On The Brink

Well there’s a title which does exactly what it says on the tin.

Anyway. Yesterday I went to a night hosted jointly by the LGBT society and SCM, the Student Christian Movement. There was stew and crumble and things and then there was a talk and discussion with Sarah Jones, the parish priest in Ross-on-Wye. Who, if you didn’t know, which to be fair you probably didn’t, used to be a man, and spent most of her twenties coming slowly to the realisation that actually, mentally, emotionally, she felt more like a woman. So she had a sex change before becoming ordained as a priest.

So for all sorts of reasons she had a lot to say. About coming to the realisation that she was transgendered (she asked us, ‘how do you know that you are the ‘right’ gender?’, pointing out that it’s a hard thing to think about, really, it’s not as simple as ‘just knowing’), about how people think transsexual and imagine some kind of panto-dame/drag-queen overly-made-up-and-coiffured caricature, when actually she was a perfectly ordinary, quite plainly dressed woman, with no make-up and sensible Ecco shoes.

She also talked about how her Bishop is quite conservative and yet was happy to see this as a medical problem; what he can’t get his head around is the fact that she is also gay, and this does then mean that she cannot whilst in this particular parish have a sexual relationship with another woman, because she would just lose her job, straight out, while in other parishes this might well be overlooked.

She praised the open-minded-ness of the Church of England – believers within the church of England really do fall on a massive spectrum between those who point accusingly at Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and those that say more forgiving things, quoting the story of the eunuch in Acts or the centurion and his friend/servant/lover in Matthew. It’s a church which can, with surprising ease, welcome those who believe (like me) that civil partnerships should be honoured in church and that gay marriage should be possible within the church of England and can’t really understand how you can make any other argument on that score, and can also welcome those who still believe that women shouldn’t be allowed to be priests and that homosexuality, let alone gay marriage, is a sin against God.

She talked also about being outed, about how one day the Daily Mail rang up seemingly out of the blue, and how she had rounds of press conferences to give and of course how then her whole parish knew and how they gradually came to terms with this, how it does now mean that literally everyone in her town knows and how in some ways the worst thing to bear is the children who have called her names in the past; but then she also talked about how she sat them down and gave them a good talking-to and how now when she passes them in the street they’ll cheerily call out, ‘morning, Vicar’, which I think is nice, because that’s a sentence I struggle to imagine any thirteen-year-old lout on a BMX uttering in most normal places, but then I guess Ross-on-Wye is probably a bit like the town where I grew up and that probably wouldn’t have surprised me too much there.

What I really liked about her was her absolute and utter honesty – she really was happy to talk about more or less anything that we wanted to ask her. Perhaps not the course she would have chosen in life – it’s like me having to spend the entire rest of my life with everyone knowing that I Used To Be Depressed, except more so – and you don’t really want that to be the defining feature that everyone knows about you – but I guess once that is why you are known, she has stood up to the plate and stood up for her cause and got on with it, and, well. I was inspired. I was really glad to have met her. And she made me realise that actually, if it annoys me so much that people make assumptions about me and about depression, then I bloody well need to step up and say so, rather than just…lying about it. Or rather, omitting the truth. I can’t carry on saying, when people ask me what year I’m in, ‘oh I was ill last year’ and leaving it at that. I always feel guilty when I do that but at the same time it does seem like sharing a bit too much (apparently I do have at least a shred of that English reserve, after all).

Anyway that’s definitely not what I came here to say. Also the food was delicious. Also I then went to the pub with some of the people who were at the talk, and then I went to meet up with the debating lot in the Union, and things got rapidly more insane from there until A and I left for chips. Oh, chips. How glorious. And then I went to bed at two and why-oh-why did I wake up at half past seven in the sodding morning? Bleh.

…for I really will eat more or less anything – I don’t drink much.

Non-alcoholic is tea, coffee (almost always decaff if I have the choice), tapwater. Rarely fruit juice. Almost never fizzy drinks (I had a Coke the other day and immediately wondered why). That’s about it. To be fair, tea can mean anything from China, India, Earl Grey and the like to any number of herbal and fruit infusions so long as they don’t involve chamomile in significant quantities. But yes, there you go.

