the train. I want to read Beyonce's Super-Sexy Rules of Seduction. ('Mix it up, surprise him, change your hair - be the woman he knows with a little bit of a twist.' So now you know- I just saved you £4.)
Well, there's a massive great recession on and young women are among those hit hardest, with youth unemployment at nearly 1/4 (not to mention all the job-seekers coming next year who can't afford university). Even Cosmo picked up on something in the air, translated into Gal-Mag language as 'We are Generation Angry!', a new series 'designed to address the problems you are facing'. 'Cosmo takes action', the four-page spread screamed at me.
On the first page they spoke to five young women about why they are so darn angry.

Lauren went to uni for three years, got herself into a lot of debt and still couldn't find the job she wanted.
Name withheld did an MA, since which she has completed 3 unpaid internships, and made it through 4 intense recruitment processes, only to find the companies had introduced 'recruitment freezes'.
Jess had to do a degree to become a youth worker, but half-way through has realised there are hardly any jobs.
Charlotte works nights in a 'dead-end minimum wage job', after graduating last year a fully-qualified social worker. 'What am I £25,000 in debt for?' she wonders?
Theresa pays a fortune on rent and the bank won't give her a mortgage as she has no credit history and no permanent contract at her job.

Obviously, these young women do not represent a fair cross-section of society. That, and the strong possibility that all of these women are the imaginative creation of a Cosmo features writer aside, it is immediately clear from their stories what their worries are and what they are angry about. MONEY, and specifically student debt. Also precarious housing and the abysmal job market. Just like the rest of Generation Angry! Just like ME! I'm in a rush to turn over the page now, to see how the 'Cosmo Task Force' [seriously] solves their problems. Should they strike? March on Westminster? Smash up Millbank? Hardest of all for a Cosmo reader, stop shopping at TopShop?

Sadly not. Here is a summary of the Action Points provided by the Task Force to the Angry Young Women.

'Do something you love.... Doing this will keep your mood high and work miracles for your confidence.'
'Challenge the world around you... Challenge the idea that a woman's value lies in her ability to attract a man...By taking the time to do this, you will begin to define what's important to you.'
'Busy your mind... When we're not fulfilling our potential, it can affect our self-esteem and make it hard to know what we want in life.'
'Look outwards... at what you can give to others.'
'See people who make you feel good... whether it's making time to meet a friend for a drink, or calling your mum.'

Well, I tested this so you don't have to (that's what we do, here at shareorshelve) and I found that when I had followed all five action points, I still actually had a ginormous student debt, and no one would give me a mortgage! Freaky. Mind you, I'm not sure I understood point 4. (Outwards where? The garden?)

Funny how a magazine like Cosmo can pick up on the genuine anger currently felt by a whole generation, and twist it into a self-congratulatory, semi-spiritual, badly worded list of garbage. Mystifies me every time.

See you Saturday
It looks like Saturday's TUC anti-cuts demo is going to be massive. Rumour say the police are preparing for half a million. Also, the weather forecast is good (hurray!) so we can all have a jolly picnic, which will greatly reduce the effectiveness of kettling as a punitive tool. See you there- at 10.30 from Malet Street if you're a student.

2011-01-05T15:18:00.001Z

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Wednesday, 24th November 2010: Kettled in Whitehall

2010-11-26T08:33:00.000Z

I will be extending this report of horrific police actions on Wedsnesday's fees and EMA demo to include commentary later on: I desperately needed to get the facts down as I remembered them straight away.

12.30: Left work at Tottenham Court Road. Phone L. She was leaving Trafalgar Square ‘with the march’ to walk down Whitehall. Had expected ‘carnival’ in Trafalgar Square to last longer so hurry down Charing Cross Road.

12.45: Can see end of march in Whitehall. Lots of police vans moving around and parked (esp. down New Scotland Yard) but mood seems fine. Caught up with marchers (around 8,000?) and meet L by Cenotaph. Police vans following us about 50 yards behind.

1.00: March comes to a standstill. Most of marchers young: sixth formers from local/ London boroughs. I am at this point near the back of the march, outside Red Lion Pub I see my other friends. (This is when the kettle actually begins: from this moment no one goes in or out. But I’m not really aware of this at this time.

1.10: Police vans come to stop behind us. Assume we are going to be held for about an hour and let into Parliament Square slowly, as had happened the week before due to the big numbers/ police protection of Parliament Square.

2.00 Realise we are being kettled. Had thought this was no longer allowed before 5pm. Vans now closed across road behind us just this side of Cenotaph and across the entrance to Parliament Square. Heavy police lines in front of vans including on side road with arches and near Parliament entrance, holding visored helmets and shields. At this point, Red Lion pub still open for business. Loads of journalists. Speak to BBC Radio London.

One van, of different size and type to any other police vehicle I saw that day (strange if not distinctly suspicious?), left in the middle of the road. Young people already climbing on it. Hanging around and feel cold.

2.30: Asked two police officers why we are being kettled. There’s around 6000 in the square, I would guess about 60 or 70% are under 18.
Me: Why are we being kettled?
PO: What’s kettling? We don’t know that term.
Other PO: Yeah, we don’t recognise that term.
Me: Well, can we get out?
PO: You can’t get out here. We’re not letting anyone out here. [Parl. Sq. Side].
Me: Can we get out at all? [have already checked on Traf.Sq. side of kettle]
PO: Over there, maybe. [Points to Traf. Sq. Side.]
Me: They said the same thing over there.
PO: I’m sure there’s ways out around the sides.
Me: This is a kettle!
PO: No, it’s not.
Me: A teapot?
PO: Well, since you two are obviously such nice girls [!] we’ll let you out.
At this point, we decide that talking to coppers is futile. Obviously we can’t leave our friends, and since they’re not going to let all of us out we return to our friends, disheartened.

3.00 Café next to Red Lion doing roaring trade. Friend gets coffee after queuing for about half an hour. Police van has now been graffitied and lights broken. Its incongruous presence in the road does not seem like an accident given the extreme care with which the police operation appears to have been planned. How did it get forgotten? Press, who are freely allowed in and out of the kettled zone all day, are going crazy taking pictures of a few masked youths standing on top of it. At least 10 professional looking camera-people.

4.00 It’s getting dark. Fires made of placards are lit: people are trying to keep warm. Many young people are trying to get out. For a while it seems that some of them are getting out one by one by the south side of the road, Traf. Sq. end, but so many people are crowded around the queues, sometimes chanting ‘Let us out’, that it’s impossible to see if they are really going or not. Certainly, crowd is not thinning noticeably.

Kids are playing games: Hokey Cokey and the Conga, to stay warm. Singing songs. We hear Abba and Lady Marmelade.Clearly, these are not professional revolutionaries.

4.30: Everyone now thinks we can get out on the south, Traf. Sq side. People rush towards it, crying ‘Let us out’. I and my friends are crushed towards the police lines, a couple of metres from the police in a crowd 8 metres deep that spans the whole width of the road. Police have done nothing to control this crowd or make it safe. We advise the young people around us to links arms or they risk being trampled. This is an extremely dangerous situation. A young girl is helped up by a friend and me. She is from Kent, has got the train in this morning with 50 others, whom she has lost. She is 16 and about 5’4”. People are pushing and falling.

Over people’s heads in the crowd, I can now see that it is impossible that we get out this end. On the other side of the Eastern police lines, I can see people and police running, 200m down Whitehall. Police on horses are following. Hope that they are at least older than this lot, who are increasingly scared.

5.00: Around this time, we can see that a second kettle is being set up. There must be around 1000 police just in my proximity, all in riot gear, and at least 30 police vans visible. I can see the horses patrolling the other kettle, coming up against the crowd, then falling back again repeatedly. I hear a deep boom several times, a very strange, loud sound, but I don’t know what it is. Goodness knows what this horrific day is costing the tax-payer. One or two people somehow get through from the second kettle. They tell us the police are being extremely violent down there.

6.00: Sitting on the floor, freezing cold. All I have had to eat or drink since 12.30 (in fact, since breakfast at 8am) is a coffee and a small amount of chocolate. We have 500ml of water between 9 people. My friend who has a long-term health condition is lying on the floor. The young girl from Kent who joined us is terrified and has not eaten or drunk anything all day.

On the Parliament Sq. side of the kettle, the police rush forward and surround their van. They push it out of the kettled area. It seems the press are done taking photos of it. The police line at some point pulls back from the area where the van had been to the borders of Parliament Sq. again.

7.00 We ask again if we can leave, politely, and are told ‘no’. One of my friends has asked at every police line, every hour, for the whole day. The responses have all been sarcastic and rude: ‘Try over there’ etc. Kids are begging the police ‘I just wanna go home’

7.30 A rumour comes around that under 16’s are being let out. We take the 16-year-old girl to the police and say she is unwell. They eventually take her over the fence, but when we ask if she will be released we are told that she will be treated by a medic. A police medic leads her away. Two portaloos are set up behind police lines. You have to queue to use them, and then ask a police officer, who accompanies you to the cabin. Many men have set up a less complex toilet system, using one corner of the road to urinate. There is urine streaming for metres around.

8.00: Thank goodness, there is a sound system now near us. We dance because we have to move to keep warm. We are not as badly off as the younger kids, many of whom are wearing miniskirts and thin tights, or hoodies but no coats. Things seem to have died down in the second kettle.

Some kids push a door near us and climb over railings, trying to get out. Instantly riot police run in, raising their batons to the kids that surround them.

8.30: We join the queue forming at the north side of the road, where some people appear to be being let out along the north side of the road towards Downing Street. Again, it’s a crush, not a queue. I try to stay with my friends but am quickly separated from most of them. People are pushing, screaming, crying.

9.30: Still in queue, 1.5 metres from front. Police at front tell us (500 people at least, if not 1000), that no one will be let out this way any more: we must leave by a different exit. Some try to push out, some try to move forward, some to stand still. It’s a very dangerous situation again. One other queue has formed in a different part of the kettle but there’s no evidence that it’s moving. Police lines have moved forward from the Parliament Sq side, a small amount of traffic is now moving through the Charles Street arches and into the square. I feel extremely angry.

The woman with the serious health condition is in front of me, crushed by the people. She begs an officer (#2383, 5’7”, short/shaven light brown hair, light blue eyes) to let her out as her condition makes it very likely she will collapse or faint in the crowd. She has already collapsed once during the day. He refuses her help. She asks for a medic. Again he refuses.

When I start calling his number and pleading with him to let just this one, sick woman out, he pretends to ignore me. Eventually he turns towards me. I say I will take his number and make a formal complaint. He says ‘How am I supposed to get just her out?’ (She is in about the fourth row by now). The crowd opens and helps her out, despite the crush. My friend is finally helped away. Ten minutes after her request. No one goes with her and I am very concerned that she fall as she leaves. As I make a note of the number, either this officer or his neighbour to my right says ‘Well, with two of our colleagues in hospital, we don’t feel very sympathetic to sick protesters.’

10.30: I am finally allowed through in a group of four. I am escorted 50m by some police, then made to queue up. I presume this is to be photographed, and is what has made everything so slow. As I walk down Whitehall, there are loads of police and police vans all the way to Trafalgar Sq. Police jeer at me as I walk: ‘You look nice and warm’ and ‘See you next time’. After 10 hours, I can go home.

All times are approximate and events may not have happened in exactly this order. This is a true version of the events as I experienced them. Others may have read the changing situations differently. But I doubt it.

Middle-claaass?

2010-11-16T20:15:00.000Z

Actually, in the wake of the Millbank demonstration, and in the current climate of extreme confusion, largely sparked by the Daily Mail, as to what constitutes middle-class-ness, and the uncatalogued mish-mash of alleged symptoms varying from sending your children to private school to never turning your fork over, even for the most slippery sweetcorn, to long Estuary vowels, to a weakness for neurosis, piano lessons and dirty sex, it has occurred to me that an update on Jarvis Cocker's legendary definition might finally be in order.

She told me that her Dad was loaded/
I said "In that case I'll have a rum and coca-cola,"/
She said "Fine."

I have therefore developed my own fool-proof three-part questionnaire in order to identify those elusive middle-classes. Piloted on students at Wednesday's demonstration, (where 99% of students polled answered Yes to two or fewer questions) it has never failed me yet. Just grab your guinea-pig by his white collar and ask him:

1. Do you call it a napkin?
2. Do you control the means of production?
3. Do you have a job?

To be definitely middle-class you must answer Yes to three out of three questions. If you only answer two correctly, you may be middle-class, but you are probably not. Even if instead of working in a coal-mine or a call-centre you are an over-educated part-time teacher with a blog and an olive tree in a pot that you bought at Columbia Road Market, you probably need to think very carefully about your status and your relation to the forces that run this country. And then snap your Macbook shut, tie up your Converse trainers and get marching.

Wednesday's demonstration: all in it together

2010-11-12T22:26:00.000Z

I thought we would be late. I thought it would all be over. I was working till 12.30 on Wednesday and my brother and I raced down Oxford Street, hoping to catch the tail-end of the demonstration. As two confirmed old students (possibly for life) we knew we had to be there, but had no great hopes that it would be well-attended, especially after the first few anti-cuts demonstrations, which mostly consisted of left activists trying to give each other leaflets in a desultory manner.

In fact, the demonstration was fantastic. As we came into Trafalgar Square, people were still pouring off the coaches, running past Nelson's column to join what I can only describe as the throng. The sun shone down on thousands of innocent upturned faces, people of all ages (and, I would argue, social class... on which, more later) innocent upturned faces singing to the heavens:

Build a bonfire/ build a bonfire/
Put the Tories on the top/
Put the Lib-Dems on the middle/
And then burn the fucking lot.

Songs they must have learnt at their mothers' knee, and which, presumably, their mother had hoped they would never need to sing.

Because while many of the crowd were young striplings or doddery lecturers, or quiet, hard-working researchers and workers from somewhere in between, the mood was not at all sweet and restrained. These were intelligent people demonstrating how extremely, passionately and doggedly angry they were. Yes, it was a peaceful march, and the officious NUS stewards commanded (probably too much, as they were a bit too moronic for my liking) a teacher-like authority over the kids. Police presence was the lowest I've ever seen it and the most outré act of rebellion was the flash-mob-inspired Mexican-wave-style cat-call that occasionally soared along Whitehall. But don't for a moment confuse 'peaceful' with 'accepting' or 'weak'. The kids were as angry as I've seen anyone since the beginning of the Iraq War.

And this is the lie propagated by the media, propounded by the government, and vomited all over us by the filthy Labour careerist Aaron Porter, and I hope it is a lie that stinks so badly that Porter can never wash it off his hands and the students who came out on Wednesday never forget the betrayal. And that they then tell their friends on Facebook and other social networking sites. The lie of the 'violent minority'. The lie of the qualitative difference between the 19-year-olds in the I Love Justin Bieber t-shirts and the 24-year-olds with the black kerchiefs tied around their faces. The lie that 'a peaceful protest was spoilt'. The lie that led to 14 injured activists, 32 arrests and will surely lead on to well-publicised prosecutions of those unlucky enough to still be defending the almost certainly unplanned occupation of Millbank Tower after the sun went down and the riot police turned angry.

Because in fact we were all there because we were full of rage. There's not one way of demonstrating where we all pick flowers, share a roll-up and go home to write our essays, and another where black-clad anarchists plot weeks before the event in secret cellars to spray-paint Tory Scum onto precious private property. Fact is, this is a war. Of course, it's only an opening battle in a war that might never really get started. We know not to get our hopes up every time the newspapers declare a winter of discontent, but if we are serious about combatting state violence against the poor, in the form of attacks on their health, their housing and their access to education, we must unite.

I don't know if the Millbank occupation was a great idea or not (or at least, I'm unwilling to fully commit myself on this point in case my boss reads this blog - oh, go on then, it was pretty cool) but I know that the people united will be defeated rather less often and rather less painfully, and that those 50,000 people shared a common goal: to protect education for the gold-mine it is, not as a stripped-down, efficient and competitive cash-cow. (It must be noted here that the march filled out both sides of Whitehall, and that before I arrived in Parliament Square my father was passing the Tate Modern, so 50,000 strikes me as an underestimation. But what do I know?) (Also, on the word 'efficient', more later.)

Not all of them were politically-conscious or left-wing or, heaven forfend, revolutionary enough to be specifically the kind of dream left-wing activist I see when I close my eyes and fantasise about a future society. The Daily Mail, black-cab drivers' read of choice, claims they were 'middle-class'. One youth had a placard with 'Nick Clegg! You promised!' daubed on it in a plaintive kind of way. He wasn't the only one disappointed with the results of his first ever general election: others cried 'Clegg, Clegg, shame on you/ Shame on you for turning blue!' There were loads of Lib-Dems in evidence, and their sense of betrayal was heart-breaking. Some students held signs asking to keep the cap, rather than scrap the fees. Others were mere school-kids with their uniform still on, including a bright spark (hopefully a future prime-minister) clutching a life-size cardboard cutout of David Cameron with a penis felt-tipped onto his forehead. (Compare with rather more intellectually-minded placard reading 'Try breaking this sign, Nick Robinson, you meretricious wanker,' and you learn something about the richness of British student culture as represented on Wednesday)

Well, much of what I saw on Wednesday was seen and reported by other, faster writers, but some things need noting.

