Category: Archive

(posted by Will)

Schpongggg!

A lisping Big Ben reminds me that time is passing, and I can feel it. My weight won’t go down. My sensible side parting has returned. Staying in is becoming more attractive than going out. Circumstances have replaced my hi-tech mobile phone – the sort that can launch nuclear missiles with making calls as optional extra – with a brick that can do little more than send texts and is so 2002.

Is 26 too early to have a mid-life crisis?

There was a time when I’d always be in the first few rows of a gig, bouncing up and down, hoping that my specs wouldn’t fall off during a particularly vigorous number. Two years ago I went to a gig at the Brixton Academy and tried the same; halfway through I was so exhausted I had to go to the back and lean against a wall.

Last year, I went to a concert gig and leant against the bar throughout. And as if that didn’t make me feel old enough, both bands – stars of the 1995/6 glory days of indie music – then split up.

Schpongggg!

Age could be a good thing. A few grey hairs might lend me the look of a debonair executive – if I can work out how to stop slouching. A middle-aged smart-casual look might give be an air of quiet authority. And bit of ageing to my voice – ideally lower and more gravelly – would make me more assertive.

That would be a nice change. If there’s something I don’t like about me when I see myself on TV, it’s my voice. Oh, and my stomach. And my chubby arms. (Mental note: if going on TV, wear a long-sleeved shirt.) OK, if there’s something I don’t like about me when I hear myself on the radio, it’s my voice.

Schpongggg!

In retrospect, maybe I’m not exhibiting any of the outward sounds of a midlife crisis. I haven’t started wearing skinny tops that unwelcomingly show off my paunch. I’ve not started learning Greek “just in case”. I haven’t taken up extreme sports or started secretly listening to R&B.

So perhaps this isn’t a midlife crisis – it’s the bit that comes before. In order to desperately attempt to recapture lost youth, you first have to lose it. Shedding the accoutrements of the young could be what the early-late-twenties were invented for.

But then we’ve just gone and got a PlayStation 2.

(posted by Em²)

I mean – we’ve all got genitalia here, haven’t we?

When I started to write this, the last line of Post 12 read “I mean – we all genitalia, don’t we?”

It was like Have I Got News For You?‘s missing words round (featuring one or more headlines from this week’s guest publication: Punning Weekly) and I had a well-crafted flow of thought, working through the various options for missing words – “have”, “enjoy”, “get let down by”. Oh well, c’est la vie.

The content of my InBox would suggest while we undoubtebly do all have genitalia of some description, spammers are working on the assumption that few of us are overly happy with them. Taking this morning’s guff as an example:

What’s that? Why yes, there are times when I’ve trickled when I wish I’d blasted. All that effort and build-up for that? Such a let down for a girl. Delete.

And what’s this next one? It’s true – I suppose an extra few inches¹ or so would be useful to block that irritating draught, to frighten my cat/neighbours or as an ice-breaker at parties.². Delete.

I’m not so sure that remaining hard for hours is such a good thing though – maintaining decorum would be difficult, for example, in my occasional social interactions with Scantily Clad Girl on the station platform of a morning. Could be quite useful as a temporary coat hook, I suppose.

While there’s so much about the human body that is poorly designed³, male genitalia are a definite case in point.

Mine ruins the crisp lines of my smart designer-label suit (or would do, were I to own one⁴).

It gets roused by the slightest thing (and often I can’t even tell what’s woken it) or refuses to stir when its presence would be welcomed.

It pays no attention to feverish mental commands to go back to sleep (in fact, this tends to make it even more stubbornly attentive).

It even seems to be able to send words to my mouth bypassing my brain completely.

It’s no wonder that most men treat their tackle as if it’s a not-particularly-benign symbiote.

Wouldn’t it be so much easier all round if we could dispense with these fiddly bits and breeding was simply a case of filling in Form 37D(ii), ticking your preferences on Form 175-8 (revised 06/96) and then allowing up to 30 days for delivery? I’m sure we could come up with acceptable alternatives for genetalia’s recreational applications, couldn’t we? A nice mug of cocoa and a hob-nob, for example?

Oh bugger – I said “nob”.

Schpongggg!

¹ Although I happened upon a TV programme last week in which an expert was explaining that all the pills and vaccua in the world can only ever alter – and then only slightly – the dimensions of the dormant member.
² Not that I’m ever invited to that sort of party, more’s the pity.
³ Where’s the 360 degree field of vision or, at the very least, an owl-like flexibility to the neck? Where’s the charcoal-like gas filter for vegetarians? Why can’t body odour be more agreeable? Unerodable teeth? Wouldn’t an extra pair of hands make Ikea a far more viable source of furniture?
⁴ A smart suit that is.