Alcoholic it’s similarly small. Whisky for sorrow-drowning and mellow nightcap fireside chats (or in bed, if need be, I promise I’m not an alcoholic, functional or otherwise, it’s just that my room gets cold). G&T if nothing else is around or midafternoon a while before dinner but I can’t stand it unless there’s a large slice of lemon and some ice in it. I love ale, as I may have mentioned, of various descriptions, furthermore I’ve never been drunk on just ale, there’s always been some spirit to blame (seriously). Ginger wine – a whole bottle on nights of serious debauchery (not that I go in for that these days) but actually otherwise I often find it too strong these days. Red wine with meals (sometimes) but I can no longer drink white. A very selected number of cocktails. Sherry (alright, yes, you can buy me another cat).

I don’t know, it just struck me as weird that I will eat more or less anything and enjoy most food at that, and yet I can’t stand most drinkable things, or rather, most things that most normal people my age drink. I have to be already quite drunk before I will hastily gulp my way through apple sourz or Carlsberg and I cannot do the vast majority of spirits, rose wine, white wine, anything too sweet in any way. And furthermore drinks have a very specific place. If I feel like whisky, wine or beer won’t do. If I want coffee, tea tastes horrific and water bores me. Based on time of day, mood, weather, the lot.

I only thought of it because cider and Pimm’s are nearly upon us, and I am so looking forward to summer. It’s funny the things that mark the seasons – now we don’t all work the land, it’s things like sunglasses and whether we have salad or potatoes with our meals and whether or not it feels like a reasonable thing to do, to drink Pimm’s, at this time in the afternoon.

In other news, I am home. Hello cats, telly, and the bedside lamps I got for Christmas (they’re really pretty). It’s good to be back. And it does feel like summer, despite the rain (or perhaps because of it – no chance of any of this rain freezing).

I’ve talked about this a bit before but I’ve had a few more thoughts on the issue so now I’m going to put them all in blog form on the off-chance that some of those thoughts are worth the reading. Basically: my ovaries. Hello, you. See, it was quite funny for a while – in some ways it still is. Oh, haha, Jenny’s just seen a small child and she’s gone all crazy and gushing about it. To be honest it was quite amusing to me because obviously I’m not likely to have children of my own for at least another five years or so. There’s part of me that somehow believes I never will get married and have kids, just because I’ll never find someone who I love as much as they love me, or vice versa, I just believe it’s somehow never going to work out for me. I don’t know why I should think that but there you have it.

Anyway. I was in Starbucks the other day with some friends, M and H, who are a couple, P, a bachelor of 64 who was on the same MA as M and is now a good friend of his; and A, who I’m always talking about, who was, incidentally, suited and booted for the funeral later that day of his friend’s grandmother, may she rest in peace. We’re all in Starbucks with our coffees and mochas and hot chocolates, M soothing his hangover with fruit salad and water, me pigging out on crisps, sandwiches, syrup waffles and an apple fritter doughnut (it was just one of those days, I don’t know). And into the cafe arrive: five mothers, about seven children between the ages of about eighteen months and four-ish, buggies and bags and toys and coats and a lot of noise.

We carry on talking and actually at first H and I are OK. The group is directly behind H so she can’t really see them without turning round; I can see them over her head but currently I’m more interested in eating and a fairly absorbing discussion of something pretty surreal (yeah, you’d be scared if you spent any time with us as a group, things get a bit mental).

And then one of those children, small, curly headed, blond, just under two years, at a guess, starts crying. It’s probably partly the fact that I am twenty years old and a girl but hear a child crying and there is nothing you can do about your response, it’s completely preconscious, and it was all I could do not to get out of my seat and run to him and pick him up and try and make it all better. Just a completely emotional, hormonal lurch. H felt it too, I could see, and we were transfixed from then on in. She was constantly turning around and neither of us were particularly participating in the conversation any more as we literally just stared.

