Millionaires, money, inheritance and entitlement

I’m on FIRE with the blogging this month! Quantity rather than quality, perhaps, but anything’s better than nowt. I would like to point out not all my opinion pieces will be having a pop at things I read in the Guardian, honest.  It’s just whenever I find a Facebook share comment extending into the third paragraph, I’m trying to remember that if I’ve got that much to say, this is probably a better place for it.  Thus Facebook can remain the happy realm of holiday snaps, George Takei and Buzzfeeds that we all know and WISH we could stop looking at. Enjoy! 

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This morning saw the publication of one of the most bizarre articles I’ve seen in the Graun for some time.  The paper reports, with apparent disapproval, that several millionaires do not plan on leaving any of their money to their children.  The miserly magnates include John Roberts (of whom I’ve never heard, but who judging from the image accompanying the article, can’t make toast worth a damn); musical maestro and Gollum-a-like Andrew Lloyd-Webber; telly chef Nigella Lawson; and martial arts movie star Jackie Chan.

For something in a left-leaning paper, the article’s response to this is frankly weird.  Erica Buis, while acknowledging that the children of a millionaire are hardly to be pitied, nonetheless takes their part against their parsimonious parent:

is this really the economic climate in which to be sending your kids out into the cold, then blaming them if they freeze? … would it be wrong for Roberts to give them half a deposit on a small flat? Something that levels the playing field between them and the younger version of him, now that the average deposit required for a mortgage is 10 times higher than it was around 20 years ago?

This seems to me to miss the point completely, which is why these individuals should be in possession of such staggering wealth to hand round or not as they please in the first place.  Never mind ‘levelling the playing field’ between these oofy elders and their cash-strapped kids.  What about ‘levelling the playing field’ between the children of the rich and the rest of the world?  These people will already have had access to the best of opportunities to set themselves up for a prosperous future – private education, additional tuition, secure and safe living environment, a network of powerful family friends, and that most precious of commodities, time.  I very much doubt that Nigella’s brood have spent their evenings and weekends manning the tills in Tesco, or getting up at 5AM to do a paper-round before school in order to be able to afford trainers, or music lessons, or food.

Whether their parents leave them an additional wodge of cash when they shuffle off the perch is neither here nor there – by the time that happens, the children of the rich have already reaped the benefits of birth.  Rich children and the adults they grow into by and large do better academically, physically, professionally, and socially, and this is a product of the environment they grew up in and the opportunities that gave them, not a status magically conferred upon the death of their parents and the inheritance of their wealth.  I don’t blame these people, or their parents, for taking advantage of these opportunities – but the fact they are only available to an elite minority is a big problem.  If equality is Buis’ concern, rather than mere acquisitiveness, she should be questioning the validity not of selfishness, but of limitless personal wealth itself.  The aim should not be to quibble about how a particular rich man disposes his estate, but to tax that estate proportionately throughout life, so that no one individual ends up with the power to bestow the gross national product of a small country, whether it be upon a child or a chihuahua.

Quite aside from this larger point, I think people who ‘expect’ inheritance are odious.  If parents want to give gifts or help out, that’s very lovely, but what on earth makes people think that they’re entitled?  There has been much wittering in the press over the last 10 years about the ‘SKI’ set – baby boomers gleefully “Spending the Kids’ Inheritance.”  But why should money be piled up for an uncertain future, rather than spent making the most out of the one life these ‘selfish’ parents are ever going to have?  Moreover, for most people, it’s not so much a question of ‘spending the inheritance’ as ‘making ends meet’: the idea that their grown-up children are ‘counting on’ an inheritance can blight the lives of less well-off parents, who work too hard and live too meagrely out of a sense of obligation to ‘leave something for the kids’.  On the other side of the coin, inheritance is often used as a weapon – some parents seem to enjoy the power it gives, rewarding this child and punishing that one from beyond the grave, safe from the emotional fall-out.  The anger, hurt and resentment this causes can tear apart the family left behind, when they ought to be supporting one another through their grief.

As my wonderful Nan was wont to say, ‘there’s no pockets in a shroud’.  She gave gifts while she was still around to see them enjoyed, died leaving little but the memory of her kindness and good sense – an inheritance which all her children, and grandchildren, can cherish.

My visit to the Ginstitute

This Wednesday, I finally cashed in a voucher I had been bought for my birthday all the way back in November.  The voucher was so beautiful that it constituted a present in itself for a stationary fiend like me, a rectangle of creamy card embossed with copper calligraphy:

But what it entitled me to was even better – the chance to make my very own gin, under the expert supervision of gin-master Jake Burger at the Ginstitute, home of Portobello Road London Dry Gin!