Posted by anna.

I’ll just say “sod it!” anyway.

No matter how hard I try. Because no matter how ladylike I try to be, no matter how much I bite the inside of my little lady cheeks and pinch the pink bits of my little lady-palm, at the end of the day, I might as well admit it, I’ll just say “sod it” anyway.

And you realise when I say “sod it”, I don’t actually mean Sod it, don’t you?

I do wish that I only ever said “Sod it” when I got annoyed. Sorry – is anyone offended by the term “Sod it”? Well, sod it if you are, it’s far too late for apologies. I’ll warn you if anything worse is coming up. If I only ever said “Sod it”, I’d count myself as moderate. But no. I wander through the bodily functions: “Oh piss/ oh peff/ oh semen”, the bodily accessories: “Oh tits/ oh dingle/ oh pap-wanking-schlong-wobble/ oh bumhole/ oh my chins”, via the semi-quasi-religious damniologies: “Oh heck/ Oh hell/ Oh Christ-in-a-strap-on”, and headfirst into the jumbling jiggyfied genitalia section (words for sex – we’ll not go into those, obviously. I mean, I’m not here to offend).

Time was – and there are few delicate ways around saying this – when I used to work in a Christian Community. Granted, it was a liberal type of place, and it was widely accepted that I was *kind of* a ginormous Humanist/Agnostic, but they kept me there all the same, because I was good with kids, and made good candles.

Well, I say good with kids. I was good with kids as long as no one was watching.

OH MY GOD, That sounds Awful!

What I mean is, kids love me. Kids loved me because I acted around them in a way that their parents would never act.

Oh dear god, you know, actually, you know, that sounds terrifying too. Hang on.

Sometimes – and this is great if you’re someone who gets to deal with kids but doesn’t actually have to take them home and live with them – kids like it if you swear. Only a little bit. And not out of hand, or violently, directed at someone – but if, when trying to deal with a twelve-year-old youth group who could only see an employee of a Christian Community Centre in front of them, sometimes, it would be difficult to get them under control. And then, perhaps, you would drop something. “Oh bollocks”, you would say. And suddenly – and I know this is cheating, and I’d never make it as a teacher – they’d love you.

I would never, ever swear, of course, in front of the little ones.

Well, I say never. I really would try. I don’t like swearing in front of small children. I don’t want to teach them words that they don’t already know – or at least words they couldn’t identify a picture of the meaning of if – god-forbid – someone gave them a book with those pictures in. No, I would try very very hard not to swear in from of innocents. And children.

But sometimes, that would make it so much worse. Because, you know, when you’re a swearer, your natural reaction to saying something wrong is to swear. However, when the thing that you’ve said wrong IS swearing, the whole thing can descend into a horrible, horrible spiral.

“Do, be careful not to spill this, because if you… Oh, shit! Oh, fuck, sorry, I said shit! Oh! I said it again! And then I said fuck! Shit, sorry, crap! Oh, bollocks, I… Jesus! Sorry, I… Oh hell, I said Jesus! Jesus, I said Hell! Oh, Shit, I…! Fuck!!!”

And after about five minutes, you may as well just settle into your career as a professional swearlady, as you just sit there, softly cursing and rocking, reacting to each ‘bad word’ with three more bad words in a row.

Ooopses. I forgot the warning there. Be warned. There are swearwords above.

But what is a swearword? It’s so hard to tell. To some people it’s only words describing an action, to others it’s only words describing a body part.

Actions, I can kind of see the violence in. I’ll argue vehemently with people using certain action words, but, for some reason, have very little argument with most ‘body part ‘ words. There are great exceptions to this rule, I admit, but, not being on my own site, I’ll refrain from conversation about axe-wounds or beef curtains. Oh bugger. Oh, shit, sorry, I didn’t mean to say bugger. Oh fuck. Argh! Shit! Sorry! Oh, tits, I said…

Seriously though. If you use genitalia as an exclamation, particularly if you use the genitalia of your own sex, how can anyone be offended? You are only calling on the things dearest and closest to you, damning it for not helping you in your time of need.

It’s a visceral, total, primal, human instinct – and the simplest expression of it ever, the closest to hand. I mean – we’ve all got genitalia here, haven’t we?

(posted by Vitriolica)

I dream of a life where I know what I’m doing.

That dream also includes a hillside self-build maniacally-eco-co-existent house, on the side of a beautiful valley in Portugal, no electricity or water bills… and there’s me… pottering around my little self sustaining estate (most likely in dungarees, but for the sake of the dream sequence argument, I’m wearing a floaty diaphanous-but-not-pornographic dress), it’s sunset, I have a gin and tonic in my hand and I knowing what I’m doing.