1. I didn't realise it until afterwards, but we were effectively kettled for a long time. As crowds swelled on Whitehall, police stopped the entrance to Parliament Square. This was about 2pm, the same time the first randoms wandered into the Tory party headquarters. As I said, there were hardly any police on the march, and it was obvious they had planned the whole thing extremely badly. As the first rumours of an occupation filtered back to us, we stood immobile for over an hour in the middle of a docile mass of people, with the way forward blocked by a small number of police. Nobody complained. (I did, but only when I and M both ran out of cigarettes). The police had panicked about the situation on Millbank, and blocked us off in order to control the situation. Kettling, since the Tomlinson murder, has been restricted and would not have been allowed at this time of day, but just blocking the march at one end, probably almost as dangerous, is fine.

We weren't informed of what was going on, and it's a testimony that the demonstration was peaceful to a fault and angry to a considerable degree because the people neither pushed, nor became unruly, nor turned back up to Trafalgar Square to go home, but merely stood and waited, and waited, and waited. And when at last they were allowed to move foward, a trickle at a time, they continued in an orderly manner along Millbank to support the occupation. The people around us were determined to complete the march even though the stewards were chanting 'make your way home' and the rally had been called off. Apart from some cute ones, who attempted a sit-in outside Parliament.

2. Around this point in time (maybe 3pm) the police really panicked. We were walking calmly down Millbank when we were barged by about 30 officers, the same ones who had been staunching the protest into Westminster Square, as they ran headlong towards the Tory headquarters like frightened rabbits. 'They've set the Tory headquarters on fire!' someone shouted, and we smiled affectionately at the terrified coppers staggering forward to do their duty. Bless their hearts.

By the time any riot police turned up, we had made it as far as Lambeth Bridge. Instead of swinging left to where the Tower loomed, less than a hundred yards away, the three police vans turned right towards Parliament and roared into the crowds at at least 30 miles an hour, hooting and wailing while people scattered out of their path. I don't know if their GPS wasn't working or if they wanted to scare any kids into going home, but I suspect the latter. Riot police, huh. When I lived in France and we were marching to save the teacher training porgramme, we used to chant

On veut notr' CAPES/
Pour pas finir CRS.

(We want our PGCE/ So we don't end up working for the riot police)

They're pretty similar the world over, it seems, like stupider Daleks drunk on violence. A metaphor for the state itself that never becomes any less ironic. The stewards were silly, the police were stupid, the riot police were waiting. I had to leave for work at 5, and I knew the 'violence' so widely-reported would never kick off while I was there. Wait till the kids and the older people and the prams go home. Wait until it gets dark. Thing is, no one went home. And that, in my opinion, is why 'battles raged' for so long. The police wanted the majority to go home so they could put their training into use, the crowd were feeling a heady mixture of curiosity and solidarity. And it's the only way to stop this kind of violence: stick around. The batons come out when the kids go home. When I left, several thousand were still camped solidly below the Tower. 'Tory Scum! Tory Scum!' Well, they are scum. So what do you expect?

3. It was a really good, successful, nice demonstration. We stood in front of Millbank watching the flags being hung over the side of the building, and we felt optimistic. People, newbies and well-seasoned activists alike, were saying 'Isn't this great?' to each other. All kinds of people.

It's been widely reported how diners in the ground floor Pizza Express at Millbank Tower kept eating through the whole thing: well, as I stood outside the door, a middle-aged Asian couple waited patiently for the waiter to unlock the door to let them leave, and the woman gave me the brightest smile as she trotted off into the middle of the crowd. This at the same point in the afternoon that protesters are alleged to have been 'hurling missiles'. And in exactly the same spot. Neither the couple, nor the waiter, attempted to use an alternative exit, but instead opended the door directly onto the semi-circle court that was the epicentre of the alleged violence. Threatening? I don't think so.

Please don't call it a Dole

2010-06-17T11:59:00.001+01:00

I finished my last exams, I handed in my last essays. I drank my last glasses of piss-poor rosé wine in the ambient settings of my union bar. I was free: fully trained in French and English after four years of carefree esoteric literary analysis and ready to launch myself and my multitude of transferable skills onto the unsuspecting Real World. My next move? I went to the Job Centre to get myself a job.

My first attempt was abortive. In the elegant settings of Stratford Job Centre Plus, where the security guards almost outnumbered the patiently waiting claimants, I queued for ten minutes in order to be given a very badly photocopied A4 sheet with 'Information for New Claimants'. Go home, I was told, and ring this number. (By the way, we call it Job Seeker's Allowance now. Whatever else it is, it is not a dole.) Darn, I don't come all the way to Stratford for fun, you know. You can sign on from the comfort of your own home? You guys should advertise this shit. Everyone would want some.

Got home, put my pyjamas on, made a cup of tea, rang the number. The initial recorded messages were scary and vaguely threatening, listing the huge piles of paperwork I would be required to complete and sign to remain eligible for my £65 a week. I took my pyjamas off and put on a suit and tie. I had finished polishing my brogues by the time a human picked up ten minutes later. I stood to attention while he briefly ran me through the most important aspects of the claim. What was my mobile network? Did I know that T-Mobile was very kindly cooperating with Job Centre Plus to offer me this phone call free of charge? Well, if it hadn't been free I would probably have been cut off already. Perhaps Job Centre Plus and T-Mobile should coalesce to let Job Seekers know this at some point during the first 12 minutes of the call? Good old T-Mobile. Are they hiring?

[T-Mobile PAYG rates from their website- To other mobiles & landlines (01, 02, 03, excluding Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle Of Man) 25p a minute]

Back to business. This phone call may take up to 45 minutes. Do you still want to pursue your claim? Er, yeah, don't mind if I do, thanks. I have no income, so.... It was a test. I passed. I'm hungry for it.

There followed an extremely probing interview. Had I ever lived outside of the UK? What exactly was my final Student Loan payment? How much money did I have in my home at this moment? I looked in my purse and under the mattress. About £6.72, but I haven't checked the sofa cushions or counted the 1p and 2p jar. Did I own property that I didn't live in to a value of more than £60,000? I patiently checked the mattress again for any unnoticed title deeds. How many years had I been at my current address? What were my reasons for claiming Job Seeker's Allowance? He was a nice man, and well-trained. After every set of five questions he remembered to test me again. You may be eligible for... pause while his computer works it out... Job Seeker's Allowance. Do you still want to pursue your claim? Well, I've started, so I'll finish. Then I can, like, buy food and stuff.

42 minutes into the telephone interview, he seemed to register defeat. Apparently I was going to pursue my claim and insist on going forward to the next stage of Benefit Crystal Maze, no matter how many questions they asked me. My next step was an interview (what had I just done? A flirtation over cocktails?) at my local Job Centre Plus, which was... long pause... Stratford. I was in! (This process has an extra layer of interest due to the number of vintage John le Carré novels I've read since finishing university, which means that during most encounters with bureaucracy I start imagining I'm in Cold War Czechoslovakia and that whatever they ask me, I mustn't tell them about the microfilm or they'll bust the rest of my clandestine agent network.)

I'm booked in to go to Stratford the next morning. I must bring my P60, P45, anything else beginning with P that I can find, passport, a letter from my university, a letter from the Student Loan Company, two proofs of address, bank details, my CV, dog licence, three pairs of shoes, an elastic band, the microfilm (damn! They just slipped it in there!) and an absolute, unbreakable, and proveable resolution to look for and find work. Bye honey, let's do it again sometime. Maybe next time I have the audacity to demand the trifling cushion from abject poverty for which I have made ten years of National Insurance payments? Goodbye Ms Grahl, and by the way... do you still want to pursue your claim?

NEXT: Pursuing my Claim

No money for ESOL in Tower Hamlets

2010-06-03T13:46:00.000+01:00

Interesting to see that a year after the strike by ESOL teachers and users to protect the absolutely vital adult English learning sertvice provided in Tower Hamlets, jobs offered on the Tower Hamlets College website are as follows:

Current Vacancies:

Job Title! Salary Reference Closing Date

Head of Faculty for Foundation Learning c. £48-50k plus final salary pension 2801 Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - 17:00

Head of Information Services c. £50k plus final salary pension IS01 Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - 17:00

Director of Business Enterprise c.£70k plus final salary pension PC09 Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - 17:00

Head of Financial Services Skills Academy c.£46-48k plus final salary pension 5501 Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - 17:00

Vacancy - Chair of the Board £Voluntary CB2010 Friday, June 11, 2010 - 12:00

Find out how to apply for one of these vacancies...

Job Title!	Salary	Reference	Closing Date
Head of Faculty for Foundation Learning	c. £48-50k plus final salary pension	2801	Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - 17:00
Head of Information Services	c. £50k plus final salary pension	IS01	Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - 17:00
Director of Business Enterprise	c.£70k plus final salary pension	PC09	Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - 17:00
Head of Financial Services Skills Academy	c.£46-48k plus final salary pension	5501	Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - 17:00
Vacancy - Chair of the Board	£Voluntary	CB2010	Friday, June 11, 2010 - 12:00

So it seems there is money for Senior Management, if not to provide essential English teaching services for a borough where fifty six per cent of the population belong to an ethnic group other than white British and more people speak English as a second language than almost any other London area.

Modern Myth continued

2009-12-30T13:38:00.000Z

Face-Paint

Women have always painted their faces. Nowadays, they are bombarded by adverts calling for the constant renewal of the contents of their make-up bags. Magazines suggest completely new products every 3 to 9 months. Designer prices for Chanel lipstick and Dior concealers are through the roof.

In the past, the message behind make-up was simple. If you wore make-up, you would attract the man you needed for financial and emotional security. Since feminism brought women into the workplace and reduced their direct reliance on men, a new myth has had to be constructed around the same old products: a new need has been created for make-up that makes them look not only young, sexy, pretty and attractive, but now also appears professional, hard-working and capable.

Advertising now works in several ways: the same old products are being rebranded to seem as though they have been entirely transformed by twenty- and-twenty-first century advances in science. Bewildering graphics show women the magical properties of foundation that ‘works with’ pores and ‘matches’ the colour of complexions, mascara that ‘rolls across’ lashes to give ‘infinite length’ and ‘divine cover’. L’Oreal promises ‘Professional make-up’, the amazingly expensive and popular MAC offers ‘Artistry and technology’.

The message is that women have become free, nowadays, and the myth hides the fact that the degree of sexual and working equality genuinely achieved has been counterposed by ‘choice’- consumer power instead of real power. The enormous cosmetics industry is working desperately to hide any unconscious memories of little girls playing with face paint, or of mothers and grandmothers covering their faces to become sexual objects, and has put a new meaning into mascara wands. Building on make-up’s transformative powers, they have simply replaced the previous goals; purity, femininity - or even old-fashioned vampiness - with new ones. Make-up now ‘works’ to make women eternally youthful and ‘blemish-free’, and even to emphasize women’s ‘working qualities’ i.e. that they are ‘still on the sexual market’ and still able to ‘play at being a man’ at work, rather than wasting time having babies, dealing with the menopause etc.

The cosmetics industry is thus using the anxiety caused by the backlash against second-wave feminism, an anxiety tied up with the socially constructed problems of ‘having it all’, to lure women away from continuing the fight for equality, and simultaneously to limit this fight to something achievable by individuals through conspicuous consumption. This anxiety has gradually led to a new attitude that one can be taken seriously and still look pretty these days: let’s forget all that nonsense about burning bras and buy into the new construction of independence. Make-up has a new image as both ‘fun’ and ‘authoritative’ which, despite appearing to empower women, actually props up the status quo’s congenital gender inequalities and undermines the confidence it appears to give women.

Women are shown to have seized science and technology, and made it work for them in the form of ever more ‘advanced’ cosmetics. Of course, where women’s equality is tied up with taking an area of a men’s world and turning it to their own, gender-specific, even sexualised, use, they are quite clearly still in the harem.

While the new, scientific mask of make-up advertising encourages the ‘working woman’ aspect of the new, conflicted myth of femininity to identify with consumption, the make-up myth also stifles our creative sides. Just like women’s scientific know-how is undermined by the mumbo-jumbo on their make-up packets, their creative impulse is drowned in the game of putting on face paint, and the importance of creation is drowned beneath a wave of beauty myth make-believe. Make-up has long been worn by both genders in a variety of different situations, so the logic which now proclaims that it is not congenitally sexist does have a basis in truth. The face-paint itself is not the problem, but the new myth that has been constructed around it can only deepen the chasm between male and female and cheapen any struggle for a serious reassessment of gender stereotyping and across-the-board equality for both sexes.

Modern Myth

2009-12-16T19:46:00.000Z

Ben suggested I add the disclaimer 'I'm not really mental' to the following essays... I feel that would probably be a waste of time but do hasten to explain that I was trying to compose a 'Mythologie' in the style of Roland Barthes. (Baby Josh's Christmas present has now been named Roland.)

In 'Mythologies', Barthes deconstructs what he sees as modern myths: in brief, these are socially constructed signs where an object or phenomenon has had a new meaning, one that may differ from or even be opposite to its literal meaning, added to it to perform a specific purpose. In the book this purpose tends to be to shore up the psychological and cultural reign of the bourgeoisie. It's very fun. You should read it.

But yes, in throwing myself wholeheartedly into this fun new game, I may have strayed somewhat away from my own beliefs and opinions. Still, see how it goes as can't be bothered to edit...

Next essay to follow shortly.

Urban Cycling
Since the election of the first mayor of London in 2000, encouraging cycling has aimed as much to reduce pressure on the overcrowded roads and railways of the capital as to aid a more global carbon conscious eco-friendly drive. The role of the mayor in London has been to create a new, smaller political world where citizens feel loyalty to their city, not to the ever more confusingly globalised national government.
Over the last nine years, cycling has been touted to us as healthy, good for our hearts, great for our carbon footprint, marvellous for our pockets, and on the whole, a fantastic way for an individual to contribute to the well-being of the city in general, while materially benefitting him/herself.
New cycle lanes, cycle networks, special traffic lights and thousands of locking devices have sprung up across the capital, complemented by reams of information for cyclists, maps, signs and even clubs to cycle safely en masse around town. A mini-industry in locks, helmets, reflective jackets and on-the-spot repairs is visible even in those parts of town formerly seen as the provinces of ‘yuppies’- the West End, the City and the Canary Wharf area. Of course, to get the cycle maps you have to write to Transport for London, which seems to rather contradict the rebranding of cycling as a mass form of transport in competition with the tube or the motor-car.
So why this sudden interest in a mode of transport that was first designed in the 1860s and for years seen as used only by those too poor to afford a car?
This skeleton of metal resembles a joke of a man-made machine, one that has not undergone any major changes for the last 150 years, never having been improved into any revolutionarily new shape or form. The multi-passenger bicycle rickshaws used in Asia seem very unlikely to catch on as anything other than a novelty in London. When compared with the car, the one-person bike seems feeble. But it is key to the urban bicycle that it is a feeble machine, one that is perfectly counter-balanced to the amount of human leg-power put into it. Calling chiefly on man’s greatest, and oldest, invention - the wheel - its spindly frame is often the same size and weight as the human riding it. Human and mechanised power are thus in perfect tandem.
So the bicycle, unlike any other form of transport, is perfectly streamlined to remain paralysed in history at a time when man and machine represented the perfect dialectic, when one had not yet shown sign of precedence, of greater strength or efficiency over the other, when a machine was something that made work easier rather than doing it for the individual. Now that society separates us from machines, from industry and the source of our wealth, the bicycle still stands for a two-way connection between man and machine while other forms of transport enclose us to emphasise our alienation from the source of power, the means of mobility, and thus from the entire outside world.
Most new cyclists will cite London’s eco-friendly transportation drive as being behind the thousands getting on their bikes. But while the new eco-mythology fools people into thinking they are doing their bit for the planet completely independently, the cycle revolution is not merely a direct reaction to problems with the environment. When you use one of the forms of larger, fully mechanised transport, you are voluntarily giving away power over yourself and your life to an engine. By choosing less environmentally damaging public transport, such as buses or trains, you are investing this same security in the hands of a public-private institution. Suddenly – and this coincided with the bicycle revolution – we do not hold the same confidence that we used to in such government-designed, business-powered institutions. As belief in self-controlling institutions that act in the public’s best interest becomes a thing of the past following the wobble of the 'credit crunch' and the country’s national politicians desperately slamming on the brakes to try and stop the City going into free-fall, a new autonomy of action is being marketed to us by the ruling bourgeoisie, an autonomy that has about as much power as a free-wheeling bike on a very small incline.
The first two mayors of London have invested a lot of time and money in getting cyclists on the streets. Now the ruling powers in the form of local authorities are taking this power back off all but the most dedicated cyclists, the cyclists who always cycled for simple reasons of poverty and efficiency. Now the myth that London authorities are cycle-friendly has been completely established, the counter-attack begins. New arguments are arising about sky-high accident rates, easily broken when one thinks that increases in cycling accidents are only in line with increases in cyclists, cyclists cause less than 1% of injuries to pedestrians and that in the past 8 years in London a cyclist has not killed a single person.
Westminster’s scrutiny committee recently claimed that “We’re always getting little old ladies who are knocked down and abused by a cyclist, who leaves them on the ground as they ride away.” Councils and the Metropolitan police have united to fine cyclists who jump red lights, who ride without lights at night, or who ride on the pavement. Not only is this new policy of on-the-spot-fines scaring naive new cyclists back onto public transport, but it is negating the myth that urban cycling is the transport of the future. Bicycles are getting in the way of the all-important tax-paying motorists who buy the country’s petrol, and must therefore be discouraged privately though encouraged publicly.
The myth of urban cycling is that it represents a form of progress in human relations with each other and the world while in reality, despite its numerous personal benefits in a city whose public transport is as erratic as it is expensive, it marks a regression in terms of effective transport systems that serve the people of London.

