Way back in mid-November (which feels like a decade ago), I announced to the world that I had joined Twitter, albeit incognito. ‘Twas a big deal for me, a truly momentous occasion, and I devoted a whole blog to it … so, so sad.
Why did I join Twitter?
This post is my raunchiest yet (for me, that’s not difficult) and written for the Girlies. So, Gents, if talk of fashion, make-up, bitching and sex is a real turn-off for you, look away now.
When SATC first hit our screens, I sniffily avoided it. I’d read the hype and decided it was nothing but cheap porn. What persuaded me to get off my prudish high horse and give it a try was the realisation that one of its pivotal characters was Carrie Bradshaw’s love-interest (one of her many, that is) Big, played by Chris Noth.
Be still my beating heart.
On Sunday evening, replete with roast pheasant, accompanied by potato and butterbean cakes à la Clarissa Dickson Wright, and a fruity pinot to wash it all down, we settled by the wood burning stove to watch Darkest Hour, the 2017 film about Winston Churchill’s first few weeks as Prime Minister in 1940.
A sentence like the one wot I just wrote used to be benign, boring even, but now it’s full of triggers for today’s wokerati. One by one:
• Eating pheasant is alarming to extreme vegans (the vegans I know are reasonable and tolerant and I don’t include them in this post);
There’s something relaxing, bordering on the therapeutic, watching a soufflé rise: whether it’s smug satisfaction at having made it; anticipation as to how scrummy it’ll taste; maybe respect for the science behind the phenomenon; or just childish wonderment at the tantalising transformation from slop huddled in a dish to the master of all that it surveys.
Yesterday was a Red Letter Day – a day that is pleasantly noteworthy or memorable. The term has its roots in classical antiquity – important days are indicated in red in a calendar dating from the Roman Republic (509–27 BC).
I bet you always wanted to know that.
Please don’t tell anyone.
I’ve opened a Twitter account. Using a pseudonym of course. And it’s only a matter of time before I fire off something a bit too right wing or pro-Brexit or non-PC that attracts what I think is known as a ‘Twitter storm’. However, as no one knows who I am on Twitter, it doesn’t matter, does it? The attacks can’t be personal. The threats would be, in practice, empty. In fact, I might just fire off something OTT anti-Metropolitan-Urban-Elite deliberately to raise blood pressures, and then argue them into the ground.
The other day, with Monday's vile headache threatening to return, I walked about 12 miles. I’d meant to walk about 10, but I got lost, several times. I'd picked up a recommended walk from the hotel website in North Yorks where Hubby and I had decamped for a few days’ R&R (that’s Rest and Relaxation, not Rum and whatever-mixer-starts-with-an-R).
The walk’s written instructions were accompanied by a small-scale map, with the route highlighted in yellow, obliterating key visual details. The text included Yoda-style wisdom (not) such as, “Continue up the hill through the forest”, where there were two possible uphill routes – one went northeast and one northwest. Another said, “Pass through a gap in the wall by the water trough”; there were several gaps and no water troughs.
Knowing that I speak German, enjoy holidaying in German-speaking countries, my best friend lives in Germany, and I have a line of Zimmermans in my family tree, a mate sent me a link to an article in The New Statesman. Yeah. The New Statesman. To me. It was always going to end in tears.
The article (From Germany, the UK appears ever more dysfunctional and absurd) was penned by one Martin Fletcher. The name rang a bell. Even before I read the article, I found his website and recognised several of his previous articles in various publications.
Fletcher thinks anyone who voted for Brexit and then for BoJo, to get it done, is a fanatical right-wing ideologue, a jingoistic xenophobe, or was too exhausted to think straight, was easily seduced by lies and vacuous gimmicks. His vocab, not my interpretation. There’s no room in his closed, liberal-elite (probably metropolitan) mindset for the possibility of an intelligent, thoughtful, conscientious, responsible Brexit supporter.
Well we are in a dreadful pickle aren’t we. Christmas is going to be the worst ever. No cheap, plastic, Chinese here-today-gone-tomorrow toys under a non-existent Christmas tree. No factory-farmed turkey. No smashed avocado for breakfast. THE HORRORRRRRRRRRRR!
Oh, strap on a pair. What’s wrong with a jar of homemade marmalade from the mother-in-law (best in the world – the marmalade, not the in-law), paper chains made from discarded colour-magazines, a whole poached wild salmon, and my home-made, home-grown plum compote. Compared to Afghan women, Chinese Uyghurs, and white working-class northerners applying to university, what’s to complain about?
