The Absurdist

My Gran, Stories and Me

2012-01-25T11:32:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I was looking at some old family photos and came across some pictures of my maternal Grandmother, my Gran. I idly posted some messages on Twitter about my memories of her and suddenly, for the first time in a long time, I really missed her and wished that I could see her again.

Some people on Twitter sent lovely messages, sharing memories of their own grandparents and a few said "You should write a blog about her", so I have. I am sure there will be mistakes and omissions in this post. Some stories will be half-remembered or perhaps embellished a little - but you don't have to know everything about a person to love them or cherish their memory.

Christened Jane, though most folk called her Jean, she was born in 1908 in Ayr, birthplace of Rabbie Burns. She was one of 9 children; 8 girls (Annie, Belle, Agnes, Jenny, Mima, Alexandra, and Bessie) and a boy (David) . She came somewhere around the middle. Her father was the trainer of Ayr United Football club and they made ends meet as families did in those days, with Sunday shoes a luxury and dolls conjured from wooden spoons and dishrags.

She was around 60 when I was born. She and my Papa lived in a small brick "corporation" bungalow in Ayr, with an immaculate garden full of roses. Gran would sometimes set a bowl of water with rose petals in it near a radiator or the fire and the sweet, dusky smell of roses reminds me of her.

She always wore dresses - never trousers, rarely a skirt and blouse that I remember - shift dresses or "shirt-waisters" in strong colours with strings of sparkly crystal beads that you now find in trendy vintage clothes shops. She wore cardigans, with a hanky tucked in the pocket or up a sleeve. She had horn-rimmed glasses which made her big hazel eyes even bigger. When she died I asked if I could have her glasses and they are still tucked away somewhere in our attic, several pairs all the same with their blue-ish rims.

I never saw her dance, nor wear a swimsuit. The swimming pool was "the baths" and the beach "the shore". She never swam (I don't know if she could) but sat on the tartan rug ready to wrap you in a towel and provide a "chittery bite" to stave off the cold.

She had arthritis and when we went for a run in the car we would stop and pick sheeps' wool from the barbed wire fences which she would wash and use to cushion her painfully twisted toes. She wore sturdy girdles with suspenders attached and sometimes I would have to help her with them because her poor sore hands couldn't manage the fastenings. I think my Mum sometimes found her weeping silently with the pain, but I don't ever remember seeing her cry.

She was a wonderful cook, not a great baker, but a magician with savoury treats. She cooked sweetbreads and ham hough and boiled ox's tongue. She also made legendary creme caramel, sometimes equalled but never bettered in any restaurant kitchen. The kitchen and pantry had grey slate flagstones and for special occasions she would stand at the kitchen counter and make elegant curls or balls of butter with two wooden pats.

She was very particular about table manners and always used good linen, which was folded away in the sitting room sideboard, where a green glass box full of stamps sat next to a little square of mirrored tiles and a china figurine of an old beggar lady. Out in the hall there was a thin red runner bordered by lino which was excellent for marbles, though sometimes we got in trouble for the racket they made.

The beds were old fashioned, probably just a cut above utility and had blankets and candlewicks or old fashioned satin eiderdowns. On cold nights there were stone hot water bottles, wrapped in towels, to warm the sheets. Pink fabric lampshades with ruffled rims were clipped to the headboard for reading in bed.

The bedroom was papered with hunting scenes and in front of the window was a dressing table with three hinged mirrors on the top. I would move the little cut glass tray with candlesticks and trinket pots which sat on top and close the mirrors around my face, till it was reflected into eternity like Rita Hayworth in "The Lady from Shanghai". Sometimes, I would try to make myself cry to see what it looked like. Nothing about the house was unusual, yet many objects in it always had a certain exoticism, perhaps because they were of the past, part of a world that was tantalisingly out of reach.

Because the house was small, I often slept in the double bed with Gran and in the mornings my brothers and I would get a story, quarters of orange sprinkled with sugar and, sometimes, a "Black Magic" chocolate. Trying to recall her face as it really was is difficult of course, frustrated by the insistent images of photographs which drain life from the original. The nearest I get to recapturing her true image is when I picture her telling us a story, her eyes wide and mischief in her smile.

She told wonderful stories, mix and match fairy tales where Cinderella would climb the beanstalk and discover seven dwarves and the heroines were cheeky and resourceful and often told the princes "Thanks, but no thanks" at the end. She liked gory stories too. She would tell us of the man who loved to eat pigs' trotters and who one day, ate and ate and ate till he could eat no more only discovering as he got up from the table that HE HAD EATEN HIS OWN HAND! (I think it took me till I was about 13 to work out that this couldn't possibly have been true.)

She bought us wonderful children's books. I often wonder how and why she picked them. They were rather out of the ordinary for the time I think, though many are now classics. "Madeline" of course with her unruly nature and ruptured appendix, lots of books by Roger Duvoisin, "The Happy Lion", "Petunia" and "Veronica's Smile". The one I loved best was "Anatole", about an honourable mouse who saves the Duvall Cheese factory with his exquisite palate ("good""not so good" "needs orange peel".) When I was a bit older my favourite was "Cuckoo Cherry Tree", a book of dark fairy tales by Alison Uttley .

My Gran was clever at school and excelled at English. On her last day at school she ran home eager to tell her parents that her teacher wanted her to apply for a bursary to attend Grammar school, but her mother told her firmly, "Jane, I've got you a place", a place in service and she started work as a maid the next day.

After she died my Mum found scraps of paper scattered around the house with fragments of remembered poetry, and the beginnings of stories written in Gran's spidery hand. In another time would she have made more of her love of language? Who knows. Her life didn't lend itself to periods of introspection.

After the war she took in lodgers and with the profits she rented a sweet shop. She made a decent enough go of that and wanted to buy a guest house, but my Papa wouldn't sign the mortgage papers. He didn't refuse out of malice, he was just a working class man of his generation who didn't believe in taking on debt.My Gran took the money and booked a long holiday on the continent, travelling to France and Italy with my Mum and Aunt, an exceptionally rare experience for women like them at that time.

She was a strong woman who knew her own mind and wasn't afraid to speak it. She had a temper and a sharp tongue and was prone to feuds with the local butcher, being barred on more than one occasion when she questioned the provenance, or cost, or something of his ham bones. She liked to watch the wrestling and would shout "Bite his bum! Bite his bum!" before letting out a throaty chuckle, eyes wide again in mock horror behind the blue-rimmed specs. She had her secrets, some of which I know but even now wouldn't share, because they're not my secrets to tell.

She died of pancreatic cancer in her early 70's, her hair still almost jet black with just a few strands of grey. After she died my Mum says a that a strange black cat with a smattering of grey hairs suddenly appeared in our garden. It would sit and watch my Mum hang out the washing or tidy the weeds. After a few weeks it disappeared as suddenly as it came. Perhaps it was my Gran's familiar, perhaps not. It's a good story, one she would have liked.

My parents live close to us and see my daughter often, more regularly than I saw my Gran. Sometimes she will stay with them and we will get a phone call from the three of them giggling like naughty schoolchildren in the queue for sweets at the cinema or in the toy shop. Sometimes I would come home from work in the dark and see them dancing in the lit sitting-room window. Sometimes I see glimpses of my Gran in my Mum, and my Dad will look at me when I am being thrawn and say "Aye, your Gran'll never be deid."

She is not here anymore, but she has left her mark, part of herself, atomised in her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, not just in her blood, it's not that simple, but in the memories we share and the stories we tell.

Memories are Made of er, Something

2012-01-06T08:23:00.000-08:00

Contender for most depressing news of the day is that apparently our brains start to deteriorate from as young as 45 - 15 years earlier than previously thought. According to a study in the on-line version of the BMJ, memory, reasoning and comprehension skills all tend to get worse as we enter middle age.

Well, tell me something I don't know. No, please. Tell me. Especially given that the list of things I don't know grows by the day; passwords, the name of my Primary 3 teacher, what happened at the end of "Moonlighting".

I have known for some time that fings ain't wot they used to be in the brain department. I'm not quite at the stage of wafting down the street in my nightgown, trilling "We'll Gather Lilacs", but there are days when I've got one foot out the door.

I've never had a particularly good memory. Not for events at least. My memory seems to resist a linear narrative in favour of a jumble of split second recollections, lightning flashes of past moments, untouched by troublesome context. My brother will say "Oh, that was the day Gran had the fight with the butcher. I got a comic and you were sick on Mum's shoes." To which, despite entirely useless and annoying promptings, I will reply, "I don't remember." I really don't. I have no memory for like, what actually happened or stuff. I just remember my Mum had nice shoes.

My memories are of picking the hot tarmac out of the pavement, or the rustling wrapping of the sweets I stole from the secret drawer in the dressing table. Basically my memory is all "Don't trouble me with the facts, dude."

I also have no memory for lyrics or quotations. All I remember from four years of English Lit is that old perv John Donne going on about a "hairy diadem". I did however have startling powers of recall where conversations or jokes were concerned. Like a choir master with perfect pitch auditioning a tone deaf school boy, I would wince as some poor soul mangled the punchline to a juicy story. No longer.

Sadly, it is my facility with the spoken word that seems to be showing the most wear and tear. I used to roam the sunlit uplands of language at will, merrily vaulting symbolic stiles and fording rivers of simile. Now I need a good mental run up to the minor incline of a longish sentence, before collapsing in the heather of an over-extended metaphor like this one.

That terrible feeling of the wheels grinding slowly, click, click, click, till the brain at last shudders to a halt at the right word and the tongue falls weeping on the required phrase, "Yes! I would like a BANANA!" Banana! It is a BANANA! Joy to the world! We are saved!

No wonder I seek out the company of fellow peri-menopausal women: women who point dumbly at the sky like a UFO obsessive because they have forgotten the word for cloud; or who are reduced to miming "scorching case of thrush" to the practice nurse while they make a phone call on their purse.

All of which makes me realise that I don't think I hear men talk about their "senior moments". Certainly not as often as women do. Is it because they don't have to contend with that spot of hormonal bother? Or do they simply like to keep their linguistic and other mental deficiencies to themselves? Perhaps their brains get more regular exercise from rehearsing the scores of decades of international football matches?

Perhaps we women are too hard on ourselves. As I keep telling my daughter as she rolls her eyes at yet another instance of my mental infirmity, "Everybody remembers what I forget, but you forget what I remember." Great swathes of dull domestic family life still fall on women's shoulders and it's not the kind of stuff that anyone wants to hear about. I could drag you to the pub to chew the fat about what went in this week's lunch boxes, but why bother when we could pour bleach in our eyes? (Plus, I can't remember.)

I do miss the mental athleticism of my youth, just like I miss a 24 inch waist or my real hair colour. But where does that get me? The solution is big pants, a bottle of hair dye and er, something else.

Dressed to Impress? Or Dressed for Distress?

2011-11-20T11:37:00.000-08:00

Being a woman of a certain age, it is not all that often that you will find me loitering in a taxi queue in the wee small hours. I have a very active social life but most of it is conducted on my sofa, or friends' sofas, or on Twitter, where you can eat too much and undo your trouser buttons without risk of arrest.

If I do venture into town, I usually make a point of getting home before chucking out time, when young people start humping lampposts and throwing themselves into the traffic.

But the past couple of Saturdays I was out and about till well past pub closing time and found myself, on my tod, stuck in a taxi queue due to wearing stupidly high, spindly, cheap heels that made walking home an impossible dream. (Imagine shoes made of jay cloths, sequins and twigs and you're in the right ball park. )

Cursing my idiotic footwear and coveting the chips of passers-by could only hold my attention for so long and, eventually, I got round to examining the fashion choices of my fellow revellers. Particularly the young women. And what an eye-popping sight it was.

When I was in my 20's, my flatmates and I would sometimes drink too much wine and then, for a laugh, put on our thermal vests, big pants and our one pair of court shoes and jump around the sitting-room to the theme from Wonder Woman. ("All the world is waiting for you, and the power you possess! In your satin tights, fighting for your rights, And the old Red, White and Blue!!)

Remarkably, it seemed that the attire of the young women in the taxi-queue had been inspired by just such a scene. (Although, unfortunately, without the super hero vibe).

Next to me stood a shivering girl clad in a medium-sized Lakeland piping bag, her lady lumps oozing out of it like fondant icing with goose bumps. Her friend wore microscopic denim hot-pants and a halter neck top only just visible to the naked eye. They were both shod in a nest of tables strapped to their feet with dental floss. Or near enough.

Wincing like The Little Mermaid at every step, looking for all the world like they had been hobbled by Kathy Bates in "Misery", their "look" was more "physio appointment" than "sexy time".

I am cringing slightly as I write this, because I am conscious that I sound like a snooty old crone. Am I the equivalent of the Victorian dowager nursing her hump and necking the laudanum at the sight of a finely turned ankle? Or the 1950's gynaecologist sneering "harlot" at the sight of a painted toe-nail? Maybe. Sometimes it's hard to tell. I'm a good twenty years older than the young women I'm talking about and perhaps I am, quite simply, out of touch.

I'm not setting myself up as fashion expert, which is just as well since I am mostly channelling Rip Van Winkle in Wallis party wear. It's not really about fashion.

My beef with the flesh on show is not that these young women were dressing provocatively. If they been enjoying their sexual power, reveling in the male gaze they attracted, then bloody good luck to them. But they weren't. They were cold, uncomfortable, self-conscious and clearly frankly bloody miserable. To be perfectly honest, it was a bit distressing.

The sad irony is that for many young women, dressing like a porn star seems to have become synonymous with sexual liberation. But it's not liberating if you're dressing that way because you feel like you have to. Just like it's not liberating to flash your boobs on Spring Break because you want a cheer from the guys. I weep that empowerment has come to mean shoes that make you bleed and bad sex in the loo of a "fun" pub in Magaluf. (If these girls are having earth shattering orgasms in these two minute couplings, I'm Eva Peron. )

I appreciate I'm hardly the first person to have commented on the mainstreaming of sex industry aesthetics. (See of course most recently Caitlin Moran's fantastic "How to be a Woman".) But some things bear repeating.

I'm not suggesting that young women shouldn't have sex. If they're old enough and mature enough to be having good, safe sex, then carry on, knock yourself out. I'm just sorry that some feel they have to be in a state of undress in order to "fit in."

Of course it's not true for all women. Some young girls stumble through the forest of adolescence and choose the road to a fashion identity of skinny jeans, Converse and Breton tops. Why do some go that way and others aim for the land of Jordan? Is it related to self-esteem? Class? The rise of narcissism? I'm not sure that we know.

I just know that it makes me sad to see young women reluctantly bound and trussed like prize turkeys in the name of being dressed to kill.

How I Discovered Facebook

2011-11-02T07:10:00.000-07:00

Last week I discovered Facebook. I say "discovered", but I do not mean it in the sense that Christopher Columbus discovered America or Blind Date discovered Jenni Falconer. I mean that, approximately four years after having signed up for it, I actually started to use it.

In some ways this was an odd decision since mostly I hear nothing but complaints about Facebook from people on Twitter - but that's a bit like Aldi slagging off LIDL and they're both pretty good actually, especially for mulled wine and esoteric biscuits - so I shrugged it off and took the plunge.

I am aware that one or two of you may already be familiar with Facebook. (I learned my lesson a few months back when I thought I was blazing a trail with the cafes that have the sushi roundabout and drainpipe jeans. ) Still, for those of you who are not, here are my thoughts.

My first tip is not to keep going on about how you have discovered Facebook, unless you also claim to have been in a coma. If you take this route you must prepare thoroughly. I decided that my last waking memory would be Darius singing Britney on Pop Idol, which doubled helpfully as my reason for falling into the coma.

Also, do not be caught out by trick questions like poor Gordon Jackson in The Great Escape. If anyone mentions Gary Barlow, laugh loudly, puff your cheeks out and go cross-eyed before intoning "And he was never heard of again."

But to the Facebook experience. At first it's a bit like being a new start in Minority Report with Tom Cruise. Pictures, words and invitations to join the Smurfs down at the Casino appear at random on the screen alongside adverts for haemorrhoids. The idea is that you then bat them around ineffectually like a dozy cat trying to catch a laser beam.

This is mostly done via use of the "Like" button which tells the Captain of Facebook that the passengers have at least one functioning digit. (At least we hope it's a digit.) I was under the impression that the "Like" button also delivered a short electric shock to the person who had posted that picture of Halloween pumpkin erotica, but it turns out that was just wishful thinking.

Sometimes a little box appears where people can chat with you and tell you all about their day, but personally I get enough of that at home, thanks.

In a way though, all that stuff is a sideshow because your friends are what really matter. In order to maximise your enjoyment of Facebook, you should categorise your friends. This helps you to keep all the weirdos that you are friends with from knowing anything about you.

You can use any categories you like, I started with "Snog, Marry, Avoid" but there was too much crossover between the three groups so I binned that one. I am currently using "Useful" and "No Use", which is working well.

Friends are the best bit about Facebook, apart from friends of friends which is even better. For in Facebook's house there are many mansions and they are all full of ex-boyfriends gone to seed and that slut who sat in the second row at sociology lectures and is now a TV evangelist.

