I’m here for the birds

Wasn’t the Queen lovely? It was a particularly nice broach, I thought and whoever wrote her speech was a genius. It had the perfect tone: not preachy but with enough Churchillian World War Two, we’re  all in this together, we’ll meet again references to keep the angry mob happy. It was genius because any psychologist will tell you that the best way to get people to comply is to point out the people doing what they should, rather than those that aren’t. Thanking us all for doing the right thing was perfect. The Daily Mail pictures and angry people on Social Media are actually making some people say, “Well, if they’re not going to do it, I don’t see why I should.”  It’s the same reason for why they don’t want us to stop and sit. If we see people doing it then it is human nature to do the same thing and people will inevitably share a bench without realising.

This morning, however, the Queen has become a nasty meme. The angry people are still angry, which I understand but hate. Anger is just a response to fear. This response to fear doesn’t help my anxiety and so I’m finding Social Media a fairly uncomfortable place to be.

However, there is a corner of anxious Twitter, where people like me have gathered for a while. It is a place where we tweet about tweets. We are only there for the birds. We share pictures of our bird tables and recordings of the birdsong we are hearing. When you are traumatised (and what is happening right now will feel like a trauma for many) it can help to focus on the small things. Watch the birds, have a pocket full of stones, take your camera out and use the macro setting. Stay small; stay safe; watch the birds.

The blue tit visits the mirror daily to engage the pretty tit in the mirror 

The Japanese are brilliant at this. They have 72 seasons, which help them to focus on the minutiae of life. We know about Sakura (the first Cherry Blossom season) but did you know that Tsubame kitaru is between the 5th and 9th of April? This is the season of the swallows return. It turns out that they are perfectly correct. Last night, I saw my first swallow of the season and so did my corner of social media. We were thrilled. We trilled. The Queen is lovely and the swallows are back.

Next time you feel the fear overwhelm you and the anger rising, I can thoroughly recommend taking a breath and being here for the birds.

How to be socially awkward

If being socially awkward is something you'd like to have a go at then here is a quick step by step guide.

1. Go to see Miss Saigon

2. Cry most of the way through

3. Laugh out loud when the man next to you gasps as Kim shoots herself (spoilers)

4. Sit in a coffee shop to try to compose yourself afterwards and tweet the person your programme tells you played Kim.

5. Carry on sobbing.

6. Get a little excited that the actress Tweets you back.

7. Know you have plumbed the depths of social awkwardness.

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."

A Swing to the Bonkers Party

I confess!  I like politics.

 I love voting; the secret wobbly wooden booths, the big tin box, the tiny pencils on a string. I love sitting up (drifting in and out of consciousness) to watch the results come in.  I like a good graphic; a bar chart, a pie chart and I miss Peter Snow with his impossibly long arms and swingometer.

I love the television; Question Time, Party Political Broadcasts, satire programmes (my teenage years were shaped by Spitting Image).

I am, however, purely an observer.  I would hate to actually do politics; I can't sit through a meeting, I'm terrible at claiming expenses, I can't make decisions and I like my sleep. 

The political parties have stopped speaking to everyday people.  They must have done, or there wouldn't be so many people passionate about UKIP.  I think I've worked out why.  They are all talking about 'hardworking people' and most of us don't want to work hard - we certainly don't want to work any harder than we are already.  Most of us would just like a bit more time off, maybe to go home from work and not think about work.  We're all quite tired and people want someone to blame.   That's where UKIP has been so successful.  They may not be offering us any time off. although their name suggests they are all about afternoon naps but they have delivered the EU and immigrants as scapegoats for everything that is wrong with our lives.  In a perverse kind of way I quite like UKIP.  They have started people talking about politics even if most of it is rubbish.

Today I noticed #WhyImVotingUKIP trending on Twitter. Ironically, UKIP started it but funny people have turned it into something much better.  If you want a laugh then it's definitely worth a look.  These are some that made me laugh:

Larry the Cat ‏@Number10cat  5h

#WhyImVotingUkip Because I'm fed up of Siamese cats coming over here and taking our jobs...

Simon Young ‏@producersimon  5h

Because I don't want those Romans coming over here, building their aqueducts, inventing concrete and sanitation #WhyImVotingUKIP

Anthony Grimley ‏@antinbath  6h

#WhyImVotingUkip Because Mr Sheen left smears on my windows and it says on the bottle that he's polish.

Something Dramatic ‏@JoelMcVeagh  2m

#WhyImVotingUkip Because no one should ever have to endure Strawberries that aren't British.

Tom Pride ‏@ThomasPride  22h

#WhyImVotingUkip: because a party led by a public school, Thatcherite, city trader from Kent is definitely anti-establishment.

Shoaib M Khan ‏@UK_HumanRights  22h

#WhyImVotingUkip: because, like the leader @Nigel_Farage, I get a bit racist when I'm tired too.

I can't help reading about the success of UKIP without singing one of my favourite songs from Avenue Q.

Everybody's a little bit racist

Can Reading Make You Happy?

It's been a while since I wrote anything and my head is about to explode.  There's so much in it and the more full it gets the less I feel as though I can write anything. Where do you start? Nobody wants to read the random rubbish that's floating around in there at the moment.  As I'm surprised anyone wants to read the normal rubbish that appears on this page, I think the best thing to do is write.  If you are reading this then I apologise and remind you that I am not writing for you but for the sake of my own mental health (such as it is).

