A Thousand Cuts

So I’ve returned to the murky world of internet dating.

I tried it a few years ago and had a great time. I meet some lovely people, had some great nights out and although my heart suffered a few cracks along the way, I came out the other side more or less unscathed.

It is turning out to be a slightly different experience this time. Suddenly the spoof news report that was put onto The Onion website for this Valentines day just passed, doesn’t seem so amusing…but strangely poignant:

It doesn’t matter how many of my friends and family say things like, ‘you’re great’ ‘anyone would be lucky to have you’, ‘it’s his loss’ or ‘I really can’t understand why you’re single’ etc (that last one is my personal favourite - as if there has to be a reason?) it doesn’t make the drip drip drip of rejection any easier.

Each time I decide to be proactive and send out a couple of messages it gets a little bit more depressing as they read my message, view my profile and click delete. Like the news report says - now I can get rejected on my own terms!

When I did it before it did wonders for my confidence as a myriad of men paid me compliments and attention. Not so this time. I’m kind of regretting having signed up for another go now, but I’ve paid my money, and goddamit, I’m going to get my money’s worth of rejection!

Pride and Sensibility

I’m not usually one of those women who gets all soppy over a Jane Austen adaptation, but I have really enjoyed the recent version of Sense and Sensibility on the BBC. I suspect that it’s mainly because it came at an appropriate time in my life and I seemed to empathise with the plight of the characters - particularly Marianne.

Jane Austen was born 201 years before me, and all sorts of changes have taken place in society, traditions and not least women’s place in the world between then and now. However, the feelings and emotions experienced by her heroines are still able to strike a chord today. Women still fall for the wrong men, give them too much too soon and trust them with their hopes and dreams, only to discover that the men are barely giving them a second thought.

I’ve very recently come across my own Willoughby. Someone who made me feel special, raised my expectations, engaged my trust and inevitably let me down.

Maybe one of the beauties of literature, art and music is that it can show us that we aren’t the first and we won’t be the last to feel this way. We can draw parallels in other people’s experience and delight in their ability to make something beautiful out of something painful. Let’s hope there’s a Colonel Brandon out there for all of us.

Words of wisdom and a plea to all men (and women) from the late, great Kirsty MacColl:

“So you took a little piece of me

Laid me open for the world to see

But if I meant so little to you

Why couldn’t you just leave me be?

It wouldn’t have made so much difference to you

But it meant the whole world to me”

New Year, New Resolve.

Right, I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions usually, but this year feels different. I lost the plot a bit over the last few weeks - what with a horrible cold knocking me out for a week or so, and then the excesses of Christmas, so it’s now time to reign it back in and get back on track.

I’ve heard that writing things down makes you more likely to achieve them, so here goes:

• Get up to date on medical appointments (dentist and opticians due soon, and other unspeakable ones as well)
• Prioritise my exercise classes - Pilates on Mondays, Yoga on Wednesday and Friday. These have made such a difference to my well being over the last couple of months - and have actually given me stomach muscles!
• Get back into the running habit. Run Tuesdays and Thursday and one day at the weekend. Option of outside or the university gym.
• Limit alcohol to one pint or one glass of wine on week nights. Most week nights I don’t drink at all, but occasionally I get tempted out and that tends to make my next resolution harder…
• Get up by 7 each weekday morning.* I used to get up at 6.30 every day when I worked to maximise my time, but that has all slipped a bit lately with my new student / teaching status. It also makes weekend snoozing much more enjoyable.
• Restrict weekday Facebook usage to ‘3 meals a day’ - Breakfast, lunch and evening. I need to realise that clicking refresh all through the day is not going to make me any more popular!
• No daytime TV*.

These may seem like odd or restrictive rules to impose on myself, but they are all pretty much designed to contribute to the same overall goal by making me more focused and - completing my PhD to a high standard and in good time (before the money runs out!) and furthering my academic career.

Right I know that isn’t very interesting for anyone happening across my blog (probably trying to find out what ‘ducks in a line’ means) but hopefully it will help me! Also rest assured I’m on the hunt for another amusing picture of malards in formation to please the googlers.

*These may be relaxed in the case of illness. Cos that’s what lies-in and daytime TV are for!

Taking the wrap

There is lots in the news and in the media about waste, recycling and the impact it has on the environment. The headlines today return to the fact that local authorities are alternating rubbish collections with recycling collections in a bid to encourage the later (and probably save money as well I suspect).

