In which I swear off men

It was two years and several months ago that I swore off men and dating. Not like I’d done before, in fits of ill-tempered pique after various men-are-from-Mars misunderstandings, but in resignation and exhaustion and despondency. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that there was any possibility of things improving, so I went cold turkey on the dating. No more men; no more dates. I had Colin, and frankly I got more sense out of him than most of my male dalliances, so that was that.

In a very brief foray into online dating, I’d exchanged messages with a few potential dates that Spring. In between changing jobs and trips to New York to meet new colleagues, I wasn’t really giving it an enormous amount of attention. One chap, though, seemed nice enough to schedule a dinner with on my return from NYC. He was tall, his profile claimed, and relatively handsome, from what I could make out in a couple of bad quality photos; into food and travel; and his messages were perfectly spelt and punctuated. How bad could it be, thought I, and so we arranged dinner near his office in St. Paul's one weekday evening.

Standing in the shadow of the cathedral, the inevitable disappointment of the online date made itself known: the man who walked up to me really wasn’t what I’d been expecting. Wearing a vast red, scruffy anorak, he was a good five inches shorter than his 5’10” claims. Not wanting to be too prematurely judgy, I put a slight sinking feeling to one side and, not being familiar with the area, nodded along at his suggestion of dinner at “a little place he knew”.

I was enormously confounded when we stopped outside what wasn't a particularly “little place”, our destination apparently being the St Paul's branch of STRADA. A surprising choice for someone who professes to be into his food, I thought, but probably bad form to bail now.

I should have bailed.

We sat down, and my date proceeded to gripe about the hideous a day he’d had. We ordered. He told me how much he hated his job and his colleagues, who just didn’t give him the recognition he deserved. I gripped the stem of my glass wine, and prayed he’d lighten up when he’d had something to eat. He didn’t. Throughout the meal, he went on to be relentlessly negative about every facet of his life – he didn’t get on with his family; his commute was awful; he didn’t like his housemates. He was most remarkable in his apparently all-consuming inability to ask me a single question about myself. Not how my day was, what I did for work, or whether I was enjoying my pretty bog standard plate of pasta.

“We’ll just get the bill, shall we?” he said as he practically licked his plate clean having inhaled the meal. Not wishing to be stuck for any longer than I had to be, I agreed, enormously thankful for an excuse to scarper.

When it arrived, he picked it up. “I’ll get this.”

Well, that’s something at least. “Thank you very much, that’s very kind.”

He fumbled in his pocket for a raggedy bit of paper. He opened it at the table, and compared it to the bill. When the waitress came to take his card, he handed her what was, less to my amazement by this point than my resignation, a 2 for 1 voucher (I’m all for thrift, but there’s a danger in pulling out a 2 for 1 voucher on a first date that you’ll just come off as cheap).

I went to drain the dregs of my wine glass, disappointed to find I’d got to that stage much earlier in the evening. We shrugged on jackets, and I pled an early meeting, as relieved as I’ve ever been to scamper off into the night, some 45 (long, oh so long) minutes after I’d met him.

I returned home thoroughly glum. “That’s it,” I said to Colin, as he chirruped round my ankles in the kitchen. “I give up. There is just no point in dating. From now on, it’s you and me, my boy.” He wailed forlornly at the tin of cat food on the kitchen side.

The next morning, I was on the train into work as my phone bleeped.

Hi, was really good to meet you last night. I had a great time! Fancy doing it again soon? X

At a complete loss as to how two people sitting at the same table could have such wildly differing experiences, I texted back my polite but decisive decline and leant my head back on the seat, vowing that the disappointment just wasn’t worth it.

Fate, of course, in her ever-amusing way, had other ideas. My strict, lifelong boycott lasted all of two months before I met The Writer – a man who, to this day, hasn’t once suggested we have dinner at a STRADA.

In which Angelina Jolie deserves the praise, and cancer isn't a battle

Whatever some angry and misjudged pieces might say about Angelina Jolie’s op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times was a brave and important piece from an enormously high-profile woman about a really difficult decision. Leaving aside the fact that gene testing isn’t available to everyone, and that a lot of women don’t have the choice, and that her piece probably doesn’t have any demonstrable effect on anyone’s actual life, the piece itself was a first.

