Dressing down

I had an argument today with a friend of friend about Sarah Millican’s dress.

Some background for you, in case you’ve missed the story.

Sarah Millican is a comedian who was nominated for a Bafta, had a wonderful evening and was eviscerated on Twitter for the temerity of having breasts. She was devastated but responded magnificently and very good for her. Millican was betrayed by her dress which she says looked lovely in the shop but which really didn’t look great in the photographs. This happens, the camera is a bastard at times. As she pointed out she’s a comedian not a model and has never learned to walk or pose in front of cameras.

What was egregious about the response to Millican’s dress was not that it was commented on, but that it was commented on in public.  There is a whole sub-specialty of fashion journalism dedicated to being bitchy about women on the red carpet. And then there is twitter. Oh lord.

I commented in a closed thread on Facebook about other choices Millican could have made and was roundly bollocked for doing so.  But I am English, and was brought up not to be rude to people to their face. Other people think we are a culture of hypocrites because we will comment discretely behind your back. The internet makes this hard, of course. Hence twitter storms.

However, I really felt for Millican. I have more or less the same figure and I never know where to put my tits in a photograph. I end up being so self-conscious when I know there’s a camera around that I always have the shifty look of someone who’s just wet themselves. The only photographs of myself that I like are ones where I didn’t know I was being photographed, or where I’ve given up responding to the camera at all.  So in this thread of doom I was reflecting on my own experience: I too face the difficulty Millican describes of finding clothes that I like and fit.

Two months ago I had my photograph taken for a national paper, one of the ones with a circulation in millions not tens of thousands, and it’s not an experience I enjoyed. I was more resigned than nervous; nervous is for situations where you have some agency. I settled for looking groomed rather than attractive and thought about what to wear for weeks beforehand. I had my hair and nails done,  I wore a highish necked dress and a waterfall cardigan that cut vertically across my boobs. The photographer hated the fact I wore black. If I had known, I’d have worn a different colour. I like to be helpful and he seemed to know his job. the piece has not yet been published, but I will probably ask someone else to read the comments thread for me. The ironic thing is that the story isn’t even about me.  Oh well.

I am so sad that Millican’s bubble was burst after the Baftas. She is a talented person, and deserves so much better.

When did email break?

I am trying to work out when email broke. I think it was about 18 months ago, maybe a year ago. No-one replies to emails any more.

I think it’s because we read them on our smart phones, but we’ll only reply to the easy ones when we’re on the move. Anything more complex we’ll leave till later and, as I learned when negotiating with my mother, later never comes.

Two or three years ago, five or fifteen years ago, emails worked. You would send an email and someone would respond within a few hours, a day at most. You would reply or send another and they would respond to that one. Email was faster and more flexible than letters, more private than faxes (unless you made the tee-hee-hee “classic” “newbie” mistake). It was great.

Recently I have been working on the schedule for Skeptics on the Fringe, and it’s been frustrating. It feels inappropriately public to make the first contact via Twitter and too in-your-face to make the first contact by phone. However, approaches by email are caught by spam filters or suffer from the double-bounce drop (if your email’s too complicated to be returned on the first bounce, it will be dropped).

I worked in times BC (Before Computers). Then I would have used the phone far more when I was confirming the schedule with the speakers, written letters quite a bit and maybe exchanged some faxes, instead of what I did today which was to use a mixture of email, twitter, FB messenger, texts, phonecalls and skype.

I am not certain which day would have been more productive, but I think I’d have been more productive BC.

We all used the phone more as a business tool, but these days I am shy of phoning people without arranging a time first, and when I do arrange a time to speak to someone call it “skyping”.  Today I got my rapid answers via Twitter, Chat, Skype, and Facebook messenger.

Would the letters have got a better response than the emails will now? I think so. People opened their post and put it in an In Tray and worked their way through it. Ideally you would deal with each piece of paper only once using one of the Three Ds (Do, Delegate or Dump). I am now trying to remember when I last saw an actual In Tray on an actual desk that isn’t in a post room. People mean to do that with emails, but the new wave of crap coming in drowns the previous wave of crap to be dealt with.

I am quite tempted to start writing letters again, just for kicks and giggles. Novelty works. In those early years of my working life, a fax was a good way to get someone’s attention because it was an urgent and important thing and the receptionist would bring it round immediately. But no-one has fax machines any more, there’s no “reply” link on a letter, no click through to our website, and stamps are 60p each.

So was BC was a pre-lapsarian age of artisan communications? When I started writing this post I thought “don’t be silly” but the more I re-wrote it, the less certain I became. With my rose-tinted specs on it seems like a golden age but Time Management™ courses and complicated products which were basically diaries in ring binders were heavily marketed suggest that someone made a lot of money out of other people being inefficient.