I am an enormous fan of gin.  Although I’m generally speaking a beer drinker, a good G&T is my go-to drink whenever I’m trying to shift my beer belly, or if by evil chance I find myself in the sort of establishment that considers Stella Artois to be the last word in brewed beverages.  As with everything I like, I enjoy the opportunity to find out more about it. I also liked the do-it-yourself aspect of the gift.  I have made my own fruit wine before, and assisted in the creation of several batches of real ale of varying degrees of drinkability.  But with the best will in the world, I think I’d have a hard time setting up my own distillery in the kitchen cupboard.  The Ginstitute offered the opportunity to muck about making spirits without any commitment.

I got to Notting Hill Gate early, so had a pleasant amble down the Portobello Road, enjoying being there on a mild weekday afternoon when it was actually possible to stroll instead of swim through the packed throngs.  The Portobello Star (which houses the Ginstitute) is a small but perfectly formed bar room, all dark wood and green-and-gold wallpaper, and as I waited there I leafed through their menu, featuring bar snacks created in partnership with the sublime Ginger Pig butchers, and a dizzying array of imaginatively-named cocktails.

My fellow Ginstituters were also waiting – a couple from York who had been given the vouchers as a gift by their son, and another couple who had more or less wandered in off the street, intrigued by the advertisement outside the pub.  Presently, we were ushered upstairs into ‘the smallest museum in London’, and into the presence of Jake, who was in the process of constructing a round of perfect Tom Collins cocktails.  Whilst we dispatched these with indecent haste, he brought us up to speed on the dim, dirty and sometimes downright depressing history of gin in England.

Gin first appears in the early 16^th century (or possibly some time before, depending on who you’re listening to and how you classify something as ‘gin’) when the Dutch are recorded as guzzling down genever.  When English soldiers fought alongside them against the Spanish in 1585, they enthusiastically acquired the habit, imbibing freely before going into battle (possibly the origin of the expression ‘Dutch courage’).  It didn’t take long for them to bring the tipple back with them to Blighty, and gin, being very strong and extremely cheap, quickly became so wildly popular with the ‘lower orders’ that it threatened the very social and economic fabric of the country.  William Hogarth’s famous etchings, Beer Street and Gin Lane, demonstrated what he and many others saw to be the deleterious effects of the gin craze on the working classes, who had formerly thrived on a diet of weak ale.

Although manifestly suffering from a brutal cold, Jake still brought the history of gin on both sides of the Atlantic to vivid life, with his enthusiasm and his store of fascinating facts.  It helped that the museum was so atmospheric, full of gin-erobilia – glass cabinets filled with dusty bottles of long-defunct brands, the business card of one of the greatest American cocktail mixers, and a number of ornate, hand-etched mirrors in the lavish style of the 18^th century’s ‘gin palaces’, which still informs the ambience of many a traditional English pub today.

 Leaving behind the bad old days of gut-rot adulterated with turps and sulphuric acid, Jake brought us bang up to date with the invention of the column still, the regulation of the distillation industry, the rise (and occasional fall) of the big hitters of mass-produced gin, and the current renaissance of artisanal gin makers proliferating in London today.  It quickly becomes clear from all the fond name-dropping that the gin world is a small and cordial one – the Portobello Road team are as friendly with the managers of Beefeater and Bombay Sapphire as they are with small-scale operators who might be seen as their direct competitors, such as the team of toffs behind the Sipsmiths range.

The history lesson was over too soon, and it was back to the business in hand.  Armed with notepad, pencil and a bracing G&T (with the Portobello Star’s distinctive twist of grapefruit rather than lemon or lime) we trooped up to the still room – a magnificent mad-scientist-meets-art-deco laboratory full of test-tubes and great glass demijohns of alcohol – to get hands-on creating our own gin.

Jake set out the parameters of our project.  London dry gin is legally a grain-based spirit of at least 37.5% ABV in which the flavour of juniper predominates (and does not, contrary to what you might expect, have to be made in London).  Beyond these basic stipulations, the world was our oyster – although he did also point out that in order to produce something drinkable, it was important to maintain a balance between the juniper base, the zesty, fruity top notes, more ephemeral flavours and the lingering spice tones.  He pointed out that with so many botanicals to choose from this did not significantly limit a gin-blender’s scope – he had recently had someone come in determined to achieve a curry gin, and was able to send them away with a bottle of something that satisfied this peculiar desire and could still be said to answer to the name of gin.