In getting to know Facebook, it is important to understand that it is powered by an addictive mix of schadenfreude and sentiment. I don't understand how you can not find it fun to stare at your ex-schoolmates' wrinkles through a magnifying glass, before slapping your thigh in joy and ticking the "has not worn well" box on your spreadsheet. (Don't pretend you don't have one.)

I secretly rather like the dreadful old photos actually. You are less likely to cry over your lost youth when you realise you spent most of your thirties looking utterly hellish. Take the pics of me in that khaki duffle coat that I thought made me look like Melanie Blatt, when really I looked like a homeless person.

But leaving aside my dreadful narcissism for a moment, the photos are also just, well, nice I think. It's been great fun trawling through pictures of parties, dinners, days at the beach, christenings and weddings. Some of them I had missed, some of them I remember, some of them of course are happening as I type this.

I know the novelty hasn't worn off yet, but at the moment I'm rather basking in the collective Facebook experience, wandering serenely through its pages like Kate Winslet being reunited with her chums at the end of Titanic. I don't intend to use it as a way of making new friends, but as a way of keeping up with old ones, of enhancing the dusty memories of our days in the sun, I like it.

The Joys of Middle Age

2011-10-13T09:16:00.001-07:00

Today is my birthday, so I am writing a birthday blog. I wrote a birthday blog last year (here it is) and have decided to make it an annual event, like Stephen Fry leaving Twitter.

I am 44 years old. So far, being 44 is jolly nice. I even like the number itself. I like its symmetrical elegance. Also I rather like the fact that, being half of 88, it is properly middle-aged. Poor old middle-age gets rather a bad press, most unfairly in my view, so I've decided to rectify that by promoting just some of its many joys.

Invisibility

Many middle-aged people bemoan the fact that you become invisible - especially to younger members of the opposite sex. This is undeniably true, but I have always found it to be a great advantage when shoplifting in Abercrombie and Fitch. So, y'know, swings and roundabouts.

Reminiscing

I once heard a kid at a bus stop say " Primary 6 was the best year of my life. Apart from primary 7." Proof, if it were needed, that young people are rubbish at reminiscing. They just don't have the material. We have cremola foam, Raleigh choppers, "Poldark", the three day week, Wimpey Bars and punk. What do the young un's have? The Maastricht Treaty and combat trousers.

Wisdom

Probably the best known advantage of middle-age. Why only yesterday a workman passing by whistled loudly and shouted "Look at the wisdom on that!" At least I think he said wisdom. It might have been "arse" and he might have been pointing at the twenty year old blonde next to me. No matter, I think I've made my point.

Versatility

The advantage of having been around a bit is that you can turn your hand to most things. Plus your girdle makes an excellent temporary fan belt when you break down on the motorway.

Inner Resources

Young people seem to need to be constantly entertained. They lack the inner resources of the middle-aged who can find contentment in themselves or at the very least in idly doodling whiskers and a tail onto the liver spot on the back of their hand.

The Element of Surprise

In the office I was one of those middle-aged working mums who sat in the corner in an ill-fitting suit from Next, typing like a maniac while picking lego out of my hair and whispering aggressively down the phone about mashed potato and ointment. What joy then to turn up at the office party in heels, lipstick and NASA engineered cleavage and regale the juniors with tales of being on the tour bus with Debbie Gibson, before drinking them under the table and cartwheeling off into the early dawn.

Of course, if I'm honest, middle-age is not all beer and skittles, though there's a fair amount of both involved. The onset of physical decrepitude isn't always a barrel of laughs, and the lightness of being that settles on us in moments of pure happiness can be ever more fleeting. But middle-age still has many joys, chief among them that you're not dead yet, for which I remain eternally grateful.

10 Things I Love

2011-10-09T03:17:00.001-07:00

A while back I was tagged by the marvellous Betty Herbert, (@52Betty on Twitter) author of the equally marvellous blog, and now book, "The 52 Seductions", to share 10 things I love. So here they are...

Beaches (Not The Movie)
I grew up in a seaside village and I can't imagine not living within striking distance of the sea. I think I would get horribly claustrophobic. I love every kind of beach, sandy, rocky, grassy. I'm even rather fond of seaweed. I like to pop the mermaid's purses. My favourite beach is Saddell beach on the Kintyre Peninsula in Argyll. You can stay in little cottages right on the beach and, one day, I will.

Disco
My musical education began with propping a Thorn tape recorder next to the radio to tape the Top 40. Probably my first criminal act. To be honest, my musical tastes have never developed much past that. I might listen to classical music, but if it's pop I want to dance and if I want to dance, it's disco. Do I even mean disco? Sometimes I might mean Carolina Beach Music, or funk or soul. Anyway, I don't mean boys in skinny jeans and low cut t-shirts exposing their wee concave chests. Bless. I mean something like this...

Telly
When I was younger I had lots of hobbies. I used to do canoeing and gymnastics and play the violin. But the only one that's really lasted has been watching telly. Want to sit on your own and cry into your Chablis? Watch the telly! Want to get really irate and shout at the Prime Minister? Watch the telly! Want to see Michael Portillo in a green satin shirt? Watch the telly! This wondrous sliver of shimmering dreams. This electronic encyclopedia of emotion. This shining citadel of learning, flickering in the corner of our lives. I love it.

Bread and Butter
If I had to describe how happiness felt it would be the sensation of my teeth sinking into half an inch of butter on a thick doorstep of white freshly baked bread. I have a strange fantasy about sleeping in a bed made of bread. Can you imagine, cushioned on that pillowy softness, encased in the aroma of buttery crust. Oooh, I feel a bit peckish now...

Ladybird Children's Books
"Her shoes were so wet that the water was running in at the toes and out at the heels." If I close my eyes and conjure up the princess in "The Princess and the Pea", the picture in my mind's eye is never my own. It is the illustration from the Ladybird book of the fairy tale published in the late 1960's. They are the technicolour MGM musicals of children's illustrations: princesses in wasp waisted primrose yellow dresses, millers' sons in open necked shirts and tight breeches. I still have them and when I take them out and look at them I can almost taste the Creamola Foam.

Cushions and Shoes
I am calling this one thing under a notional heading of accessories. I love their infinite variety. If humans were not as wonderful as they are, someone would have invented the cushion and left it there; a bit of burlap sacking with some horsehair, Bob's your uncle. They'd have got as far as the hobnail boot and then gone to the pub. But they didn't. They took these mundane objects and looked beyond their function, they made them pretty and luxurious and funny and fetishistic and they don't half cheer me up some days.

Democracy
I don't wake up every day and actively think "I LOVE DEMOCRACY!" but it's probably unlikely I'd be faffing around here thinking about shoes and cushions if it didn't exist. In my previous job I met elected members from Parliaments around the world, like the representatives from Oyo State in Nigeria, who had been besieged by gunmen in the Parliament shortly before their visit. They asked how politicians and officials were "made" to do things. Were they prosecuted? Were they put in jail? Well, we would say, it doesn't always work, but for the most part people just sort of, um, follow the rules. Boring, but also kind of magical really and certainly precious.

My Daughter
(and Everyone Else Who Knows Me, Or At Least The Ones I Like)
It's hard to say something here that won't make the non-parents throw up and the parents go "WE KNOW!", but I couldn't write this without including my daughter because she is the joy of my life and I adore her. Like millions before me it was a bit shocking to realise how much I loved my daughter, how fierce it is.

I love my friends and other family too and I don't have to wash their clothes for them, which is nice.

Large People Falling Over At Weddings
I don't mind a bit of witty banter but I'm really a slapstick merchant at heart. There's not much makes me laugh more than a sturdy middle aged man in tartan trews crashing full pelt into a trestle table. Unless it's a tented bridesmaid falling off a chair.

The Secrets of Long Term Love

2011-10-07T05:18:00.000-07:00

Two good friends of mine just got engaged and I am quite delighted for them. It is lovely when two friends get together and they are two lovely friends so the whole thing, basically, could not be lovelier.

I'm a bit of a softy at heart. I love weddings and try to be an exemplary guest. I agonise over gifts (or the price, certainly). I'm also one of those people who cries (especially if there is no free bar or late night buffet).

Sometimes I do worry though, that young couples are not entirely prepared for the reality of long term love. Of course, it is now quite common for couples to live together for a while before they marry, or have a civil partnership, or decide to commit in the long term. But there is a big difference between two or three years of fondue parties with fellow young solicitors and proper, down in the trenches, blood and guts, toe-nail clippings on the armrest, long term love.

So I have taken it upon myself to tell a few home truths. The first rule of long term love is that you have to discuss what is for tea EVERY SINGLE DAY FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. Reaching terms of agreement on beverages can also be a minefield. Particularly getting your partner to accept that placing the teabag in the cup the night before, "to save time in the morning", is an early sign of madness.

It is also true that it is difficult to keep the romance alive. Delicate whisps of underwear dancing like snowflakes on the washing line, are replaced by sturdy cotton items resembling dead moles on a fence. The courtesy of only breaking wind in the garden is abandoned, to be replaced by a lift of the cheek and a cursory flap of the Radio Times.

Bearing all of this in mind, I think it is best to approach long term love with low expectations. The key to this is to have a really crap wedding, or rather, have a great wedding but a really crap wedding night, since this best reflects later life when fun times are reserved for going out with your mates.

A friend played a blinder in the crap wedding night department. She and the groom had their small reception in their flat, the idea being that they would slope off to a swanky hotel in the wee small hours. In the end they both got hammered and couldn't face the journey.

My friend went to bed just as a food fight was breaking out and awoke some time later to find her husband climbing into bed, apparently coming down with something, so cold and clammy was his chest. But still, he also had a raging erection. The good news was that the cold and clammy chest was only a large slice of gammon stuck to his pecs, the bad news was that the erection turned out to be half a cucumber in his boxers. Shortly after, the door opened to reveal a sleepwalking male house guest who urinated on the bed.

I rate this as an excellent introduction to long term love, particularly if having children is on the agenda. For the horrors of secret nose-picking, or tights worn two days in a row, pale into insignificance when you enter the long term love landscape of parenthood.

For example, no-one tells you when you're exchanging rings that one day you will dress your concussed husband's head wound with a sanitary towel, before making him have disorientated sex with you, because you are ovulating. Or that he may be forced to take dictation for a shopping list that includes "nipple protectors" while you stand naked after your shower, blowdrying your episiotomy stitches.

I imagine there are people in long term relationships reading this "tutting" and getting ready to launch into a lecture about how to keep long term love "fresh" as if it were a smelly armpit you were forced to sniff on the tube.

I am not about to criticise them. I admire them, I really do. I am in awe of people who have date nights and won't let their wives see them in their curlers. I wish I were more like them, rather than being someone who shouts "OH, DRY YOUR EYES!" when my husband suggests that I might like to change out of my pyjamas in order to go to Homebase.

And yet, and yet, there is also something very special about allowing one other person in your life to see you very far from your best. I'm not cut from the same cloth as I was 20 years ago. Not emotionally, and certainly not physically. If we want to be loved for who we really are, then surely that must admit the possibility of still being desirable with a crumpled face in last night's make-up.

I'm not advocating making no effort for your nearest and dearest, it's a bit disrespectful to say the least. But I also believe that true love has tenderness at its heart, and that tenderness does not require perfection. Thank God.

Twitter: Why the Little Blue Bird is Good

2011-09-28T02:40:00.000-07:00

I had a lovely day yesterday. I spent most of it with Celia Pedroso, a travel journalist and food writer from Lisbon. We drank coffee, walked up Arthur's Seat, ate a scrummy lunch and generally had a fine time.

Celia was put in touch with me by a mutual acquaintance, food writer and legendary Metro restaurant critic Marina O'Loughlin. "Fascinating, but what is your point caller?" I hear you cry. Well, rather oddly, I have never actually met Marina. I only know her through Twitter where she tweets under the name @MarinaMetro.

And yet, there we were, Celia and I, two real life people chatting in the sunshine, brought together by a person I have only known as a series of 140 character tweets and a picture of a giant slug in horn-rimmed specs.

I used to attempt to explain the attraction of Twitter to non-Tweeters, but no longer. Now I simply hang a sign round my neck saying "I use Twitter so, yes, I am a moron." It's less painful and does not distract me from getting quietly slaughtered while the conversation moves onto bunions and how much to spend on cheese at Christmas.

The fact is Twitter is much like life. On Twitter there are good eggs, bad eggs, smelly eggs, clever eggs, sexy eggs, pompous eggs, an egg to suit every pocket really - as long as you're careful how you sit down. Also, just because the eggs are not actually in your pocket, do not presume that they will not one day end up in a delicious real life egg sandwich. Are you following this? Thought not. In which case, read on. Or not.

Being on Twitter is a Substitute for Living Life

An assumption often made by anti-Tweeters (let us call them "hostiles") is that relationships on Twitter are a substitute for bona-fide corporeal relationships.

Fact 1: Tweeting does not render one incapable of texting, or hiding from the neighbours like a proper normal.

Fact 2: I have friends in real life and I see and speak to them often. Sometimes even when, quite frankly, I really cannot be arsed.

Fact 3: A cursory glance at my timeline shows that, miraculously, people who tweet can do other things as well. They work, they go to the theatre, they run, they read, they cook wonderful food, they walk up hills, they swim in the ocean, they care for ill relatives, they help out at school. Their lives are as rich and diverse as anyone else's. Clearly there are exceptions, like Piers Morgan, but they are in the minority.

Twitter Friends Are Not Like Real Friends

Fact 4: I follow more than 600 people on Twitter and I'm not going to pretend that they are all bosom buddies. I am not about to invite the postman to dinner either, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have the odd exchange about the weather.

Fact 5: Some Twitter friends become real life friends. I know because I have drunk wine, eaten cake, danced and laughed with them. I had mentally tacked a large "No Vacancies" sign to the "new friendships" part of my life. Twitter brought back a bit of the freewheeling attitude to friendships that I had when I was younger, when I was quite happy to have half-cut partial strangers arrive at the door in order to watch Vic and Bob and share a slevery bottle of Irn Bru.

Fact 6: Sometimes, though perhaps rarely, you can develop a real friendship and fondness for people you have never met. I don't understand why people who think "84 Charing Cross Road" is charming and delightful refuse to believe that people can establish a genuine connection on Twitter.

People Only Talk About Rubbish Like What they have for Breakfast

Fact 7: Have you taken part in any real-life conversations of late? See my earlier point about bunions and cheese. I am as likely to talk crap in real life as I am on Twitter. In fact more likely because, like squeezing yourself into a tight party dress, you have to make a bit of an effort for 140 characters.

Fact 8: For lazy toe-rags like me Twitter is heaven sent. It is like having the zeitgeist elves visit while you are sleeping. Tweets I have favourited send me to wonderful photographs of Victorian London, obscure Northern Soul recordings, the full text of political speeches, recommendations for books and films, copies of research and inquiry reports. As well as sites where you can draw stick men and watch kitttens ride on tortoises.

I don't like everything about Twitter. There are times when a clash of "tone" makes it feel prettty uncomfortable - like going out for dinner and having the person next to you strip naked and sit on their lasagne, crying, while other diners are playing scrabble or trying to put a hat on a guinea pig.

There are plenty of things about Twitter that irritate the hell out of me. The playground spats, the pack mentality, the displays of aggression and snide remarks. But, let's face it, walk down Princes St on a Saturday and you're bound to bump into one or two total and utter gits.

Twitter can also be a bit exhausting. I think it may have been Greg Stekelman, aka @themanwhofell who said it's a bit like having an angry wasp in your brain. The knowledge that it's whirring away all day and all night, like a giant pedantic cocktail party can make it hard to switch off. But then, some people get addicted to Benylin.

Sometimes I see myself from the outside, staring at a never ending stream of tiny people on my phone and think "The whole thing's bonkers." But I don't ever think, as its critics do, that it is a barrier to "real" experience.

I've been thoroughly cheesed off and Twitter has lifted my mood, I've been happy as a clam and Twitter has made me happier. It has made me laugh, it has made me cry, it has patted me on the back and it has made me pull my socks up. Twitter is not the pinnacle of human achievement, but it's thought provoking and fun and I'm glad I found it.

Twitter is what you make it, and what makes it are the people. You know who you are and I'm glad to have met you.

Raising My Heckles

2011-08-24T03:01:00.000-07:00

I just love heckling. I cannot tell you how much I love it. It's almost as good as the thrill you get when you buy a jam doughnut and find two angry wasps in the bag.

So imagine my delight when I went to see a comedian the other evening and got treated to some top notch heckling. Bon mots such as "Speak up!" "Not funny!" "Oi! You! Yeah, you! Ha!" kept the audience entranced, or at the very least, homicidal.

For if brevity is the soul of wit, these guys were really, really, really, reallly great. No, really, they really were, really good.

At times they were positively avant garde, dispensing with the tired tradition of heckling with words and critiquing the performance with atypical groupings of syllables and urgent grunting. Some heckles may even have been produced by body parts other than the vocal chords.

I do hope that if any of them ever get to have sex, their partner shouts out "BOOOORING!" just as they are hitting their stride.

Anyway, in honour of that fine body of men (oh yes, they were men) I have set out below some of the most momentous heckles in history.