On Friday night I just caught the end of a television programme about the amount of unnecessary packaging we as consumers get through on a daily basis. The presenter, Mark Constantine, who is the managing director of Lush cosmetics (see the website for pictures of Lush staff without their packaging!) spoke to representative from supermarkets about where the responsibility for excessive packaging lay.

The supermarket rep. confidently informed Mr Constantine that this was all driven by consumer demand, and that all customers have a choice, but that they choose to buy heavily packaged goods. Whilst I am sure that this has a lot of truth behind it, I decided to see for myself on Saturday as I headed out for my ‘big shop’ at a local Tesco.

I decided that I would consciously try to avoid excess packaging wherever possible. I would look for this ‘choice’ that I was supposed to be being offered.

As a vegetarian a large part of my shopping experience in the fresh produce area. I started off well - courgette, carrots and onions found their way into my basket without any wrapping other than that ably supplied by nature. Next - mushrooms…not so good. There was no option to buy a few mushies without also taking home with me a plastic box. I’m sure they used to offer nice biodegradable paper bags for mushrooms, but that choice seemed no longer to be on offer - in this store at least.

I grabbed the last red pepper - again no more than a price sticker. However, the next person would be forced to buy a pre-wrapped pepper. Not much choice there then.

There was very little in the way of lettuce or other unpackaged ‘leaves’ so I sadly resorted to a bagged salad…

I won’t run through everything on my shopping list - but you get the idea. The choice that we consumers have only seems to go so far and the supermarkets need to start taking more responsibility for the impact that this kind of unneeded rubbish has on the environment now and in the future.

Funnily enough both myself and the nice man on the till managed to get through the checkout process in one piece, despite my lack of plastic bags for veg, and my desire to take everything back home in my lovely comfy backpack as opposed to the shops plastic carrier bags. I even got myself 3 green clubcard points in the process!

Some thoughts…

My ongoing interest in capital punishment has become rather more intense than usual over the last few weeks.  This is mainly, I think, due to seeing several films related to the issue and reading a couple of books documenting the lives of Britain’s hangmen.

Last night I watched ‘Infamous’ - the second film in the last couple of years following the work of Truman Capote as he researched and wrote his book ‘In Cold Blood’.  This ‘non-fiction novel’ documents the murder of a family in Kansas and the subsequent capture, trial and execution of the culprits. 

Whereas, when reading the ‘Chronicles of a Victorian Hangman’ or the autobiography of Albert Pierrepoint (or watching the excellent film based on the latter) it is in some way possible to distance yourself from the events by consigning them to history, the difference with the US-based Capote films is that this still goes on there.  Perhaps they no long hang people in a shed, but in the USA the state routinely takes a perfectly healthy human being and ends their life in the name of justice.  There are currently 3350 people on death row in America.  29 people have been executed this year, including 3 in the last week.

I do not believe that anybody is fundamentally evil.  I believe that people sometimes do evil things and that many people are victims of society, circumstances and chemical reactions in their brains.  With this view of the world any acceptance of capital punishment is beyond comprehension for me.

Charity begins…

Last night I was travelling back on the bus from a softball game in Wandsworth, when I saw something that made me really sad.  We passed a charity shop.  I didn’t see which one it was particularly, but someone had left a couple of black sacks of clothes outside, obviously as a donation.  Two women were standing by them, had ripped them open and were going through and helping themselves to anything they fancied from inside.  This reminded me that I’d seen the same thing happening outside a charity shop on Upper Street in Islington.  A woman helping herself to clothes from a bag left outside.  Whoever had donated them intended that they be sold in aid of a particular charity, and I don’t imagine for a moment that these people weren’t completely aware of that.

I mean, I know there are terrible things going on in the world; war, prejudice, persecution, destruction of the environment to name but a few, and that possibly in comparison some tight-arses filching a few secondhand clothes might not seem such a big deal.  However, it just seems to me to represent in a very specific way the level that we humans can sometimes sink to.  Although the scale is completely different, perhaps we might think that the kind of selfishness and disregard for others  that leads a perfectly well dressed woman to steal from a charity shop is not all that different from that which at least in part underlies larger scale atrocities and tragedies.

I’m not suggesting that pestilence, war, famine, and death can all be entirely reduced to the same basic motive as this.  However, it is all on a scale of what is acceptable behaviour - not just because a law or religion say it is so - but because a human being finds it so.

Why blog?

Someone asked me this weekend why I have a blog? What is the point of it? If it was just to record what I’ve been up to then I’d just keep a diary, wouldn’t I?

