On The Brink

This is likely to be the most poorly expressed collection of thoughts I’ve ever written. Apart from a couple of my drunken journal entries. Those are excellent. But no, they’re not likely to ever make it up here, sorry.

Anyway. This is one of those few posts that has made it into my drafts folder. It’ll take the form of a disjointed kind of a list.

Firstly: rape jokes. I sort of feel like I ought to find them inappropriate because, you know, rape is a terrible, terrible thing, without any hint of non-seriousness there whatsoever and no, I mean it. But, for crying out loud: Dead Baby jokes. Madeleine McCann jokes. The Bunny Suicides. A hell of a lot of the sense of humour of (primarily young people and probably mainly students) revolves around some seriously terrible things. Perhaps this is how we process those things, perhaps it’s just that things are funny when they really shouldn’t be – why else would Jeff’s Giggle Loop be such an on-the-nail description of that kind of laughter you laugh when you’re at a funeral or your spouse is breaking up with you? We laugh at inappropriate, terrible things, perhaps because we’d otherwise cry, or perhaps they’d make us angry, or perhaps it wouldn’t, but we have to react in some way.

No, I’m not getting into the psychology of what makes us laugh. Bother that. If it’s OK to laugh at dead babies and Madeleine McCann and so on, then sure, if you think of something genuinely witty to say about rape, say it. If it’s not OK to laugh at rape jokes then dead babies and Madeleine McCann are out too, OK? Good.

Secondly: I like cooking, I like doing things for other people, I love it when you create something edible and it makes someone else happy, or you pass your plate over at a restaurant because the portions are, as ever, huge, and you get to watch someone you love slurp white wine sauce out of a mussel shell whilst looking as happy as Larry at you. I like knitting things, it’s only a matter of time before I do actually kidnap a small child (no, not really, I’m not utterly daft) and I hope to goodness that someday I get married and have children and don’t have to work so that I get to spend lots of time at home bringing them up. I get a bit gooey about little boys in school uniform or choirboy outfits or whatever and I’m already eyeing up the Hornby. I don’t think this is incompatible with the fact that I do want a really interesting research career first/later in life and I am quite independent and would like to do a number of things first.

Thirdly: I really would rather not walk home alone late at night. I know, technically, that if I was a Good Feminist I’d carry a rape alarm and learn how to poke someone’s eyes out with the heel of my DMs or something (not that I own DMs), but actually, I’d rather get a taxi, make someone walk me home, or be home before it gets late. I will walk home alone, and I’m not scared to do so, I just can’t help thinking that it isn’t a good idea.

Fourthly: Women’s magazines are full of airbrushed, long-legged beauties who look decades younger than they should and impossibly perfect. They wear clothes which are pedalled to us constantly, bags we must have in order to fit in. Personally I don’t tend to enjoy those magazines much – I get all the fashion I need from the various newspaper supplements in the Times or the Guardian, and I really don’t care about celebrities. Furthermore I think very few people actually are made to feel inadequate by the terrifyingly unattainable role models and examples set in these magazines. Perhaps one is as a teenager – I know it certainly angered me at the time that even in magazines aimed at teenage girls one is constantly told how to diet and all the rest of it when really we should be getting the message that, actually, you are who you are, and that is wonderful. But I don’t think anyone once they reach a certain age or level of maturity is made to feel inadequate by the frank mythologisation of womanhood in women’s magazines and basically everyone just enjoys them for what they are. I don’t think they’re massively damaging.

Fifthly, a slightly different point: the norm for women at this point in time is to shave their legs and their underarms and pluck their eyebrows and get rid of (I don’t know how, this isn’t a problem I have) any trace of a moustache. And so adverts telling us to buy razors and feel like goddesses obviously appear on television. Again, I don’t have a problem with this. I am happy to fit in with a cultural norm that dictates that I should either shave my legs or keep them out of sight. And I know there are a number of women who don’t want to shave their legs or remove their moustaches or whatever and they just bloomin’ well go for it. I don’t think adverts telling you that using a certain razor will make you feel like a goddess are saying you can’t feel like a goddess if you have hairy legs – that’s as odd a proposition from the advert in question as saying that using that razor will actually turn you into a goddess.

