A Blog About The Many Troubles

My friend Fran came back from South Korea where she’d been pretending to be a human slinky for an audience of hugely impressed Korean business people, and told me about a man she’d sat next to on the plane. He’d quite calmly told her that our unsustainable Western way of life was coming to an end, that it was only matter of time before revolution occurred, everything was turned upside down, and we all ended up living from the land.

We were waking up really early in a twin room of a cottage in Newbury, and from my floral duveted single beds I said quite a lot of things like, ‘well that’s not really very plausible, is it?’ and from hers Fran said quite a lot of things like ‘in the long term I really see myself as a bio-diverse farmer’. After a bit we had to get up, so Fran went off to look at the cows and breathe deeply in the morning air, which is the sort of thing she does, and I pissed about a bit on my Iphone, which is the sort of thing I do.

But I did still think about it, as I tried to get past Stage 2, Level 3 of Sonic the Hedgehog (I’m not very good), because although I generally play the cynic to her wide-eyed bio diverse farmer, underneath it all I find her optimism, compassion and faith in the essential values of community and humanity exceptionally inspiring.

Fran does Shamen dancing in Devon, goes swimming naked in the sea in the dead of winter, lives in a spiritual community in Hackney, and would love nothing better than to travel the UK in a camper van busking and singing Yiddish songs.  When she was briefly an Evangelist she gave everything she owned away on the street. She’s pretty bloody wonderful.

I am Mrs Crouch End, although I try to pretend I’m not, and I get my organic vegetable box served up once a week on my doorstep. If I can’t see real, delightfully unrestricted cows, I can look at pictures of them.  We live in Crouch End because we love the much vaunted ‘villagey feel’ and ‘sense of community’. We have carols in the park with other middle class parents, having a local fishmonger and expensive knitting classes in the luxury wool shop.  But I can’t help sometimes wondering if we’ve created the illusion of community for ourselves. I wouldn’t dismiss those things, as I love living around them, am very happy they exist, and have just signed up for six weeks of knitting classes.  It’s just that I wonder how much of that is close to what a real community can achieve, and whether or not we’d all just eat each other alive if the organic milk ran out.

In a secular society, what motivation is there to keep on being honest when things get really difficult?  As our finances are generally withstanding the recession currently, we’re buying more locks for our back door as burglaries on our road happen daily, splashing out on more expensive train tickets to avoid the chronic overcrowding, and retreating more and more into consumerism as a way of protecting ourselves from the increasingly chilly old world.

A taxi driver last night told me that he watched someone steal two hundred quid’s worth of petrol from a garage when he was filling up his cab. He went up to the till and asked if they were going to call the police. ‘No,’ said the cashier. ‘What’s the point? What are you? Pump 12? That’s £35 please’. He told me he felt completely despairing about his honesty. Is there anything more depressing than that?

As things slip further and further out of control, cuts slash through the fabric of society and injustice is quite clearly utterly rife, self-protection becomes the most tempting option.  Fran hasn’t set up her beautiful rural farming idyll yet, and my flat in Crouch End is pretty cosy, and we’ve just had shutters put on the back doors, and I’ve always really wanted shutters. So I mostly tell her she’s being a bit naive, and that sadly this is how the world works, and that there must be other more moderate ways to combat consumerism than to only eat what you plant yourself. But while I can usually break her down with thirty eight reasons why something is bullshit, when it comes down to it she’s the only person I know who would go to Iraq as a human shield, and not really be afraid.  And you can’t knock that.

A Blog About The Many Troubles

My friend Fran came back from South Korea where she’d been pretending to be a human slinky for an audience of hugely impressed Korean business people, and told me about a man she’d sat next to on the plane. He’d quite calmly told her that our unsustainable Western way of life was coming to an end, that it was only matter of time before revolution occurred, everything was turned upside down, and we all ended up living from the land.

We were waking up really early in a twin room of a cottage in Newbury, and from my floral duveted single beds I said quite a lot of things like, ‘well that’s not really very plausible, is it?’ and from hers Fran said quite a lot of things like ‘in the long term I really see myself as a bio-diverse farmer’. After a bit we had to get up, so Fran went off to look at the cows and breathe deeply in the morning air, which is the sort of thing she does, and I pissed about a bit on my Iphone, which is the sort of thing I do.

But I did still think about it, as I tried to get past Stage 2, Level 3 of Sonic the Hedgehog (I’m not very good), because although I generally play the cynic to her wide-eyed bio diverse farmer, underneath it all I find her optimism, compassion and faith in the essential values of community and humanity exceptionally inspiring.

Fran does Shamen dancing in Devon, goes swimming naked in the sea in the dead of winter, lives in a spiritual community in Hackney, and would love nothing better than to travel the UK in a camper van busking and singing Yiddish songs.  When she was briefly an Evangelist she gave everything she owned away on the street. She’s pretty bloody wonderful.

I am Mrs Crouch End, although I try to pretend I’m not, and I get my organic vegetable box served up once a week on my doorstep. If I can’t see real, delightfully unrestricted cows, I can look at pictures of them.  We live in Crouch End because we love the much vaunted ‘villagey feel’ and ‘sense of community’. We have carols in the park with other middle class parents, having a local fishmonger and expensive knitting classes in the luxury wool shop.  But I can’t help sometimes wondering if we’ve created the illusion of community for ourselves. I wouldn’t dismiss those things, as I love living around them, am very happy they exist, and have just signed up for six weeks of knitting classes.  It’s just that I wonder how much of that is close to what a real community can achieve, and whether or not we’d all just eat each other alive if the organic milk ran out.