In the dream, I know what I’m doing for dinner, what I’m realistically going to accomplish in one day, what the children need from me, what my husband needs to hear to de-stress him, what I’m going to watch on the telly, which project I should stick with and which to jettison. I know my place in the scheme of things and I don’t feel guilty for being an artist. In short, I have grown up. In the dream.

I hit thirty five a couple of months ago and I was fully expecting to wake up the next morning with a head full of wisdom and finally feel like an adult. I had been expecting it at 30, at 25, at 21 and 16. But obviously, it was taking its time with me…. but, thirty five came and went and I am no more a grown up than I was when I was thirteen. Bugger.

I still want to go to bed when I damn well want, want to get up when I damn well want, I want to work all day on whatever I want and not have to stop to make the bloody dinner. I want to say “sod it!”, get in the car and sod off for a few days, take the kids with me, or leave them behind, they wouldn’t mind either way. I resent having to do anything like housework, laundry, cleaning… can’t see the point in most of it… it’s just going to get dirty again. I still want to eat ice cream three times a day for a week (the week after, I’d be just as happy eating cabbage the same way). I still want to leave my hair unbrushed then shave it all off on a whim. I still want to go shopping and spend way too much money.

So, I think I shall just give up waiting to grow up.

I’ll just say “sod it!” anyway.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/unkemptwomen/26763354/

(Posted by Hg.)

So I wait, and I wonder. Standard approach #1. Do nothing, let’s have a think about it. Like Hamlet declaring himself reborn as a man of deeds rather than words, then taking out his notebook. “When in doubt, do nowt,” goes the Yorkshire saying. But what if you’re always in doubt? What if nothing is ever certain? Is a life of deferral something to aspire to? I’m really not sure.

More and more, I find myself wondering. What’s it all about, is usually the recurring theme. The Big One, the six million dollar manifesto. Like Natalie Imbruglia, I’m torn. Both blessed and cursed with the ability to empathise with either side of a dichotomy, I’m a living synthesis of every possible tenable position. It’s tiring. I pray for certainty, but find myself doubting that anyone is listening.

This transparent theorisation is all smokescreen, of course. The simple fact is that I can’t make up my mind. Man of action, or life of leisure? Thrusting, power-hungry exec or gen-x (just) dropout rejecting The System? I’ve given up many things to get where I am now, a driven hamster on a slightly bigger wheel than the others. I enjoy the exercise and although I don’t seem to be going anywhere, the view is great. But with every passing month, the shirt and tie round my neck feels more like a noose.

Over in the corner I see the rats who’ve dropped out of the race and I envy them. I could do that, I think. This wheel’s over-rated. I’d much rather be getting ratted. Bollocks to the Protestant Work Ethic; my tastes are catholic enough, I could find meaning in a low-budget life. I could stack shelves in the morning and happily spend the afternoons and evenings reading, swimming, playing with the nieces and nephews.

Around this time, fear and uncertainty usually take their place in the chorus. Many people would envy a lifestyle like mine. I worked hard to get here, could I really give it all up on a whim? What if I got bored and found myself trapped? For all its shortcomings, boredom is definitely not a feature of my current existence. Frustration, yes. Disillusion and unfulfillment, yes. But boredom isn’t an option when you’re trying to live three lives at once.

When in doubt, do nowt: the procrastinator’s biggest justification. There’s no need to do it now, because I will definitely do it better if I just have a little longer, to think about it, to analyse, to plan. The planets are not quite aligned, the dice might not fall as expected. Another shake, another flick of the wrist… better luck next time. Things are always better if you leave them to mature. Let’s watch the pot while the paint dries.

So I wait, and I wonder, and I contemplate my next move. Locked in the prison of my thoughts, I hope for someone to bake me a cake with a life in it. Like a modern-day Hamlet, I reach for my BlackBerry. In its inane inbox, cryptic calendar, chaotic contacts and tepid tasks, maybe an answer must lie. Then I realise, all answers are lies. Nothing will ever be certain. I stare through the bars at the blue sky and my mind wanders to my recurring fantasy. I dream of a life where I know what I’m doing.

(Posted by Rob)

There I was, dangling from a cliff on a burning rope over a pit of tigers. I looked off to one side and there, growing from a crack in the rock, was a bramble bush. I reached out a hand (why worry about falling now?) and grabbed a berry, scratching my hand slightly on the prickles. How vivid the berry tasted. How much more alive I felt when this present moment was all I had, when the inevitability of death was not just a theoretical truth but RIGHT THERE.