10, 000 BC: IN THE MOUNTAINS

Troglodyte 1: Man! Or rather, neanderthal man! A bolt of light came down from the sky and hit that twig and all of a sudden my little hairy tootsies are roasty toasty! Whoa! What's all that about?!? Tell you what, let's get more twigs and keep it going! Yay! This is like that time when me and the missus nearly fell in that volcano and...

Troglodyte 2 steps forward and pours water on the burning twig.

Troglodyte 1: I guess it did need more work.

12th CENTURY: SOMEWHERE IN ITALY

St Francis of Assisi offers up a prayer to God.

St Francis: Lord make me an instrument of your peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, ...

Unknown peasant: BALDY!

St Francis : Pardon? Oh, I like that actually.

15th CENTURY: ITALY (AGAIN)

Leonardo Da Vinci holds forth to a group of students on his many diverse and marvellous achievements in art, design, engineering, cartography. Suddenly, a passing washer woman cries:

"IS THERE NAE END TAE THAT MAN'S TALENTS?"

(Some records attribute this to a member of the audience in the Glasgow Apollo during a Roy Castle show, but true to the spirit of the piece, let us not be troubled by the facts .)

CIRCA 1600: LONDON ENGLAND

The opening night of Hamlet at the Globe Theatre.

Hamlet: To be or not to be, that is the question.

Unknown peasant: Make your mind up, son.

NOVEMBER 19, 1863: GETTYSBURG PENNSYLVANIA

Abraham Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg address.

Lincoln: Four score and seven years ago...

Unknown pedant: Oi! Big nose! "Four score and seven?" What's wrong with "87?"

Lincoln: ...our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, ...

Unknown pedant: Ooh, "brought forth"! Lah de dah! What's wrong with "made"!? Bloody left wing intelligentsia! Plain English too good for ya?!

Lincoln: ...conceived in liberty

Unknown pedant: LIBERTY BODICE! BIG GIRL'S BLOUSE!

Lincoln: ... One nation, under a groove. Er, um, sheesh, I've lost my place now...

Unknown pedant: YOUR MUM! YOUR MUM!YOUR MUM!YOUR MUM!

(The unknown pedant subsequently became a successful political blogger.)

I could go on. (Please don't - Ed) Instead I will give you the words of Teddy Roosevelt.

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

I'm not sure I'd condemn all critics quite as harshly as President Roosevelt. Intelligent criticism is an essential componment in public discourse and the evolution of art forms. Even some hecklers are quite funny. Just not the ones I heard the other night. And to those of you who disagree, I would simply say, "LOOOOSERS!".

IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST

2011-07-19T02:08:00.000-07:00

Today the great and the not so good who presided over the shocking saga of phone hacking at the News of the World will appear before a committee of MPs to be held to account. (Or at least those not under arrest will.)

As a piece of political theatre no doubt it will be gripping. It may even provide some of the answers to important questions about who knew what and when.

But it cannot hope to address the fundamental issues raised by this scandal, not least because of the extent to which politicians have been made complicit by their failure to act. So there will be the inquiries and possibly, perhaps probably, the prosecutions.

As I write this I am on holiday abroad, not on-line much and therefore very much out of the loop. Muffled cries of more resignations and arrests have filtered through, but the allegations of wrongdoing seem essentially unchanged. As appalling as the story has been, in recent days there has been a sense of stasis, of further revelations going over old ground. There may be little more that can usefully be said at this point.

And yet I can’t stop thinking about it. Why? What is it about this story that makes me keep turning it over in my head? I keep on worrying at it, trying to make sense of it. Conflicts still rage around the globe, nations teeter on the brink of bankruptcy. A few hacked messages, the attempted smash and grab of a politician’s bank details, seem pretty small beer by comparison.

So why do I care so much? Is it the ruthless power of a media dynasty? The household names who cried foul but were deemed fair game? The politicians who raged and wept in private but in public kissed their tormentors and wished them well?

I think it is because it has shaken my faith in the system. It has made me question whether I really know the country I have lived in all my life. I am aware this sounds rather melodramatic. Maybe it is. Maybe I’m a bit hysterical; maybe not.

I wrote recently about democracy, about the fact that I worked for a long time in the Scottish Parliament and that, during meetings with politicians from emerging democracies, I felt very lucky that I happened to live here and now, in a political system where, basically, those in charge follow the rules. I felt lucky to live in a country with a delicate system of checks and balances, evolved and refined over many decades, which protects us from corruption and power without responsibility. But, in relation to hacking, that system failed.

I am reminded of the received wisdom about great disasters. In essence, "man-made” disasters occur when not one but several mechanisms fail simultaneously. We have been failed by not one, but three of our most important institutions: an elected parliament accountable to the people, a free press, and an independent police force. If this wrongdoing had not been exposed, who knows how much further we would have drifted toward catastrophic democratic failure.

Again my melodrama detector is flickering. But it is difficult to overstate the seriousness of what has been uncovered. The unscrupulous behaviour of some journalists on one newspaper, or even a number of newspapers, is only the beginning. The serious breach of trust is that, as evidence of that behaviour began to emerge, politicians failed to act decisively, the police failed to investigate fully, the wider press failed to report. The refined system of checks and balances did not work, more than that, barely seemed to exist.

But we have been fortunate. We have been fortunate to have practitioners in these institutions who were not persuaded to let questions lie unanswered. The story may never have seen the light of day if not for the exemplary journalism of Nick Davies and The Guardian. MPs such as Tom Watson, Chris Bryant and Norman Fowler continued to campaign on these issues when no-one wanted to listen.

But overall we cannot escape the fact that we have been let down. So how on earth did we get here?

The story of how sections of the press have increasingly felt an entitlement to private information is a whole other blog in itself. Suffice to say that the “they were asking for it defence” most recently expounded by the former News of the World journalist and moral amoeba Paul McMullan, is wearing pretty thin, not least because many of the victims of hacking were not celebrities or public figures. (Though frankly, I thought hacking was a pretty big deal even when it was starlets, and Max Clifford because rest assured, if they'll do it to the rich and famous, they'll do it to you.)

As for the politicians, I am glad they have acknowledged that things had got too cosy by half with the fourth estate.This is the ray of hope to have emerged in these murky times. If the main parties stand together, this is the best chance they will have had in many years to free themselves from their self imposed servitude.

For while there may have been reasons for politicians' complicity, there was no justification. If you put yourself forward for high public office we have a right to expect you to make brave moral choices. We certainly have a right to expect you to confront the abuse of power even where it might be held against your party or you personally. The alternative is a whole political class in hock to the media barons.

As for the Met police, their behaviour has in some ways troubled me most of all. Incompetence? Poor judgement? Cover-up? Corruption? I'm not loving any of those as explanations, to be honest. When we start to doubt the willingness of the police to investigate without fear or favour we really are in serious trouble.

So where do we go from here? Tougher regulation of the press is surely unavoidable. The PCC has been overseeing this essential national industry like the management committee of a private members club. That cannot continue. But we must remember that good journalists got us out of this hole when elected members, regulators and police were missing in inaction. We need a regulatory system that encourages and protects the kind of reporting undertaken by The Guardian on this story, while curbing the worst excesses of intrusion and abuse.

I don't accept that tougher regulation and press freedom are mutually exclusive. I have never believed that a regulatory and wider legal framework which protects legitimate private information and press freedom is beyond the wit of legislators. There are other areas of law, (medicine for example) which throw up difficult questions of competing rights, freedoms and responsibilities.

Frankly the issue, while complex, is not as impossible to resolve as some journalists would have as believe. In that respect we must remember that the media, as the messenger, is also the subject of the debate. This is quite unique. No other profession enjoys the privileged position of directly arguing its own case in the court of public opinion.

Of course we must listen to the views of the press on how their industry should be regulated. Their experience and insight is essential. But sometimes insight is gained at the expense of perspective and objectivity.

Stronger regulation does not have to mean a move away from self regulation. There are analagous examples such as the way in which doctors are “policed” by the General Medical Council which could be followed. Why can a body of (former) journalists and lay people could not be given the power to impose large fines and also decide that newspaper executives and editors may not be fit to hold senior positions?

I care passionately about the quality of the press in this country. It's not only the banks that are too important to fail. A strong and vocal press should be our national conscience, asking questions others would rather ignore, calling out bad decisions, forcing the body politic to acknowledge its failings.

Press, politicians, regulators, police, we need them all to act in the public interest, because the public interest is what matters.

Transformative Teaching or Why We Really Are All in this Together

2011-06-30T04:54:00.001-07:00

Teachers and teaching have been in the news a fair bit of late. Although that's not strictly true because there has been very little discussion of teaching itself. The heated debate has been mostly about pensions and holidays. Subjects dear to all our hearts of course and therefore understandably likely to stir strong emotions. Thank God they're not also talking about making gherkins mandatory in cheeseburgers or Twitter might spontaneously combust.

All this chat about teaching, (and the fact that tomorrow is the end of term here in Scotland so we are doing all that end of term stuff like concerts, presents for the teachers, drinking neat martini and smoking cocktail Sobranie in the loos,) sorry, where were we? Oh yes, all the chat about teaching has made me think about my own teachers. Recently someone also asked me if I had a favourite teacher.

The truth is, not really. I remember lots of teachers, but I'm not sure that I'd pick one out as a favourite. I remember Mr Anderson who ate his chocolate biscuits before his sandwiches, I remember Mrs Bailey with the crazy beehive and hairy legs, I remember Mr Roger who ran up and down in front of our desks pretending to be a sperm. I remember Mr Eastbury who came in one day rather half-cut and sat cross-legged on his desk; and Mrs Paterson who played the tape of an "O" Grade German student who, in his oral exam, said everything in English but with a German accent and who called the characters in the story Fritz and Gretel.

There are a couple who stand out from the crowd though. One was Mr Stevenson who took us for English. He looked a bit like Gimli from the Lord of the Rings, if Gimli had worn Hush Puppies. He read aloud and acted the parts and fulminated loudly if we didn't like the things he liked. It was in his class that I read "A High Wind in Jamaica" and "The Great Gatsby" for the first time. He also gave me the worst mark I ever received for a creative writing piece.

It was all about a clever girl who worked as a secretary in order to support her ailing mother. It was mostly a description of her outfits, with a bit of romance chucked in. It was basically the literary love child of The Bunty and "Scruples". He gave me a "D" and wrote on it something like "This is very boring. You are better than this." I think all of those things explain why I might have been a little bit in love with him.

Then there was Mrs Rochester a music teacher who joined in my fifth year and took over the choir. She was very tall and theatrical and she conducted like her life depended on it. The senior choir grew from 20 pupils or so to over 100. They could barely fit us all on the stage. We sang carols and old songs from musicals, but with her we also sang Gilbert and Sullivan pieces and "Worthy is the Lamb". Put simply, she had ambition for us. She therefore also expected more of us than the other choir masters had done. (Though any pupil could join.)

Neither of these teachers changed my life. Frankly I came from a nice middle class home and was reasonably bright and didn't really need my life changing. But they both taught me very well. They had a passion for their subject which lit the embers of enthusiasm which lurk in even the most painfully cool and self-conscious adolescent breast.

One of the many unfortunate things about the nature of the debate surrounding today's action is that discussion of teaching, of the transformative power of a good teacher has been squeezed out. I am not belittling the importance of the issues under discussion. Teachers have every right to fight for a decent pension. I do not expect them to do it simply for the love it. They deserve fair recompense like the rest of us.

They derserve fair recompense because the job they do is very important. For parents what could be more important than the education and social development of your child? For non- parents what could be more important than nurturing the citizens of the future?

I think we all need to be honest about both the burdens and benefits of our jobs (if we have one). Many of my friends and members of my family are teachers. They work hard in a stressful and important job for a salary that could not (except in some very rare cases) be called vast.

Some teachers are wonderful and work above and beyond the call of duty. Some are not that great. My husband works in education and I know how wearisome it is to be needled about your holidays by a lawyer who earns four times what he does. But, having shared the long summer holidays with my husband for the first time these past two years, I also know the rare delight of having that "breathing" space.

I recently met two young women who, despite having worked full time for their employer for two years, received 8 paid days holiday a year because they were retained on 12 hour a week contracts. I am categorically not espousing that as the way forward. I was shocked and angered by it and saddened by their acceptance of it.

I don't think a fairer deal for them will be the result if teachers' pensions are eroded. But I do understand why they might feel resentful and how preying on such feelings drives a divide and rule philosphy which is to the detriment of society as a whole.

Teachers are not, and do not claim to be, martyrs to the cause of our children's future. Neither are they indolent parasites. MPs are not all avaricious monsters, most journalists do not routinely tell lies for a living, even some bankers are quite nice people.

Basically, let's remember, we really are all in this together.

Voter Apathy? Vote Yes 2 AV

2011-05-04T05:16:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow Scots will go the polls to choose the next Scottish Government. In doing so we will use a form of proportional representation, a system which aims to ensure that the number of Parliamentary seats each party wins better reflects their support in the country.

We've done it now since 1999 and no single party has ever had an outright majority in the Scottish Parliament. Miraculously the sky has not fallen in, a plague of locusts has not descended upon the land and Tunnocks tea cakes remain as delicious as ever.

Why do I bring this up now, you yawn?

Because, as you jolly well know, tomorrow Scots, along with the rest of the United Kingdom, will also go to the polls to vote in the referendum on whether to change our voting system, from "first past the post" to the alternative vote or AV; and the experience of electing the devolved administrations shows that it is possible to introduce electoral reform without inducing a national nervous collapse.

AV is not a proportional system. More's the pity in my opinion. (If you want to know more about AV you can read all about it on the Electoral Reform Society's website.) But at the moment it's the only bum numbingly dull electoral systems debate in town. For truthfully, most folk would rather be forced to stir a pot of boiling tripe non-stop for 24 hours while listening to the collected speeches of Nadine Dorries, than discuss electoral systems.

And the doomsday scenario for the Yes 2 Av camp is that this apathy, coupled with fear of the unknown, will see the campaign for change hit the buffers. But actually those of us suffering from voter apathy are the very people who should be voting yes 2 AV.

Trust in politicians seems to be permanently at an all-time low. People are tired of "Punch and Judy" politics. The electorate wants to see fresh new faces and a new approach in Parliament, not the same old party hacks.

Well frankly you can't have that and first past the post. First past the post is all about the old two party hegemony. That's what it's designed for. That's when it works best. If you want to see a new kind of politics, why vote to keep first past the post? It's marching for change in concrete wellies.

The truth is systems can only deliver so much. Certainly that's true of AV which is not the fundamental change that many reformers are looking for. Much relies on changing the culture of politics and the behaviour of politicians, and indeed political reporting, which traditionally rewards those who land political punches rather than build bridges.

Trying to create a new politics on the foundation of first past the post is like grafting a pig's ear onto a mouse's back - entirely alien to the host body.

AV is not perfect. No electoral system is. It will not right all the wrongs of the current political system. But if we say no we are resigning ourselves to more of the same for longer than I can bear to imagine. I'll be voting yes for positive reasons. But even if you're fed up and tired and bored and can't be bothered. In fact especially if that's how you feel, if you're overcome with apathy, why not vote Yes 2 AV?

A Real Life Bucket List

2011-03-27T11:52:00.001-07:00

This week has been glorious, weather wise. Sunshine, cool breeze, fat white clouds and blue skies. Spring sprang this week and, for me, this changing of the seasons heralds the arrival of a new year more meaningfully than the distant chimes of Big Ben at midnight.

So perhaps this is the time to make some resolutions. And why not think big? Why not go the whole hog and compile the resolutions of a lifetime? The things I want to do before I roll over, turn up my toes and start pushing up daisies.

But why do so many of these so-called "bucket" lists dwell on "dreams" that don't often trouble us on a day to day basis? Do people really wake each day and think "Oh rats! Another day without fulfilling my lifelong dream of swimming with dolphins/going hot air ballooning/baking the world's largest battenberg." I don't. My real life dreams, dreamt on a daily basis, are more likely to be about having a built in barbecue or upper arms like Jennifer Aniston. So, truthfully, the list of things I want to do before I die, goes like this:

1. Make a very great deal of money

2. Win "Strictly Come Dancing"

3. Wake up one morning with neat, finely turned ankles

4. Be interviewed by Michael Parkinson ("Yes, Michael, it's all happened very fast...")

5. Amass a museum quality collection of antique jewellery (may count as a subset of 1.)

6. Wear matching underwear every day

7. Win an Oscar

8. Own a utility room

9. Win the X Factor

10. Become an eminent art historian

11. Go out for dinner in a white silk shirt without spilling anything on it.

Am I reaching for the stars here? I'll let you know.

Boys and Girls and How to be Best Friends

2011-03-22T05:37:00.000-07:00

Tonight I will be helping out at the Primary 5, 6 and 7 disco. This involves doling out juice and crisps and generally skulking about waiting for an opportunity to be embarrassing.

I have helped at discos before and it's always highly entertaining, not least because of the opportunity to analyse the behaviours of the different sexes. Girls spend a lot of time talking to each other behind their hands and the boys mostly slide about on their knees.

Men and women, boys and girls. Nature versus nurture. Skipping stones or shell collecting. How many words, how many prayers, how many sleepless nights of tortured thought have been devoted to unpicking the intricacies of the attachment between men and women and how to sustain it?