I wasn’t particularly thinking, ‘aww, that’s cute’ as two of them clumsily hugged one another, or marvelling at the way they play and how you can literally see the learning process going on, which is amazing really – oh! if I pull this cord the lamp switches on! and off again! And if I do it again…? it switches on! and off! and on!… – I was thinking all of these things, yes, but what I was mainly feeling is this irrepressible gut instinct about just how much I pray I have children myself one day. I’m not mad – obviously I don’t mean now (though jokingly I did ask A if he would be the sperm donor for my children) – but it’s not as if I have got any rational mental choice in the matter. Hormonally I am absolutely and completely cut out to be a mother, because that is my evolutionary role – to have children, and to teach and protect them until they can look after themselves.

Sometimes it amazes me that we think we’re all so clever – we build buildings higher than we can really imagine, we fly planes, we invent computers, the internet, solve the enigma code, know how to blow up our own planet, drive cars, play chess, write great literature, record history, the Bible, produce the most heartstoppingly beautiful music and paintings and sculptures, have conversation, complicated humour and wit, brew ale, set fire to things, cook food, ferment things to create whisky or wine or whatever. We have clothes, watches, make-up, houses, streets, a money economy where most of the money these days is in the form of imaginary numbers that get shifted about from computer to computer, transactions going on that sort of don’t really exist (you can see just how much I know about the economy…)  – and underneath all of this, all this intelligence and thought and beauty and might and power – we are just animals. We’ve just designed a hugely complicated system for satisfying basic animal needs for food, warmth, companionship, sex, having offspring. We are only a bunch of hairless apes with bad posture and 20/20 hindsight, and we only want these same basic things, on some level. We cannot escape the fact of our nature and in some ways why would we want to?

Think about it. You invite all your friends out for a sophisticated-sounding dinner party, when what you’re really saying is, come to my place where it is warm, look potentially sexually attractive, eat too much food and we’ll probably have lots of humorous but slightly coarse conversations and jokes all evening before finally going home and falling asleep. You go out to dance somewhere and it’s all just about the display. We may as well have bright green shimmering feathery tails like peacocks, we just happen to be a bit less elegant and (perhaps?) a bit less weird about sexual display but that’s all it is, posturing.

We are still animals, underneath it all. It doesn’t make the art or the philosophy or the science or the architecture or the other millions of amazing things we’ve done pointless, of course not, they add to our experience and appreciation of the world and they are great achievements, but we shouldn’t forget that we are basically apes who just happen to walk on their hind legs. That’s what I tell myself anyway, because otherwise there is no rational explanation for the complete hold small children have on me (no paedophilia jokes in the comments please, I might just cry…).

This is another film I watched recently. Obviously being The Road I didn’t enjoy it as much as I liked Avatar, because, let’s be honest, it’s about a man and his son slowly dying all alone in a post-apocalyptic, dead-Earth hell, where seemingly everyone is out to steal their stuff and also probably eat them.

It’s not wholly faithful to the book and there is, surprisingly (but also not that surprisingly) too much schmaltz – all this flashbacking to scenes before the wife/mother to man and boy dies, played by Charlize Theron and utterly, hopelessly, pathetically adored by Viggo Mortensen. One wonders what she ever saw in him. The cat is currently standing on my shoulder so I’m sorry if he takes it upon himself to contribute to this entry. A couple of we-are-going-to-make-you-cry scenes with a piano. And an ending that was ambiguous but in almost entirely the wrong way – not, Can I Trust You, but Can You Even Be Real? Now I can’t see the screen. Thanks, cat.

However, for a film adaptation of a book it was better than I expected by a long way and definitely worth seeing. Beautifully shot, and it threw up a lot of questions about morality, death, suicide, grief, love, and so on. Good acting, and maybe they missed a trick on some of the screenplay but the film is probably worth watching for one scene alone where they meet on their travels an old blind man and see the slowly changing morality of the boy and his father, separately, and also, just who is really in charge.