Textualisation

2009-12-06T15:33:00.000Z

Gardiner expressed surprise that I use predictive text because apparently it is really long and annoying and difficult. I said it wasn't, at all, really, but today I noticed just how many times it has let me down it the three months that I've had this phone.

Just for ABC...
abergavenny
blog
cardiff (clearly Sony Ericsson have a problem with South Wales)
cabaret
c? (i guess c? is not actually a word)
bagel
calais
camden
canterbury
barthes (morons!)
beckett (double morons!)
adana (it knows doner though- clearly my phone has no taste in kebabs)
bastards
benno
camberwell
cette
chancery
chanel
charing
cheesecake
cheshire
chiara
chutney
aldersbrook
bleurgh
alexis
bethnal
anglais
bonkers
commie
amour
bordeaux
correspondance
courtauld
crap
brixton
crt
artiste
bruv
auch
buckingham
buffy
budgens
auerbach
bushwood
cuppa
aussi
awesomeness

cwmbran

And now I've broken my new phone and will have to type all this essential vocabulary into a new one.

2009-11-16T14:47:00.002Z

Question- Can you entirely change the value of a council service by changing just one letter in its name? Answer- There is no longer a Children's Play Area in Mile End Park: there is a Children's Play Arena. Actual facilities have not been affected. Go Tower Hamlets Council, the masterminds who have renamed their libraries Idea Stores, their private police force THEOs (they're enhancing your Street Safety, dontcha know?) and rather beautifully adapted the Olympic Park to Olympic Parklands.

Back to school

2009-09-29T17:03:00.003+01:00

‘Trop d'école tue l'école’ Potschke Well I'm sorry it's been so long. I'd like to say that I've been busy, but quite the opposite is true. I have been simultaneously doing very little and living life to the max. It's been wonderful, especially on those rare occasions that the sun shone over Forest Gate this summer. Also, I haven't had a cigarette since the 7th July. Well, I've had like one-and-a-half, but they didn't count. It hasn't been so tough, but I'm finding it very hard to work without smoking. Usually I have a cigarette every 200 words, or whenever I feel I've written something worth writing, or whenever I get tired. Nowadays I write 200 words... then I just stop writing. My My Documents is crammed with things I started working on, vowed to finish, deserted for one second to make a cup of NRT tea, and then abandoned. The time it takes for the kettle to boil is just long enough for me to lose concentration and/or interest. Anyway, if I successfully complete any of these you can look forward to my opinions on everything from abortion to John Le Carré over the coming unspecified time-span. I'm back at university and so blogging will move up my priority list. Summer Holiday Priorities 1. Lie in sunshine 2. Drink Polish beer in sunshine 3. Go camping 4. Watch the Ashes 5. Never get out of bed before noon, if at all 6. Eat 99 Flakes 7. Go to Proms 8. Do very little in Dalston 9- 42. Other activities 43. Blog Term-time Priorities 1. Get up every day 2. Blog 3. Read books unrelated to my course 4. Look at Wikipedia 5. Find a new place to live 6. Spend hours in Drapers slagging off the beer, décor, ambiance, bar-staff 7. Pretend not to do very little in Walthamstow 8. Think about smoking with the cool kids 97. Actual degree-related work I went back to school yesterday. It hadn’t changed much. People at my university tend to be monosyllabic, obtuse and smell of cheap wine, and the students aren’t much better boom boom. I picked up ‘Cub’, our student magazine. It had an expensive-looking new design and was printed on thick, matt, A5 paper. Daring. Inside, among a lot of faked ‘readers-write-in’ features stolen from London’s free papers, was an editorial by Sam Cunningham explaining to those of us who had forgotten why they were at university. Whilst others sit around unemployed worrying about how they’re going to afford to pay the mortgage, you have the opportunity to relax and sit out the worst of the recession, and will be ready to walk into the influx of new jobs when the market picks back up again. There really has never been a better time to be a student and there may well never be another. For your information, Sam Wanker Cunningham, I am at university for three reasons 1. To learn stuff- both the stuff taught on my courses and other stuff. Which I have time and energy to learn because I don’t come home from work exhausted at 7pm every day on a dangerously overcrowded tube train. 2. Because my pre-university job which I loved, although easy enough that an intelligent 12-year-old could have done it (not brilliantly as I did it, but adequately), refused to pay me a living wage unless I got myself a degree. 3. I was terrified that if I left it any longer the fees would go up even more. I’m already paying more than £3000 a year. But mostly number 1 (I’m in a lists mood tonight). ‘Ride out the recession’. Huh. A student living in London can barely pay the rent with their entire maximum yearly loan. Afterwards they must rely on grants, or part-time jobs, or, more likely, on their parents, who are just as affected by the recession as anyone else. At the same time they’re likely to be racking up fees loan of over £10,000 for an undergraduate degree. Cunningham is talking nonsense, which is what I have learnt to expect. Students are poor. Like all poor people, they will suffer during a recession. And it’s painful to hear education dismissed as some kind of investment- we have nothing to invest! Except, like the princess in Rumpelstiltskin, our future first-born-child. Anyway, plenty of people can give you the facts on student poverty and student debt. But I’ve been at university for over three years now, and it breaks my heart that I have yet to come across a decent, well-written article. I used to live with a woman who had been active on her student paper, and like the paper itself she was middle-class, middle-of-the -road, amoral and frankly boring. Call me a snob but that barely surprises me coming from Sussex University. But I don’t know any evil, selfish, reactionary, over-wealthy, flippant spoiled brats at Queen Mary (well, maybe a couple, but they all study Politics) and yet that’s all I see in Cub. These idiots are giving student journalism an even worse name than it already had (and then going on to fuck up the entire media, but you kind of expect that). Student magazines could be almost-censorship free, and where else can that happen? (Except on my blog). Instead, students censor themselves, and student magazines end up not just bland and politically impotent, but also boring, ignorant and offensive to the majority of students who are neither of these things.

Barefaced

2009-07-01T02:07:00.002+01:00

‘But Frances, what exactly were you so upset about last night ? ask Fausto kindly. ‘Huh?’ ‘One minute you were drinking your beer, the next minute you were shouting like a crazy person.’ Ah yes. Sarkozy, of course. We were sitting by the Loire on a rug, drinking cans of Braubergen and watching the river flow past. Enrique asked me what I thought about Sarkozy’s latest cheeky little sound-bite on the burka; I saw red. It took me a long time to work out where I stand on the subject of Muslim women’s dress for two reasons. One is that I grew up in a very Muslim area and went to school with Muslim girls- there I learnt to look at the person behind the headscarf. You have to learn, because on a purely personal level someone with their face covered can be slightly –slightly!- daunting. It’s not very hard, though. In year 9, maybe year 10, half of my school friends began to cover their hair, and a handful started coming to school in head-to-toe black. At the same time I dressed mostly in trousers with holes in them and baggy men’s jumpers. We didn’t make an issue of it. The other reason is that I’m not keen on organised religion and wholeheartedly reject most of the major religions’ customs and rituals. ‘Because God tells me to (through any of His mysterious channels)’ cuts no mustard with me as a reasoning device. In fact, I would rather people didn’t wear the burka, but I would also prefer people not to wear Crocs, especially the trendy new ones in the shape of Mary-Janes, and am often slightly offended by white pedal-pushers, especially in conjunction with white sleeveless shirts. That’s my opinion. I don’t share these opinions with every girl who passes me in the street because my father taught me that my right to swing my fist ends where the other person’s face begins. Also, I don’t care that much. Nicolas Sarkozy has no such reservations, and declared last week in a carefully calculated profile-raising broadcast that ‘The burka is not welcome in the territory of the (French) Republic.’ Super. The man’s simultaneously liberating women and integrating Muslims. Or is he in fact hiding an attack on women in general behind an attack on French people of African and Asian descent? The way people –or, in fact, women- choose to cover their bodies is not a matter for government intervention. Maybe the burka, more and more evident in Western Europe these days, is a symptom of a malaise within Muslim communities, but it should not be a symbol of this malaise. You don’t solve people’s problems by making an issue out of women’s sartorial choices, however misguided. You don’t make people’s lives better by dealing in symbols. ‘It’s not a religious sign, it’s a sign of servitude, of abasement,’ continued Sarko. Well, in that case, there is either a problem of the servitude and abasement of women or there is not. I would argue that there is, and that this problem is not by any means limited to Muslim communities, although I am convinced that it is a serious problem within them, especially among the poor. How do we challenge the second-class status of women, whatever their religion and ethnic origin? By making them change the way they display their bodies? Laurie Penny made some excellent points on the same subject- ‘One of the few things that nearly all nations have in common is ideological control over women's bodies as political territory.’ These days, middle-class white women would probably not stand for such an open attack on the way they choose to dress (although all of us are of course constantly being judged by our clothing and our bodies in barely disguised attacks by the media). Muslim women have perhaps less opportunity to resist such an onslaught, which makes it even more ironic that they should be presented as powerless under the pressure of Muslim men- what’s the difference between a woman’s husband telling her what to wear and Nicolas Sarkozy doing the same? I really love two things about French society, though neither is problem-free. The secular state, and its insistence on keeping religion out of schools, jobs and government, is brilliant. The attitude that if you want to be French you must love France makes sense to me too. Maybe we could replace our bullshit citizenship test (The British Citizenship Test claims that Father Christmas comes from the North Pole- at some point I will write an entire blog on what this means for British society) in the UK with one question - ‘Are you prepared to try to love the place you live? (Often, people with immigrant backgrounds seem to be among the few who really do love the UK.) Of course, the all-encompassing nature of the officially-sanctioned view of French identity leaves very little room for manoeuvre. (Digression: An English social geographer I spoke to last year described his research into migration to France and England from the West Indies. He asked for statistics relating to Jamaicans moving to London and was given the figures he needed. When he asked the French authorities for similar information he was told that the French government did not concern itself with French citizens who chose to move from the French domain of Martinique to the French domain of Ile-de-France. ‘What are the problems involved with this kind of migration?’ he asked. ‘There are no problems,’ came the reply. ‘So we keep no records.’) However, loving your country has very little to do with your personal beliefs on other matters, and secularism has nothing to do with repression, until politicians decide to use it as such. (I had to read Rousseau this year, but no catchy quotes spring to mind, which you will understand if you too have ploughed through Du contrat social. Or maybe I’m a moron. Anyway.) ‘We are not threatened by clericalism,’ continued Sarko. ‘We are threatened by a form of intolerance which stigmatises all religious participation.’ (Intolerance by whom, exactly?) Well-said, but what’s that got to do with the way someone dresses? Yes, there is a school of Muslim fundamentalism that works by putting women in a lower position than men, but in a society which claims to have laws in place to protect gender equality, there is scope to change this. Where existing laws can’t protect women’s right to equality, let’s make some new laws. Let’s try and get poor people living in the cités (urban areas with majority social housing, think La Haine), whether Muslim or not, whether men or women, into better jobs, better education, better social statuses. Let’s get more help for vulnerable women and women who are financially or emotionally reliant on men. Let’s help women (and men) who are victims of physical and psychological abuse. This is the road to better integration for French and immigrant Muslims, and the road to a France where it’s easy to love your country. Do this, and it wouldn’t surprise me if fewer women wanted to wear the burka. And if they don’t, who cares? Ideas for how to stop people wearing Crocs on a postcard please. Fausto nods. ‘You seem a bit calmer today, though.’

Francie takes brief moment from 'real work' to shout at world

2009-06-11T21:55:00.004+01:00

You know what doesn't cost much? Bike ramps on steps. That's what. Then you can have people able to USE their bikes, all around their city (both of these pictures are urban, one in Brussels, one in Tours) Then you get THIS (below). We should also get rid of Boris Johnson.

Psycho-somatic

2009-06-01T00:29:00.004+01:00

I’ve been sick in bed since Friday afternoon with a mild fever and a serious case of self-pity. Other symptoms included a throbbing head-ache, undefined pains all over and disturbingly high (for me!) rage levels. Outside my tiny window the blazing sunshine mocked me as I shivered under my duvet. Finally I had finished my play, handed in my dissertation, been given my grades for the year and I had to start my holiday in bed. I often get sick after long periods of sustained effort, especially when I don’t let my work-load stop me partying. (A maths friend: ‘Eight hours a day, six days a week, for a month? You call that a long period of sustained effort?’ ‘Well, I am taking literature. Things are different for us.’) But personally I blame my sickness on the events of Friday morning, which was when that pain in my stomach set in. (I have such funny, funny buddies in Tours. This one: ‘Sure, Frances always ends up sick in bed when she has to get up before 9am.’ Ok, I know my weaknesses. I’m not cut out for the working world. Point duly noted.) Yes, I had bought my croissant by 9. 15 on Friday. Me and at least 400 other students from Lettres et Langues. We had a rendezvous with Loïc Vaillant, le President of Université François Rabelais. The bastard. If you read this blog (bless your heart) semi-regularly you’ll know that Loïc has already fucked my camarades over good and proper. He effectively broke the strike. He started last month by blackmailing teachers back to work, and carried on by blackmailing students into taking exams. Five weeks ago he and his Conseil d’Administration (French for pack of over-paid bastards) tucked their beer-guts under some meeting-table for long enough to decide that the semester should continue until the 12th June. We all got an email. Screwing. But not much anyone could do about it, and since said Conseil has insists that exams must take place, a necessary(ish) evil. Teachers reacted to the strike being broken by the pragmatic method of attending class, but not teaching. Students, whether pro or anti-strike, have however been forced to spend the last couple of weeks speed-revising a semester they have never been taught. Now this week, a new offensive from Loïc. On the 27th May he emails students- not ALL students, just those in Lettres et Langues (Literature and Modern Languages), although ALL of Arts and Humanities has been blockaded for the same amount of time. NEW SCHEDULE for L&L students- an extra 2 weeks of ‘teaching’ semester, followed by an exam period from the 15th June to the 3rd JULY!!!!! There is no logical reason for this. Two more weeks of term make no difference when teachers are at most pretending to teach. Loïc quoted ‘parents of students’ who were anxious that grades should not be given without due work. Complete bollocks? I think so. Especially since he added that teachers didn’t want students to pass exams they didn’t merit to pass. My arse. The only reason teachers are back at work at all is because they want us to pass exams for which we haven’t studied. This move is a deliberate plot to save face for the university’s academic reputation at the expense of its most vulnerable students. They can no longer punish strikers and pass anti-strikers. What they can and will do, is make it as difficult as possible for any student to actually attend exams, so that when they fail the rest, they can pretend those who passed were the only ones with the requisite academic proficiency. Academic proficiency, I repeat, my arse. Some True Stories

Student A, like many others, gave 3 months’ notice on his flat in March. His parents live in Bordeaux, 250 miles away. If he stays for the exams, he has to find a sofa to crash on- not ideal for revision.
Student B has booked plane tickets to Cuba for herself and her boyfriend for the 1st July. Absolute bargain, only 750€ each, non-refundable. Either she repeats her year, or she misses out on her ‘graduation trip’ and loses her money.
Student C would normally have a couple of weeks holiday between the end of exams and leaving for his summer job, in a hotel in Cannes. (All summer jobs in France start the 1st July, same as the school holidays.) He has signed a contract and his hotel boss refuses to allow him to start his post late. He must choose between exams and two months’ work. He needs the two months’ work because he lives off his grant, 500€ a month, 10 months a year.
Student D has applied for masters programmes in several UK universities. They normally need her grades by the 10th June. Several weeks ago she phoned them up and asked for an extra two weeks to send the grades- three out of four agreed, but grudgingly. The fourth already told her they would not consider her application after that date: now she must phone the others and try to explain.
Student E wants to be an English teacher, and had a placement in a school in Leeds for a month, starting mid-June.
Student F has an interview in Lyon for the teacher-training Concours on the 17th June. Twenty people were selected out of hundreds for the interview stage, and they won’t change dates. However, if she doesn’t pass her exams, she won’t get in either.

