Touching the Planet

How many people in our western cyberized world have never walked barefoot on the earth?

I had to bully the one I walk on beaches with into taking off his boots and socks in order to feel the sand and water between his toes. I was shocked by this. I love the feeling of the ground beneath my feet, whether it is grass or mud or stone or sand. Apart from the sheer physical pleasure, I feel grounded, refreshed and restored whenever I touch the planet in this way.

But how many people live such protected and artificial lives that they have never done this? Have you never touched the planet with your feet, Gentle Reader, or is it something you do whenever you get the chance?

It worries me.

Holding Patterns

Too much to say, too little time to say it. Well, too little energy really. So this is just a list of notes for subjects to pick up on later:

• Welsh road-signs, politicising language, the restfulness of not speaking a language
• Auditioning for relationships, the dynamics of relationships with no expectations of having children
• Accounts
• Cancer management
• Touching the planet

Ok, I didn’t say any of it was particularly interesting - just that it is stuff I’ve been thinking about recently, and want to revisit soon.

What is it about the Welsh?

I get upset with racism, it is something I find strange and frightening and I am distressed by overt and covert racism wherever I see it. I have been known to pick fights with taxi drivers who use words like “these people” in their social chit-chat. I’ve walked out of conversations with friends in pubs saying “I’ll leave you Nazis to get on with it”.

The one I spend my dirty weekends with has a more racially and culturally varied mix of friends than I do. This is partly because of his work, partly because of his geography, and - just possibly - partly because he is genuinely colour-blind and I am not. I was raised by good people of great integrity who were - to coin a phrase - kindly racists. There was a certain paternalism in their attitude, similar to the patronizing espousal of right-on left-wing causes by white students in the 1980s, if the truth be told.

For a while I had to work abroad. Although I did not work in places such as the far east where I would have been visibly foreign, I did work with other douce and smooth northern Europeans. I was on the receiving end of the same sort of subtle and polite racism which is so prevalent here. Being in neutral territory made it easier for Americans, Australians and New Zealanders to express disdain of all things British too. I also worked in Scotland and was the departmental English woman. But this was racism-lite in every respect.

What I find odd and concerning is that I simply cannot shift my dislike of the Welsh. I loathe the way they speak, I find them shifty and deceitful, I perceive them as being insular, narrow-minded, xenophobic and complacent. I think they have unnecessary chips on their shoulders and are wilfully stroppy and past-masters of passive aggression.

It worries me that I interpret these things so negatively, rejecting the musicality of their voices, failing to see their cautious reserve for what it is, misinterpreting their sense of tradition and heritage and their strong sense of history and cultural identity.

Even more worryingly - perhaps they are actually open and honest people who are broad-minded and flexible thinkers and it is me, that I am so blind and prejudiced that I simply will not see these qualities in them at all.

Whichever it is, I still feel uneasy going to Welsh Wales this weekend. I don’t like the Welsh and I don’t like myself for not liking them.

The one useful thing that comes out of this navel-gazing is that I can go some way towards understanding the fear and unease of the bigots in the area in which I live who are overtly and covertly racist against the large asian communities here.

Football Fubars

I like going to football matches because they are live events and I enjoy the sounds and the sights and the emotions and the people-watching. However, I live in a biennial dread of European and World Cup football tournaments.

This is partly because I dread the feeling of an entire nation sulking the following day: it is as if every man and every woman suddenly had a synchronised and lachrymose episode of PMS.

It is also partly because I feel as if I am going to miss out on something. Scrooge hates Christmas, in part, because of the feeling he has that he’s all alone in his hatred of it. Even though I know it is all going to end in ignominy and tears, I have this sneaky suspicion that the people who engage with the thing will end up the emotional winners.

Maybe I should just give in and watch the bloody thing.

No epiphanies

Some blogs are easier than others. This is a tricky one, not because of any great anguish in my life, but because I don’t actually have much to say. I’ve not done any great philosophical thinking. There’ve been no dramas. I’ve had no epiphanies.

I have had to spend almost 400 quidlets getting the car serviced and MOTd, which displeases me rather a lot and leaves me extremely broke for the rest of this month and probably half of next month too. On the other hand, I’m going to make the effort to park further away from work which will be both healthier and cheaper. And I’m making myself packed lunches. Also healthier and cheaper.

So, not a bad day, all in all, apart from impending poverty. I just wish it wasn’t quite so cold.

Don’t you wish your girlfriend was STRAIGHT, like mine?

The kerfuffle last week about my use of the word queer in another town in cyberspace led to some discussions between me and the one most intimately affected. He - with some justification - sees me as a straight woman. After all, he’s a bloke, and I’ve only ever had relationships with men, and I socialise as straight. (I’ve never made a big deal of my occasional sexual encounters with women because I’m far too scared of political-lesbians to socialise as bi.)

So, he sees me as this straight woman he’s pulled, and now I am turning round and saying “but I’m not straight, I’m queer” and he’s saying “but you’ve never been gay or bi” and there we are going round in circles.

We didn’t get trapped in the “queerer than thou” debate which can take place between different groups in the LGBT communities, but he did say something very interesting which I am still mulling over. He said: “most FtMs are in denial that their girlfriends might be bi or queer - we want to think that our girlfriends are straight because it proves that we are ‘real’ men”.

Ever since then I’ve had a transgendered version of the line from the song thrumming in my head: “Don’t you wish you girlfriend was straight like mine?”

I am still not entirely sure what to make of it all.

Half a head is better than none

I had a migraine yesterday.