Telling someone, yesterday, that my daughter is studying journalism I was accused of rolling my eyes as I said it.  "I suppose you're thinking that someone has to," they commented.  I am very proud of her and I'm sure that when she starts to write I will enjoy every single word but this has been a week when I find myself holding my head in my hands and wondering why journalists actually exist.  I'm probably reading too much and for that I blame Twitter.  The constant drip-feed of news, gossip and speculation about what might or might not be news, the links to both good and bad articles and the reporting in newspapers of what has been said on Twitter has left me jittery, checking my phone every 2 seconds in case I miss the next rude thing to be tweeted.

Last week I was fascinated as the Reeva Steenkamp murder unravelled on twitter.  I use her name on purpose because it is not the Oscar Pistorius' murder, he is not the victim and he might not even be the perpetrator (although as more details unfold in court it seems it was his gun and he did pull the trigger) but reading my twitter feed on that day, you would be forgiven for thinking that he was the victim.  Then, as the day went on he became a 'wife beating monster.' and I worried about laws I don't understand like sub judice.  The next day the 'proper papers' got involved.

The last time I can remember being shocked by the front page of a newspaper was in November 1981 when the Daily Mail called Michael Foot a 'Worzel Gummage' and an 'Out of work Navvy in a Donkey Jacket'

At the time I thought this was terrible. Here was an old man, with a chest complaint, wearing a nice warm coat and they were picking on him, not because he hadn't done his coat up (which I would have thought was perfectly reasonable) but because they didn't think his coat looked like it cost enough money.  The more enraged I got about the picture the more stories I read about it and then it became clear that it was his wife's fault and everyone hated his wife because she was a feminist.  This only confirmed my desire to be a feminist, who didn't have to make sure their husband wore expensive coats. At the time, I decided I would never read the Daily Mail again and until the invention of twitter I have never not even been tempted to pick it up in the Dentist's waiting room. Twitter seduced me, when a girl who had shown us round on one of the University open days had a horrible article about lazy teachers published and then I was then again seduced by the the Samantha Brick controversy. 

As I grew up I took what was written in papers with a pinch of salt and have mostly found headlines to be funny in their crassness and wondered who they were fooling and then last week the Sun stooped to an all time low of tastelessness.  I was genuinely shocked after being confronted with row upon row of the headline, " 3 Shots. Screams. Silence", illustrated with a picture of what I thought was their page 3 girl, pouting and pointing her various assets in my direction.  Only when I got home and consulted twitter did I discover that the picture was of Ms Steenkamp and there were opinions ranging from total outrage to an appreciation of her beautiful form in her 'work clothes'.  

In the last few days, I have been obsessed with Hilary Mantel's comments about Kate Middleton.  One of my pet hates is women turning on each other and having read some of Hilary Mantel's writing before I was surprised, as I didn't think this was really her style.  The Prime Minister got very worried about it, he made a statement from India, where he had previously said that he was worried about the lack of women in his cabinet but really wasn't sure what to do about it.  The poor man is so confused!  The Mantel piece is worth reading in full, not least because the woman really knows how to write.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n04/hilary-mantel/royal-bodies

She wasn't really attacking Kate but the press and the establishment that still forgets that women who marry royals are real people, with real hopes and dreams. I quite like this royal couple and I like to think that they married for love and are strong enough to ignore everything  the stupid press and anyone else says about them and it should end there but the backlash is unforgivable.

Mantel Piece - love a play on words

The criticism seems to have been along the lines of, "how dare that ugly woman who is too clever for her own good say anything about the beautiful princess, who is having a baby." 

The Sun reduced it all to Bump...1 Grump....0, with several pictures of Kate looking beautiful and radiant and Hilary looking, frumpy.  The comments by women on these articles was really shocking.

http://storify.com/robertsharp59/the-unwitting-irony-of-mantel-s-critics

Mostly, this has been about lazy journalism and women being cruel about each other but just occasionally it has sparked a brilliant piece of writing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/feb/19/hilary-mantel-duchess-of-cambridge-controversy

That should please Hilary Mantel, to inspire brilliant writing as twice winner of the Booker Prize has to be worth taking all this rubbish for. 

Waterstones book shop tweeted in the week, "Whoever said that money can't buy happiness has never bought a book."  They may have a point so I'm off to find my happy place in a book and leave Twitter and the Newspapers alone for a while. 

What if?

From the moment you find out you are expecting a child you worry.  Will they have all their fingers and toes? Will they cry all night?  Will they have ginger hair?

You delude yourself that you have some control over what will happen.  You watch other parents and think, "I'm never going to be like that!"  Self-righteousness becomes your middle name.

A normal sleep pattern is never your right ever again.  During pregnancy they kick and wake you, in infant-hood they need feeding and changing, as toddlers they just wake up to squeeze in between you and your husband trying to make sure they remain an only or the youngest child.  When they go to school they sleep, exhaustedly through the night but you have forgotten how.  You lie awake worrying; do they have friends, are they making their 2 levels progress (ha), are their teachers being mean to them.  They take exams and you worry.  They walk to the post box for the first time you worry.  They go into town with their friends you worry.  They get on the wrong bus home you worry. They learn to drive and you worry.  They go out and get drunk and you worry.

What no one tells you is that you worry after.  It is when they are home and safe that you lie awake at night and think.  What if they had failed that exam?  What if they had taken the wrong turning to the post box?  What if their friends had left them in town on their own?  What if they hadn't rung you for a lift when they realised the bus wasn't going to bring them home?  What if they forgot everything they've proved they can do whilst driving?  What if they hadn't got home safely?

Sue Perkins posted this picture on Twitter yesterday, saying she wished she worked there.

She can't be a parent, otherwise she would know that she already works there, that it is a very stressful job and the pay is appalling!