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On our drive down to Cornwall last weekend I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a sign which I was quite sure read ‘Beast Burning’. It was attached to a fence by the side of the road, and by the time I’d read it we’d already gone past it.
‘I just saw a sign that said ‘Beast Burning”, I told J.
‘What? You must have misread it.’ He said.
‘No, I’m sure that’s what it said. What kind of beast do you think they’re going to burn? I mean, it could be anything. A cat, a cow…’
‘Probably not a cat’, J pointed out, ‘it wouldn’t burn for very long. There’s a lot more burning to be got out of a cow.’
‘Poor beast.’ I said.
And then I discovered a half-eaten packet of mint humbugs in the glove compartment, and we forgot all about the whole thing.
On the drive home on Monday morning, our Sat. Nav. went all wiggy on us and we ended up bimbling all over Cornwall on teeny little roads with high hedges for a couple of hours. There are no motorways in Cornwall, so teeny little roads are basically your only option for getting around, and it is safe to say that without the Sat. Nav. we would probably still be there, so I’m not complaining, but it did take us on a very long and convoluted route out of the county.
Or maybe it was just a very clever little Sat. Nav., because, as we were finally pulling onto a major road, I happened to glance to my left, and there was the sign! Right in front of me!
Beast Burning! It’s quite hard to read because I had only a second to take the picture and didn’t have time to zoom in. So, to save you from squinting, this is what the sign actually says:
Colliford Lake Park
BEAST BURNING
Sunday 28 October
Ticket Hotline: xxxxxx
Postponed
Until 4th November
Not only will a beast be burned at this event, but it is expected to be so popular that there is a ticket hotline. A ticket hotline! Who are these Cornish savages who will phone in advance to reserve tickets at the burning of some poor beast? Aren’t those sheep standing around the sign feeling a bit nervous? I would be, if I were a sheep. I would be thinking ‘Hmmm, that sign says ‘Beast Burning’. I am a beast… Fuck.’
Well, internet, in the interests of full disclosure, I did investigate this Beast Burning thing when I got home, and it turns out that those sheep were right not to be overly concerned. Apparently, the beast being burned is a wooden effigy of the Beast of Bodmin Moor, a possibly non-existent leopard-like cat of Cornish legend.
So that’s alright then.
But is it wrong that I’m kind of disappointed?
J and I have been invited to a Halloween party tomorrow night, and I can’t decide whether to be pleased and excited about it or sulky and grouchy. Because, you see, it is a fancy dress party. And I do not DO fancy dress. Last time I got dressed up as anything other than myself was at university, as a naughty school girl, which was basically the most convenient excuse for wearing something slutty in public when I was on the prowl for a conquest on a Friday night.
Incidentally, I heard a funny story, I can’t remember where, about a British girl invited by her American boyfriend to a party in the States. ‘Is it fancy dress?’, she asked. ‘Yeah, fancy.’ He said. She turned up at the party dressed as a tomato, to the humiliation of all. Because fancy dress in the UK means ‘wear a costume’ but in the USA it means ‘don’t turn up in sweats’. Where did I hear that story? That’s going to drive me crazy now until I remember…
But, I am British! We do not DO Halloween! I wasn’t allowed to go trick-or-treating when I was growing up because my Dad said it was begging. When trick-or-treaters came to the door, Mum would give them a single grape, or a penny, despite my protests that I had to go to school with those kids and they would almost certainly beat me up the next day.
Grown-up British people certainly do not get dressed up for Halloween. I am feeling really quite resentful at our supposedly grown-up, supposedly British friends, for throwing a fancy dress Halloween party, in direct contravention of both their age and nationality, and thus throwing me into this sartorial dilemma.
J is unfazed by all of this. He plans on putting on a tux and going as James Bond, which is a) really boring and b) irritating because I don’t have a similarly easy option. I mean, I could put on a cocktail dress and say I’m a Bond girl, but really I will just spend the whole evening looking like myself in a cocktail dress, and saying to people ‘Oh I’m a Bond girl’.
‘Go as a naughty school girl’, says J. ‘Or a naughty nurse? A naughty air hostess?’
‘Basically, you don’t care as long as I go as something naughty’ I point out.
He concurs.
So, the party is tomorrow night. I have no costume and really no inclination to spend a lot of time or effort acquiring one. I could just wear my normal clothes and say that I’m dressed up as myself from yesterday, or myself in a parallel dimension… But I don’t want to BE that girl – the sulky one who won’t get into the spirit of the thing (even though I am both sulky and not getting into the spirit of the thing). Any suggestions for quick-fix Halloween costumes that can be put together from a normal wardrobe with a minimum of fuss? I will be forever in your debt.
We are back! I still have a cold! It is now at that irritating stage where I have the cough of a twenty-a-day smoker and I keep hacking up phlegm at inconvenient moments when I don’t have a tissue, and have to go and find somewhere discreet to spit it out. Lovely!
Anyway, we had a lovely time. Even though, about halfway through the drive to Cornwall it became increasingly clear that the BBC weather forecast (sunny and clear skies) had LIED.
Luckily we had a back-up plan in case of bad weather, and that plan basically involved gluttony of the most extreme order. So as soon as we got to the hotel we got into our bathrobes and got stuck into a cream tea. Hours later, after a three-course meal in the hotel restaurant, I was rather beginning to regret the gluttony….
The next day however, lesson demonstrably not learned, we tucked into a full English breakfast.
And then we drove to St Ives, where we felt we were duty bound to sample the other great Cornish contribution to gastronomy, the Cornish Pasty. (Nope, not a small tassled thingy that strippers put on their nipples, but a delicious pastry full of steak and potatoes).
It brightened up in the afternoon, and we had a lovely tramp on the beach at St Ives.
And obviously we attempted the obligatory photo-taken-by-holding-the-camera-at-arm’s-length-shot. In case you are wondering if J is in some kind of pain, I am pleased to inform you that this is his ‘Elvis face’.
I know.
And we finished the day with a hotly-contested game of Monopoly back at the hotel. And J resoundingly beat me, just like he always does.
So, despite the dreadful weather, we had a lovely time. And we ate so much that now we both feel a bit sick. It’ll pass though…
I still have a cold, and it’s back to work tomorrow (boo!) but I am feeling a lot more goodwill to mankind after a few days away. Also, coming up, an all-Cornish edition of Signs and Wonders, in which we ponder what exactly is involved in a ‘Beast Burning’. Watch this space.
Hello! Happy Thursday! I have a cold, our boiler is broken, our new sofa has a hole in it, and today I have to track down a shade of paint for the hallway which is white, without being too, you know, white, and cream, without being too, you know, cream, and basically today is not a good day. AND, I just wrote a damn post and WordPress fucking ATE IT. Happy fucking Thursday. I hate you World.
But! J and I have booked tomorrow and Monday off of work, the cats are going to jail the cattery, and we are going away for the weekend! To Cornwall! In case you don’t know, Cornwall is on the south west coast of England. You know, that pointy bit that sticks out at the bottom. It is famous for many things, my two favourites being cream teas (Scones! Covered in clotted cream! Clotted as in, this is what your arteries will be after you eat it!) and the Cornish Independence Movement.
You see, once, a long time ago, some guy called Sebastian Munster drew a map of Great Britain, and he labelled the regions Scotland, Wales, England and Cornwall (actually Scotia, Wallia, Anglia and Corneuall but, you know, I guess they didn’t teach spelling so well back there in 1550 – kidding, don’t email me). So Cornwall is all, ‘hey, Scotland and Wales get to be separate nations! We want that too! THIS MAP SAYS WE CAN!’ And the rest of the UK is all ‘wait, are those guys serious?’ and Cornwall is all ‘Dammit we are not kidding!’ and the rest of the UK is all ‘awww, bless those little Cornish people with their little independence movement. Man those guys make some good cream.’ And so it goes on.
So, this weekend, J and I will be eating our own body weights in clotted cream, and revelling in the fact that we are in a small corner of England with its own flag and its own language, where people are seriously threatening not to participate in the next census unless they can have ‘Cornish’ listed as an ethnicity on the form.
I love my crazy country.
Have lovely weekends all! I am going to go and investigate not too white and not too cream paints now, and bitch about my cold to anybody who’ll listen. Happy days.
So, where does life come from? Extraterrestrial organic compounds? Abiotic Chemistry? Extreme Environment? God?
Nope. None of those. I’ve found the answer. I’m not even kidding. Honestly, this post is going to change the world, because I’m here to tell you, I know where life began. And it can’t be a mistake, because, look, there’s a sign and everything:
That’s right, the origins of the universe are to be found in a small shopping mall/cinema complex in Fulham, West London. I bet you’re surprised. I know I was. I mean, on a Saturday night the atmosphere on the pavement outside can get a little, neantherdal, what with all the nightclubs and bars nearby. And on the mornings after England manage not to totally shame themselves in a sporting event, the levels of litter and vomit around the place could certainly be described as, um, primordial-soupy. But still, it wasn’t what I was expecting, and it’s a bit of a disappointment, honestly, to discover that all that stuff about the big bang was wrong. Poor little Stephen Hawking will be so disappointed. And as for all those hours I spent in Sunday school, with that Garden of Eden yarn and the dramatic irony with the snake and the apple, well, it’s kind of irritating to discover all along that it was just nonsense. I could have stayed at home and watched cartoons after all.
But, I’m spreading the word anyway. I’m sorry if you feel the same level of disappointment that I did. The same sense of ‘what, that’s it?’ It is a bit of a bummer, I know. But you can take some comfort in the fact that the cradle of existence does at least have both a Krispy Kreme and a pretzel stand.
I know I do.
Someone I used to go to school with just posted a photo of my old class on Facebook, and my first thought was ‘dear LORD, what was I thinking with that fringe? It’s eating my head!’
I am in the second row from the front, fourth from the left. The one with the weirdly long neck. I remember having this photo taken. It was at the end of the year in the Upper Fifth, so the year we took GCSEs, and our form teacher (Mrs Beverly) let us untuck our shirts for the picture, which was a MAJOR TREAT because normally shirts absolutely had to be tucked in at all times. And looking at the photo now, I can totally see why, because we look really scruffy. I am sixteen here. This was ten years ago.
I’m not in touch with many of the girls in this photo anymore, which makes me sad. Although by the magic of Facebook I have been able to catch glimpses here and there. Most of them have boyfriends now, which is progress from our days locked up in a girls’ school mooning over photos of Damon Albarn and Kiefer Sutherland. A couple of these girls are even married now, although nobody, as far as I know, has any kids yet. It seems that our school’s mission to drill into us that education and career should come before babies must have been largely successful.
I would like to pop into that photo, and take that girl with the weirdly long neck and the regrettable fringe to one side, just long enough to tell her that her school days totally aren’t going to be the best days of her life, that she is not nearly as ugly as she thinks she is (although a haircut wouldn’t hurt), and that her life is going to take some interesting turns, but that so far things have mostly worked out OK. Most of all though, I would like to insist that she takes French A-Level instead of Politics, because in the real world knowing the key differences between circa-1998 Tory and Labour policies on education will be way less useful than being able to understand all the jokes in Nancy Mitford books.
Statistics Without Tears: An Introduction for Non-Mathematicians
I am reading this book at the moment. Lest you think I have taken leave of my senses, I should point out that I have to read it. For work. And worse, I am expected not only to understand this book, but actually to use the things I learn from it. In my actual job! MY job. Something has gone very wrong. How did I get here? I don’t know who I am anymore.
Anyway, this book would be brain-melty enough as it is, what with the forcing me to grapple with terms like ‘standard deviation’ and ‘central tendency’, and breezily advising that I should ‘calculate the square root’ of something before proceeding, but without actually telling me what that means or how one goes about doing such a thing.
I typed ‘calculate the square root’ into Google, hoping for a nice friendly little guide, but all I got was lots of ‘how to calculate a square root when you don’t have a calculator’ pages. Sigh. Internet, you don’t understand. I have a calculator. It is right here. Look! Shiny! Please just tell me which buttons to press and in what order I should press them to reveal this mystical square root thing.
Oh, and as for you, book, here come those tears you promised me I wouldn’t have.
Anyway, like I said, brain-melty. Also may cause you to rant at inanimate objects in your head. But then, THEN, the book really starts to mess with you. See, it gives an example of something costing forty pounds, three and a half pence. That’s right, a half pence. A quick flip to the title page tells me that since it was first published in 1981, we can allow the book some leeway here. The halfpenny was still being minted until 1984, and OK, my edition was published in 2005, so you would think some copy editor somewhere along the way would have come along and got rid of the half pence. But, they didn’t. No biggy, right?
But then, a few pages later, there is a chart showing the modes of transport used by students from some fictional college, in the years 2006 – 2010, with the line ‘the proportion of students travelling by car is known for each of the last several years up to 2010.’ What the heck, book? You can predict the future now? And yet you are still using halfpennies? You can predict student car usage up to 2010 but not the devaluation of the pound, huh?
Clearly some copy editor has been meddling with this book. And they have done the editorial equivalent of your Mum buying your school shoes two sizes too big so that there’s ‘room to grow’. And it is bothering me way more than it probably should that this eager beaver editor has gone to such lengths to future-proof this text, all the way up to 2010, whilst at the same time, mere pages earlier, we have a reference to halfpennies! Gah!
And of course, it should be worrying me that of all the information I have been attempting to absorb from the pages of this book, this is what has stuck in my mind. But really, it just proves what I have always known; that my place is with the words, not the numbers.
The First Rule
No talking. No eye contact. Not even under the most dire of circumstances. Not even if there is a drunk sitting in the carriage hurling abuse at people; not even if somebody throws up on their shoes; not even if a four-piece bongo band gets on and starts serenading you on your merry way along the Piccadilly line (I have witnessed all of these things, by the way). Under none of these circumstances, or really practically any others you can think of, must you look at or speak to anybody else, or even glance briefly in anybody’s direction in order to sardonically roll your eyes. Nope. The only (possible, maybe, with a prevailing wind ) exceptions are: if someone gives up their seat for you, you may make the briefest of eye contact and mutter ‘thanks’ under your breath. If the driver makes an amusing announcement*, you may chuckle lightly to yourself. Otherwise, everybody in that tube carriage, no matter how jam-packed it may be, is busy pretending that they are standing all by themselves in the middle of a big empty field, and if you do anything at all to ruin the illusion, they will, silently and without eye contact, hate you.
The Second Rule
Getting a seat during rush hour involves a very carefully choreographed dance, one for which everybody else knows all the steps, and if you don’t know them you risk either a)mortally offending somebody (not that you would ever know you’d offended them what with the no talking and no eye contact) or b) getting quite badly stepped on. So, here are some pointers:
The rules are simple. Everybody wants a seat. There are a lot more people on the train than there are seats. Ergo, a lot of people are competing for them. Competing in a completely silent battle, in which none of the players show the slightest hint of acknowledging one another, but will still all pretend they are standing completely alone in a big empty field. Fun times!
The best way to get a seat fast is to stand as near as possible to a sitting person who looks like they’ll be getting up soon. Indications of this include: putting their book away; putting their gloves on; folding up their newspaper; moving in a manner which suggests they may soon be picking up their bag… You get the picture. Sitting people who make any of these gestures and then do not get up will be the unwitting focus of silent, white hot fury from all around them.
If you are standing near a seat, and the seat occupant gets up to leave the train, you get that seat! Yay! But, if there are two of you standing equidistant from the newly-vacated seat, the rules of ownership become more complex. Basically, it all depends on which way the person leaving the seat leaves. If they leave by passing in front of the other commuter, you can sort of edge your body into the seat as they leave it, while the other competitor’s commuter’s access is blocked. However, if the other commuter is wise in the ways of seat taking, he/she can take a preemptive strike, by taking a step towards you and inserting their body or bag in between you and the seat, as the original occupant stands up, thus blocking your access. Sometimes this isn’t possible, it all depends on exactly where the key players are standing, and being able to read the angles involved. Reading them wrongly will result in either missing out on a seat that is rightfully yours, or humiliation and possibly being sat upon.
Pregnancy, infirmity, disability or any other ‘-y’ that might on other, more civilised transport systems, guarantee you a seat on even the most crowded train, will not necessarily work for you on the tube in rush hour. Sitting people will go out of their way never to look up at those standing, lest they accidentally happen to notice somebody in greater need of a seat than themselves, and are thus forced to either give up their seat (never!) or acknowledge their own meanness of spirit. Thus you will often see rows of seated people, those who forgot to bring a book anyway, resolutely staring at their shoes for their entire journeys. It’s every man and woman for themselves down there. It may be silent, but don’t for one minute think it’s benevolent.
The Third Rule
It is a point of pride, amongst regular commuters, that they will read whatever it is they have brought to read, no matter how tightly packed the carriage may be, and no matter what ridiculous poses they have to adopt in order to stand up, hold a book, turn pages and still hang onto something while they do it. You will frequently find yourself being poked in the back by the spine of somebody’s paperback, or getting your hair caught on the edge of somebody’s newspaper. You will not complain about, or even acknowledge, these discomforts.
You can read somebody’s newspaper over their shoulder, but you must give no indication, by actually moving your head, that you are doing so. Instead you must give yourself eye strain by trying to read something to the side while always looking straight ahead. Incidentally, it is a universal truth that the contents of a newspaper being half read over somebody else’s shoulder will always be infinitely more fascinating to you than anything you will read if you actually have your own newspaper.
There are other rules of tube travel which are not unspoken. Rules which are, in fact, frequently yelled at you by tube employees, and reinforced with signs. Like, let people off the train before you get on; mind the gap; and, most importantly of all, always stand on the right side of escalators or walk up the left. This last rule will become so ingrained that you will find, wherever you go in the world, standing on the left side of an escalator makes you feel slightly nervous.
So, there you have it. It’s safe to come to London now, armed with this helpful guide. And should you wish to travel the tube at rush hour (although nobody in their right mind would actually choose to do this, you know, if they had an actual choice) then you can do so safe in the knowledge that you are not causing anybody to silently but passionately hate you. And that’s always nice.
*Example I have actually heard:
“I know this train is really packed, and we’re pulling into a station that is even more packed, so it’ll probably be more fun if you just imagine everybody’s naked.”
So, I signed up to take part in the Blog Action Day about the environment, and at the time I had no idea what I was going to post about when the date finally dawned, and here it is, October 15th, dawned all over the place, and here I am, writing a post about the environment. And I feel so conflicted about this topic that if I sat down and tried to plan a carefully argued, balanced and considered post then I would just be sitting here with my hands hovering uselessly over the keyboard all day. So look, I’m just going to start typing and see what happens, OK? Bear with me here.
The problem I have is this. The way I feel when I read about the terrible things we’re doing to the environment is similar to the way I feel when I read about a woman putting her cat in the washing machine on a boil wash because it kept miaowing. I feel full of rage. I feel sick. I feel utterly helpless. And I stay awake at night imagining in vivid detail how that poor cat felt, but ultimately, my knowing about it doesn’t stop it from happening. It doesn’t save the cat. All my knowing about it does is make me feel miserable. And that’s why I avoid reading stories about animal cruelty. I make regular monthly donations to animal charities, and I trust in them to hunt down and stop the cat launderers of this world, and meanwhile I do my best to avoid ever hearing about it.
I feel pretty much exactly the same way with stories about the environment. We use energy-saving light bulbs; I take public transport to work; all of our major household appliances are rated category A for efficiency; we recycle everything we can. But reading that the USA has refused to ratify Kyoto, or that China is planning to build another 500 coal-fired power stations, all I feel is helpless. In the face of such global recklessness, what difference does it make if we use the car to do the weekly supermarket shop? When the disaster is on such a grand scale, is my leaving the TV on standby really going to tip the balance in favour of apocalypse?
But honestly, I am trying to fight this attitude. I know that before we, as a country, can tell China or the USA or Russia that their behaviour is unacceptable, we have to put our own house in order. The UK is a tiny place compared to those giants, and our impact on the environment is comparatively small, although it is still fairly shaming when you look at it per capita. But however futile my efforts may feel, I do need to recycle, and use energy-saving light bulbs, and not leave the TV on standby. And I have to stop looking the other way when I see a news story about the environment. I have to pay attention. We all do.
What’s going to happen? Nobody knows. The fact is there will be a resolution to this. Either the destruction will continue, all the way to its apocalyptic conclusion, or some things will happen to stop it. What exactly those things are is as yet unknown. At the moment, the prevailing idea seems to be that human beings around the world need to significantly change their lifestyles. We need to stop flying, and stop driving; we need to curtail our dependence on fuels of all kinds; we need to stop overpopulating this planet that can no longer cope with our demands.
But here’s the thing. I don’t believe, for one moment, that everybody is going to stop doing all the things it’s necessary for them to stop doing. I don’t even believe that enough people will stop to make a difference. It’s not in human nature to go backwards. Our drive for better, for more, for further and faster and bigger, is what has made us the most advanced creatures on this planet, and you can’t go against it. You can’t tell people to stop advancing, to stop aspiring, because they won’t. Using energy-saving light bulbs is one thing, but trying to stop people from going abroad for their holidays, or stop them from hoping one day to own a sports car, or from having a third child if they want to, is a futile attempt to go against human nature.
And so we turn to science to save us. Science must find a way to make the things we want to do less harmful. At the moment, all too often the best option for the environment is also the most expensive and/or inconvenient, which is precisely the problem. Until science and technology can find a way to make the things that are the best for the environment also the things that are the most desirable, affordable and accessible, things won’t get better. Because not enough people will prioritise the environment over aspiration, affordability and convenience. Not enough people to make a difference.
And if the scientific solutions can’t be found? And if it all just keeps getting worse? What then?
The truth is, we don’t know.
The truth is, I don’t want to think about it.
The truth is, I feel full of rage. I feel sick. I feel utterly helpless.