Instead, I shall think longingly of the true golden age, of the years between 1994 and 2012 when people read and replied to emails.

Incidentally, I assume you know, you babes who are reading this, that the cc on an email stands for “carbon copy”. Tell me you also know that a “carbon copy” was created by placing a sheet of black “carbon paper” between the heavier piece of paper of your top copy and the lighter piece of paper of your carbon copy; the impression by metal typewriter keys would then knock the carbon onto the carbon copy. This was one of the reasons why accurate typing mattered. The first carbon copy was legible, the second less so, the third a grey fuzzy blur.

Britannia ruled the waves

How many people does it take to arrange a picnic on a beach?

300, apparently, if the beach is in the Western Isles of Scotland, if the people having the picnic were the Royal Family, and if they got there using the Royal Yacht Britannia.

I was brought up by royalists; my great grandmother wouldn’t let taxis take her down the Cromwell Road. But logic and atheism pull me towards republicanism these days, more-so now than ever after visiting HMY Britannia yesterday. I should have taken photographs, sorry about that.

Bedrooms and bunk beds

The strongest images I took away were of the stark comparisons between the bedrooms of the Queen and Prince Philip, looking like rooms in a rather old fashioned country house hotel, but palatial compared with the grey below-decks quarters of the “yoties”, folding bunks stacked three high in dormitories sleeping dozen or so men who had no more than a locker each for their possessions…. well it made me feel very republican, so it did.  And apparently they slept in hammocks up until 1973.

The Queen’s bedroom on HMY Britannia – © Copyright Alan Findlay and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence.

That said, yachtsmen volunteered. they were members of the navy or the marines, and some served for up to 20 years on Britannia, one for 34 years, so no-one was coerced. But even so.

There were rules to ease social awkwardness

The crew were to be as unobtrusive as possible, and if a Yachtsman did encounter a member of the Royal Family, he had to stand still and look straight ahead until they had passed. – Britannia: Life below decks

This was common in aristocratic households where servants were required to turn to face the wall if they were seen by a member of the Family. It serves to enforce the hierarchy of course, but it also saves all that awkward social interaction too, preserving the illusion of privacy.

Quite extraordinary.

The argument was that Britannia acted as a floating embassy.

State rooms in the Royal Yacht Britannia © Copyright Alan Findlay and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence.

But it only needed the state rooms for that, not the Royal Family’s bed rooms, sitting rooms, sun lounge and private sun deck.

Whose money?

Britannia was paid for out of the defence budget, and when members of the Royal Family were aboard it was accompanied by ships of the line. While Blair’s act in pulling the financial plug can be read as spiteful, it was rational and it wasn’t petty. Britannia cost £11m a year to run, and a new ship would have been hundreds of millions to build. I’ve no objection to the Royal Family paying for their own floating palace, I do object to them free-loading with the defense budget though.

What’s she for, exactly?

We are always told soothingly that the Queen is a constitutional monarch and has no real power, all she does is sign bills into law. In which case why does she need such fancy bedrooms, palaces and such? What is in those Red Boxes we are told she works so hard on every day? What the hell are we paying her for?

Maybe it’s because she does exercise real power. And this raises the real question: by what right does she exercise that power? Who elected her?

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• The Wikipedia entry on Britannia
• The Royal Yacht Britannia Website
• Archive photographs of her being built from the Daily Mail
• The Royal Yacht Britannia on Facebook
• The Royal Households – Britannia

Paula and Peaches, Peaches and Paula

 

Paula Yates always irritated me.

She was just enough older than me for that to be annoying in its own right, and then there was the way that she always mentioned she was a size 6. Every. Single. Time. She. Wrote. An. Article.  And then she gave her daughters those ridiculous names: Fifi Trixibelle, Peaches Honeyblossom, Little Pixie and Heavenly Hiraani, which almost seemed a form of child abuse in its own right.

Then it turned out she was Hughie Green’s daughter,  which creeped me out rather. And then the poor bitch died aged 41.

I may not be a size 6, but I am not dead. And so I felt sorry for her.

And now Peaches Honeyblossom has died aged 24, poor girl.

“I remember the day my mother died, and it’s still hard to talk about it,” Peaches told Elle in 2012.

“I just blocked it out. I went to school the next day because my father’s mentality was ‘keep calm and carry on’,” she said.

“So we all went to school and tried to act as if nothing had happened. But it had happened. I didn’t grieve. I didn’t cry at her funeral. I couldn’t express anything because I was just numb to it all. I didn’t start grieving for my mother properly until I was maybe 16.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26931337

Katherine Whitehorn wrote that Exodus 20:5 is an observation, not a curse. It says:

I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation

And here we see it playing out once again.

Larkin of course summed it up perfectly, though one summer about ten years ago I flipped his famous poem around. His original is here. Here’s my version. Both seem sadly appropriate now.