That’s the way the Zen Buddhist parable has it, anyway. Of course, I’m not a proper Zen Buddhist. Not the bowl-of-rice-porridge-and-thirty-blows-from-the-roshi-with-a-stick-every-morning kind of Zen Buddhist. Not even a practising-sitting-meditation-thirty-minutes-a-day Zen Buddhist, though I did that for a bit and still meditate sporadically (these days usually walking meditation rather than sitting).

In fact, most of the time I’m not any kind of Zen Buddhist, though the part of me that grew up on Kerouac and Ginsberg would love to be able to claim I was. But sometimes – just occasionally – “living in the heart of the moment” has been more than a line from an Al Stewart song, and “Be Here Now” more than a disappointing Oasis album. Just a few times I’ve had a glimpse of what life might be like if I simply got out of my own way. If I stopped thinking of myself as an individual, personal ego wrapped up in a bag of skin and bones, and managed to identify myself with the whole of reality. No me, no you. No “me” being born, no “me” to die. What it would be like if I let that greater reality (call it God if it makes you happy) – which manages to grow my hair and push shit through my bowels without any conscious intervention from little “me” – take over the rest of my life, and the illusion that is Rob Saunders just would just shut the fuck up.

How very mystical and airy-fairy that sounds, as though I sat there going “OMMMMMM” and fasting while pondering the secrets of the universe until I became a Perfect Master. And how far that is from the reality (heh – the reality of reality). As it happens, I can tell you what it was like. As in so many of my blog posts, dear reader, the answer lies in music.

Let me take you to a rehearsal hall in Stockbridge, Edinburgh. Date: some time during 1999 or 2000. We are at a rehearsal of the Edinburgh Symphony Orchestra, and I am leading the second violins (the lovely Emma had yet to join us). We run through a piece (I forget what) with no unusual occurrence. Then we come to the main item in the programme, which is Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. No need for me to describe it in any detail: it’s in two movements, technically quite challenging, and I’d played it once before some years earlier. The important thing isn’t anything to do with the sharps and flats, or the tricky counting. It’s that as we start playing the music, I begin to have the strangest feeling that I simply cannot play a wrong note. I can not go wrong. I certainly am not in fact playing any wrong notes: the music is coming out perfectly, the best I’ve ever played. And it isn’t “me” doing it. I am there, watching with fascination, but the music is…it seems a cliché, but let’s go for it: the music is playing itself. It lasts all the way through the first movement, and also the second. It lasts through all the stops, starts, and running over things that make up a rehearsal. And when we reach the end of the Sibelius and play something else? Back to “normal”. Back to “everyday reality”. I play OK, but it’s Rob the Bald Guy doing it, not The Force taking over.

And for all the other rehearsals of the Sibelius, and in the concert itself? Same story. Only for that one piece, but the instant we start playing, “I” vanish.

When I describe the feeling it sometimes feels pretentious to use Buddhist metaphors, as though I’m trying to give myself airs. So sometimes I say it’s like something out of “The Inner Game Of Music” (which it is). Or perhaps I use a jokey Star Wars analogy (as I did in the last paragraph). Or I describe it as like an out-of-body experience except that I hung around to watch. But that’s just window-dressing, to cover up the fact that if I’m honest I haven’t a clue what was going on. It felt as though some…..thing…. that knew much more about the music than I did had taken over for a while, as if on the dual controls in an aircraft. I was still completely aware of my surroundings, of the sensations of playing, of the sound; “I” just wasn’t interfering with them. The eminent Japanese Buddhist D T Suzuki described enlightenment as “exactly like normal life, but a few inches off the ground”, and that hits the mark. It felt: scary; exhilarating; wonderful. I wanted it to carry on, but it only happened for the one piece. Every time I played it, but only the one piece.

I often wonder what will happen if I come to play the Sibelius Fifth Symphony again. Some smart Buddhist (maybe Suzuki again) once said that much of mankind’s unhappiness comes from the doomed attempt to make reality repeatable. I know I shouldn’t expect a burst of cosmic consciousness the next time, but human nature being what it is, I suspect I will be disappointed if this time it’s just like playing any other piece. Like a child who hasn’t fathomed why last time he turned on the TV it was the Teletubbies, but this time it’s the news.

So I wait, and I wonder.

(posted by Saltation)

I’d hate that.

Oh, I so would. In fact, never mind “would”, I hate that NOW. Right now. This bloody instant. Jeez I hate that. That is RIGHT out of order, that is. From here on in, that is not to be raised in public anywhere in my hearing.

