1984

I've been out with my mum and sister for the day.

"Oh, nice," you say, except that we've been to the hospital and I find that medicine makes me want to swear. It makes me want to swear a lot.  It's not that I don't appreciate the expertise or the wonderful treatment we get without having to mortgage our houses but I find the waiting, the confusing language, the inability of anyone to look you in the eye, or tell you anything unless you ask, the fact that you could walk in with your limbs in your handbag and no one would care because it's not their department and appointments where they look at a scan and decide they'll have to have a meeting before they can tell you anything sending you home again to come back to be told nothing that they couldn't have said on the phone frustrating.  Boy, that was a long sentence! Sorry.  Breathe!

But my mum and sister are funny.

The hospital is the Royal Free, right next to Hampstead Heath.  We've been many times before. It's a long way to go, so we usually have coffee in one of the bakeries, frequented by male couples and mums with the latest pushchairs.  You get a choice of breads, quinoa salads and any kind of coffee you fancy.  My sister prefers the pub where skinny old ladies, who have had fascinating lives talk to you about their gin habit.

It's a place where many interesting people live and have lived.  You could bump into Judi Dench or Sting and there are blue plaques everywhere.

"George Orwell," my mum read, "Who was George Orwell?"
"1984," I replied.
"I didn't want his birthday," she said, "What did he do?"

We laughed.  When there aren't enough swear words, laughter is the best medicine.

Bat Out of Hell

At University I had a one-eighth share in a car.  It was a beige Morris 1800 with a dodgy petrol gauge.  It was a great tank of a car with a tiny horn that said, "Parp, parp, excuse me!" I would like to tell you that it had a beast of a name and drove like furious bat out of hell but it was a very sensible car for some very sensible students.  We called it The Fifty-One Mobile, after the corridor of the hall we lived in and we had a little book to fill in to calculate petrol and mileage, so that everything was fair. Whoever drove the car would take their own music, which was a refreshing change from Kate Bush on repeat that I had to listen to in Halls.

One day we were going out somewhere. It was during the day, so it might have been to the Wicked Woman, with the crooked chimney in the village with the stupidly long name for Sunday lunch or it might have just been a shopping trip to Woolco. I can't remember who was driving but it might have been the boy with the collection of cardigans that I coveted, who was never short of a girlfriend or two.  Whoever it was I know I thought they were cool and would have expected them to have good taste in music.  I was sitting in the back and I know that my friend with the long copper hair and button nose, who sparkled like pennies that boys wanted to collect was also in the car.  The music coming from the tape player was soothing and I slumped against the side of the car, singing along. 

The 51-Mobile looked a bit like this

"Oh will you hold me so close my knees go weak," I sang. "Oh, it must have been while you were kissing me."

The track changed.

"I got a taste of paradise........"

I was surprised.

"Have you got a love songs tape?" I asked.

My friend wrinkled her pretty little nose and laughed, her laugh that sounded like tinkling glass, "What?"

"Love songs?" He asked, "What makes you think I'd have love songs?"

I hesitated.....

"The words?" 

"No. It's Meatloaf!"

"Yeah, it's Bat out of Hell!"

"They're still love songs," I persisted, despite the laughter, "I mean it sounds like a musical.  There's all this unrequited love and angst."

"Oh Julia, you are so funny!"

Maybe I was funny, or just ahead of my time.

Yesterday, we saw the long awaited Bat the Musical.  Jim Steinman wrote the songs for Meatloaf and the album was released 1977.  I was completely out of touch with the kind of music that went on Top of the Pops as I went to music school on a Thursday night from 1974 until I went to university.  The composer worked on Sunset Boulevard/Whistle Down the Wind* with Andrew Lloyd Webber  and had wanted to turn make his own musical of Bat Out of Hell ever since.

Jim Steinman wrote everything for this musical and I think that might have been the mistake.  The story was confused and to understand what was going on you had to have read all the words being projected at the back of the stage before the show started.  It was a love story, though. Not that a lack of story mattered to most of the audience. 

