Beauty and the Beasts – Big Brother again I’m afraid

Hopefully this will be my last post on the Big Brother Bullying thing. I saw very little of the actual programme, but thanks to YouTube I’ve seen gory snippets and the eviction interviews.

Shilpa

In her exit interview, Shilpa struck me as being prudent, diplomatic and politic. She had no idea what the British public thought of the bullying, no idea how supportive it was of its local stars. Sure, she’d won, but at that point of course she had not seen the whispering that went on behind her back, so she did not know just how unpleasant Danielle, Jo and Jade had been about her. This is not to say that she was not telling the truth in her interview, but I doubt that she was telling the whole truth. She struck me as someone who was behaving with extreme caution based on very few cues. I find her grace, self-possession and poise to be admirable.

Jade

By far the most illuminating thing Jade said in any of the three interviews I found on YouTube was “I don’t know any (no?) other way to fight”. The only way she knows to express disagreement is by screaming foul-mouthed abuse. I find that both shocking and plausible. It makes me feel sorry for her, but crucially I am sorry for her for different reasons than she is sorry for herself. If she does want to grow up then her starting place is right there. It depends on whether her “advisers” have the maturity themselves to hear what she said in that interview, and find appropriate professionals to help her. (I did find myself wondering just how badly she had pissed her agent off, to make him or her recommend Celebrity Big Brother to her. You can see the stitch marks all over this).

One other thing which was interesting though was she said that she had no idea that she was a leader. She said that she could see it in the videos, but she had not seen it in herself. It is just possible that in the right hands that could be used as the positive point to start building some self-respect and adult responsibility.

You see, Jade reminds me of a three-year-old, in particular in her interview with an obviously uncomfortable Dermot O’Leary and in an interview with an invisible News of the World interviewer. She kept on wailing how sorry she was, but her subtext appeared to be “I’m sorry, please like me, I’m sorry, please like me, I’m sorry, please like me.” She seemed to be eaten by insecurity rather than guilt. Now I don’t recommend guilt as an emotion, but it is at least the first step on the road to remorse on to responsibility and adulthood. She has now checked into the Priory with “depression”. I am sorry, but acute unhappiness is not depression. I’ve been in both spaces. They are very different. She is in the “Mummy make it go away” phase which – to be honest – one should have grown out of by the age of 9. Again, this is not to say that she isn’t honestly desperately miserable right now, but she seems incapable of accepting that the situation is of her own creation.

Danielle and Jo

Danielle and Jo show the self-awareness of logs, I am afraid. Or maybe they have just marginally more self-control and self-respect than Jade, and are simply not wailing all over the red-tops. Danielle did do a very whiny interview in the Mirror, saying that Big Brother hadn’t shown her being nice to Shilpa, unfortunately this was only after she had been told to shape up in the Diary Room, and she seems completely unaware that being nice does not wipe out being nasty. Incidentally, if Teddy Sherringham did decide to end their relationship while she was in the house, then he most certainly should not have said so in public. It just makes him seem as shallow and nasty as the long-legged shit-smelling beauty herself.

Jo I find the most interesting. She denies that she has done anything wrong, which shows that she is herself standing up to the bullying of the press and the other meedja.

Both Danielle and Jo said “I giggled because I was nervous” – so someone briefed them well before those interviews. Most people with nervous giggles have no idea they are doing it.

Ach, it’s all nasty, shallow and unpleasant. But plaudits for Shilpa who “had the grace to hold herself when those about her crawled”, and hold herself in a way which neither Marilyn nor Diana ever managed, for that matter.

I wonder if she’s a gay icon yet.

How to use a sword to cut the top off a bottle of champagne

Ramblin’ round t’internet the other night I found a website dedicated to “the noble art of sabering champagne”.

It’s all rather fun in a Pirates of the Carribean kinda way, if you like your fun to feature more testosterone than sense. I was amused by following safety tip:

Drape a towel/linen napkin over the bottom portion of the bottle should the bottle explode. The towel will help to contain the glass.

Useful advice, that, doncha think?

(I owe the link to Doug).

Lazing on a Sunday afternoon

There are few advantages to being a pink-nosed snot-monster, but it’s been a long time since I’ve done nothing on a Sunday except put coal on the fire, brew tea, and read.

Very little beats it, I must say.

Jade Goody to be interviewed by police

Police to talk to Goody over ‘Big Brother’ racism row
Hertfordshire police said yesterday that they are trying to interview Jade Goody about allegedly racist comments aimed at Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty during her stint in the Big Brother house. So far the 25-year-old has been unavailable for the inquiry … There was further bad news for Goody when she accused of “legitimising” bullying in schools ….
The Independent
Also the BBC

I said that Channel 4 was thinking in legal terms not ethical ones. As another example, the editor of the News of the World waited to resign until after the jail sentance was handed out to his journo. No point in doing the decent thing if you can get away without it, is there?

It seems that today’s cynics know the laws about everything but have values about nothing.

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Doorways and windows

Some time ago a metaphorical door slammed in my face.

For a while I was suddenly acutely aware of just how many blocked up doorways and windows there around us. My hypersensitivity found them in urban environments and rural ones, in buildings built 700 years ago and ones built in the 21st century. I became briefly obsessed. Some of the doorways and windows I photographed are bleak symptoms of industrial abandonment and change, while others are picturesquely ruinous. Then, almost as suddenly as it started, my need to photograph them faded away. It takes no great self-awareness to understand what was going on.