OK, maybe if I’m not wearing my hearing you could sneak it out.
Not saying you should.
Not saying you couldn’t.
Not saying you not shouldn’t.
Just saying: if I am wot nearing my hearing, sorry: hot searing nigh earing, you might have more of an outside chance of not being not able successfully to utilise the absence of the missing double negative re that.

But don’t rely on that.

Just stop that.

That is bad.

Not this, of course. This is lovely. There should more of this. And also of it. Just ask any old lady.

We stopped this nice old lady in the street and asked her opinion, and she replied firmly in her reedy old voice: “I think there should MORE OF IT!”
So there you go and here we are and is that the time? I’m late.

So so what, I hear you cry, in your far-off-but-oddly-close internet perspectivy kind of way. Not via the comments box, obviously. ‘Cos I’m still writing. Just by sheer dint of will and personality. And good on you. Good on you! All that (sorry) criticism you took as a child, about watching too much TV and having too many gadgets and getting to way too high a high-score above your dad on Playstation… well! Who’s laughing now, eh?! Eh?! Not them, oh no! It’s YOU! You with your powerful electronically-enabled mind, powerfully reaching out through the modern electronic cloud we swim through today, to communicate with people around the globe without the need to even TOUCH that (sorry) laughably old-fashioned “keyboard”. Ha! In fact you can reach right out and CONTROL people who

hi
my name is gerald and i am 15 years old oh god no not old enough no pimples jeez. i am 21 no 22 years old and tall and i am looking for a girl. friend.
i have lots of interests and senses of humours and a powerful dynamic charging career and six feet and you can email me on ultraboy547@aol.com for a good time and possible long term relationship

are just… hello? Hello-oooo? are you WITH me? God, aren’t girls scatty? They’ve all just rushed off.

Kinda interrupted that lovely maniacal cackling you were working up to too.
That is SUCH a shame.
You, no really you do, you do the BEST maniacal cackling of anyone I know.
Almost megamaniacal.
No!
Really!
I’m not just saying that!
I swear to god.
You could SO do any melodrama. ANY!
No, really. If there was ANYONE who could take over from, oh I dunno, say Charles Dicken (there used to be two of him), he used to be the world’s best periodic-short-dramatic-fiction-person person, it’d be you. No! You! I mean it. Really!
I mean, you know Dickens, right? Right? Famous now for knocking out a few books about boys going up totally non-freudian chimneys and then becoming vastly rich and inheriting and all SORTS of stuff that’d have him pilloried on suspicion now, right? But did you know he actually made most of his bread and butter while he was alive (not sure what he’s eating now) from publishing his stuff every month in periodicals? I mean, he never really published a whole novel as a whole novel the whole time he was alive. Just lots and lots of magazine instalments. So each week, to maintain reader interest for his next instalment, he’d end up with his hero in the middle of some dramatic cliff-hanger. Like. Uh.

“There I was, dangling from a cliff on a burning rope over a pit of tigers.”

(posted by Stuart Ian Burns)

There’s no motivation as strong as love. When I was fifteen I used to leave the house at the same time every morning to make sure that I was on the same bus to school so that I could see a girl I was in love with. I would only every see her for about ten minutes, and she had no idea (unless she noticed me trying not look to look like I was looking at her). I ended up speaking to her twice and I knew it wasn’t to be – her ambition was to be a solicitor, mine was to even get into a university. Those measures of success were being drilled into me, and seemed to matter, at least at that age.

I suppose you’re expecting me to say that her ambition inspired my own and that motivated me to better things. Disappointingly it didn’t. Even now, I don’t measure my own success or lack of against anyone else. I have ambitions and dreams, a career I’m working towards but it’s on my own terms its not because of a road map drawn up by anyone else or because I see someone else’s life and want to emulate them. It’s too easy in this life to have a role model to aspire to be then to fail, wasting a life and potential you might have in other areas.

That said, I’m thirty now and I still don’t have a clear direction. I’m still waiting, what plan I do have in flux because of my own little long game. I’m not quite were I expected to be now, perhaps a touch behind, but no one gets perfection, there’s always a niggle. Is my niggle that I’m not in love at the moment? I used to get it all the time, the stomach cramps, the inability to form actual words when someone is around, the not knowing were to put my hands. Perhaps I grew tired of it not going anywhere; I hope my subconscious hasn’t decided that it’s had enough with all that and in the words of the song I’ll never fall in love again. I’d hate that.

(Posted by Pam Br)

For the first time, the system had let me down. I’d like to say that, but if I’m completely honest, I let myself down.

I’d had my life planned out since the age of 12. There was never any question – I was going to university and I was getting a degree and I was going to have a career. I though it would all just happen naturally, without any effort from me. First mistake.