Question: Which of the above is going to pass their year? Answer: The one who has (or whose parents have) the most money. Everyone else is going to re-take the year or drop out, with the smug tones of Loïc ‘We gave you the chance to sit the exams with every regard for our academic reputation’ Vaillant ringing dourly in their ears. So the swine, accompanied by his fat-jowled puppet, Heinz Raschel, doyen of Lettres et Langues, granted us a ‘meeting’ Thursday afternoon to discuss these changes. Meeting postponed at last minute after Monsieur le President had qualms about his personal safety in our building and was escorted back to his chauffeured silver Audi. New meeting- 9.30 Friday morning. Oh dear, I feel ill again already. The hall designated for the meeting was far too small for the four or five hundred who showed up. The president and the doyen sat at the front, surrounded by students sitting up the aisles, on the stage itself and spilling for metres out of the double doors. Discipline there was none. Student after student explained their personal complete inability to attend exams after mid-June, and were met by LIE after LIE after LIE from the podgy mouths of the president and his toad. One thing is clear- the rhetorical powers of Arts undergraduates easily overpowers that of Loïc, a dermatologist by profession. One student finished his speech to overwhelming applause by saying ‘This faculty has developed an allergy to its own president- you should at least be able to understand that.’ Calls of ‘Demission!’ (resign!) turned into chanting. We sat in that baking hot hall for over FIVE hours. How they had the EFFRONTERY to even address us is a mystery to me. Two fat old men, each on well over four grand a month, treating the student summer holiday as though it still really were a holiday, to be given and repealed at the will of a committee of other fat old men (there are also fat old women on the Conseil d’Administration). People were screaming, and in tears. Where were these bastards when we were on picket lines and marching for the independent status of the University system for the past 6 months? Some (five or six) presidents across the country made a stand for the strikers. It didn’t cost much. Loïc’s response has been a thin stream of emails urging us to attend classes that weren’t actually taking place in the Pharmacy campus way over the other side of town. And the day he brought in a team of security guards to unblock the faculty, easily outwitted by peaceful protests around the outside of the building. This man is meant to have the best interest of the... too depressed by managerial hypocrisy to even finish that sentence. The lies they told varied across the five hours. It started with ‘teaching staff asked us to change the timetable’. Teaching staff were at that moment sitting in their offices in the same building so it didn’t take long for someone to pop and disprove that. Then it was ‘parents’ who had forced the semester to be pushed back. I laughed, but it wasn’t funny. (Whoever heard of people coming back from a strike because their parents told them to?) Next they said that the original email sent five weeks ago had warned the semester might go on until July. There’s wi-fi in the building! Five minutes later a girl was writing up the exact words of the original on the whiteboard behind their heads. They tried claiming it was the faculty’s right to examine students up to and including the 2nd July. A quick check of the university website proved that in fact it was the university’s right not to give grades until after the 2nd July, meaning that students were officially enrolled until then, not obliged to attend. The only people I’ve ever seen lie so barefacedly are politicians at the very end of their careers and small children. After 5 hours the crowd was wearing almost as thin as Loïc’s lies. He kept the damn thing going so long because he would have wet his pants walking out of a hall so full of angry students. At nearly 3 o’clock, he made a sign to Raschel and the two of them ran in an undignified manner to the door. A throng rushed to stop him. He hadn’t even given us answers, let alone results. They pushed and shoved their way out. Loïc tried to stop outside the back door for an interview op with TV-Tours, but the cries of ‘demission!’ were too loud. His Audi backed up with a squeal of brakes- hopefully that’s the last I’ll see of one of the most disgusting men it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. And that’s why I was ill. Report on Friday's meeting (in French) from TV-Tours.

Struck

2009-05-20T21:17:00.006+01:00

We're officially fucked. Teachers in our university have now voted to go back to the work. After 7 months of industrial action and 4 months of strike, they resumed teaching yesterday. They had been threatened with a 30% pay-cut, and most of my camarades are blaming this for their caving-in. I can't say for sure, not having been in their meeting (not invited) but if it's really that, it's a bit bloody low. Due to the independent status of French universities, teaching staff can strike without any significant cut in pay for long periods as long as they fulfill certain provisos- attendance at university, continuation of research, office hours etc. (Beautiful thing about university systems, even independent-ish ones- they couldn't give a shit about teaching as long as research keeps bringing in the cash). Minister for Higher Education Valérie Pécresse is trying to attack these rights with great difficulty. But she's trying to attack a whole lot of university rights, and in a lot of her other nasty little plots she's succeeding. Anyway, from this month teachers at Tours would be taking this pay-cut in order to carry on industrial action, and clearly there were just too many members of staff in the meeting who will only support industrial action if it doesn't affect how long they spend at the beach this summer. Maybe I'm being ungenerous- maybe they are trying to give students a chance to catch up on this lost semester. I'm guessing the same pressure is being put on teachers across the country as only between 6 and 10 faculties are still bloquées, down from 50 at the climax of the strike. University presidencies have panicked at the thought that the exam-diploma-job machine might grind to a halt and put the boot into what is now the weakest part of the strike- the teachers. It's the worst possible time to cave in. We were in a fight to automatically give people a pass mark for the semester, and we might just have won it. They couldn't make everybody repeat the year, and as long as exams were properly blocked, they would have been forced to pass everyone. Why strike all year then stop striking two weeks before the end of the already lengthened semester? It just doesn't make sense. I've passed the term. Not altogether honestly, but that's not really my fault. But my French friends are currently trying to learn a semester's syllabus in two weeks, having had about three weeks of class since Christmas. Usually they would already be on holiday. It's so unfair. I'm actually wasting valuable dissertation time worrying about their plight. This has effectively decimated the student side of the movement as well- no one can attend meetings or demonstrations now that they're suddenly under such exam pressure. The LRU or Pécresse reforms are set to go through now anyway, and have already been passed in the National Assembly. No one really still thinks we're going to have any kind of significant victory there. My major criticism of the movement all along (apart from that we didn't go far enough in our actions) was the lack of communication between staff and students. I think we got more and more divided, at least in Tours. We all started out in November fighting the masterisation of the CAPES and gradually we developed different priorities. Students went on to make demands for better benefits, grants, etc, whereas staff became caught up on the job losses and status changes alone. Students were generally a lot more radical in thoughts and actions as well, although there were certainly some very 'engagé' staff... Now basically the presidency has capitalised on this division. Even students who didn't particularly support strike action are completely against going back to school at this point, because it's such a travesty of a semester that it's completely worthless as an academic marker, and therefore represents nothing but a demonstration of power by university bosses and the government. I've been so excited all term to be part of such a huge movement- it seemed like in this country things actually got done, and the people had some kind of power. Now I'm completely deflated and miserable. No one takes my suggestions for bringing the great French tradition of boss-napping into the university. And no one seems to realise how badly they might be fucked- when students lose their power, the road is open for French universities to become English universities. If we lose the fight over masterisation, the next fight will be over marketisation.

Let no man tear asunder?

2009-05-13T03:29:00.003+01:00

I went to a beautiful wedding last year. My friends had been together since secondary school, their kid was old enough to carry a bunch of flowers very nicely and young enough to be extremely cute. M and I were dolled up to the nines, hanging on the arms of handsome young men and drinking extra hard to mark the special occasion. When the lights dimmed and the bride and groom started to dance we clutched hands and held back tears. At some point before we had to start worrying about last trains back to civilisation (why can’t people tie the knot somewhere easily accessible, like East London?), I’m sure I gazed at my date through my beer goggles and indulged in a brief fantasy in which he figured as a minor character behind mounds of white tulle, giant cakes, and everybody knowing that it’s my special day... Afterwards M and I were too starry-eyed to indulge in our usual benevolent character assassinations of everyone present. (We never say anything vicious about anyone, but we are fond of feeling deeply sorry for people’s manifold faults, and blaming any untoward behaviour on their secret sorrow/ insecurity/ as-yet undiagnosed mental health problems.) ‘It was just... magical,’ we sighed. ‘The bride was stunning.’ (She was.) ‘The whole thing was... perfect.’ That’s the problem with criticising marriage- weddings. They really are lovely. On the other hand, I went to a Catholic church service on Good Friday. A man in a purple dress, flanked by a bunch of suspiciously innocent-looking pre-adolescent boys, chanted in Latin about the events leading up to Jesus’ alleged crucifixion for three hours. It was lovely. I was secretly disappointed that the friend who had dragged me there couldn’t come back for the grand finale on Easter Sunday, so we could find out what happened next. (Like watching The Matrix and Matrix Reloaded and not Matrix Revolutions- is he alive? is he dead? are they going to save the world at the end? Actually I never bothered watching the last Matrix film, but I’m sure it all turned out just as happily for humanity as the New Testament did.) My somewhat heavily made point is: just because it’s beautiful and moving doesn’t mean it’s not deeply sick and wrong. People aren’t idiots. You want to fool them into accepting an exploitative and enslaving institution, you got to put on a bit of the old razzle-dazzle. I’m pushing on now into my mid-twenties, and while that couple was not the first of my set to tie the knot, they had a child young and came from a very Caflic background. Now more and more of my friends are settling into couples, and I’m shocked and disturbed that no small number of them are contemplating marriage in one way or another. As M said recently (rose-tinted wedding-y glow now wholly worn off) ‘Even the feminists are getting married!’ We shared some smug pity over the sad plight of our clueless acquaintances over a cup of tea. So why on earth are people doing this? I don’t buy the ‘We want to share our love with everybody’ crap. No, you want to conform. In a big white dress. You want a party, have a party. Buy champagne. You want a wedding dress, buy a wedding dress. I have one. I have even worn it in public (on Halloween). You want a ‘special day’, wear the wedding dress in the street. Everybody will look at you, and probably think you look ‘glowing’. Where do the ceremony, ring, vows and licence fee come into sharing your love? I have regular parties to share my love. When I find a man that knows how to share his love in the same way, I’m gonna hang on to him. Double parties! ‘It’s not about the party, we want to commit to each other forever and getting married seems like the best way.’ When I was a teenager, I remember being very impressed that Fat Boy Slim and Zoe Ball just wandered down to their local registry office, clutching cowboy hats and a bottle of whisky, and pulled in a couple of strangers off the street to witness their marriage. ‘That’s real love- that’s not just for show- they’re only doing it for each other,’ Well, committing is not something you do for five minutes in front of someone with a really big desk. Committing is something you do every day, and all the time it’s because you choose to do it. It’s hard, I can tell you as someone who did it for a bit and then decided I wasn’t up to the task. Doesn’t anybody ever think for a minute about this? Why the fuck have women (and men) been getting married for thousands of years? Uh, duh- because they weren’t allowed to have sex, live together or have children unless they did. Why not? because keeping people in small family units managed and controlled by the ruling powers was an important part of the feudal system, which remained useful to said ( albeit slightly different) ruling powers after industrialisation.

“The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.” James Connolly

Marriage is an essential part of –and symbol for- the patriarchal system. Once, the only women who worked were spinsters, widows and the very poor. Even now, women’s jobs –often lower-paid and more casual- are among the first to go in the recession. Keep people locked into couples, where one has greater earning capacity, physical strength and social status than the other, and you have greater control over your workforce. If you need to, for example during a world war, you can get the women out too. In times of recession, send her back home and you know the family unit will still (probably) eat. (Taking your husband’s name is also still a sign that he has a higher status than you.) Then there’s the problem of the church. Yes, the wedding has been taken out of the church- the registry office ceremony loses all the ‘Who brings this woman to be married to this man?’ cant, and even in Church of England marriages the bride can now opt (as Victoria Beckham did) to cut out the promising to obey your husband bit. But choosing to get married at all seems to me like picking and choosing the bits you want from organised religion. ‘I don’t believe in God, but the ceremony He came up with (or didn’t) as honed and ritualised by generations of religious nut-jobs and tyrants, is just what I need to fix my life up. Just take His name out, won’t you?’ This is acknowledging the church’s cultural hegemony without accepting that other forms of almost identical manipulation are replacing it. In a world without God, why hang on to His ideas? Suckers! Black slaves in America were not allowed any kind of formal marriage ceremony. Instead, to be allowed to live together in a couple, they were often made to ‘jump the broomstick’, a basic (and self-explanatory) rite. Props required- one broomstick, or other suitable pole. The happy couple held hands and jumped over a broomstick on the ground together. I don’t know the origins of this ‘ceremony’, but it served to satisfy slave-owners’ moral qualms about men and women living together and having sex with each other, without giving them any status as Christians, which would imply rather too much shared humanity with their owners to be quite safe. (Jumping the broomstick is apparently still common as a jolly end to American, or at least African- American, marriages. But that’s by the by.) I would propose that when we read about sleb and royal marriages, when we’re conned into spending thousands we don’t have on imitations, even when we daringly run away to Vegas and tell the friends and family afterwards, we are still just jumping the broomstick for our masters. ‘But we’re not marrying for them, we’re marrying for us!’ Mmmm, love. Great stuff. I love a bit of love. I keep trying to tell myself it makes the world go round. But why do we still –even the feminists!- modify our ideas of love to fit in with what They want from young couples? (Sorry, keep meaning to stop capitalising that ‘T’ but can’t help myself). Marriage has far clearer advantages for the system than it does for the individuals concerned. It preserves class boundaries. Often it preserves gender roles which themselves preserve class boundaries. It locks people into their situation by law, and also by social opinion and peer pressure. It’s inextricably linked with a whole set of social mores and dictated behaviour that we might otherwise rebel against. I’m not saying anything against choosing a life partner, buying a house, and generally settling down eternally. Hell, have kids if that’s what’s gonna make you happy! Whether marriage is still synonymous with a woman’s oppression by her husband is no longer clear. I would tend to say no, as a general rule. Of course there are far too many horrific cases of abuse and violence, and less well-documented cases of mental and spiritual domination, mostly by men towards women although also the other way, but I don’t know if there’s a great deal of difference here between married and ‘common-law’ cohabitations. What marriage does still always entail, on the other hand, is an apparently voluntary nod by two ‘free’ individuals to the power of the state, the Church, the press, and what I am thus reluctantly forced to term ‘the ruling classes’. I repeat. Why the fuck? Afterthought The gay marriage question is of course not a question. I fully support everyone’s right to have an equal access to a completely harmful and stupid thing, much as I support freedom of religion, freedom to read the Evening Standard and freedom to hold an opinion that differs from my own. (You’re all wrong, by the way.) The answer is the same as Bill Hicks’ on the subject of gay people in the army: ‘Anyone dumb enough to want to be in the military should be allowed in.’

Writers

2009-05-09T18:05:00.004+01:00

Jo has written an excellent list of '25 writers who have influenced me'. As she points out, it's pretty difficult to choose them, although I could easily have borrowed twenty of the ones she chose. Here are some of the ones that always make me think 'I must write more myself, and will definitely start as soon as I finish this essay/academic year/sandwich'. Non-exhaustive list. Every good book I read influences me in one way or another... just not necessarily to write.

Maya Angelou
Margaret Atwood
Charles Baudelaire
William Blake
Anne Brontë
John le Carré
Charles Dickens
Franz Fanon
Gustave Flaubert
Thomas Hardy
Seamus Heaney
Cynthia Heimel
Joseph Heller
Herman Hesse
Michel Houellebecq
Christopher Isherwood
Doris Lessing
Toni Morrison
Vladimir Nabokov
Zora Neale Hurston
Thomas Pynchon
F Scott Fitzgerald
Robert Service
Muriel Spark
Oscar Wilde

I separated childrens authors because I think they have a different kind of influence over you as a child (especially a child with no tv!) and as a grown-up, but here are some from whom I'll always take inspiration.

Joan Aiken
Bernard Ashley
J M Barrie
Antonia Forest
Judith Kerr
Roger McGough
AA Milne
Antoine de Saint- Exupéry
Jean Ure
Benjamin Zephaniah

Held to ransom

2009-05-06T13:27:00.005+01:00

Students demonstrating... students waiting...