(As an aside: urgh. Is it inherently evil to make use of your resources to ensure your children grow up with their mother still alive, and then write about the – I imagine – enormously complex emotional process of having one’s breasts preemptively removed as a safeguard against a disease you don’t yet have in order to spark a wider discussion about that disease and women’s health? No, I don’t think it is. Famous people get ill too, and celebrity doesn’t make them less human, something that I honestly believe some people are unable or unwilling to grasp. )

But what struck me as well as the bravery of a woman who partially trades on her looks and her sex appeal, as all actors do, in openly discussing the unusual decision she’s made, was her language.

In her piece about having a faulty gene that increases her risk of getting breast cancer and ovarian cancer, she says that her mother “died at 56”. She doesn’t say that her mother passed away, or lost her battle with cancer. She says her mother died – which I found enormously refreshing, although she still says that it was a disease that her mother “fought”.

A while ago, the inimitable Jenni Murray wrote a piece for the Indy on why the imagery around “fighting” cancer, and the phrase “to lose one’s battle” with it is so vastly inappropriate. Because it is, and enormously so, even if you do have to stop and consider it for a moment.

Saying that someone “lost their fight” gives, as Murray puts it, “the impression that death from cancer is somehow an indication of failure to have the moral fibre to fight and defeat it.”

Frankly, I find it insulting – if not downright repulsive – to suggest that the people who have died from cancer have railed against it, but just not enough, and had they tried a bit harder, and put just a bit more welly into the project, then they just might have pulled through.

Cancer isn’t one of those projects you can succeed or fail at by putting a few extra hours into; it’s not something you can put your mind to and have a good bash at flushing out of your system. It’s a horrid and life-destroying disease. People don’t ‘fight’ it: if they’re lucky, they have treatment and live with it, or after it. The alternative is that it kills them.

Jolie has been faced with an awful choice – and has done a brave thing. Cancer is vile, and dealing with it in any form – including the near-90% chance of its arrival – takes a metric fuckton of mental and physical fortitude. Her decision to speak out about how she’s dealt with it and the drastic steps she’s had to take is admirable. Here’s hoping that the added awareness she’s given to the cause will mean that it’s a decision that some women will, at some horrid moment in their lives, find it easier to make – but not a battle they have to fight. 

In which the RSPCA's prosecutions are enormously misguided

Way back when, I used to be a big fan of the RSPCA. I was about eight years old, had passed through the short-lived phase of wanting to be a professional showjumper, and moved on to wanting to be a vet. I remember spending a lot of time in which I could have been doing something far more productive watching Animal Hospital after school, with its heart-warming tales of RSPCA vets fixing hedgehogs with broken toes and patching up sickly cats.

The ambition lasted for about six months (so, also short-lived) until Ma Blonde gently pointed out that I didn’t really like blood, and it would thus be tricky to progress in my chosen career. I’ve never got over the squeamishness, so unsurprisingly, I got over the career idea instead.

I do still have a soft spot for a good animal welfare charity. Colin was adopted as a tiny wee (given his current stature, unbelievably wee) thing from Cats Protection, and I can’t fault the dealings I’ve had with them during the process and since. But I’ve come to the conclusion that the RSPCA actually isn’t a good animal welfare charity.

It undoubtedly has a great cause at its heart. Ostensibly they’re about making sure that animals don’t suffer at the hands of people. Great. Not got a problem with that at all. But largely that’s not what comes across – and the feeling has recently only increased that their raison d’être is being forgotten.

Since the arrival of their new chief exec, Gavin Grant, at the beginning of 2012, I’ve had an overwhelming sense that the RSPCA has been pursuing issues and legal cases that, taken in conjunction, have started to look an awful lot like a campaign driven by a political agenda, instead of focussing on genuine cases of animal wellbeing.

There have been numerous allegations of politically motivated prosecutions – all of which have cost tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of pounds. The case against the Heythrop Hunt for illegal fox hunting cost £320,000 - something the judge involved described as “staggering”; and a case dropped at the last minute against members of the Vale of Avon Hunt has been variously reported to have cost between £50,000 and £100,000.

Because of its status as a charity, where prosecutions fail, the costs are borne by both donors and taxpayers. If I’m donating to a charity, I don’t want my money spent on spurious, politically motivated prosecutions if I expect the cash to be spent on rescuing sticky seabirds; and as a taxpayer… well, my cash goes on a variety of things I’d rather it didn’t, but I’m almost certain that there are better uses for it than specious and failed legal cases, where animal welfare isn’t the main issue at stake, especially when legal aid is being cut in other more deserving areas.

