I went out drinking with Thomas Paine...

... he said that all revolutions are not the same...

This song came out in 1991, right in the middle of the last big fat recession. It's amazing how sharp it suddenly sounds. 

And its inspiration, Thomas Paine, died 200 years ago. It's amazing how sharp *he* suddenly sounds as well. Fairtrade cotton company Gossypium (based in his home town of Lewes) have just released a very cool T-shirt in his honour. I am tempted. As BB also famously (chez joella at least) said, the revolution is just a T-shirt away. 

Or maybe it's more the case that we just carry on reinventing a broken wheel until we go the way of the dinosaurs. In which case, I'm having one for the road. 

joella

The May to September Fish Lines

When I was about 12, I had a sort of all in one halterneck top and shorts. It was banana yellow, and every time I put it on, which took a while as it was complicated, I experienced massive dissonance between how I would like to have felt wearing it - leggy, tanned, cartwheeling, glorious - and how I actually did feel -pallid, clumsy, exposed, and profoundly self-conscious. I kept thinking this would change, but it never did.

Summer clothes still have that effect on me. In fact summer itself still has that effect on me - I can't stay long in the sun, I only go to the beach when it's cool and breezy, and when I watch the brown, wiry Palestinian woman who has the allotment a few plots down from mine striding around purposefully in vest, shorts and wellies, I feel 12 years old all over again. Her plants grow tall and strong, mine give up and wilt.

But then there is Hinksey Pool, Oxford's seasonally open municipal lido, which lives in the middle of a park full of towering conifers. Somehow, it's different there. Pale Aquarians emerge blinking from the breezeblock cubicles, pile up their towels, put on their goggles and slip into the water. There, as the children go home for their tea and the shadows lengthen, women of an uncertain age swim up and down, up and down, along the lines of fish painted on the bottom of the pool. Above us is only sky, blue or grey it doesn't matter, because it's warm in the pool, as long as you keep moving.

Hinksey Pool is a strange organic shape, so no two crossings of it are the same length. The fish lines provide general direction, and there are men who plough up and down them, refusing to deflect. The women of an uncertain age travel along the same lines, but differently. Occasionally, I have swum up the longest fish line directly behind my friend H -- one woman can be knocked off course, but two are harder to shift. Eventually, though, one of them kicks you in the cheekbone, because ultimately, you are making an artistic statement, and they are making an autistic one.

There is plenty of shade around Hinksey Pool, and there is also a kiosk which sells chips and ice lollies. It's absolutely English, and absolutely wonderful. Last night, I swam over to the edge to climb out, and another woman was waiting by the ladder so she could climb in. 'This is like a tropical scene,' she said, 'and you're like a dolphin swimming towards me!'. I sort of knew what she meant, but I wasn't quite sure what to say. So I smiled, and said 'I love it here'.

We all do, she said. We all do.

joella

An invitation to the School of Life

I got a phone call a few weeks ago from Roman Krznaric, who I have met a few times - I once hung a radiator in his front room, and for several years I had a wood chest in my garden that used to belong to him and his partner K. He was calling because he is leading the 'Work' course at the School of Life, and he wanted to know if I would come and give a talk about becoming a Lady Plumber.

I was full of reasons why I might not be a good person to give such a talk - I am not really a plumber (or am I? I don't know), I'm still a 0.6 FTE NGO X wage slave, I actually bring in substantially less money that I did before I hatched this plan (though I grow my own salad leaves now, thus saving untold ££s), I don't really know what happens next - but he said no, that was all cool, and the course was just as much about questions as about answers. OK then, I said, you're on.

I was more nervous than I thought I would be, but maybe everyone is when they talk about themselves. Plumbing is quite easy to play for laughs, which helped, and there is a story in there - the Dark Days in the New Building, the inspiring if unpredictable presence of J the plumber, the urge to challenge a few stereotypes, and hell, to do something new. I don't think there's anything extraordinary about my experience, and nobody who finds it as hard to get out of bed in the morning as I do is ever going to change the world, but maybe that's the point.