They fuck you up, your darling kids.
They may not mean to, but it’s true
that by the time they’re on the skids
you find there’s sod all you can do.

And so it goes from bad to worse
they have the faults their parents had.
Nothing’s learned and that’s the curse
of little shades of mum and dad.

Man hands on misery to man,
and every effort comes to grief.
You do the very best you can
and then they kick you in the teeth.

Peaches Geldof’s last Instagram

Poor women. Both of them. They should have died hereafter.

A series of small epiphanies

Nell

For a while I’ve been planning  a talk about what it’s like to be  what Skeptics call “a Woo” and about my journey from there to being one of the folks running Skeptics on the Fringe.

“Woo” is a term I dislike for a bunch of reasons, mainly because labelling people makes it too easy to stop thinking about them as people and stereotype them. No-one should do that to anyone, but we are Skeptics, dammit: we should think, especially when we are complaining that the defining group of this other group is that they don’t think.  Irony, much?

I had a couple of hours of driving to do tonight, appropriately enough  visiting Ash Pryce founder of Edinburgh Skeptics and then Keir Liddle founder of Skeptics on the Fringe.  I used the time to sketch out the structure of the talk and identify the key points I want to make.  It’s now sitting as bullet points on my laptop.

I hate bullet-points because PowerPoint doesn’t kill presentations, bulletpoints kill presentations. I prefer slides – if they are used at all – to be images rather than words.  The bullet-points will become my speakers notes. I could even use this as an opportunity to learn Prezi.

So I need to get some images together.  This glamour-girl from the 1920s in my grandmother.  Come to the talk when I eventually give it and you’ll see why she’s there. Somewhere I have a supercute pic of my dad with me slung under his arm when I was about two years old, and if I can find that I want it in the slides, failing that there’s one of him in what looks like a bishop’s mitre.  I think I still have my O’level certificate somewhere.  And I want to include some book covers, some podcast logos, stuff like that.  As it says here, the talk is about a series of small epiphanies.

It’s going to take a chunk of time to put together yet, but I hope it will explain why intelligent and rational people are still attracted to Alternative Medicine, reincarnation and similar things, that it will interest scientists and atheists lucky enough to have been raised that way, that it will reassure skeptical activists that skeptical outreach really is worth it, and explain why Phil Plait was right when he said Don’t be a Dick.

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I’ll be keen to do this talk at Skeptics in the Pub and other appropriate events once I’ve finished the slides. Contact me via contact@edskeptics.co.uk if you’d like to discuss dates.

Ho, ho, bloody ho

OK – I am going to whinge now.

It takes more than one day to prepare for Christmas, though not much more.

My Christmas preparations are modest compared with many people’s (an evening each for the pudding, the cards and the tree, and an afternoon for buying presents if you pick your emporium well, and an evening to wrap them). They are also expressly designed to keep me out of shops and to avoid giving money to Amazon.

However, if done, ’tis best done early. And this year circumstance, exhaustion, commitments and illness have prevented me doing the things I enjoy (decorate the tree, go to midnight mass, make a pudding for next year) and have made the ones done out of duty stressful and late.

If I can’t do things I enjoy with people I love, then my ideal Christmas really is a cheque given to Shelter or Streetwork, (and these days to my local Foodbank) and a retreat with the Buddhists so I can rest, think, and re-calibrate myself for the year ahead.

Merry Christmas. Next year om mani padme hum.

A tax on decency

These folk are collecting in Tescos South Queensferry this weekend http://edinburghnw.foodbank.org.uk/ and of course I bought tinned spuds, pasta sauce, UHT milk, tinned fruit and jelly as requested. But the regular donations page of their website is broken so the momentum built up by this weekend’s outreach cannot be turned into regular donations.

Besides which. What the actual fuck?

This is Cameron’s Big Society – it imposes a voluntary “decency tax”. This tax is paid only by those of us who think “there but for great good luck go I” and pay out in the hope that our tins of potatoes and suspended coffees will make any kind of a blind bit of difference, and in the sickening awareness that no, they really don’t.

I should not be giving tinned food to Foodbanks, I should be paying taxes which fund benefits that enable people to buy their own food.  I should not be buying suspended coffees, I should be paying taxes that fund housing benefits for the houses people actually live in, not the non-existent theoretical houses that don’t exist so they selfishly and fecklessly end up on the streets. No-one should be forced into the desperation that makes them beg for charity from strangers, they should be claiming the support that they are entitled to from any half decent society, and that society should give them the helping hand they need to get up and out of poverty.