The audience were absolutely the best thing about this musical. It was a delight to watch the London Coliseum packed full of people over 50, rocking it out and dancing in the aisles.  You might imagine that I didn't like the musical if I thought the audience were the best part but it's just that they were so entertaining.  

We were up on the back row, which was probably too far away to properly appreciate everything but the music was amazing.  It was an outstanding performance by Andrew Polec and the set design and choreography were something else.

It only runs until Tuesday, so unless you can get to Toronto you will have to get a move on if you are over 50 and fancy a spot of nostalgia and rocking in the aisles.

(*I just looked up which one it was and it turns out that Jim Steinman was already writing for musicals when he auditioned Meatloaf and then decided to write an album for him - it was a musical - I was right, even then!)

Bruce

I was on the train next to a woman and her daughter, both with perfect skin and a glow of youth. The mum tapped her  i-phone with perfectly manicured hands topped with extra long mauve acrylics. She straightened the cord on her earphones. The little girl was cute: dressed in a grey hooded tracksuit with a subtle black Mickey Mouse print and a thick Aran roll neck jumper over the top. Her hair was styled to match the print on her leggings and she fiddled with the handle of her pink child-sized wheeled suitcase, that I suspected went everywhere with her.
"Can I have something?" the little girl pleaded, turning her big brown eyes briefly towards me for support. Her mum gave her a box of juice, tapped her phone with a clicky nail and chatted to a voice we couldn't hear, laughing happily about when she thought they'd be home.

The little girl finished her juice just as her mum's mood changed and she said, sadly, "He died?"
The little girl pulled one earpiece from her mother's ear and tried to listen. Her mum took it from and continued the conversation but didn't put it back in her ear.
"Oh no. He died? When?"
The little girl picked up the earpiece and twisted the cord around her finger.
"He was quite old, wasn't her?"
The little girl move the ear bud closer to her, looked at me and chuckled, making me complicit in her naughtiness. Her mum continued, unaware.
"We haven't seen him about much lately. I liked him."
The little girl put the earpiece to her mouth and whispered, 'Hello Daddy.'
Mum gave no indication that Daddy had heard.
"Yeah he was tall. "
I felt sad. I wondered what their neighbour had been like.
"I liked the way his little white moustache twitched when he smiled at you. He always said,'nice to see you.'"

I sent a text to my daughter asking if Bruce Forsyth had died (she's quicker and more reliable than google). He had.

The mum finished her conversation and turned her attention back to the little girl and her suitcase handle.

I've been looking at all the tributes today and think that overheard conversation is one of the best.  We invited Bruce Forsyth into our homes for more than seventy years.  We grew up with him.  He was like a familiar and much loved neighbour.

No more boys and girls

Last night, I watched the programme 'No more boys and girls' on BBC 2 and commented on Twitter. Twitter was a furiously angry place on that hashtag but most people hadn't watched the programme.

I was unsure whether to watch. I thought there was going to be an intersexuality agenda. The clips made it look like they were going to make the kids cross dress, pump them full of hormones and surgically resect their genitals.  This was, however, a programme about equality. It was about how we stereotype boys and girls in a way that harms many of both.

The cross dressing part (on the clip) was a very small experiment with babies to show how adults encourage what they think of as girl babies to play with dolls and boy babies to play with construction toys. There was no child abuse involved.

It was a programme that challenged thought patterns (or would have done if people actually watched it). Set in a class of year 3 children in the Isle of White with a very brave male teacher. He was immediately called out for calling the boys 'mate' and the girls 'love'. He wasn't aware he was doing it. Twitter erupted. "That wouldn't happen in my DDs school, they're very supportive - And why aren't they wearing shoes?" Teacher bashing, a sport that our country could excel at, became the first knee-jerk response. I have a lot of admiration for this teacher, putting himself in the firing line like this and being open enough to accept his unconscious labelling of the children.

