Shorthand and (Stereo)typing

In the old days everything was simple.  Your social status was immediately obvious because your clothes, your accent, your demeanour, everything about you – all spoke of your position in society.  Though there was some level of social mobility, it would have been almost impossible to ‘pass’ as someone of a different social class, else there would have been no ‘Pygmalion’  – and even no ‘Educating Rita.’

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/pygmalion/summary.html

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085478/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl

The advantage of this (if you want to see it so) was that it operated as a kind of shorthand.  You could tell at a glance who someone was and how you should treat them.  They could tell at a glance how to behave towards you; whether with deference or brusqueness, whether to give an order or hail you as a fellow.  It made life easier and more straightforward.  It also made it terrible.  It put people in strait-jackets; it consigned individuals to oblivion or slavery before they were born.

Even when I was growing up in the ‘sixties, three distinct social classes were still in operation.  It would not have been remotely funny for two Ronnies Corbett and one John Cleese to do the famous ‘I look up to him/I look down on him’ sketch if it had not expressed a visible truth.  (Women didn’t even figure in this scenario because they derived their social status from the men in their lives; any unmarried working women were either definitely working-class or else practically classless.)

But now we have thrown all this out in the name of equality.  I’m more than thankful for that, don’t get me wrong: the class system perpetuates privilege and injustice and ought to be abolished (insofar as it actually has been.)  But there’s a problem.  Because now that we have no shorthand telling us how to treat people, some of us are resorting to typing.  Stereotyping, that is.*  If you rely on appearances to judge the person in front of you, that’s called prejudice.  We seem as a society to be particularly bad at taking people as we find them.  We seem to need a kind of shorthand to help us with short-term encounters or first meetings.

*see what I did there?

Nowadays men know that they shouldn’t patronise women; white people are better-informed about how to treat ethnic minorities and I hope we are all much better at talking to people with disabilities.  This is not to say that prejudice doesn’t exist; of course it does, but we’re more clued up about it.  We have strategies – and in some contexts, laws – to deal with it.

The problem is that the progress towards equality has taken place – in this country at least – within the context of individualistic captalism.  We may all be equal, but we are all in competition with each other.  We live in a ‘me too!’ society where everyone wants to be at the top; and we deal with this by means of competitions.  Everything’s a competition now – just look at the TV schedules.

There must be a better way to do this.  I just don’t know what it is yet.

Kirk out

PS  Oh, and while I’m mentioning ‘Educating Rita’ I must recall a brief sojourn into the limelight by a friend.  He phoned into Dermot o’Leary’s show on radio 2 to protest at the amount of rap music he played, and was invited to come on the programme and choose one word to describe a song they had just played.  Words such as ‘bilge’, ‘offal’ and ‘dross’ received an outing: the item was called ‘Educating Peter’.

 

 

 

 

 

Intelligent Design? Think Again, Guys!

A few years back I was struggling to use a gadget that was too stiff for me when another woman stopped to help.  She struggled too; then she said, ‘men design things for their own strength, don’t they?’  It brought me up short, because I’d never thought of it that way before – but she’s right.  And it set me thinking.

It’s not only ‘manly’ gear such as drills and chainsaws that this applies to (though it is annoying to have to grip a ‘hand-held’ sander with both hands in order to stop it going off on its own) – I don’t have particularly small hands for a woman, and yet I have daily struggles with objects that have presumably been designed by men without any thought taken for the 51% of us who might want to use them.

Take my thermos.  It’s one of the elegant metal ones that don’t have a breakable interior; it has no handle and is therefore presumably designed to be held in one hand.  Yet were I to try this I would risk spattering myself and the library with scalding tea.  Oh, sure, I could’ve got one of those nice pink-patterned thermon (I think that’s the correct plural; if I say thermoses OH will have a seizure) but they don’t hold enough tea for any sentient human being to sustain life.  And there’s the rub: if you want any deviation from the supposed norm you have to pay extra and get it in pink.  So that living in this world as a woman you can come to feel a little bit like Gulliver in Brobdignag.