It's not just me that's fed up. Although I have two fighting cats in the flat at the moment, and one of them (the bad one) just tore my hand to shreds. I have also done something to my sleeping patterns to which my body has taken great offence. It is therefore retaliating by giving me nightmares, preventing me from getting up in the morning, and generally behaving like a very mad old person's body. Headaches. (Cats also screaming a lot). Swollen glands. I told my body that it was logical, if I needed to be on a picket line at 7am and at a nightclub until gone four, to simply stay up all night. I was nice about it. I offered it tea. It remained unconvinced. I showed it the sunrise in a Unesco World Heritage Site. It made one of my eyes start twitching. Poor, poor me. But there's worse problems round here at the moment. My fellow students, here and in at least 24 other French universities, are in the centre of a power game between the government, faculty administration and teaching staff. It's driving me crazy, and as an Erasmus student, a UK fee-payer and pretty much a dilettante, I'm probably going to get away with attending next-to-no classes, taking no exams, and not receiving any credit for the second semester. For my camarades at Université François Rabelais the outlook is grim. Some students have attended around 6 weeks of some classes. With at least half of the departments of English and French on indefinite strike since January or February, some teachers have not taught at all this semester. The 'rules', here and for most French faculties, state that students must have attended at least three quarters of the 12-week semester to receive credit. Now the swine have extended the teaching semester until the end of May in the hope that they can catch this up, but to what avail? Teachers still aren't teaching, and why should they when the government took advantage of the two weeks' Easter break to push the LRU (Pécresse reforms) even further forward. Exams have been 'scheduled' for early June. Resits for September. Teachers may set exams, or then again they may not. There's a rumour that striking staff will set us blank examination papers. Which they may or may not mark. After which they may or may not release the grades to us and to the administration. At least the teachers are still fighting. A couple have had arrests and court dates after demonstrations. Two went to hospital after clashes with the police last month. And they're fighting for us too, working to get the year validated for all the anxious students waiting to know if they're going to graduate or not. Lucky the teachers are fighting for us, because they seem to hold a little more power than the students in the movement, who are now being attacked on all sides. The president of the university has moved on to tactics against students which amount, quite simply, to strike-breaking. In Monday's General Assembly students voted to continue the blocade of the Lettres et Langues building. After 7 months of action and very little success, its very important to keep up what little pressure we can. The next morning I came in at 7am to help man the pickets. Unfortunately by 10ish I had to urgently go to bed, and during the day's meeting a little later the president invited the police into the building to disperse strikers. 'I have always kept the university open to democratic debate,' he reminds us, smugly, in a general email. Guillaume Cingal, head of English, probably disagrees. After he sent an email to all English students to reassure them that the department would fight to get everyone a pass-mark for the semester he found his right to email his students had been taken away. He has now learnt to use Facebook. On the same day a motion was proposed by Minister Damien Meslot to fine students involved in blocades 1000€. It's all becoming nightmarish. The government has not hesitated to become involved in the 'validation' row. Obviously, students who have spent the year defending the rights of future generations still balk at the thought of not passing their degree. People have already had to cancel holidays, work placements, summer jobs. Everyone's paying an extra month's rent to keep up with the changed timetable. Many can't get their places confirmed for courses in September until they get this year's results. We're being blackmailed. The demands being made of us by the government and the President of the university have no relevance to our academic abilities and knowledge. They amount to

'Stop playing strike now children, or we'll take away something you really need. And don't forget youth unemployment is back up to 23%! Better behave, 'cos you're going to need that degree in today's France!'

It's patronising, and it's dangerous. We're not in Year 9! Most students are here to learn, and this semester we've certainly learnt a lot, even not all of it was on the timetable... But I'm a foreign student, and a lazy bastard, and if I were to take the exams normally tomorrow I would scrape a (pretty low) pass mark in every class. What the hell does M. le President think we've been doing for the last three months? Sunbathing? No, we have been studying the courses at home like adults. And sunbathing a little bit. At least marching in nice short-sleeved t-shirts to get our arms brown. And in general, how much of what one learns at university is actually taught in class? (Talking Lettres et Langues still here, not medicine). If I hear the words 'academic reputation' one more time I'm going to hit someone over the head with a book. Yes, M. le President, defend the academic reputation of an institution you're watching go to the dogs. I don't hear you mouthing off about academic reputation in the face of a thousand academics losing their jobs, or the dumbing-down of a teacher-training degree! Well, I'm a bit sick of it all. The government's taking a gamble on education, and we're the chips. It's not a fun position to be in. I was so happy to come to university in France, where education is not a market, but watching it become one is depressing me even more. Especially now, where the student movement to save the university system is in crisis, the universities themselves are in chaos, and the summer holidays (best time to push through dodgy changes in education law) are approaching far too quickly.

NHS Direct Pandemic Prevention advice

2009-04-29T12:11:00.001+01:00

Ensure everyone washes their hands regularly with soap and water
Clean surfaces regularly to get rid of germs
Use tissues to cover your mouth and nose when you cough or sneeze
Place used tissues in a bin as soon as possible

It’s not all bad news- or is it?

2009-04-17T23:44:00.006+01:00

Last time I skirted near the interesting subject of feminism, I mentioned women ‘whose confidence has been so buffeted they wish it was the 1950s again’. I’ve spent the past couple of days back in the 1950s myself reading ‘The Golden Notebook’ at last, a novel which puts Lessing‘s other excellent work in the shade (and certainly makes me deeply unenthusiastic about returning to my actual current self-imposed reading programme, mostly novels –American and French- from 1920s Paris). This article makes sense as a follow-up to my last rant on feminism because of this current nostalgia- not just in ‘The Rules’, but in Cosmo, and in intelligent people’s heads and in the air, for an age that was just as messed up as we are now, if not more. Thinking about what’s changed since then leaves me with a sense of one step forward, two steps back. Or, to be fair, three steps forward, two steps back. There’s so many connections between our bodies, our sexual needs, our relationships, our attitudes to society, that need more thought. And we’re not putting in the work! Reading a story from 50 years ago I realise that although institutions have reformed (divorce, abortion, contraception), our anxieties –and even guilt- about our own desire has not.

And I sat there and I thought: do you suppose he’s forgotten what he said and why he said it? Or aren’t we supposed to care what they say? We’re just supposed to be tough enough to take anything? Sometimes I think we’re all in a sort of sexual madhouse.’

Ella says drily. ‘My dear Julia, we’ve chosen to be free women, and this is the price we pay, that’s all.’

‘Free,’ says Julia. ‘Free! What’s the use of us being free if they aren’t? I swear to God, that every one of them, even the best of them, have the old idea of good women and bad women.’

‘And what about us?’

Lessing is fascinating on the subject of what women’s sexuality means, and one of the interesting things about this exploration of ‘Free Women’ in a patriarchal society is this old idea that if part of the people is not free, then nobody is free. The heroines’ act of defiance is not that they enjoy sex, or that they sleep with married men, but that they continue to do this as they are becoming middle-aged, and have children. And today, now we accept divorce and premarital sex and experimentation, we still put a very clear age cap on this tolerance, as exemplified in Bridget Jones, and Sex and the City, and other fiction about single women enjoying life. And the age cap is linked with fertility- Bridget Jones is in her mid thirties, and Carrie in her late thirties, when they finally find love (don’t ask me how I know that). And I’m worried it’s too deeply socialised to fight as individuals- I certainly forget half of this when someone with nice eyes asks me for a drink- so we have to fight is as a group, or even better, as a society. However, something else that stands out in The Golden Notebook (and, sadly, in Lessing’s much later work) is a highly uneasy relationship between the ‘Free Women’ in the novel and homosexuality, male and female but especially male. The single mothers in the book both worry about direct and associative homosexual influence on their children- in one episode the heroine asks her lodgers to move out because her child is becoming too close to them and their fairly open relationship. It reminds me of The L-Shaped Room trilogy written a decade later, where the protagonist, also a single mother, experiences a warm but nonetheless anxiety-ridden friendship with her housemate, a kind jazz musician who is not only gay but also black, and therefore has no natural place in her child’s world. Also, as ‘Free Women’ bringing up children alone, the heroines are trying almost to compete with conventional child-rearing- a sort of ‘I have made the choice to live outside the norms of conventional society, but will not force my child to live there too.’ While they encourage discussion, and certainly a left-wing morality, there is also the sense that the children are to be protected from their mothers’ extreme behaviour. [I went to a Catholic christening a year or so ago, a lavish do where both the parents freely admitted that they were not and had never been practising or believing Catholics, and that they had taken this step for their child’s future, not for themselves. ‘Good Schools’ were mentioned. (The child was about 18 months old). Why the fuck do we make moral choices that we are afraid to impose on our children? It amounts to admitting defeat straight away in any advancements we can make as a society rather than as individuals. Either the brat is going to be completely dominated by established social mores until the day it graduates from university, an independent adult, in which case you might as well follow your heart, or the parent’s influence will override everything else, so you might as well teach your sprog that you are not a complete hypocrite. Don’t even get me started on people who only get married for the children. Many of my school mates were as small-c conservative as you get, and no one ever blinked an eye at me being a bastard. (Or at least, not about my parents not being married, tee hee.)] I suppose the women’s lib movement concretised itself in the 60s and 70s into something more solid and all-embracing than mere Sex Wars. Here, however, the implication is that homosexuality is almost a threat to the liberated heterosexual woman, a ‘choice’ made by men that excludes women at the same time as aping femininity grotesquely. Of course, solidarity between what is now LGBT and women’s liberation owes much to other social movements, Black civil rights in America in particular. But to give Lessing her due, it also has a debt to pay to novelists such as herself. Despite its problems with homosexuality, the book opens a debate on gender identity; it both questions men and womens’ traditional roles and investigates where they come from and to what point they are necessary. One of the most irritating fallacies about modern feminism is when feminism amounts to complete or partial rejection of men. At the end of the day, if you’re a heterosexual woman, you’re going to ‘need’ a man on some level, and one of the things The Golden Notebook discusses is that it is always difficult to find a dignified equilibrium in sexual relationships, whether you rebel against typical man-woman traditions or not. (Molly, divorced ‘Free Woman’ and her counterpart, Marion, demonstrate this in their different relationships with the same man). This has taken me bloody ages to figure out for myself, and all I can really come up with now is- I have not been as honest and frank as I deserved to be in many of my relationships. I owe it to myself and to the men concerned to be more scrupulous in this matter. I think French men have shocked me into accepting the importance of this. I general, English men are pretty easy to drift along with if nobody asks any questions- I don’t think it’s French culture in particular but just adjusting to Abroad in general that makes me evaluate my assumptions. As always in my self-evaluations, the conclusion is that I need to be more assertive and more demanding, which will probably strike fear into the hearts of my more loyal readers. One of my best friends recently referred to me as sexually liberated- well, you aint seen nothing yet.

2009-04-09T20:52:00.002+01:00

Best weekend EVER. Or at least in my top three this year. I drove around Essex singing 'Holding out for a hero' at the top of my voice. I surprised April in the bath. I practically overdosed on curry. I went Eclipse. I won the Grand National (ok, my horse did) at 100-1. I jumped out of a cake. I missed my plane and couldn't bring myself to care less. I played the Best Game Ever with my favourite people. I saw my wonderful new house and all the friends I miss. I hitch-hiked 650km back to Tours from Calais in the sunshine to find my buddies waiting on my doorstep with wine. It was wonderful.

Why I Love France

2009-03-28T21:44:00.005Z

Oh France, you gave your language to my children, your lovers and your mushrooms to my wife. You sang my songs. You delivered my uncle and my auntie to the Nazis. I met the leather chests of the police in Place de la Bastille. I took money from the Communists. I gave my middle age to the milky towns of the Luberon. I ran from farm dogs on a road outside of Rousillon. My hand trembles in the land of France. I come to you with a soiled philosophy of holiness, and you bade me sit down for an interview. Oh France, where I was taken so seriously, I had to reconsider my position. Oh France, every little Messiah thanks you for his loneliness. I want to be somewhere else, but I am always in France. Be strong, be nuclear, my France. Flirt with every side, and talk, talk, never stop talking about how to live without G-d. Leonard Cohen- from Book of Longing

Equal Opportunities

2009-03-27T11:04:00.002Z

Gordon Brown and the Queen have been chatting about making her job more 'equal opportunities'... getting rid of the bias against women and Catholics. The Prime Minister said 'In the 21st Century people do expect discrimination to be removed.' What the fuck? It's not like they're ever gonna clean that job up enough so that it's the best applicant who gets it.

Le Fabuleux Destin De Frances Grahl

2009-03-19T21:30:00.006Z

My university buildings are still bloqué so I have been able to devote all my time this week to demonstrating and pretending to be Amélie Poulain, two of my favourite things to do in France. I've never really felt myself to be a particularly useful member of society -an ornament, at best- but still there is something very particular about not really having any demands on my time at all. After 7 weeks of strike, I'm finding it difficult to even bother to go into school at all (although to be fair that's a problem I've had for the last ten years.) I pop in for the general assemblies, and usually bump into friends. The great thing about an erasmus year is that when you end up in a café in Place Plumereau drinking café creme and discussing Gloria Gaynor, you are still working on your French. I did this (with some variation of classic ballads analysed) almost every day this week. The trees are in blossom and everyone's wearing T-shirts and shades. I should finish reading Les Miserables, but this is really what I came to France for... Cycling across the Cher, eating raspberries by the lake, playing Jungle Speed, a game that still needs to catch on in England, over several bottles of wine in my loft... 25,000 people marched on Thursday in Tours and around 3 million in France. French demonstrations can be awfully fun- here the union of Artists of Touraine came out, wearing bowler hats, playing trumpets, and dragging dozens of massive sheets of painted corrugated metal, with which they built a sort of Berlin Wall around the Hotel de Ville. Tours musicology students, who have blocked their own faculty building for the past couple of weeks, sent a brass band, and the big trade unions competed as to who had the best music on their van/float (SUD won). In one of the speeches, someone said 'We're sending Guadeloupe our support, and they've sent us their weather,' which was true, it was blazing sunshine in a clear blue sky. Strike in France can also be horrible. The march in Paris on Thursday ended with tear gas and flash-balls, not really for any particular reason. In my experience, that kind of police provocation is usually to give the demonstrators a bad name, but if 5% of the population was already in the street I really can't see a point. A few weeks ago I went to Paris to march with my university in a massive university demonstration (50,000 people) and the police had just blocked off the route of the march completely, with amoured vans in a double row across Les Invalides, stopping the march from getting to its planned destination of the Assemblée Nationale. I don't think that kind of order comes from the police. It doesn't make that much difference to them, except that obviously a lot of people were angered, so the fun began for the CRS around 4.30 instead of 7.30. I tend to assume that the decision to break up a massive popular protest comes from the same guy who said 'Désormais, quand il y a une grève, plus personne ne s'en aperçoit'. Also this week I went on a much smaller march for a little girl called Nora, an Algerian baby adopted a year ago by a French couple. Her parents are fighting the baby's deportation, which would certainly lead to her return to an orphanage in Algeria, not, one assumes, the most wonderful of places to grow up. Her father has been on hunger strike for several weeks, leading to his arrest last week (I think for setting fire to his own car but I'm not sure). Poor kid is 16 months old! There's been a spate of deportations recently, many of people who have lived here for years, have jobs, are reasonably successful, pay their taxes and contribute to French society. Moral? Credit Crunch classic. 'Doesn't matter if you're integrated, when push comes to shove we're gonna screw you over as much as we like to show 'real' French people [i.e. voters] that we care. Even if you haven't yet learnt to walk.' These cases are examples to other immigrants, reminders of their second-class not-even-citizen status. I'm afraid the recession is gonna foster a lot more racial discrimination before it's over... In other news, I've finally been proved right- not hanging out with your friends enough does cause cancer. Louis has made a friend, a big ginger and white tom from the next door flat who likes to invite himself in over the rooftops. I'm trying to decide what to do over the summer- could be my last long summer holidays before I have to face the Real World. Until then I shall continue making believe I am a character in a French romantic comedy. Feels right.