In the interests of fairness, it’s probably worth noting that a large proportion of the criticisms have come from Conservative MPs whose constituencies cover the areas of the hunts involved, as well as the Countryside Alliance; and the majority of the reporting of the cases outside the trade press has been by The Daily Telegraph – all parties who’re opposed to the Hunting Act anyway.

But I don’t think this should invalidate the criticisms being levied at the RSPCA, because it’s not just small- and big-c conservatives who’re concerned. The Charity Commission is assessing formal complaints against the RSPCA for its behaviour around the issues of badger culling (where it’s been accused of intimidating farmers participating in the scheme); one barrister has publically labelled it “irresponsible” and behaving “like a bully”; and the Charity Commission’s CEO has also written a letter to Grant, asking him to review the charity’s prosecution policies. A former Executive Director of the League Against Cruel Sports has said (in an excellent piece, the full version of which is well worth a read) that “to take prosecutions under [the Hunting Act] it as if by doing so one is achieving a valid welfare outcome, is as misguided as it is wasteful and deceitful.”

I have no doubt that the frequent and sensationalist headlines must pluck at the heartstrings of many, and at the pockets of more. But when the money is being misspent, the honesty of the motives is called into question, and the reputation of a once-admirable institution is being driven into the ground, it’s simply an indefensible course of action.

In which Barbara Hewson is enormously, horribly, catastrophically wrong

Sometimes, I can’t muster the energy to be cross. There’s so much happening in the world that’s deserving of an enormous tantrum that if I were to get angry about all of it, there’d be no time to do anything else, and I need to work and pay rent and mix good gin and tonic and stuff.

But sometimes, there are things worth being angry about.

Like women who are apparently so far detached from the innate human capacity for empathy that they opine really quite ludicrous things like, the age of consent should be lowered in order to prevent the persecution of old men.

I just...

No.

In no particular order, because I’m so cross that this is just a spew of thoughts onto a page, rather than a coherent analysis:

“I do not support the persecution of old men,” writes Barbara Hewson, a senior human rights barrister at a London chambers (oh, oh, the irony). Well no, neither do I. But I also don’t support people escaping justice for crimes they might have committed, however long ago; and I sure as hell don’t support the abuse of young girls.

“Taking girls to one’s dressing room, bottom pinching and groping in cars hardly rank in the annals of depravity with flogging and rape in padded rooms.” Murdering someone is far more serious than beating them up – so the justice system shouldn’t bother with trivialities like assault? Obviously not.

“Touching a 17-year-old’s breast, kissing a 13-year-old, or putting one’s hand up a 16-year-old’s skirt, are not remotely comparable to the horrors of the Ealing Vicarage assaults and gang rape, or the Fordingbridge gang rape and murders, both dating from 1986. Anyone suggesting otherwise has lost touch with reality.” People aren’t suggesting that. But taking advantage of young and vulnerable people when you’re in a position of power is still nothing other than wrong.

“We should focus on arming today’s youngsters with the savoir-faire and social skills to avoid drifting into compromising situations.” Because it’s a victim’s fault, when she’s abused, just as it was the fault of Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus in Cleveland that they got into the assailant’s car, not the assailant’s fault for KIDNAPPING THEM AND CHAINING THEM UP IN A BASEMENT?!

IT MAKES ME SO BLOODY ANGRY.

Victim blaming is rife, and needs to stop. Crimes are the fault of no one other than the perpetrators. Telling people not to go out at night, or not to wear short skirts isn’t doing anything other than contributing to the – wrongly – received wisdom that you can avoid being a victim of crime. Sometimes you can’t – but perpetrators can always avoid committing it.

Convictions for rape are so enormously low as it is. Changing the law to make it easier for rapists to get away with what they’ve done several years ago is vile, just as it would be vile if we were to change international laws so that genocidal maniacs who go into hiding would at no point have to answer for their crimes.

We fetishise celebrities in our society, and it needs to stop. They can’t be held up in a rarefied position above the law. There’s no excuse even to countenance changing the law so that people already in positions of power are exempt from answering for their behaviour.

