Man Woman Woman Man

Yesterday was the perfect day; a day in London.

 I can't tell you how good London is for me. Don't get me wrong, I love being a country bumpkin, walking along the sea wall with the dog, digging the allotment and living at a slightly slower pace but the moment I step off the tube I feel energised. The bustle of people, the tall buildings, the things to look at, the choices to make all make me smile. 

We were in early. We joined the queue for day ticket sales of Kinky Boots at 9.30 and were 6th in the queue. Front row tickets for £25 - brilliant! Followed by brunch at Bills, a walk around Covent Garden, Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square, all punctuated with several stops for coffee.

Once at Trafalgar Square I find that I am unable to resist the National Portrait gallery. Somehow, all those people, their lives , their stories call to me. My son humoured me although he did point out that it creeps him out, "all those people looking at you!" several times. 

I am always fascinated by the women. Maybe it's because there are fewer of them, or maybe their stories are more interesting and not so often told. On this visit, I had trouble distinguishing between the genders. Was the fact I was about to see a show about drag queens influencing how I saw these paintings?

Two of these are men and two are women. Top left is George IV (1780), top right is called The Ugly Dutchess (1513), bottom left is Radclyffe Hall (1913) famous lesbian poet and bottom right The Chevalier d'Eon (1792). The Chevalier is particularly interesting as for years it was thought that this was just another 'ugly woman' painting. He was however a famous French  soldier, spy and transvestite and accepted easily by London society as a woman. The feminists of the day such as Mary Wollstonecraft, who thought men and women were really the same and had a daughter who went on to write Frankenstein, embraced him as an icon and he offered to lead armies of Amazonian women against France's enemies.  Without defining clothes, make up and hair styles would we really be able to tell the difference between the sexes unless we examined their genitals? 

Then there was Kinky Boots. Never have I seen a musical where the whole theatre is standing at the end. It is such a feel-good show. The Angels were totally amazing and so likeable that even the most entrenched homophobe would have found it difficult not not be shouting "Oh Yeah!" at the end of the first half. My daughter and I have serious body envy. Those men have the best legs and bottoms I have ever seen and with front row seats we were possibly the only people having no doubts that they were actually men. 

The cast was amazing. Matt Henry's voice is just divine and Amy Lennox has absolutely brilliant comic timing. I don't think the songs will be ones you leave the theatre humming and some of the lyrics were a bit clunky but the energy of them left you in no doubt of Cyndi Lauper's rock God status. No matter how good the rest of the cast were it was the Angels that stole the show. (Marcus Collins an X-factor runner up showing just how little of a singer's talents the X-factor actually shows).

"Three days left.  St Paul's Cathedral and the Millennium bridge tomorrow," said the Chinese girl sitting next to me checking her maps and itinerary in the interval."
I was curious. "What's been the best thing so far?"
"This! This!  It has to be this!"

I've come away with a sore jaw from smiling too much and a curiosity about whether a woman can get away with that fabulous lipstick. 

Glitter kisses all round. 

What are you waiting for, woman?

In Fairy Tales, women are always waiting.  They are waiting for their Prince to come and rescue them.

I've tried to think of a Fairy Tale where the woman isn't waiting.  Cinderella; waiting to be rescued by a Prince from a life of servitude.  Rapunzel:  waiting to be rescued from a tower and a lifetime of having her hair used as a ladder.  Sleeping Beauty:  waiting to be rescued from sleep.  Snow White:  waiting to be rescued from seven small men by one tall man.  When my daughter was little she loved this narrative.  We would play games where I had to pretend to be asleep so that she could pretend to gallop over on her horse and rescue me.  I quite liked games where I had to pretend to be sleeping.  It was interesting that she always made me do the waiting, while she took the part of the Prince, even if she was dressed up in her highly flammable nylon Disney Princess costume with clicky plastic heels, waiting was not an option for her.

I wonder why we so love the story that women wait. Maybe these tales are designed to get us used to waiting; it's good to be patient if it's going to take 9 months to gestate a baby or you will have to wait for the LSH to spend ten minutes in the toilet whenever you are just ready to go out.  The problem is that it's just not true. 

The women I know aren't waiting for a man to rescue them; they are human rights activists with bolt cutters hidden in their knickers. They put their own bins out, mow their own grass and write their own songs. So when I saw this article   http://metro.co.uk/2015/10/26/woman-never-has-to-worry-about-money-again-after-ed-sheeran-pays-off-her-mortgage-5461924/?ito=facebook      I was confused.