To give us an idea of the possibilities, Jake passed around a number of raw aromatics, including juniper berries, coriander seed, and orris and licorice roots, encouraging us to crush, smell and taste.  The juniper yielded the Christmassy aroma and sweaty undertone familiar to anyone who’s ever stuck their beak into a G&T.  Jake told us that it grows wild on the mountainsides of Tuscany, and is hand-harvested, the berries beaten from the prickly bushes into buckets using a special stick known as a spank-berry.

When I was able to control my mirth at this (I think perhaps that third cocktail was not such a great idea) he continued to introduce us to the somewhat daunting array of distillations at our disposal, ranging from familiar kitchen staples like cinnamon and orange peel to the rather more exotic (wormwood), the unexpected (English hops??) and the (to me) downright essential (Yorkshire Tea?  Yes please).  We were given some time to scribble down the flavours that had most appealed to us, advised by Jake if we had gone too far off-piste, and finally – the science bit! – were allowed to start mixing up our gins.

I had decided to create a plain and hearty English gin, evoking the cosy, comfortable pleasures I subscribe to.  So in addition to Jake’s recommended minimum mixture of juniper, coriander, angelica and orris root, I added English hops, a healthy slug of Yorkshire tea, an extra helping of the biscuit-y orris, some cassia (described by Jake as tasting ‘like cinnamon but more so’) and a little lemon verbena and some grapefruit for a lift.  I wish I could pretend this was the result of a judicious decision-making process, but frankly I was just overexcited, and had to be politely restrained from adding elderberry, dandelion and burdock, and licorice root as well.

The result was deemed a success by Jake, my Ginstitute colleagues, and most importantly by me, and was lovingly christened “Spankberry Tea & Biscuits”.  Offered the choice of having the label applied dead flush or drunkenly askew, I’m sure you can guess what I opted for.  If you fancy putting your tastebuds in my hands, you can nip along to the Ginstitute’s website and order a bottle of my gin – just enter number C191403.   However, I can just as confidently recommend the Portobello Road’s own Number 171.  I was also provided with a bottle of this as part of the day’s haul, and can therefore testify to its deliciousness in cocktails, mixed with tonic or slurped surreptitiously from the bottle on a station platform.

We finished off the afternoon with a round of martinis back in the museum, then stumbled off into the sunlit streets, a bottle of gin under each arm and dipsomaniac smiles on our faces.  An absolutely corking present for anyone you know who’s fond of gin!

Use your words

I am – to put it kindly – an opinionated person.  Less kindly, but perhaps more accurately, I am a mouthy cow.  I always have been.  This is the result of being raised by highly articulate, argumentative people who frankly didn’t have the patience to treat me like a child, even when I was one.  While I would rarely be fobbed off with a simple and unequivocal “Because I SAY SO!”, if my parents took the trouble to argue with me, then they were playing to win.  I wasn’t going to get my own way (or even the time of day) unless I was able to put forward a compelling argument.

And then there was the question of my cultural consumption. I refused to learn to read at all until I was five years old.  My resolve was finally cunningly undermined by my grandmother.  On my fifth birthday, she displayed a pair of beautifully illustrated hard-back books she had bought me (The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, if you’re asking) and then ostentatiously handed them to my father for safe keeping, saying what a shame it was they were no use to me yet, but that he could look after them for me until I had learnt to read them myself.  I got those books within the month.  I read them; then I read everything else.  My tastes were catholic: I read the standard children’s fare – comics, Judy annuals, and the inevitable Enid Blyton (resulting in a lifelong preoccupation with pork pies and ginger beer) – but also anything else I could lay my hands on: Catherine Cooksons at my nan’s, my father’s eclectic mix of Tolkien and Tolstoy, Dune and Louis L’Amour, and anything and everything in my mother’s glass-fronted book cabinet – a treasure trove of Terry Pratchett and Thomas Hardy alongside heavy tomes on genetics, astrology and zen, not to mention crack-spined copies of Lolita and the Kama Sutra, guiltily inhaled while standing by the shelf, one ear turned towards the living room door.

I loved to read, because I loved words.  Because words gave you power. They allowed you to put ideas in people’s heads.  And they allowed you to make people see you – really see the real you, whether they liked it or not.  Without them, I could only be what other people chose to see.  But by using my words, I could force them to see the parts of me I was proud of – that I was clever; that I could be funny; that I had all the same hormone-driven desires as my prettier peers, that no-one wanted to recognise could be roiling beneath my dumpy teenage surface.