In a secular society, what motivation is there to keep on being honest when things get really difficult?  As our finances are generally withstanding the recession currently, we’re buying more locks for our back door as burglaries on our road happen daily, splashing out on more expensive train tickets to avoid the chronic overcrowding, and retreating more and more into consumerism as a way of protecting ourselves from the increasingly chilly old world.

A taxi driver last night told me that he watched someone steal two hundred quid’s worth of petrol from a garage when he was filling up his cab. He went up to the till and asked if they were going to call the police. ‘No,’ said the cashier. ‘What’s the point? What are you? Pump 12? That’s £35 please’. He told me he felt completely despairing about his honesty. Is there anything more depressing than that?

As things slip further and further out of control, cuts slash through the fabric of society and injustice is quite clearly utterly rife, self-protection becomes the most tempting option.  Fran hasn’t set up her beautiful rural farming idyll yet, and my flat in Crouch End is pretty cosy, and we’ve just had shutters put on the back doors, and I’ve always really wanted shutters. So I mostly tell her she’s being a bit naive, and that sadly this is how the world works, and that there must be other more moderate ways to combat consumerism than to only eat what you plant yourself. But while I can usually break her down with thirty eight reasons why something is bullshit, when it comes down to it she’s the only person I know who would go to Iraq as a human shield, and not really be afraid.  And you can’t knock that.

A Blog With Questions About Love In It (And Two Brief Mentions Of The Manford Scandal For Those Who Like The Tabloids)

Hello. I thought I'd do a blog. I accidentally called it How To Be Ideal because I made a mistake with the keyboard while I was trying out possible titles and now I can't change it. If anyone knows how to change it, please let me know. To clarify, I definitely don't think I know how to be ideal. It was only one of the possible options. I don't really have any idea how to be ideal at all.

I began this year having been recently utterly and completely shafted by someone I really loved. Not my husband.  He’s not that kind of husband.  Or the story’s yet to break.  In fact his agent called and asked him to clandestinely reveal any ‘Manford-style’ stories he might have stuffed down the back of his Twitter account – ‘just so they could be prepared’.  If that’s what we’re all up to, it would also be great if he could tell me. I also like being prepared. 

I’ve spent a large part of 2010 (as well as giving birth to and caring for a human, working, and watching Don Draper screwing around) thinking on and off about the particular person who left me so upset, and what happened, and trying to deal with the moral and philosophical repercussions.

Without going into details, one of my colleagues and best friends let me down in quite spectacular style, leaving me massively in the lurch in a very vulnerable situation, when I was quite heavily pregnant.

 The particulars of what happened are not really very interesting. I’m more fascinated by the question, to misquote Charles before he really cocked things up, of what love is. Love should, really, be unconditional.  Real love that’s actually worth anything.  If love is conditional, doesn’t that mean we’re all walking around trying to protect ourselves, get shit for ourselves, and generally are all ready to leave the moment we don’t feel like we’re getting what we want?

Predictably, becoming a mother has been massive shock in the unconditional love department. I thought I was loving.  I am definitely loving.  I hug people, defend people, and make people birthday cakes. Fine.  But the sort of love that is demanded of you by a rage-filled, shit-filled, pained human who can’t focus their own eyes is unlike anything I have ever known.  

In case you hadn’t already realised, sometimes it’s absolutely dreadful to be a parent.  You are there to be chucked up on, to comfort, to be woken every three hours or more around the clock for months on end while recovering from major surgery.  You are busting a gut, 24 hours a day, for someone who really doesn’t understand why or how.  It’s a relationship you cannot leave.  And regardless of how desperately your body craves sleep, or what you personally feel able to offer emotionally and physically, it is your responsibility and your duty to get out of bed, whip your tits out, and get on with it. And if I’m deeply honest, from the bottom of my soul, I have had private moments, hobbling around with a big surgical scar through my stomach holding a breast pump and a screaming, tragic baby human, where I’ve wondered what on earth I’ve done to myself.

We have been a little bit unlucky (and also of course massively lucky to have such a beautiful, healthy although utterly grumpy sort of person). He’s been ill a couple of times, in hospital for a few nights each time with a pitiful drip in his tiny foot.  His illness was initially misdiagnosed, and for several weeks we endured dreadful woes, almost tearing each other up, with no clue as to why the baby was so desperately unhappy.  But babies get more ill than ours. People cope with much worse than we did. And there is no point at which you can say, ‘Well. I didn’t expect to be treated like THIS.’

I’m sure many mothers will claim this has no bearing on their personal experience, and I am very, very happy and fairly jealous that your experience of motherhood was so unconditionally blissful. I certainly would never deny how extraordinary and mind-bending and utterly phenomenal my experience has been, and still is. It’s very, very exciting. But that’s not the point.

In the past I have had such a strong sense of right and wrong that I’ve ended up cutting people out of my life when I felt they’d done something ‘wrong’.  A few years later, I’ve realised I’ve lost a friend over something that was never so clear cut. Both my and Mark’s families have feuds that look set to last until death, and some which already have. I stopped all contact with the friend who screwed me over so handsomely because I felt the stress of the relationship was affecting my health and also that of my unborn baby. But ironically the unborn baby has gone on to cause me about thirty times as much stress as she ever did, and in the end the love I have for him will be one of the strongest and most intense forms of love I’ll ever experience.

Does that mean it’s worth staying in every relationship we have, regardless of how punishing it might be on us personally, because that’s ultimately what it means to be someone who truly loves? I mean, that sounds awful.  And as a cheerful atheist, without a religious framework of eventual reward for that sort of love, I’m not sure I can face it.

For the time being I’ll keep on hoping that Watson doesn’t wank off to any photographs of breasts.  That would be ideal.  But if he does, would even that relationship, which is really the bedrock of my life as I know it, end? And would that be the right thing to do? Watson. Get off Twitter until I’ve made up my mind.