A few years ago I was lucky enough to witness a brief exchange between some children of my acquaintance which told me everything I needed to know. (Names have been changed to protect the innocents.)

The scene: A holiday cottage. Three families are staying there over Christmas. The children have known each other since they were very small, but see each other rarely. Two girls of about five are seated in companionable silence at the kitchen table, drawing, cutting out etc. Then;

Alice: We are really good friends aren't we Jane?

Jane: Yes Alice. You are my best friend. Are you my best friend?

Alice: Yes Jane. We are very best friends. Best friends in the world.

Jane: Yes. We are such good friends people think we are sisters don't they?

Alice: Yes! We like all the same things and we play together all the time don't we?

Jane. Yes. We do. And that is why we are best friends.

Alice: Yes:

The following day Alice and a little boy, also about five, are sitting at the kitchen table in companionable silence drawing, cutting out etc. Then:

Alice: We are really good friends, arent' we John?

John: Eh?

Alice: We are best friends.

John: leaning away from Alice and looking spooked, "Whaaaaaaat!?!"

Alice: We are best friends. We are like brother and sister.

John: Oh, MAN.

John pushes his chair away and gets down from the table and goes to the sitting room.

Alice: Oh.

A grown-up suggests Alice take some sweets through to John and that they watch "The Incredibles" together.

Five minutes later, John and Alice sit together watching "The Incredibles". They laugh together and occasionally comment on the action. When it is finished John jumps up:

John: Alice, do you want to come upstairs and see my GoGos? I've got MILLIONS.

Alice: Sure.

They head upstairs. John can be heard excitedly telling Alice about his GoGo collection and the special bag he has for them. Alice is laughing.

And there you have it. Putting it into practice is, of course, another matter.

Porn Again: An Innocent At The Home Office

2011-02-24T04:13:00.000-08:00

The current edition of the Radio Times carries an interview with former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to promote her forthcoming Radio 5 Live programme on porn. In it she talks about the scandal which erupted when it was revealed that she had claimed for pay-per-view porn watched by her husband.

It's fascinating stuff. But there is one disclosure in particular which brought me up short. The article states:

"...Jacqui Smith's most startling revelation is that she had no idea porn was so widely available on line. "I thought the attraction of porn was that it's illicit: you go into a private shop to buy a DVD. But what the Internet has done is to open up free, hard pornography to anybody of any age. I found that quite shocking.""

Gosh. What I find quite shocking is that a former Home Secretary was apparently unaware of the Internet's function as a giant porn machine.

What other miracles of the modern world might Ms. Smith be unfamiliar with? Squeezy bottles of tomato sauce? Pentapeptide skin technology? The horseless carriage? It does make one wonder how the conversation went when news of her husband's indiscretion was brought to her attention .... *screen goes wavy*

INT: The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is seated at the desk, her head in her hands. She sighs, turns, picks up a small stick and loudly beats a gong positioned behind her chair. Almost immediately the door opens and two men enter. They are Sir Farquhar Monro, Permanent Secretary of the Department and the Minister's PS Bernard Sillitoe.

Sir F: You rang Minister?

BS: (Pointing gingerly at the desk.) You do remember Minister, you have the buzzer?

JS: Oh for the love of God Bernard! I've told you, I've no truck with the damn thing. It's just something else is going to break down on you. Now sit, please. I'm afraid we, I, have a situation.

Sir F: Is it, by any chance Minister, a matter relating to your husband and what one's aide de camp might refer to as "gentleman's entertainment"?

JS. Good God. Yes. How did you know?

Sir F: Ah, the jungle drums Minister, the jungle drums.

JS: For Christ's sake Farquhar! I may not be into Bebo and whatnot but surely we can use a bloody telephone!

Sir F: Ah yes, figure of speech Minister. I merely meant that such news tends to travel fast.

JS. Oh. Right. Well you probably know I've mistakenly claimed for some er, entertainment through pay-per-view. God knows how that works. Maybe it's a collector's thing like in the Sunday supplements. You know, where you buy one DVD and then you get a set in a ring binder. And the magazine comes with it. I got a very good offer on Little House on the Prairie.

Sir F: I'm sorry Minister, I don't follow.

JS: Pay-per-view Farquhar! They said he got it pay-per-view! You must pay per DVD you view! Or for every peek through one of those little holes in the wall, or something. I thought you were a man of the world!

Sir F: Ahem. I see. No Minister, pay per view refers to a service offered by satellite and digital broadcasters where one pays to view a particular, er, item on the television.

JS: What!? You can get a porno on the telly?! But that's ludicrous!

BS; Well, indeed Minister, given what you can get on-line for free, and with a bit of forethought not even your mother would know what you'd been looking at especially not if you...

Sir F: (Hastily) Yes, thank-you Bernard. Ah, Minister, I must inform you that we men about town, we blades, we tomcats, as it were, are no longer restricted to a fly blown Penthouse wedged under the tennis club hut. No, no, these days most pornography is viewed via the Internet.

JS. Oh don't be ridiculous Farquhar. The Internet is for terrorists and swimming hamsters and that sort of thing.

Sir F: That may be Minister, but I can assure you that if you have an interest in erm, carnal matters, the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread.

JS: What do you mean sliced bread?

Sir F: (Starting to look really quite concerned.) Again it is a figure of speech Minister. Used to denote a breakthrough, a user friendly innovation akin to the introduction of ready sliced bread.

JS: I'm not familiar. I always buy a nice cottage loaf.

A silence descends. Sir F and Bernard are at a loss.

JS: (Sadly) I've never understood what people see in these films anyway.

Sir F: Well, they can be a boon to those who live a lonely existence Minister.

JS: No I mean I don't know what they can see. How do they know what's going on when it's in the dark? Even if you had your shorty nightie on, you're under the covers two minutes in.

Sir F: Ah. I think Minister the makers of such entertainment are perhaps economical with the actualite when it comes to the depiction of..., of..., an act of love. It is likely, for example, to be unnaturally well lit.

JS: (Wringing her hands) Stop! Please! I have no desire to look into the mouth of the beast!

Sir F: (Gently) Yes Minister. This is all most trying for you. We must of course issue a statement as a matter of urgency..

JS: Of course, of course. (Checking her watch) The girls in the typing pool will be keen to catch a tram before nightfall.

BS: Actually Minister, I may have mentioned we no longer have a typ...

Sir F: Yes Bernard, we must not become mired in inconsequential detail at this most difficult and sensitive juncture.

JS: Thank you Farquhar. You have been very kind. Now I must fix myself up a bit before I face the press. (Thoughtfully..) Perhaps I should give an interview to the Manchester Guardian, they've always been very supportive... I shall plug in my Carmen rollers and be with you in a jiffy...

BS: I'm not sure if you're aware Minister but if it's big hair with a salon finish you're looking for the Babyliss Big Hair is getting a very good press at the moment...

Sir F: Yes. Thank-you Bernard. Now about those expenses for the Heads of Department strategy weekend, I think it might be best if the claims are sent direct to me....

ENDS

Food Perversion That's A Real Turn Off

2011-02-23T11:43:00.000-08:00

Today I mentioned on Twitter that I had eaten banana on toast. I am sorry to bring this up, particularly because it will confirm the prejudices of those who think that Twitter is a stream of inanities such as "Just had banana on toast.", or "Off 2 work! LOL!!" or "Cutting up dead bodies is harder than you think." But in the end the need to share my story with the world appears to have gotten the better of me, so here we are.

My tale of banana on toast got quite a reaction I can tell you. Very soon literally* scores** of tweeters were sharing their banana on toast experiences. And there I was at the epicentre of it, like Nigel Slater at a greasy hair convention.

I'd like to be able to say that it was heartwarming and made me go all fuzzy inside, like when I see James McAvoy's forearms, but the truth is I was left rather disturbed by the whole thing. Why? Because of what it revealed about my fellow tweeters' eating habits.

For example, one person responded that they hoped I had put sugar on it. Sugar. On banana on toast. Er, yeah. Great idea. Why not go the whole hog and sprinkle it with DIAMONDS?!

This got me thinking about Great Food Perversions of Our Time. Not obvious perversions like a daylight kebab. No, something much darker which, once discovered, cannot be wished away.

You might be rubbing along quite nicely with some new acquaintance, discovering a shared love of the Doobie Brothers and candlewick dressing gowns, when they mention casually that they put garlic in their carbonara. There's just no coming back from that is there?

Growing up in Scotland the greatest barometer of food perversion was mince, for no two Mums' minces ever taste the same. It is also a truth universally acknowledged that one Mum's mince is another child's nightmare. It is the epicurean equivalent of the "smelly lobby"; that strange smell of "otherness" that hovers on the landings of certain houses not your own and enables you to experience anew the intoxicating, familiar scent of home.

For a child missing home, different foods only add to the heartache. When my Mum was in hospital having my little brother, my elder brother and I were farmed out to neighbours who, very kindly, gave us our tea. I remember well the look of anxious distress in my brother's eyes when we were given spaghetti hoops on toast. " This is all very well, " he whispered, "but where is the meal?"

It was an important milestone in our young lives to realise that not everyone ate oxtail stew with prunes on a regular basis.

I leave you with some of the food perversions which have made a lasting impact on me. I'd love to hear about yours.

When Sweet Turns Sour
Inappropriate sugaring looms large in my food perversions. Sugar on bananas on toast we have already discussed. Sugar on french toast (or "eggy bread" if you must) is another. I am not averse to french toast with, say, a caramelised pear or a wee bit of chocolate sauce, but a naked sprinkle of sugar is prime perversion.

Likewise of course sugar in porridge. If God had wanted you to put sugar in porridge he wouldn't have invented Ricicles.

Tommy Sauce; The Rules
Tomato sauce is acceptable thusly: on burgers, with chips and in macaroni cheese. That's your lot. Tommy Sauce particularly has no place near an egg of any description.

A Has-Bean Friend
I once went on a cottage holiday in the far north west of Scotland with a group of lifelong friends. Those of you who have done this will know that there is nowhere to hide a culinary peccadillo. I could only watch with horror as a woman I had known all my life tipped a tin of baked beans into, yes, you've guessed it, the mince. To say that it caused a rift would be something of an understatement.

Scotch Broth: Barley Making Sense
Scotch Broth without barley is like making love without hot buttered toast. I rest my case.

*by literally I mean not at all literally
**by scores I mean "one or two"

FIRST KISS

2011-02-09T05:57:00.000-08:00

For some reason my first kiss popped into my head today.

It wasn't like first kisses in the movies which happen at the Prom, or on the bleachers bathed in golden twilight. I didn't have a crush on the boy. He didn't pass me notes in class or carry my books home.

He was German and was on holiday in the little seaside town I grew up in. I think I was 13, maybe 14. We had gone to the beach, my friends and I, because someone said there were German lads staying in the Church of Scotland holiday home. This would not have been my idea. I wasn't interested in boys. (I wasn't interested in girls either). I had a proper crush on Paul Newman after watching "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and it was pretty hard to compete with that, to be honest.

I found my friends' endless discussion of boys mind numbingly tedious. I thought it was phoney and idiotic. I just didn't get it. I always wanted to say "No, he's not looking at you. Now can we go for chips?" But I didn't because I was a coward and I knew that the path of truth would lead to long lunch hours on my own at the social suicide end of the tennis courts.

Anyway, it was just as well I wasn't interested in boys because they weren't much interested in me. I had long brown hair in plaits, wore vests, played the violin and looked about 11. Let's put it this way, I was no Julie Wallace. (She became an air hostess.)

So it was all the more perplexing when we arrived at the beach and found the German boys and one of them was interested in me. I can't remember how this became apparent but it did. I don't' remember his name. I know I didn't fancy him and was frankly terrified because he was 15 or 16 and was wearing clogs.

After my friends got over their astonishment, they quickly made it their business to steamroller my increasingly desperate objections and force me at hissing point into a walk along the cliff top path with clog boy.

We walked along in silence. I don't remember how good his English was, but my German, gleaned from my brother's "Battle" comics, consisted mainly of "Raus!" and "Schnell!" which my nascent sense of diplomacy told me was probably best avoided.

We stopped at the end of the path. Panic and embarrassment swelled in my vest clad chest as I sensed that the time was nigh. I remember closing my eyes and thinking "Okay. Let's get this over with." I think I stopped just shy of holding my nose.

And then he kissed me. Who knows what it was like really? In my memory it has become a classic teenage teeth grinding nightmare, like pressing your lips against the boring machine that dug the Channel Tunnel. I do remember that he smoked and that the taste of stale, tarry cigarettes was overwhelming.

A few minutes later it was over. I said goodbye and ran home, the taste of ashes in my mouth.

How to Have the Best Burns Night Ever, Eh No?

2011-01-25T02:33:00.000-08:00

Today's the proud day when the eyes of the world are upon my own wee home country of Scotchland. Och Aye and, let us not forget, the noo. All over the globe men, women and transgender folk are gathering round their i-pads to celebrate the birth/death/life (Note to research: check that will you? I've got cocktails at six, then Brahms at the Usher Hall) of our greatest shagger and poet/lyricist.

Yes, it's Marti Pellow Night! When citizens of the greatest small non-sovereign nation north of and attached to England join together to take heroin and sing "Ilikekickinginthegutter and-a Wishin' Ah Wiz Lucky", while mincin' aboot like they've goat a bad case o' piles.

But jings! Ah'm huvin ye's oan, so ah am! Marti Pellow night's no' till the morra right enuff, eh no? Tonight is of course Burns Night when, just fur a wee change, "supper" consists of oatmeal and the heart and lungs of lamb chopped and nestled in the stomach of a sheep, then boiled for 8 hours. I can see youse ur thinkin' "Oh, fur a nice bowl of Special K and a wee Blue Riband!" eh?

Noo, noo, dinnae get your sporran up yer erchie, sure the haggis n' neeps n'tatties is pure delish and us lot eat it a' year roon' (Ed: Good Christ, can you imagine?!)

But it has come to our attention here at The Absurdist Tartan Towers that a guid wheen o' folk dinnae ken how to put oan a Burns Supper! Michty! Whit would Andrew O'Hagan say? So, we've goat the gither to bring youse the pure definitive guide to the best and brawest Burns Night EVER!

The Food

Of course the traditional and aforementioned haggis (or in the plural haggisarium) is the centrepiece of the feast. Remember that it must be de-boned and thoroughly plucked before serving. Ask your local specialist Gaelic butcher to do this for you. Next the neep (or neeps, plural). Neep, more commonly known as turnip or "boak", is an orange root vegetable which should be vigorously boiled until it achieves the consistency of lumpy wet cardboard. You can smother it with butter and salt to bring out/disguise the flavour, but where's the fun in that? Finally, champit tatties which even youse eejits fae doon south surely cannae balls up.

Everything must be served either piping, PIPING, hot so that it sticks to the roof of your mouth, scarring the tender flesh thereof quite hideously, or, stone cold.

The Speeches

The most celebrated part of Burns Night where the works of the Great Brad (short for Bradley, Burns' middle name, not many people know that...) are given voice and life, and have been passed down through the generations like a peculiar genetic disorder.

Address to the Haggis
First The Address to the Haggis when a portly gentleman with a sizeable beer gut must bring on a minor stroke by bellowing "Fair fa' your honest sonsie face, Great Chieftain O' the Puddin Race" at the guests before stabbing the haggis, or haggisariearium if it's a large gathering, in the buttocks until blood is drawn or until the haggis concedes defeat. You can place a photo of First Minister Alex Salmond on the haggis if you wish, and if that is not freely available a picture of look-a-like X Factor contender Wagner will do just as well.

After the haggis has been disemboweled, the sheep's stomach casing is placed on the head while the assembled company sing "I Love a cookie, A Co-Operative cookie, You can tell it's Co-Operative by the smell. " (It is of course essential to correctly pronounce Co-operative, as "CO-PER-AY-TIVE"; or the thing doesnae scan and you will sound like a numpty.)

Toast to The Lassies
It's now time for a toast to the lassies. This is the point at which Andy Gray and Richard Keys denigrate the ladies present, ridiculing the notion that there were ever any great woman poets, ending with the famous line, "Emily Dickinson? Do me a favour love."

Response to the Toast to the Lassies
The women then respond to the toast either by giggling, feeling Andy's biceps and offering to give him his favourite fish tea, or by punching him to the ground, depending on whether or not the event is being held in the 21st century.

Finally all guests must stand and shout "Weel Done Cutty Sark!" while pulling the pony tail of the person to their left and sooking a Lee's macaroon bar.

And so, with the formal part of the ceremonies over, the company can now let their kilts oot and get on with the serious business of getting hammered on Scotmid blended whisky.

You do have some leeway in terms of entertainment for this final part of the evening. Old favourites include a screening of "An Audience with Billy Connolly", burning an effigy of Thatcher or a classic cabaret with Lulu belting out Deacon Blue's "Dignity" from atop a giant Tunnock's Tea Cake.

And so, as the evening draws to a close, all that remains to be done is join in one last rousing chorus of that great romantic ballad, "Stop Your Tickling Jock" and to take pride in this great and forward looking nation of ours, soon to have its very own digital TV channel if somebody would only stump up the readies.

