Sue Bailey

Remember the olden days when half of blogging was “hey, look at this”. I don’t need to do that any more: I’ve got Stumble and Google Shared Items and if it’s really good I can Twitter it. Which means I don’t get to do this:

Geds is amazing. Utterly, utterly amazing. Sometimes I think he’s writing my life but with more insight and more perspective than I’ll ever be able to manage.

I kept using break up terms to describe the end of my faith. “It was an abusive relationship,” I said. “God and I just need some time apart.”

Somewhere in the back of my mind I think I expected the phone to ring some day. It would be god. Asking me back. I had a list of suspects who I figured would take on the role of “Voice of god.” I braced myself, just waiting.

My phone never rang.

That’s how it was.

I was prepared to cry, and I did, in buckets. I wasn’t prepared, though, to be utterly gobsmacked by the content of Obama’s speech.

The “we will restore science to its rightful place” was – as delivered – almost throwaway. Which is as it should be. Running government on provable facts isn’t something we should have to fight for, despite the last eight years.

And then it got better. America is “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers.” There’s a president I can believe in.

A Michigan man has been told he must marry his partner or pay $3,800 medical costs from the birth of their child.

State lawmakers amended Michigan’s paternity act five years ago to waive birthing costs for a father if he married the child’s mother. … The law is an incentive to maintain the sanctity of marriage, Genesee County Friend of the Court Jack Battles said. Taxpayers are entitled to get that money back from [the father] if he and [the mother] choose to remain unmarried, Battles said. “It’s totally up to them,” said Battles.

This is, frankly, the mentallest thing I’ve heard for a long time. Even if you believe in marriage and/or in children being born in wedlock, can you really argue in favour of this law? If you believe that marriage is “the right thing to do” – in whatever sense – can you really think it’s right to get married for the sake of a $3,800 medical bill?

Of course, there’s a flip-side to that. If you can be forced to get married to get out of paying a medical bill, then marriage has become meaningless, so why not just do it? It’d be the easy option – for now. I don’t know what Michigan’s divorce laws are like, but I’d be happy to bet they’re not dissimilar to divorce laws in most places: it’s a whole bunch easier to get married than to get unmarried.

As reported though, neither Ms Witt or Mr Johnson seem to be considering the wedding option. She says they just need more time to pay: that the $500 a month that the state wants is beyond them. He says there’s a principle involved: “I don’t think anybody has a right to tell anyone who they have to marry or when they have to get married.”

And personally, I’d say no to this marriage for much more than practical reasons. There are plenty of religious and quasi-religious ceremonies that mean nothing to me, that I would have enough respect for to not do, precisely because they mean nothing to me. I won’t take holy communion, not even in the Church of England which seems to think that (having been baptised as an adult) I should. I won’t recite the Creed or the Lord’s Prayer, because I don’t believe those words and to pretend I do, for the sake of convenience or politeness or social custom, belittles those who do believe the words; it would be a lie to myself if I did anything other than remain respectfully apart.

Michigan’s lawmakers might think they’ve made this law to maintain the sanctity of marriage, but really all they’ve done is slap a price tag on their holy sacrament.

For some reason –

- maybe it’s one bit of good news in the sea of gloom. Goodness knows we need it.

- maybe because after the initial sigh of relief, the human stories start to reveal just how crazy we all are. The man who brought his suit bag out of the plane. The woman who tried to get her luggage out of the overhead locker. A million OMG it was on Twitter first stories.

- maybe it’s because in everything I read, there’s a hint in the background that New Yorkers feel as though their city is itself a independent organism, and in a week where I went back to London and felt as if it were a one night stand with a lover who’d left me forever, irresistable but unbearable, where just standing in Piccadilly Circus made me want to cry and cry and cry and go and jump under a train so I’d never have to leave it again, that’s a feeling I can sympathise with rather a lot.

or maybe *just because*, the “miracle on the Hudson” has been fascinating me, and I can’t stop reading all the little background stories about it. Correctly, most of the praise goes to Captain Sullenberger and his incredible crew, but in the Observer’s piece this morning, I found this tale:

Some passengers screamed, others tucked their heads between their knees, and several prayed over and over: “Lord, forgive me for my sins.” But a man named Josh who was sitting in the exit row did exactly what everyone is supposed to do but few ever do: he pulled out the safety card and read the instructions on how to open the exit door. … Josh stood up. “Someone tried to pull the door in,” another passenger recalled, “and he said, ‘No, you’ve got to throw it out.’ He twisted it and threw it out.”