In yesterday’s Independent, the publication’s student editor, Tom Mendelsohn, wrote an excellent piece about the burgeoning ‘men’s rights’ movements in British universities. He, all too rightly, took apart the arguments some students are making in a debate about whether York University Students’ Union is right to refuse to ratify a feminist society – an argument that boils down to “it’s unnecessary.”

I can’t help but think when senior women in positions of high regard are making such vile and foolish statements as these, that people fighting for the rights of all people to be heard and treated equally has never been more necessary. 

In which our neighbour is naked

One of the adjustments I’ve had to make since moving out of my little house in Home County and into a littler flat in Brixton is the fact that we live in very close proximity to our neighbours. We can hear when the washing machine is on in the flat upstairs; we can occasionally hear German radio through the wall from next door; and we can see from the bay window in our sitting room whether the chap in the flat over the road is smoking out of his window. But the beginning of this week provided a stark reminder, if one were needed, about just how much can be seen through the windows from the other side of the street.

The Writer and I were lazing on the sofa at 10am on Bank Holiday Monday, watching old episodes of Frasier and eating crushed avocado on toast (possibly one of the best breakfast foodstuffs known to man). Not paying full attention to the television, movement in a flat over the road caught my eye. One of the girls on the second floor a few doors down had clearly just got out of the shower, and was wandering around her kitchen in a bright teal towel. Thinking no more of it, I returned my attention to my avocado.

Thinking no more of it, that is, until the next thing to catch my eye wasn’t the teal towel, but an Eastern-style tattoo next to her left breast.

Her naked left breast.

“Um… Is that… is she…?” I put my plate on the coffee table, and pointed at the window. “Is she doing the washing up naked?”

“Er,” TW peered out the window. “Yup, seems that way.”

She must have had a barrelload of washing up, because she stayed there, flashing her tattooed boob and naked left side of her body to the inhabitants of the street for the next 20 minutes.

Being British, and therefore not au fait with public displays of nudity, I am flummoxed as to why you’d stand at your kitchen window, in full view of the street, without your clothes on.

Maybe she’s happily oblivious to the fact that standing at your window means you can be seen by the entire street, even though that fact should be glaringly obviously to anyone who’s ever, you know, looked out of their Victorian terrace window.

Maybe she assumed no one would be up and about at 10am on a bank holiday, and therefore there’d be no one around to see her.

Maybe, postulated TW, she had a guy in the flat and, “walking round and doing things naked is more acceptable when you’ve got someone else in the flat who’s naked.”

Maybe she’s European and just doesn’t care.

Maybe Friends holds a special place in her heart.

Maybe she’s particularly proud of those Chinese symbols next to her left boob and wants to show them off to a wider audience.

Maybe she likes the fact that the inhabitants of the street can see her naked.

Whatever the reason, it’s a stark reminder that it works both ways. More care will be taken from now on, by both the occupants of our flat, to have clothes on in front of windows at all times.

In which I read through April

14. Title: So Much Pretty

Author: Cara Hoffman

Recommended by: India Knight on Twitter, and chosen by members of the #LondonBookClub as our April book; bought from Amazon.

Read: 4 – 9 April

Two points to note: I would never have picked this up if it weren’t for LBC, which is doing its job in expanding my reading repertoire; and, I think it’s safe to say that I won’t be reading anything else that comes recommended by India. Ever. It’s a thriller about a young woman who goes missing in very-small town America. The characterisation isn’t brilliant; nor is the writing. The way Hoffman flips between third and first person narration annoys the crap out of me. The story has potential but isn’t handled well enough to be truly suspenseful or shocking. And yes, I get the political point she’s trying to make, but that’s not done powerfully enough to make a real point either (in fact, it just comes off as a deep hatred of men, rather than anything else). To be brutally honest, I just wanted it to end so that I could get on with something else. In short, it’s not worth reading unless you’re at the airport and the only remaining choice in WH Smith is between this and Jordan’s latest “autobiography”. And if that’s the case, I’d go for a newspaper instead.

Score: 3.5/10 (some points for effort)

15. Title: The Heart Broke In

Author: James Meek

Recommended by: Amazon, and bought from the same.

Read: 10 – 21 April

This, I liked. I liked it more and more as it went on. It started quite slowly, but by the ending, I was completely hooked. It’s rare a book can balance love, sex, underage sex, adulterous sex, celebrity, a show presumably based on the X-Factor, death, revenge, science, terrorist-committed assassinations, a protagonist that may or may not be based on Brian Cox and poetry in a really pretty compelling novel that’s beautifully written with some memorable turns of phrase, but this one manages it. One that’s earnt its permanent place on the bookshelf.

