There’s no place like home

November 8, 2018November 7, 2018 ~ janeishly ~ 5 Comments

The really great thing about the UK is that visiting it always gives me so many reasons not to regret having left it in the first place.

Of course I often also get to meet up with family or friends, or encounter lovely new people, but such meetings could always take place elsewhere. And after Brexit they may well have to.

But it’s the grime, the pettiness and the sheer 1984-ness of the place that really shocks me every time.

Naturally there are bits that aren’t quite so dystopian. My native Isle of Man isn’t generally too horrible, for example… provided you stick to the unspoilt bits in the middle, rather than the vast swathes of detached luxury executive dwellings in non-vernacular styles and the almost continuous traffic jam of four-wheel drive vehicles on the Island’s tiny roads.

This time, however, I was in south east England – including three days in the hellhole that is London – and I was constantly reminded of Ford Prefect’s words to the Golgafrinchams. “You’re all a load of useless bloody loonies”.

I know, that’s a bit harsh. There are, I’m sure, plenty of nice people in London – indeed, I got to meet up with not only the aforementioned lovely new people at Procopywriters’ Copywriting Conference, but my best friend Nick, who currently has the misfortune of being stuck there for work.

But even nice people can be insane. And as someone who discovered the term “hypersensitivity” with an enormous feeling of relief and recognition, that’s what city dwellers very much seem to be.

I can just about cope with somewhere like Malmö (population 340,000), which even to my eyes is really only a large town. But once an urban area hits the million mark in terms of population, the levels of crazy seem to increase exponentially.

This time I didn’t even manage to get off the plane before the nausea set in. Flight Time, Flybe’s inflight magazine, is a macrocosm of all that’s wrong with the modern world. Aimed, presumably, at the affluent 30-something, there’s a lot of chat about design and branding, including, horrifyingly, with reference to Liverpool, a city I have a great deal of affection for. In the early 1980s it introduced me to the monstrosities of Conservative policies. In the late 1980s when I was at university in Wales, it was my jumping off point for the Isle of Man. And now apparently it’s a place where hipsters can experience world-famous brands.

But the inflight entertainment wasn’t over with Flight Time. Because even the Flybe menu card had something to say about Britain in 2018, being a showcase for the current emetic tendency to describe everything in terms so sycophantic even a member of the Royal family might blush. (Or then again maybe not.)

First we have a posh pot noodle with a “hand-crafted broth”. What does that even mean? Are we expected to believe that there’s a chef somewhere on the plane carefully chopping herbs and reducing stock to make this exquisite offering (which would of course cause third-degree burns if served filled up to the brim like this).

More emetic branding

And then there’s that thing – and I’m sure there must be a term for it other than “we’re a bunch of culturless wankers and we’re pretending we still remember what history means” – where everything has to be tied to a particular locale and then drenched in treacle.

I present a delightfully delicious and drinkable beer, with, presumably, the character of an over-priced caravan in an insular, damp and windswept part of the UK mainland where the locals talk with incomprehensible accents. Whatever that tastes like.

Emetic branding in handy can form

And then I got on the train, and the bombardment became audible as well as visual, and still just as pointless. I mean, is it really necessary to tell people at every stop not to forget their stuff and to mind the gap? Does that actually even work? How many people who travel on those trains every day even hear the warnings any more? Or do they think “Ooh, I’m so glad that automated announcement cautioned me against leaving my belongings behind, because otherwise my handbag and all my shopping would still be on the train. Silly me. That’s the fourth time this week I’ve nearly done that”.

But that kind of thing, annoying as it is, pales in comparison with the frankly scary “See it. Say it. Sorted” campaign, which involves both incredibly repetitive announcements and posters, and which made me feel like I was in that sketch off Not the Nine O’Clock News (you know the one). I mean, why not just put up a big poster saying:

“Let’s get rid of these nasty foreigners!”

Every time I encountered this message I felt ashamed, not only to be British, but even to be anywhere near the UK, as if I was condoning it simply by being there.

But the Brits do love a good sign. Especially in Debenhams in Chatham, apparently.

And I for one was very glad they were there. Because I never expect hot water from a hot tap, and I certainly wouldn’t turn the tap off if there wasn’t a sign asking me to. What kind of person would?

But once again, the winner of the “Most pointless instruction” contest was a woman employed by Southend Airport. (Do they do special insensitivity training, I wonder?) Last time, it was someone stridently insisting we “Stay behind the yellow line” as we walked across to the plane, despite the fact that the yellow line ended right where she was pointing at it, leaving us with another 20 metres of tarmac to cover, unaided by lines. “I’m going to be so glad to get back to France”, muttered the smartly dressed and very Received Pronounciation elderly lady walking beside me. “They’re all just so stressed here.”

This time, the instruction was, if anything, even more intended only to bolster the ego of the issuer. It’s also a bit of a conundrum, to my mind. Because one of these bags is a sealed bag for toiletries, and the other, apparently, isn’t, despite a) being equipped with a zip and b) having been used to contain toiletries for travel on a plane many times (as you can tell from the state of it), thereby presumably putting every other passenger on that flight in danger, including people using Southend Airport.