Attack by the Awful A's

2009-03-11T16:15:00.005Z

La Nouvelle République (my local paper) featured six articles today voicing its fears about the 'extreme left' in Tours. 'Antis, Anarchists, Activists... they're taking over the streets.' Interesting alliterative grouping there. (Antis, Anarchists, Activists- what will YOU choose?) One gets the feeling that the rather bourgeois, comfortable department of Indre-et-Loire was trying to ignore various groups of disaffected youth and has been called to attention- literally while enjoying a coffee en terrace in Place Plume. (Since I've been in this town I've noticed a rift between wealthy and not-so-wealthy that has none of the disparity of a city like London. On Saturdays, middle-aged women in fur coats do their shopping at the Galleries Lafayette whilst appearing completely oblivious to young people begging and bumming fags. I had long assumed there were a lot of squats in Tours. It seems that suddenly they are a threat to our comfortable, middle-class town life.) Tolerated while all they do is beg, all of a sudden they are dangerous. In a country with such a high youth unemployment rate, isn't it fairly natural that some people choose to 'opt out' as much as they possibly can? Even where insecure housing and begging for a living is a choice? Well, everyone's been rushing to put in their two-centimes-worth about Saturday's events. The departmental Prefet made a speech in which he deplored the fact that 'Voyous and SDF' (hooligans and homeless people) were encouraged to join in what 'may have' started out as a genuine party. Since a lot of homeless people tend to beg on the corner of the square where the police started gassing people up, I'm not fully convinced they are guilty for this involvement. As for hooligans, one assumes they were paying customers in the bars until the police forced the bars to close early. In a lot of interviews with bar managers, all that most of them seem to be upset about is the early closure and consequential financial loss, which came after police intervention and not as a direct result of the party. The police, on the other hand, are trying to get to the 'instigators' of the party. A chap who created a facebook group after the event, 'If you, too, felt like you were in Baghdad on Saturday 7th March in Tours!' has been asked to cooperate with the local police in moderating his group so no one can organise a repetition. Even more cooperative are Facebook themselves, who are helpfully delving into archived records of the original facebook event to give the police names and details of the organisers. Thinking back, a couple of things strike me. One- the police have been pretty well-behaved since the beginning of the university strikes here, but already last Thursday at our march they were out in riot gear for the first time this year. I think they may have judged the time was right to cut down on the Mr Nice Guy stuff... you know what the police can be like- 'Yeah, we've been really tolerant for ages. Now we can do what we like, right? We don't need an excuse!'. Except that Saturday furnished them with the excuse. Two- Within the legitimate strike movement at the University, people have been sensible enough not to enter into debate about Saturday. However, given that a lot of the ridiculously overblown reactions are aimed not at us, the students, but at a different group altogether -hooligans and homeless people- (I think there's some racism involved as well, as poor people in Tours are decidedly more ethnically-mixed than students here) maybe we should think about a bit more solidarity here. After London, this town can be annoyingly petty-bourgeois, complacent and bigoted. And although if I were ever to encourage rebellion I probably would not do it on this blog, it does occur to me sometimes that it would not be that difficult to bring Tours to its knees. (More on actual university strikes soon, I thought I wouldn't mix the two issues.)

Strikes... Parties... Riots... Impromptu brass band concerts

2009-03-08T17:25:00.008Z

At the centre of Tours is the old town, a network of cobbled streets grouped around Place Plumereau, the heart of the medieval city. It's a magnet for tourists and party animals alike, with buildings dating as far back as the 15th century and dozens of bars, clubs and restaurants crammed into a pedestrianised area a few hundred yards across. Traditionally a student area due to its relatively low rents and the extremely high bar:resident ratio, it was saved from demolition in the 1970s and glammed up during the 80s and 90s to become the most beautiful part of a beautiful city. View Larger Map After over five weeks of strike at their university, students at Tours are coming out into the town to increase public awareness. A demonstration last Thursday ended in a face-off with local police dolled up in riot gear as protesters blocked the two main bridges into town. This didn't stop the Commission for the Community from organising a party in Place Plumereau for Saturday night, a sort of flash-mob/ protest that was probably intended as much to boost strikers' morale as to create publicity. We're all a bit down this week after quarrels with the President of the university and even some disagreement between members of the movement. Well, I actually had another party, so I just popped by the square on my way to the under-the-counter-alcohol candy shop. It was a beautiful sight. Around the edges of the square, tourists and towns-folk sipped their saturday night demis, pretending not to watch the middle where jolly students and hippies drank bottled beer and danced in a conga line. I waved at my friends, wished them a bonne soirée and toddled off to my friend's birthday. Coming back at 1am from Les Halles I would normally cross Place Plume, but from la Place du Grand Marché I could tell something was going on in the square. I cut down rue de la Rotisserie and found myself slap-bang in the action at the corner with rue du Change. Crammed into the tiny street, a couple of hundred young people were being advanced on by CRS (riot police). A friend told me the police had burst into Place Plume at around 10.30 while protesters and partiers were dancing round their bonfire, and had been gradually pushed south of the square. Here it is necessary to comment- anyone who actually wanted to stop a bonfire would send the fire engines. This was a move on the part of the police to stop free protest, not fires. What the police hadn't counted on was the fact that every young working person in the Tours agglomeration gathers in the bars on Saturday night to kick back. My British readership may not believe this, but there are young working people in Tours who resent violent police involvement in peaceful protest. Some of them even distrust their police force. So by the time I had got there the students had in fact dispersed into largish groups around the centre-ville, but their numbers had swelled from a couple of hundred to maybe a couple of thousand as young people spilled out of the rapidly closing bars to help their cause. What I first saw on the corner of rue du Change was the hard-core of a mixed group of youth, the ones who were taking the biggest risks to keep the riot police out of our part of town. I had barely been updated on this by my friend Etienne when flares roared up in front of the police lines, blanks appeared to be fired and he grabbed my arm, shouting 'Run!'. We ran back into Place Plume as the narrow road was filled with tear gas. My friend pulled my scarf tightly around my face but it didn't make much difference. The gas filled up everywhere for a good hundred yard radius- it must have affected a lot of onlookers and people on their way home. Despite the gas I stayed in rue du Change for a good half hour, taking photos and talking to people. The police were trying to advance back north towards Place Plume, but kids throwing bottles and periodically rushing them in a mass impeded their progress, so they contented themselved with generous doses of gas (lacrymogène, my wortd for the day) avery five minutes or so. They'd been stuck like that for several hours and were clearly awaiting reinforcements. When my camera ran out of battery I went home and changed out of my party gear into a hoody. I decided this time to approach the riots from rue de la Monnaie, coming up behind the police lines. A small crowd had gathered to watch on this side, presumably all people who thought they would be protected if they stayed behind the police. When I got out my camera, however, there were problems. An officer told me to move further back, so I did. However when he told me to stop taking pictures I refused. He told me he would break my camera- I said 'I doubt that.' There were clearly too many witnesses for him to try. Then he told me he would break my camera if I didn't delete all the pictures, and if not, arrest me. He was one of those thugs doing crowd control safely behind the actual riot police lines, a real thicko. I replied that if he wanted to delete the pictures on my camera he would have to arrest me first, and we could go down the station and discuss the matter. 'There's nothing to discuss. It's illegal to take pictures of a police officer carrying out his duty.' I suggested here, perhaps a little rashly, that as an employée of the state, if he was doing things at work that he didn't want recorded, he was probably not doing his job properly. Classic answer- 'I don't come and take photos of you doing your job.' 'Alors maybe you're in the wrong job, Monsieur.' He grabbed my camera. I held on fast. Then the crowd saved me- all the young men behind me got out their camera phones and started snapping in solidarity. This posed enough of a mental challenge to the copper that he losened his grip, and I judged the time right to slip away, not without taking a quick pic of him. Funnily enough that was the only picture of the night that wasn't completely blurry. As I wandered away from the police lines, several more vans drew up. The long-awaited reinforcements had arrived. I kept on round the corner to the Place du Monstre, on the western edge of the old town. And what a charming sight after the CRS! A group of boys were leaning out of a first-floor window with brass instruments- one had a tuba- playing jolly music to the crowds below. Crowds were dancing to a variation on the theme from Tetris, a great song and one of my favourites. I saw my friend Benjamin and he introduced me to his girlfriend. 'Enchantée,' I said, as though we were all having an apero together. It was 3.30 am. The dancing carried on in Place du Monstre, but the newly strengthened police had nearly finished pushing everyone out of the old town via the 8 or 9 roads radial to Place Plume. I saw the smoke pouring out of the nearest side road, rue du Grand Marché, and gauged it was time to go home to bed. Skirting the Place to get home via tiny, winding side-streets, I could see cops fighting kids, and smoke everywhere. When I came into my road, rue du Commerce, the main exit from Place Plume to the east, there was still a line of protesters to one side of me and a line of police to the other. I ignored the flying bottles and went off home to bed, but the noise carried on till much later. This morning rue du Commerce was scattered with broken glass and blood.

I'll give you fucking 'Rules'....

2009-02-20T21:53:00.006Z

Am I living in a fantasy world inhabited only by me? Am I the cock-eyed optimist from South Pacific only the other way round? Was everything I learnt from my mother applicable only to her, and then only in certain, wintry sunshine, test-tube conditions? Well, yes, to all of these, and I think we all know that. But surely not about FEMINISM! My fucking immoveable ROCK of doctrine when all the others- socialism, pacifism, smoking- seem to waver. I know there are women and men who don't believe in feminism, just as I know there are people who are wrong about many things but still lead happy, fulfilling lives and try to be good people. But I seem to be surrounded by women who make no connection between a vague rebuffal of feminist theory and activism and the miserable conditions they 'find themselves in' in their own personal and particular ways. I didn't mean to read The Rules, it was lying around. And after Rule 16- 'Stop Dating Him If He Doesn't Buy You A Romantic Gift For Your Birthday Or Valentine's Day', I did decide to brush through the remaining 39 rules as quickly as I could, which took me all of 15 minutes. This book sold over 2 million copies! Although it is absolutely bursting with gems such as 'if you have a bad nose, get a nose job,' and 'It is never necessary to make eye contact... let him look at you!' I don't want to linger too long on this subject. It's a backlash classic. It's for women whose confidence has been so buffeted they wish it was the 1950s again. It's a bit like a religion in its canny, manipulative, win-win set-up, as it underlines over and over again that if you follow The Rules and he is The One, he will propose to you within 15 months. If you follow The Rules and it doesn't work out, then he was not The One. If you don't follow The Rules and you still get together, it won't work out, as reavealed in dozens of 'real-life' examples from people called things like David and Sandra. If you believe in God/The Rules, you don't need proof. If you don't believe/obey, don't be surprised if you get no proof. Don't ever call him. Don't ever ask him to dance. Don't offer to pay half. Et cetera, et cetera. The book's advice to women can be summed up as 'Nothing ventured, nothing lost.' Oh, and don't jump his bones until he puts a ring on your finger. I was getting really upset. I had to get out Cynthia Heimel to cheer myself up.

'A woman needs a man like a fish needs a net.' Cynthia Heimel

This is more of a rant than an analysis. I just get so tired of 'Even if you're a beast in the board-room, be an angel/little girl/bunny rabbit outside of work'. Passivity seems to be shoved in my face from all directions. And no one's happy! For one thing, who gives a fuck about the board-room? You call that being a successful woman? I fantasize vaguely about ways to rehabilitate you and the rest of your class back into useful positions in society. And don't get me started on 'equal oportunities'. I promise you, when I come across an equal opportunity I will be sure to blog about it. I'm sure it will be something along the lines of identical twins raised by wolves. I sometimes wish I was a man so that if I ever heard a woman saying 'Well, we got everything the suffragettes were fighting for,' I could punch her in the face. I could do it anyway, and have received the cue THREE times since Christmas, but it wouldn't be as good. Plus I'm mostly against violence. French women are making me depressed. I still have to finish reading The Second Sex but already I'm sure Simone de Beauvoir must be turning in her grave. I felt in London that women's lives had got better, that all women didn't necessarily have to campaign for their rights in order to be in the Sisterhood, that people irrespective of gender could get together and form adult decisions about their dignity, their bodies, their lives together or apart. God knows I haven't always had perfect relationships, but I never felt seriously attacked or compromised or that anyone behaved badly due to gender differences. Taking the rough with the smooth always had its place in relationships just like it has in every aspect of life. Here I find not that there is less confidence in feminism as a way of life- it's maybe taken more generally for granted, just like socialism, pacifism and smoking, but that basic principles that I barely think of as feminist but rather as good-sense, sound rules for everyone's happiness are ignored. Men are more macho. Women more docile in relationships. Relationships more serious, and even in people of university age, more likely to end in marriage. The divorce rate is the same here. Whatever. My close friend's girlfriend thinks I am Jolene from the Dolly Parton song, and cannot be reassured. My drunken comfort about 'La Sororité' left her more muddled. The only compromise I could find was to beg her to voice these fears to me as often as they came back, and to tell me straight away if she thought I stepped over the line that I in fact wouldn't have dreamed of straying near. Another girl was dumped by her boyfriend three days before Valentine's day, during which he slept with someone else, and then took him back. An English girl I know was amazed to find after drunkenly getting off with someone that they were now officially going out. Another English girl dated a French man for some time before overhearing him talking to a friend about his other, real girlfriend. I haven't moved to Saudi Arabia or somewhere, but these differences are freaking me out a bit. And everyone is so down, so nervy, so unconfident. No wonder there are people who will seize any Rules, no matter how Victorian, in order to feel they are in control of their love life and that they're doing things right. I would like to propose my own rules, which I personally think will either lead you to an engagement with The One in under 14 months. Or perhaps to a bit of self-respect.

Have lots of friends. And make as many new ones as you have memory for in your phone. Then make some more.
Tell the truth. Not necessarily the whole truth, but definitely nothing but the truth.
Except if you're playing the 'Outrageous lies to strangers' pulling game. But you are only allowed to play this with people you're never gonna see again. And if by accident you do see them again, you have to confess immediately that you're not really a scuba-diving nun about to show the Pope some coral reefs in Indonesia.
Never call a love/lust interest. Never answer his/her calls. Never go out with him/her. Never let him/her kiss you. Never sleep with ANYONE. Unless you want to. (Thank you Cynthia.)
Think about stuff. Think about everything you can think about. Then buy books on things you want to think about a bit more and read them. Don't believe everything you read.
Use a condom.
If someone is really mean to you, never see them again. If you don't enjoy this, meet them once to discuss it.
Never salvage a relationship. But start a brand-new relationship with the same person if you want to.
Pay your way, you dirty sponger. According to your ability.
Never treat anyone else's set of rules as anything more than advice. Make your own fucking rules!

Lightning strikes twice

2009-01-29T13:11:00.005Z

Students occupying the big amphitheatre in Tours university when the motion for indefinite strike action (along with 50 French universities) was passed this afternoon. I'm on strike in France. 30,000 people marched this morning in Tours, I've never seen anything like it. If you're in England don't forget to show your support to the students occupying part of Queen Mary for Palestine.

Going downhill fast

2009-01-21T18:37:00.004Z

When I was little I can remember pushing my bike up hills just to whizz down them at what seemed like breakneck speed. The appeal of skiing is similar- it's as close as you can get to freefalling without doing something really silly. Add the beauty of the Alps, the clear air, the black pines against the bright blue sky. Being that close to the sky is literally out of this world. I kept laughing for no reason (the altitude?) and when I fell over (all the time) I was thinking 'This is life. I've really found something this time.' Of course I probably won't go back soon as I'll never get that deal again. I could probably get free accommodation with an old friend, but the lift-pass and the ski rental alone come to more than I paid for the week. The hordes of expensively sunglassed Brits milling around the lifts are not really people I'm keen on anyway. It's not for me. They're people who have to buy thousand pound holidays to experience the magic of spiralling downwards with no control. I feel that way when I wake up in the morning.

France is better than England!!

2008-12-07T18:46:00.009Z

Champagne costs half as much.
In the Socialist party split, the left (ok, -ish) won. Just. But still.
The trains are twice as fast and half as expensive. And the price of a ticket is still calculated in relation to the cost of the journey (to an extent).
Edith Piaf.
The cost of cigarettes; although I should maybe think about moving to Belgium. Or Andorra.
Skiing is not a sport reserved for the privileged few, but the domain of the fairly-privileged many.
Everyone has a healthy disdain for all institutionalised power. You don't hear people here saying 'Well, they may have shot that Brazilian guy, but they're only trying to make the streets safe for decent people.' Distrust of institutions is good for you!
Asterix and Obelix.
Freshly baked bread.
You can still have jokes with the people in the ticket booths at the station. They're in no hurry.
Christmas markets with vin chaud at 80 centimes a gobelet.
Gad Elmaleh.
My council rates are one seventh of what they were in bloody Newham.
Fresh vegetables are less likely to have been flown in from Paraguay.
Thierry Henry.
Students still live on a budget here, and therefore have some inkling of being careful with money... a Mac laptop is not an essential of life! Bière and clopes are!
Because of this, no one wears heels and make-up to school!
Zizou.
Verlan- c'est ouf!
Proud to be part of Europe. And in French politics when people are proud, you can be damn sure they're getting something out of it as well
Proper mountains, proper beaches, proper countryside, with appropriate climates, all within a couple of hours of each other.
Recycling bins on the Paris metro.
The French film industry is still making a token effort to make films that have not been made before.
People are POLITE! (see post below)
People in this country had actually heard of the last Nobel prize for literature winner. And even if they hadn't, they wouldn't have written a load of facetious articles in the weekend colour supplements boasting about it.
There is only one weekend colour supplement per newspaper.
Stupid little dogs.
Stupid little dogs' hairdressers. I could look through the window for hours.
Women (often the owners of said dogs) who don't let old age stop them dying their hair magenta.
Traffic light systems that allow cyclists to proceed legally while cars in the same lane have to wait.
Petanque- kicks bowls' arse.
Marianne- kicks Britannia's arse.
La Marseillaise- kicks God Save the Whatever's arse.
Bugger the Etats-Unis!
The 35 hour week.
Strikes!
Free gynocologists for students.
World news consists of more than American politics, African disasters and humourous stories about Arizonans getting their penises stuck in things.
Republic.
Condom machines outside every pharmacy.
No one raises an eyebrow if you race up to said condom machines at 3am dressed in winter coat and slippers and ask SDFs and/or gendarmes for change for a 5€ note.
Johnny Depp lives in Provence
Almost free education
Table mats and napkins as standard in every household, even student flats.
Even French Cosmo is rather less heartbreakingly offensive than its English and American counterparts.
Dom-Toms mean that in any government job you might be suddenly 'forced' to transfer to a tropical island with only a 40% salary increment.
Libé instead of the bloody Guardian.
Trams instead of bendy bloody buses.
Nostalgie!
Nightclubs with chairs and tables, that stay open till 5, not 3.
Bidets are fun.
Decent coffee.
Coffee as accepted part of every meal.
No VAT on tampons.
Wine in pichets- catering to people who like eating nice food in restaurants but couldn't give a crap what they're drinking, as long as it costs 7€ 50 for a litre.
Le Tecktonik
Louis and I are here.