Kirk out

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Week is a Long Time in Crime

As regular readers will know, I am a fan of certain types of crime fiction, starting with Ian Rankin and working downwards: and in crime stories, just as in epic narratives, there are universals.  As every epic starts with an encounter, every crime story needs a location.  Plot is hugely important, as is character – but location arguably outranks* both; in fact setting can be a character in its own right.  Who could imagine Rebus outside of Edinburgh?  I feel I know Rebus’s city almost as well as he does; I can picture the seedy alleyways and run-down estates: I’ve climbed Arthur’s Seat, been inside the Castle and visited Warriston Cemetery.  Similarly the Isle of Lewis comes through loud and clear in Peter May’s ‘Lewis Trilogy’.  Islands are good locations for crime as they are finite, bounded by the sea; places where people cannot easily come or go.  They are dramatic and often dangerous.  But a city can be dramatic and dangerous in a different way: and none more so than London.

So it was with deep joy that I pounced upon ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’, the latest – and, I assume, the last – in the Nicci French ‘Frieda Klein’ series, in which London is a character as brooding and ever-present as Rankin’s Edinburgh.

Freida, a psychotherapist who lives near the river, is the protagonist of these stories.  But though she lives alone she is hardly ever left to her own devices; apart from her clients she has a succession of friends who both support her and bring their own problems for her to solve.  They are her virtual family, her real family being both unloving and absent.

There is a single villain at the back of all the events in the series; a villain who grooms, abuses, murders and who, for the last few books, has been assumed by the authorities to be dead.  And not without reason, since they buried his body: Frieda, however, believes the body they buried was that of his estranged twin brother; and that Dean Reeve is alive, stalking her and killing anyone who gets in her way.

The series spans a week, starting with ‘Blue Monday’.  I am deep into this latest volume, and if past form is anything to go by, will probably finish it at the weekend.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Here’s the series:

https://www.goodreads.com/series/67491-frieda-klein

Here are the Peter May books:

http://www.ur-web.net/PeterMayMain/lewispage.html

and here’s an article on Rankin’s Edinburgh:

https://www.ianrankin.net/rankins-edin

 

 

 

 

burgh/

Kirk out

*or out-Rankins?

 

 

What Sort of Time Do You Call This?

The day begins at 5 am with sleeplessness and goes on until you give in and call it a – well, a day because now that it’s got to 6.15 there is Absolutely No Point in trying to doze off any more.  Fortunately I don’t have an arduous day – or at least, no more arduous than usual, just work and visiting relatives.  Relatively easy, ho ho.  But as anyone knows who has ever had a rough night, sleep or the lack of it can cast a pall over the most joyous of lives, and if you have problems which on a normal day can be kept under control, on a day like today they run riot.  It’s like a wet playtime in school.

So: I won’t burden you with all the problems I’m facing on a daily basis as I have blogged about these before; but it would have been nice if ‘Newsjack’ had appreciated my sketch enough to broadcast it.  It would have given me a little lift; instead of feeling that nothing ever goes right, I’d feel that one small thing had at least been achieved.

If any of you have ever suffered problems which just seem to go on and on; which get better one day only to get worse the next: which seem in fact to get better to give you false hopes only in order to dash them on the rocks, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

*Sigh*

Apologies for the downer today.  And now, to cheer you up, here’s the sketch I wrote – which I and OH both thought was funny:

Theresa May’s Leadership

 

‘GAME OF DRONES’

 

ATMOS:                             CAFÉ

F/X:                                      BACKGROUND CHATTER, CLINK OF CUPS, HISS OF COFFEE-MAKER ETC

 

JOURNALIST 1:       I give up.  My paper wants an editorial on the current political climate but I don’t understand politics any more.  Nothing makes any sense

 

JOURNALIST 2:       It’s easy.  You have to stop seeing it as politics

 

J1:                               You mean –

 

 

J2:                               Just think of it as popular culture.  Everything’s dumbed down these days, right?

 

J1:                               I guess…

 

J2:                               So take the Great Repeal Bill: it’s just like Game of Thrones.

 

J1:                               Taking us back to medieval times, you mean?

 

J2:                               Exactly.  Repealing every piece of legislation since Henry the Eighth

 

J1:                               Or Sixth

 

J2:                               Or Henry the Fourth part one

 

J1:                               OK – I get that.  But Theresa May is just inexplicable

 

J2:                               No, no – she’s just like that robot in Futurama

 

J1:                               Bender?  The one who bends girders?