He had separate coat cupboards for boys and girls, which I'm sure was just a way to divide his class in two, so that they didn't all put their coats in the same cupboard. The programme voiceover suggested that telling the children they could put their coat in whichever cupboard they liked and letting them paint the cupboard doors was his idea and not really part of the programme's agenda. The cupboards were both the same to start with so it wasn't as if boys got the better cupboard.  I thought this bit was the most interesting, as it showed how complicated this issue is.

The programme was more interested in the things that we tell each sex of child that negatively impacts their life.  (Such as girls lacking confidence and boys lacking emotional intelligence) There was some good science in the programme, debunking myths about male and female natural abilities. They said that these stereotypes hurt boys as well as girls. There were some heartbreaking moments when you saw how these stereotypes hurt the children.

There were two groups of furious people on Twitter. First, there were the people who felt threatened. These were mostly men. Men who were incandescent with rage at women who wanted equal rights. Men who were ready to kill someone for turning the boy who cried about not being as strong as the girls into a 'pussy'. They hate women and will use any hashtag to shout about it.

 There were also people like me, menopausal feminists, who are furious.  Well, to be honest, we are furious at everything.  But we have been fighting for equal rights for women for so long that the whole transgender/intersexuality debate seems to have confused the issues.  These women have grown up children and programmes like this can feed into their guilt that letting their little girls play with Barbie dolls somehow stifled their chances in life.  We grew up at a time when girls who didn't identify with typical female things were still allowed to be called girls (or tom-boy girls) and boys who didn't like male pursuits were called sensitive boys.  No one suggested that they were born into the wrong body.

I got a little confused with the Twitter debate.  Someone said, "This is so stupid. If gender is a construct and we're all the same then why even bother with gender equality." I think that we're are not all the same.  I don't think all women are the same.  Gender is how, as a society, we socialise people of different biological sex.  We don't have equality and that's why we need to bother with it.  Women are still losing out in the workplace (There are more people called John in the top jobs than there are women). We should be asking the question if we are socialising the genders the way we want.  Do we want a polarised society with each side at war with the other? Do we want to be able to determine the biological sex of a person by their wrapping? Do we want men who can't understand or express feelings that aren't anger?  Do we want women who think they have to be stupid? Do we want children who have no interest in the things gender stereotypes allow for them think they have to take drugs and have painful surgery to conform?

The first step should always be to understand and to be aware of what is actually going on and what we are doing.

Robert E Lee

I wish America was on the same time as us. I keep seeing a Donald Trump press conference or tweet before I go to bed and end up having an awful night's sleep filled with horrific dreams.  Last night I dreamt that I was running a seafood restaurant called Old King Creole and I hate fish. My dreams, luckily, aren't as horrific as the reality.

Like everyone else I watched the images coming out of Charlottesville slack-jawed. It seemed like something that should be only seen in the pages of a history book or dystopian novel but there it was, in real life. White (mainly) men, marching, angry, frothing at the mouth, carrying torches, flags emblazoned with swastikas  and chanting "Jews will not replace us,"or "Blood and Soil." Donald Trump blamed the violence on many sides but to us watching at home it looked very one sided.  We saw some people in the crowd fight back but we knew that the car that killed Heather Heyer was driven by someone on the same side as those shouting, "We want our country back." (None of them were Native Americans, surprisingly).

From the beginning of the coverage, I was confused, "What are these people protesting for?" I asked the Long Suffering Husband, "Haven't they got everything anyway?"
The LSH patiently tried to explain their point of view because he always likes to be fair. He thought that they could see things that people not like them were getting to balance stuff out and they were jealous.  I shouted at him.  He said that he didn't agree with them and flounced off upstairs muttering, "I don't know why I bother to talk to you if you're going to be like that. Why ask me a question?"

I wasn't angry at him. Not really.  But I didn't want anyone to make excuses for them.  I did want to understand though and I don't.

President Trump said that they had a permit to protest and I wondered why they would be given such permission.  It seems that  it's all the fault of Robert E Lee.

They were protesting that a statue was going to be taken down.

That seems a reasonable thing to protest about.