And it was great fun. The best bit was the Q&A session... it was interesting to say out loud things that I have only really ever said to myself. Someone asked if I'd thought about going back to help out at the college, and wouldn't that be a good thing to do, and I'd sort of thought about it, but not for a while, and yes it would.

Generally, it was inspiring to be around such active thinking about the nature of work, what's important about it, and how it defines our lives. I'd like to have more of these conversations out loud. It's not an easy thing to do, so respect to the School of Life for starting some those conversations off.

joella

I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours

I have this rumbling fear that the country is sinking into right wing bigoted quicksand, and over the next decade we will all be suffocated slowly by our own fear and intolerance. It will be bad for lots of people, and lots of those people will be women.

Example 1: Female journalist is pilloried on CiF for suggesting, actually quite apologetically, that the students at St Annes College Oxford who elected a "white heterosexual male officer" were fuckwits and worse. Whereas anyone who has had to walk into a party full of shitfaced six foot rugby players to retrieve their stolen underwear from someone's head could tell you that whatever white heterosexual Oxbridge males need, it's not more representation.

Example 2: Successful-and-thin Liz Jones writes about how appalling it was to actually eat (her version of) normally for three whole weeks. This article made me feel very, very weird. I don't think I know a woman who has a relationship with food that is completely free of complications, and really, the last thing any of us needs is 'I know I am so wrong to basically starve myself but it is the only thing that validates me and I can't wait to get back to it' shit like this.

Example 3: A bad habit of mine is playing online puzzle games when I'm bored. Which is how I came by BubbleBox.com. The game types: Action, Adventure, Puzzle, Skill, Sport, Sandbox and... Girls. The top Girls ones include Cake Mania, Beauty Resort, Personal Shopper, and My New Room. On the one hand there is stuff, and on the other there is stuff - pink, sparkly stuff - for girls. A trivial concern, maybe. Or maybe not.

There is the odd glimmer of light. For a couple of years now I have been following I Blame The Patriarchy - beautifully written (the posts - one can't always say the same for the comments), furious radical feminism mixed with heartwarming nature crap. Google Reader suggested I might like it, and I do. Even though I, you know, live with a dude.

It was IBTP which pointed me at Sarah Haskins. And also taught me the word 'cuntalina', though that didn't go down so well with the radfems. Anyway, this is one of the things I read in my spare time. I don't share every sentiment, but it goes a long way to reminding me that Femail (and, let's face it, Observer Woman) are, basically, part of the problem.

But I don't see it getting better anytime soon. I think the solution might involve moving to a log cabin by a lake and listening to nothing but birdsong till we sort this shit out. Anyone want to come along?

This post was brought to you by Talking World War III Blues - Bob Dylan.

joella

The road leading home

I had a lovely evening out tonight with people I last properly saw in the Hot Place. Two of them are temporarily based in the New Building, and a third was passing through. It was a chance to revisit the days of chaos and paranoia from a safe distance, and with our guards much further down.

And I appreciated the chance, even as it was embarrassing to hear how I got stoned by accident - at the time, none of the women I was smoking with knew how to tell the (relatively) senior person from Head Office that the shisha that night was "special", so none of them did. I wondered afterwards why I spent two hours in a paranoid funk writing out all the numbers from my mobile phone longhand. And then washed my hair several times and ate my emergency stash of Bombay Mix. But now I know.

I wandered home via Tescopolis, to pick up a pint of milk. In front of me in the queue was a young woman buying a bottle of pink fizz. They have a sign up saying that you will be asked for ID if you look under 25 (this number seems to go up every week) and sure enough, she was carded by the (also young, also female) cashier, who said 'by the way, you forgot your zip'. She felt for her flies, which were down. I felt for mine, which weren't, but the cashier clocked me doing it, so they might as well have been.