This first set are buildings which are mainly 19th or 18th Century, mainly urban and mainly Northern.

This next set show some Troglodyte dwellings in Bridgenorth, Staffordshire. Compare them with the dwellings at Kinver Edge.

More urban, Northern industrial buildings, but 20th century ones this time:

These are medieval, being the Convent by the Thames at Godstow, just north of Oxford.

And finally a 21st century urban building, where the windows are blocked because the property is not yet ready for occupation, instead of being blocked because it is no longer being used.

“Make this Valentine’s Day Extra Special”

Made I laugh.

Cinquain: a verse about verse

Verse forms.
My thoughts evolve
with structure and content.
As each combines with the other
verse forms.

15^th October 2003

Right and wrong, black and white

Channel 4 seem to be happy to broadcast what they term “cultural” and “class-based” bullying. It seems they did almost nothing to stop Jade Goody and the other housemates bullying Shilpa Shetty. This suggests to me that the reason that they wouldn’t broadcast “overtly racist behaviour” is because racist actions are illegal. If they are basing their decisions on what is and is not illegal, then they are ignoring questions of morality, ethics and human decency. I wonder, did they take the advice of Lawyers or did they go to their Public Relations people? Did they take anyone’s advice at all?

So why IS bullying ok when racism isn’t?

Bullying and racism overlap in a venn diagram: not all bullying is racist and not all racism is bullying. So far, so obvious.

There are legal structures around racism, of course; racially motivated attacks in the UK carry greater sentences than mere thuggery and you are legally protected from racist bias in the workplace.

Presumably racist acts are illegal because it is relatively simple to legislate against them. After all, it is the action which is legislated against, not the attitude. It is racial, (or sexual or homophobic) discrimination which is illegal, not racism, sexism and homophobia. In all conscience, it is hard enough to prove discrimination in a court of law or a tribunal.

Racism is a prejudice that cannot speak its name. No-one in their right mind is going to stand up and say “I am a racist” – witness Mel Gibson’s retraction of his anti-Semitism last year. People will however ascribe the most appalling bigotry and prejudice to “cultural differences” and get away with it. Call me naive, but I fail to see why prejudice based on “cultural differences” is morally any better than racism. It is not as socially unacceptable, and it is not legislated against, but it is – surely – just as bad morally. Channel 4 has used this get-out-of-jail-free card itself, and allowed Jade Goody and the other housemates to use it, thereby perpetuating the pernicious myth that it is ok to express prejudice based on another person’s culture “because that isn’t racist”.

I really have to conclude that Channel 4 is morally bankrupt. It seems to me that the only reason they stepped in at all is that racial harassment and racial discrimination are illegal. If they weren’t illegal, I suspect that they would not have stepped in.

It seems that they do not know the difference between right and wrong, only the difference between black and white.

Ice

I’ve forgotten how to drive on ice.

I am not sure whether to put it down to global warming or post-recession efficiency with the gritting, but I am struggling to remember the last time I had to drive on ice. I really think it must have been the mid-90s.

So there I was, descending gratefully out of fog and blethering away with the phone on hands-free, when I lost traction on the front wheels. Not for long. In fact, by the time I’d squeaked “fuck!” into the phone I’d regained the steering and thought “Blow-out? No. Ice”. I then said “I’m ok but I’ll call you back” and started concentrating on the infuriating mixture of water and rime that I was driving over.

I am an irritatingly safe driver; the sort that always obeys urban speed limits and that will sit for as long as it takes – for three minutes, five minutes, seven minutes – waiting for a safe gap in traffic. The sort that will go round a roundabout twice rather than cut across two lanes and who will plan a route to avoid a bad junction.

I do however swear like a Big Brother contestant at anyone I think is endangering me and I run red lights on the basis that – where I live at least – every other bugger out there is running the reds which makes it more dangerous to go through on green. Actually, I prefer to run red lights than get rear-ended by the two vehicles behind me who follow me through. (Have I mentioned how much I hate tailgaters?)

It was dark as well as icy this evening, so I drove at 20 miles or so per hour in the middle of the empty country lane in case I found some black ice, skidded off to one side, ran out of tarmac and landed in a ditch, when I saw the rise and dip of another set of headlights a third of a mile or so away. So I pulled over by a farm and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Then a vehicle arrived behind me and also waited.

The headlights weren’t coming any closer and I’d got my new best friend behind me so I decided to set off again but this time with a nice friendly tailgater cosying up behind me. In fairness, he wasn’t outrageously close, but I still have no idea why he hadn’t gone past me when he reached me in the first place.

We went over the brow of the hill and saw a car facing us with one wheel on the road, two wheels on the verge and the fourth in the ditch and another car behind it also facing us but more or less in the right part of the road. Since I was not following anyone, they must have both been coming towards me when one lost it and tipped off the road.

Normally I’d stop and offer to phone the police or the AA or whoever, but my tolerance for people who drive aggressively on rural back-roads is fairly low at the best of times, and my sympathy for people who try to overtake on rural back roads at night when the temperature is hovering either side of freezing dips well below freezing itself.

So I didn’t stop; I didn’t offer to phone the police or the AA or anyone else; I just drove on by and 6 minutes later I was home.

What is really odd is that I don’t actually feel like a bitch.

“Cultural Differences”

Can anyone explain to me why bullying someone because of “cultural differences” is acceptable, but racist bullying is not?

(I have – of course – got thoughts of my own, but no time right now to marshall them into coherency, let alone write them up. I know and you know that I will be posting them as soon as I can though.)