Now, my first thought was that this woman was just being a po-faced jobsworth. Indeed, my second, third and fourth thoughts were exactly the same. But I’ve just discovered that there may be a valid reason for demanding that toiletries are placed in a self-sealing bag. Apparently some security instructions contain this line: “Your plastic bag must also be airtight so that vapour testing can be successfully carried out on the contents”.

But once again, this is just so much bullshit. (In fact it’s just a continuation of the other flight security myths I wrote about a couple of years back.) In the unlikely event that the security check finds something dodgy in my toiletry bag, I’m pretty sure they’re capable of shoving it in their own sealed bag for vapour testing. Or are they saying that they can tell it’s not got holes in just by looking at it? In which case I’m off to join a UK airport security team to get X-ray eye implants. I’m sure they’ll make it easier to spot all those nasty foreigners, for a start.

PS – If you’re one of the nice people sharing my flight back to Caen, sorry it took so long to write this. I did warn you!

Writing as therapy, or why reality isn’t necessarily relevant

August 31, 2018 ~ janeishly ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about reality recently. And it’s occurred to me that for a relatively idealistic person, I tend to adopt an extremely narrow, logical approach to my past. Consequently, when I think back over my life, I ignore the things I don’t remember. Probably we all do this.

So I remember bits of our family holiday in 1979, if only because it was shortly after the election of Thatcher as PM, and I was still so politically naive at the age of 11 that I still thought it was a good thing for a woman – any woman – to be elected to that position. I’d never heard of Conservatives, or realised that a political party could despise its fellow citizens to quite such an extent.

And yet I don’t remember anything of the summer a few years earlier, when we had a visit from my Aunty Pam and Uncle Pete, during which – to judge by our slightly raffish appearance – we were impersonating some kind of Mafia family.

L-R: Me, Aunty Pam, Dad, Uncle Pete, my brother John, Mum.

So does this mean that my aunt and uncle didn’t visit us in summer 1974? And if I sit down now and write a detailed account of my (imaginary) Austrian cousins visiting us in 1983, what distinguishes the two? A real visit of which I remember nothing, and an imaginary one of which I have an extremely clear recollection? Which is the more real?

Research has shown that the brain doesn’t really know the difference between reality and imagination. This is, apparently, very useful when it comes to setting yourself goals. So for example, if you tell yourself in sufficient detail how fit you are, your brain goes, “Hm. So I am. Then I need to behave like this“, and off you go, refusing dessert and getting to the gym four times a week like you always intended to. (It should be said that although I believe this works, I haven’t yet managed to implement it in terms of practice.)

And I’ve recently discovered, both from personal experience and from watching someone else do it, that you can deliberately rewrite your past, giving yourself a more satisfactory plotline – whatever you personally consider to be satisfactory. This means that those little niggles (“Why didn’t I say ‘Yes’ when he asked me out?”, “I should have taken that job offer”, “If only I’d gone to that party”…) can be resolved. And it’s surprisingly liberating.

Now, obviously you can’t rewrite the big stuff in your life. If you’re an impoverished 45-year-old bartender, you can’t have accepted that job offer if it would have led you to becoming a billionaire at 30. But you can definitely picture yourself taking that job offer – whatever it was – and it not leading to the success you’ve always imagined. Maybe you’d have burned out at 23? Maybe you’d have been on the street at 25? Maybe you’d long since have been dead? Instead, you’re a bartender, and yeah, perhaps it doesn’t pay much but you enjoy meeting people and hearing their stories and having your afternoons free. (And if you don’t, get a new job. Life is short!)

But for small regrets it’s surprisingly effective. You think of a situation that you’ve always regretted, and you sit down with a pad of paper, or at your computer – personally, I always write best on paper, but these days I have to use one of those soft propelling pencils so that my atrophied writing muscles can cope – and you write yourself an alternate story as you’ve imagined it so many times. Write it like you’re a novelist. Put in description, dialogue, comedy, drama… whatever it takes to make it believable. Plunge into the story like it’s a warm bath, submerge yourself in the bubbles, feel it permeate your pores as the scent of Badedas tickles your nose. Write it and rewrite it. Live it. Feel the excitement, the nervousness, the elation – or the boredom, the arguments, the misunderstandings, the failures. Or, more likely, both.

Because if you look back over your real life, even the best bits aren’t perfect, are they? If you were editing the film of your life, you’d tweak stuff to make it flow more smoothly. Well, when you rewrite your past, don’t do this. Instead, bring your most level-headed realist to the table and give them free rein to sneer as much as they like. Write as it would have happened. And see where it takes you. In my experience, it takes you down a path that makes very little difference to where you are today, or to who you are.