I did alright in high school. I should have done much better, but I was lazy and didn’t study. I left with 6 qualifications, 2 A’s and 4 B’s. Enough to get into my chosen degree course anyway.

Second mistake was not getting a summer job. I was so sheltered from the big, bad world. Living in the suburbs and having reasonably affluent parents, I didn’t have a clue about the value of money or having to budget.

I’d chosen a joint degree course in geology and archaeology (well, you can’t say I wasn’t ambitious !). I don’t remember ever getting to grips with either subject. I wasn’t prepared for the transfer from teaching to lecturing. I was used to getting attention and help whenever I needed it and you just couldn’t do that. I stopped attending lectures and spent all my time in the student union or in gay bars with poorly chosen “friends”. My parents were in the process of separating, so they never asked me how I was getting on. It was too easy to have a good time. I hadn’t had many friends in school and I had been bullied, so I latched onto the first people who were nice to me. Third mistake. The fourth mistake came as a result of the third – getting a student loan. If you had friends you had a social life and that costs money. I spent maybe £100 on books for the first term and the other £3200 was blown. I was out every single night, burying my head in the sand and convincing myself that if I could just keep laughing nothing else mattered.

Halfway through the last term I realised that there was no way on this green earth (or any other earth for that matter) I was going to pass the exams. I didn’t fancy repeating the year and I knew there wasn’t much chance of me getting a job in that field anyway. Excuses, excuses. I spoke to my advisor and switched to accountancy for the next year. A new start. Didn’t bother with a summer job again. What’s the point when they’re throwing money at you ?

I started the next year with all good intentions. I bought my books and attended lectures religiously for 3 whole months. Then we got our first essay assignment (duh duh duh thud). I didn’t understand it at all. It might as well have been for anthropology and in Polish. I don’t know why I didn’t just ask for help. I guess I just found the whole lecturing system a bit too impersonal. Another excuse. I knew I couldn’t repeat another year so I threw in the towel and dropped out. I’ll never forget, or forgive myself for, the disappointment on my mother’s face when I told her. It would be so easy to blame it on the university system or the bad influences but I have to take responsibility. It was all because I didn’t want to ask for help.

There is a silver lining to this cautionary tale. It was around this time that I met my wonderful girlfriend. She gave me the boot up the arse I needed to get a job and, 5 years later, life’s getting back on track. There’s no motivation as strong as love.

(posted by Clare)

For the first time, the system had let me down.

Because it did, surely it did… didn’t it?

At some time, it must have done. Or how did I end up a revolutionary socialist, at the tender age of 16? I was angry, and chomping at the bit. I was going to save the world. Because there were wrongs everywhere I looked, and they needed righting.

What made me most angry? Nuclear weapons were the first thing I marched, shouted, jumped up and down about. That was when I was 13. Then I got riled about the unequal distribution of wealth, and the exploitation of the working class. But I’d always been a stickler for fairness. Wherever there was an underdog I’d be there, whether the quiet girl teased at primary school or the mother whose daughter (my friend) was castigating her for not ironing her uniform… “Parents are people too, you know!” was my self righteous cry.

But revolution is quite an extreme reaction. Was it feminism? Is that what did it? Was I a victim of terrible sexism? At the age of five I insisted my teddy was female (why should all bears be male?), and marched around the playground shouting “Boys are rubbish, put them in the dustbin!” I declared myself a supporter of women’s lib at the age of nine and naïvely rejoiced at the introduction of a female prime minister. But do I have any personal tales of misogynist injustice? Nope. I was the only girl studying A level maths. I felt a bit outnumbered. But nobody ever, would have dared ever tell me I couldn’t do whatever the hell I wanted to do.

I honestly can’t think of one single significant example of being let down by the system. Not personally.

But boy, I can tell you a gazillion tales of other people’s pain. The friend who was dragged into the back of a police van on a Saturday night, beaten up and then charged with assault. One of them headbutted him and broke his own glasses. My mate was charged with criminal damage.

I could go on. I won’t.

But you know what? I’ve been trying to work out why somebody would blow themselves sky high if they hadn’t grown up in a war zone. Why they would kill innocent people if they didn’t have blameless dead relatives of their own. What would make them feel THAT strongly about something…

But we do. Human beings. We’re capable of anger, passion, great good and sheer evil. And we always, every one of us, think we’re right.

What we’re not so good at is taking a step outside, and looking at things from someone else‘s point of view. We’ve all behaved badly, we’ve all hurt people. But we all feel happy to condemn when someone else is committing a crime.

There’s no question in my mind that those bombers perpetrated a hideous, heinous, evil act. But that gets me nowhere. I want to know why. I want to know who next. I want to know when. And what scares me most is not that a stranger whose mind I’ll never inhabit has done this terrible thing. The question that burns in my brain is… Could it be me? Could it be you? And whose eyes, and whose teeth will be exchanged for the eye and the tooth of last week’s victims?

