Sue Bailey

Rapes at Latitude prompt launch of safety awareness campaigns

The way to stop rape isn’t to make people more safety conscious. It’s not even to hire more security guards and undercover police.

The way to stop rape is for people to stop raping other people.

1. Do it because you enjoy it,
2. though an appreciative audience always makes it more fun.
3. The right way to do it is the way you want to do it. Other people’s rules don’t count.
4. If it’s hurting, stop (unless you like it hurting).
5. The answer to “how often” is “as often as you can manage”.

Dedicated to the authors of these posts.

My local bricolage stocks the following items:

1. Wood-effect ceramic tiles.
2. Ceramic-tile-effect laminate flooring.

I am unable to resist using both items in the same room.

Utterly loving the Vicky Pollard riff in the middle.

And I think this is all true. BUT. Why do we fall out of love then? Why isn’t the shared history *enough*?

Whatever love means. Which, I tend to think, is nothing at all.

The things you crave are not necessarily the things you think you’ll crave. What I’ve missed today is walking round London with J in the dark, listening to her talk about her life, about finding her happy. About feeling, amazingly, not jealous, but so happy for her that she’d found her life.

I want some friends.

I want some friends that I see. Not people who Skype me a couple of times a week when they have nothing better to do or they need their WordPress fixed. Some people I see more than two or three times a year. Some people I see when it’s normal, not when I’m having another fucking nervous breakdown because I miss London so much.

I want things I can’t have.

I don’t understand why they make it so difficult. Suicide booths, from Vonnegut’s vision of the fulfillment of patriotric duty, have become a joke – viz. Futurama, and Martin Amis. But it’s a joke no one means. You can’t go to the corner, pay your dollar and have it done with. You can’t catch the bus, or go to Switzerland. They’ve made it difficult.

And I don’t understand why. What the hell is it about being alive that makes everyone want it to be the only option? Doctors, who ought to know better, who ought to know that we’re all just an oozing puddle of piss and snot in the end, spend their whole careers hooking us up to machines that pump in artificial oxygen and electricity to keep us going. Pharmacists add stuff to pills to make us puke them back up again, and – if what I read on the internet is true – fuck about with drugs on a molecular level just so we can’t overdose, or if we do, so we’re left vegetables dependent on the aforementioned doctors, instead of dead.

How the bloody hell does any of that make sense?

“Suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed.” I know the historical background to this – the condemnation and forfeiture of the felo de se. But I think we’ve moved beyond that now. (If the Queen would like my collection of empty wine bottles and cheap paperbacks, I’m sure she’s welcome to em.) Surely it’s possible, now, that one can rationally decide that one no longer wants to live?

But still, this prohibition persists. Self-deliverance? Nope, return to sender. None of us is allowed to opt out.

I used to think it was religious. My father, on discovering that I (aged thirteen-ish) had been eating more paracetamol than was good for me, saying, “you know if you’d died, you’d've gone to hell.” Suicide is the sin against the holy spirit, apparently. The one that’s unforgiveable. Well, chums, see you in hell: I can’t imagine it’ll be that different. I’ll keep a couple of pitchforks warm for you.

It isn’t religious. Even those who are in favour of AS want to make it difficult. Tribunals, Lord Pratchett? Really?? He makes it sound like getting planning permission. And those people – those otherwise sane, liberal, libertarian people – who argue against pills and books about pills and websites that explain where to get pills. Do you know what you’re doing? You wouldn’t argue I couldn’t eat, read or fuck what I wanted: why do you arrogate to yourself the right to decide that I have to continue breathing, whether I want to or not?

I just want to be able to get on with it. I don’t want to spend hours, days, browsing internet forums full of miserabilists trying to find out if *this* and *this* and *this* mixed will work, will knock me out before it hurts, before I get scared, will cancel each other out, will just get puked back up because of what doctors have added in…

Why? It’s my fucking life. I choose not to live it any more. Why don’t I get to make this choice?

Honestly, it’s Dorothy fucking Parker all over again.

photo credit: Marc Lacoste

1. Socialists are better shags than Tories, but have much worse taste in fonts.
2. For such a non-materialistic nation, the French sure send out a lot of junk mail.
3. People with religious eBay IDs complain a lot more than average.
4. The longer English people spend out of England, the more likely they are to turn into Daily Mail columnists.
5. Women get personality transplants along with their new babies. Most opt for “tiger”.

Someone – I don’t remember who, and Google isn’t helping me – once said that the English learn their history from Shakespeare and their religion from Milton. I’m a good Ricardian, so I protest the Shakespeare, though I’ve no objection to Paradise Lost as a scripture: if we have to have religion, let it at least be made of beautiful language.

It’s not just Milton and Shakespeare. Everything I know about Imperial Rome, I know from the pages of I, Clavdivs. There are vast swathes of English history (the eighteenth century, for example) that I know only by trying to figure out what 1066 and All That is joking about. Scottish history is Macbeth and Braveheart. And I’m entirely convinced that British government is like Yes, Minister (with shades of House of Cards) and American government is like The West Wing.

The British Museum has a new exhibition, devoted to Monteczuma, Aztec Ruler (doesn’t that sound like a Viz character?). Unsurprisingly, there has been a plethora of documentaries and press coverage on the Aztecs and their disastrous confrontation with Cortés… all of which has only served to remind me of my sole source of knowledge of South American history. Oh dear:

1. “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”
2. Friday nights (absolute me time)
3. Birthdays (you should be spoiled unmercifully)
4. My computer (people who snoop deserve to find stuff that upsets them)
5. My laundry basket (I don’t want your dirty socks, and you don’t want mine)
6. My bank account (if you’ve ever heard a woman ask her husband for money to buy him a birthday present, you’ll never have a joint account)
7. Your right to say what you like; my right to say “not on my blog”.
8. New Year’s Eve
9. The ballot box
10. Being told the truth (I’d rather be hurt than lied to, a million times over. No one ever gets this.)

And you?