 

J2:                               Exactly.  She’s bending the Tories up and down…

 

J1:                               Right and left…

 

J2:                               …over to Northern Ireland…

 

J1:                               …up the Magic Money Tree…

 

J2:                               You’re getting it

 

J1:                               But what about the leadership challengers?

 

J2:                               Well – you know the cat in Dilbert?

 

J1:                               Catbert?  The evil genius?  What about him?

 

J2:                               Isn’t it obvious?  That’s Jacob Rees-Moggy!  All he does is sleep in a corner of the House of Commons watching with one eye open and awaiting his chance.

 

J1:                               That’s brilliant.  I totally understand politics now.  There’s just one thing I don’t get

 

J2:                               What’s that?

 

J1:                               How do you explain Boris Johnson?

 

J2:                               There’s no explanation for Boris Johnson.

END

Kirk out

 

 

 

What sort of time do you call this?

Crossword Crossover

It’s funny the things that cross over from real life into blogland and the things that don’t.  As I said before, I’m very bad at telling people about this blog; but I am also quite bad at telling my readers about some things that happen in real life.  Viz: crosswords.  I have got into the habit of starting each day with – well, first of all with a pot of tea and second of all with a conversation (see previous posts) but third of all – once I’ve checked email and Facebook – with the Guardian crossword.

I began these when I felt stymied in my work.  Either no words came, or else the ones that did were dull and uninspiring; or they were interesting but like hair after washing I couldn’t do a thing with them (I’ve never understood that comment about hair, by the way) – anyway, I decided that a cryptic crossword would sharpen the wits and enable me to do more of the things I like doing with words – or more of the things that words like me to do with them.

At first it was hard.  I’d been used to solving the Telegraph cryptic with a couple of co-conspirators: and let me tell you, doing the Guardian alone is a whole new quantum level of difficulty.   The online-ness of it does help though, because one of the major drawbacks to a paper crossword is that you can’t make too many mistakes, wheresas with online crosswords you have a ‘check’ button so that you can try out different ideas without committing yourself.  If all else fails, you can hit the ‘reveal’ button.  So in some ways it’s easier.

And does it help with the words?  Well it certainly gets the brain going in the morning, and I’m a lot better at solving them than I used to be.  Cryptic clues help you to see words in a different way (a ‘flower,’ for example, is often a river) and to search your memory-banks for synonyms and your lateral brain-waves for homophones and lookalikes.  There are many tricks crossword-compilers use to construct their clues; and I’m constantly finding out new ones.  The Rev. Spooner is a staple, indicating that the beginnings of words have been swapped over.  Anagrams are near-universal: you also find the ends or beginnings of words chopped off, or else alternate letters used.  It’s a whole ‘nother language: it’s English but not as we know it – in fact there’s so much I could say about this that I’m going to go away and think about it and put it in a whole ‘nother post.  Or maybe a series of posts.

Anyway, here’s the link if you want to try one yourself: I recommend the Quiptic if you’re new to these.

https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords

Kirk out

 

 

 

What’s the Time, Mr Proust?

When I read Proust for the first time many years ago, after six volumes of incredibly lengthy sentences discussing ‘lost time’, the last two words of the work were so short that they hit me like a bullet between the eyes.  In time: these words seemed to sum up the entire work.  And having read it I don’t think we spend enough – er, time – thinking about time.

Time is a fascinating thing.  I don’t pretend to understand Einstein’s idea that there is no such thing as simultaneity: for one thing it’d make nonsense of songs such as ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix.’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_the_Time_I_Get_to_Phoenix

The thing is, with ideas like Einstein’s I can get them on an abstract level, but I can’t translate it into my own experience.  What does it mean to say that by the time I get to Phoenix she won’t be rising; that the two events happen separately and are unconnected?  I can’t get my head around it.

Another phenomenon which I’m sure has a scientific explanation, is the way ideas fly away when you look directly at them.  For example.  I had many thoughts this morning of a stimulating (if not simultaneous) and inventive nature, but as soon as I came into the library with a fresh sheet of paper ready to work with them, they all flew away.  I think this is like Alice’s experience in the wool shop (if it was a wool shop) where the shelves seem crowded but as soon as she looks directly at one it’s empty, though all around they are as crowded as ever.