And if it does, you’ve learned something. Perhaps you realise that you really can’t stand being married to your spouse any more, that you haven’t felt excitement – or even affection – with them for years. Or your reinvented past when you worked as temporary crew, delivering yachts all around the world, is so challenging, so much you, that you decide you can’t live another moment without getting back on the water somehow. Maybe you can build on those lessons and make small changes in your current reality. Maybe you have to throw it all up and start again. Or maybe you just manage to finally put some of those regrets to rest and be happier with what you’ve really achieved.

Whatever the result, I guarantee you’ll find it an interesting experience – and if you have literary ambitions, a better writer, too.

No Man’s Sky – mindfulness in an extreme world

July 2, 2018November 26, 2019 ~ janeishly ~ 3 Comments

For two years now, on and off, I’ve been playing a game called No Man’s Sky. If you’ve heard of it, you’ve probably heard about the negative reaction it got when it came out and apparently didn’t live up to some people’s expectations. Personally, it was exactly what I expected when it first arrived, and two years later I’m still blown away by it.

The simplest description of the game is that it’s about exploring the universe. In fact, it’s about exploring an infinite, procedurally generated universe, which means that pretty much anywhere you go you’re alone. I think it was this last aspect of the game that led to most of the negative reactions. Personally, I like bumbling about exploring planets without any particular aim in mind. Apart from anything else, the game landscapes are quite often stunningly beautiful.

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In about a month, the game will be undergoing another major update, and I’m playing as often as I can to achieve a few of my own personal goals before that happens. The last major update led to enormous upheavals, including planetary climates changing completely, and in some cases land levels altering substantially too. And it’s rumoured that this update may lead to all players losing all their current save games and having to start all over again.

If that happens, that’s OK with me – but as I say, I do want to achieve a few things before then. One of those is to achieve a particular game milestone, which involves spending 32 in-game days on a planet classified as “extreme”. This means either an extreme climate or very tetchy drone sentinels. Or possibly both. Every time you leave your chosen planet to go somewhere more hospitable, your counter resets, so if you want to hit the milestone you have to be prepared to spend a lot of time planetside dodging sentinels or hiding in a cave. You can also stand your player character in a building, where they won’t be using up life support resources or being attacked, then go to bed in real life and come back eight hours later having achieved the goal without any effort. But that seems rather dull to me.

So I’ve spent a lot of time in recent days standing about on a particular planet (actually a moon). It’s called Takahokunea, and I like to think that maybe in the far past it was surveyed by a crew with at least some Maori blood. (New Zealanders seem to get everywhere, so this seems highly probable.) Planets and moons in No Man’s Sky vary widely, as you’d expect, and some of them have quite a lot of buildings of various sorts where you can shelter. This one isn’t like that, so I’ve set up my HQ by parking my spaceship on a small plateau where there’s a galactic trade terminal (to sell any tradeable commodities I happen to come across) and a nearby cave.

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There’s nothing much else within any kind of reasonable walking distance, and time spent in your spaceship doesn’t count towards the total for the milestone, so I spend my game time ambling aimlessly around the countryside, trying not to get trampled on by the fortunately friendly – if clumsy – local fauna, and shooting down vast numbers of drone sentinels, which, because this is an extreme planet, attack me on sight. I’ve also learned some stuff about the mechanics of the game that I hadn’t previously appreciated when I simply landed on a planet, did a particular task then left again. And other than the odd burst of adrenalin when I’m under attack, I’m finding the whole experience to be extremely meditative. Earlier today I stood for a while on a large rock, on a flat area of blueish grass atop a tall pink cliff and watched the sunrise sweeping across the neighbouring planet.

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Later, while I was talking to my mother on the phone, I directed my character into the cave and stayed there for a bit, surrounded by the drifting mysterious motes of light that you find in caves (I’ve never worked out what they are).

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In this game, once you’ve got past the initial scramble to repair your spaceship and equip yourself with basic kit, it can all be very restful, if that’s how you choose to play. And god knows with the hideous things going on in the news in the real world at the moment, we all need a bit of mental peace sometimes. I’d highly recommend standing on a planet, just waiting for time to pass, as a form of mindfulness meditation.

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Of course, I’m not the only person playing the game. And some of them are doing even weirder or more meaningful things than standing about on a pink and blue planet watching the sun rise.

For example, someone recently built a giant pachinko machine. Given that my own base looks like half a dozen garden sheds shoved together, I find this kind of thing enormously impressive, although even more lavish constructions have been made by other players (more on this below).

The Pilgrim’s Path describes one player’s walk around an entire planet, taking about 45 hours of game playing time. Reading between the lines, he had the kind of experience you’d expect if you walked around a planet – doubt, exhilaration, wonder, fear – ultimately coming away with something much more profound than you’d get from 45 hours of playing something like Grand Theft Auto. He also learned just how supportive the NMS community can be, with people giving him advice and encouragement, and ultimately cheering him on via a live stream of the final hour of his epic journey.

And Andrew Reinhard, the guy who led the excavation of the Atari burial ground, is doing archaeology in No Man’s Sky, specifically surveying the remains of the human habitations and material culture of the original Galactic Hub, which underwent sometimes catastrophic changes during the Atlas Rises update. These sites include Glenn William’s Memorial, a planet with a model of Deep Thought, another with a ziggurat tomb and of course Dudenbeaumodeme, the site of the Pilgrim’s Path circumnavigation – not strictly part of the Galactic Hub, but interesting because many other players had been there since the original visitor. [Note: While aimlessly exploring this particular moon, I found what look like steps, cut in the rock. I’m pretty sure they’re just an accident of the topography, but it made me look even more carefully at the landscape.]

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And while researching this article, I came across this story, which I hadn’t previously encountered, but in many ways doesn’t surprise me. If ever a game could change – or save – lives it’d be No Man’s Sky.

Brexit music (a letter)

June 6, 2018 ~ janeishly ~ 1 Comment

Dear Brexit,

I know this is probably going to be painful to read, but I just have to tell you how I feel.

I know it’s not your fault. You didn’t ask to be born. You certainly didn’t ask to be given such an ugly name. And everybody hates you. Even your parents don’t want you. So I understand. I really do. And I feel sorry for you.

I’ve tried very hard to explain you to people, and to try to make it so that you can just dissolve back into the ether and leave us all to get on like we did before – a bit unsatisfactorily, true, but at least we didn’t have civil war like we do now. I’ve really tried to release you from this horrible situation.

But I can’t. No matter how many arguments I lay out, no matter how many jokes or cartoons I share, no matter how many headlines or opinions I quote, or even facts – and there have been so many of these, right back from well before you came into existence – nobody’s listening. A large number of British people still think you’re doing just fine. A small, but to me absolutely incomprehensible number of British people think that even if you’re the worst thing ever, they still want you.

And I’m tired of it, Brexit. I’m tired of hating total strangers because they’re unwilling to look the truth in the face. I’m tired of wondering whether people really believe that the British government has any idea what it’s doing, in any respect other than making its friends even more money. I’m totally gutted at the fact that the main opposition party, headed by a man who I truly believed in, also wants to take the country back to the mythical Golden Age of the 1950s, before all these nasty foreigners came along. As a student of history, I can think of any number of reasons why everything was apparently so much better back then. As a student of reality, I can think of any number of reasons why we’re actually doing pretty well today, if only we’d look at what’s around us rather than at what’s headlining in the Daily Mail or on the BBC. But what’s the point?

I still have many people close to me who are going to be negatively affected by you on a massive scale, Brexit, regardless of what you do next. But you know what? I don’t actually care any more. I’m safe from you, by virtue of being very lucky. And I know that’s all very well for me but what about everyone else, but that’s none of my choosing. I didn’t bring you into existence. I’ve fought you every day for three years.

So we’re over, Brexit. Because it’s not about you, it’s about me. You forced me to think about my identity in a whole new way. You made me wonder whether I was actually British. You forced me to choose sides. Well I’ve chosen. And I’m European through and through. And one thing I’ve noticed about Europeans is that they just don’t really care about you. They’re sorry for you, and a little embarrassed, but they carry on with their own lives and worry about stuff that’s really important.

So that’s it. I just can’t do this any more. Don’t ring me. Don’t text me, don’t Tweet. Don’t send me links to clips from Question Time or surveys on YouGov. I’m unfriending anyone who still sees you. I’ve blocked you everywhere I can, and I’m not going to change my mind. Have a nice life. Or don’t. Whatever.

Jane

Mont St Michel by night

April 8, 2018 ~ janeishly ~ 2 Comments

I recently visited Mont St Michel for the third time, this time staying two nights on the island. It’s always difficult to know whether to say “I stayed on the Mont”, “I stayed on the island” or something else, because the former sounds like I’ve been exposed to the elements in the style of a Spartan baby, and the second isn’t really accurate as it’s (still) not really an island, although it’s obvious that the new walkway is having some positive effect on reducing the silting of the bay.

Anyway, at night, and early in the morning, Mont St Michel is one of the most peaceful places I’ve ever been, because there are no roads and therefore no cars. It’s ironic, therefore, that I had the worst two nights’ of sleep I’ve ever had in a hotel room – entirely as a result of the traffic.

Yes, this really was the colour of the sunset.

The problem with hotel rooms on MSM is that you never know quite where you’re going to be sleeping, because the bedrooms are scattered around the village in what are referred to as “Annexes”. Mine was, at first glance, a beautiful large room in an ancient building, with, of course, a stunning backdrop – which is actually even more impressive after dark.

As you can tell by the angle of this picture, it was pretty close to the village wall. It was also situated over La Grande Rue, which meant that it was fairly noisy during the daytime. But I had thought it’d be quiet at night after the (other) tourists had mainly gone home.

However, it turned out that despite the hideous price of hotel rooms in/on/at Mont St Michel, the owners haven’t invested in either internal or external noise insulation. This meant that I could hear every word exchanged between the couple in the next room – although they weren’t talking loudly – until midnight, followed by his snoring. As I’d planned to get up early the next day to go out with my camera this was slightly annoying, but I went to sleep anyway. Meanwhile, Mont St Michel carried on being magnificent in the darkness.

I can’t imagine why the French call it “La Merveille”…

My first inkling of the real problem with having a room over La Grande Rue came at 5.45 the next morning. And it’s an obvious one, if you think about it. The site gets not far short of 3 million visitors a year, and many of them want to eat or stay there. This means that vast quantities of food and laundry have to be brought in and out – up a street far too narrow for delivery trucks. This means that deliveries have to be done using trolley type things. Trolley type things that make a terrible noise, whether full or empty, when running at high speed over ancient cobbles.

I got up, looked out to see what was going on, swore a lot, both at the racket and the rain, and went back to bed. After about another hour I fell asleep again, and thus my early morning was abandoned.

The next night, however, the trolleys began at 4.20 am… This led to more swearing, but this time I also got up and watched what was going on.

First came the laundry sorters. There were at least two of them, and they spent most of their time having a very loud conversation, presumably in case the noise of the trolleys hadn’t quite woken everyone in the village.

Then there was a forklift truck with a motor that made an extremely menacing howling sound, taking food supplies further into the village for the restaurants.

It also got up to quite a respectable speed on the way back down the street, when it was empty.

Eventually the laundry men were finished, departing with a train of trolleys each. They must have pretty strong muscles to go with their voices, because as I know from my time as a femme de ménage in a French hotel, full laundry bags are far from light.

There was a brief period of quiet, and I wondered whether to make myself a cup of tea or to try to get back to sleep. But the night’s entertainment hadn’t finished. The dulcet tones of “cardboard box being kicked along medieval ramparts” came next, culminating in it being booted down the steps opposite and along the street by a man who for some reason made me think of Enrico Caruso.

By now, it was about 6ish and I was beginning to think that was it, but of course the reason why Caruso was out indulging in a spot of pre-dawn box-booting was that the binmen were coming.

These guys also had a loud conversation, probably about the Health and Safety rules they were infringing, as they had a vast amount of rubbish in the trailer thing they were pulling behind the forklift, and indeed when they finally moved off one guy had to steady it from behind. Although quite what he’d have done if it really had tried to escape, I’m not sure.

As I watched their lights disappear under the archway to the right, I breathed a sigh of relief and headed back to bed.

Then the next set of trolleys full of food arrived…

The moral of this story is always, but always, travel with a set of really good earplugs.

Oh, and just in case you’re thinking “But how much noise can a trolley really make?”, here’s one of them in action. Yes, it really did sound like this.

Magic is not age-related

March 27, 2018March 28, 2018 ~ janeishly ~ 2 Comments

Yesterday I read this interesting and topical post which, ironically, I found highly offensive. Why? Because of its implication that everybody born before 2001 is some kind of blinkered idiot simply because they don’t belong to Generation Z, and have not, therefore, been endowed with the ‘magic’ powers of that age group.

I don’t care one way or another about gender or race. I’m not interested if you’re Catholic, Muslim or atheist. I don’t give a shit if you’re upper or lower class, providing you’re not an idiot about either. I’m certainly not a rabid feminist. Because, oddly enough, even though I’m a contemporary of the author of the article, I have a really simple view of the world. I think we should all be equal.

I’ve often looked back at my childhood and marvelled at my sheltered, apolitical upbringing. I was born on the Isle of Man in 1968, which meant that as a kid I experienced a kind of Famous Five existence largely denied to my peers growing up on the mainland. Everybody I knew was, by most people’s standards, pretty well off. Now don’t get me wrong – the Isle of Man is a tax haven, but for those of us whose families have come from there for generations this entails nothing positive. There was council housing and unemployment there just like everywhere else. But at the age of 11 or 12 my friends and I would spend our summer holidays travelling around the island by vintage steam train, electric tram, bicycle or foot, visiting medieval castles or scrambling on the cliffs. We could go anywhere safely, and did.

I was 5 when the island had its first murder for 43 years. In many parts of the world this would have been unheard of, even then.

Aged 10, I went home from school one day and asked my mother whether we were Catholic or Protestant, because I had no idea what the distinction meant. 50 miles across the sea to the west, this would have been engraved on my brain from infancy.

In May 1979, when Margaret Thatcher was elected, I thought a female prime minister was a good thing, because I had no idea of the difference in political parties.

Whenever we travelled to the mainland, I was always shocked at the number of burglar alarms, on even the meanest grimy terraced houses. There were, of course, burglars on the Isle of Man – my father was a policeman, and he was at one time part of the Ports Unit, responsible for spotting ne’er do wells on their way on to and off the island. But burglary wasn’t so prevalent that an average homeowner needed an alarm.

I was startled at the age of 14 when I realised that the burnt out buildings and vacant plots littering Liverpool, where the Manx ferry docked, were left over from the, to me, long previous World War II, which the city had never been prosperous enough to rebuild.

But it was at about that age that my innocence came to an end.

I’d already seen through the pitiful instructions for how to survive a nuclear war in “Protect and Survive”, the UK civil defence booklet published in 1980. Living on the Isle of Man, I learned early on what nuclear power was, and what effects it could have in the hands of the unscrupulous and negligent, regardless of what shiny new name you gave the processing plant. And Raymond Briggs’ “When the Wind Blows” finished off any illusions I had left on that score.

The Falklands War and the miners’ strike taught me very quickly what a Tory was, and how they would do anything to profit from and mislead their fellow humans. News coverage of these events taught me that I couldn’t trust the media, either tabloids, TV or even the ‘serious’ papers. (Interestingly, Wikipedia states that the Falklands War was covered ‘in a neutral fashion’. That’s not how I remember it!)

The Toxteth riots opened my eyes to institutional racism in the police force, so I wasn’t surprised that Stephen Lawrence didn’t get any kind of justice until long afterwards.

I was pretty well acquainted with the history of World War II, so I was horrified to discover that, not only did some people deny its worst atrocities had ever happened, but some others – who really ought to know better – were still fighting over the land they’d been allocated at the end of that conflict, illegally trying to expand its borders. And that the Western world was, for some reason, turning a blind eye to this.

I learned of climate change and animal cruelty, sexism and racism. I learned of pollution and the sickness we were spreading through the natural world by our thoughtlessness.

I realised how quickly people could fall through society’s safety net, no matter how comfortable they’d been before. During my master’s degree, I also discovered how rapidly society could collapse when a country is run by a government whose only real policy is to feather the nests of the rich. When I started my course, in September 1990, I was heading for a career in museums. By September 1991, museums were closing at the rate of several a week, as a result of funding cuts stemming directly from the Conservative government’s poll tax.

And then I left the Isle of Man for good and was immediately swamped by the sea of misery and hopelessness that was Britain in the early 1990s. I lived in inner city Birmingham and learned how the social services treat those in need of their aid. I learned how to make a little bit of MOT go a long way to keep an old car on the road ‘legally’, and how to survive on just a few quid a week. I saw people stealing from each other or turning to prostitution to fund their drug habits.

But I also saw people coming together and creating a new kind of society – a self-proclaimed underclass with new music and new forms of mass entertainment, where barter was self-evident and creativity rife. People living lightly in the landscape, taking their small homes with them as they moved, using minimal resources and causing no harm. That new music, those new forms of entertainment and that new way of living were deliberately targeted in the 1994 Criminal Justice Act.

But I was still pretty well off by many standards, and I soon worked out that it was better to be poor somewhere wealthy like Malvern than somewhere impoverished like Sparkhill.

Then came the Iraq war. I remember sitting in a pub where I was a regular, scoffing at the pictures of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ which so obviously showed earthmoving equipment and minor industrial buildings. The ensuing reaction from everyone in that rural pub other than the four people at my table demonstrated that – despite what they would insist today – they all thought I was naive at best and a traitor at worst.

Eventually I got a job. But I soon saw that I had no chance of ever having a decent house, or even a decent quality of life, in the UK. So I moved to France as soon as I could scratch together a few thousand pounds for a ruin in an impoverished area of the country. I think of myself as a European these days, and I’m proud to do so.

But I haven’t stopped despairing over our collapsing ecosystems or the plastic in our oceans, animals being transported long distances in hideous conditions or bankers being paid bonuses for fucking up the economy of the entire Western world. I haven’t closed my eyes to sweatshop countries producing designer labelled clothing for anorexic idiots to wear once in the pages of Hello! then discard like sweet wrappers. I firmly believe that we’re rapidly heading for man-made disaster of some type – though whether climatic, major inter-continental conflict or simply cheap-flight-induced-pandemic, I wouldn’t like to say.

I’ve done very well for myself. I have a home in Sweden and – if the renovation is ever finished – one in Normandy. I have my own business, which is doing better every year. I have friends all over the planet. I’m in the extremely fortunate position of having been able to get Swedish citizenship, thereby freeing me from the clutches of the ravening Brexiters, whose narrow-minded jingoism and sheer ignorance have the UK on a direct course back to IRA bombings and widespread rationing.

So I’m one of the lucky ones, and I’m grateful for that every day. But that doesn’t make me ignorant. It doesn’t stop me protesting against injustice. It doesn’t make me indifferent to other people’s suffering, or accepting of the greed and stupidity that still others wield to create and excuse it.

Just because I was born half a century ago doesn’t mean I don’t see entrenched attitudes and privilege just as clearly as the kids from Stoneman Douglas school.

So, Mr Tallon, don’t include me in your sweeping generalisations. I may not have grown up in the years since 9/11, but that’s not to say I haven’t been in the trenches. And I haven’t been alone. Maybe you’ve never had any empathy. Maybe being American gives you a different experience of life – let’s face it, everyone outside the USA, adults included, thinks that your attitude to guns is totally fucking insane.

Or maybe you’ve just never opened your eyes to what’s really going on in the world around you. Because you clearly haven’t noticed it, but many of our generation have been soldiers too.

The antibiotic myth

January 22, 2018January 22, 2018 ~ janeishly ~ Leave a comment

medication

There’s a programme on the radio this morning about the history of antibiotics. It was quite interesting while they were talking about the discovery of penicillin, but I’ve just had to turn it off.

Because, as I knew they would, they’ve got to the bit about antibiotic resistance all being our fault. “People became addicted to antibiotics” is how they phrased it.

By which they mean the following dialogue, which I know you recognise because you’ve played the part of the villain many many times:

Patient: Doctor, I have a cold and I really need antibiotics to cure it.

Doctor: I’m very sorry, but antibiotics don’t work against colds so they’re really not appropriate. I suggest you take an over the counter painkiller, drink plenty of liquid and rest.

Patient (threateningly): But I insist on having antibiotics! If you don’t give me antibiotics now, I’m going to get very very angry!

Doctor (cringing): No, no, please don’t hurt me! Here! (scribbles prescription and hurls it across the desk at the ravening patient)

I don’t know what the point of this myth is – although my cynical side tells me that it’s to distract us from the agricultural use of antibiotics which mean that most of us are being subject to constant low-level doses whether we want to or not – but isn’t it about time that the media stopped blaming antibiotic resistance on ordinary people? If there’s ever been over-prescribing of antibiotics for inappropriate uses, surely that’s down to the people doing the prescription, not the poor bloody patients?

Crême brulée! Or how to get the best dessert in a French restaurant

December 5, 2017December 5, 2017 ~ janeishly ~ 2 Comments

It’s occurred to me in recent weeks that there’s more going on than you think when you’re offered dessert in a French restaurant.

Now, I’m talking here about the kind of restaurant where they don’t print a menu – but of course you already know to avoid those, don’t you? The most this sort of place has is a chalk board with the menu du jour scribbled on it. But the menu du jour usually only lists the first two courses. So the available desserts always come as something of a surprise, and you really have to get your tactics right when it comes to choosing one.

MENU_desserts_preferes_francais

If you’re very specific about what constitutes a dessert, then you may already be limited to a couple of choices. If you want something chocolatey, you’re not likely to be offered more than mousse or fondant au chocolat. So that’s easy. If you’re a pie-eater, then you probably don’t even that much choice in large swathes of France – here in Normandy and in many other areas it’s always apple. Although where I used to live in the Limousin my other half got so blasé about the prune tart he now so desperately craves that he would only eat it if all the other variants (pear, apricot, peach etc. etc.) had run out. But even there he did once play an extremely good trump card in the dessert menu game and was rewarded with a piece of mirabelle tart, which he still reminisces about to this day.

Anyway, the way the dessert game goes is this. The waiter/waitress will sidle up and begin the manoeuvres with the traditional “Vous prenez un dessert ?” To which, of course, the only response is “Yes”, even if you already feel like your stomach is bursting, because once again this is a particular type of restaurant and the chances are that the price you’re paying includes dessert – and quite possibly coffee too.

The starting position thus established, the waiter/waitress is once again forced to make the first move. They rattle off the list of desserts. If your French isn’t good, or if they’ve got an impenetrable accent or a bad cold, you may have to put yourself in a disadvantageous position by asking them to repeat the list. Or you may – as I often do – simply panic at the plethora of choices and end up going for the first thing you’ll definitely like, only to hear something much nicer being offered to the next table five minutes later.

However, there’s an interesting thing about dessert menus, which I’ve only recently managed to formulate. If you wait right until the very end…. and then beyond it, you may just be offered the secret dessert.

Of course it’s not a secret to the restaurant staff, because it’s often the one they’ve squirrelled away for their own delectation later in the afternoon when you’ve all been turfed out full of boring old fromage blanc and îles flottantes. But they will offer it to you, if you can keep your nerve.

It has to be said at this point that the hidden dessert may actually be something that’s no nicer than the other things on offer. But you’ve got, in my estimation, a 30% chance of it being something absolutely stunning.

This happened to me recently (and the discerning reader will note that this was clearly not in Normandy). The exchange went something like this:

Waiter: “J’ai mousse au chocolat, tarte au pomme, crême caramel, îles flottantes, tarte à la pêche, baba au rhum, de la glâce, des sorbets…”

Me: (maintaining an expectant silence) …

Waiter: (faltering) “Et (sighs)… j’ai également une tarte bon accueil.”

Me: (brightening) “Et c’est quoi ?”

And the Tarte bon accueil (created by and named after the restaurant) turned out to be an indescribably good concoction of egg and mystery that tasted rather like the smell of an old French farmhouse, with added sugar. Smoky, acrid, sweet and fabulous. One to go on the list of Top desserts I have unearthed along with the Tarte délice au rhubarbe that I ate precisely once, about 12 years ago, and can still taste.

Today, however, I was outplayed by the waitress and patronne of the restaurant, who cleverly played the Age card just at the perfect moment:

“Il y a mousse au chocolat, crême brulée, tarte au pomme, fondant au chocolat avec crême anglaise, buche glacé…” Here she looked a little nervous and I really thought I had her – until she continued, with a slight quaver in her voice, “mais je ne me souviens pas de quelle saveur…” Then she came to a stop.