Amy Wadge has been a well respected singer songwriter for some time. She wasn't sitting around waiting for Ed Sheeran to come along on his white horse to rescue her and pay her mortgage. I'm certain that she is glad she met him and co-wrote with him and I'm sure it has meant that unlike most women she has maintained a healthy income despite the crime of having two children but the narrative isn't true.

 It fits the Fairy Tale but life isn't Fairy Tales. If it were then I should have been rescued by now because I am very good at waiting. My tax return: I'll do that tomorrow. Learn the words for all the songs for the Barnardo's concert? Plenty of time. There's still 12 whole days. Finish dealing with the quince? Oh, I don't feel like doing that today. Clean the house? It will only need doing again tomorrow. Read another book? Oh, go on, you've convinced me.

Poem: a lazy rant

A poem appeared on my Facebook feed this morning. It was called HOW MUCH I DISLIKE THE DAILY MAIL. The title appealed to me. I'm not fond of the paper either and I was drawn in by the big shouty letters.

It listed all the things the author would rather do than read The Daily Mail. I thought I would enjoy the poem, as I try not to read that particular paper unless I need to practise my anger management skills. 

The poem ended with the verse:

"Even if I were blind and it were the only thing in Braile,

I still would not read the Daily Mail."

Whoa! That's a bit much. My forehead was covered in cold perspiration, anxious thumping in my chest caused me to conclude that I would read the Daily Mail over nothing. 

I re-read the poem. 

It's a good job he wasn't offered a Guardian. 

I can think of a few.

Don't make me read the Guardian

It might hurt my pericardium

Or burst my myocardium

It would be like seeing the bogeyman.

Just don't make me read the Guardian.

And that is why I will never be a poet and will continue to rant in non-rhyming prose.

Social Media, Drama and Real Life

I like social media; how could I not when I blog? I like drama, especially the Archers and I like real life.

Increasingly, these are not separate things. The more I write my own stories, I realise that the boundary between truth and fiction is nebulous. Last night, I wrote about an octogenarian, whose cheeks were lined with the underground map of Tokyo, with a nose so huge it was hard to imagine he had been born with it. This morning, I am sitting across from this man in a coffee shop, listening to him complain about how Facebook hasn't paid enough tax. He is indignant and is never going to use Facebook again. I wonder if I write that he uses Facebook to advertise his skateboarding business it will become true. It's how Charlie Brooker must have felt when the Cameron/ Boar's head revelations came out.  Oscar Wilde said,"Life imitates art more than art imitates life," which I doubt but the coincidence of making art that then happens is an experience every artist must have experienced.

Social media has thrown another dimension into the mix. The number of times Jeremy Kyle ironically says, "oh right, so it's on Facebook, it must be true," only to be proved through the lie detector, which he stands by 100%, that it was true. Did writing it on Facebook create it? It's almost impossible to have a conversation with someone in real life without them mentioning something they've seen on social media. Celebrities prefer Twitter.  They say that Facebook is too much full of people bragging about their perfect lives, which is probably because they are celebrities and they and all their celebrity friends have perfect lives.  My Facebook feed is full of 'inspirational quotes' that I struggle not to comment on sarcastically, pictures and videos of animals doing strange things and people moaning about their children.  I've checked for perfection and it does not exist in my world. Twitter is much more brutal and unreal than Facebook. Celebrities complain that they should have known better than to have an argument with an egg (the default picture).  They think that if a person has changed the picture it must be a picture of themselves and they are therefore less anonymous. Sometimes I think celebrities are stupid.


I use Twitter, mainly, to talk to other Archer's listeners about The Archers.  I don't know most of the people I interact with on Twitter and people I do know say things like, "I don't understand your tweets."

I find that the line between real life and The Archers frequently blurs and I am often suspicious that I know an Archers writer and sometimes fear that I am secretly Lynda Snell.

 I am surprised that they don't seem to have social media in Ambridge.  You never hear Will Grundy say,

"'Ere Nic.  Did you see the picture Will put on Facebook of his cow?" only to have her chuckle, "Now, now Ed, that's no way to talk about Emma."

They have the Ambridge Website and there was a brief moment when Tom Archer (the one that went to Canada and didn't come back, not the one we have now, who is Dr Who's grandson) put pictures of his pigs playing football on YouTube as a marketing ploy but Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like don't exist in Ambridge.