The greatest atrocities in world history have been committed at the hands of ordinary men and women. Nazi soldiers and every-day Germans. Rwandan soldiers. Balkan citizens. Large numbers of people caught up in the language of hate, seeking retribution against those they consider to be their enemies. People like you and me, answering the call of “We will not be beaten” and “They can’t do this to us, because we are strong.”

In the summer of 1969, I was born.

That year Nixon gave the go-ahead to “Operation Breakfast” – the covert bombing of Cambodia, conducted without the knowledge of Congress or the American public.

On June 29th, in New York’s Greenwich Village, the police raided a gay bar and sparked the Stonewall riots.

On July 14th, Francis McCloskey (aged 67), a Catholic civilian, died one day after being hit on the head with a baton by an officer of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) during street disturbances in Dungiven, County Derry.

For the first time, the system had let me down.

(Posted by Rob )

“Sing it. Sing it so I can hear all the words.”

There she goes, Mrs Dodds the teacher who takes the choir. A dandelion-head of frizzy white hair appearing over the top of the upright piano, silhouetted against the windows across the classroom. Between us, lines of boys and girls standing ready to sing, some with look-how-hard-I’m-concentrating expressions, some with a kind of easy nonchalance, but all ready to hit those consonants so hard the windows will blow out. (“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” won’t be released for another eleven years, but the scene where the aliens’ reply to the human musical tootling shatters all the windows will make such an impression on me that maybe it echoes backwards through time.)

“Toodle-um-a-um-a, toodle-um-a-um-a, it looks like rain….”

And where am I? I’m the new boy, standing near the back because of my height, only in the school for a few months because we’ve just moved into the village. Not totally friendless, but with those guarded friendships you get when everyone else is already formed up into groups and you’re an appendage. Fairly bright: up there in the top five or so, sometimes vying for the top spot with Julia (a nerdy type but I fancy her like mad, just knowing somehow that she’ll blossom into a real beauty) or with Paul (son of one of the teachers, very full of himself, bosses people about, the kind of blond sporty type I am already coming to be wary of). Ten years old and wanting to fit in, that’s where I am.

“Toodle-um-a-um-a, toodle-um-a-um-a, don’t mind the rain….”

At my previous school we’d done French, which I liked. At my new school they do not only French, but German and Dutch as well. It beats me how anyone manages to take in three languages on an hour a week between them, and I’m not sure how much they do take in. However, all that is pretty theoretical because no sooner has my pudgy behind hit the seat in those classes than somebody asks for volunteers to sing in the choir which will be rehearsing at this time each week. And that, said John, is that. Goodbye French, hello choir. I do choirs. I do music.

“He’ll mend your umbrella, then go on his way….”

Picture the tubby ten-year-old, a bit of a nerd with a head full of science and a worryingly good memory for trivia. Also – courtesy of Dorset-born parents – cursed with an accent which to anyone from the Manchester area is redolent of Long John Silver, of yokels with straw stuck in their mouths, of village idiots…. The accent doesn’t show though when I let rip with my boyish treble. It’s a belter of a voice in fact: not King’s College Chapel material, maybe, but decently formed, in tune, and able to get the high notes without straining or cracking. I can certainly keep my end up in the school choir, which I love. The ugly duckling becomes a skylark.

“Singing toodle-um-a-um-a-toodle-ay,
Toodle-um-a-um-a-toodle-ay,
Any um-be-rellas to fix today?”

Terrific. The notes die away. Windows still intact, but we’ve nailed it. Oh, and there goes a hand over on the far left, near the piano. It’s Paul, the abovementioned alpha male of Junior 5. Not a bad voice himself. What does he want?

“Yes Paul?”
“Please Mrs Dodds, Robert Saunders wasn’t singing.”

What?

“Sorry, Paul?”
“Robert Saunders wasn’t singing.”

Has this child gone insane? Not singing? You’d have to cram a sock in my mouth and spray me with tear gas to shut me up.

And then. And then. I can see it now, forty years later, Mrs Dodds hardly even looking at me and saying “Well, we don’t want people in the choir who don’t sing, so Robert can go back to Mr Clowes class. Go on,” because I was standing in shock , “Out you go.”

I can feel around forty pairs of eyes on me. The ones nearest me, mostly female, puzzled because they know I was singing. Paul’s, triumphant. The rest? At the age of ten, the word “Schadenfreude” is still in my future, but the concept has arrived. I put down my music, eyes pricking and throat closing up with anxiety, rage, confusion and embarrassment. I clamber out of the row of children, and leave. I close the door behind me. I let go of a few anguished sobs but I’m literally choked up, and not much comes out. Slowly up the stairs, not wanting to get to the top.