A Taxing Problem For Us All

2010-11-24T13:13:00.000-08:00

So the Scottish Parliament has flexed its muscles in order to administer a rap on the knuckles to a somewhat penitent SNP Finance Secretary John Swinney over the Scottish Variable Rate (SVR) tax stushie.

Despite early attempts by the SNP to tough it out, yesterday in Parliament Mr Swinney expressed regret for an "error of judgement", acknowledging that the Parliament should have been informed from the beginning of the negotiations with HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) over the cost of collecting the tax.

It is true that some commentators, and no doubt a fair few voters, are struggling to care about who said what to whom over the Bill for an IT system to collect a tax that none of the major Scottish parties have any intention of implementing. It is also true that claims that the power had been "lost" or even that it had "lapsed" were inaccurate. The tax varying power remains a power within The Scotland Act. The issue is one of technical capability, not legal competence.

Still there is also force in the counter argument that a power in principle is no more than wishful thinking if no practical means of exercising it exists; and that a fundamental power such as this should not have been allowed to wither on the vine, certainly not without full democratic scrutiny.

The issue of funding for HMRC to support the collection of SVR appears now to be more complicated than was obvious from Scottish Secretary Michael Moore's initial letter. In some ways this plays strongly to the advantage of the SNP since it highlights the difficulty of a devolved Government achieving its objectives when the agencies tasked with delivery are not under their control.

Conversely however, the extent to which an apparently simple and clear objective (the ability to vary tax by 3p) has become mired in administrative detail is also a timely reminder that Governments can have all the legal powers their hearts desire, but they don't amount to a hill of beans without effective policy execution.

No doubt lessons will be learned from this saga to inform the implementation of the tax provisions contained in the forthcoming Scotland Bill, (which takes forward the proposals of the Calman Commission). Not least that a detailed and public memorandum of understanding about the roles of the Scottish Government, HMRC and the Parliament might be useful.

There is now talk of an inquiry by the Parliament's Finance Committee. Many issues are yet to be clarified, but it does seem that the funding decisions were complex, and quite finely balanced. You might well disagree with Mr Swinney's decision not to commit the necessary funding, but it is more difficult to see it as entirely unreasonable.

It is on the question of transparency that Mr Swinney and his Cabinet colleagues were arguably most vulnerable, and indeed in expressing regret he has acknowledged as much. It does now seem that his statement to Parliament that he did not intend to raise the Scottish variable rate was a little like proclaiming "Don't worry, I won't shoot!" when in fact there were no bullets in the gun.

However, the way in which this tale has unfolded also raises wider issues of transparency in the political context. Specifically the extent to which the business of politics can make honesty a risky policy. Had Mr Swinney come to the Parliament seeking views on the HMRC funding request, would this have been treated objectively and sensitively by the opposition parties? Maybe. Maybe not.

If the SNP had proposed refusing to provide funds their opponents could have challenged their credentials as the party seeking greater powers for Scotland. If they had argued in favour of funding, they might have been criticised for wasting public funds on a vanity project; shelling out cash in order to retain a power they had no intention of using, (partly because the new Calman inspired tax powers are waiting in the wings).

I have written before about how hard it is for politicians to meet the expectations of the electorate. We claim to want politicans who listen and respond and yet often they are castigated for indecision, "u-turns" or "flip-flopping". Senior politicans may be many things but most of them are not daft. They behave the way they do, they play politics they way they do, because they are rewarded for it.

We may decry knockabout politics but it gets headlines and it lands electoral punches. The difficulty is that clarity, openness and honesty can be the first casualties. To return to SVR, it has been very difficult as an interested, never mind casual observer, to follow the facts of this story.

The initial letter from the Scottish Secretary, whilst opening the issue up for debate, was scant on detail and arguably rather partial when it came to the facts of funding negotiations. For their part the Scottish Government were slow to release written details of what had gone on. At the time of writing, I have still not been able to find any mention of the SVR stushie on its website. It may be there, but it's certainly not easy to find.

All of this makes it pretty tough for a concerned voter to get a handle on the facts and who to believe. Why does that matter? It matters because it is an issue of trust. We are forever being told that trust in politicans is at an all time low. Much of the blame for that can be laid at the door of Westminster politicans who behaved so badly over their parliamentary expenses.

But trust is also a problem because too often the politicians seem only to be talking amongst themselves. The focus of their energy is on winning the argument, making a case, dodging a bullet. Sometimes you can do all of these things very successfully, but is that the same as making things better?

This week saw the broadcast of "Mandelson -The Real PM?" where the arch politician of our times described himself as a "professional politician". And perhaps that sums it up. That word, "professional". It prioritises politics for its own sake, rather than as an agent of positive change. I don't mean to suggest that politicians don't care about voters. In my experience they do. Only that sometimes they may need to be reminded not to behave as if the politics is an end in itself. And that's a taxing problem for us all.

Why TV Eye Candy is About More than Botox

2010-11-15T14:55:00.000-08:00

So, do you think John Craven has had botox? Or Huw Edwards? Or maybe Jeremy Paxman and Mark Lawson have been having fillers? What do you reckon? Maybe Kevin McCloud and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall are devotees of the chemical peel?

I imagine you probably think that a rather ridiculous idea. I imagine you probably had a wry chuckle at the notion of Paxo in a hairnet shooting the breeze about his greasy T-zone as the needle went in.

But what if I said that Fiona Bruce or Kirsty Wark or Mariella Frostrup had been botoxed up? Or that Sarah Beeny and Nigella had been having sneaky injections to plump out those frown lines? That doesn't seem so ludicrous does it? In fact it seems perfectly credible, if not extremely likely.

The need for regular injections of botulinim toxin if you are to have a successful career in televsion, has been in the rather unforgiving spotlight recently thanks to the age and sex discrimination case being brought against the BBC by former Countryfile presenter Miriam O'Reilly.

The ongoing employment tribunal has seen claim and counterclaim traded, with O'Reilly claiming that she and other 'older' female presenters were axed to make way for younger, prettier faces, while BBC executives have insisted that the issue was about relevant experience for the programme's new primetime slot.

Whether or not there was a breach of employment law by the Beeb in this specific instance is for the tribunal to decide. But the general question of whether there is increasing pressure on presenters to keep looking young, and whether that pressure is greater for women, is surely worth peering at in the magnifying mirror for a moment or two.

Why does it seem ridiculous to suggest that Jeremy Paxman or Mark Lawson might have had botox? Why is it not so for Kirsty Wark or Mariella Frostrup? They are all experienced, heavy hitters in their chosen field. They all work largely in 'serious' programming where commisioners might feel confident that audiences were willing to tolerate the odd grey hair and crow's foot.

One inevitably comes to the conclusion that the key difference is gender. We expect women in the public eye to go further in pursuit of eternal youth, or the best approximation of it that can be had by having your forehead frozen by a dentist in his lunchbreak.

On one level this is hardly news. We all know that most women put more effort into looking good than most men. As former Crimewatch presenter Nick Ross put it in a Daily Mail piece inspired by the O'Reilly case "We all know women are objectified more than men...it is women who reveal their breasts, midriffs and thighs, who wear the make-up, go to beauty salons, totter on high heels and are generally held up as the personification of beauty." In summary, since women's looks are more important in real life they're bound to be on TV too. Charmingly put I'm sure you'll agree. However there is no denying that factually he's pretty much correct. While recognising that some good looking women also have talent (round of applause) Ross goes on to take a swipe at "autocuties" who leap-frog more deserving male journalists because of their televisual appeal.

But hang on a minute here. The implication of the view set out by Nick Ross is that it is somehow inevitable that women will be judged on their looks to a greater degree and that this in many respects gives women an advantage.

But where is it written that women are to be judged on their appearance more than men? And why should the fact that you have to be pretty to get a job be seen as an unfair advantage rather than unfair discrimination?

I don't want to be flippant about this because the fact is we know it does happen. We know that sometimes, particularly in jobs where appearance is important, pretty women might get a job ahead of more deserving men and, indeed, unattractive women. And that does arguably give those women an unfair advantage even if they do not want it.

But that advantage given to a very few simply enshrines a wider discriminatory attitude that women have to be able and attractive in order to get on.

To return to the very wonderful Mark Lawson. Why does it seem ridiculous that he might have fillers or botox or a chemical peel? Well, the lovely Mark wasn't really going to be in the running for People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive title in any event was he?

But much more importantly, it's just not about the way he looks. He didn't get the job because of the way he looks. His looks are irrelevant. No-one would be so crass as to assume that because Mark Lawson had put on a bit of a timber or was receding a bit or getting jowly that he wasn't still an intelligent, insightful, engaging and charming broadcaster. His age and attractiveness are not significant in determining his professional worth.

That's not the case for Mariella Frostrup. And that, in my view, is wrong.

In any event, I have a problem with the suggestion that having botox or fillers is simply an extension of everyday grooming, like applying make up or plucking your eyebrows. A friend of mine, a former GP, now conducts minor cosmetic procedures for a very upmarket chain. If I were going to have botox I would go to her in a heartbeat. She has spoken eloquently about how safe it is if properly administered and how natural it can look and for a period I thought, yeah, why not? In five years time everyone will be doing it. It will be just like dyeing your hair or wearing contacts.

Except that it's not really. I've seen some people who look fabulous after Botox. I've seen many more who look frankly, a bit bizarre.

Often people don't look younger, they just look like someone who has had botox. It can alter your face quite fundamentally. It is also rather disconcerting to see the mismatch between the bits that have gone under the needle and those that haven't: a glassy forehead untouched by the hand of time and jowls like Marlon Brando in the Godfather. Likewise with fillers which give the face an odd spongy quality, as if your cheek bones were in training to form the base of a sherry trifle.

I'm not having a go at people who choose to do it. I have never subscribed to the view that plastic surgery is simply a sticking plaster for deeper emotional wounds. I knew a girl at school who had the most absolutely enormous comedy nose which was the bane of her life. I met her many years later after a really super nose job and she looked amazing and was 200 per cent happier.

I certainly gave serious thought to botox myself. And maybe if they did it better and you still looked like you, I'd still give it a go. But when I thought seriously about having it done it struck me that that I wouldn't want to to tell my daughter. I spend a lot of time telling her that what matters is being kind, and working hard and that good nail varnish and shoes and fabulous jewellery is the very nice icing on the cake. And how does Botox sit with that philosophy? And when I realised I would be embarrassed to tell her I realised I probably shouldn't be doing it.

I'm also not averse to a bit of eye candy. No-one is suggesting that Mary Beard should be a judge on the X Factor. I get that for some jobs being beautiful and/or young is pretty essential. There's no dignity in playing the ingenue if you're knocking on 45. Though interestingly, in cinema and TV drama there does seem to be more room for diversity, for a range of facial and body types which help convey the emotional complexities of different characters; - you can be Keira Knightley or your can be Christina Hendricks; you can be Julia Roberts or you can be Julie Walters. Lets face it would Tommy Lee Jones be Tommy Lee Jones if he looked like a catalogue model? No, and we'd all be the poorer for it.

Perhaps that's my beef with Botox, it seems to me to be anti-complexity, Botox is both a symptom and a cause of the homogenisation of beauty. But then maybe, like McDonald's, they're only giving us what we want? It's all very well blaming the media for the promotion of unrealistic physical role models, for presenting us only with images of impossibly perfect human beings, but we collude in the odd mass delusion that these paragons are what humans should look like, denying the evidence that is all too obvious every time we step out the door.

That's why it is claimed that we only want to look at beautiful people, that we don't want ugly buglies cluttering up our screens. But I don't actually believe that's true. Apart from the number of national treasures who are not beauty queen material (Jo Brand? John Sergeant?) we love, and love to look at, people in every day life warts and all.

I look at my daughter with her grandparents. At the way she gazes at them and strokes the papery skin on their hands as they tell her a story or read her a book. She does not care that they are not young or conventionally beautiful. I spoke recently to a lady in her late 70's. She was very smart and entertaining company and when she smiled her age fell away and you could see in her smile and her intelligence and the animation of her spirit, the beautiful woman she still was.

It's easy to become blase about the increasing prevalence of cosmetic surgery, particularly that designed to keep us youthful. It's tempting to just rattle off a joke about wind tunnels or staples in the hair line.

But the question of whether we can live with ourselves as we grow older speaks to a deep and fundamental need in us. It is about the acceptance of ageing as a part of living and a recognition that we can be loved, liked and respected past our accepted sexual sell by date.

If we want storytellers and narrators of substance and value, on TV or elsewhere, why can we not be trusted to find that in men and women of all ages and appearance?

Sexy. Fancy. Dress. Or Not.

2010-10-30T14:22:00.000-07:00

There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who would have sex with Piers Morgan and those who would only have sex with Piers Morgan in the hope that they would meet Simon Cowell. No, hang on, that's not right. Well, it's true, but it's not what I'm trying to say.

Oh yes! I know! There are two kinds of people in this world, people who do sexy fancy dress and people who don't.

I learnt this as a mere stripling acting as an unpaid skivvy at my Mum and Dad's fancy dress parties. The door bell would ring and there would be Mrs Anderson*, rouged cheeks, ringlets and cleavage like the San Andreas fault line.

Just as you're breaking into a sweat thinking "Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" you notice the basket of satsumas and realise she's Nell Gwynn. If Nell Gwynn had been a thickset 53 year old dentist's receptionist with elephantitis. But still there she was, one sniff of a costume party and her sexy, sexy head was on. What a trooper.

Actually, it was much more disturbing when your parents' friends were really proper sexy. Like Mrs Frances*. She was some ancient old bird of 33 that you babysat for and if you slagged her off for having rubbish biscuits your brother would go red and say things like "I like her. She smells nice." but normally she was just in a Simon shirt and a pair of Wranglers and clogs so you would think, "Well she's no Victoria Principal, but she is quite slim, I'll give her that."

But then she turns up at your parents fancy dress party in harem pants and a bikini top with a belly chain and "Blimey!" for once you really sympathise with your brother who is having to chat to her with only a tray of stuffed eggs to hide his discomfort.

Suffice to say I am not a sexy fancy dress person. I learnt this from my mother who, despite being lovely and having what they called in the '70's "a smashing figure," NEVER did sexy fancy dress. My Mum was always Fidel Castro or Groucho Marx or something and was funny and cute like Judy Garland in Easter Parade and never had to worry abut whether her bosom was about to dip in the chicken vol au vents.

So having learnt it at my mother's knee I know my fancy dress mojo, but for those of you who don't, here is a short guide to fancy dress archetypes.

1. The Jordan

This is easy. Think "common prostitute in Hammer House of Horror. " Synthetic fibres only, particularly for your hair extensions, frilly pants like Chris Evert or at a push simply knickers with days of the week on them, but ALWAYS on show. Ladies, this is not the time for mystery. Make- up is classic, applied half-cut in the dark over a thin base of creosote.

2. The TV Chef

At it's simplest its just comedy lips and a hair net for Jamie. Or you could do Nigella but that does require full frontal nudity save for fairy lights draped over your pomegranates. Finally, if you can take a lot of pain, you could do Gordon Ramsay by wrapping twenty elastic bands around your face, putting two pain aux raisins up a tight white t-shirt, and shoving a Le Creuset milk pan in your underwear.

3. The Politico

Fidel Castro, Che etc. Just some basic camo left over from that survivalist's convention and a tache. The tache can be finest plug hair if you can come by it, if not any old merkin you have lying around the house will do just as well. If you want to do right-wing just hollow out a large ham, stick a wetsuit and sunglasses on it and put it on your head like Monica did with the turkey in the Friends Thanksgiving episode. You are the PM natch. (NB: Of course the Cam-Gamm thing is Trademark Caitlin Moran of The Times.)

4. The Fop/Aristo/ Historical Clergyman

18th century aristo with powdered periwig and knee breeches. A word of caution, unless you are Elton John there is a strong chance that wearing this means you are a complete tool. (See Conrad Black )

There endeth the lesson.

*All names have been changed or the entire story fabricated.

HAPPY, HAPPY BIRTHDAY

2010-10-13T00:49:00.001-07:00

Today is my 43rd birthday. It is no understatement to say I have waited all my life to be this age. If Simon Cowell were here I would cry and tell him that this is my last chance at a 43rd birthday and that it means EVERYTHING to me.

Cos it does actually, mean the world to me to be 43. Even though, to all but the most deluded, I am middle aged, and middle age is not supposed to be something one celebrates. How do I know I'm middle aged? Well apart from the maths, which you can do if you wish, the signs are all there.

I read the warning notices on fairground attractions; I find aerial photography quite fascinating; I worry about listed building regulations. And then there is the physical deterioration, not catastrophic as yet admittedly. An extra crow's foot or two, a shade more wobbly round the jowls, a smile which is becoming, literally, 'long in the tooth'.

Am I delighted to face the inexorable signs of ageing in the harsh morning light of the mirror each day? Yes and no. No, because I am a bit vain and sentimental and it would be just lovely to think you could stay young and pretty forever. Yes, because you can't.

Five years ago my cousin Dawn died having been diagnosed with breast cancer two years before. Unfortunately, by the time she was diagnosed the cancer had already spread and she was told there was no chance of remission.

Dawn was a fearless child. One who would jump hollering from the highest diving board while I practised a safe, neat little dive from the side of the pool. I always envied her that. And she had the most beautiful strawberry blonde hair.