Score: 8/10

16. Title: On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin

Author: Marie Colvin

Recommended by: The Sunday Times, which gave away an e-edition on the anniversary of her death in Syria

Read: 16 April – 2 May

Colvin was, frankly, awesome. I’m not a great reader of non-fiction, but having done a Politics / IR degree, I am enormously interested in things other people might not be about current affairs and international relations and how the whole system hangs together. This is a collection of the late Sunday Times war reporter’s journalism: each piece is a few hundred words on a subject, and enormously easy to dip in and out of. It gives a brilliantly evocative picture of some of the most important moments in recent world politics, given an extraordinarily human edge. A snippet, talking about East Timor 1999:

[I]… had the most irritating conversation with my foreign editor. “What do you mean everyone’s left and you’re staying?” he asked. “Don’t know. I’m staying.” “Well, why have all the men left?” In exasperation, I said: “I guess they don’t make men like they used to.” To his great credit, and my embarrassment, he printed that comment in the paper. It’s been tough getting dates ever since. One word of warning, though: the last section, inevitably, nearly made me cry.

Score: 9/10

In which a dinner party isn't to taste

The dinner party is one of my favourite forms of entertaining. You don’t have to leave your house; you can eat well and get enormously hammered without having to spend an absolute fortune in a restaurant or overcrowded London bar; and you can see several people in one go, making it hugely efficient without the feeling that you’ve not got round to speaking to everyone properly, as at any other party.

The Writer and I had a few people over on Saturday, less a dinner party than just dinner, but with five of us around a table, it still merited a little more thought than often goes into a midweek supper of Fridge Lucky Dip.

There’s the cleaning that happens so that no pants or other sundries are left in full view of an unsuspecting guest; the necessary call upstairs to borrow a chair so that everyone has somewhere to sit; and the pondering of the menu to ensure that people don’t get fed the favourite Wednesday fallback çilbir and a bit of stale whatever’s left in the cake tin.

We got up not enormously early on the Saturday, but enough so that Borough Market wasn’t quite yet a heaving throng of sweaty, slow-moving tourists (although the amateur photographers with vast DSLR cameras, gigantic lenses and absolutely no sense of peripheral vision were out in force, buying nothing, snapping everything and generally getting in the way).

We loaded up on a variety of goodies: bulbous, sweet-smelling fennel; a few bunches of deep green wild garlic; a bushel of blood oranges (for which, my mental arithmetic later suggested, we were embarrassingly undercharged); fat, juicy Portobello mushrooms; and a few other bits and pieces including the requisite chunk of banana and walnut cake – complete with plastic fork – to sustain us on the way back home, much to the envy of the other Northern Line day trippers.

After the aforementioned blitz of the flat; the procurement of a chair; and the preparation of an initially ominously sticky but resultantly delicious blood orange and Campari cake, I’d showered and dressed, and was standing in our bedroom trying to backcomb my hair into submission. The Writer was in the kitchen, singing along to Al Green and wrestling the starter – carefully – into submission with the rarely-touched mandolin.

Suddenly, the singing stopped, and he appeared in the bedroom.

“I’ve come to a conclusion,” he said, holding a thin piece of fennel in his fingertips that he was chopping for the starter.

“Oh, and what’s that?”

“I was thinking as I was chopping that I don’t think I’ve ever cooked anything with fennel before, and I thought, well, that’s odd. Why wouldn’t I have cooked with fennel? I’ve cooked with most other things. And then I realised.”

“What did you realise?”

“Well, I put a piece in my mouth, and I realised that I don’t like fennel.”

A trip round Borough Market manhandling the things; a discussion in Tesco about what apples to use in a fennel, apple and goats’ cheese salad; another discussion about whether the white Pecorino in the wine rack would be worth chilling to have with the starter; and several hours in which recipe books with large, styled colour photos lay strewn across the kitchen side had apparently not been enough to remind TW that he didn’t like the main component in a dish that we were some 60 minutes away from serving. Getting down to the wire and only eating that which should have been going in a bowl that reminded him.

Best laid schemes, ‘n’ all that. Still, at least we had enough chairs.