I’ve not had a migraine for two months, though I had a spate of them day after day at the end of March because of some new medication I was on. Not having migraines is wonderful, and the horse pills that I’ve been prescribed to take at the onset of a migraine have been life-transforming. I’d kinda forgotten how intrusive they are.

I had a headache across my eyes yesterday and around the back of my skull, but it wasn’t the familiar half-head (hemi-cranium) of the migraine, so I took a couple of ibuprofen and hoped for the best. A few hours later I had to admit that although the headache didn’t feel familiar, the sense of nausea and distance did, and I realised that if we didn’t get in the car and go to Morrisons right now we’d be foodless and milkless until some unpredicted time on Sunday.

The one I spend my weekends with did the shopping while I stood in the carpark wondering if I could face going to the loos in Morrisons to throw up and realising that I Could Hear Every Sound With Crystal Clarity. The sonophobia is the worst thing about having migraines in a public space. Throwing up on the street is as nothing compared with losing one’s ability to filter out extraneous noise.

When he’d finished doing the shopping we set off for home, only a couple of miles, but I’d made sure I’d located an old carrier bag just in case. About half way there I pulled over, got out the bag and sat in the driver’s seat throwing up. Breakfast isn’t improved by being seen again at six in the evening. All the while, there he was, sitting patiently in the passenger’s seat, reading a magazine. I didn’t dare laugh. Choking on breakfast would only have caused annoying and unnecessary delays.

We got home. I went to bed with the bin from the bathroom. He spent the evening on-line. We missed Doctor Who. I slept. Today I am in that washed out space I occupy after a migraine. They feel wonderful after the event. But it’ll be a long time before I forget the sheer Englishness of parking up at the side of the road, one person vomiting and the other person reading a magazine.

Big Brother and the W.I.

I went to the WI last night. I’m not sure what the equivalent of the WI is in other cultures. I go because I like to belong to an organisation which slow-handclapped Tony Blair and one where middle aged women get naked for charity. The point about the Womens’ Institute, I guess, is that an organisation based on the solid virtues of rural life, feminine handicrafts and baking is an unlikely hotbed of such subversive activism. The other reasons are that I finally feel old enough, it is a pleasant way of meeting local people, and I like and respect middle aged and elderly rural women.

WI meetings are surprisingly formal. They start when the secretary reads the minutes of the previous meeting, and then there is a lot of business such as announcements about wine-tasting trips to local vineyards, pub quizzes and afternoon teas at other WIs. This all takes half an hour or so, maybe a little bit more. Then there is the entertainment for the evening. An Improving Talk. Last month we had a talk and a demonstration of stained glass making. This month the talk was entitled something like “musical memories”.

I found it boring, amusing, pleasant and rather sweet in more or less equal quantities. The speaker looked like Fester Addams, but had a palindromic wig which looked the same from the front and the back, and I spent a lot of the evening worrying that it would tip forward over his nose. He was in his 60s I’d have guessed, and he played us big band records from the turn of the previous century to the mid 1940s. Some of them were real toe-tappers, but of course we sat decorously, our hands in our laps. There was a soft murmur of talk through the records. It was an evening of gentle innocence. He struck me as a good man.

After the talk we ate cakes, drank tea and gossip, and I offered my help at the village gala next month, and then I made my escape. Virtuous womanhood can only go so far. When I got home, I settled down to watch Big Brother. I know that it is trite to draw a comparison between the honesty of our good-hearted and unpolished speaker and the cynical manipulations of Endemol who select shallow and vulnerable people, provoke them to mean-spiritedness and violence, place them in moral and ethical dilemmas, and prompt them into degrading themselves for money. It may be a trite comparison, but it is one I am going to draw nonetheless.

Every aspect of our life is full of actual or metaphorical E-numbers. We no longer like the honest and almost naive taste of reality, and instead prefer Reality TV.

Peacocks screaming

a car’s horn blares out
the peacock screams a reply
ugliness cuts air

Lost for words

I’ve set myself the task of writing something here every day - or every weekday at least. The challenge of course - as with most things on the internet - is content. I have to find something interesting to say every day, and something interesting to other people. Because, of course, whatever I say must be interesting, challenging, witty, incisive and intelligent. And, ego and vanity aside, whatever I say should be worth other peoples’ time to read.

Some years ago I went on a Buddhist retreat over Christmas. I’d still recommend it as a good way to spend Christmas or New Year. I was one of the few people I knew that year who lost weight. On retreat we meditated and prepared food and walked and slept and listened to stories about the Buddha and cleaned the retreat centre and were generally simple and spiritual and vegan.

By far the most interesting part of it, for me, was the 36 hours we spent in silence. Eating in communal silence is simple enough. You tend to take more care of people: you check to see if they need the salt or the pepper and if you are stuck at the wrong end of the table from the egg-free salad dressing, you just touch your neighbour gently on her arm to attract her attention and point. Sharing chores becomes calm and companionable when you communicate softy with touch and with sign language. It’s all very pleasant.

The really interesting thing, however, is what happens when you don’t have to socialise; when you don’t have to babble about what you are doing, or ask friendly questions, or empathise with a tale of woe, or listen to someone else’s anecdotes. You don’t have to scrabble around to fill those social silences. The space that you are in becomes physically companianable, and mentally or emotionally stress-free.

Of course, the silence can have side-effects. All the stuff you’ve been drowning out, not saying, denying, suddenly has a space to come out in. You may break down in tears because you are not clamping down on whatever it is that wants to cry out.

But the most interesting thing is that words suddenly have value. You don’t squander them on social-oil and small-talk. The odd thing about those 36 hours of silence, was how much more gentle and honest the silent signals were, when the noise of words did not get in the way.