And yes, I know the argument that benefits breed a culture of entitlement. But who is really displaying entitlement here? The person terminally ill with cancer who is “fit for work”? Or the trust-fund Tory who stashes their money offshore? The CEO paid tens of millions of pounds, building up enough wealth to keep their grandchildren in coke and botox all their trashy lives? Or the poor fools forced to work for them for free because it’s “experience” and “without experience they won’t get a job”? The Energy Company bosses making millions? Or the people freezing to death because they cannot afford heat and food?

People freeze to death in their homes. In a western country. Just because it is winter.  Which comes around once a year.

This is what the Tories do – they make taxation optional. Only pay to help others if you want.  If you don’t want, no problem. That’s fine.  Really.

Yeah, right.

But yes, I do want. So yes, I handed over the tinned spuds, pasta source, UHT milk, tinned fruit and jelly in the knowledge it’s a band-aid stuck down on top of gangrene.

But I really shouldn’t have had to.

In a nutshell

I found this snippet while tidying up the blog.  Since today would have been my Ma’s birthday, I am posting it now.

While emptying the house before my father died we found a packet of letters addressed to my grandparents and labeled in my mother’s writing: “Congratulations on our engagement and commiserations on Martin’s death”. Martin was her brother, killed aged about 26 in combat. She’d added: “Must have been difficult to write”.

Quite.

It’s my Ma’s shrewd sarcasm that I miss the most.

Feminist mammoths

The current upswing of feminism is rightly re-igniting debates about bodies and judgementalism.  As the meme goes

If you want a bikini body, put on a bikini

The idea that our bodies are there to be judged is common-place and getting more-so.  In the Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame  women step out, we show off, we reveal and display ourselves (our long legs, our cleavages, our baby bumps, our  holiday tans and bikini bodies), we bare ourselves.  In relationships we are happy, proud, smiling, or with mystery men.  In Dacre’s world, women cannot do something for its own sake or for ours, only for our audience of watchers or because of a man.

I  have a tattoo.  (Stay with me, it’s not as wild a change of subject as you’d think).  I could never see the point in a tattoo I couldn’t see, so it’s on my forearm and I chose mammoths because I like them.

They raise the question though, of who is the tattoo actually for?

It’s hard to work out what they are, especially from a distance. The design is based on cave paintings and is an awkward mix of line-drawing and shade. The only time they’ve been complimented spontaneously was once in a pub when I stood up with my arm held horizontally, reaching for the back of a chair.

In Daily Mail terms they are a failure. But from my (literal) perspective, they are great, and I love them.

I like seeing them trample down my arm towards whatever it is I am doing. (Hitting “post” in three… two… one….) They are a comforting sight first thing in the morning.  They even have names, though I am ashamed to admit this.

So, is a tattoo for person who has been tattooed or is it for other people?  Well, as it turns out, this particular tattoo is for me.

These aren’t just mammoths, they are feminist mammoths,

The day we noticed the world had changed

This post is a response to my friend Ash Pryce’s post: Living History: a Look Back on 9/11

I remember 9/11 very well because I wasn’t working that day and I watched from about 15 minutes after it started to be shown on the UK news. So I watched the second plane go in and the towers go down.

One of my strongest memories is of being aware that no-one knew what was happening, no-one knew what would happen next, how many were killed (40,000 people worked in the twin towers, so the final figure of 3,000, published days later, seemed like a merciful escape). The tv pundits didn’t have any briefing notes, there weren’t any alliterative sound-bytes from Alistair Campbell. We were suddenly, disorientingly off-script. Anything could happen that morning.

I knew that the world had irrevocably changed. Of course it actually changed a while before: 9/11 was the symptom, the part of the plant above ground, the final signal that we could see. But I knew that the world was about to become darker, nastier, less predictable, less trustable, less secure and less safe. That it would never be the same again.

You are right, ten years is an interesting time-span. It’s long enough for children to turn into adults – five years doesn’t do that – but short enough for adults to feel it was just the other day. And as you point out, twelve years or more is a recognisably long period of time.

So, ten or twelve years on – yes, the Americans and their allies took war to Afghanistan, to Iraq and (hush, don’t mention it) to parts of Pakistan. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay radicalised young men who would otherwise have just spent their teenage years playing street cricket on waste-grounds in Bradford or Finsbury Park.

The other kicker though is the electronic supervision we all live with; with every connection observed, every interaction noted. Orwell, Gibson and Stephenson are overheard in a bar. This is inextricably mixed in with the Randian neo-conservatism that combines a vicious sense of personal entitlement and malign greed and a willful rejection of science and the vindication of a monotheistic faith. It’s an evil mix, and it is bringing about the downfall of the US with the rest of the West tumbling after.

So in the short term, by say 2006, not much had changed much. But the world we live in now, and the world it is shaping to be, is a fuller realisation of dystopian post-democratic, techno-totalitarianism that even I imagined, cynical and fearful as I am, cynical and fearful as I was twelve years ago.