However, would like to add a few words in praise of- bacon, cheddar, proper tea, beer in pints, an egalitarian second person and magic fm.

2008-12-04T16:43:00.004Z

England. Off-Licence. Me: Alright? Man from shop: Y'alright? Me: Twenny Camels please. (Man hands over cigarettes. I hand over money.) Me and Man: Cheers. (Leave off-licence.) France. Café/ Tabac Me: Bonjour Woman: Bonjour Man: Bonjour Me: Bonjour Monsieur! (Have been coming to this shop twice a week for two months now, so now ask...) Me: Comment-allez vous? Woman: Très bien, très bien, et vous? Me: Très bien merci. Woman: Il fait froid encore Me: Mais au moins il ne pleut pas (This exchange now a ritual) Random woman in queue: Mais cela ne va pas durer; il y a de la pluie prèvue. Woman: Alors, que sera-t'il aujourd'hui? Me (as always): Deux paquets de Camels, s'il vous plait. Woman: Alors, Camels, Camels... Random woman in queue: Vous etes americaine? Me: Non, anglaise Woman: Deux paquets de Camels; ca vous fait... ca vous fait... dix euros et quarante centimes, s'il vous plait. Me: Merci beaucoup. Woman: Merci Me: Ah, j'ai peut etre les quarante centimes, s'il vous aide. Woman: S'il vous plait, merci. Me: Merci encore. Woman: Merci à vous. Me: Alors, bonne journée, au revoir! Woman: Bonne fin de journée, au revoir! Man: Au revoir! Me: Merci, au revoir! (Leave shop) Random man smoking outside shop: Au revoir!

2008-11-24T12:57:00.002Z

BUY FLAT-SCREEN TELEVISIONS ON CREDIT THIS CHRISTMAS TO ARTIFICIALLY BOOST THE ECONOMY Does the world we live in make sense to anyone else? It very often makes me want to buy LOADS of jaffa cakes and stay in bed indefinitely.

Don't trust people who can touch-type

2008-11-23T21:10:00.002Z

And NEVER tell them to write down everything you say.

Right, where is my folder? Oh man, I didn’t know I’d have to stand up. According to Scotland a new history - oh it was this book. What do you know about the history before this, the Jacobites and all that stuff? Where’s my list? Oh I guess we’ve got the history that dude gave us, the '45 that’s important, all about Bonnie Prince Charlie. In Waverley, that’s all about that. You have all of this in this essay. Do you want to put that onto my bibliography. We’re going to have lots of books, I don’t think we have to hand in our bibliography, not for weeks. Come on man. Stop it, I wish everyone would leave my computer alone. Come on. Fuck. Oh I’ve got Microsoft Office speech recognition. OK let’s do this again. Ah. It actually says the specific things that Walter Scott made to change Scottish identity. And it’s called the World Burns Club, the Robert Burns World Foundation. Ok I think I’ve got names for all your slides, shall we start with that. So there’s a title page, right.

With thanks to my secretary, Sarah

Most awesome Post-Office Press Statement ever

2008-11-15T16:49:00.003Z

Problems at Queen Elizabeth's coronation upon decision that she should also be called Queen Elizabeth II in Scotland, (unlike James I and VI) even though there had never been a Queen Elizabeth I in Scotland. When the first post-boxes with the royal cipher EIIR were unveiled in Scotland, some were vandalised and several blown up with 'crude home-made bombs'. The director of the Post Office in Edinburgh said:

The matter is so trivial that we are letting it take its normal course.

Kind of sums up the Post Office's answer to any problem- pay debates, lost parcels etc.

Nothing Toulouse

2008-11-13T17:48:00.005Z

It was cold and raining in Tours, and we were feeling miserable, and we'd already been to see James Bond and there was nothing else, not even at the art-house cinema. At seven we came in from cycling across town soaked to the bone, and neither of us could stop whinging for long enough to listen to the other one, which is a frustrating state of affairs. 'Sarah,' I suddenly said. 'Go and pack an overnight bag. We're getting out of here.' We dropped the keys at a friend's so he could feed the cat and by eight o'clock we were at Tours station. 'N'importe-ou... vers le sud... vers le soleil.' The lovely woman offered us Marseille, but it meant changing at Paris. We chose Bordeaux instead- Paris was not going to cheer us up- and hopped on the next TGV. The beers I bought on the train cost more than the ticket. Bordeaux has every thing you could ask from a 'European city break'- a tramway, a cheap hotel with an expensive continental breakfast, a massive river with beautiful stone quays, cafés and sunlight and a glorious cathedral (St. André). I lingered in a tiny second-hand shop selling everything from authentic aquitaine lace caps to fur boots to bright plastic telephones while Sarah had her hair cut. Tired from the Museum of Aquitaine History, we sat on a wall in the autumn sunlight and watched old men playing petanque. I surreptitiously sketched them as the gold plane leaves drifted down around us. Then on the Friday night it clouded over a bit- clearly we hadn't gone far enough South. We thought longingly of Barcelona. Back to the station with the same criteria. This time the man was a Southerner himself. 'Oh, if you want sunshine,' he assured us. 'Don't worry about Perpignan, just get down to Toulouse.' Moment of worry about being stranded in Toulouse with class on Monday morning. 'How much will it cost us to get back to Tours on Sunday evening?' The answer was... ridiculously cheap. So back on the train- this time I remembered to get my beers from the corner shop before we left. We got to Toulouse just before midnight. The area around the station was charmingly big-city, rather like King's Cross before they got the Eurostar in St. Pancras. I had a bath in the hotel- our bath in Tours was not made for someone of a reasonable height such as myself. Sarah Wikipedia'd Jean Jaures for me- maybe we're morons but we had seen so many roads and squares named after him in our travels we thought we should find out who he was. Was gratified by this nugget in the entry:

In the 1976 film Maîtresse (English title: Mistress), a character looking at a Parisian map laments, "There are too many avenues named after Jean Jaurès."

The next day we fell in love with Toulouse, with its grandiose red brick buildings, threaded through by the gorgeous Canal du Midi and the wide Garonne. I reckon it's the perfect size for a city, the fourth largest in France, with around a million people, and the one of those sweet underground systems with only three lines. And it was awfully Occitan, with the street names written in two languages and people talking with a twang in their accents. They do love their red brick!- even the churches- even the twelfth-century churches- everything. It looks lovely in the bright southern sun. I went to a wicked modern art gallery in an old -red brick- abattoir and saw some great drawings by Antonio Saura. Especially loved the illustrations for Don Quixote. (I have been thinking, and if I actually HAD to pick the greatest novel ever, it might well be Don Quixote. Picking Ulysses, which is what everyone always seems to do, is like picking Jaffa Cakes as the greatest biscuit ever.) In the evening we went to the oldest wine bar in Toulouse and sipped posh-arse wine out of playmobil-sized glasses. Then something amazing happened- we found a restaurant that sold Real Curry! Like you get in Britain! Awesome. I practically kissed the waitress when she brought the bill over. Do you know how long its been? Of course we did a little shopping, and saw the fruit markets and the brocantes on the Sunday morning, and the botanical gardens at great speed, and as we raced to the station on our last day we remembered a little bottle of wine for the guy who fed our cat. I had been pissed enough on the Saturday night that I happily slept all the way back to St Pierre des Couilles, the annoying suburban station that serves Tours. (Our main station is not big enough to take all the trains it needs, so they run a shuttle made out of recycled cans back and forth.) There is a moral to this story, children, and it is one of my mottos, so listen carefully:

Fed up? Raining? Don't like your life? Run away!

2008-11-04T21:29:00.003Z

This is my Translation teacher's marking code. Really! It's roughly in descending order of how serious the mistake is... bar- barbarisme ns- nonsense cnvr- ca ne veut rien dire GR- grande faute grammaticale gr- petite faute grammaticale tps- faut de temps cs- contresens cp- on ne comprends pas la phrase synt- syntaxe acc- faute d'accord fs- faux sens const/struc- phrase mal construite/ structurée clq- calque (on copie les mots un par un) md- mal dit +md- tres mal dit impr- impropriete o/- orthographe x- il manque un mot inex- inexacte conj- conjugaison reg- registre asp- aspect How awesome is that! 22 different codes! I think I love her!

Sickened

2008-11-03T16:43:00.004Z

1. My whole flat smells funny. It's spreading down the stairs. 2. 'I kissed a girl and I liked it, hope my boyfriend don't mind it,' Both the action described in the song and the song itself are cheaper, less titillating pornography than Mills and Boon.. Everyone who wants to try kissing a girl has tried it by the time they are seventeen, and everybody else couldn't give a fuck. 3. My friend mended my PC and in doing so got rid of all the programmes I never use. Including Paint! I need Paint! I use it all the time! Spent ages looking for it until I thought to ask him. He got rid of Minesweeper as well, but I was too ashamed to suggest I needed it back. 4. Now I'll never beat my dad's high score. 5. The US elections make me itch with either bored fury or furious boredom. 'Because democracy is not a spectator sport.' ~ US presidential election slogan, Democrats (2004) What? 'Course it is, especially in America! Its being covered by seemingly 'serious' news sources as though it were celebrity Big Brother! 6. I didn't move 400 miles south of London to have it SNOW in OCTOBER. 7. I accidentally watched most of the Sexism and the City movie before I was rescued by uncontrollable vomiting. Contrary to most evil back-back-back-lash brainwashing, this film is not a good argument for the feminist movement. It is an argument for a crazed killing spree against all the men in the world and most of the women in New York. This film's definition of 'love', the thing every successful, financially stable, expensively shod career women is allegedly desperately searching for, makes me want to never leave my flat again, but instead spend the rest of my life leaning out of the window spitting on passer-bys' heads. And shouting 'Fuck You' when they look up. The subplot with the plump black assistant who finds love where she least expects it! (SATC broadening the brainwashing- its not just thin white women who need a man's love) Think what a horrific message the TV show sent out then multiply by a thousand, then take off some for the message being somewhat dimmed by the boring boring boring zzzzzzz... And the clothes aren't all that either. But my fault for watching it. Please DON'T watch it, so that I can tell myself I did some good by sharing the 'love'. 8. I bid for something on ebay- I actually won it, by some lucky chance, but I don't think I want to participate in an auction ever again. Felt wracked with guilty anxiety- what if I lost but had pushed up the price by like £50 for someone else? Then they would be paying £50 for the dubious honour of being crapper than money than me. (I also have this paranoid fantasy that there's all these unemployed financial traders out there at the moment with nothing to do but stare at the internet, and what better mindless facebook replacement for a redundant stockbroker than to surf ebay wantonly pushing up the prices on other people's stuff that they don't want just for kicks while doing coke off their tropical fish mousemats?) Clearly online auctions are for people who can stomach competing markets. I can't. 9. Got a job interview for a teaching job. The interview takes place in an office. I have to bring- Passeport original + 2 copie(s) recto/verso. - Carte d'étudiant original + 1 copie(s) recto/verso. - Dernier diplôme obtenu original + 1 copie(s) recto/verso. - Curriculum Vitae - Pièce indiquant le n° de sécurité sociale original + 1 copie(s) recto/verso. - RIB Does this office not have photocopying or scanning facilities? I might not get the job! It's like a test- only if I am dedicated enough to make 11 copies of obscure documentation will I prove that I have the mettle for the job. That's like 1Euro 60!

New List

2008-10-25T12:43:00.002+01:00

Time Magazine Top Hundred, 1923- 2005... this list is interesting because it starts around the point where I think of 20th century literature as really getting 20th century-like. Virginia Woolf's 'Night and Day', for example... already experimental but doesn't feel modern, unlike 'To The Lighthouse', a book I hate but which is indubitably modern as well as modernist. Some of these books are crap, and they've made the elementary mistake of putting children's literature on the list, which is never going to satisfy anyone. Agreed, 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe' is a better book than half of these, but a.) there are different criteria for reading/judging a child's book, and b.) maybe if you haven't read C S Lewis by the time you're reading Time Magazine it's getting a bit too late?

I have a whole collection of these lists now, some better than others. The Waterstone's one includes cookbooks, which is incredibly annoying. This one is good because it's in alphabetical order- when they try to rank them they always put the most daunting at the top, usually either Joyce's 'Ulysses' or Danté's 'Divine Comedy', for no real reason except its weighty reputation.

I don't try to read everything on the lists but they always bring books to my attention which someone, somewhere thinks of as the best book ever- and I haven't read it; keeps me busy, and gives me even more stuff to buywithoneclick.

1 - Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

2 - A Death in the Family, James Agee

3 - Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis

4 - Money, Martin Amis

5 - The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

6 - Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin

7 - The Sot-Weed Factor,John Barth.

8 - The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow

9 - Herzog, Saul Bellow

10 - The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles

11 - The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen

12 - Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret Judy Blume

13 - A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

14 - Naked Lunch, William Burroughs

15 - Possession, A S Byatt

16 - Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather

17 - The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler

18 - Falconer, John Cheever

19 - White Noise, Don DeLillo

20 - Ubik, Philip K Dick

21 - Deliverance, James Dickey

22 - Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion

23 - Ragtime, E L Doctorow

24 - An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser

25 - Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

26 - Light in August, William Faulkner

27 - The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

28 - The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald

29 - The Sportswriter, Richard Ford

30 - A Passage to India, E M Forster

31 - The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles

32 - The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

33 - The Recognitions, William Gaddis

34 - Neuromancer, William Gibson

35 - Lord Of The Flies, William Golding

36 - I, Claudius, Robert Graves

37 - Loving, Henry Green

38 - The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene

39 - The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene

40 - Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett

41 - Catch-22, Joseph Heller

42 - The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

43 - Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

44 - The Berlin Stories, Christopher Isherwood

45 - Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

46 - On The Road, Jack Kerouac

47 - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey

48 - The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski

49 - The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John le Carre

50 - To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

51 - The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing

52 - The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, C S Lewis

53 - Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry

54 - The Assistant, Bernard Malamud

55 - Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

56 - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers

57 - Atonement, Ian McEwan

58 - Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller

59 - Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

60 - Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

61 - Beloved, Toni Morrison

62 - Under the Net, Iris Murdoch

63 - Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

64 - Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov

65 - A House for Mr Biswas, V S Naipaul

66 - At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien

67 - Appointment in Samarra, John O'Hara

68 - Animal Farm, George Orwell

69 - 1984, George Orwell

70 - The Moviegoer, Walker Percy

71 - A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell

72 - Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

73 - The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

74 - Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

75 - Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson

76 - Call It Sleep, Henry Roth

77 - American Pastoral, Philip Roth

78 - Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth

79 - Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

80 - The Catcher In The Rye, J D Salinger

81 - White Teeth, Zadie Smith

82 - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark

83 - The Man Who Loved Children, Christina Stead

84 - The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

85 - Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

86 - Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone

87 - The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron

88 - The Lord of the Rings, J R R Tolkien

89 - Rabbit, Run, John Updike

90 - Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

91 - Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

92 - All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren

93 - Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

94 - A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh

95 - The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West

96 - The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder

97 - Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf.