So, while in other countries women are denied education and many other basic rights, whilst in some places life is an awful lot harder if you are a women; whilst there are undeniably people who we may well encounter every day who think less of me because I am a woman than you, because you are man; whilst domestic violence and rape and things occur all the time and that is utterly terrible, I still wouldn’t say I was a capital-F Feminist. I can’t see what is wrong with the media  as it is commenting on the way Mrs Cameron dresses, say (heck, they also comment on the dress sense of Mr Cameron and all the rest), or telling me that I should use this razor to shave my legs. I think we are awfully lucky in the UK today to have the choice to be and dress and sleep with whoever we want, to be able to marry who we like and when we like and only if we like. I like dressing up and wearing lipstick and playing the role of a woman in society. I like being a woman, I like being a girl, I like being a lady, and conforming to those stereotypes. I like it when some of the men I know patronise me a bit for being a bit of a girl. I will laugh at rape jokes, I will shave my legs and feel like a goddess, I will stare in wonder at the new seasons capes and jersey dresses and boots and I don’t mind in the least that the vagaries of fashion want me to buy new things each season because, when I have the money, I like buying those things.

This is what I’m concluding: I am not a Feminist. I believe in equality and freedom for all people in all places and while I care that women get raped and are denied basic rights to education and divorce and the right not to be stoned for adultery after having slept with someone new after becoming a widow, I also care that men are fighting wars and battles and gunfights over who they are, who they believe in and the colour of their skin; that children are dying every day from a lack of clean drinking water; that it’s harder to get into a good university simply because you’ve grown up on a council estate and gone to a state school; that our economy is in real trouble and I do worry that Osbourne is cutting too much, too fast, and that that will spell trouble in the end. I am a feminist insomuch as I am also a childist and an andronist and an environmentalist. It should surely all come as part of a package – part of being a decent human being is, surely, caring about others, no matter what or who they are.

This post was originally meant as a lighthearted riposte to some shocking allegations thrown at me in the pub a week or so ago. Whoops.

One of my first male friends shared my birthday, when we were about six; then there was Alex at school who also did (and does still). We had a sort-of joint thing once, by which I mean that I went to her birthday thing and some people gave me presents too and then I didn’t have to do any organising myself. Good work. And then we went to college and met not one, not two, but three people who also shared our birthday. And now I am living, next year, with a guy who also shares that birthday but is, I believe, a year younger than me. So happy birthday to all those concerned!

As you can imagine, if you’re about my age and have facebook, my wall is filled with congratulations on my birthday. Some of those are from people I haven’t spoken to in ages and people I never knew that well in the first place and I wonder if that’s just some kind of reflex reaction – see birthday notifications, send good wishes. I’m sure, however, that it’s all very well-meant. Some of those people I’ve not spoken to in ages are people I’m very glad to have heard from and I would probably do the same, even if the messages themselves are a bit generic, how many different things can you say about a birthday? Happy birthday, have a lovely day, have a good one, have one on me, have you got anything good planned for tonight, then? Then there’s the more old-fashioned Many Happy Returns, and then one friend (who I really haven’t seen in a long while and would really like to, when I’m a bit less busy in a few days, definitely, plan) who has reminded me that I am now old enough to adopt a child and hire a car in a foreign country, possibly even at the same time. Excellent.

Other people, whose congratulations are equally as bland, are indeed very good friends. So thank you to those too. And other people have used my birthday as an excuse to get back in touch and start talking about meeting up, to which, yes, if you’re reading this, absolutely.

So although I was tempted to get all curmudgeonly and bitch about how on your birthday, on facebook, millions of people you barely remember, and don’t mind forgetting, decide to get in touch to say something mindlessly dull about a day that really doesn’t matter that much to me. But actually, most of those greetings have put a smile on my face. I’ve been reminded of friends who are currently in wholly the wrong country, people who have been away or busy, or I’ve been away or busy, and however much we mean to meet up, catch up, it keeps not happening but that doesn’t mean that the thought’s not there.

So what I’m really saying is that, where it’s truly meant well, as an expression of friendship cherished and or memories well-loved, thank you. Really, I do mean that, despite the next paragraph.

I’m not into mindless giving of birthday wishes and this is where I think facebook is a bit weird, this obsessive collecting of ‘friends’, and there are plenty of people I’d not have on my friends list but deleting them is so final, if they found out it would be a rather complicated social slight and basically I can’t be bothered with making waves and upsetting people just because I really don’t remember or care about the last time we spoke but you might. Yes. Curmudgeonly, I told you. And, well, deleting people, even with Dom’s helpful list, is still a bit tedious.

Another thought I’ve just had is this: it’s kind of surprising how quickly one year or two have gone by and suddenly you think, when was the last time I saw X? And then you do, you have lunch, and it’s like you were never away. Or it’s awkward as arse. After all, this ain’t When Harry Met Sally.

This is the thing with my degree, see. You study, in massive detail, all the things that can possibly go wrong with the human body.