She was only in her early 30's when she died, leaving not just her little boy but her husband, mother, father, brother, sister-in-law and tiny new-born nephew. And a whole host of friends. I never knew how many till the day of her funeral.

So if I feel sad at the onset of another winter, I remember that I will celebrate Christmas with my family on 25 December. And I think of Dawn who died in December and celebrated her last Christmas early so she could watch her son open his presents one final time.

If I look in the mirror of a morning and feel a little maudlin, I think of Dawn and the way she bore her illness and I determine again not to be sad at the passing of the years but grateful for them.

Seeing what happened to Dawn may not have turned me into someone who treks in the Himalayas and watches the dawn over Macchu Picchu, frankly that's not really my cup of tea. But it has made me determined never to regret another birthday.

So believe me when I say I will enjoy today, my 43rd birthday, and I shall raise a glass to Dawn who never got to enjoy hers.

Benefit Reform: Behind the Scenes

2010-10-06T05:22:00.000-07:00

The Chancellor of the Exchequer's grace and favour country mansion, Dorneywood.

INT: Elegant drawing room. Chancellor George Osborne is lying on the sofa, flicking through "World of Interiors". He is dressed casually in smoking jacket, cravat and velvet slippers bearing the monogram CofE. A knock at the door. George leaps up and grabs a large sheaf of papers from his red box. He moves to the fireplace and, resting one elbow on the mantelpiece, begins to study the documents intently.

GO: Good God, come in! There's no time to waste!

The door opens and Sir Humphrey St. James, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury enters with his PS Barnaby Sumpthwaite.

Sir H: Good morning, Chancellor.

GO: Honestly, you public sector namby pambies with your door knocking and your "Good mornings". You've no sense of urgency. You wouldn't bloody last two minutes selling wallpaper in my shop, you feather bedded egg-heads.

Sir H: (smiling urbanely) You wished to see us?

GO: I've been reading this submission on plugging the ruddy great deficit, (thrusting papers at Sir H). Some of the options are ludicrous! Raise taxes!? You bunch of unreconstructed socialist morons. It's ludicrous! I suppose you'll be suggesting workers' communes and nationalising the banks next.

Sir H: Please accept my apologies Chancellor. Now, if I may be so bold, you wished to see us?

GO: Christ man, why hell else would you be here? You're like that useless bitch pointer of mine, kept returning the bird to the wrong bloody gun!

Sir H: Indeed. I wonder however if now would be an appropriate time for you to sketch out your thoughts on why you wanted to see us?

GO: Benefits Hump. Cutting the old benefit bonanza for all the numpties that haven't the gumption to get themsleves born into a successful painting and decorating business. Bloody workshy idiots. But I don't want that jumped up geek Miliband accusing me of having it in for the working classes. So bloody unfair. My beater had two weeks in Majorca last year courtesy of the Osborne dollar. So we have to take the benefits from the middle classes Hump old boy, and I've the very one, Child Benefit. Ruddy ridiculous. All these nappy valley yummy mummies blowing it on cupcakes, own brand chablis and clogs. That's not why we're fighting overseas.

BS: Actually, I'm not sure that the clogs trend ever really translated beyond the catwalk Chancellor. They're very unforgiving on a chunky ankle....

Sir H: Thank you Barnaby. That is an interesting proposotion Chancellor,(pressing fingertips together and pursing lips). If you will permit, I would like to explore some of the questions of both principle and practice which arise were such a policy to be pursued.

GO: (Stifling yawn) Oh, knock yourself out you goggle-eyed dweeb.

Sir H: Child benefit is a universal benefit. As such many see it as totemic, as an indicator of the State's commitment to a welfare system which reaches out not just to those on the breadline, but also to those on modest and middle incomes. Universalism is, after all, also a central pillar of the NHS and of our education system. Many would argue that it is important that we have policies which reflect a shared sense of citizenship, that make manifest our shared commitment to the welfare state. Removing child benefit, even from the better off, will therefore be seen by many as a direct attack on the founding principles of the welfare state.

GO: (Making 'yak yak yak' gesture with both hands) Ooooh, ten out of ten!

Sir H: As ever, the Chancellor's comments are most apposite. However, set against that, we find ourselves in uncharted fiscal territory. The structural deficit must be tackled and removing child benefit from the better off, whilst potentially unpopular amongst the middle classes, could mean less stringent cuts for those on very low incomes. And so we come to the practical difficulties. I am sure Chancellor you will have considered the difficulties in introducing an efficient, effective and equitable system of means testing. It strikes me that if removal of a universal benefit is pursued, then it must be executed in a way which is, and is seen to be, scrupulously fair. (Where are the jokes? - Ed)

GO: Oh here we go, (in whiny voice) "It's so complicated. We've tried and tried Sir but we've run out of biscuits so now we need to stop." FFS, JDI you great DODO! Well you can thank your lucky stars that I've brought a bit of private sector interior design experience to bear on this problem. Do you remember those adverts for Prize yoghurts where the yoghurts were "The Prize Guys"? Well that is me. That is me and Dave. We are the Prize guys and we have fixed it. Anyone on top rate of tax gets it whipped off 'em. Tough but fair. Endov.

Sir H: Hmm, I do wonder Chancellor whether that approach, though it does have an admirable clarity, might not lead to some unfortunate anomalies.

GO: (Fingers in ears) La, la, la I'm not listening. TOUGH BUT FAIR, FOUR EYES!

Sir H: If I may seek your indulgence a moment longer. Is there not a concern that, due to the fact that the the higher rate of tax is applied to individuals and not to households, some couples earning up to £86k a year would keep the benefit, whereas households with one person earning in excess of £44k would lose it?

GO: And?

Sir H: Well Chancellor does that not strike you as, er, somewhat problematic? Let me give you an example. Do you see those cows in the field out there, a big one and a small one? Would it be fair do you think to take the hay away from the little cow, but let the big one keep its hay?

GO: Aha! No you don't. I've seen this one before. It's not a big cow and a small cow, it's just one of them is further away.

Sir H: (rubbing temples) With respect Chancellor, this is not in fact a matter of perspective. One cow really is almost twice the size of the other. £86k really is almost twice £44k. I would humbly submit that your solution is somewhat challenged in relation to matters of equity.

GO: I would humbly submit that my foot will challenge your bony arse if you keep raining on my parade you badly dressed speccy beanpole. The big cow needs twice as much as the little cow so of course it can keep the hay. I mean if you're at the Wolsey with Fatty Soames you're hardly going to give him half portions are you?

At that moment the door bursts open and in bursts a wild eyed Samantha Cameron, baby Flora on hip, wearing clogs and brandishing large glass of Tesco's "Finest" chablis.

SC: Where's the bloody decorator? There you are, you horrible little tradesman! What the hell is this I'm hearing about the kiddies' fund? First Dave takes a pay cut, and I've had to bloody go part time. What's going to keep me in Wolfords and cocktail Sobranie now you simpering lady boy?

As Samantha lifts the poker from beside the fireplace, Sir Humphrey and Barnaby beat a hasty exit.

Barnaby: I am rather concerned about how these proposals are going to play Sir.

Sir H: Christ boy, I couldn't give a rat's arse, I'm out of here in six months and my pension is bomb-proof. At least this one's not a bloody Jock....

ENDS

Breast is Best, but Mothering Means More

2010-09-28T11:06:00.000-07:00

According to media reports, a public health white paper for England and Wales to be published later this week will encourage employers to do more to enable new mothers returning to work to breast feed their babies.

I appreciate that there is much to be done to ensure the safe delivery of this little bundle of policy joy, which at the moment is not much past the ecstatic point of conception. Not least what is to be done with said baby in-between breast feeding breaks; since dropping it off in reception for a quick leaf through The Economist can only be a short term solution. But it does seem to be, in principle at least, a good thing.

I don't intend to list all the benefits of breast feeding, since by now they are pretty well rehearsed. Suffice to say, it sometimes feels like it cannot be long before we discover that breast fed babies have cuter dimples, prettier toes and quite lovely singing voices.

With that in mind, I want to be VERY clear about my support for breast feeding at the outset, because I am now about to say what can sometimes feel like heresy; that for some women breast feeding may not be the right thing - and that's okay too.

Some women give up breast feeding because their employment circumstances make it difficult, some because their husbands don't like it, some because their mothers purse their lips and disapprove. Some give up though simply because it can be painful and exhausting and bloody hard work.

I do not have a personal axe to grind here. I breast fed my daughter, though not exclusively, till she was six and a half months old. I had a lot of help at the beginning and "established" feeding quickly and painlessly. I loved feeding my daughter. When I stopped feeding her I cried and cried because feeding your baby yourself can be one of those joyous wonders of motherhood that makes all the tiredness, trauma and weight gain worthwhile. For the avoidance of doubt then, BREAST FEEDING IS A GOOD THING.

But it is not the only thing.

I have a number of friends whose experiences with breast feeding were not as happy as mine. One of my closest friends had terrible pain from feeding when her son could not latch on properly (due, it transpired, to a "tongue tie", a minor mouth problem which was not picked up initially). I remember visiting her and seeing her distress every time the baby needed to be fed. The combination of the physical pain she endured and the constant reminder that she was not able to fulfill her baby's basic needs really took its toll. Feeding, or rather the inability to feed, assumed an enormous significance. It became the thing that defined their relationship.

She attended a breast feeding clinic every week and was constantly supported and encouraged by midwives who told her of course she could feed and it would all come right. And she would listen and smile and go home and cry and dread the next feed. Eventually a kindly health visitor took her aside and told her in hushed tones that perhaps she had done all she could and that really it was time to try something else. My friend says the feeling of relief at having been given permission to stop was immense.

She and her husband were then spirited away into a broom cupboard to be given advice about formula as if it were a dirty little secret. The whole experience was difficult and distressing and spoke of a system which seemed to focus on the benefits of feeding to the exclusion of other aspects of parenthood. (My amazing friend then went on to feed her son exclusively on expressed milk, before successfully establishing breast feeding when he was several months older. She's a better woman than me. )

Breast feeding is promoted, rightly, as one of the most important ways of bonding with your baby. But if feeding is not working out, it has exactly the opposite effect. The fact of being unable to feed your baby becomes all-encompassing; making bonding with your child in other ways nigh on impossible.

Finding the right solution is not helped by the fact that it is such an emotive issue, often presented in divisive and caricatured terms. On the one hand there are the tree-huggers who sit around brushing each other's hair and playing the mandolin while breast feeding their infants; on the other hoop earring wearing feckless mothers who force feed their offspring bottles of vimto.

It's also a tricky one in terms of the gap between the benefits described in the literature and one's own experience. The convenience of breast feeding for example is often emphasised in promotional material. Well yes. It was very convenient for night feeds and if you were stranded in traffic jams. But it could also be enormousy tying and if, like me, you had bosoms like the Hindenberg, not actually that easy to do comfortably and discreetly.

I'm not trying to diss the science. I breast fed my baby in large part because I have faith in science, even though I don't understand it, and the science told me I should. But if I'm really honest it's sometimes difficult to square that with the evidence of my own eyes.

I see children that were born at the same time as my daughter every day of the week. Their health, happiness and intellectual ability appears to have nothing to do with whether they were breast or bottle fed. I know that this is personal and anecdotal - but it's a very powerful experience. Many people just don't see the science translated into every day life; and the health professionals and policy makers have to get better at acknowledging that.

No-one should be deterred from breast feeding for cultural, social or economic reasons. Women who breastfeed their babies should not be thrown off buses, out of cafes or into coal cellars lest their brazen need to nourish their child should throw the populace into paroxysms of embarassment and/or lust.

But equally motherhood should not be defined by which teat your baby drinks from. Yes, breast is best, but mothering means much, much more.

The Fag-End of Philosophy

2010-09-14T03:20:00.001-07:00

On the bus this morning I sat next to a woman with an almighty hacking cough. She looked harmless enough, but clearly she was hiding her phlegm under a bushel. Because as soon as I sat down she started with the chesty burbling death rattle. It was like eavesdropping on a bunch of orcs having rough sex.

Do you think there are some people in the world who, on sitting next to a hacking cougher, feel sympathy rather than revulsion? I hope so. I hope there are good Samaritans out there who might have patted her arm or offered a blackcurrant Soother, rather than miming an imaginary barrier between us and fashioning blinkers from a copy of The Scotsman.

When we both alighted at the same stop, she scrabbled frantically in her bag and pulled out a packet of fags, nearly extinguishing the lighter flame with the force of her cough, before taking one huge comic book draw so that her cheeks disappeared like a Chilean sink hole. Immediately she seemed calmer and almost as quickly I felt a pang of sympathy, pity even, for her addiction to the evil weed.

I am aware that this will infuriate those smokers who do it for the love of it, for whom it is a pleasure without guilt, a means of self-expression, a fetishistic ritual of indulgence to be savoured and worn as a badge of honour. Fair enough, you lot carry on, knock yourselves out, I don't feel sorry for you AT ALL.

But, I do pity the others, the ones who would dearly love to be able to kick their habit, who have tried many, many times to escape it's wraith-like clutches before once more falling sobbing and spent back into the lethally seductive arms of Lady Nicotine.

I don't pretend to understand how addiction to nicotine works, y'know biologically nor nuthin'. I was one of the lucky ones. Despite having my first fag in my mid teens and smoking on and off till I had my daughter in my mid thirties, I just never really seemed to get clinically, literally, addicted.

Sure I had nights where, after a few cans of Forge lager, I would worry the sofa upholstery with my bare teeth hoping to find a long forgotten SilkCut, but I was that classic oxymoron of the social smoker, happy to puff away on a Saturday night out, but then equally happy to do without Monday to Friday. Then when I got pregnant I stopped, made a conscious decision not to start again and never did.

Many of my friends were not so lucky and woke up one day suddenly one of the unhappy band who cannot get through the day without the old tar sticks. Their addiction makes them unhappy, it worries them and frightens them and gnaws at their self esteem. Some have given up, but others are still miserably addicted, and their mantra is often the same, "I just wish I'd never started."

For them there is no doubt that being a smoker, becoming addicted to cigarettes, is a matter of profound regret. I think of them whenever I pick up Hello! and read a Chopra loving, snake-oil salesman of an NLP addicted celebrity say smugly that they 'don't believe in regrets.' Well, in return I'm tempted to say that you're either a saint or a sociopath.

If you can say hand on heart that you have never been selfish or petulant or greedy or casually mean or unkind then congratulations and you may be excused. If, as I suspect is more likely, you are human just like the rest of us, are we to take it that you don’t regret your behaviour and the hurt it caused?

At the very least, are we no longer to be permitted a quiet moment of reflection where we admit that perhaps we wouldn't do it ALL again? I have never understood the appeal of surveying the human wreckage of a catastrophic decision and saying "If I had my time over, I wouldn't change a thing." If the same principles were applied to scientific endeavour, we'd still be eating spit roasted vole and using portable hooded hairdryers by Pifco.

Similarly, when team positivity asserts that “you make your own luck” we can hopefully assume they don’t really mean it was your fault when that pesky drunk driver crossed the central reservation.

But of course lets not forget that “everything happens for a reason”, a philosophy most recently espoused in a lead Vanity Fair article by the shining example of good judgement and sober self awareness that is Lindsay Lohan.

The marvellous thing about clinging to this philosophical flotsam and jetsam is that it simply reaffirms that bad stuff only happens cos something better is waiting round the corner. And anyway, it wasn't your fault, it was the Universe did it and ran away.

Yes, yes, I know I'm probably being far too literal and what you really mean is that we should seize the day, follow the dream, give a Simon Cowell approved 120 per cent - and for what it’s worth, I agree. I'm not suggesting it's healthy to spend one's life brooding about the mistakes of the past or feeling burdened by the guilt caused by other people's unhappiness.

But at the very least I object to these slogans – for that’s what they are – on the grounds of borderline idiocy since they don’t even say what they mean. I'm tired of bumper stickers masquerading as wisdom.

Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes we regret it. Sometimes we light up yet another fag and wish we hadn't. That's life and not believing in it doesn't mean it's not true.

California Gurls: When Big Business Turns Child Catcher

2010-09-08T07:54:00.000-07:00

Most children learn to read. First they read their name, then maybe Mummy, Daddy, cat, boy. Then all of a sudden, out of the blue, they start to read items in every day life: packets, leaflets, street signs, bitchy texts about the X Factor that you're sending to your workmates. One day, they also start to read newspaper and magazine headlines in the supermarket.

And that's when your desire to shield your little angel from some of life's horrors becomes rather more complicated. I wouldn't describe Katy Perry as one of life's horrors exactly, but her presence on the cover of Glamour magazine did lead to some interesting reading for my 8 year old daughter when it caught her eye. Namely, cover strap lines like "What to Do With a Naked Man" and "I didn't know I'd been raped until I realised I was pregnant."

And this got me thinking about what happens when (in a big deep voice) TWO MARKETS COLLIDE! In this instance, when the music business simultaneously targets children, little girls in particular, and grown ups with grown up tastes.

For it was no accident that my daughter's eye was drawn to that particular magazine. Up until this summer she had never heard of Katy Perry. But all that changed with the release of "California Gurls" (yes, that is how they is spelling it.)