If leaving that room is bad, arriving back in the other classroom to take up French (and German) (and Dutch) halfway through the year is even worse. How do you make an entrance that takes the sting out of “Hi, I’m a failure and have just been binned from the choir for no reason I can comprehend yet”? I may have an awesome capacity for trivia, but the memory of that entrance, indeed most of my memory of that class, will vanish completely. I may eventually learn French and German (even a few words of Dutch), but not from Mr Clowes, though I assume he will try to teach me.

——————————————————–

Forty years on, it still rankles. I can only make sense of the whole incident as a set-up of some kind, whether because Paul was Mrs Dodds’ class favourite or for some other reason. Why else would his unsupported delation have led to my immediate dismissal? No chance to say anything in my defence. No asking the children round me if they had heard me singing. No “You’d better start singing or you’ll be out of this choir” even. Just “Please Mrs Dodds, Robert Saunders isn’t singing” and I’m history. Remembering the incident brings up so many negative emotions that if I wallowed in them I would begin to turn to the Dark Side. I really do want to go back through time and cut Paul in two with my blood-red light sabre. I want to gesture at Mrs Dodds and have her throat close up even more than mine did when she threw me out. “Apology accepted” I would breath metallically at her lifeless form. When I think back, it’s her role in all of this that I find most despicable and hard to understand. Paul, I assume, got rid of an unwanted rival, and fair enough, that’s what ten-year-olds do, if they’re total prats who believe the world is made for them alone. She was a teacher, and teachers are supposed to be the Guys In White Hats when you’re ten years old. For the first time, the system had let me down.

(Posted by PB Curtis)

“We should be proud of what makes us, us.”

“Ewes? Female sheep?”

“No, Us, upper class.”

“Your usage of us is very u; surely, you mean you, not us.”

“We beg your pardon?”

“One is merely middle class, your highnesses, for which one apologises and feels humble in your presence. I’m non-u, and thus we can’t be proud of it. You wire in, though, and knock yourself out.”

Not exactly the way the conversation went, but a legitimate mimeo thereof. The discussion was class shame – I believe (no, I bet) it was Julie Burchill who said that only the middle class are ashamed of themselves – but my high-born friend seemed to be just as stamped with the Burchill imprimatur, given her call to proud arms.

I’m pro-pride, as a rule. I truly believe that if we spent more time and effort being proud of ourselves for what we do, and what we are, we’d all need less medication and fewer therapists. We’re encouraged not to, however, and the blame for this lies squarely with Evagrius of Pontus.

He is the founding father of charts of infamy with his original list of eight nasty human passions, and argued that pride was the worst of the lot. It’s classical Greek irony, this proclamation that pride is shameful. You can’t help but wonder if he didn’t hate himself just a little, because Evagrius apparently enjoyed great acclaim as a theologian, before – HA! – getting busted having it off with a Roman Prefect’s wife. Then he has the gall to blame pride for his downfall, rather than his penis. With that sort of chicanery, if he was alive today, he’d be a former Tory cabinet minister.

Anyway, I digress. I was in the middle of talking about class structure in Britain, and I go off and get hung up on Greek cock. That is always happening to me. My point was going to be that while pride is cruelly undervalued, actually being proud because Mum and Dad were upper, middle, or working class is missing the point. Fair enough to not be ashamed – which is the noble origin of “working class and proud of it” – but plain old wrong and stupid to really be proud. If only because, as Clare illuminates, there are more sterling qualities than the retarded social construct of class to be proud of. We all know that – right? – but shame remains the more enticing emotion, because it’s become perversely legitimised as humility.

Had “Shagger” Evagrius not been such a weasel, he might have made a compelling case that it’s shame that’s an offence against God, and love, and the self; the world might have been a much better place for it. Pride is a hosannah. Sing it.

(Posted by Clair)

The corny ones will get you every time…

My life is ruled by cliches. Every day there is a cliche that describes my life, and slowly I’ve got to come to grips with the fact that my life isn’t perfect.

There are good things that happen, and bad things. There are obstacles to overcome and hurdles to be jumped. But despite all this, life goes on.

As a race, humans are remarkably good at carrying on despite everything. We plough through and achieve despite the odds. The odds might be terrible, we may be facing war or poverty, slavery or hunger, but we have a humongous will to carry on. An innate desire to survive, despite all the odds. And I think we should be proud of this. Proud of the inner strength that drives us onward. We should be proud of what makes us, us.