It was the wool shop:

‘The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things — but the oddest part of it all was that, whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite, empty, though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold.‘

This is surely familiar to anyone creative: you have a million ideas all crowding into your mind but as soon as you sit down with pen and paper and try to summon them up, they become terminally shy.  So it was with me this morning: I had several bright ideas and almost wrote them down; however they seemed to suggest that this would be premature, and that they needed to stew a little further, so I left them where they were.  And now that I’m in front of the computer, where are they?  Hiding, that’s where, and refusing to come out.  No doubt they will come out at the most inconvenient moment, say, three in the morning.

*sigh*

Another phenomenon I’ve observed (and I’m really not sure science has caught up with this one) is this.  You may be wrestling with any number of ailments or neuroses; and then you go away on holiday.  It’s as though this fact – the fact of your going away – takes the ailments by surprise; and for once you are able to shake them off and arrive at your holiday destination free and light-hearted.  This continues for a day or two; however, sooner or later the neuroses will wake up.  She’s gone! they say to each other, rousing themselves and packing their bags; then they set off, shading their eyes against the sun to see where you are.  You can spot them, black figures charging up the hill in ones and twos – but if you are on the watch you can pick them off one by one: or at least identify and store them to deal with at a later date.

Kirk out

 

 

 

Jumping Jack (News)Flash

Newsflash!  Newsjack is returning – nay, at the time of going to press, has already returned – to Radio 4 Extra.  Yes, that cross between Weekending and The Now Show, the nursery slopes for would-be satirical sketch-writers, is back and looking for contributors.  Say no more: I immediately pulled out my pad and began scribbling.  I have often thought, when listening to The Now Show or The News Quiz, ‘giz a job – I can do that’ – but needless to say the ideas that occur to you as spin-offs need more than a little honing before they are fit to stand up by themselves and take part in a radio show.

My first efforts were, alas, out of date since the news stories bumping around in my head were not the latest.  But it’s all good practice and in the end I sent in a sketch where two journalists try to make sense of Theresa May’s current leadership strategy.  If it doesn’t get on I’ll reproduce it here; if it does, you can listen next Thursday evening.

Here are the jokes I rejected.  Like the fish John West reject, I’m hoping they make my fish the best *

‘Reports are coming in that the divorce bill between soap star Brit Anya and her former lover Hugh Rope has risen to between £55 and 75 billion.  Both sides disupte the figures; meanwhile their offspring have all been repealed, resulting in another Great Bill which will be divided among fans of the star.  Jeremy Corbyn the Leader of the Opposition has offered to give some of the offspring a home, though it is not clear now many as a Party is still going on in his House.’

‘Meanwhile there are reports that leading Liberal Democrats have spent the summer on Dover Beach trying to push back the tide, to the accompaniment of a Green chorus singing what about us? and this is a Green tragedy.’

‘Rupert Murdoch was last night sent to bed without any supper because he had had a full-blown tantrum after learning that he couldn’t put the Sky into his toy box.  His mother Theresa said he had too many toys already.  Commentators believe that the 86-year-old is afraid he will never earn any money or amount to anything.’

I’ll keep you posted.

Kirk out

*though all my gags are of course 100% vegetarian

The Horror! The Horror!

What a grizzly and unpleasant occupation writing is!  How many other jobs could you have where you go to work, slave for six solid hours and come home feeling that you’ve sweated blood and achieved nothing?  True, today – my first day back after a break – I did write a few spoof headlines for ‘Newsjack’ (they’re looking for contributions) but then I discovered that I’d missed the deadline for my headlines so now I have to scan the real headlines so that I can make more spoof headlines ahead of the deadline.  It’s making lines in my forehead…

Contenders for next week include the Trump ‘wall’ story latest and the ongoing Brexit saga.  Watch this space…

I find it difficult working in the library because of the other people coming and going and because I don’t have a space that is mine.  Unreasonably I regard the table at the far end as my space and get irritated if someone else bags it first: it’s also quite limiting that you only get three hours a day up to a total of seven a week on the computers.  But when I work from home, is it any better?  I get distracted by phone calls; I go in the kitchen to make a drink and end up loading the dishwasher.  It’s hopeless.  And when people say to me, as they sometimes do, how wonderful it must be to have a creative gift etc etc, I want to jump up and down and scream and say, ‘have you any idea what hell you go through to produce even the minutest piece of perfect prose?’  As Michael Caine used to say to people, if you wanted to do it, you’d be doing it.  If you really wanted to be an actor you’d be out there doing it; working in rep, am-dram, street theatre – whatever, just so you could act.  So if you want to be a writer, write.  After all it costs next to nothing: what could prevent you?