For those of you not familiar, this burst of bubble-gum pop has a chorus which runs;

"California Gurls are unforgettable/ Daisy Dukes bikinis on top/ Sun-kissed skin so hot to melt your popsicles/ Oh, woah, oh! Oh, woah, oh!"

Something about the chirpy tune and the combination of words like "girls" "Daisy" "bikinis" and "popsicles", rendered this tune irresistible to my daughter and her chums. And that was before they saw the video.

In the promo a luscious Katy and assorted popsies are frolicking inside a board game named Candyfornia, a land of sweets with lollipops like palm trees, candy floss clouds, bon-bon pillows and salted caramel tumble dryers. (Okay, I made the last one up).

Looming over them is sugar daddy Snoop Doggy Dog who (horrors!) has the 'gurls' trapped there for his delectation, lustily licking his lips like a pervy Willy Wonka. Katy romps around the Candyfornia board freeing fellow cuties trapped in hubba bubba bubbles with the heel of her stripper shoes. She also lies naked and licking her wrist on a candy floss cloud with her bottom cleavage just obscured by a stray wisp of spun sugar. The 'gurls' then dance on the beach in cut-off shorts with bikini tops designed to look like giant cupcakes iced with glazed cherries on; or rather, enormous breasts.

But the Snoopster is mighty peeved at this and sends an army of gummy bears to CRUSH the little 'gurly' sweeties . Whereupon Candy Queen Katy morphs into a female avenger clad in a glittery red bikini with two canisters of "scooshy" cream strapped to her boobs.

She then proceeds to twist her cream guns in the manner of a porn star fondling her breasts, whereupon enormous spurts of milkiness shoot from her bosom pistols, vanquishing her little jelly foes. (I did not make any of that up.)

You may deduce from this that the video for California Gurls is not really appropriate fare for 8 year old girls. And yet, with its scrumptious set and 'girlpower' subtext, they couldn't have made a video that would appeal more to little girls if they tried. And, basically, that's my point. I rather wonder if they did make it to appeal to little girls. At least in part.

Now, I don't have a beef with Katy Perry, even if there is something of the replicant in that wide eyed stare of hers. She's a grown woman and the cartoon Vargas girl sexiness of her persona is vastly preferable to the dead eyed grindings of many other largely interchangeable pop starlets.

I don't know for certain who buys her records, but I'd be pretty surprised if it's 30 something musos. I imagine a young, very young, female audience is a lucrative market for her. But clearly you would also want to exploit God given talents like those on display in the California Gurls video. Hence a creative marketing strategy which reels in young kids with the most wonderfully realised candy world and which appeals to adults with raunchy, if tongue in cheek, sexual content.

So if it's inappropriate don't let her watch it, I hear you cry. Well, in my defence I didn't. She saw it at someone else's house and came back raving about it. We watched it through together and at various points I thought, should I stop this? Should I say, "I don't want you to watch this"?

But I have no particular problem with my child seeing female nudity and the giant cupcake bosoms were actually pretty funny (we're not beyond the odd booby joke in this household) and basically I didn't want to project my own adult sensibilities onto her experience. For there is no doubt that she just likes the tune and the bright colours and the funky clothes and THE SWEETS!!

But when we reached the cream gun, ahem, climax I determined that this was not a video that she should be allowed to watch again. Why? Because little girls want to be like big girls and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And, sure enough, it was not long before a friend reported that her daughter had been bouncing around in the sitting room miming the cream gun twists while belting out the tune.

Little girls (and that is what 8 year olds are) should not be imitating the simulated sex poses of porn stars and pole dancers. Even if they do so quite innocently. What happens when such little girls, who have been pouting and jiggling their way through childhood, turn 12, 13, 14, and do begin to understand the significance of the imagery in Katy Perry's apparently wholesome visual treat? Would it be surprising if by that time they have developed a kind of sense memory of studiedly provocative behaviour which implies a sexual maturity they do not in fact possess?

Acres of coverage has, quite rightly, been given recently to the impact of "raunch culture" on children, young girls in particular. What were once specifically adult porn and sex industry aesthetics have become increasingly mainstream, creating an environment such that the horrors of pole dancing kits in the toy section could even be contemplated.

But such overt attempts to commercialise sexuality for children have cheeringly so far been met mostly with howls of disapproval. The Mumsnet campaign Let Girls Be Girls for example, which asks retailers not to sell products which "exploit, emphasise or play upon children's sexuality " is having considerable success. Not just in consciousness raising, but also in getting firm commitments from major retailers not to succumb to the temptation of making a fast buck from products which cynically aim to sexualise our childrens' play.

But at least these direct attempts to target children can be easily identified and met head on. It is much, much harder to combat the "dog whistle" marketing of adult products to multiple markets which include young children. It is insidious, feeding into the culture until it begins to become the norm and therefore much harder to challenge.

I am not turning into Mary Whitehouse here (I hope). Sex is a (welcome) fact of life and society needs to cater for the needs of adults as well as children and families. But selling products with sexual content so that they surreptitiously appeal to young children is crossing the line. So forgive me if I see Katy's sweet offering rather more cynically, as big business turning child catcher and refuse to be seduced.

Letts Hear it for Libraries

2010-09-01T04:41:00.000-07:00

So, are you familiar with Quentin Letts? No, it's not an estate agents, though it would be a damn fine name for one I grant you. Okay, do you read the Daily Mail? What do you mean, "Are we alone"? Fine, let's skip that question if its going to be a source of embarassment.

Quentin Letts is a journalist who writes for a number of British newspapers, including the Daily Mail. He is a theatre critic, political commentator and scourge of health and safety clipboard operators everywhere. He has a cheeky Just Williamish air; with blinky eyes behind little round specs; and he is never without a worm in his pocket all the better to frighten annoying gurls like Germaine Greer.

Quentin is currently presenting a series on Radio 4 entitled "What's The Point of..." where he questions the purpose of some of Britain's national institutions and obsessions. This week it was the turn of public libraries to have the beady eye of Letts turned upon it.

Suffice to say that I suspect Quentin and I would not see eye to beady eye on quite a number of issues.But I am forced to admit that I found myself agreeing with some of his thoughts on libraries.

Since I stopped working in an office, I have spent more and more time in the library. Also talking to check-out assistants and asking for free carpet fitting quotes, but that's another story. I now believe more strongly than ever that the public library is a shining beacon of civilisation which we all should cherish, and, more to the point, USE. It is testament to the power of the library that it could unite Mr Letts and I; specifically in the belief that it plays a vital role in unlocking human potential. So when Quentin called for the library of the future to be "a placid communal sanctuary, a public space for literary pleasure and self betterment", I found myself nodding in agreement.

Funnily enough, I am in a library as I write these words. As it happens, the library I happen to be in is no ordinary library. It is the National Library of Scotland. An institution which I love with a white hot passion which shakes me to the core.

The National Library, has comfortable chairs with leather padding and wide oak desks with room to spread your papers out. The enormously helpful staff will bring the books TO YOUR SEAT while anointing you with sweet smelling oils, feeding you dates and blowing gently on your neck.

As if that were not sufficient entertainment, there are my fellow libary users. Posh Edinburgh University students called Proteus and Porphyria with golden skin and shiny hair and pearly white teeth newly released from the loving care of an expensive orthodontist. Elderly ladies with shoogly beads, lopsided bosoms and birds nests, hair; retired gentlemen in mufti of flannels and a blazer; wild eyed academics with nicotine stained fingers and inky patches on their jacket pockets. And, in the unlikely event that you tire of the people watching, there are the books.

Books and books and books in abundance. In the small room where I now sit I could lovingly stroke the spines of ;"The One Pound Note in the History of Banking in Great Britain"; "The Encyclopedia of Islam"; Virgil's "Aeneid"; or "A Dissertation Upon English Typographical Founders". The stylish young woman next to me is reading a report of the 'Viceroyal's Visit to the West', in a 1900 edition of "The Queen: The Lady's Newspaper". Then there are the journals, newspapers, maps, manuscripts, rare books and the Scottish Screen Archive. Not to mention the exhibitions, events and a rather nice cafe in the foyer.

Of course the National Library is the Sunday Best of all libraries, but my little workaday local library is not too shabby either. Well actually, it is quite shabby but marvellous nonetheless. There are mothers and fathers and children reading and playing (quite quietly for all you purists like Quentin). Learning not just to read but to question and to think for themselves. Men and women filling out job applications and researching for interviews. It was at a library that I did the research that helped me get the job that paid my bills and secured my first mortgage. It was at a library that Jimmy Reid got the education that led to a life that was celebrated by the great and the good when he died.

Young people who are not given the space or peace to study at home. Old people who just want some human contact and can't work the computer. And yes, sharp elbowed middle class folk like myself who know a good thing when they see it.

The day that "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", the last in the series of Potter books, was published, I was in my local library. A forlorn looking little boy of about 12 came to the desk with his grandmother and asked to order a copy of the book, knowing that the next day at school most of his friends would be brandishing their copies. The librarian smiled and spoke to her colleague and took from under the desk one of the brand spanking new copies which had only been published at midnight before. I hope the disblieving grin that spread across his face was somehow captured in the monthy performance indicators return.

A society that funds and supports public libraries is a civilised society, a democratic society, a society that believes in progress and tolerance and community and the kind of society I want to live in.

Mr Letts gave the last word in his programme to the former poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, whose father had never finished a book in his life, and I will do the same, " I owe my life to libraries." he said, "I went into a series of quite small rooms and found that I was in the world."

Scottish Football News is a Breath of Fresh Air

2010-08-26T09:16:00.000-07:00

I am not a sports fan. Though I do like Wimbledon, the Olympics, World Cup football and Dancing on Ice. My pulse does not, however, start racing at the thought of a mid November fixture between Albion Thistle and "the Rovers", (as I believe they are called).

This morning however, as I sat de-fuzzing my felt Cath Kidston door stop, I did wonder if perhaps my life was becoming a little too cosy. So I decided to break out of my comfortable ...er...comfort zone and what better way to begin than by immersing myself in the world of Sport?

I therefore turned to the unopened and freshly ironed copy of The Scotsman by my side and decided, right there and then, that I would, FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER, read the back pages first.

And so I read the 8 pages of footballing information. I will not call it news, for I fear that is a misnomer implying as it does reports of matches, scores, end to end stuff, near misses, things that had actually happened and the like.

But no. Rather football fans apparently wish to read stories about why some people think they would like to play football somewhere else; or what some people might do in certain matches that might not happen; or why some things that some people have said are not fair and really quite annoying.

In that sense it is very like political reporting. You know, where Peter Mandelson tells everyone what has just happened and what to think like the way the characters do in Mistresses. ANYWAY, I was a little disappointed at the lack of results and facts related to events in the past but in other respects I found I liked it very much.

I liked the headlines, which are poetic and rather mysterious, like the titles of short stories by Saul Bellow or Philip Roth: "MacDonald Ponders"; "Hooiveld Finds No Room For Sentiment"; or, "Baudelaire's Misfortune is A Boost for Proust". (Okay, I made that last one up.)

Some read like briefings from the Pentagon, "Roberston adamant United can oust AEK amid chaotic backdrop" or "Yemeni forces demand answers from Jambo's Oligarchs" (Okay, I made that one up as well.) I also liked all the foreign names, which are exotic and occasionally quite amusing, like 'Crouch'.

Some headlines though, I found downright impenetrable:

"Du Chatinier says pressure all on Scotrs". It does actually say"Scotrs". Is this a typo? Or is it a real footballing phenomenon? I imagine it is a cross between 'Scots' and 'snotters'.

Others read as if they are perhaps incomplete:

"Robinho wants away" ... early the night cos it's macaroni fur tea?

However, my absolute favourite was the collection of positively uplifting thoughts brought forth from the mouth of one Mr Craig Levein, who I believe now holds a managerial position in relation to the Scottish national embarrassment, er, sorry, squad.

The candour of Mr Levein in discussing the selection of the squad in advance of an upcoming European double-header (note footballing lingo) is an absolute breath of fresh air.I wish to point out that I have NOT made any of this up:

"I cannot afford to look in detail at who speaks in a Scottish accent and who has a Saltire hanging from their bedroom window." (Well indeed, who can in this day and age?)

"I pick the guys who are not going to be caught in the headlights, who are not going to go into their shells." (So he mixes a few metaphors, chill down will ya?)

"I want to win them both, I think we are capable. But we are capable of losing both, It's football." (The key word here is 'capable', let's just focus on that.)

"I am still getting a handle myself on what this is all about." (Okay, starting to get a bit worried now.)

"I picked a group of players for the last game, half of whom did not turn up." (Don't know about youse, but I'm fair bursting with pride here.)

"So I thought, I'll throw some young boys in and hopefully we can get something out of it." (Let's just admire the candour shall we? I'll admit the strategy may need work.)

Simply Marvellous. Though I do wonder whether he realised that there were other people in the room who could hear him.

Anyway, it was all very fascinating and finally, you will be pleased to know that Lithuania believe they can cause upset. But then so can I, especially after a tin of pea and ham soup. Still that's a (non) story for another day.

Creating Glasto at Home: Why It's Never Too Late to Give it a Go

2010-06-26T08:19:00.000-07:00

Okay, first, let's examine the facts. I have never been on the receiving end of a stage dive or in the thick of a mosh pit. I have never stood swaying, my lit lighter held aloft in the dark, unless I was half cut and trying to light a fag. The last live gig I went to was a jazz guitar evening in a converted church where there was ice cream during the interval. In short I am not, and never have been, what might be called a regular frequenter of down and dirty live music spectaculars.

Even in my youth I would stand, plastic glass of warm beer in hand, feigning ecstasy at a Red Lorry Yellow Lorry encore, secretly thinking "What wouldn't I give for a seat and a bit of Luther Vandross."

So it will surprise no-one that I have never been to Glastonbury. Indeed, (whisper it) I have never been to any music festival. Nope; not once; not ever; no way. Not even WOMAD and it's practically Glyndebourne.

This is a fact of which I was once inordinately proud. It became a badge of prematurely middle- aged honour to roll my eyes at fellow 20 somethings hitting the festival circuit. "Ooh yes!" I would sneer, "Take me to the nirvana of gut rotting samosas, damp underwear and petty crime that is T in the Park, so that I can listen to every song in Cornershop's back catalogue!"

But the uncomfortable truth is that the comedy value of acting middle aged diminishes in direct proportion to the rate at which one becomes, well, middle aged. And yes, the youthful confidence that there will be endless opportunities begins to wane.

And so it is only now, with the spectre of being past it looming, that I am starting to flirt (embarrassingly) with the notion of giving Glasto a go. But there are so many questions. What does one wear? How should one talk? Should I do da dub step wid da dudes in da Dance Village?

Yesterday I decided to peruse the website, but it does little to calm one's fears.Turns out it's a cross between ancient Rome, Blade Runner and Bluewater - themed areas stuffed to the gunnels with alcohol, carb stations and a forest of firm thighed young women in eye-wateringly teeny shorts.

I read the details of the Shangri- La Area and became increasingly alarmed. There is no sign of a Costa Coffee, or a Waterstones, nor a LIDL tent where one could eat pretzels or buy a wetsuit. Instead it is home to a variety of other mini-zones like The Alleys, or 'Badlands', 'a seedy maze of wrongness...dark and steamy, chaotic and sexy..home to a myriad of bizarre nano-venues". Blimey. While I recognise most of the words in this sentence, I realise that I have absolutely no idea what it means.

So last night it occured to me that a trial run, creating Glasto at home, would be the best way to ease oneself into it. Excellent. Yes. That is the plan. First, I leap headfirst into the compost bin and roll around for a bit, drying myself off with the newspaper that lines the guinea pig hutch. Earthy aroma : tick.

Next; wardrobe. Channeling Florence that has the machine and Le Roo (see, I've been doing my homework) I fashion a strapless romper suit from a National Trust tea towel and some M&S control knickers. Stylish and secure, I am liking it.

Recognising that my open toed shoe boots are are asking for trouble in the chemical loos, I pack several pairs of blue plastic overshoes, nicked from accident and emergency. But still it lacks something. Squinting at photos of the crowd I see that some kind of head gear is de rigeur. Aha! I fall upon our Cath Kidston peg bag which will also give sun protection to the back of my neck. Tacking on some tassels and a rape whistle finishes it off to a T. Outfit: Tick.

Of course I now need somewhere to lay my fashionably attired head, so I drape a sheet over the clothes horse and sit inside it. I immediately want some warm diluting orange juice in a scratched plastic beaker and a cuddle from my Mum, but I just suck my thumb for a minute and it passes. Accomodation: Tick

It is now that the outmoded nature of my dance stylee begins to trouble me. Do people still twist each other's melons man? I try to remember the routine me and my mates used to do to Firestarter but can't get past the bit where we pretend to light a match. There is nothing for it then but to switch on the telly, watch a bit of Glasto and try to emulate the crowd.

I lie down on the floor and look up at the telly to try and get a sense of the scale of it. I jiggle my hands around like that lovely bit in "Gregory's Girl". The Pyramid Stage glows like a beacon. The tiny points of light in the crowd ripple across the screen. Thousands and thousands of people all swaying, whooping and singing in the dusty hot night, absolutely right in that moment. A sense of endless possibilities while the music is playing.

And I think, that looks bloody great.

Forceps for Meredith Grey?