Ambridge, however, does exist on social media.  I suspect that it might be difficult to avoid The Archers on Twitter on a Sunday morning.  Twitter has a lot to answer for.  They suggested that Rob was a wife beater, amusingly referring to him as Titchynob and look what is happening to poor Helen.  She's become a doormat. Totally out of character and her mother, who never liked any men has decided that he's a saint.  People are now tweeting links to women's refuges for Helen but it's all pointless. I used to like Ruth.  She was a strong woman who took over the running of her boyfriend's farm (and then married him to secure the farm for her children).  Unfortunately, Twitter didn't like her.  They didn't like her Prudhoe accent, so the writers have turned her into a snivelling, whinging, grieving idiot.  Why couldn't they have left her as the woman who had affairs with her hired help (no, not Bert Fry, that is a terrible image).  Jill used to be a matriarch.  No one messed with Jill and now look.

Twitter is too misogynistic to allow strong female characters to exist.  They are all destroyed.

Luckily, I missed much of the awful doormat parts this week as I was laughing at my own joke.  Rex 'fancy a goose' Fairbrother, was telling Ruth about his Granny Seaside, whose real name was Nester.

"Nester Supermare," I shouted at the Long Suffering Husband.  He looked up from the Grand Prix, lifted his headphones off one ear and rolled his eyes when I repeated it.
"Oh, never mind.  Twitter will understand."

Welsh Wales and Fig Rolls

I'm rather fond of Welsh Wales.

This weekend we visited Swansea University, which is like a large comprehensive school with flats and a disco (showing my age) wedged between some parkland and the beach.

 It has a maths department that my son liked, with a proper mad professor with white unkempt hair, corduroy trousers and checked shirt that left a small triangle of his pale, hairy belly exposed at the point where the buttons tucked into the trousers. He gave a lecture on, "To infinity and beyond," which he demonstrated with sheep and hotels  (what do you expect in Wales?) and ended by saying, "My time is finite," and abruptly  leaving the room. The other maths staff were much more normal. On my way back from the toilet I had a chat with a woman about the Long Suffering Husband's suggestion that, although we'd seen many university statistics, no one had yet told us their establishment was in the top 1% for cleanliness of toilets. I told her that we were compiling our own and unfortunately Swansea was not near the top of the list. She agreed. Later, I discovered that she was the maths professor responsible for giving us the statistics talk. The LSH and my son, meanwhile, had been having sensible conversations with another member of the department. Before I joined them I spotted a table with biscuits and swooped. "I'm a sucker for a fig roll," I told the snickering students. 

"Oh, you're back," said the LSH, "Was there anything you wanted to ask?"

"No, it's perfect here; they've got fig rolls. Actually, I have, what's the weirdest question you've ever been asked?"

He laughed. I was serious.

We've heard some strange questions. My favourite (when we were visiting with my daughter) was, "Who cleans the windows ?" These are the things that have kept me going.  I know it's an important decision but I find they all blend into one and I'm developing my mother's problem of confusing any place that begins with the same letter: Swansea, Sussex, Suffolk, Southampton, what's the difference?

There are so many things to like about Welsh Wales: the people, their accents, welsh cakes, water that isn't the colour of mud, the things they paint on walls.

There's only one thing not to like; it's just too far away, even in a black transit van, pretending to be the A-team.

Facial Hair

It's that time of year again.  The weather is on the turn and men up and down the country are experimenting with things to keep their face warm.  Even my Dad has grown a beard. If the Long Suffering Husband experiments with facial hair again I might suggest a balaclava.

Pintrest is full of good ideas

 I can see the appeal of facial hair, really I can; I've always wanted to be able to grow a beard myself but they are just too prickly on the outside to live with.

My dad vowed he would never grow a beard again after the last attempt caused him to crash his car in 1979 but now, here he is over thirty years later looking a bit like Santa Claus.  He's had it professionally styled now to make him look a little more Paul Hollywood and a little less St Nick. My sister suggested it was beard art, which made me wonder if he had a little pirate skull and cross bones etched into it.

Beard growing doesn't last long for most men; they are either beard wearers by nature (probably due to their mother's choice of breakfast cereal while pregnant . I imagine porridge to make a clean shaven man and shredded wheat to make a bearded one.) or they're not but they will all experiment with a naked chin or a fully furred one.  Natural beard wearers can be quite fanatical. There is a Beard Liberation Front and a Handlebar Mousrache Society, who have been known to fall out, which surprises me, as on the formation of the BLF, its founder, Keith Flett said, "Beards are politically progressive. All the great revolutionary socialists had a beard. Stalin had a moustache." Mr Flett is quite pleased about Jeremy Corbyn's election as the leader of the Labour Party and is also rather interested in beer. (www.kmflett.wordpress.com) The two seem to go together but are not mutually exclusive because if they were my Dad would have to have risked further car crashes and grown a beard years ago. 