98 - To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

99 - Native Son, Richard Wright

100 - Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

(the blue authors mean I've read other books by them)

Stuff that makes me dig my fingernails into my palms because I'm so fucking angry

2008-10-16T23:01:00.003+01:00

French Milk They INVENTED pasteurisation! Meanwhile, we were working out how to make a decent cup of tea. I don’t care if I get Cowpox or whatever, they can keep their new-fangled science, it tastes funny. People who are sorry that a fascist is dead Either express your deep emotion at every single person who dies ever, every time one of them does die, which should keep you busy and therefore out of my way, or don’t feel sorry that Holocaust deniers die. Spend that ‘sorry time’ thinking about Holocaust victims instead. Find Your Ideal date in Orleans websites They pop up all over the place, don’t they? You’re just doing some academic research [like streaming Scrubs] and the screen is suddenly filled with pictures of girls, 22, Orleans. But they’re always the same girls. So clearly the sites don’t work, or such pretty girls with such flamboyant cleavages would find their Prince Charming and take down their photos. Weird. The verb ‘PMS-ing’ OK, so PMS never had a chance. You come up with scientific proof that aggressive or depressive behaviour in women is linked to a bodily function that only their half of the species experience and clearly there’s going to be some abuse. Some people don’t believe in it, some people describe themselves as suffering particularly badly from it, I personally couldn’t care less one way or the other. Sorry to give offence to ‘sufferers’, suffer away if it makes you feel better, but we’re all full of hormones, we all act weird sometimes, maybe you should adjust your work/life balance, or your being-a-wanker/life balance. If all else fails, every seven months ‘Company’ magazine publishes an article called ‘Men get PMS too’, which will cheer you up if your IQ is the same as the number of days in your menstrual cycle. Periods suck because often you forget and get blood on your pale pink silk pants, the new ones that weren’t from Primark, and because they’re a reminder of your own explosive fertility, a reminder which tends to put me off not just sex but also leaving the house. But hormones suck in the same way that your spinal column sucks- sometimes it plays up and sometimes when you’ve had a long day it really hurts, but what you gonna do? You need that backbone! So if you want to think that you’re being a shit because of the way your reproductive system work, that’s fine, I’m a shit because aliens control me. But YOU HAVE NOT BEEN PROGRAMMED BY SCIENCE TO BE A SHIT EVERY MONTH FOR THREE DAYS. [I have, but that’s for research purposes, for the planet Rrfvhu.] You may FEEL like shit, that may not be your choice. But you do not have to ACT like shit. [Luckily for my conscience, those cheeky Rrfvhu guys also control my muscular movements, including speech and blogging. And my conscience too, come to think of it] You should in fact REMAIN A GOOD PERSON. [No one knows what this is any more. If in doubt ask me.] So should everybody. Don’t let the hormones win! Something is going on here, of course. I don’t like randomly attacking people who are already worried they’re undergoing bloating and mood-swings. I just have to, because of this fucking verb that’s been harshing my mellow recently. Because it’s an attack on my freedom as a woman. WOMEN ARE IN CONTROL OF THEIR ACTIONS. It’s a seditious, sneaky way of telling us we don’t know what we’re doing, just like ‘education makes women’s brains overheat,’ or ‘showing your hair will make you sexually irresistible to men,’ classic methods to fucking keep us in our place. And I’m specially cross because on the same day I saw a woman in a Hollywood romantic-comedy (classic testing ground for all sexist brainwashing due to shortly be released to the masses) a woman explaining her unreasonable behaviour with that fucking verb-

“I’m sorry, but I’m PMS-ing at the moment,”

and then a woman I KNOW asked ME if I was feeling “hormonal” , a dirty euphemism for a filthy, filthy word. (Luckily for her I set her straight.) If anyone ever asks you if you’re PMS-ing, feel free to punch him or her in the face, but please make sure you explain afterwards that you chose to do it of your own free will and were not forced to by either little green men or hormones. (Or me.) Credit Crunch namedropping As in October’s Cosmopolitan

In the current economic climate, it’s more important than ever to know you’re spending money on beauty products that work!

Sorry, been reading too much Cosmo recently. Joe The Plumber He’s the reason people outside America don’t like Americans. He’s the kind of voter that makes you stop believing in democracy. He’s the guy who needs to have a tax-break- not so he can feed his family or take a holiday to the Grand Canyon despite the Whatever Crunch, but so that he can buy his business (why?) hire a bunch of Mexicans [who probably haven’t or can’t register to vote anyway so don’t count] to do the crappy work for minimum (why?) and ‘plough the profits back into the economy’ (can’t understand this either, since the economy is bankrupt and the argument is for a tax-break). And on top of all this, he’s a total smokescreen invented purely to mask a crooked decision to protect the super-rich. And he loves this role- that’s the American Dream, buddy! Sorry, been watching too many Presidential Candidate Debates recently too. Should have stuck to Cosmo. People who feel sorry for me Fuck off. Being of an age where I have spots and wrinkles at the same time OK, if you must feel sorry for me, make it for that. My keyboard The G and H keys stopped working. I asked a computer-savvy friend to sort it out, and he said ‘Shouldn’t be a problem, unless you spilled beer on your laptop,’ so I had to buy a new keyboard, and it’s French, and highly annoying. The Student Loans Company or Student Finance Direct, or Give Us Your Spare Kidney, or whatever they’re called these days. I have a lot of reasons, but at the moment the main one is that all the people on their ‘help’-line are Scottish. So they don’t pay fees. So they’re sitting up there in their loch-side call centre, looking out onto the glen, thinking ‘Och aye, Frances Grahl is tekkin oot a £3000 fees loan! Puir wee Sassenach!’ or something of that ilk, and then smirking. (Excuse racial stereotyping but I am now taking an extra credit course on Scottish Identity, so, you’re wrong.) Liking at the moment- Autumn leaves, carrottes rapées, telling people that Tours belonged to the English in the 12th century

Shipwrecked!

2008-10-07T13:07:00.002+01:00

1. Pulp, 'Razzmatazz' 2. Leonard Cohen, 'Ain't No Cure For Love' 3. Tchaikovsky, 'Marche Slave' 4. Bonnie Tyler, 'Holding Out For A Hero' 5. Tammy Wynette, almost certainly ''Til I Can Make It On My Own' but I am very tempted by 'I Still Believe In Fairy-Tales' and ''Til I Get It Right'... my door to love/ has opened out/ more times than in,/ but I'm either fool/ or wise enough/ to open it again... perfect country lyrics. 6. George Michael 'Careless Whisper' 7. Kris Kristofferson 'Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I'll Ever Do Again)' Do I only get seven? Damn! I well wanted both Justin Timberlake AND Julie London's 'Cry Me A River' And Blur's 'Star-Shaped' and Nina Simone's 'Don't Smoke In Bed' and and and... no, my decision is made, let's see if I stick to it when I'm actually on the show. Book- 'A Tale of Two Cities' Luxury- coffee, and since I could have a luxury I couldn't afford in real life, one of those espresso machines, I would be very eco-friendly on my desert island so I could push the boat out and get one of those sick ones with little foil cartridges. You could ask for an ipod, couldn't you, that would take all the fun out of it. If I could only take one it would be the Kris Kristofferson song. It's already probably my favourite song, but it also means that if my grandmother visited, I could play it to her. Check out who you would like to be stuck with... I wouldn't mind Quentin Blake. And if YOU could only take one?

2008-09-21T16:08:00.001+01:00

Rush Limbaugh on McCain's VP choice. 'Sarah Palin= Babies, Guns, Jesus. Hot damn!'

So THAT's what I'm here for

2008-09-19T12:34:00.002+01:00

I was beginning to wonder. Spent the whole week wandering bemusedly round ugly University buildings looking for classes which then turned out to be English for Idiots, or rather more embarrassingly, German for people whose understanding of the German political system is about 78times as informed as my own. Not to mention interminable meetings with evil French administrative staff whose raison d'etre seems to be blighting the live of innocent Erasmus students, and Heads of Department who all seemed to assume I was in France to take courses in Shakespeare taught in English. Then I managed to get a French literature class this morning and it was awesome- ha ha kids, I'm gonna learn the entire history of rhetoric from Protagoras and Corax to Schopenhauer and Herbert Spencer! In your FACE! This class kicks the arse of anything they bothered to teach me in the QM English department. Not to speak of the French department, where they seem to adhere to the view that French literature -and philosophy- started and ended with the sainted Albert Camus. I'm overwhelmed with the awesomeness of French universities. There were about 90 people in the class, which seemed to be taking place in a disused garage, but I learnt loads of stuff! Had been beginning to forget that I go to college to learn stuff. And because it's BTW, but that is a secondary reason after all. Well I better go read some Plato. Your FACE!!!

Touring and Tours

2008-09-14T10:41:00.004+01:00

I'm adjusting to life in the real world again, have been in Tours a week now in my little rooftop flat, haven't got much done apart from buying a bed and a lot of wineglasses, joining the library and wandering around town looking at the pretty buildings. Now I'm back on the internet and I'm catching up on three months of not being bothered to read the newspapers. Finished work at Les Genets on the first of September, but then I went to Nantes with Dave and Kate, my friends from last year, to go out drinking with all my colleagues. After that Lucille and I took the TGV down to Aix en Provence where we partied and enjoyed the sunshine in a much needed mini holiday. We unwisely played 'I have never' all night before going dancing, which left us so drunk we jumped into a fountain on the way home. Aix is pretty but kinda posh and full of old English people wearing silk scarves and lightweight Burberries. Lucille came back to Tours and helped me through the ghastly process of signing the papers for my flat. This took a grand total of 4 hours, 5 calls to England and one crying tantrum, which appeared to be what swung it... the estate agent was completely prepared to withhold my keys till Monday, until I burst into tears and Lucille started shouting about sleeping on the streets. Since then she, her mother and our friend Marlene have been taxiing my stuff over from where I left it in Nantes, pestering the estate agents for me- yes, it's a beautiful flat, no, it hasn't got hot water at the moment- and generally keeping me in a good mood. I don't actually know anyone in this town yet so it's been nice to have them around. There's been stuff like Sports Open Day, and International Student Pot d'Acceuil, but they sounded a bit lame. I did wander down to register as a student at the Fac de Lettres, which is only two hundred yards from my front door. They were very laid back when I started stressing at them about my course options: they have an incredibly complicated website with about a million courses, but I can't seem to work out what takes place where and when and how many points of my obligatory 60 each class counts for (at QMUL my course units have to add up to 8: am slightly fazed by the 30 points, considering there are lots of classes on the list only worth 2 or 3). School starts tomorrow so at worst I'll just turn up and see what I can find, and wait to see my conseilleure pedagogique on Tuesday, which might just make everything clearer. Would have been nice to know which books to read... am just finishing yet another John le Carré in French as more halfhearted warmup. The faculty itself is one of those charmless cement things knocked up in the 60s when they were desperate, but it's sandwiched between the beautiful old town (where I live) and the Loire. There's a café and a book market down on the river bank and they have live music in the evenings. Plus it's got a great library, and I'm also right next to the main public library for Tours, which is very cool and old school. Well, I think old school libraries are cool. Think 'Shushhhh!' Sarah, my flatmate, is arriving from California this morning: I got up at 6am to go to Charles de Gaulle to meet her, spent bloody ten euros on a cab to the station only to find that the train they told me to get last night doesn't actually exist. The next one would have got me in to Montparnasse an hour after her plane landed and cost bloody 87 E return. I decided to go back to bed and watch Pirates of the Caribbean in French. The third one, which is boring up until the scene with a million Johnny Depps, and then crap afterwards. That one scene is pretty good though. Also reading the news online. Tomorrow I'm definitely gonna buy a paper. Anyway, I might be coming back to England next Saturday night. For one night only mind.

Another virtual postcard

2008-07-11T11:22:00.002+01:00

Hi

I’m in France. The sun is not shining today, and I have a terrible hangover so I just ate two double chocolate magnums and drank two double espressos. I start work tonight at five and I’m hoping to pull my head together by then for our jolly salsa evening. Right now I’m sitting in the bar in my sunglasses with Lucille and Seb, my fave colleagues, watching the Tour de France with one eye and the hot new chef with the other. Luckily I woke up cross-eyed this morning. Adrien, the animateur (events organiser), has just come in from the petanque court as it’s started properly pouring. His customers appear not to mind having a little beer instead of carrying on with their boules tournament. The animateurs actually seem to spend most of their time in the bar here. We’re not allowed to give anyone free drinks this year, but what do I care? They can’t fire me- I got a proper French contract.

The season has properly started and there’s a million people in the bar every night, with their disgusting children waddling up to the counter at 11.45pm with twenty-euro notes clutched in their fat fists demanding ice-creams and pringles and a never-ending stream of change for the bubble-gum machines and the fussball table. Fucking parent work 48 fucking weeks in the year and then when they’re absolutely forced to spend two fucking weeks with their revolting offspring they find that giving them more money than I earn in a week every day is an adequate replacement for, say, games, conversation, spending time together, remaining sober enough to even recognise the brat... Anyway. Yesterday we had a bucking bronco machine thingy in the bar and I had a go. I was amazing. I have thighs like steel. Plus I had the best cowboy hat. Having seen me thrown off a mechanical bull in a mini-skirt, the customers gave me many many tips yesterday.

The season has properly started and yesterday after we finished work at 2am we went down to Cocos, the shabby and tacky night club that we grace with our presence pretty much every night. It was ‘saisonier’ night so we got free drinks, and danced to crap house in the company of every seasonal worker, English and French, in the St Jean de Monts region. I was still wearing my cowboy hat (red with sequins) as I am a classy lady. And Steve (my boss) drove me there in his ‘decapotable’ (convertible) at about 130km/p/h with music blasting and me waving my hat in the air. See, classy.

The season has properly started and I’m now sharing my luxury apartment in the pool-house with Julien, who is wonderful and came with a telly, a microwave and Pro Evo on the play station. Suddenly my room has transformed from an oasis of calm to the place everybody comes to party. We just got through 32 bottles of rose wine in a week. Plus several of whisky and vodka. The campsite manager passed by as I was putting the recycling in the bins and I gave her a feeble smile. She has instructed the campsite security guards to write down what time we come home every night. Me and Julien usually give them the slip though, we know their ways only well.

A parcel arrived from Joey yesterday to general excitement. All the girls (and Julien) now have aqua nails. Best of all, Marlene and Lucille are using proper Vaseline as lipsalve. Just after I turned up, Marlene asked me if it what true that English girls put Vaseline on their lips. When I said yes, to try it out she reached into her handbag, pulled out a tube of strawberry-flavoured Durex lube, and smeared it onto her own and Lucille’s mouth. ‘Bit sticky’ was the consensus. So I promised to get them some from England- Vaseline in French just means generic lubricant. The girls send gros bisoux to Joey and so do I.

Well, I have to have my shower and paint my face into the mask of a dedicated professional. I broke my umbrella and the five metre walk to the toilets is looking seriously unattractive. I love you all and miss you all. Any one who wants to visit is extremely welcome. Especially my darling Joshua Robert, who I miss passionately already. Many kisses. Keep in touch. F xxxx

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Heroes

2008-06-28T15:56:00.000+01:00

‘My heroes have always been cowboys/ and they still are, it seems/ sadly in search of and one step in back of/ themselves and their slow-moving dreams.’ Willie Nelson

Just before I left... at three in the afternoon, drinking plastic jugs of Pimm’s in Wetherspoons, someone reminded me of my main ambition in life aged sixteen.

‘Francie, you always wanted to be the Great Gatsby when you grew up. Now you’ve come as close as you can without getting caught up in a mess of car-crashes and hopeless, obsessive love,’ (or words to that effect) ‘Don’t you think it’s time you got yourself a new role model?’

I’ve been giving it a lot of thought. There’s no shortage of heroes.

Sydney Carton
Magnus Pym
Becky Sharpe
Inspector Grant from Josephine Tey
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Desdemona (but not Ophelia)
Winnie the Pooh
Don Quixote
Toad of Toad Hall (actually Toad of Toad Hall is The Great Gatsby, just presented differently)
Jo from Little Women
Jo from The Chalet School
Yossarian
Ginny from the Marlowe stories
Elsie from What Katy Did
The protagonist in A Farewell to Arms
Miss Jean Brodie
Emma Bovary (but not Anna Karenina)
Matilda
Viola
Jude the Obscure
Emma from Emma
The protagonist in The Bell Jar (we need to reclaim this excellent book from the self-hating, self-harming, American teenage girls)
Jane Eyre
Steppenwolf
Kezia in various Katherine Mansfield stories
Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin
Count Fosco
Mr Majeika
Stephen Dedalus
Lucy and/or Jill from Narnia
Dorian Gray

The problem is that most of them seem to be just as self-destructive as Jay Gatsby. Even Winnie the Pooh ends up lying down and taking it when his erstwhile ‘lifelong companion’ rejects him and the Hundred-Acre-Wood in favour of ‘school’ and conformism in the real world. Or else they’re cool while they’re young and then they turn down good-looking, rich charmers to marry elderly German professors, or boring English tuberculosis specialists, or pretentious, repressed homosexual dukes of crappy islands, and breed hundreds of moronic children. Of course since Bildungsromans about women, especially older ones, tend to have that anticlimactic feeling- the heroines grow up by discovering they have to stop doing whatever they want- you can’t really blame them for finishing their exciting youths off with a boring marriage.

I’m beginning to feel like Rimmer when he goes into Better Than Life, the computer game that makes all your dreams come true, and gradually realises that his sub-conscience has it in for him, and so all his dreams will always be nightmares. No, it’s not quite the same. But the problem with literary heroes is that an author can finish the story any time he likes, but you’ve got to live life until it’s over. (I just paid six grand to find that out.)

I may also be getting to old for an ambition that starts with the words ‘When I grow up...’