While writing my previous blog (“Inspired choices of music”), I had a feeling that I’d written something very similar before. I checked previous blogs – no nothing there. I searched all my documents saved on my laptop – including archives – and found an essay I had drafted in 1998 while living in the US. It was almost published in a prestigious magazine, nay TWO prestigious magazines, but the first rejected it after a monumental tussle between two editors, and I rejected the second when the editor said he liked the essay’s first half but not the second so could I re-write it. No one tells me what or how to write, so it remained unpublished and I forgot about it …
“You can analyse the pants off it in the most scholarly, imaginative way, but at the end of the day it boils down to your instinct. Your soul. A religious experience. A certain piece of music just does ‘it’. What’s ‘it’? Ask your soul,”…
No I’m not thinking of Classic FM’s Top 100 or Desert Island Discs, but the most perfect, irreplaceable, hand-in-glove musical pieces ‘inserted’ in films, which re-imagine the former and elevate the latter. I’m not referring to music written specifically for a film, but classics lifted out of their original contexts and snuggled perfectly into an alien genre.
This occurred to me while attempting to play the piano the other day after six weeks in a sling. I shoulda stuck to “Chopsticks”, not tried something too ambitious, but Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” is what caught my eye while rummaging through my music stool. I tried to play it and failed.
A headline in today’s Daily Mail Online reads, “Supermarkets are ALREADY selling festive products with shoppers urged to buy now and 'stock up' amid fears over Christmas food shortage due to gas crisis”. Another one reads, “Alok Sharma [Business Secretary] insists there is 'no immediate concern' … the supplies will be there for Christmas…”
I know what you’re thinking; you’d rather trust a supermarket than a politician, so there must be an imminent shortage and you must shop for Christmas without delay.
Nah. Let’s think this through, shall we?
I haven’t blogged for the longest time, which helps to illustrate the main thrust of this post. (I’ve got so many pent-up blogging topics that posting might be a daily event for a while, so gird your loins.)
I’ve had a ‘disability’ for about five weeks now. My left arm is in a sling 24/7 after my shoulder operation mid-August and will stay there for another week, then two more weeks at least before I can drive then six or more months before everything can be considered to be back to normal.
Yes this is just a temporary disability, and it’s on the mild side. For those who face anything like this –or worse, permanently, physical, mental or emotional – I salute you. And to take part in the Paralympics or Invictus Games or whatever – superheroes every one of you.
I had one of those What The F - - k (WTF) moments recently. In the midst of reading / writing / planning stuff about the (lack of) merits of Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) and what a con / disappointment / travesty / gamble / meaningless hogwash it is, I suddenly thought about Afghanistan and stopped typing as if the keyboard had vanished. Poof!
What do these disparate topics have in common? Read on!
I recently got into (another) spat on LinkedIn about whether Latin should be a compulsory subject in state schools. Gavin Williamson, the Secretary of State for Education, has just introduced such a policy, which drew howls of derision from the usual suspects: “Irrelevant.” “Useless” (the subject and Williamson). “Teach climate change instead.” “Teach values and ambitions.” Eh, what?
More often than not I struggle to find space in my diary for a meeting, a catch-up with a friend, or even to take Mum food shopping. Yet I am not in paid employment, have no kids, and have a cleaner (two, in fact) and a gardener. Plus, Hubby is reasonably house-trained. How do people manage without such cards stacked in their favour?
Yesterday was a prime example. Sunday was supposed to be a stress-free day, culminating in an 8pm skink with a couple of mates (that’s skyping plus drinking for those readers who missed an earlier blog). This digital exercise was nothing to do with Covid-quarantining and everything to do with us being geographically challenged when it came to meeting in Buckinghamshire. The timing worked perfectly for me, as Hubby and I would have comfortably finished dinner and I’d be half way down my second glass of red.
We bought my engagement ring and my wedding ring in Hatton Garden many years ago. Back then, every shop seemed to have an orthodox Jew behind the counter. I don’t think I really thought about that at the time, or subsequently, but last Friday the memories came flooding back.
Watering my whatever-they-ares on the patio yesterday afternoon, I was repeatedly irritated by manhood-substitutes (aka helicopters) returning from Silverstone, where Lewis Hamilton had become the second English sportsman to disgrace his country in a short space of time.
It’s just been announced that a sculpture depicting colonial defiance is one of the two winners that will next occupy Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth.
According to the BBC News website, Samson Kambalu's Antelope
restages a Baptist preacher, John Chilembwe, and a European missionary, John
Chorley. Chilembwe is wearing a hat in defiance of the then-colonial rule that
denied Africans the right to wear hats in front of white people. On the plinth,
Chilembwe is larger than life, Chorley is much smaller next to him, “elevating the
African’s story and revealing the hidden narratives of under-represented people
in the British Empire”.
I for one am sitting on my hands and looking the other way.