I have to say, though, if everything was dead, if all that was left was me and a few thousand other human beings, with nothing to eat but each other, the odd dead insect, and a dwindling supply of stores to loot for tins and the like, if I had the guts I would seriously consider suicide; I would certainly not make much effort to stay alive, just because, well, what for? The film managed to present suicide as actually the most sane and rational choice; Viggo Mortensen’s optimism was blind, naive, visionary, and utterly mad.

Anyway, if you’ve read the book, I would definitely at least consider watching the film. If you haven’t read the book, you should read it; and I don’t know whether or not it would be your type of thing. The cat is nudging my face now and definitely wants some attention, or more food, or something, so I’d better be off.

Actually, strictly, not necessarily farinaceous news at all, actually, because I’ve just looked it up in order to find out how to spell it and it turns out that ‘farinaceous’ does not just generally mean Stuff You Can Eat, it refers to the stuff in question containing starch. No word on the edibility or otherwise of such stuff. So I very much doubt it stretches to drink, and this post was going to just exclaim a little bit on the wonder of a cafetiere of (these days, decaf) coffee along with a bowlful of porridge and a sudoku (or, if you’re really lucky, a back-issue of the Style magazine from the Sunday Times, courtesy of H’s wonderful parents. That is one of my favourite ways to get my caffeine. Or, you know, not get my caffeine, but get my coffee experience anyway.

I also like tea in general, especially (for some reason) when I’m actually working – doing work and sipping on a tea is (in my apparently premature middle age) one of the best things about my daily life at the moment – the amount of time I get to spend working whilst sipping something hot – ordinary builders’ tea, PFW, hot chocolate, hot milk, you name it (P.S. try stirring a spoonful of Nutella into hot milk. Best hot chocolate I’ve ever tasted).

Oh, actually, on the nutella front: get some toast. Get some nutella. Apply liberally. Get some blackcurrant jam. Apply less liberally. Cut into bitesize quarters and you have the least practical, messiest study time snack ever. But it is so worth it. Very simply before the discovery that nutella and jam were made for one another, my life was very literally not complete. I need some more nutella, though.

There are many reasons why I’ve never got into posting recipes up on my blog as some people do. The main one is because my average supper consists of a dish my housemates have christened Lentils And Shit*. But I’ve just been given another reason why I don’t write a cookery blog, and this is it, and you should read it, because I hear stories about Marcus’s cooking (and you already know you like his writing). I hear legends. And yet he’s a student, so he has the same kind of economic constraints as the rest of us work with. The other reason would be that I undercooked yesterday’s aubergines and I think that’s probably why I feel ill now. That or my epic gym session yesterday afternoon/evening (don’t look at me like that – ‘afternoon/evening’ does not mean that it was both, merely that I don’t know whether 4-6pm counts as afternoon or evening. Darlings, I am not getting obsessed, fear ye not).

*Obviously I am not being literal when I say ’shit’. It’s like when I say ‘Everything In The Fridge Curry’, I don’t mean that this packet of minstrels and that tinful of coffee, a bottle of milk, ketchup, mustard and twelve eggs are going in along with all the vegetables I own (I probably don’t even mean ‘all the vegetables I own’). Actually, Everything In The Fridge Curry hasn’t been done for a while. Oh, and I can cook properly as well as adopting this wild gung-ho supermarket-sweep type approach! Anyway, back to Lentils And Shit. The only difference, night by night, is the shit – onion, garlic, aubergine, raisins, spinach, more garlic, whatever. And the flavouring – if you have mushrooms and green peppers add soy sauce and ginger, if you’re going aubergines then curry powder works quite well, you know these things. It’s mainly because I somehow seem to own a lot of lentils, but I’m nearly out of them now, and then I can branch out into different and potentially more exciting food.

I’ve been having a few more thoughts about tea and coffee. Here are some of my favourite (or not-so-favourite) ways to get my caffeine.

The Nursing Home Coffee: this is the original Bad Caffeine Moment. When I worked in a nursing home I’d regularly do twelve hour shifts and have to get up at half six three days a week, which at the age of eighteen was even worse for me than it would be now. In a twelve hour shift you get a total of one hour break (nominally) although if you don’t just walk away mid-morning, you don’t get your allotted break, so morning break would more usually be in between wheeling one resident into breakfast, and going up to the room of the next, and would go something like this: dip into kitchen, grab mug, hope none of the nursing staff are around (despite being allotted a break they would usually tell you off for actually taking it, no matter that they were only there because they’d just nipped out for a fag or whatever), fill it a third full of instant coffee, followed by a quarter of sugar and a quarter of boiling water. Stir. Add milk. Taste. If lukewarm, down. If any hotter, tip a little away and add more milk. Believe me when I say that that quantity of instant coffee is rough and you need the sugar for energy and to make the whole thing palateable and if it’s not something you can down instantly you will not make it through the mug. So you add more milk until you can down it. Then you do so. Then you run to the next room and keep going (if you can stuff a few broken custard creams into your mouth at the same time this won’t go amiss).

The Yoga Tea: This follows the same principle. I don’t take brilliantly to starting the day without a cup of tea if I’m getting up early enough to go to yoga. It used to be the case that I literally couldn’t start the day without a cup of tea and a cafetiere of coffee and these days the only day on which I really feel the lack of tea is on yoga days. I don’t often get time even to do this particularly lovely variant on the idea of tea, but on the rare occasions when I do, the boiling water and the teabag barely make an acquaintance before they’re sleepily thrashed with the nearest teaspoon-like object (pen, fork, even the lid of a milk bottle will do) to get out as much actual tea as possible in the amount of time it takes to get the lid of the milk bottle off with my teeth – and yes, sleepy tea-thrashing is a possibility, teabag removed, milk and cold water added, down, leave. It tastes like what it is – lukewarm water and milk, with the merest and most horrible hint of tea – but it does the trick.

I Am A Student And There Are Never Any Teaspoons: This has led me, obviously, to stir my tea with any number of peculiar objects. The first time you do it in first year you immediately think ‘I’m eating scrambled egg, from a shoe, with a comb’ and then, ‘dirty’ (Black Books. Watch it); then you have temporary Withnail & I type delusions about things living in the sink. And then you get used to stirring your tea with pens, forks, knives, milk bottle lids, paper (quick! before it disintegrates! always fun). However I reached an utter low point about a week ago when, in abject laziness (and anyway what does happen to those teaspoons?) I grabbed the knife I’d just used to butter some bread, stirred my tea with it… and ended up with a veritable buttery oil slick on my tea. If you thought either of the above sounded rough (and they are), this is infinitely worse. Definitely not one to repeat.

As for the teaspoons, they disappear. They are not in the drawer, they are not in the sink, or either side of the draining board. They simply disappear into the ether. And then, every few weeks, suddenly there are billions of the fuckers on the draining board or on the drawer with no rhyme nor reason – the washing up situation is absolutely unchanged but suddenly there is cutlery. This is a mystery almost on a par with how I have the same volume of socks as I started the year with; but now, none of them actually match, and this is not becuase of my shoddy approach to colour sorting in the wash – there is no way that they were any of them originally part of a pair with any other of them. What happens?

Happy Birthday, Callan. Because it’s always nice to get a post with your name in the title :P. Here’s to many more strange and wonderful years *cue deep philosophical thoughts about the passing of time*.

P.S. I am going to see my Mummy in a city near me where she’s at a conference, tomorrow, for lunch. This makes me very happy. I don’t actually call her Mummy, I call her Mum. But do you find you’re more likely to use endearing terms like Mummy and Daddy when you miss your parents? I do. Anyway, free food, and a nice bit of home grounding and gossip and silly cat stories and people-watching and tough advice. Hoorah!

This is actually about dreams of things I would like to do with my life and not stuff I’ve thought whilst asleep and not accountable for what happens in my head. So here is a list, ranging from the mundane to the definitely-never-going-to-happen-but-wouldn’t-it-be-nice, of things I’d like to do some day, outside of the whole career-marriage-kids-die-happy thing. I’ve probably done a post like this before but it’s probably changed a bit, and I felt like writing this list, so here it is:

1. Learn to knit well enough that I can knit exciting clothes for myself and (sorry, kids) my maybe-some-day children (they’re going to hate me).
2. See a rocket being launched (albeit from a certain distance).
3. Travel round the world without going on a single plane (this is not particularly likely)
4. Be able to draw people that look not only like actual human beings, but also like the people they were originally meant to look at (to this end, I’ve joined the Life Drawing class at my university).
5. Know about wine – what’s good, what’s bad, what’s better, what those strange words mean, what goes with what, and most importantly, what I do and do not like (in slightly less vague terms than ‘this is nice’ or ‘this tastes cheap’).
6. Know one end of a camera from the other (ditto joining PhotoSoc). To be fair to myself I am my mother’s and grandfathers’ (yes, both of them) daughter/granddaughter insofar as they are all (or were) good and interested amateur photographers (my grandda does the photos for the Peoples’ Theatre in Newcastle and still develops the films himself in his darkroom behind the kitchen); and I’ve taken some not completely terrible shots in the past, but I would like to know more about the technical side of things rather than just be baffled as I am at the moment by all the strange numbers and symbols and moving parts on my grandfather’s old manual or the various DSLRs I’ve managed to get my hands on in the past.
7. Pretty-much-always be part of a half decent orchestra/choir.
8. Learn to sew and make my own patterns (because I like very few of the patterns you can buy in the shops because they don’t appear to be designed by anyone who really knows what’s going on in fashion right now – so I don’t know where Lucy gets her patterns!
9. Some day get a solo in the university chamber choir.
10. Learn to ski (seriously it looks fun and also I’m kind of embarassed that I can’t – it seems that everyone has been at least once and I don’t want to end up doing a Bridget Jones (although I’d be far better dressed, all sleek in all-black minimalist awesome skiing…stuff. Whatever people wear when they’re skiing) and making a fool of myself; it just seems like one of those things I ought to be minimally competent at).
11. Make a creme brulee – I don’t know why, I’ve just always wanted to try.
12. Have singing lessons and get vaguely good at this whole singing thing.
13. Go and buy lots of clothes in London next time I have money (Camden, Portobello Market, Oxford Street, and the rest. Perhaps I should go on a minibreak for one).
14. Climb all the Munros (mountains higher than 3000ft in Scotland)
15. Learn the first Cello Concerto by Schostakovich.
16. Go back to That Hamlet Near Morfa Nefyn (I can’t remember what it was called) on the Lleyn Peninsula, Wales – unbelievably stunning even in the rain.
17. Have my entire wardrobe consist either of things I have owned since forever or of things which I bought second-hand or sourced ethically (and be able to afford things like this)
18. Be able to paint/draw and be pleased enough with my efforts that I can stick ‘em up on my walls in frames and such. I would love to know how to handle oils well but I’ve lost the confidence I had as a child/young teen so I’ll work my way up from pencil and charcoal slowly, thanks!
19. Have a book published (why not? you know this blog is beautiful :P)
20. Habitually sometimes cook from a recipe – and an interesting recipe at that. Yes, I can make up delicious food from scratch using only lentils and cabbage and taters, but I would like to have to arse around for days finding a deli that stocks asafoetida or something, and then do finicky little things with this or that ingredient, and then unveil a dish of something so unbelievably perfect that it makes you almost cry, matched with the perfect bottle of wine (see no.5), and followed by a melt-in-the-mouth have-more-than-three-spoonfuls-and-your-heart-will-stop dessert. Preferably served with candles and Mr Right and not much else.
21. Live in London for a while.
22. Go to the Proms once in a while.
23. Go to bed every day feeling that I have accomplished something (I like that feeling in my life at the moment. I may be incredibly stressed but I like that I am getting things done)….

…which means I should get off the laptop now and go and do some more work. Is there anything I’ve forgotten?