Behind me, a someone held up a bag of Tesco Value frozen vegetables. 'Are these any good?' she asked me. 'I'm not really a vegetable person'. I don't know, I said. I mean, I *am* a vegetable person, but I don't buy that kind. 'Right,' she said, and laid them aside.

On the way home, I passed two students flyposting for the Jesus Festival.

All these young women, out on their own late at night, doing things and making decisions. It's like we live in a free country or something.

joella

It's not dark yet, but it's getting there

I heard Nick Griffin on the radio a couple of years ago, and one of the few consoling thoughts was that he was pretty much a lone voice in the fascist wilderness.

But no more. No, the good people of the North West have gone and democratically elected him to the European Parliament, despite the fact that fewer people voted BNP than five years ago. What the fuck was everyone else doing? Singing Dixie?

I had an extended blog / Twitter / pub argument with a friend of mine in his early 20s who said he wasn't voting because there isn't any point. Here in the South East we have exactly the same MEP representation as we did last time, so he could claim QED, but you know what they say on the West Wing - decisions do get made by the people who show up.

Today there is an online outpouring of anger and angst. I am slightly reassured by this, as I'm sure is anyone else who had assorted family members made into lampshades, or is, like Housemate P, both British and black. 'They keep talking about indigenous Britons,' he said, 'but I don't think they're talking about me'.

No. I don't think they are. And yeah, online outpouring is important and cathartic. But Facebook petitions, Twitter hashtags and Not In My Name websites don't keep fascists out of parliaments. Only voting for non-fascists does that.

I *know* the Labour party have been banging nails into their own coffin ever since the invasion of Iraq, and I *know* politicians of all persuasions have covered themselves in shit with the expenses debacle. I can see why people are disillusioned with the political process. And I can see how fundamentalist Islam, cheap Eastern European labour and growing inequality feed the fire of discontent in the belly of our ill-educated, debt-ridden, benefit-dependent lumpenproletariat, who really, really want someone to tell them it would all be different if it wasn't for the foreigners. You are entitled to a better life! You are white!

Yeah, I can see all that. But I don't have to like it. And it gives me what my friend K would call the serious wiggins. You've got to have faith, but days like these, it's mighty hard to have much of it.

joella

Here be dragons

They ask me sometimes what PMS is like, those people who don't have it. I never quite know how to describe it, though I can tell stories of skidding across a kitchen floor on the half a kilo of dried penne I had just thrown on it, of sobbing on a swing surrounded by a shredded loaf of bread, of spending an hour crouched on the floor cleaning the gunk out of the bit of the dishwasher you only see when the door is open, of learning the hard way never, ever to make major life decisions when the moon is swelling.

Basically, it's a random mixture of big horror and fixation with tiny details. You don't look forward to it, but hey, it's not boring. Yesterday I was down at the allotment by myself. There are a million things that need doing at the moment... digging, watering, hoeing, hacking at nettles, more digging... but the only thing I wanted to do was squat by the rocket patch and thin out the seedlings.

I'd left this a tiny bit late and it was a delicate job, stroking the leaves apart and feeling down underneath the little clumps to tease a stem away and pull it out without disturbing any of the others. It was hot and the soil was almost steamy (I worked out it was easier to pull out damp seedlings than dry ones) and it was kind of mesmerising. I was fascinated by my own fingertips and the things they can feel. It was restful to be focusing on a little patch of earth and not having to think about the rest of the big scary world.

And then I had a flash of a TV programme about hand transplants that I saw many years ago. It was disturbing, these men with someone else's hand sewn on the end of their arm, learning how to pick up coffee cups. One of them went all purple and had to be taken off again. Big, clumpy dead men's hands.

And then I couldn't thin the rocket anymore. An hour or so later, there was the little dark stab of pain that let me know it was ok to put my pyjamas on and curl up in a ball. No more dead men's hands for another month, hooray!

joella

"What is lawful is appropriate"

What a charming man Bill Cash must be. They didn't say I *couldn't* bleed the country dry, mum!

I picked up this story because my blog stats shot up suddenly. This has happened before and only ever means a surge of interest in my 2003 post about the equally charming Laetitia Cash. Booze soaked old school feminism remains a minority interest, sadly.

Still, it's great to have new visitors. Thanks Laetitia! Can I buy you a drink? Oh, hang on, I'm a taxpayer. I already have.

joella

Target Women

How did I not know about Sarah Haskins till yesterday? More on how I came to know about her another time, this is too good not to share. Enjoy.

joella

Cornwall: the verdict

Executive summary

Not at all like Lancashire. Well, maybe a little bit.

Full report

Pluses

• Fish. I first "got" fish in 1992. My Significant Ex and I were staying on Kovalam Beach in Kerala, which in those days wasn't much more than a bunch of £1 a night huts and some bars playing Santana. The boats would come in, the sun would go down, we would have a little fishy (from the tandoor) on a little dishy (made of banana leaf), and it would blow our tiny minds. I have been few places since that have had the same effect but Cornwall is one of them. It's turbot-charged.
• Cliffs. Where I come from, we don't have cliffs. We have epic stretches of sand that move almost seamlessly (give or take a few sand dunes full of shagging teenagers) into market garden-friendly terminal moraine. The whole of the Fylde coast is one long ribbon development, where the streets are wide and the bungalows are many. Cornwall has tiny steep sea apertures, where the gradients are perilous and the cottages are miniscule. 
• Industry. Well, ex-industry. I heartily recommend the Charlestown Shipwreck & Heritage Centre. It gives some wild insights into life in a china clay exporting tiny steep sea aperture (by way of mannequins eating pasties with big boots on) while also and fairly unrelatedly packing thousands of shipwreck, rescue and salvage-related facts and artifacts into old clay tunnels. It's passion-led preservation at its best. Go see it. 
• Enviro-art. You know about the Eden Project. It has its critics but I was charmed. I particularly liked the WEEE Man (though would have preferred a WEEE Woman, naturally) and the rainforest biome. It was getting hot in there. We took off some of our clothes. 
• Horticultural Victoriana. The ancient rhododendrons and gunnera in the Lost Gardens of Heligan (warning: shit website - why do people still use Flash like that?) will stay with me for a long time. The whole place seems to be decaying gently even as it is restored, but if you narrow your eyes you can just about imagine what it must have been like at the height of the Empire. 
• Beer. They do lovely milds (I am getting quite into mild, in my old age), and they do it all over the place. Pretty much every pub is excellent, in a real ale real fire dog-friendly stylee.  In winter I imagine you may find yourself stranded in one for several weeks, but I could also imagine many worse places to be stranded. 
  

Minuses 

• Petrol consumption. It's kind of a nightmare to drive around, as the roads are miniscule and the parking impossible, but the geography means there's not a lot of alternative. And this was May - I would not like to get stuck on the main street in Mevagissey in August, you'd still be there in September. We saw the occasional intrepid cyclist, and some impressive bus driving, so maybe you could do it without a car if you were organised about it. There are lots of pubs to stop in, after all. 
• Time warp. It has a sort of stuck in the 1970s feel to it, and a lot about the 1970s was well worth leaving behind. Where there is money it is flashed around, where there is not it is all a bit bleak. Our hotel had something of the Grace Brothers about it, plus a disco on the Friday night that I seriously thought was ironic (I sat in the bar with my dad for an hour and didn't hear a single song recorded after 1985), but wasn't. I approved of the kippers for breakfast and original Armitage Shanks bathroom suites with matching tiles, however, and once you accept you're living in a world where chintz has never gone out of fashion and golfing clothes are normal, it ain't so bad. 
• Politics. You have to order the Guardian in specially. I think it comes by helicopter. 

joella