"You had people who were very fine on both sides," said the President. I expect some very fine people did decide to protest the tearing down of a statue. I can imagine, as a protector of the arts, doing it myself but if I then found myself in a crowd of people chanting the slogans we heard, I very much doubt I'd stay.

So, who was Robert E Lee and why remove his statue?

He was my orthodontist when I was eleven. I particularly remember his name because my parents snickered, "I can't believe his parents would have called him that."
"You'd think that he'd at least take the E out."
I asked who Robert E Lee was and they gasped, "Don't you know?  What do they teach you at school?" and I was too ashamed to asked more.
I blustered, "Oh, of course, I'd forgotten."
I convinced myself that I knew.
"Robert E Lee Robert E Lee Robert E Lee Robert E Lee," I chanted over and over in my head and an image of a steam train appeared.  (Try it)

I knew, with absolute certainty that Robert E Lee was a steam train that had tried to beat a speed record. I mixed the stories of Stephenson's Rocket and the fatal attempt at a water record in the Bluebird to come up with a story about a steam train that had failed. I knew it had to have been a failure because of the way my parents laughed.

The statue can't have been of a steam train because no one gets that passionate about an inanimate object so it must have been of my orthodontist and I can understand why they want to take it down.  He was a terrible orthodontist.  I had four teeth taken out and it was his job to close the gaps, getting rid of the wonky tooth, caused by overcrowding.  I still have four gaps and the wonky tooth (although I am quite attached to all of them), so I think he must have been a huge failure. Why they ever put it up in the first place, though, is a mystery. It would almost be as silly as erecting a statue in honour of a general on the losing side of a battle 62 years later.

Being Julia

When you are a small child, you accept who you are and you accept your name.  You never question if you are who you want to be or whether your name properly represents you.  As you become a teenager that all changes.  You believe that you can choose your identity. In my fifties I have those feelings again.  I want to cut my hair off and die it pink and reinvent myself.  Maybe I could even change my name.

I've always been a reader and it was books that made me want to keep my name.  At a time when the country was filled with little girls called Susan, Tracey, Sarah, Sharon and Julie, Julia was thought of as being a little bit different. Teachers would say, "Oh, Julia, that's a bit unusual, where does that come from?"  I would shrug my shoulders and not care.

Then I became a teenager and I wanted to give a romantic answer to the question.  I would have liked to have said, "Oh yes, I'm named after Julia in 1984. You know Winston Smith's lover.  She was a survivor." After I read Brideshead Revisited I really wished I'd been named after Lady Julia Flyte. Of course I did.  She was beautiful and fierce. I loved her. I'd had to look up the word languid when reading this as a description of her and then went around practising being languid to the point where a boy asked me if I was alright because I was walking so slowly.

In truth, my mum wanted to call me Julie because everyone was called Julie but my Aunt and Uncle beat her to it.

If I'd been American then I might have aspired to cookery and modelled myself on Julia Childs.
In 2007 Julia was the 10th most popular name in America, probably because of the popularity of the lovely Julia Roberts.

In my fifties when I'm having another identity crisis I realise that I don't have the survival instinct to be the Julia in 1984, am not beautiful enough to be the Julia in Brideshead Revisited, can't cook well enough to be Julia Childs and being Julia Roberts is out of reach of any mortal.

Twitter brought another Julia to my attention.

Julia Hartley-Brewer is a journalist who has been on Question Time and politics shows as a newspaper reviewer.  She's the kind of woman that makes the Long Suffering Husband shout at the telly.  She's all pearls, nice hair with an expensive red tint to it, plummy laughter and a staggering disregard for anyone other than herself.

She tweeted.

It was a tweet that shocked me. It shocked lots of people on Twitter.  I thought it was odd to be proud of making someone feel sad.  She justified it by claiming that he was forcing his political opinions on her and that she hadn't been rude.  I was expecting everyone to reply to all of her future tweets (forcing her political opinions on us) with "I couldn't care less." I wasn't expecting just how much abuse she would take. Someone who I think is normally quite fair wrote a blog, imagining how her day would normally go.  It was brutal  (and quite funny) but I couldn't help thinking that I really wouldn't want to be that Julia at the moment.  It had briefly flitted through my mind to try on the personality of this woman that makes the LSH throw things and then I realised that I need to get a grip and remember it's just a name.