When these non natural beard wearers finally decide to shave they will inevitably experiment with a moustache for a few days, hours or seconds. The time their moustache lasts is inversely proportional to the number of women/teenagers in the house. Moustaches are funny, which is why Movember is so successful. 

Keeping a moustache for a while could entitle a man to qualify for membership to the handlebar club, providing their moustache has 'graspable extremities' and they could meet in The Windsor Castle pub on the first Friday of every month to drink beer (even moustache wearers are fond of beer)

However, most men do not join this elite group but briefly experiment with a style that they know they will never be able to wear in public, no matter how well it suits them. This is the toothbrush moustache. 

"Go and shave that thing off at once!" their loved ones will shout, "You look like Hitler."

"I was thinking I looked more like Chaplin or even Oliver Hardy," they say hopefully. 

Hitler!  Blooming Hitler. Ruining things for people: vegetarianism, the Swazstiker, Nietzsche, the first verse of the German National anthem. Even the name. The LSH had an uncle Dolph, which I naively wondered was short for dolphin. He nearly choked and although he never actually said his full first name aloud he did say that he was sad that he hadn't been able to pass his family name down the generations, as it had been ruined by one moustachioed man. 

Richard Herring, in his radio 4 series 'Objective' has suggested that we reclaim this item of face furniture back from the fuhrer. He actually left the house with his and while he was expecting to be beaten up most people just politely laughed at him behind his back. He blames this on the fact that it was a Hitler moustache but I suspect that all moustaches are now items of ridicule. You never see a pencil moustache and as far as I know Erol Flynn never successfully ordered the killing of 6 million Jews and although Elgar knew how to write music to stretch all his violin pupils I don't think he can be blamed for the fact that we don't see fluffy caterpillars residing under people's noses.

As funny as they are, I am still a bit jealous that I can't grow one.

There's Maths in That

One of the worst things about being a parent accompanying your child on University Open Days is the desire to be in a completely different department. I like studying.  There are many subjects I would like to know more about but I confess that Maths wouldn't be at the top of the list.  In most of the maths subject talks I have struggled to stay awake.

This week's maths talk at Reading University was a new low, for me.

"I'm sorry about this lecture theatre.  It is the only one like this I promise but it was near the maths department and if it was raining you'd appreciate it," the lecturer told us.

It wasn't raining.

"The seats are not very comfortable but at least you won't be falling asleep during my talk."

The seats were very uncomfortable; hard, slippery wood that made you slide forward and bang your knees on the  panel at the front.

"That sounds like  a challenge," I said aloud, embarrassing my son before resting my head on my arms, folded on the pull out desk top and snoring.

I woke with a lightly bruised rib to watch a series of slides showing what maths was in.

"See that blade of grass?  There's maths in that.  Want to know how many endangered Puffins there are?  There's maths in that.  People are mapping the floor of the ocean.  There's maths in that."

I'm being mean, of course.  She was a very good teacher.  We know because she listed the awards she  had received.

Reading is a funny University.

It's a beautiful campus and has everything it should: perky students, tired and badly dressed professors, trees, parkland and a lake.  The Long Suffering Husband pointed at the lake and said, "There's maths in that," I was hoping that there would be fish.

It also has wildlife.  One of the students, taking us on an accommodation tour, who was very excited to be living in a Hall with a cocktail bar was also quite keen on the wildlife.
"Look, a squirrel!" I said
"Yes, we have wildlife.  I've even seen a fox."
"Squirrels and a fox?"
"Yes, and cats!  We have a campus cat and I've seen it attacking a squirrel."

I suspect that Reading's thing might be 'diversity'.  They do seem proud of it and rightly so, if the student with the strong Chinese accent who kindly showed us his room is to be believed.

He pointed to the lake through his window, "I have great view."
"But you didn't choose that did you? You just choose the type of hall you want and you get given something."
He frowned. "I think I do. I fill in form of preferences.  I remember ticking box for the lake.  I could choose single ginger or mixed ginger."
I rubbed my ginger son's hair and said, "That's good to know."
Another bruised rib and a loudly whispered, "gender," put me straight.

It's a very safe campus.  I overheard a student telling two worried parents so.  "Yes, it's a very safe campus.  I've only lived here 14 days and nothing has happened to me."

As I'm not wanting to study maths it's really not my place to have much of an opinion about  whether each University we look at makes it to his list of five but it's hard not to be slightly concerned, as a parent when their advertising posters look like this: