Charities take MDGs from the summit to the streets and the tweets

If it was not for the work of charities and select sections of the media, I worry that the UN Millennium Development Goals summit and its purpose would have passed many people by.

There has been some progress on the eight MDGs, but it is, at best, uneven and slow. For example, Eastern Asia has surpassed its target already for halving the proportion of people, between 1990 and 2015, whose income is less than $1 a day. However, in Sub-Saharan Africa and Western Asia it is lagging massively behind.

Continue reading at… http://community.thirdsector.co.uk/blogs/thirdsector/archive/2010/09/23/charities-take-mdgs-from-the-summit-to-the-streets.aspx

Voluntary groups show there’s power in numbers

There was a sense of unity at the Protest the Pope march in London on Saturday, which is no mean feat considering there were around 10,000 individuals, many of them defined by different beliefs, lifestyles, religions and creeds.

Continue at… http://community.thirdsector.co.uk/blogs/thirdsector/archive/2010/09/20/voluntary-groups-show-there-s-power-in-numbers.aspx

No Nathaniel no – keep your kit on please

So I’m sitting in a booth. Nothing strange there. I’m leaning back, the padded leather cushion behind me gives a little; I stretch out and wait for the next act.

As the music starts, it’s a tune that I know – The Spirit of Man, from War of the Worlds. Yes, the classic song that urges a despairing vicar who has given up hope in the face of a martian invasion to trust in humanity. When I first heard this song, I felt a rousing in my heart. I imagined the blood-red skies in an apocalyptic landscape with mechanical Martian structures crushing humans and, with it, our hope. I’d had a few Bacardis but I was far from delusional. Read the lyrics for yourself:

NATHANIEL: Once there was a time when I believed without hesitation
That the power of love and truth could conquer all in the name of salvation
Tell me what kind of weapon is love, when it comes to the fight
And just how much protection is truth against all Satan’s might

BETH: There must be something worth living for
There must be something worth trying for
Even some things worth dying for
And if one man can stand tall
There must be some hope for us all
Somewhere, somewhere in the spirit of man

Okay, so it’s a bit biblical for my liking, but it resonated. I was overcome with the power of insignificance and the magnitude of the universe. And white rum is powerful stuff, I’m telling you. (Click here to listen on Spotify).

Back to the comfy cushioned seat… so my foot starts tapping. It’s War of the Worlds, I cry! How great, that at the Edinburgh Festival, I am seeing a show that involves War of the Worlds, for nothing. A free act that I found by chance.

Imagine my surprise when Beth (the character who urges Nathaniel to not give in) has a quick grope of the vicar’s crotch. It was a slip of the hand, my more prudish side insists to the perplexed perverted one. Oh – there it goes again. It seems this vicar is as randy as a Catholic priest at a school play.

And Beth is now busy massaging her bosom while telling the small (so very, very small) audience about the ‘spirit of man’. Now when I heard that song for the first time, I made the assumption that the spirit of man was a catch-all phrase for humanity (albeit disguised with token sexist terminology). But according to this Beth, Nathaniel’s spirit was bottled up someone down below his belly button. It seemed she had mistaken it for a genie’s lamp.

It was as Beth stripped off her corset to reveal nipple tassles, that I realised no amount of Bacardi was ever going to be enough to reverse this image from my mind.

I can’t really explain how ridiculous this display really was. It was completely dislocated from reality or comedy. It made a mockery of the institution that is War of the Worlds. Imagine porno versions of your favourite songs/films:

–    Apocalypse (fuck me) Now
–    Schindler’s Fist
–    Star Whores
–    (Lock) Jaws

It just doesn’t work. It never will.

Needless to say, the night got worse. The next act involved lycra and grown men pretending to be flies and swatting the audience with fly swats – never a crowd pleaser I find, hitting people.

This was followed by the icing on my rotten made-of-shit cake. A Burlesque act. On hearing the words, my girlfriend and mate did a runner to the bar, leaving me to sit back in my booth, like a sleazy motherfucker and watch a woman strip. I had to watch the bags you see. But no-one else knew that. No, the rest of the 12-strong audience glanced at me and thought: she’s loving it, loving it, loving it (cue bad 90s music).

And I really, really, really wasn’t. Not only am I against stripping for the very obvious reason that it degrades women’s bodies to mere objects for (usually) men’s pleasure and nearly always acts as a precursor into selling a body as if it’s a cup of coffee, but I am against it because I don’t find it enjoyable.

I’m sitting and watching a woman remove her clothes in time to music and expected to clap afterwards. Well hey, I hate to ruin the illusion, but rhythm ain’t that hard. Even my washing machine has it. And taking off my clothes? I do it every night. Without any rapturous applause, I might add. The added (more) nipple tassles, feather boa and glitter may as well have been rusty nails in my libido.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking the woman in question. She was attractive and surely confident. But I’m sure as hell that stripping just isn’t an art, no matter how much you gyrate/how far you can bend over/how extreme the pout or how long I have to wait for you remove a thong from up your arse. Critics wouldn’t spend decades debating the merit of the lighting.  I wouldn’t take my Mum to see that at the Tate Modern. I wouldn’t buy a print of it from the gift shop. And I wouldn’t put a postcard of the aforementioned arse on my noticeboard above the fridge. It just isn’t art and, glancing at the rest of the audience, most appeared visually uncomfortable.

This kind of stuff isn’t suitable for a comedy/theatre festival. It isn’t an art form, it isn’t particularly funny (if you don’t count the poor performer having to walk butt-naked through the audience when the lights were switched on at the end to the bogs).

There must be something worth living for, Beth told Nathaniel. And I don’t think it’s hard-ons that will be the salvation of humanity…

I want to be ‘one of those people’

I’ve spent a lifetime wanting to be ‘one of those people’. Whether it was a person with a placard outside an embassy or the person at school that could eat the entirety of a pear (core/pips included) without so much as a flinch, there have been lots of little and much bigger things that I have wished I could do.

Seeing myself as perhaps rather a sedentary bystander (if that isn’t too much of an oxymoron) of life in general, there has always been a kind of knot of frustration deep below the sheltered layers of quilted laziness and fatigue in my under-achieving brain.

I want to do good stuff, great stuff even.

I read history books, I get Wikipedia ‘Articles of the Day’ and that’s not to mention the constant reminders in the news – they are all showing me images, footage and sound of those kind of people out there doing really important things, while I sit under the glow of halogen office lights, my biggest success of the day being typing at a ridiculously fast rate and buying my favourite soup from the food trolley before it sells out. It’s not quite what I had in mind when I drooled half-asleep over A-level set texts and stayed up buzzing on Pro Plus at uni believing that all that shit really did matter.

It’s a curious thing, watching people. And I don’t mean in a creepy, follow-you-home kind of way. The ones around me now are consumed by the screens before them, some plugged in with headphones too, hypnotised by the modernity of technology. But I am talking about those other people again – the ones who find themselves in warzones, in protests, in conversations about things that matter.

How? I have always thought. How do they end up there and how did I end up here? No-one in sandals approaches you when you hit adulthood with a big signpost asking ‘Do you want to do something worthwhile with your life or do you want to focus on you for a bit longer?’ If they did, I was too busy sleeping or watching Eastenders.

And as much admiration as I had for those other people, I couldn’t help but hate them a little bit too. The irony hey? I didn’t just do nothing, but I also resented the people who were doing something.

So it was surprising, even to me, to see myself breaking out of this mould last weekend and becoming ‘one of those people’ who seemed so intangible previously.

There I found myself, among around 7,999 other women walking down Regent Street towards Trafalgar Square, the wind whipping up the passion in our cheeks, the crisp colours of marble statues striking a pose against the sky radiant in blue. It sounds fantastical, magical, and it was.

In my previous experiences as an outsider to days such as this, I had always suspected, and actually hoped, that the event itself was rather dull; that the excitement seen on the faces of those involved was just because they so desperately wanted to be having fun; that really their feet were aching and they were dying for a cup of tea.

Yet on London’s Million Women Rise march on 6 March 2010, as cold as the temperature was that afternoon, I didn’t care one bit.

On a purely personal level, the sense of purpose and unity that arose from being part of ‘something’ that wasn’t an office party or a queue for a bus was really quite enlightening.

Listening to the voices of women whose lives had been about plights of passion and fights for rights seemed to lock into place that knot of frustration that had been tightening in my brain, and it made more sense. The frustration could become motivation instead.

It’s not so hard to be part of something. It only takes finding a cause that you believe in (and there’s a million out there) and actually participating in it, – whether that’s through signing petitions, attending rallies, emailing MPs or telling friends, the gain far outweighs the effort every time.

We are always told that today’s generation lacks that sense of community that existed in previous decades. I don’t personally agree with that, I think we have just become more global and network more extensively through the aid of technology. Yet there is something special about being part of something that matters.

I have chosen women’s and gay rights as my principal areas for concern because I believe deeply in equality. Along with my usual daily grind of work and more work, I am finding time to develop my interests in these areas and, in doing so, have met some wonderful people and learnt some fascinating stuff. The more I learn, the more awake I feel. That empty coma-inducing mentality that I survived on before is learning how to really think and feel again – that incredible self-awareness so key to human beings is no longer being wasted on flickering screens and chit-chat alone.

My individual actions as a fledgling feminist may not make a discernable difference, but knowing that, as a collective, I am part of a movement that has and continues to empower and demand change, is motivating in itself.

So if you’re feeling a little lost/bored/intellectually and morally deadened/any of the above, then just consider becoming ‘one of those people’. I can certainly recommend it.

Should a straight woman run a gay news website?

Last week the editor of Pink News publicly ‘outed’ herself as straight in the Guardian. ‘So what?’ some might sigh. Surely in this modern world of alleged equality, we gays should well know how sexuality is not a factor in how well someone can do a job? But if this is the case, how come so many people have got their pink knickers in a twist?

To read the rest of this wonderful story by me, click here. And feel free to comment underneath: http://www.lesbilicious.co.uk/campaigns-politics/should-a-straight-woman-run-a-gay-news-website/#ixzz0hg8opZLD

Lesbian smear campaign

Lesbians can catch cervical cancer.

If you have trouble understanding that sentence then you may find that, throughout your life, simple stuff generally confuses you. Don’t be alarmed to find out that most people probably think you are a twat. The likely cause of this is that you probably are.

You see, if even a layperson struggled to understand the above statement, I would be shocked. It’s not exactly a revelation is it? (PS Did you know that women and straight men can get AIDS too?). So to face such ignorance from a qualified professional took some beating.

Today I went to a Family Planning Clinic (Why? You might ask… lesbians can’t have kids can they?), to discuss why once a month I turn into Regan at the drop of a hat and cry at episodes of Jeremy Kyle. I meet with a nurse who is friendly enough.

She asks what I use for contraception and I politely explain that I don’t really need any – ‘I’m gay.’ ‘Brilliant,’ she replies, more than a little flustered.

On we go with the questions… ‘Are you pregnant?’

‘Err… no. Not unless my girlfriend has a big giant invisible cock.’ I didn’t say that though. I just shook my head.

‘Have you ever had a cervical smear?’

‘Yes,’ I reply, thinking that they were compulsory and remembering the dozens of letters I’ve had from my GP urging me to make sure I have regular smear tests.

‘Have you really? Why on earth would they do that? I mean, you don’t need one do you? How funny.’

At this point, my cervix probably blushed, it’s hard to tell, but my face certainly did. ‘I was sure that every woman over a certain age has to have a smear test.’

‘Really?’ Yes, that’s what the NURSE actually said to me.

‘I don’t think sexuality has anything to do with getting cancer.’

‘I suppose not,’ she pondered.

Now, forgive me for condemning this woman. She was pretty nice other than this and didn’t intentionally mean to make me feel hugely uncomfortable in what was a pretty personal and private meeting anyway. But I could not go so far as to say that her comments or attitude were harmless. Far from it – she directly implied that as a lesbian, I do not require regular, if any, cervical smear tests and therefore that I am not at risk from cervical cancer.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this is bullshit in its rawest form. It’s staggering that a health professional, whose job it is to inform vulnerable women about sexual issues, could be so discriminatory and ignorant at the same time.

Sadly, this isn’t an isolated case. Diva magazine did a feature on this very thing not that long ago.

According to this, statistics show that a woman’s risk of cervical cancer is cut by 84% if she has a smear test every five years, and 91% if she has a smear every three years. It’s estimated that NHS cervical screening saves more than 1000 lives each year.

A British Medical Journal editorial published in 2003 said: “An unfortunate perception exists among healthcare providers and women who have sex with women that they don’t need regular cervical smears… sexual intercourse with men is a powerful risk factor for cervical cancer. However, it’s important to counter the erroneous assumption that women who have sex with women aren’t at risk of catching human papillomavirus. Around one in five women who’ve never had heterosexual intercourse have human papillomavirus which is associated with developing high-grade cervical intraepithelial neoplasia” – in other words abnormal cervical tissue development.

So please, don’t ever be fooled into thinking that because you sleep with women and not men that you can’t develop cervical cancer.

It is more than just a myth. It’s a lie that puts lives at risk.

Women’s rights can’t be wrong

Tammy Wynette said it well really. Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman (I’ll selectively ignore the rest of her song lyrics for the purpose of this blog). But she had a point. It is hard. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining – I’m not saying I want to start pissing standing up or take testosterone replacement, but I feel quite justified in my right to moan about the burdens that womanhood has placed on my shoulders.

I attended a discussion group recently. The topic was whether lesbians in this country should care about lesbians in other countries – where approaches are more hostile – and what we should do about it. The question prompted a variety of responses. In the main, it was heartening to hear that people cared; they wanted to help, but weren’t sure how. The idea of setting up a human trafficking ring to bring over Nigerian lesbians was raised, but as with most good ideas, practicality reared its ugly head. We just aren’t well connected enough to the underworld of London.

But what of those people who are subjected in other countries to harsh and often brutal responses to their sexuality? How exactly can we help? It’s not like hunger or poverty – I can’t just pack an old shoebox full of unwanted toys and clothes and send it off with a wing and a prayer. With the exception of talking/writing and, in doing so, raising awareness, there’s very little I personally can do that is short of packing my rucksack and heading off with a ‘Gay and Proud’ placard and a big red target painted on my back.

It’s a depressing thought and a sobering one at that – I am lucky. Sure, it was tough telling my Dad that I thought that rather than saving up for a wedding he should start a fund for IVF if he ever wanted a grandchild, however, my life is not in danger and I am not persecuted for my beliefs.

It was with interest that I listened to one person explaining that we should leave some matters up to the people in their own country to sort out. This caused some outrage, but I remained quiet, not sure what to make of such a statement. The person argued that, if such laws (such as anti-gay legislation) had been voted in by the people of the country, or the main religious movement there dictated that it was wrong, it wasn’t for us to go over with our rainbow flags and demand change. What about the gay people who are born into that sort of country, some asked. ‘They can just leave and come here or somewhere more tolerant.’

This is exactly the sort of argument that some people base their anti-Iraq sentiments on – it’s not up to us to go sorting out other countries’ issues and problems based on our own principles of democracy. There is some logic in this perhaps. It would certainly lead to less conflicts and an easier life for people over here.

However, this laissez-faire attitude is like putting the brakes on world development. It’s the ‘let someone else worry about that because it doesn’t affect me’ kind of thought that allows bad stuff to continue and gain momentum, making it not just bad but terrifying.

Sure, it’s not really my problem that there’s a lesbian in Iran living in fear because it’s against her religion to be attracted to women. She might get beaten for it. She may just have to shut up, shut down, spend her life in denial/hiding. What can I do about it? I’ll just thank my lucky stars that geography saved me from a life of misery.

I’m sorry, but I can’t do this. It just doesn’t feel right to turn a blind eye. How on earth will things ever improve if we don’t consider the world as a global community, as opposed to one fragmented by man-made borders that our ancestors gave names to?

As a lesbian, you are given a label. I am therefore more likely to be interested in the lives and fates of others like myself. But going back to my original point (if you can remember back that far!), what about my role as a woman? Surely there’s enough other women that I don’t have to care too much about their rights – I’ve got enough on my plate with gay issues haven’t I? Yet another question that I find hard to answer and one that arose from the discussion group.

While talking about the persecution of gay people abroad, we stumbled across the subject of strip clubs. There was a general consensus in the room that, as women who like women, we should care about women’s issues. It’s a fairly logical argument I suppose, but not everyone agreed. Despite the common conception that many lesbians are avid feminists, many aren’t much interested in the rights of women beyond their own sphere of influence. It got me thinking… should lesbians be expected to carry the torch of women’s rights moreso than any other woman? Historically, yes, this has often been the case, giving many lesbians their atypical ‘man-hating’ label in the process.

The subject arose when it was discussed that a lesbian club in London featured women pole-dancing and stripping. ‘So what?’ argued one woman. ‘Like men, I like looking and it’s just a bit of fun.’ Another vehemently argued the opposite – that it is this kind of ‘fun’ that damages women worldwide, perpetuating the myth that women are a commodity that can be bought and sold as readily as a cup of coffee – that it is acceptable to judge women aesthetically and solely from a sexual standpoint. It is a tough call – I hear the first woman – why should she care? Just because she sleeps with women in her private life, like many thousands of men, she enjoys looking at women sexually and feels justified in doing so. By being gay, she didn’t take an oath to look out for the rights of other women, gay or straight.

So why is it that the majority of the group took the opposite approach. ‘Who better to care about the needs of women than us?’ said one. And maybe she’s right. Being gay by no means suggests that you must be a feminist or an activist of any form, but the nature of our sexuality means that we take an interest in women and the needs of women, both straight and lesbian.

As women, we should be outraged at the idea of women stripping for us in a club because they are one of us, regardless of our sexuality. By ignoring the issue, we are agreeing in principle to the sexualisation of young women, deeming it acceptable even to other women who, in reality, should be the friend and not the foe. On a superficial level, most gay women would have to be chemically castrated to not find the idea of half-naked dancing women attractive, but we must think with our heads not our libidos. We have a duty to do so.

Maybe men don’t have to do this, I am sure many don’t as they gain gratification from the idea that these attractive, often drug-dependent or poverty-stricken young women are actually dancing for their pleasure (and not the dirty cash that pays their undeclared wages that are not protected by employment laws). Yet I for one cannot switch off and just think of them solely as sexual objects. I see another ‘me’ (albeit less good looking and with arguably smaller tits and a less flexible hip action).

I am well aware that there is an argument, often by women in the business themselves, that stripping is a life decision that is well informed and well paid; that they are not coerced and not exploited. Individually, for those women, that is great. I am glad to hear it. Yet it cannot be ignored that in many cases this is just not true. And stripping for cash is often a pre-cursor to a much more dangerous activity – prostitution.

Should we as women shoulder more responsibility? It seems like many of us believe yes, myself included, however my reasons for believing this are kind of vague. I just care. I am just not really sure why I do.

Being a woman is a label that many of us share. It is a unique identity, yet is also so generic. Beyond my own experience of being a female, I care deeply about others’ experience of it too. It should be something positive – something that can be freely explored within the understanding and accepting framework of a more general society. However, as is the case for many lesbians, many women too face discrimination and stereotyping, in this country and further afield.

I strongly believe that I have a duty to care about other people, whatever their sexuality, religion, race or indeed gender. If being a woman means that I better understand the needs of other women, then I should take this belief and put it to good use. The women’s movement has come on leaps and bounds in this century and the last, but it is by no means a fait accompli. For this reason, I will continue to write about these issues and try to encourage others to feel the same. By staying quiet, I am tacitly acknowledging that there is nothing that needs to change in the world and that isn’t something that I am prepared to accept…

Helen Goddard – should she really be branded a sex offender?

Rex Features

Yesterday, music teacher Helen Goddard, aged 26, was jailed for having sex with a 15-year-old female pupil at a fee-paying school outside London. She was sentenced to 18 months in prison, has been put on the Sex Offenders’ Register for 10 years and has been banned from working with children for life.

On reading this story, I was forced to question the morality of such a punishment. Anyone that has read the details behind the case will know that the relationship between the two was most definitely consensual, instigated by the pupil, and was of an intimate and loving nature. Yes, sex was involved, but it was not the driving force of the affair and not the only thing to focus on.

The girl’s parents are rightly outraged that their daughter lied to them and that a teacher, which they effectively pay, misused her authority and position of trust.

But isn’t that the end of it? The girl wasn’t morally raped – she was legally raped. Having sex with someone under the age of consent, 16, is rape in the eyes of the law. So why does it make me uncomfortable that I don’t seem to be seeing through these same eyes?

Goddard has lost her career, her integrity, her reptuation (a former child trumpet prodigy who played at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in 2000) and been through a very public and humiliating trial with sordid details of her sex life exposed in most of the nationals. This is a young woman whose primary action was to fall in love and to act upon this love.

Many people will argue that there is more to this than love – that she was in a position of trust, that she took advantage of a hormone-fuelled teenager, even that she is some sort of deviant for having found affection in the arms of someone 10 years her junior. But is she a predator? Is she a rapist? Is she a sex offender?

There has been no question that she pursued the pupil – a relationship was formed out of a friendship, a closeness that became something more – something that has happened to most people the world over – you meet someone, there’s a connection. Of course, no-one forced Goddard to act upon this desire. She is a 26-year-old woman, and speaking myself as one, I know that by no means am I always grounded enough to make the right decisions, especially when it comes to matters of the heart.

Rape is a hate crime. Is this what we are discussing here? It is a nasty and ugly abuse of power, an act of force and usually violence, not a romantic weekend in Paris, not a walk in the park that turned into a kiss, a text message that reads: ‘It’s going to be a beautiful day. I love you. You are on my mind all night.’

Fifteen-year-olds, and younger, across the country are having sex. They have sex with other people their age, with those older, younger – to criminalise each action would be absurd. Goddard was a teacher, so of course, she must be held accountable for her actions; lose her job, maybe face a teaching ban, but she is not a sex offender and does not need to go to prison to understand the mistake she has made.

The media loves this sort of story. Ooh it is a sex story – even better a nice little teacher pupil-fantasy scenario. And a lesbian? Bingo – let’s splash it across the front pages with a nice picture of the so-called sexual predator, looking very err… predatory as she walks into court (where she later bursts into tears on being sentenced). What could possibly satsify the salacious appetites of the tabloids, and sadly, the nationals, further? Surely only fluffy handcuffs and sex toys (god forbid) can taint her character just a bit more? (because these are the tools of the devil don’t you know?).

This is all without the mention of paedophilia – as necessary as the humble printing press in creating a tabloid these days. The media is full of this kind of paedo-hysteria, stranger danger bullshit, constantly implying that the world is full of predators stalking our young people and forcing them into bad and dangerous ways.

Look behind the Goddard story, behind the draconian and blanket laws, and find a story that is both sad and heartening. The judge in the case chose not to impose a ban on the couple seeing each other, despite the law essentially branding Goddard a sex offender so implicitly admitting that they do not actually believe this to be the case. The judge rejected a prosecution request to ban the teacher from contacting her victim for five years, claiming it would be ‘unnecessary, unkind, and cruel to the victim’. Does this not also give the impression that the girl would be worse off for not seeing her lover than by having contact?

This lack of ban means that she will be able to contact her from prison, as well as see her privately when released. It is obviously something that the couple, at this stage, plan to do, with Goddard punching the air in victory in court, when being told that no such ban would be imposed.

Obviously, the court is not accepting the fact that Goddard is a risk to the pupil. The judge also refused, another prosecution request, to ban Goddard from being allowed to be alone with underage girls – once again, demonstrating the fact that the teacher is not viewed as a threat to young people in any sense.

According to Goddard’s barrister, the teacher ‘is quite young for her age’ and he claimed that the couple continue to ‘love each other very much’.

The law is in place to both protect and punish. Yet cases such as this merely show how black and white law is when applied. Surely cases should be judged on individuality? Surely a ‘victim’s’ wishes and thoughts should be taken into account? This is merely a sentence for sentencing’s sake. Goddard will have a large part of her life absolutely ruined and is being portrayed as some kind of sexual monster because of it. The judge admitted it was a ‘difficult’ case, yet was powerless to use any sense of perspective or proportion.

Someone once used the analogy of if you picked up a pound coin on the ground and put it in your pocket, then by the principles of law, you could be charged with theft and sentenced accordingly. Is this not one of those cases? A knee-jerk overkill reaction to a crime that is essentially innocuous for all parties? It was something that could have been dealt with within the school, not made public, and not brought to a criminal trial.

A statement by the girl’s parents (as printed in the predictably biased Daily Mail piece) states: ‘Our teenage girl has been led to believe by Miss Goddard that their contact is within the bounds of a normal relationship, apart from the fact that our daughter is a few months underage. From our understanding, Miss Goddard and our daughter feel that it is possible to continue their relationship without difficulty when our daughter is 16 at the end of this month. In conveying this to our daughter, and taking no responsibility for her actions, we do not believe Miss Goddard has fully understood the seriousness of her breaking the boundaries and completely breaching the trust embedded in the teacher-pupil relationship.’

While I am sympathetic to the parents, it is all to easy to blame Goddard as the vile perpertrator. Their contact, although unusual, is ‘within the bounds of a normal relationship’ if they chose to let it be as they are both consenting and by all accounts, the pupil has reached a level of sexual maturity in order to be able to make this judgement. The girl is nearly 16, so agonisingly close, it makes you wonder what Goddard’s punishment would have been if she were to have embarked on this affair just a few months later. Would the world look kindly on their plight? Would she have gone away with a rapped knuckle and a P45? The world of ‘what ifs’ is probably plaguing her right now as she sits in a cell wondering where it all went wrong. The parents claim she has not fully understood the seriousness of her actions – I would say that she most definitely has. As a teacher and a woman of 26, she will have known the risks involved, even if she did not fully grasp that a nasty future of incarceration and humiliation would be on its way.

Love makes us do stupid things. It makes our judgements cloudy, makes us rebellious, makes us defy the odds. Literature is awash with these Romeo-Juliet, love across the boundaries-type sagas and usually they have us swooning, hoping that our love-torn protagonists will beat the system, overcome the prejudice and be entitled to achieve what they both, as two human individuals, truly and independently desire.

As Helen Goddard ponders her future now, I would love to ask her just one question? Would you make the same mistake again? And if I was a gambling woman, I would place my bet on a ‘yes’. Love is not a choice as this harsh and stoic law would assume. It is grey, complex and extremely divisive. Young people are entitled to their opinions and laws which seek to protect them must, in turn, respect this. I just hope that the couple’s feelings can withstand the media and parental pressure, which has undoubtedly harmed the young girl more than any caring and loving relationship ever could, and they can go on to prove the legal system and its army of Daily Mail reading, democracy-hating followers, well and truly wrong.

How the Cornflake Girl ate Hammersmith for breakfast

Straddled, she sits, her legs clad in shimmying silver tights atop killer black heels.

Aflame, her hair long, unnervingly straight, a cloak behind which to hide her pale, unassuming face.

Now we get a lot of oddballs in Hammersmith – it’s not uncommon to see the full spectrum of society waiting for a bus outside HMV so a slightly disturbed 40-something muttering the word ‘motherfucker’ over and over under her breath is just rite of passage round here.

Difference is, hundreds of people have paid to see this one – and not just in London – all over the UK. We are, of course, talking about Tori Amos. The feisty fireball from North Carolina came and delivered to a packed audience at the legendary Apollo arena last Thursday (10 September).

When I arrived, I was late. I had to climb over legs to find my seat and Amos was already in full swing (damn, missed Cornflake Girl). It took only moments for me to realise what I was witnessing. There she was, legs akimbo in a cage of keyboards, belting out a song I hadn’t heard in years, but had stayed dormant in my psyche.

It was my first Tori live experience and I was stunned – the voice was so powerful, the stage presence even more so, considering it was just her alone with two guys in the dark far corners facing out to the eager crowd.

Tori Amos isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. She wails. She says some odd things. Her melodies are often hidden beneath layers of complex piano playing and wolf-like howls.

Yet her talent is undeniable. That night, it came and smacked me in the face with the full force that Amos has always intended it to. Her music isn’t forgiving – it’s not meant for the faint-hearted, or those who wish to have their music presented in a simplistic three-minute format – an intro, verses, chorus, more verses, chorus, bridge, chorus, bridge – throw in a key change for dramatic effect, if you will.

No, instead there are lyrics so undiscernable that even Alan Turing would have a problem deciphering them. Listen closely and there’s poetry in every line; a feeling conjured up, a place, a memory.

But I can’t attempt to write a review without coming back to the very core of her performance – the piano. It was staggering to see a modern musician so competent at music in a world where we are often so used to having just a charismatic front person who may hold a guitar in the odd song.

Watching someone play the piano isn’t typically a visual treat. It’s grounding and unsociable when a big crowd is watching. Yet Amos delivered each song from between her pianos with such vibrancy, such energy, such passion, that the keys and their sound became all we could think about. She was captivating as she writhed, sexually, over her stool, kicking her heels and occasionally coyly looking out from behind the wall of ginger at the adoring faces before her.

The applause was raptorous, the songs unforgettable and the lady – who is a rare reminder of a musician that has refused to sell out to commerciality despite tens of albums – is not for turning. For fans expecting to see the voice that they had listened to in their bedrooms for years, this was Tori Amos at her purest. Long may those Little Earthquakes in the world of modern music continue… it was a motherfuckin pleasure.

Not enough gay girls on film

It’s Saturday night. Soho is bustling with crowds, all jostling down the cobbles, flashes of colour and lots more besides.

I’m sitting with Vernon Kay and wondering what his wife is like is in bed.

No, not another of my warped dreams, it is in fact, a reality. The Bolton Wanderer is on the TV and the images of Soho are a distant memory in the back of my mind.

It’s Saturday night, and I am sitting in, playing along with a gameshow that used to be on when I was 12. It’s like one elongated menstrual cycle with lots of pain.

Flicking through the TV guide (the printed one, I am rejecting digital until they force it on me in 2012), I see Graham Norton, people jumping over a giant totem pole in lycra, John fucking Barrowman, Graham Norton, Little Britain, more lycra, and did I mention Graham Norton?… I mean, no wonder I am thinking about Tess Daly in a gimp suit (joke, honestly).

But seriously, what the hell am I supposed to do? If I want to see another lesbian, it’s either hop in a cab, watch Bad Girls for some pretend ones, or that increasingly all-too-familiar friend, the internet.

Now, maybe if I did have cable, then I could watch The Ellen Show on repeat or catch a glimpse of a lesbian in Gray’s Anatomy, but I don’t. And I won’t for that matter – it’s a completely baseless point of principle, so don’t ask me to explain, I just like to feel outraged from time to time.

Am I asking too much? In a word, no. Lesbians aren’t an endangered species, but I am more likely to spy one up a mountain, right behind the snow leopard on the BBC’s Planet Earth. So where the hell are we on the small screen?

I’m not talking about the fake ones either – in Hollyoaks, Eastenders etc. I mean, I don’t turn up my nose at these, but it’s a bit like booking a magician for your birthday and ending up with Derren Brown.

What about good old Rhona Cameron I hear you cry? She’s been holding up the entire UK lesbian quota for the past decade it seems, and even she has disappeared down a big L-shaped hole of late. Christ, the poor woman is probably in The Priory for exhaustion.

So who else does that leave representing Britain? Like UHU, I’m stuck. Answers written on the back of a postcard, or maybe a stamp, please.

This really is a national disgrace.

Gay men get on TV more easily than dust. They present primetime TV shows and although they are usually made to come across like crotchless Action Men – gay in spirit, humour and manner, just not in bed – at least they get a look in.

Children growing up, exploring their feelings, look up to people on television as role models. So who are our young lesbians looking up to? Pat Butcher? Now I’m not saying life wouldn’t be easier if all lesbians didn’t wear pink earrings and bitch slap Babs Windsor for a laugh – it would certainly make them easier to spot – but this is a serious issue and one that broadcasters should be taking head on.

It is great when big TV dramas include lesbian storylines, but why not use some gay actors for once? Why are they always straight and pretending? It shouldn’t make a huge difference, and if we were represented substantially, I wouldn’t even be making this point, but we’re not, and it sucks.

Maybe we like to hide our lights under our (ahem) bushells, but why are we not doing something on our television screens regularly, and why when it is, is it always sexual? I mean Christ, there must be a few cat lovers willing to go on Pet Rescue or something.

By sitting back and watching on in silence, we are driving our lesbian youngsters underground; forcing them to seek their only solace in YouTube clips, blush in front of an Emmerdale liplock with their Mum watching on, steal copies of Diva off the top shelf, and have to laugh at silly films by silly boys about vampires.

So unless Tess Daly is about to come out live on the lottery, which is about as likely as my numbers coming in (or Derren Brown predicting his own demise), things aren’t looking promising for my night in. As some bloke called Simon Cowell said recently, Britain has got talent – let us remember, that some of it is, in fact, lesbian.

So a round of applause to that Cowell bloke for taking on America’s most recognised gay woman, Ellen DeGeneres, and giving her a judging role on the biggest TV show in the land, American Idol. Sexuality aside, I am sure she will be a great judge and make a very humorous contribution.

Shit, is American actually becoming the land of the free? Black presidents and gay women on American Idol? With Cameron waiting in the UK government’s wings like Fagan with a hard on, ready to steal our money and our morality, Britain runs the risk of going back to the Stone Ages. As much as it pains me to say it, we should follow America’s example and promote minorities (especially good looking ones – joke) as beacons of hope for the rest of us, who are sat at home in their pyjamas, plotting to kill Graham Norton in despair of it all.

Can’t get no city satisfaction

Life shouldn’t be a battle. So why is it that I constantly feel like the rope in a tug-of-war? It seems that this modern world has left me feeling torn. No, I haven’t been drinking at lunch time, I am actually trying to make a social commentary here.

Walking along the dirty streets of Hammersmith, my soul cries out occasionally like one of those mad beggars you see outside tube stations, telling me to pitch my sights a little higher. What it means is flee – find a job that involves milking the laughing cow or selling organic pastries off the back of a goat. Forget this 9-5 bollocks – you don’t even get to watch Neighbours on a weekday.

It’s easy, some people say. Just sell up and move to the country. There’s even a programme about doing it. But when it comes to it, I panic. As wonderful as the thought of homemade cakes and acres of grass to skip about in, who the hell is going to bake the scones and mow the lawns, because it certainly ain’t me. And therein lies the rub. I would have to be rich to make this country escape a worthwhile one. Otherwise, I’ll just be poor with a mouse problem. A London werewolf in Ludlow or somewhere, only coming out at night to avoid the farmers.

Another worry is that I might (whisper) be a little bored. My mind is fine-tuned to be incredibly lazy these days. Television, the internet and radio do most of my thinking for me. There is barely a time when I am not reading or listening to something. What would I do faced with the back-end of a farmyard animal, or worse still, a load of farmers?

Don’t get me wrong, I have lived in the countryside before now. I got by then – I frolicked in fields and had lots of pets. But that was the Dark Ages – no computers, no digital TV and no music on demand.

Would the scent of manure fill the void of Sky Breaking News? Probably. But what about all that information that I am accustomed to? I am intelligent enough to realise that the rat race would function pretty well without me. It’s not a system that cares. There’s plenty of hungry little rats to keep on running and even more so that don’t question why they are doing so. If I toddle off to the country like Dick Whittington, I am confident in the fact that ‘my world’ will carry on regardless.

So why stay? I could convince myself that I am destined for great things, however, no matter how hard I try, great things are just never going to transpire so long as I work in journalism. Salaries suck, jobs are getting axed – and the bottom line – I can’t really be arsed most of the time.

But like some kind of hardcore drug, I am hooked on this modern world. I hate its dependence on fleeting emotion, its triviality, its impatience. I am a product of it and, as ‘they’ say, you can’t choose your parents.

So unless I become a self-appointed evacuee, I am going to have to stay for now. I am just going to have to prepare myself, start my withdrawal slowly. I can’t just go rushing in with my Wellington boots on and the Wurzels playing on my MP3. I am going to have to get used to the idea. TV will be switched off at 8pm. I will try to avoid screens of all kinds (work are going to have to get used to this idea) and I am going to do test-runs into the country.

Under this plan, in approximately 12 years, I will be ready to face the country and its eerie silence. I will just have to beware of the moon, as they say on the moors…

Saying NO to perfect sex

Say YES to perfect sex! So says Raymond Mcdermott. I mean, who wouldn’t? Most people I know wouldn’t say no to any sex, yet alone this ‘perfection’ that my friend Raymond talks about. Anyway, just to make it clear, when I say friend, I mean email contact. And when I say email contact, I mean someone who somehow knows my personal email address and messages me from time to time about my erectile dysfunction (yep, I have major problems in this department apparently and not having a penis doesn’t seem to warrant a good enough reason why I can’t get it up).

As you may have guessed, I’m talking about spam. Not the sweaty meaty type that comes in a can, but the equally unpleasant stuff that invades my email account almost daily.

Now I’m not anti direct mail by any means – it’s a good way of grabbing new customers for businesses. Yet I would appreciate a little more effort by way of personalisation. People should make a bloody effort. My name is a girl’s name – I’m not a ‘Toni’ or a ‘Francis’, or even an ‘Alex’, the chances of me having penis-related problems are non-existent. And I am 26 – do I really need Viagra yet?

Improve your sex life! Says Dino Bunch. Well, thanks Dino, but I don’t like the insinuation that it’s bad already thanks very much, especially from someone called Dino. It gets worse however. Girls don’t like you? We have a solution! Says Homer Buckner. Well they do. And I like them. I don’t see the solution here. Other than changing your name by deed poll.

She will love you more than any guy, says Casey Smart. I take it ‘she’ is bisexual then. But wait, what’s this that Hugh Land is telling me today… You can drill your woman all night long without having any worries. Err… I think my woman may be a little concerned if I turned in with a Black and Decker under my pillow.

But a personal favourite of mine has to be from the so wonderfully named Trina Slaughter. For a start, if you are going to call yourself a made-up name to attract customers, choosing a word that conjures up images of meat hooks and hacksaws may not be the best starting point. But it is what Trina offers that intrigues me… Apparently: She reveals all the juicy secrets that women will NEVER tell you and she does it with a smile on her face. Her proven-to-work tips cover all of the basics, so this is a great starting point for new pick up artists. Attract women like a magnet with these techniques!

If I didn’t think that I would pick up the computer equivalent of an STD on visiting Trina’s site, I could be tempted. Don’t go assuming that I am a ‘pick-up artist’, I am just curious. Dating tips from someone called Trina Slaughter can’t be underestimated, even just for the novelty value. Plus this smile on her face while she tells ugly people how to pull – it’s got to be worth a click through maybe?

Back to the point though, where the hell do these people get their data from? Which company have I forgotten to tick/untick a box on a form for and, as a result, have signed away my entire life history to without my knowing? I guess this is the point  they haven’t got it from anywhere, because, according to their records, I am a really lonely man who can’t get it up and has a health condition that requires inhuman amounts of prescription drugs that I can only buy in Canada from a chap called Reed Dickson (who interestingly informs me that my happiness is tightly connected with my health condition).

If they want people to click through to these sites, there’s got to be at least a very thin air of knowledge about who they are sending these emails to. I don’t need Viagra (not yet anyway) and I don’t have a painkiller addiction (despite the wrath of Satan descending on my womb every month).

So I am taking a stand. I am deleting my Spam inbox and saying no to Dino, Reed, Homer and Trina, and saying NO to perfect sex.

How Zac Efron rescued me from The Rock and a hard place

As part of my child-friendly weekend, I got to watch a lot of films. Blockbuster was offering a four for £10 for four nights (shit this sentence is so unattractive). A selection of films were chosen:

• Marley and Me
• Race to Witch Mountain
• The Kite Runner
• 17 Again

I had only heard of two of these before, Marley and Me – something about a dog with Owen ‘The Scarecrow’ Wilson and Brad Pitt’s cast-off Jennifer Aniston – and The Kite Runner – my choice, something a little cultural perhaps. With no dogs (or other talking animals).

First off we watched Marley and Me. It was better than I expected. Aniston was decent, Wilson was actually quite good and the dog was good in a dog acting kind of way. It was quite an emotional film, not just the giddy ‘caper’ that the promos all suggested.

Then Race to Witch Mountain. I have little to say on this, suffice to say that it involved Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson trying to help two teenage aliens to save the world from pollution or some such shit – think Al Gore with acne and trouser tents. Dwayne was as appalling as only someone called Dwayne could be and the kids were the kind that you hope will be found at the bottom of a canal someday. With bite marks.

So then we got to the gritty one, The Kite Runner. I swelled up with pride as I inserted the morally sound and culturally rich DVD into the player. This was going to be education and fun. Beat that Dwayne. It began inconspicuously, a heart-warming tale of two friends in Afghanistan in the late 1970s. There were kites, chases through the street and myself, my girlfriend and the 11-year-old were doing well. I think I even managed a few smug looks across the room, asserting my film choice superiority with a simple curling up of the corner of my mouth.

That was until the anal rape scene. I would say my arse fell out, but that might be inappropriate given the subject, however, I was mortified. The 11-year-old’s innocent eyes were fixated upon the screen where a teenage boy was raping a boy of about eight as a punishment for his social standing and religion. The dreaded words came to my ears like a a hammer hitting steel. ‘What happened Chloe? Why is he crying?’

Errr….

‘Why is he walking funny?’

I pause the television and take stock. This isn’t what I had intended. Where the fuck was Dwayne now?

I glance at my girlfriend who has one of those looks on her face, the kind that makes you feel as if you just unzipped and raped him yourself. So I began to try and explain. ‘The older boy wants to punish him, wants to make him feel small and silly, so he has raped him. It is a very nasty thing, the worst thing a person can do to another. It has hurt him.’

As if it couldn’t get any worse… ‘What’s rape?’

Sex education, the birds and the bees, all that stuff, it is the butt of a million parenting jokes – how to explain where babies come from and so on. But rape? That’s jumping a million stages. It’s like telling a kid that Father Christmas is probably a paedo with a stick-on beard sat in a shopping mall just as they head off to bed with a mince pie on Christmas Eve.

I froze like a wildebeest in a corner and let my girlfriend take over. She said some choice words like ‘forced’, and ‘up his bottom’ while I searched the room for the box to check the certificate. It was a 12. Not even a 12a. Things didn’t improve much when later on in the film a woman is stoned to death by men with rocks for being an adulterer (another ‘pause and explain’ moment) or when a guy’s face is smashed into a mirror later on.

Plus, my joke about how it should be renamed The Kite Bummer didn’t go down too well either. After some chocolate-related counselling, and much talk about how far away Afghanistan is, we sought Hollywood-style comfort in the form of Zak Efron in 17 Again, my girlfriend’s squeaky clean choice, of course.

The cover of this DVD promised a ‘Tom Hanks in Big‘ kind of movie, so I had high expectations. Without writing a full-on review, it was a good film – plenty of laughs, Efron filling the main role’s boots fairly effectively (although the idea that a grown-up Efron would end up looking like Matthew Perry was as likely as me giving The Kite Runner as a gift to my niece on her birthday). Still, it was easy watching and the perfect ‘post anal rape scene’ remedy.

And more than this, it got me thinking. The premise of the film is that Matthew Perry is a 40-something guy who is on the verge of divorce and doesn’t ‘get’ his two high school kids. He was once the star of the basketball team and Mr Popular, but spends his days wallowing in what could of been (if he hadn’t got his then girlfriend pregnant at 17 and jacked it all in).He meets a weird Captain Birdseye lookalike janitor who sends him back to being 17 (and looking like Efron again) in order to put things right, blah blah blah.

I began to wonder as I watched this, would I want to go back to being 17 again? What would it be like? Would I do anything different? Maybe I wouldn’t be sitting in work writing a blog. And maybe I would be rich. And successful. I probably wouldn’t be a ‘journalist’. I would be an inventor wowing the suits on Dragons’ Den with my ingenuity and innovation and generally taking over the world (I could tell you about my ideas but I would have to virtually kill you, somehow, or you would steal them and I would become even more bitter, write even more crappy blogs and develop anger-induced RSI).

But what about actually being 17 now, in this day and age? Would it be any different? There wouldn’t be Opal Fruits or four TV channels, slouch socks or Swatch watches. I would have to engage in predictive texting and know all the words to High School Musical.

It’s funny how you spend most of your adult life wondering where the time went, perhaps regretting not doing certain things and resenting the fact that the 9-5 rat race has swallowed you up like Jonah’s whale, despite your teenage protestations that it never never never would.

Yet the thought of a ticket back to teenagedom is a scary one. It is a world that hummed of badly disguised body odour, was full of lecherous boys wearing 501s with curtains and where my facial skin was an almost attractive example of pebble dash (an exterior wall finish composed of mortar against which, while still wet, small pebbles have been thrown and pressed in, in case you didn’t know. Quite a good analogy I reckon).

What’s changed, you might ask. Well, luckily quite a lot. Life isn’t so bad and I don’t have to contend with (as many) hormones these days.

The big difference back then to now is perspective. In the 80s, I had hope for my future – I was going to live in a big house, always start my pension early and be earning over £40k. I may even have a holiday home in Provence. I would go on lots of holidays (back then I still thought school holiday rules applied) and do my food shopping in M&S (the pinnacle of home shopping).

Little did I know, that reality like a thief in the night would break in and anally rape me of my dreams.

I can’t complain too much I suppose. But I do. It’s what I do best. So if I am walking a little funny when you next see me, don’t ask too many questions, okay?

The end of board games? I haven’t got a Cluedo

I had a child staying with me these past few days. Not a random child mind – I met her at a service station. Now I am being deliberately misleading, probably to my own detriment so I will stop. Anyway, the aforesaid child is my girlfriend’s ex’s child whom they brought up together for several years (Cue Eastenders theme tune).

Anyway, much of the weekend was spent being justified in immaturity for once – and I loved it. I nearly drowned in the Thames on a rowing boat (I thought tides were for wimps) and I sat in the sun in Hyde Park while the majority of my contemporaries were wasting their lives in office blocks across the city. I got to eat spaghetti shapes that looked like Scooby Doo and eat Haribo until my skin started to seep out cola flavouring and my eyes looked like jelly eggs.

If this wasn’t enough, I went to a ceramics cafe and made myself an olive dish. It is pretty shit, but it has been some time since I attempted pottery of any form and my former impression of Demi Moore splattered in clay has been irreversibly destroyed. Still, I have an olive dish. Now I just need to start eating olives.

What else you ask? I played on an EyeToy. I am at a loss to actually explain what this is, suffice to say it is a webcam that you put on top of your TV and it supplants your head onto that of a cartoon character. It somehow knows when you are moving and how fast and is able to score you on how efficiently you punch up in the air or run on the spot (which is not very in my case). I dismissed this kind of ‘toy’ as modern trash before playing. In fact, as I began to play Simon Says with a virtual drill sergeant on a screen, I cried out, sweat dripping like salty tsunamis from my forehead, ‘What ever happened to board games?’. I admit, Pictionary to me as a child was The Future. It seemed so forward-thinking, all that pencil and paper, coloured squares and big words. I was seriously blown away by the introduction of a small tub of playdough when Cranium burst onto the scene and am still reeling from Monopoly – the DVD edition.

It seems that the days of sitting about on the living room floor getting sore arses playing Cluedo with your grandma are over. The EyeToy and such like are the next generation of interactive games. As much as I hated the concept, and although I know that the assault course would terminate my grandma’s very existence, it wasn’t that bad. I secretly enjoyed beating an 11-year-old in a game of virtual volleyball and I actually did some exercise – so much so that today I feel like I was hit by an HGV on the way to work.

I suggested Scrabble as a suitable post-workout comedown. Instead, we posed for a series of pictures that the i-Toy took of us standing in my living room. On reflection, I worry that the EyeToy is in fact a Russian spy. Or, more likely, a spy from my local council. If you think about it, it is a cunning plan. Trick loads of kids into buying a ‘toy’ that actually can watch people for hours on end in their own homes without arousing any suspicion.

If you read the Daily Mail today (please don’t), it says 1 adult in 78 has come under state surveillance. I wonder if I was one of them. More to the point, what would they discover about me? The fact that I can throw an imaginary javelin 44 metres? Or maybe that I have fake tan on my legs today?

In order to spy, surely there has to be something worth spying on? I can’t believe that every 78th adult has anything worth watching. Maybe I just lead an unbelievably boring life, but what really can these government spies determine from a bit of snooping?

It used to be that being a spy was a cool job. Just look at that James Bond geezer, he did alright out of it. Yet the whole concept of being a spy is getting pissed on by this latest government debacle. It is claimed that police and other officials tapped phone calls and emails an average of 1,381 times a day last year. I wonder how disappointed they would be to hear my phone calls:

‘What time are you home tonight?… Yes… I’ll make tea…. Pasta probably…. Yes, I know it’s the third night in a row, but I have Italian blood… Okay, I don’t, I’m a BNP member’s wet dream… Yes, I know I am… I finish at half five, not a second later… Cool, see you then… Bye.’

Despite there being, I imagine, a kind of kudos associated with being the subject of your own personal spy, it is a breach of privacy. One that I wouldn’t particularly want – I get freaked out at the thought of the spirits of dead relatives watching me have sex.

So what is the world coming to? After spending a few days with a representative of the next generation, I am still undecided. As technology develops, so does the world around us, whether that’s games or phone taps. It is unfortunately an inevitable consequence that we lose a part of ourselves as humans as the machines take hold. This doesn’t necessarily mean a Terminator-style apocalypse, but it does mean that we are trusting technology more and more, and with it, the few people that control the technology grow more powerful.

As Chris Huhne of the Lib Dems so eloquently put it: “We have sleepwalked into a surveillance state, but without adequate safeguards. Having the home secretary in charge of authorisation is like asking the fox to guard the hen house.”

There’s a very simple answer to all of this Mr Huhne – bring back fox hunting…

PS What’s your favourite board game and why? Comment and let me know… not for any reason, just because I am nosy and want to spy on you.

RIP Teletext

Teletext News is dead. It’s not as momentous as Michael Jackson’s passing, but it has still struck a very minor chord in me. There’s no screaming hysteria, someone might write one book or something, but it’s no big deal to most. However, the ripples will be felt – I liken it to losing an old aunt that you didn’t see very often or like very much. She may have smelt of piss and her biscuits were always stale – but she was old, rooted in the past, and there was also a whiff of nostalgia.

I may sound like I sit at home all day playing Bamboozle and tripping out on squares of cyan, and although I do spend a lot of my time in a sedentary manner, staring at screens, this is not because I was filling the gap between Jeremy Kyle and Trisha.

No, I used to work for Teletext. People often wonder where stuff like Teletext comes from. It’s like a Jessica Fletcher murder mystery – stuff just happens and no-one knows how. How does it update? Who picks the stories? Who designed it? And more importantly, who the hell hasn’t redesigned it? I often sit and ponder such thoughts. It was however, more romantic when I didn’t know.

Teletext is one of these strange anomalies – a faceless service that hasn’t evolved in decades. It rolls on 24 hours a day, providing such a wide range of information, from holidays to horoscopes. Yet the question I always was asked when I worked there was one that resonated… ‘Who actually reads it?’ And it is a good question, one that I unfailingly faltered at, stammering like a 16-year-old Gareth Gates at an open mic night.

I read it. I knew it inside out. But I had to. And even then it wasn’t that great. Because the national news provided on Teletext came straight from news agency the Press Association (who was my employer), it was actually of a fairly decent quality. The regional news however was done by PA regional reporters who had better things to do than write three pars about recycling schemes in Cumbria.

The shift work was dull and the work repetitive. But you could never complain that it wasn’t a challenge. As a sub-editor, headlines are the crown jewels of production. It’s your chance to be a bit creative, show some flair, maybe even slip in a nifty pun without your editor noticing. Teletext made sure that this was an almost impossible task. For each three par story, you had to write three headlines – one for the digital copy, one for the main headline and one for the index page. Each headline on each story had to be a set length, give or take one letter. On the index page things were even tougher – you had to write every headline to 35 characters. You heard me. Every headline, to the letter. And 35 isn’t very many.

It’s been said by many people, most a lot wiser and wrinklier than myself, that Teletext is the best training possible for a fledgling sub. The equivalent of the Colosseum for a young and hairless Russell Crowe. It makes you good without you knowing, hones your legal skills and makes you really, really anal about unnecessary words.But for every unnecessary word that you cut out, you end up using the most stupid of words to replace them.

Never have I uttered the following words more times than I did at my time there, fitting massively big ideas into 35-character headlines: bid… probe.. rap.

Even better, these headlines: ‘Man held over supermarket theft’; ‘Woman killed in collision with tree’. They may not be 35 letters, but to this effect. They honestly were the most awful headlines imagineable – all because Titan (the program used to work Teletext) was so inflexible and dated that it didn’t allow for anything else. We tried, honestly we did, but the feeling always prevailed – who reads it anyway?

I guess now, nobody will.

I am sad about it – not least for the people who will probably be unemployed as a result. The digital age has snuck up on us fast. Only two decades ago we were happy with neon news and pages that took 60 seconds to refresh. Now we want everything fast and don’t want to have to miss vital moments of Eastenders to do so.

Working on Teletext gave me a rare insight into its strange and incestuous world. I marvelled at the Christmas Advent Calendar which revealed the most ridiculously bad pictures and the holidays that were cheaper than a meal at Wetherspoons.

In some other guise, I am sure the service will go on – I hear the web version and Holidays bit will soldier on. Yet it will be with a heavy heart that I pick up my remote to look at the Teletext TV guide only to see the button resting there, redundant and remniscient.

The future is bright, it may well be orange, but for unfortunately for Teletext, it’s not cyan, yellow, black and white anymore.

Apparently I am a ‘hetero hybrid’… but how gay are you?

Confused? by =sinademiral (Deviant Art)

I am 55% gay, 45% hetero, apparently. I have been told this number-specific diagnosis by a Swedish gay pride website that did not actually ask me a single question, other than my gender and Twitter user name. Fascinating stuff or just a pile of steaming stuff? It did, at least, lean in the right direction given that I am a gay woman – although apparently, by definition, I am a ‘hetero hybrid’. I take this to mean a bisexual? Inaccurate, but what a way to put it.

This online gaydar must be pretty hit and guaranteed to miss given that it doesn’t ask you any personal questions. It said I had mentioned the word ‘ass’ in my previous twitterings. It is a far stretch to imagine that by mentioning ass, that I have gay tendencies – do straight people not have asses too? Ironically enough, I was referring to a donkey at the time anyway. So there, you big gay online judge. More worryingly is the other words listed which identified me as a queer ‘un. I shall list them and then wait for a gasp of united astonishment… ‘Brilliant’, ‘Broad’, ‘Boom boom’ and, of course, ‘Gay’ –  by merely mentioning the word you are condemned to a life of sex toys and lube.

Let’s analyse (anal..yse… will that sound me out?)… ‘Brilliant’? What is this? What is gay about the use of this descriptive adjective? ‘Broad’? Are we talking asses again or maybe beans? Okay, there may be a tenuous lesbian link in the latter, but this has got to just be bullshit. My favourite is ‘Boom Boom’. I don’t even remember saying this one – was I quoting the Outhere Brothers’ 90s classic? This contains the lines ‘Put your ass on my face, I love the way your pussy tastes?’ Have I found the link? Pussy? If so, then the old lady that donates to the Cat Protection League is gonna end up more gay than a butch with a hard hat and a power tool. If so, then I deserve to be burnt at the stake, not called a hybrid. Forget witch hunts, hybrid hunts are the new craze. Burn the bisexuals and the world will be a more balanced place don’t you reckon?

I speak in jest of course. I’m a lesbian, I can’t be prejudiced – not even a tiny bit. Not even to bisexuals, and Christ, everyone hates them. If bisexuals were lemmings, they would be buggered (not literally), never knowing which path to take, standing stammering and sweating at a crossroads like Shaun Ryder trying to go cold turkey.

I’m being silly. But it’s a valid point. The gay community doesn’t really ‘get’ bisexuals and their  life of sexually ambiguous limbo, in the same way as the straight one generally doesn’t. The world is so confusing that we need to put stuff in boxes. It isn’t always practical, or nice, but people that don’t fit in boxes (bisexuals, fat people etc) just get our goats.

I read a ‘news’ article the other day in which Duncan from Blue outed himself as bisexual. This is straight from the horsey one’s mouth so isn’t some tabloid lie – in his own words, he told it how it is. It’s not an easy thing to admit, especially with the North Korean-style armies of teenage girl fans that keep him in Timberland and not Top Shop clobber. He says he has had relationships with both sexes and this is what makes him happy. Far be it for any of us to judge. Most people who feel like he does keep it under wraps.

When coming out I was tempted to say I was bi in an attempt to cushion the blow to my parents’ ears – at least there would be a 50/50 chance they might think – but I changed my mind as they would be constantly awaiting the smell of aftershave at the door when I went out for a date. I couldn’t cope with the pressure and expectations – I would forever be letting them down – far better to disappoint them just the once.

Being bisexual must be very difficult to announce – to some people it’s like saying ‘I’m not fussy me’ – or worse – ‘I’m a greedy shagging bastard and will fuck anything that moves’. Truth is, I actually think most people are bisexual, but it’s a bit like autism – there’s a spectrum – i.e. lots of grey space and fuzzy edges. Why not? People are strange, as The Doors once said – if we can get past physical barriers such as ugliness, bad teeth, mullets, too much fat/too little fat etc, then surely we can get past a pair of tits/bollocks? It’s personalities that count, and it’s easy to fall in love with them. No, this isn’t just wishful thinking on my part.

Which brings me, very nicely, full circle to that silly online quiz that I took earlier. I was at first a bit annoyed to read that I was a ‘hetero hybrid’, choosing usually to define myself as a lesbian, not a hetero anything, yet alone something that describes an unpopular mode of eco-friendly transport. But thinking about it, what does it matter? We’re all a bit hetero, even me, and we’re all a bit homo too. It doesn’t define us, just adds a bit of colour to the grey.

Why I’d make a crap superhero

My mate Dave writes blogs. He wrote one last week about superpowers. In it, he described the concept of having hammers for hands. Pretty useful if you are Polish and want your CV for Barratt Homes to stand out, but pretty useless on all other counts.

It reminded me of Edward Scissorhands. That poor bloke didn’t have much luck did he? Even a nifty bit of topiary on his neighbours’ hedges did little to stop people viewing him as a freak.

It got me thinking anyway. There is a fine line between superpower and freak, with the main difference being visibility. Superpowers, I have decided, should be secret. It’s all about the going into a phone box dressed like an Apprentice candidate, and then coming out like the Green Giant. I mean even he must have surely had a day job? Harvesting all that sweetcorn before turning big and green and stuff (something I have never understood as surely he would have turned yellow unless he was eating peas? Maybe he was in the wrong field).

Anyhow, powers should be kept under a bushell. That’s why Clark Kent and Peter Parker had dual identities. Only idiots parade powers about, like Geoff Capes and people who go on Britain’s Got Talent. Superpowers should be secretpowers. They should, like Jack the Ripper, only come out at night. And when they do, they should be ruthless, silent and deadly. Or maybe not deadly. Or else you really will get arrested as a serial killer, no matter how much you protest. It’s like that silly bloke in No Country for Old Men, going around with a compressed air tank to kill people with in broad daylight – I did not feel scared in the slightest. He was a crap killer and that was a crap power. It’s like killing walking about with a drip and then strangling people with the cord.

I got to thinking about hammerhands and other variations that included DIY tools, such as the Allan Key killer, which I think sounds rather intriguing. I might start that screenplay after all.

But what if I could choose my superpower, rather than having to wait for some Kryptonite to fall from the sky. Invisibility is a good one, a cliché, but a good one at that. The possibilities are quite endless… perving aside, it would be great for just spying on people you know and hiding when the ticket man comes down the aisle on the train. But saying that, it could get tedious. And I think being invisible would cause me to give up all effort made, however currently minimal that is, on my appearance. I would be a very scruffy and unapproachable invisible. It would be difficult to find an invisible girlfriend without lowering my standards.

So what about being able to see for miles? Or to have super-sensitive hearing? Well, seeing for miles would be good. The risks of an RTA would be massively decreased and I would know when one of those charity knobs with a clipboard was about to close in on me when I’m out shopping. Hearing everything would be good – I could eavesdrop in on conversations and pretend that I was highly informed. Yet the downsides to both are pretty obvious. My world is chocca with information as it is. Any more and my poor shuddering little brain will jump off Beachy Head with a big rock.

It is easy to see that any physical powers would have people branding you a freak. Any implement, outdoor or kitchen, is just silly and would have people laughing rather than running out of the door. You just couldn’t command any respect, even if you could whisk an egg in two seconds and make pizza dough with your toes.

Michael Jackson was always called Wacko but that guy could moonwalk – a true superhero trait in my book. That move would foil any criminal. As would grabbing their crotch and screaming ‘Schmooaan’.

Roger Federer, now he’s a guy with some pretty inhuman tennis ability. But he is still a freak, which ever way you look at it. That’s why everyone wants Nadal to come back and beat his ass back to Switzerland with a giant Toblerone.

I guess the power that I would most like would be travel. Not necessarily time travel, although I would quite like to give the thumbs down to a few gladiators in Rome and perv on some ankles in medieval England. No, I mean travel Star Trek style. I want to get beamed up and beamed down faster than Peter Andre can get a divorce. The potential scope for coolness with this power is limitless. Plus I would never be late for work again.

If I wanted to go on holiday, I could get transported without having to sit on one of Ryanair’s multi-coloured tin cans ever again. Transport for London wouldn’t get a penny more of my hard-earned wages and I would never miss an episode of Neighbours. If I was needed anywhere, I could be there in a flash, without flying or anything. I would just appear, like swine flu in Mexico, cause some chaos, and then eff off somewhere else.

I guess if I had a superpower, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing a blog though. I would have much better things to do. But in order for such a power to be bestowed on me, I would probably have to lose a little of my laziness. It’s no good being able to go anywhere if you can’t be arsed and usually, I can’t be arsed. I can barely drag myself to the tennis courts, work, cinema, pub – take your pick.

I wouldn’t be saving lives, I would end up some loser superhero, dried up, on the superdole and disappearing into invisibility whenever the bailiffs came round.

Taking a shower with your boss

My employers have installed a shower in our office block. I presume this is to help cleanse the sweaty martyrs that pedal to work each day and thus to prevent mass body odour epidemics.

I have no issue with the installation as such. Except that the location chosen seems to me, slightly odd. The women’s shower has been built in what was once a cupboard in the ladies’ toilets. Toilets makes them sound like there are many of them. There are in fact two. Two cubicles for nearing 100 women I would say. Nice. Apart from being a breeding ground for swine flu, there is a strategy issue here. You can’t go in there for a nice ‘private’ moment shall we say. Instead, you are subjected to privacy invasion at its worse kind, along with sound effects that invoke images of M15 waterboarding terrorists in the cubicle next door.

Back to showers though, there is the blue door that leads into it, literally half a metre opposite the cubicle door. Inside looks pretty much like any other shower. Except it is in a toilet at work. It is not even one of those cleverly sound-proofed doors – it has a 12in gap at the bottom and top, meaning every Tommie, Dicksie and Henrietta can catch a glimpse of my feet.

This isn’t the middle ages and ankles aren’t considered sexually forbidden territory, I know, but I don’t share my feet readily. They are usually clothed in socks and shoes when I greet colleagues. Sandals are acceptable in certain weathers, but naked feet are just creepy.

Plus, the idea of standing naked, wet and exposed with my boss having a piss only feet away fills me with a feeling that I cannot quite pinpoint. It could be dread. It could be fear. It could even be a strange kind of excitement. But whatever it is, it is wrong. I have to deal with the noise issue in the toilet on a daily basis, but coming out of the shower to face people in suits, or even, just people in clothes? It is too intimate. Forget team building if that’s what they call it. I would rather shower alone.

Unless it means a pay rise perhaps…

xrqc5tudgh

Home is where my heart is – so please don’t sell it

They say home is where the heart is. But mine is being sold – my house that is. But whoever buys it, whatever unsuspecting 2.4 family with a gerbil and trust issues moves in, they are buying a part of me.

My parents have split up. At 26 this should be something I can both rationalise and move on from. Yet the fallout of such a messy event is still being felt – and they split 18 months ago.

Being told this morning that the house in which I first pretended to run away (to the upstairs cupboard), first lost my hamster, probably my virginity and at times, my mind, is being sold to some horrible (I am sure they are) strangers makes me deeply sad.

I walked around in my lunchbreak listening to Holding Back the Years by Simply Red and remembering times of old, before my Dad got a floozy and my home was a place that I could always escape to, whenever it all got too much.

As I have got older, this has become the case even more so. So many times I have fled there, my girlfriend picking me up from work in a Ford Focus chariot and speeding me to Somerset for a long weekend of ironed duvet covers, well-prepared food and early nights. It has been a refuge to me – a place where each crack in each wall means something (such as that’s where my eldest brother cracked the other’s head by slamming the door into it) and the smells mean more to me than a waft of Oxo on a winter’s day.

That place represents my family and my very being. It is an old, crumbling farmhouse now, empty of the children that once tore through it’s safe and solid doorframes, climbed out of windows and flooded the bathroom floor.

It’s where my dog died, panting lightly on the golden gravel as I stroked his silken ears and felt his breath warm on my wrist. It’s where he is buried. It’s where my cat lives. She, very much like me, hates change. She sits, as she has done every day for 11 years, waiting to be let in, mewing for milk and wanting attention. The roof is where my brothers put her, pretending she was stuck so that I would cry and kick their bikes.

It’s where we hid in barns, ran through long grass and got bitten, heard mum calling us in for tea. It’s where school mornings felt so dreary and dreaded; where coming home meant Neighbours and arguing about the remote.

Today I feel sad. I don’t feel the warmth of its embrace any more. When I next go there, I will have to say goodbye, like it has an illness that can’t be cured. But it will not die. Not that I want it to collapse and kill the new inhabitants, honestly, but what I mean is it will always be there. Not just in my subconscious, but also my reality. If I go past it, it will be like I have pawned it in and can’t afford to buy it back. It will stand there, just as it has always done, but not for my pleasure anymore. Still full of my memories, but now full of other people too. I can’t stand it. It must be like watching your partner sleep with someone else. Only I am more jealous about my house because it is mine. In a way that people cannot be. It can be bought and possessed, sold and inhabited. Plus, it can’t have sex with anyone else. It can’t even flirt.

Home is where my heart is. Without it, I will be like Paul Young, laying my metaphorical hat wherever I go. Even when I have saved enough money to buy a house (say in like 2050), it won’t be like that one. Although I suppose if I want to run away, I can always hide in a cupboard and pretend to be nine again. Sounds like a good idea to me.