Anyway, even though I got entangled once more in the impenetrable thicket that is my novel, the day wasn’t entirely wasted.  After all, at the end of it I got to write this blog post…

Kirk out

 

 

 

The Organ Grindr

Yesterday morning before I had even ingested an amount of tea sufficient to restore some sort of consciousness (it’s life, Jim, but not as we know it) OH informed me that there is now a ‘choral app.’  Not having any context to put this in I resorted to an irritable ‘what?’

‘A choral app,’ he said – repetition, in the mind of Mark, being equivalent to explanation.  He treats my queries rather in the manner of a Victorian colonialist who, when not understood by the natives, merely repeats himself more slowly and loudly.  I have long since learned that silence is the only response; sure enough, after only ten minutes of this he explained that an organ app is an app which tells you where your nearest choral evensong is.

‘It’s like Grindr,’ he explained.

‘Organ Grindr!’ I quipped.

Such puns are a staple of our daily conversation: I venture to assert that without them our married life would – ahem! – grind to a halt.  Another grind-related pun which surfaced quite early on in our joint existence arose out of the ubiquity of coffee-grounds.  OH and I are like Jack Spratt and his wife (name unrecorded) in that I only drink tea and he only imbibes coffee.  But whereas I dispose of my tea-leaves in a thoughtful and tidy manner (without reading them first) he merely gives the decanter a casual swill, leaving coffee grounds All Over The Place.  This being our honeymoon period, it took me a while to complain but when I did he instantly quipped ‘grounds for divorce!’ and so a tradition began.  Other standing jokes include such gems as ‘we were disgusted by the bus so we went by tandem’ (de gustibus non disputandem est) and many more which unfortunately I can’t remember (and neither can OH) because they arise out of the moment and are forgotten until the next moment.  When I asked if he could think of any, he suggested I should have written them down in a notebook.

‘I did!’ I said.  ‘I just don’t know where the notebooks are.’  And there’s the rub: generally speaking I write things down to forget them, not to remember them.  The whole point of writing is to get things out of your mind; words and ideas that would otherwise lodge there like awkward house-guests, never leaving and starting arguments with all the other guests.

So now you know the secret of writing.

Kirk out

 

 

 

 

 

Life is Just One Damned Wednesday After Another

How did that happen?  All of a sudden it’s the first Wednesday of the month and I’m being reminded to link to the Insecure Writers’ Support Group.

I’ve been listening to the revealing diaries of Stephen Fry – or some of them, since these already seem to run to several volumes.  I wasn’t totally impressed with the later volume I read (can’t remember the title) as there seemed to be a lot of partying, hanging out with stars both here and in the US, drug-taking, flying, drug-taking… it was like The Great Gatsby and there didn’t seem to have been a lot of editing; there were few highs and lows, just a long building towards an inevitable crash – for which we have to wait until the next volume.  However, these diaries, serialised for Radio 4 and now available on 4xtra, proved much more engaging as they cover the years from the beginning of his career to the start of the drug-taking and include an encounter with Stephen Sondheim and a fax machine at midnight and a friendship with Douglas Adams (taller even than Fry) centring on the birth of the Apple Mac.

I have also been catching up with Winifred Holtby’s ‘South Riding’, a book I keep meaning to read but somehow never do: this adaptation stars Sarah Lancashire (‘Last Tango in Halifax’ and ‘Happy Valley’) and features Phillip Glenister and the woman who plays Lynda Snell.

I’ve been following a ‘course’ (though ‘course’ is a bit of a grandiose word for what turned out to be a series of daily thoughts on writing a novel) and finding them interesting.  Today’s thought was about the journey of the hero from obscurity to fulfillment and how that usually begins with an encounter.  Think Harry Potter and the owl post; Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf; the Pevensies and the wardrobe.  There do seem to be universals in these stories – and the readings gave me much food for thought.

You can sign up to the course here:

http://malcolmpryce.us7.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=4f8b34b50b7f0f76a49dc8a21&id=bc0923a6e2

In the meantime a shout-out to all other insecure writers.  Fling yourself off the precipice and fly!

Kirk out