Most importantly of all, words gave you the power to say what you wanted, explain why you wanted it, and prove that you deserved it.  They allowed me to take the mass of unmet wants and inchoate passions sloshing formlessly around in me, and shape them into something I could work with.  They gave me tools to track down the elusive truth of an argument, an idea, a person, to whittle and refine my concept of that truth until I was as close to it as it was possible to get.  And that proximity to what was real was an exhilirating drug I found I couldn’t do without.

The practical upshot of all this is that I am an INTENSELY verbal person.  I honestly don’t ever have a feeling that I can’t articulate – in fact, for me, the feeling barely exists until it is articulated.  I feel compelled to talk about things that are difficult or painful, or that I just don’t understand, as it is only by reasoning my way through them with words that any kind of resolution is achieved.  An unexplored emotion will nag at me like a sore tooth, and I just cannot keep from prodding.  I’m lucky I was born when I was, not a few hundred years ago, or I’d barely have been out of the scold’s bridle or off the ducking stool I fear.  Simply put, the worst thing anyone can do to me is present me with a problem and then say “I don’t want to talk about it.”

However.  There are people I encounter with whom this characteristic is a problem.  What works for me does not necessarily work for them, and my need for clarity and conclusion can on occasion actually inhibit them.  Some feel intimidated by the demand that they verbalise their thoughts and feelings on sensitive or complicated subjects even to themselves, never mind a third party.  Others are intuitive, instinctive people, for whom it is enough to simply feel a thing without having to define what it is and why.  I have had to learn to know when to stop with these people, because what to me is an exchange of views, feels to them like an argument; what from my perspective is an investigation of who they are and how they feel, to them is an intrusive interrogation.

Because my power lies so completely in my words, power over me resides in silence – not just those who can force me to be silent (mercifully few since leaving school), but those who have mastered silence themselves, who refuse to be drawn at all onto my home turf.  It is a method of control that seems to go much deeper than mine, than grappling the world to the ground with words.  Satyagraha means “insistence on the truth”, but is exemplified by passive resistance – it is what I always think of when I encounter one of these people, who are capable of sitting with a feeling or a fact without needing to understand or argue with it, to challenge or to change it.  I envy those who hold this alien power, frustrated by their power over me – for if they won’t give me their words, I cannot share or shape them, must stand struck dumb before them, seeing only what they choose to let me see.

When ‘could be worse’ isn’t good enough – a response to Laura Kay’s ‘4 Great Things About Renting’

Laura Kay, who describes herself in her Guardian profile as a ‘free-lance writer and part-time sandwich maker’, has written a comment piece for the Graun exhorting ‘Generation Rent’ (the growing numbers of people in their twenties and thirties who can expect to be renting privately for the foreseeable future) to buck up – renting is actually a great lark, and we should be sanguine about skyrocketing house prices and static salaries.

I find this article extraordinarily irritating.  Which is a bit unfair, as it’s only her opinion.  It probably doesn’t help that I’ve been saving about a third of my income for a mortgage deposit for the last year and a half, and keep thinking about how many pairs of boots I could have by now if I hadn’t been!  But mainly it’s the senseless optimism and lack of logic that nabs my nannygoat.

Quite apart from apparently having the political consciousness of a dishcloth, Pollyanna here seems to have forgotten a few very important caveats to her ‘4 great things’:

1) Not living in fear of breakages:  I actually live more in fear of breakages as a renter than I would if I owned the place.  If the boiler breaks in my flat, I have to

(a) get in touch with my landlords, who are a bugger to get hold of as frequently out of the country;
(b) get their permission to get the problem solved, deal with their angst about how much it’s going to cost, potentially have to put up with them trying to get it done on the cheap by some dodgy geezer with no qualifications before they eventually admit defeat and let me get a professional in;
(c) go through the whole process again if the first intervention doesn’t work, although this time with the angst amplified, and with passive aggressive noises being made about how much expense/hassle is involved in renting the flat to us and ‘maybe we should just sell it’, leading me to be incredibly anxious and inexplicably guilty every time several things need sorting in quick succession.

If I actually owned the flat, and thus the boiler therein, I could simply get the damn thing fixed or, if I couldn’t afford it, live with it.  I wouldn’t spend my life in a state of anxious powerlessness.

2) Freedom to move:  Only if you have a massive deposit sitting handy, or someone rich to sub you.  Most landlords won’t give you back your deposit until weeks after you vacate the property; paradoxically, new landlord won’t let you move in until they have the deposit.  So unless you have a few grand going spare, upping sticks is not exactly the carefree process the author implies.