Lectrics., Dad and Neighbours.

My Dad died in February, which is about the same time as our outside light stopped working.

"I need to change the bulb," the Long Suffering Husband said every day without doing anything about it until the end of March.
"Don't worry," I said, hoping that if it was dark no one would find their way to our front door and I'd be allowed to wallow in peace. I didn't want my neighbours knocking on the door to borrow an egg or asking if I'd feed their cat.  Normally, I like this sort of thing but in February and March I didn't want to have any conversations that started with, "I'm so sorry..." I kept my head down and scurried to and from the car, to avoid hedge clippers,,dog walkers and parents wrestling their children into the car for the school run.  This was possibly a mistake.  Grief does make you feel lonely and it might have been good for me to pass a pleasant few minutes talking about the weather or the amount of foxes.

We changed the light bulb at Easter but it still didn't work.

Now that I'm talking again most conversations include the line, "And how's your mum?" said with a tilt of the head and a look of concern.  I think this is a coded way of them letting me know that they missed the chance to say. "I'm so sorry.." at the time.  When I tell them that she's fine they seem a little disappointed and I feel a bit guilty of depriving them of the chance to console at the time.

My Dad was always really good with neighbours.  They became friends and would call for an early beer or join a brass band with him.  Their current neighbours have been brilliant.  Every time I've visited a head has popped over the fence with an invitation or a man has appeared at the end of the garden (like a resident gnome) offering gardening services.

The other thing that Dad was good at was 'lectrics'.  As a telephone engineer he knew a lot about electricity and would be the person the LSH turned to whenever we bought a light from IKEA and couldn't work out how to fit it.

The LSH was possibly one of the more competent amateur electricians who turned to my Dad.  As a child, we would often get a call from an Uncle who had got into a mess.  Uncle Charlie was the the one I remember most.  Mum would hand over the phone, rolling her eyes and saying, "He's done it again.  He should come with a health warning. One day he'll blow everyone up." Dad would patiently listen, try to explain, talking about red, black and brown wires before saying, "Hang on, don't touch anything.  I'll be round.  Give me half an hour."

He would grab his leather clad GPO meter and I would go along for the ride.  When we got there there would be wires hanging from the ceiling  above a step ladder or a hole in a wall with wires poking out and my Uncle Charlie would be looking frazzled but as cheerful as ever.
"i never was any good at lectrics," he'd say.
  Dad would get up the ladder, Aunt Rene would make tea and find a Mr Kipling's cake and I would play with my cousins or listen to Uncle Charlie's gory stories about how he got his leg caught in a threshing machine when he was a boy.  Whatever the problem had been Dad usually had it sorted before the tea had brewed.

Yesterday, we bought a new light.  The LSH fitted it and it didn't work. He tried everything Dad had taught him.  He drew a circuit diagram, tested switches all to no avail.  At one point every downstairs switch was hanging off the wall.
"This is where we need your Dad," the LSH said, "Come on, you're an electrician's daughter you must know something."

I told him that I knew that you didn't need to wire a plug to make an electrical item work if you knew to put the blue wire in the left hole of the socket and the brown wire in the right.  He shuddered and remembered that was something he had trained me out of.  I told him that there were 100,000 volts in a telephone exchange switch and that it smelt of a cross between biscuits and garlic bread and that the black wire was neutral and the red was live. I could also remember Bye Bye Rosie Off You Go Birmingham Via Great Western but wasn't sure what it meant. He shrugged.
"The problem has to be that the circuit is broken somewhere.  You need a man with a meter,"to confirm it." I told him.
The LSH tried a new piece of wire and took off a few more switches and then he saw a neighbour.
The neighbour had a meter.
They stood and looked and tested, concluding that it didn't make sense.
The circuit to the switch wasn't broken but it was broken to the outside wire but the outside wire had been changed.
"It's almost as though this wire doesn't come off this switch," said the neighbour perceptively.