It’s not the pathogens that bother me, I’m not worried – as yet I’ve never caught anything too serious (apart from a bout of food poisoning this year related to, well, the state of our kitchen *grumble*). I’ve got a pretty tough immune system by and large, and anyway, there’s not much in terms of random illnesses you can contract in the UK. Nothing as bad as the Ebola virus, or E.Coli, or whatever.

I worry a bit about cancer – one in three of us will get it, after all, but equally the chances of an individual cell in your body turning cancerous are miniscule, and there’s nothing I can do about that.

There’s also nothing I can do about the bit that does bother me: genetics. Except, kind of, there is. Because I won’t know until it happens that I’ve got cancer, or diptheria, or tetanus. There is nothing I can do to prevent those things from happening except do my bit to prevent those things happening like take a reasonable amount of exercise, not smoke, and read the Daily Mail obsessively, of course. But it’s not me that I’m worried about in terms of genetics – it’s what am I going to pass on that I don’t know about yet? What currently silent heterozygote mistake do I carry – one gene fine, the other containing a terrible deletion or insertion or repeat, which, when I was put together, could be safely ignored because the other gene for whatever-it-is was fine, and won out? What if I just happen to fall in love with someone who also happens to have that error, and there it is? I want someone to sequence my whole genome and just tell me the worst, tell me that I carry genes which will give this child short sight and loose tendons (duh) and probably a mild scoliosis and/or spina bifida (but not the really bad kind) – all that I know I definitely or probably carry on my genome and that’s fine, that’s not caused any big problems for anyone in my family. It’s also possible, but quite a slim chance, that I carry something else which has had terrible consequences within my family; and this frightens me in the dead of night sometimes or when I’m not expecting it to frighten me, and it’s difficult to remember that it’s a very rare thing to carry and I will hopefully not have the bad luck to ever have children with a fellow carrier. And then there’s all the things I don’t carry as such but who knows what will happen, what instability and fragility there is in my genetic code, which, completely unpredictably, will cause all kinds of problems for a child of mine?

And yes, I say I’m not worried about the illnesses I may or may not have, but honestly, I’m terrible, I’ve had headaches and started to worry about tumours; there’s an odd lump on my elbow I keep meaning to get checked out and it’s almost certainly nothing but I’m sure it’s grown; I spent a good proportion of the last year wondering – academically – if I had MS, although why is, well, a story for another time. Let’s not go there…! I wasn’t actually frightened about it, more just drawing parallels and spotting symptoms and adding things up and it came to a fairly reasonable ‘what if’ which concerned rather than frightened me, but I don’t want to go to the doctor’s about it because it’s just too much like hard work to schedule an appointment and register at a surgery (that’s right, I’m not currently registered anywhere. Well, no, I am at Uni Town, but… well, that’s a rant for another day. The UHS is the Fort Knox of bureaucracy). And then you start spotting random symptoms which are almost certainly just nothing but could be Something Fairly Serious… if combined with a whole bunch of symptoms you don’t have. I know too much not to think about it all; and not enough to know for certain that I’m being seriously daft.

And then I think about the level of hypochondria in intelligent friends who do completely unconnected degrees – English, Engineering, Maths, Philosophy, Chemistry – and I realise that actually, I could be so much more concerned about so many more illnesses. I must have some reasonable level of knowledge after all. And at least I don’t know enough about helicopters to convince myself that they’re suddenly going to remember that according to Physics they have no good reason to stay in the air, and just land on my head.

It’s in the name. I think four is far too young to be at school. You barely know your own name, your hands aren’t developed enough to hold a pen, and it isn’t fair to expect you to play nicely or sit still. Frankly I don’t know why we even try at that age. I’m moving to Sweden, or Denmark, or Norway.

I have no idea what’s going to happen. I have no idea, either, what I’m going to want, and whether what I want this time next year is going to be the same as what I want now or somehow entirely different. And so it doesn’t matter that I don’t know what’s going to happen, because I also don’t know how I’m going to feel about it, so I basically have to assume that whatever it is it’ll be fine; because even if you could tell me what’s going to happen, how I feel about it now and how I will actually feel about it could well be two entirely different things.

So actually, yes, it’s all OK. Even though sometimes I would like someone to drop out of the sky and whisper in my ear, tell me about my future, promise me it contains Nobel prizes and a real-life Daniel Craig/Mr Darcy hybrid and a car that drives like an Aston and runs on solar power or the breath of fairies or something. It’s not going to happen (the sky person thing, I mean, not the Aston thing, that’s a definite). I don’t know what’s around the corner and, if I’m honest, I’d rather not find out too soon. It’s like reading the last page of the novel when you’re still only just getting up to the dramatic bit. You really don’t want to spoil the ending or know about twists in the tail, they’ll surprise you soon enough.

Two people for whom I have more respect than I know how to put into words (really, I don’t) are getting married. In some ways I barely know either of them but, well, we follow one another’s fortunes and misfortunes and I can honestly say that their news has made me a very happy woman.

Now I’m going to go and swim in a millpond. A very good day, I think.

I have fat thighs, am completely mad, and only look pretty if I hunch my shoulders, turning my knees in, and the person looking at me is on the sofa two feet below my eye level with her head hanging off the edge of the seat.

These are all things which my sister has told me about myself today. Of everything else, she says: “There’s a mad person with eyes on top of the bookshelves. But I have baked bread”.

Tomorrow (this morning as you read, I expect) I’m starting my main summer placement, straight away followed in the evening by my first shift at our local pub. It’s going to be a long and tiring day, logistically demanding, and I will probably be catnapping on the train. I am excited. I will tell you more when I’m wearing my glasses and not actually already in bed with the pillow looking all plump and enticing.

Oh, yeah, and I’m cycling. Please no-one run a book on how many of my own rules I break in the first day?!

First please understand that I am not Jeremy Clarkson and I am not a total killjoy and I am in fact a cyclist myself. ‘Am’ may be a slight inaccuracy given that I had my bike stolen two years ago and have been borrowing my sister’s ever since. But I did used to cycle everywhere back in Old Home Town, and I come from a family of People Who Cycle. My grandfather used to race, I believe. So I’m definitely qualified to have this rant. Obviously.

Anyway, there are a lot of people out there who just shouldn’t be allowed to ride bikes. Ever. At all. Anywhere. At least not without reading this handy little list of Things You Bloomin’ Well Ought To Know first. So – here it is.

• A basic, boring point, that I wish I could say I think all cyclists in Britain already know. You cycle on the left-hand side of the left-hand lane on the road. Not in the middle of the lane, certainly not in the middle of the road, no – you cycle exactly a foot from the kerb if not less. If you don’t have the control over your bike to stick to this, go and practice in your local supermarket car park in the dead of night. Or a school playground. Or your local park. When no-one else is about and assuming that you’re lucky enough to live near a park in which you probably won’t get knifed or mugged whilst trying to do this.
• Stick your left arm out when you want to go left and your right arm out when you want to go right. Technically you should also flap your right arm about when you’re slowing down to a stop but no-one does this so you’ll probably just confuse people. You should also indicate when you’re pulling in and pulling out too, just like you would in a car.
• This one is so insanely obvious that I could cry. Yes, you’re making me cry. You do not have wing-mirrors, OK? So you’re less reliant on visual cues than most other road-users. You’re also bloody vulnerable. So WEARING EARPHONES IS KILL-ME-NOW LEVELS OF STUPID. Okay? Do I need to go into this in more detail?
• On the wing-mirror thing – look over your shoulder. Seriously. Whenever you do anything. As if you were in a car. Remember?
• Technically it’s illegal to ride on the pavement. If you’re a total idiot, though, I think most people are probably happier if you stick to the pavement on big roads at busy times – as long as there are absolutely no pedestrians or plenty of room to ride round them. If there isn’t room to ride round get off the bike. You’re too stupid to deserve to ride it anyway and it’s best for all of us otherwise I might just lose it and beat you to death with my shoe. You’ll have to wait while I take it off though.
• The legal position on lights is that you have them full-on when you’re riding in the dark, and flashing while you’re walking your bike along. You have to have a white front light and a red back light. You should not ride with flashing lights, this is just stupid, people will have no idea that you’re on the road and actually cycling at a decent pace.
• Bags on handlebars really aren’t terribly clever. I have learnt this from personal experience. Handbags over the back or shoulder aren’t great either. Really your options are to get a basket or panniers or leave your possessions behind or wear a rucksack because otherwise the off-balance weight and swinging of the bag will, someday, pull you off your bike, or get caught in the spokes or something. Not ideal.
• If you are sharing space with pedestrians – there are, after all, plenty of shared pedestrian/cyclist paths – get, and use, a bell.
• Please use your brain, idiot. If you have one of those New Cameregg child-trailers that basically turns your bike into a mini-rickshaw (personally I think these are daft, I mean, at what point is it a good idea to put your toddlers a foot above the ground, on the road, with nothing more than a tent and a large flag to warn other people of their presence? You wouldn’t put your kid’s play-tent up in the middle of the road, would you – so how is it suddenly a good idea just because it has wheels?) then please remember it is not a fucking snow plough and don’t use it on narrow pedestrian/cycle routes. The whirring of your wheels really isn’t sufficient warning to me that I’m just about to get swept off my feet and knocked into the brambles and to be honest I don’t really want you to use your bell in order to warn me that this is about to happen so that I can voluntarily hurl myself into the brambles instead. So. Baby-trailers. Not a good plan on the roads for the sake of your children; not a good idea on the pavements for the sake of everyone else in the entire world.
• If, as a cyclist, you’re not sure how to negotiate a big junction or a roundabout or something, get off and walk. Seriously. It might just save my blood pressure if I don’t have to stand on the pavement and watch you improvise your way around the junction, narrowly avoiding death and causing thirty cases of road rage along the way.

I think that’s probably about it. I would like to point out that I have witnessed examples of all the above today (or at the very least, this week) on my walk home from work. I didn’t actually end up in the brambles, if only because Mr New Cameregg Trailer Guy just happened to cycle past me on a bit of the path which was mercifully surrounded by green and verdant lawns. I had to do some fairly nifty diving to avoid him, though. And no, I didn’t get a word of apology. After all, Mr NCTG was being super-environmentally-virtuous and we mere mortals, just walking, which somehow doesn’t have the same environmental caché, these days, does it?

Sorry, chaps. I mean, I’m all in favour of cycling. I think it’s a quick, enjoyable and environmentally sound way to travel whilst getting fit and seeing some nice scenery (if you’re lucky enough to live or work or socialise somewhere pretty) but I do think there are ways of doing it, and ways of doing it seriously wrong. And I know I’m not perfect as a cyclist I’m sure – I can be overconfident, I almost certainly ought to wear a helmet, and I have a terrible habit of ending up trying to cycle in inappropriate shoes or skirts and therefore concentrating more on not flashing approaching drivers than I am concentrating on the serious business of Neither Dying Nor Killing Anyone. But at least I know what I’m doing and now – with my handy guide – so do you.

*Nern is a family in-joke. It seemed appropriate here and is roughly equivalent to total and utter retard, without any of the non-PC connotations of that word, being as how my mother made it up one day under no provocation whatsoever.

I’ve just read this article, in the Guardian. It’s all about the trend for skinny skinny skinny male models. And it’s very interesting in that it shows that men’s bodies these days are starting to be public property in the same way that women’s bodies are (no, seriously – as the author of this article quite justifiably points out, addressing, one assumes, all of male humanity: ‘Do you know what it’s like to turn 12 and find your body subject to the scrutiny of the entire world? Do you know what it’s like to be constantly judged by the opposite sex and (perhaps more harshly) by your own? To be conditioned to view your body in such a way that you regularly find yourself in a public space (a park, a train carriage, or walking down a street) rating the legs, or bellies, or upper arms of everyone you pass in terms of the merits and failings of your own? Do you know how self-conscious that makes you, how disarmed, how confused, how dissatisfied, how unbelievably freaking vulnerable?’). Which is obviously terrible, because the human body should not be objectified, judged, dissected and criticised like that the whole time, no matter your gender or size.

But anyway, what I mainly wanted to say was this: I really do not understand the attraction of skinny guys. I just do not get it. I find skinny men utterly weird in the same way that I find completely cleanshaven men slightly creepy. I do not get the attraction so many women seem to have to David Tennant or Matt Smith. I like a man who is bigger than me in all dimensions (I really have no objection to men with bigger boobs than me – if I did have such an objection I’d be right back looking at the skinny men and well just no). I like a man who is stronger than me, and a bit of fat never went amiss. Seriously.

Other than that I’m not particularly fussy about men. Or rather, I guess I am, but I have some slightly unusual ideas of what makes a man good-looking. And to be honest – as, again, the author of this article mentions – women actually don’t care that much about the looks of their man. We would all rather have someone with a good personality, who makes us feel good about ourselves and who makes us happy and who is happy when he is with us. Clever, funny, caring, and frankly it’s a massive turn-on to be wanted by someone. And actually, in the past, I have liked and gone out with and been attracted to skinny guys, because I’m fickle like that. But if you asked me to describe my ideal man in terms of looks he would be taller than me by a few inches, probably, broad-shouldered, strong, but not utterly ripped. And I know a number of girls who really really fancy skinny guys and I simply do not understand it, so having seen this article I wanted to register my confusion with the world.

Now let’s all have a nice long feminist-centred debate about manorexia, male grooming, and the pressure to look a certain way, and whether, after all these years, men possibly deserve it…?!!