Only the Cruelty card would have trumped this, and I really didn’t have the heart to play it. A simple “C’est tout?” or even a suitably timed sigh might have worked, but she really is extremely elderly and I worry every time I visit the establishment that she’ll have retired, the place will have closed down, and that I’ll then have one less venue where I can hone my dessert hunting skills. So I caved and had the fondant au chocolat. And very nice it was too.

Just… probably not as nice as the dessert she had tucked away in the fridge to eat later.

Death of a lion: Fluff – 2005-2017

October 31, 2017October 30, 2017 ~ janeishly ~ 5 Comments

In 2005, as now, we were renovating in France. Renovating is horrible, hard work, and when you’re making it up as you go you need to stop and think often, ideally with an alcoholic beverage for company. Our place for stopping and thinking was the bar in the village 2 kilometres away.

One day, as we were setting off for the bar, Geoff said, “Let’s go a different way”. “OK”, I said, “I know a road I’ve been meaning to drive along to see if it’d be nice for a bicycle ride”.

And a few minutes later, as we drove along that new road, we passed three kittens playing on the grass verge. We carried on for about another 100 metres, expecting to see a house that they could have strayed from. There wasn’t one. They’d been dumped there, probably only a few minutes before.

I reversed the car, and the smallest kitten, a long-haired ginger ball of fur with a sweet face, came pottering straight up to Geoff and readily agreed to be picked up. Geoff brought the kitten to me in the car and went back to try to capture the others. The fluffy kitten immediately began exploring the car.

And so Fluff came into our lives.

the look — Fluff not long after we found him.

We did – eventually – capture the other two kittens, one tabby and one a short-haired ginger, both bigger and clearly more suspicious of people than their little brother. All three of them lived with us for a while until we found a nice new home for Tabby and Ginger (later renamed Tiger Tim and Citron). But by that time we simply couldn’t give Fluff up.

He was the smallest of the three, with tiny little teeth like plastic needles, and it took him ages to eat his food. His brothers would have finished a whole bowl each by the time he’d gummed his way through three mouthfuls, and he’d want to stop eating and go and play with them. In the end we used to have to lift him up to the newly-installed kitchen counter, still wrapped in protective plastic, and feed him separately, just to make sure he’d eaten enough.

This summer, I took a video of Fluff, now 12, eating some prawns off a plate on the kitchen floor. In one minute, he manages to ineptly eat about two-thirds of a prawn, scattering bits everywhere. He just never really got the hang of eating quickly.

He also never stopped being nosy.

Fluff wasn’t the only nosy one in the household.

Fortunately, he had ample opportunities to indulge his curiosity. He lived in ten different homes in two countries, and spent nights in many hotel rooms in between. He crossed Europe in a 7.5 tonne truck in the worst storm for 40 years, and visited the site of the Battle of Waterloo – twice. He took the overnight ferry across the Baltic several times, and thoroughly enjoyed gawping at the sea. He stared very hard at people on bicycles and children in prams. He made it quite clear that he didn’t approve of the Netherlands, or Denmark, to the point that future crossings of Europe were always planned to avoid both countries.

Although he was free range for the first 18 months of his life, once we moved away from that part of France he became mainly an indoor cat, being walked on a lead twice a day. Walking a cat is actually quite restful, although you rarely cover very large distances. I went through quite a lot of audiobooks while meandering slowly around the garden as Fluff sniffed at things and, occasionally, rolled in deer poo. By summer 2017, he’d got to the point where he could largely be walked without the lead.

The lion prowls the savannah. Sweden, summer 2017.

Everyone’s reaction on meeting Fluff was the same: “What a lovely cat!” “What a magnificent tail!” “Est-il un Persan ?” “Oh, isn’t he beautiful?” And he was, indeed, very attractive. No matter how grubby he got outdoors he always seemed to be clean again within minutes of coming back in.

My afternoon nap on the office sofa quickly became *our* afternoon nap.

But it was his sweet, playful nature that really stood out. He was naughty, sometimes. He was even bad tempered on very rare occasions. But mostly he was an enormously entertaining character, joining in with our conversations, demanding his walks, periodically jumping out from behind the furniture and grabbing us by the knees, tying himself into impossible positions while asleep and still insisting on playtime every day even at the age of 12. And he certainly took in a lot of information from his (too small) box next to my computer as I dictated translations while he snoozed.

He was always ready to join in a conversation.

He used to invent new games and expect us to learn the rules, and mostly we did – though I never quite understood what I was supposed to do when he was hiding under the table by the door.

When he died, two weeks ago today, almost completely out of the blue, it was a truly enormous blow. Of course it’s nice to be able to have the windows open, not to have fur all over everything and for us both to be able to plan to travel at the same time. But that’s a poor exchange for losing such a loving and amusing companion.

We had one final journey together. We took him back to that village in the Limousin where he’d first lived with us, and laid him to rest in a beautiful, peaceful spot facing the sunset.

He will, naturally, be much missed.