More than once, I’ve sat in Josh’s seat. A flight attendant’s handed me the safety instructions and said, if there’s an emergency, you’ll need to open the door: are you happy to do that? will you actually read the card? And at that last, I’ve felt ashamed, for all those passengers who keep talking or reading through the safety announcement, and for – I suspect – the larger proportion of us, me included, who politely turn our faces towards the crew and look as though we’re listening but in fact, don’t take register more than two words of what’s said, and certainly don’t learn how we’d get out in an emergency. Because, right, it’ll never be us.

I am sitting in the bar on the boat, eating a tuna sandwich, which is the nearest thing to vegetarian offered by French ferry companies in the off-season. Opposite me, starting at his laptop screen, is someone I have not seen or even thought about for 15 years, one of the Nicks I was at college with.

At certain times of my life, I have tended to collect people with the same name. In the pub I drank in in the late 90s, there were Chrises: Scottish Chris, Hairy Chris, Chris the train. Later, Steves: Gay Steve, Irish Steve, Fat Steve and Steve Steve, who had no distinguishing characteristics. At college, it was Nicks. This Nick is not that Nick on whom I had a terrible crush in my first term, nor the Nick who supplied interesting substances, nor the people of whom, in lieu of any memory of their surnames, I think of as Beautiful Nick, Scary Nick, Hippy Nick. Nor Julian, who always looked like he should be called Nick.

This is Tall Nick. Tall Nick was both a (very tall) pillar of the Christian Union, and a militant scientist, so it’s unlikely that our paths would have crossed but for the accidents of the housing ballot which put us in adjacent rooms at the top of a not-very-desirable house, with the promise of our first choice the following year. And astonishingly, we managed to coexist quite happily, despite my propensity for coming home drunk and fucking loudly, and his equally inconsiderate desire to get up early and go to lectures.

It is him: I am certain of it. He just stood up and by my trigonometrical calculation, is approximately three hundred feet tall. The tallness of Tall Nick is, even 15 years later, impressed upon my memory from the occasion when he came to cry on me after having been dumped by the *other* pillar of the C.U. It is very difficult to bestow a maternal and comforting hug on someone more than a foot taller than yourself.

“You haven’t changed a bit.” It’s one of those lies like “you can’t miss it” or “of course I wasn’t faking it”. But he *hasn’t* changed a bit: his clothes are still preppy, his hair is still Oxbridge-floppy, his nose is still too big for his face, which is and always was in my opinion, his saving grace: with an average sized nose, he’d have been conventionally good-looking, which wouldn’t have suited him at all.

I do not think that he would recognise me. If there is a shred of my anorexic, 20 year old Goth self left, she is buried very deep under fat and grown-up clothes and five years about which I remember absolutely nothing. I think I would be pushed to recognise her myself, so why would he?

He is staring very hard at his laptop screen now. I wonder if he wonders why a fat, middle-aged woman is watching him. I wonder if I should go and explain myself.

When doctors told Marie Seward that her period mood swings and depression were extreme she felt both relieved and angry.

You should go read that article on the BBC before you read my half-assed observations below. Mrs Seward says a lot of things that make a lot of sense, but the one sentence that really gave me goosebumps is this one:

“You think it is normal,” she said.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s New Year’s Eve, and I’ve heard that they take your blogging card away if you don’t write some sort of list post. So here’s mine.

1. 2008 was decidedly meh. Let’s never have another year like that.
2. Sitting on your arse waiting for things to get better only means they’re going to get worse.
3. eBay bores me. I’ve been saying this for far too long. Time to really do something very decisive about it.
4. I quit biting my nails. If I can break one life-long habit, I can break the rest of em.
5. I didn’t read nearly enough books. Remedy this next year.
6. For five days in Chicago, I was really happy. Learn from this.
7. I have no maternal instinct. I may have a materteral instinct, and I should find out for definite.
8. I like people more than I think I do (though I still prefer cats).
9. In 2009, I will have a lot more fun. That’s the closest to a new year’s resolution I’m going to get.

Beautiful photo by Stig Nygaard.

Various news websites including TechCrunch ran the story over the weekend that the UK government is – again – trying to regulate the internet. Culture Minister Andy Burnham is proposing a cinema-style age-appropriatness rating system for websites, which he believes would protect children from offensive and damaging material online.