I’m been thinking about this and the motivation behind maintaining these pages, and I think I’ve come to some conclusions. I’ll try not to get too deep…

Ultimately we are on our own in this world. Nobody else sees through our eyes, walks in our shoes or experiences the sensations of life in quite the way we do. However, by sharing our experiences we can find common ground with other people and imagine how our lives and world views might intersect with theirs.

I pride myself on having a wide range of interests, hobbies and passions. Whether it be something simple like knitting a blanket, growing some herbs on my windowsill or watching the cygnets outside my window grow up day by day, whether it is the progression of my PhD project, an inspiring film, book or play or just a thought about life, the universe and everything, there is so much in life to think about, wonder about and to find joy and inspiration in.

All these things become even more enjoyable and rewarding if you can share them.

Now, I know that many of my friends aren’t interested in the same things that I am, or don’t agree with me, or see the world in the same way as me. However, this doesn’t stop me having the urge to share. By writing about my thoughts and experiences on this blog, I am putting my stuff out there and asking people to share it with me.

I guess that is why I check my blog stats every day to see who has visited, and why I get over-excited if someone posts a comment. I am imagining that someone out there is sharing something with me. Finding the same thing interesting, funny, annoying, inspiring or whatever!

Three books that I ordered arrived in the post for me this morning. I can’t wait to read them, but there is nobody in my immediate physical or email vicinity who would be interested in the subject matter.  However, I very much look forward to sharing them with any virtual readers who may, in the future, come across my humble little blog!

Stay In Lane!

Now I love cyclists. I think they are great. Some of my best friends are cyclists! In general they tend to be people who care about the environment and want to keep fit and reduce traffic congestion. All very good.

However, I am getting more and more annoyed with those people out there who pretend to be cyclists, but don’t have the courage or perhaps the skill to use their bikes properly. I am talking first and foremost about cyclists who ride on the pavement.

Between my Haringey flat and the tube station there is a long straight road. All along the length of this road is a lovely marked out cycle lane on both sides of the road, and yet it is very rarely that I walk the five or so minutes along this road without seeing at least one cyclist up on the pavement. Why?

Now, it is against the law, dangerous and selfish whenever a cyclists decides that the rules of the road don’t apply to them, but it really beggars belief when there is actually a cycle lane provided for their use!

I also witness similar goings on almost every day on my walk to work in Islington. There is a major road which for a couple of hundred metres is one way. Rather than go around the one way system as any proper road user has to do, cyclists often decide that it will be ok to ride on the pavement for this part of their journey. It is downhill and they often come bombing past me at speeds which would mean serious injuries if they were to collide with a pedestrian.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with little kids riding on the pavement, but once you are old enough to pay full fare on the buses, and certainly when you are old enough to drive, then you should be on the road with all the other vehicles.

Pedestrians and cyclists should be on the same side in the road wars, but these pseudo-cyclists give their well-behaved cousins a very bad name.

Dangerous dog?…Dangerous owner!

I was walking from my work to my university this lunchtime through a small park/garden under a block of flats, when I passed a man and his pitbull.  I first saw the dog when as it ran past the man towards me.  I’m not exactly scared of dogs, but when they are this type and they are running towards me I get a little worried.  I was kind of glad when it had gone.  Then I realised that the owner had changed direction - he’d been checking something in the lobby of the flat and was now going back wherever he’d come from.  He called the dog as he walked away in front of me.  Suddenly, something hit me hard on the back of the legs, almost knocking me over.  Yep, you’ve guessed it, it was the dog.  I’m not sure exactly how or why it did it, and thankfully no teeth were involved, but it scared the life out of me.

I had my radio headphones in my ears so I didn’t hear the ’sorry’ that the man apparently muttered.  As I continued to walk on and tried to get my heartrate back to somewhere near normal the man was looking over at me.  He seemed to think it was unreasonable that I was still shaking and trying to get my breath.  He pulled a face at me, so I asked, ’should’t it be on a lead?’  He said, ‘yes, but then so should some people’.  I told him that it scared the life out of me and that it hurt.  He replied, ‘I said sorry.  Anyway, it’s not my fault, it was the dog!’.  I pointed out that he was responsible for the dog and put my headphones back in so I couldn’t hear whatever he muttered back.

It just seems to be that his attitude sums a lot of the problems we have as a society.  People not taking responsibility, not obeying a law which is blatantly designed for the safety of others (I’d have driving on your mobile in the same category!) and downright being selfish and uncaring. 

I just hope that the owner thinks about it and decides to keep better control of his pet in future, before it knocks over a child or an elderly person, or does something worse.