Then we remembered. My Dad had put the outside light in when we did our extension. The front door was off at the time and he connected it from a wire in the cavity wall. There would be no fixing it, especially as we now have cavity wall insulation.

It was sad to think that Dad will never turn up with his trusty GPO box but was nice to know that we have good neighbours.

It's not war

I had a difficult night's sleep.

I know that's not unusual for me but last night I worried.  I worried about the world and I worried about women and it left me feeling uneasy and seeped into my dreams.

I dreamt of a world in the midst of a revolution and woke up shouting, "Sandra! No, Sandra! Just make a cup of tea!"  I have no idea who Sandra is or why I thought tea was going to solve the problem but I was left with the feeling that I had not properly supported Sandra in her revolutionary efforts in a post-apocalyptic world.

It's probably because I felt I had not properly supported a young girl that I met when walking the dog yesterday.

School holidays leave me with too much time for my mind to wander. I have time to watch TV and go to the cinema, walk the dog at leisure and read too much nastiness on Twitter.  Yesterday, I watched the Handmaid's Tale and Dunkirk. Twitter was full of misogynistic rage against women, especially against Mary Beard who said something about history that a couple of men also said. The news out of Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan report the terrible plight of the women living there and women in this country are turning on each other over suggestions that women should be able to have top jobs.

It depresses me that we think that women and men are at war. Still.  Sit through Dunkirk and tell me that you want to be at war.

When I read the Handmaid's Tale in the 80s it got under my skin.  I was out of sorts for weeks.  It had never really occurred to me before that women could be so badly treated.  I'm still not sure I approve of the book.  It always worries me that life imitates art and so you probably shouldn't write the worst thing you can imagine. Just after I read the book I was in a park with my family and there were a group of people, which we would now recognise as Muslim.(It was an unusual sight then)  The women were in full black (jilbab and niqab) tents with their eyes peering out of a small slit.  I asked my mum if they were 'breeders' and if they needed help.  My mum hadn't read the book but we had a good discussion on whether just the wearing of such clothes was oppressive to women.  We decided that it could be just as the girls dancing on Top of the Pops in their pants could be oppressive to women.  We thought no more about whether the women (or the girls on TOTP) needed help and only concerned ourselves with what we thought was 'right'.

That is a problem.  Instead of concerning ourselves with the safety and happiness of each individual person we lump people into groups and think about what is 'right'.  This can stop us acting when we know we should.

When the Long Suffering Husband and I went to Greece on holiday before we had children we were woken in the night by a huge row exploding on the balcony opposite us.  The man was screaming and shouting at a sobbing woman and throwing all of her possessions from the balcony to the street below.  He was calling her a slut and suggesting that she had slept with someone else.  The girl went down to collect her things and he wouldn't let her back in.  We did nothing.  We talked about it.  The LSH wondered who goes on holiday with a boyfriend and sleeps with someone else.  I often think about her and hope she was safe but at the time we only thought about who was 'right'.

Yesterday, I hope I did better. A young couple sat in a car in a car park shouting at each other.  Her handbag was thrown out and when she got out to get it he sped away, driving angrily and dangerously.  She stood, shaking and sobbing.  People watched.  They stood still. They tried to decide who was right.  They didn't want to get involved.
"What do you think happened there?" the LSH asked me.
"It doesn't matter," I said, "take the dog."
I went over and asked if she needed any help.  Her tears made me want to cry with her but I didn't.
She said that she was fine and would ring a friend.  I told her that I would be on the field with the dog if she changed her mind.

I did something but I wish I'd done more.

I wish I had stood with her until her friends arrived. I wish I'd told her to ring her mum. I wish I had cried with her and told her that I didn't think she'd been treated fairly.  I wish I'd told her she was worth better.  I wish I'd helped her feel less powerless. I wish I'd made sure that she was safe.

I wish I'd done this without thinking that all men are dicks.