If you want an enumeration of all the reasons why this is a bad idea, that’s been done very well in the comments to Civil Service Minister Tom Watson’s remarkably open post asking for opinion on the proposal. So in brief, here’s my objection:

It won’t work.

It won’t work because the internet doesn’t work like that, because parents who were really, truly bothered would supervise their children’s surfing, and because curious adolescents want to look at porn – and wouldn’t you rather they did it in the comfort of their own homes than by having to shoplift from newsagents like my generation did?

I think there was an opportunity here. Those of us who make our livings around the internet are not very good at remembering that we’re in a tiny minority and not everyone sees it like we do. When I first told my sister-in-law I was working for an internet company, she thought I had to be either a credit card fraudster or a pornographer: not everyone updates Twitter from their iphone on the way to dconstruct. So this prospectively big debate could have been the perfect moment to talk about what the internet is, and what it can do: how it’s not just about porn and gambling, how it can be a force for democracy, for social change, how it can empower the politically disenfranchised. And how restricting that isn’t something that any of us should want to do.

But we didn’t. Mike Butcher, editor of TechCrunch UK and arguably one of the highest profile internetters in the UK, wrote a blog post, entitled “PWN3D!!1! Dude i totally got ur name. w00t!!!” Ahem, sorry, no. Entitled I stole the culture secretary’s twitter account.

Well, no. He didn’t. He registered an account on Twitter with the ID andyburnham. Which is the name of the culture secretary. And he put “culture secretary” as the bio. Hacking Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account this ain’t.

And though it made it to the FT, engaging in reasoned debate it ain’t either. I’m sure that people who use Twitter understood what Mike Butcher was trying to do, and the other 99.999% of the population didn’t understand or care one jot about his stunt.

I think it’s a safe bet that the Secretary of State for the Department of Culture, Media and Sports doesn’t care about Twitter either, or he’d already own his name. We might guess, realistically, that Mr Burnham doesn’t have the first clue what Twitter is. But somewhere in the department of culture, media and stuff must be a group of civil servants whose job it is to know about the internet – otherwise their minister wouldn’t be making these pronouncements about it. And presumably those people know what Twitter is. So they don’t consider it important enough to have advised their minister that now he’s in the Cabinet, he ought to own his own name. In fact, they haven’t even bothered to registered the position or the department as a Twitter id – I know, because I registered @cultureminister and @DCMS this morning. Maybe Twitter isn’t quite as vital as we thought?

If we’re going to argue effectively for the non-regulation of the internet, we’ve got to look beyond our own navels; people who use Twitter are not the ones we need to convince. Let’s come up with a message that’s going to convince the 99% of the population who don’t see it our way, who think the internet is something like an extra TV channel but full of paedos and gambling. Because they – like Andy Burnham – are the ones we need to convince.

PS To Mr Burnham or anyone else at the Dept. of C, M and S – No hostages; I’ll be happy to hand over @cultureminister and @DCMS to you any time you like. I’ll ask only that you might use them now and again.

1. Cranberry sauce is good, even if you’re not having turkey. Cranberry sauce in a jar from the supermarket (a.k.a. jam) is filthy.
2. Normally, make your own by boiling up cranberries in orange juice. One year, forget to buy orange juice and accidentally drink up last bit in the fridge. Need to be inventive.
3. Bung some cranberries in a pan. Cover with red wine. Set on Aga, at the cooler end of the hot plate (you want to reduce the wine rather than boil the fuck out of everything).
4. As the wine heats, the cranberries will pop. Take childish pleasure in this.
5. Add a good shoosh of coarsely (need I say freshly? hopefully not) black pepper to the mix. Reflect on the amazing taste combination that red wine and black pepper make.
6. Optional: as the wine gets thicker and the berries start to fall apart, add a small, finely chopped red birds eye chilli. The idea is to have little pops of chilli flavour amongst the smooth, dark-red taste.
7. Taste it now. Wish that you could actually eat something quite that sour. Add brown sugar, half a teaspoon at a time; the idea is to reduce the sour, *not* to sweeten it. Taste after each addition; when it stops making your eyes water, stop adding sugar. 1½ teaspoons was enough here.
8. It will thicken as it cools.
9. Wonder why cranberries are sold in such enormous lots. Consider what to do with the rest of them.

Wishing you a jolly Festivus, new Yule, old Yule, event to cheer you up in the middle of winter, historically spurious religious celebration, bah humbug and, of course, Dr Who Day.