2010-05-31T04:15:00.000-07:00

This morning I put the hairbrush in the fridge again. Yesterday, the green beans were discovered in the sock drawer. Once, and only once, I managed to pop my mobile phone in the post-box, which wouldn't have been the end of the world, except that foolishly, I forgot the stamp.

Being a tad on the forgetful side may be an irritation in the domestic sphere, but in the workplace of course it can prove rather more serious. Not for me, thankfully, since I've never had a job where anything more important than a missing Annex to a background paper on the migrating patterns of actuaries was at stake.

Rather more worrying are the instances of forgetfulness in the operating theatres of Scotland's hospitals, which were revealed in the response to a Freedom of Information request just published by the Press Association.

Forceps, needle tips, fragments of a bone drill and swabs were among the lost property items reported as having gone AWOL in the icky inside bits of real live people. The data detailed that, since 2008, in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde a total of 12 patients had been discharged with objects left inside them after surgery. NHS Borders meanwhile confirmed that forceps, which are typically between six and eight inches long, were left inside a patient at Borders General Hospital.

Hang on a minute, the tip of a needle's one thing but EIGHT INCH long forceps? Surely that can't be right? I mean, we've all left our eyelashes curlers in the hotel ensuite at some point, but come on, chaps!

A number of questions arise about such a mishap. First and foremost, why were the forceps casually laid to rest in the patient's innards in the first place? That's the equivalent of putting your red wine glass down on the cream carpet at the neighbourhood watch meeting, it's never going to end well.

Frankly, it reeks of a rather dismissive approach to the dignity of the patient's entrails. What next? The anaethestist propping his thermos on your spleen while he doles out the egg nog at the Christmas party? The surgeon wedging her compact mirror into your lower bowel while she squeezes her blackheads?

For if familiaity breeds contempt, it must be jolly hard as a practising medic not to get slightly blase about rootling around in some dude's gizzard. We'd like to think that the atmosphere in theatre when we're etherised on the table is as reverent as a Trevor McDonald interview, when it's probably more like the accounts department's 'Cupcake Friday'.

Personally I blame Channel 5. I wouldn't be surprised if next years stats reveal a worrying number of patients who have had to return to hospital due to discarded DVD Box sets of Grey's Anatomy, protruding from under their rib cages.

My hunch is that while the creme de la creme of the country's medical and nursing undergraduates should be stopping in the library, heads buried in Gray's anatomy, they're much more likely to be swotting up the anatomy of Izzy and co. Especially now that McDreamy is on tap on catchup tv, him and his sexy barnet pining for that whiny, pinch-faced, cotton-bud Meredith bloody Grey who has all the sexual allure of an Afghan hound. (I'm sorry, where was I?)

Oh yeah, what sort of example is that to set unattractive, um, sorry, I mean impressionable young Scottish puddins, er... rather, medics? With role models like that, no wonder 12 piece teasets are being casually overlooked during appendectomies. It's hard to keep your eye on the swab count when you're undoing each others' scrubs with your eyes and wigging out to Snow Patrol.

But of course I'm being facetious - they never play Snow Patrol in theatre, only when they're lying in the foyer, spent from a long hard day rolling their eyes and shagging transplant patients.

Seriously though, it's obviously not a barrel of laughs to be wheeled home after an op oblivious to the fact that there's a wee internal party bag of gauze wrapped monkey wrenches festering inside you. Thankfully however, though 'one such incident is one too many', it's still a pretty rare occurence. Partly due to procedures designed to prevent such incidents , particularly that all swabs and instruments should be "counted back out and in" again, by not one, but two members of the nursing staff. (Though budget restraints mean that it's not possible to have Brian Hanrahan on hand for anything other than headline cases.) But also because clumsy, slapdash, buffons like myself are, on the whole, not likely to get through the rigorous training required.

The NHS, despite its cock-ups, is a marvellous, wondrous, life saving and life affirming institution and we all should thank our lucky stars we have it - though sometimes it does pay to have your wits about you - especially if you hear "Chasing Cars" as they're putting you under.

Fergie's Fall From Grace

2010-05-24T04:40:00.000-07:00

It certainly makes for depressing viewing, a middle aged woman, once the nation's sweetheart, feted at home and abroad, now reduced to a tawdry and pathetic figure, cynically screwing as much money as possible from her association with an institution well past it's sell by date.

But enough of the word of mouth on Sex and the City 2: clearly the big winner in this week's spectacular fall from grace awards is Sarah, Duchess of York, exposed by the News of the World for offering access to Prince Andrew for £500k.

It appears that after the years spent bumping along the bottom of the tank in which "Hello!" keeps its minor royals, Fergie is back on the media A list for all the wrong reasons. Except that in a strange, through the looking glass way, she's gets it so wrong she's almost right.

The joyous wonder of Fergie's association with the Royals is her total inability to cultivate or maintain anything approaching "mystique". She is a walking, talking, human anti-mystique virus. Fergie, just by being Fergie in all her "Fergieness", has let more light in on the magic of monarchy than a bonkers red setter with a penchant for chewing the curtains.

Silly Royal "It's A Knockout"? Poor Fergie didn't get the memo that you're not supposed to look as if you're enjoying yourself - bouncing around in her wimpole like a Spamalot extra. Extra marital affair? No coy glances over the polo cup for her. No, no! Rather grainy pap pictures of her instep being nuzzled by a semi naked YANK!

If the famous fairy tale of regal hubris and collective delusion featured Fergie, there would be no need for a little boy to point the finger. Fergie would be up there on the podium shouting "LOOK AT US! WE'RE NOT WEARING ANY CLOTHES!"

And of course hovering in the background of all her indiscretions was the cardinal sin for a woman in the public eye of allowing herself to get fat and unphotogenic. Diana's press was far from positive at times, but she always had the fall back of the drop dead, knock em' down photoshoot that silenced the critics - not least because their tongues were hanging out.

Of course, until this latest and possibly greatest cock-up Fergie had long been on the road to public rehabilitation, hauling herself out of debt, acquiring a new self-help, no self pity persona - oh and of course shifting some weight.

This is where I need to say that those of you who were expecting a republican rallying cry should look away now. I know her behaviour is appalling, sad and lacking in any kind of integrity, I know it wasn't some sort of conspiracy that forced her to seek to fund an expensive lifestyle that she could no longer afford. But, she also is a woman who still bears the scars not just of an unhappy childhood, but of the pressures of sudden global fame for which she was clearly ill-equipped.

Several months ago she appeared on Pamela Connolly's 'Shrink Rap' discussion programme. From Fergie's point of view it was no no doubt an opportunity to share how she triumphed over adversity. But instead it showed a woman with her face oddly frozen and a disconcerting habit of talking about herself in the third person, still not at ease despite all the NLP mumbo jumbo.

And it will take some going to bounce back from this latest 'indiscretion', caught on camera slurring like Oliver Reed in the green room, miming 'give me the money' and incoherently wittering about wire transfers like a Nigerian fraudster.

There will be many who see no reason to pity a woman from a privileged background who, despite her claims of "not having a pot to piss in", still lives in a luxury most ordinary folk can only dream of. Fair enough.

But there is also something slightly disturbing in the sense one has of vultures circling overhead, now that she is once again in the wilderness; of smug satisfaction that those long ago cries of "vulgar, vulgar, vulgar" have been proven true. And sometimes it's healthy to feel a degree of compassion even for these we don't particularly admire.

In the final event one thing's for certain, as a cautionary tale for any young woman who thinks that marrying her prince is a guaranteed happy ever after, they don't come much better this.

Rolling News

2010-05-11T07:54:00.000-07:00

BREAKING NEWS: As I write this, Gordon Brown has just left Downing Street and the nail-biting cliffhanger of the past few days is over. Never have so many flights of steps borne witness to so many platitudes and a collective sigh of relief can be heard, if not across the nation, then at least in the TV satellite vans currently besieging Westminster. Relief that, at long last, there is something to report.

Well "Hallellujah!" and praise Laura Keunssberg!

For Ms Keunssberg, Chief Political Correspondent for the BBC News Channel has been an absolute trooper, always there, like Zelig, on the shoulder of history.

Take, yesterday afternoon, when it fell to Lib Dem negotiator David Laws to update the assembled hacks on the state of play with Con - Lib negotiations. David duly did the needful, muttering "friendly", "constructive", "national interest" and "more Red Bull please". The fairly obvious gist was that they hadn't reached an agreement, but hadn't given up on doing so. Called upon to explain the complexities of this concept, Laura K went all Donald Rumsfeld and intoned "Well, it's not a deal, but it's not not a deal."

Ms Kuenssberg is obviously not daft, no- one gets to be a Beeb Chief anything without being very bright, very knowleadgeable and very hard working. It would have been as clear to her as anyone else that a deal had not been reached. But then a deal had not been reached ALL DAY and this in news terms, was frankly unacceptable. It then becomes the reporters job to convince the viewer to disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes. It's not an option for Laura Kuenssberg to say "move along people, there's nothing to see" since, horror of horrors, we very well might.

So what made said bright, able professional tie herself up in double negative knots (apart of course from near exhaustion which is taken as read...)?

Two words; rolling news - which in recent days has reduced the nation's finest journalistic brains to a rabble of breathless curtain twitchers.

"They're in the car! They're gettting out of the car! They're on the steps! They're at the top of the steps!" The hack pack recorded the movements of the negotiating teams with all the obsessive mundanity of an anxious first time mother checking the contents of her baby's nappy.

Of course, rolling news also had it's pre-polling day moment in the sun, outside the very ordinary Rochdale front door of Mrs Gillian Duffy. "These are amazing scenes" the journos exclaimed as the minutes rolled by, the door remained resolutely shut and scenes of any sort, amazing or otherwise, truculently failed to materialise.

To return to the curtain twitchers in the street, they were ably supported by the graverobbers in the studios. Since anyone who was anyone and knew anything was either in the talks or under wraps, the ghosts of Government past rose up to be stroked and petted back to life by Burke and Hare aka Huw Edwards and Jon Snow.

The mummified remains of Lord Hurd (previously plain Douglas) were exhumed, propped up next to the cheery spectre of Shirley Williams, and most chilling of all, a cadaverous John Greenwood slithered into the studio, to lecture us from the beyond political grave about what "the public wants."

But the most entertaining media spectacle of them all was the already legendary face off between Adam Boulton and Alastair Campbell. Campbell verbally planted his palm on Boulton's forehead and whistled nonchalantly while Boulton swung ineffectually at him like a demented emoticon. It was indeed very extremely hilarious and merited all it's youtube hits and retweeting.

But it was frankly also slightly disturbing that a professional journalist of that seniority should lose it so comprehensively on national television. Even if we take into account the possibility of a strong dislike of Campbell, it is also a symptom of the hysteria which has collectively gripped the political hacks. Boulton seemed like the personification of a lobby on the edge of professional meltdown, compelled as it was by the demands of the news schedules to find endless new ways of saying nothing much at all.

So what, you might say? A few slightly overwrought journalists at Westminster is surely nothing new. And yes, sadly, that's true. But given the fragile nature of the negotiations, and the "uncharted territory" that was being reported on, we "the public" might have a right to expect that those granted the privilege of recording proceedings keep a level head.

The sight of Brown leaving Downing St. hand in hand with his wife and children was poignant, moving and captured a sense of the incredible burden and privilege it is to hold such a high office. We need the cameras there to capure such moments and we need able writers to underscore and help make sense of the story unfolding. And we all need a moment to catch our breath and take it in.

Stand for Parliament? I'd Rather Lick the Pavement Clean

2010-05-05T05:16:00.001-07:00

So by tomorrow it will be all over. Except of course that it won't. Even if we're spared the hysteria which will surround the horse trading which comes with a hung parliament, the hangover from this election will be pounding in our heads for a long time to come.

Whatever the new administration looks like, we can be guaranteed that gangs of hacks, jaundiced from weeks of binge campaigning, will be desperately trying to prize the fag end of meaning from this empty can of electoral Kestrel.

But pity the poor sods charged with creating a coherent narrative arc from this soap opera. Non-doms, Tory Toffs, Brown the wounded dancing bear; leaders' wives, bigotgate, and the Lib Dem love in. There's a doctoral thesis in the coverage of Mrs Duffy's front door alone. The emerging concensus on the top story though appears to be the impact of the leaders' debate and the Presidential nature of the campaign.

But if that is the tale that we are to tell our grandchildren, we are overlooking some very important protaganists in this story. No, not the electorate you narcissists - ALL the other candidates.

Watching the election coverage one does think "Stand for Parliament? Why not lick the pavement clean?" Except that doesn't begin to cover it. How about, lick the pavement clean as passers-by shout abuse and encourage their dogs to lift their legs on your new suit from Next, while an Oxbridge graduate from the BBC holds his nose and asks you to justify your position.

Before you all beat me about the head with a copy of the Daily Telegraph, yes I remember the expenses scandal, yes I've seen a picture of Eric Pickles, yes I know that some of our elected representatives are shallow, vacuous, greedy, indolent, self -pitying egomaniacs whose presence on the hustings is an affront to our intelligence and common sense. But if those elected and seeking election are a bunch of losers, (even the winners), why aren't we all stepping up to the plate?

Well because most of us would, I know, rather cover our naked forms in Marmite and have it slurped off by Ian Beale than spend 10 minutes in the company of the slippery snake oil salesmen that we no longer read about in the papers every day. And there's the rub. What is the tipping point at which your average concerned competent citizen actually wants to join in? We might all agree entirely that someone's got to take the lead, it's just not going to be us.

In any event, not wanting to hang around with some of the most hated men and women on the planet is not the only disincentive to seeking a political career. What if you actually get elected? Here's where I admit that for 10 years as an official at the Scottish Parliament I actually worked cheek by jowly jowl with elected politicians.

Chatting with friends, it often became clear that most people had a rather warped view of what the daily grind represented for your average parliamentarian. My mates imagined a demanding programme of champagne fuelled receptions and fact- finding tips to Bali interspersed with a little light fete opening and the occasional piece of fiery oratory delivered to serried ranks of cheering followers.

The reality of course is "somewhat" different. Most elected politicians spend most of their time in dingy flourescent lit offices reading mind numbingly dull tomes on matters like finanical performance indicators in further education, leavened only by a welcome phone call from a constituent screaming abuse about their rubbish collection (which, as we all know, is a matter for the local authority.)

One of the reasons why I, and many of my former parliamentary colleagues, loved The Thick of It (TTOIT) so much was not just that it is was so funny, but that it captured the mundanity of every day political life so perfectly. You could smell the curled up chicken tikka sandwiches lurking in Olly's briefcase from the lunchtime meeting buffet. TTOIT also caught the sense of forlorn frustration that many politicians feel at the fact that "making it" politically often makes it harder to do the things that got them into politics in the first place.

Because, shocking though it may sound, (adolescent high foreheaded policy bots and political junkies aside) most politicians start out wanting to help people and many continue to feel that way. Perversely though, the business of getting through the day for most MPs can leave little time for campaigning on the issues that they are truly passionate about and which may have got them elected in the first place. Add to that the electorate's high expectations and we find ourselves with disappointment and hurt feelings all round.

For the breadth of skills required to be a fine parliamentarian is pretty mind boggling. They need to have the oratorical skills of Jed Bartlett, the forensic questioning technique of Petrocelli, the charisma of George Clooney and the balls of Madonna. But most of all they need to be the kind of bloke we'd be happy to have a pint with. Especially if they're female. And for all that we are prepared to pay them roughly the same as an Area Manager for the Carphone Warehouse.

Of course politician's must take their hefty share of the blame for the contempt in which they are now widely held. We've been lied to and patronised and ignored and all too often treated like an irritation by those who are supposed to serve us.

But still we're a pretty tough crowd. I suspect even a cross between Nye Bevan, Mandela and Joanna Lumley would have some voters muttering "Too bloody Welsh...". As Alain de Botton posted (postulated?) on his Twitter account in the wake of the bigotgate farrago "We want our politicians to be at once entirely ordinary and completely exceptional."

And of course the fourth estate play their part in this. The demands of rolling news, a complusion to editorialise anything that moves and the (probably age old) insularity of the Westminster media/political village paint a political picture that rarely tells the whole story.

Political journalism is also dominated by the same kind of mindset as old fashioned politics, which is to say going for the jugular and admitting no weakness. So while we say we want politicans who listen and respond, we ridicule them for "flip-flopping" "caving", or "u-turning". We say we want politicians to tell the truth but in reality they would often be crucified for it. The attraction of the debates for many people may actually have been the opportunity to hear the politicans speak at some length about their policies

This is not supposed to be an apologia for politicians. Many, indeed very many, behaved disgracefully in relation to their expenses. Some have the intellectual rigour of a demented donkey and the compassion of Cruella de Ville. A number would be lucky to find and keep gainful employment of any kind in the real world. I've met politicians who would leave you for dead at the side of the road if it meant two minutes in the Newsnight studio. I've equally known politicians who are decent, kind, considerate and tolerant in their views. Both kinds, I might add, can be found in most parties you care to mention.

Politicians are human, awful, admirable, fallible. To paraphrase that great political philosopher Julia Roberts in Notting Hill, at the end of the day they're just people, standing in front of the electorate, asking you to vote for them.