3) Housemates: I’ve had some bad ones.  I’ve had some great ones.  But ultimately, I’m nearly 30; I’ve been in a relationship for over 5 years; I know who I want to live with.  My parents had bought a house and had two children (and, fair dos, a divorce) by my age, whereas I am still living like a student.  It’s not such a ‘great experience’ any more.

4) Not a symptom of a ‘lost generation’: Ah, this is the one that really had the cerebral fluid boiling out my ears.

“We may be a generation struggling to find jobs and affordable housing, but we’re also a generation who can talk about it, laugh about it and get on with it. There are worse things to be known for than not owning four walls: at least we’re not Generation Plague.”

I detect a strong aroma of the Four Yorkshiremen here – “oh, but we were happy in those days, though we were poor!” “BECAUSE we were poor!” – along with a sewage-y underwhiff of Tory pull-your-socks-up-never-had-it-so-good-ism that makes the gorge rise in my throat.  It could be worse, so stop complaining?  I’ll accept that as a socioeconomic argument when you can spit into my open coffin, thank you very much.

Yes, there is nothing intrinsically awful about renting; indeed, in many other countries it is the norm and people are perfectly happy to do it.  But those countries have social housing, rent control, tenancy rights, and a living wage, as well as a reasonable expectation that when you’re old, state provision isn’t going to be so paltry you will have to make a choice between eating and heating.  In Britain, unless you get very lucky with your landlord, to be a renter is to be a second class citizen, with very little of the ‘freedom’ Kay extols – not even the freedom to paint the walls or keep a cat – and no security at all.

An update and one from the Archives: Victoria Pendleton, femininity and being a “proper girl”

OK, so, that new year’s resolution to write write write write write?  Umm, working on it!

I have been ridiculously busy this week one way or another, and have not really had time to blog.  On the other hand, a visit to the gorgeous William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow has prompted an idea for a potential new novel, which I have been researching in a preliminary kind of way.  This is very exciting, as I don’t get ideas for novels very often – in fact the last idea I had was over 10 years ago, and I told you what became of that.  So if you live to a ripe old age, you may yet get to read a rough first draft of my story about Jenny and May, the daughters of William Morris.  Just, you know, based on past performance?  Don’t actually hold your breath.

ANYWAY.  In lieu of any actual fresh writing, I have refreshed the following article (first written in 2009) just for the sake of something to put up.  I should note I am a lot less judge-y of other women nowadays (and have also learned how to put on make-up), but I still stand by the points in the article in the main, and I was pleased with it as a piece of writing.  Enjoy!

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Victoria Pendleton, femininity and being a “proper girl”

I generally eschew free magazines as a point of principle.  I live in London, and commute to work – this means that I am bombarded with so much free media that the mind boggles briskly at the thought of just how many trees must die each day in order that the post-rush-hour streets of London may be carpeted with greyish sludge on rainy days.  I hate having to run an obstacle course from my front door to the office, vaulting over unreasonably alert young men in cheerfully-coloured rainmacs attempting to foist a range of unwanted publications on me before I’ve had my first, essential-for-interaction-with-other-human-beings cup of tea.  And I hate advertising.  And litter.  And the tickly whisper of SOMEBODY ELSE’S NEWSPAPER brushing against my ear on a crowded tube.  So no CityAM, no Stylist, no ShortList, not even The Evening Standard – I spurn these pillars of the printed word, heedless of the blandishments of their vendors.  If the relentless repetition of the title in an increasingly nasal voice can be considered a blandish.

However.  This morning, I was stuck in a tunnel for 15 minutes; my iPod had packed up; and my brain had started to bleed with ennui. This, incidentally, is another symptom of London life.  When one is so constantly and copiously cudgelled with content – via billboards, hoardings, shop windows, smartphones – a few minutes of stimulation deprivation becomes more deafening and disconcerting than a fruit machine at a funeral.  So, to escape my own thoughts, I picked up and flicked through today’s offering of hard-sell and dreck in the form of Stylist.  On the only page completely free from adverts, Victoria Pendleton, Olympic gold medallist and face of Hovis Wholemeal Breakfast Week (OK, so not completely free from adverts), enlightened London on the question of how she goes about her average day.  From more or less the opening paragraph, the interview was an object lesson in patriarchy for the modern age.

“I wake up at around 8.30 AM,” says Victoria, “have a shower and do my make-up.  I do have to be a bit functional, so I just put on a bit of Mac mascara, YSL’s Touche Eclat (my can’t-live-without-it product) and scrape my hair into a ponytail.  I worry sometimes that with all the training I do I won’t look feminine.”  Quite apart from the blatant product placement making my skin itch, this sentence struck me on the femi-bone (which is to say, that part of my system that responds to any sexist stimuli by pumping me full of feminist bile).

A large picture of the woman in question dominates the page; and I see that Ms Pendleton is quite right to worry.  Try though she may (and does she ever try, jutting her hip and pouting her lip for England) there is nothing ‘feminine’ about her direct look or her lean, healthy body.  Her muscular arms and thighs, the flat firm wall of her abdominals, the aura of power she exudes even when not pedalling furiously in pursuit of gold, are so far removed from ‘femininity’ that all the Touche Eclat in the world cannot help her to that hallowed state.

It is often noted that conceptions of ideal female beauty, before television facilitated the homogenisation of culture, have varied hugely from country to country and from era to era.  But from Rubens’ chubby, lolling lovelies to the almost preternaturally fragile models like Lily Cole who command the catwalks today; from the Japanese manga obsession with pencil-thin yet strangely pneumatic schoolgirls to the re-emerging tradition in Mauritania of force-feeding young girls to make them obese (and thus, by standards of their culture, more feminine); one factor is consistent in all conceptions of femininity.  Whether it comes with rolling curves of soft, inviting flesh, or jutting bird-bones and huge haunted eyes, that which is feminine is that which is weak, helpless, harmless.  It is feminine to wear soft, delicate fabrics that tear easily; it is feminine to teeter along in pin-thin heels, deliberately crippling oneself; it is feminine to cringe, to sulk, to cry – but not to shout; it is definitely not feminine to cycle 500 metres in 33.838 seconds.

Pendleton seems to know that in spite of everything she has achieved, her lack of femininity exposes her to an opprobrium that she cannot get out from under by winning medals or breaking records.  To her credit, she has not allowed that fact to put her off.  But she does work hard in this interview and elsewhere to reassure society of her essential harmlessness.  “For years I’ve been the only girl on the team, but now there are three of us – it’s so nice to have someone to share your nail polish with when you’re on tour!” she gushes, glossing over the heartening fact of increasing numbers of serious sportswomen with a girly giggle.

She concludes: “at the moment, I’m working towards two things: the Olympics and my wedding.”  The symbolism of the fact that the first thing she does when she gets home from training is to put back on her engagement ring (which might be lost or damaged during her intense sessions at the Velodrome), and the reassurance such an image offers to a nervous patriarchy, is so glaring it’s almost embarrassing.  Although if you want genuinely embarrassing, try Pendleton’s photoshoot for lad’s mag FHM and the accompanying commentary:

“Anyone who watched the 2009 World Track Cycling Championships in March will be aware of two things. Firstly, that FHM’s July issue cover star Victoria Pendleton has the sort of legs that could, should you inadvertently find yourself in a sexual embrace with the woman, kill you. Secondly … Pendleton cried so much that her lips were spasming and big drippy bogeys were on their way.”

The combination of fear and contempt encapsulated in this passage expresses all the social pressure that comes to bear on the women who either can’t or won’t be feminine – that is, who either refuse or are unable to feign weakness and debility wrapped up in a pretty chiffon package. FHM’s solution to the problem of Pendleton’s strong, healthy body, dismissively described as being ‘constructed for function rather than form’, is to photograph her in her underwear in a variety of vulnerable poses, those life-threatening legs hobbled in six-inch heels.

Now I KNOW that Pendleton is an independent woman and nobody forces her to simper about make-up or pose in her underclothes; and I KNOW that the feminist movement cannot cry conditioning forever, and that no matter how much progress is made on the equality front, there will always be women who prefer the trappings of femininity to the potential power of womanhood. Nor do I think the two are perforce mutually exclusive; I myself am wearing nail polish right now (well, more or less; I put it on about a week ago and it is now little more than a series of purple archipelagos clinging to my regrettably much-chewed nails) and have not yet felt the urge to jack my job in and make cakes all day – no more than I do after the average working day, in any case. I don’t think we all need to be nine and a half stone of twanging muscle, faces scrubbed clean and hair scraped back to face the glorious dawn of the matriarchy.

What I object to is the desperation which women like Pendleton, who for whatever reason can’t or won’t do ‘femininity’, feel the need to explain away their strength or their intellect with the silent reassurance: ‘I’m still a proper girl.’  And for all that I object to it so strongly, I am guilty of it too.

I don’t really wear makeup.  I never have.  I dabble in eye shadow now and then, and every so often I’ll buy a pot of blusher or tube of concealer that is used once and then gathers dust on my dressing table until I throw it out two years later.  What usually prompts these pointless purchases is a sudden dread of becoming one of those old women with blue eye shadow up to her hairline and orange lipstick stuck to her dentures – women who have looked in the mirror at about sixty and panicked, after decades of scrub-faced complacency.  I don’t want to be that inept when my time comes, I think.  I need to develop a cleansing regimen, I need to figure out how to apply foundation without looking like a ghost, a leper or an Oompa-Loompa, I need to become a proper girl.  The notion that I might just simply continue not to bother until the day I drop down dead doesn’t seem to get much of a look in when the fear is in me.

This creeping sense of shame at my failure to be a proper girl is what drives me to periodically part with great wodges of cash for some variation on a glorified crayon.  But the real reason I don’t use the damn things, the reason I have not devoted the time and effort required to becoming proficient in their application, is that I simply don’t like how it looks on me.  Not just because I can’t put it on right; on several occasions, for special nights out or just for fun, I have asked girl-friends to ‘do my face’; the result is invariably, subtly wrong – I may look nice, but I don’t look like me.  And while me might not be much to look at, when I am offered the choice between that and the painted stranger in the mirror, my gut reaction is to reach for the wet wipes.

On one occasion when this wasn’t practical (the friend in question had spent half an hour anointing me with her best items and would probably never have spoken to me again) I wore my strange face to the pub, and was told by another (male) friend that I looked like ‘a very sexy clown’.  At the time I thought he was being a dick; but looking back, it was perceptive.  The make-up I was sporting was subtle by the standards of the group; but on me, it sat strangely.  I wasn’t wearing it to bring out my eyes, or emphasise my smile; I was wearing it to be a proper girl.  And so, of course, I looked as stagey and ridiculous as Victoria Pendleton, Olympic cyclist, in stilettos and a scrap of silk, prone on the floor in a gentleman’s wank mag.

New Year, New Blog

Happy 2014, one and all!  Well, nearly.  I like to get the jump on the new year, as, for me, it is always a time of great change (real or anticipated).  I am a huge fan of the whole new year shebang – the party, the countdown, the kiss, and the slew of earnest resolutions more honoured in the breach than the observance.  I am not even slightly cynical about it.  New year, new start.  Again.

It’s the hopefulness I like, and the impetus the new year gives me to reanimate my spirit from whatever rut it has worn itself into in the preceding year – a shot in the arm, a shake awake, and a timely (hah!) reminder that life is passing, and won’t come again – and that really, truly, it is not good enough to spend weeks at a time achieving nothing more remarkable than an encyclopaedic knowledge of the various ailments suffered by the characters of Tenko.  It is the opportunity for change.

As I get older, new year is taking on even greater significance, as the pace of change that life imposes on me on its own account (as opposed to the chosen changes I laboriously will into being) slows down.

Between leaving school and my late 20s, life hustled me along with gratifying haste.  First I had a gap year, an experience that hooked me on the intoxicating drug of constant change for its own sake, of always having somewhere else to go.  Then university, which although a solid stint of three years, was a constant cycle of change – first this flat, then that, these friends then those, this unit and then the next, exams, holiday plans, dead time followed by deadline, on and on.  Then two masters degrees, interspersed with full-time jobs that lasted for six months, eight months, ten months – between 2007 and 2010, I lived in a different city every year.

I liked being able to earmark chunks of my past based on some significant aspect like that – the city I lived in, the qualification I obtained, the job I had, the person I loved, each year a discreet unit with little long term overlap.  I liked the simplicity and the variety of it, and this preference seeped into other aspects of my life – although I am always buying things, I tend to give a lot of things away; although I have passionate connections to my friends, the oldest and best of them will tell you how hopeless I can be at keeping in touch.  The wheel turns and I turn with it, keen for renewal, for the new.

However, as I stare down the barrel of 30, I realise that wheel is slowing down, and that I am… accreting.  I have lived in the same city for four years, the same flat for two; I have been in the same job (a proper, full-time, permanent, professional job) for 18 months.  I save money, I own furniture, I am planning to buy a flat as soon as may be.  I am becoming (belatedly) a grown-up.  This is both gratifying and terrifying in equal measure.  It is as if hitherto I have been a liquid, sloshing around from corner to corner and shape to shape, and now I am solidifying at an alarming rate, becoming the person I will have to live with for the rest of my life.  If I allow it to happen, I will turn around in five or ten years time and find that I remain, give or take a few wrinkly bits, the exact same person that I am today, and will have simply lived out several repetitions (with minor variations) of the same year.  The world will permit that; it no longer demands change, or choice.  It is I myself who must demand it, if I want it.

And I do; I want to keep on changing, to keep on learning, to keep on opening doors of possibility rather than letting them shut behind me.  I want to continue to be able to say, “that was they year that I achieved that goal/had that experience/made that start.”  And so I do what I do every year around this time – I make a list of hopes and dreams, call them resolutions, and make a promise to myself to try to change, to learn, to open the doors.  Here’s to 2014, the year that I:

1)     Give up drinking for January. 
OK, it’s hardly stunning in its originality, nor is it exactly challenging; but being booze free for a time gives me the time, the money and the energy to do the other things I want to do.

2)     Learn to preserve food.
This one’s a bit folksy, but I really love the idea of making my own jams and pickles.  Last year, on a trip to the US, I fell so in love with pickles that I bought this brilliant book from the overwhelmingly vast and wonderful Powell’s bookstore in Portland, flew back home full of good intentions… then stuffed it on a shelf and forgot about it for eight months.  Fail.  2014 will be the year that I put food in jars.  Mmmmm, botulism, here I come.

3)     Finish knitting this dratted jumper.
I have been knitting the same jumper for about two years.  At one point, I left it for so long it got weevils and had to be fumigated.  This is getting ridiculous.  Just.  Do.  It.

4)     Start writing this dratted novel.
Even more shameful than an unfinished novel is a novel you never began.  For getting on 10 years (yes, that’s right, 10 years) I have been claiming to be ‘writing a novel’ about Caravaggio.  Thus far, it consists of about 4000 words total of miscellaneous first draft scraps, including one passage referred to in my house as the ‘sex in a cupboard’ scene, which out of context (and as there is no novel, there is no context) just sounds wrong.  This is EMBARASSING, and must be remedied.

5)     Learn French.
I don’t want to live in the UK for the whole of the rest of my life.  I don’t have any solid plans or immediate intentions, but one day, I want to live and work abroad.  French specifically may or may not be useful, but it’s good to keep your hand in with languages.

6)     Get fit.
2013 may not have been the standout most exciting year of my life, but it did contain one notable feature – I got fit.  Not Schwarzenegger fit – I doubt that that is either achievable or desirable for a pudgy English girl – but daily exercise, bags of energy and endorphins, I-can-feel-my-muscles-when-I-walk fit.  I hardly looked different at all, but I felt fantastic.  And then my birthday and Christmas came along, and an orgy of overindulgence has left me bloated, lazy and knackered.  I want to feel fantastic again.

7)     Let my work into my life.
It’s time to can this attitude I’ve had that paid work and my “real life” are mutually exclusive.  I think this is a hangover from my uni days, when the need to have a paying part time job (or jobs) alongside my full-time study meant that it was very important to carve out time that wasn’t for work, and wasn’t for study – clearly demarcated ‘me’ time in which I could abandon the otherwise omnipresent guilty feeling that whatever I was doing, I probably ought to be doing something else.  In real terms, it means that I turn up to a job and I work, hard, and for as long as is necessary to get the work done to the best of my ability – but when I go home that’s that.  This doesn’t actually make the slightest bit of sense anymore, given that I am finally working in a field that interests and challenges me, and about which I have some actual opinions.  I’ve met lots of knowledgeable, passionate people working in information, and I want to be one of them.  I want to be talking about it, learning about it, and getting involved in a way that goes beyond what is relevant to the specific task I’m doing at the time.

8)     Be a good mentor.
Through my job, I’ve been able to get involved in an email-based pupil mentoring programme, and have been paired with a really, nice, smart girl who’s just started her GCSEs.  I want to do my very best to help her achieve her goals this year.

9)     Pick up my trumpet.
I have a (slowly rusting) trumpet under the bed.  Time to get it out and start pissing off the neighbours.

10)  Write.  Write write write write write!
This is the big one.  Writing used to be my LIFE.  It was all I did, all I wanted to do – I still have a trick of mind where I narrate my life to myself in my head as I’m living it, because I used to write as naturally as breathing.  Most of it was ghastly bad, of course, but that’s beside the point.  The sheer volume of my creative output, and the pleasure it used to give me, was spectacular.  And it still gives me a buzz like nothing else.  Even now – writing what is essentially a glorified shopping list – watching the sentences appear on the page, reaching for the word that will work, is the best feeling I have had all day.  I am going to commit to writing something creative – a bit of novel, a blog post, even a poem (God help us all) – at least three times a week.

That’s probably enough to be getting on with for now.  Loads of other things I’d like to do, and hopefully will, but these ten resolutions will give me something to goad myself into action with when all I want to do is slump down on the sofa and read Damn You, Autocorrect for five hours straight.

Any encouragement, suggestions or lists of your own will be received with interest!