On Poverty & Reading Books

Book shelves with books on.

I'm wanting to get back to more personal blogging, but here's a thing about books and poverty.

England divided into 'readers and watchers', BBC News:

England is suffering from a "worrying cultural divide" with poor adults much less likely to read books than their richer neighbours, a report says. The country is divided into two nations, those who read weekly or daily, and those who prefer TV and DVDs, it says. It finds key links between an individual's social background and how likely they are to read.

There are a lot of statistics in the article, few of which are very shocking. For example, rich people own more books than poor people. Who'd have thought it? Another strange phenomenon I have observed is that although richer people have only slightly more feet on average, they own considerably more shoes...

More than one in four (27%) of adults from the poorest socio-economic backgrounds said they never read books themselves, compared with just 13% of those from the richest socio-economic backgrounds.

Around 16% of the population of England is "functionally illiterate". The chances are that almost all of these people occupy the poorest socio-economic background, for obvious reasons of both cause and effect. That entirely accounts for the difference - in fact, if the sample were big enough, it might even suggest that a slightly greater proportion of rich people who can read choose not to.

And more than six in 10 (62%) of those from the richest backgrounds said they read daily or weekly, compared with four in 10 (42%) of those from the poorest.

Okay, so on these figures, the ones that indicate the worrying cultural divide, we're talking 60:40. To be perfectly honest, I'm pleasantly surprised that the difference is so small, given the massive disparities in educational opportunities, the fact that poorer people generally have less time, less access to books, live in environments less conducive to reading in peace and are more likely to have intellectual, cognitive or sensory impairments that prevent them from reading.

That's if we assume that everyone is being honest. We know that when you ask men and women how many sexual partners they've had, you end up with a statistical difference which simply cannot be true; men feel under pressure to raise the figure, women feel under pressure to lower it. I suspect something similar here.

Among the wealthier middle classes, there is a much stronger hierarchy of the arts; middle class people frequently boast that they never watch the television that takes pride of place in their living room. Meanwhile, although to a lesser extent, working class people (especially men) sometimes feel that the world of books doesn't belong to them. They may even feel that the books they read don't count as proper books.

I suspect that some poorer respondents may have downplayed their reading and I'm absolutely certain that some richer respondents will have exaggerated theirs.

And 83% of adults from the richest group feel that reading improves their lives, compared with 72% of those from the poorest group.

Hmm, yes, well. The difference here is very slight, but here's the thing:

As well as middle class snobbery and mythos surrounding the arts (Art can save the world!), richer people have much easier lives. Thus, when they think about things that can improve their lives, they are likely to think about books, art and esoteric things rather than, you know, decent affordable housing, a living wage, having enough food to eat and everything else they take for granted but others cannot.

I believe wholeheartedly that books do improve our lives, and perhaps make the most difference to the most difficult lives, but I understand there may be a difference in the way this question is understood by richer and poorer readers.

The article concludes:

Viv Bird, chief executive of Booktrust, said: "This research indicates that frequent readers are more likely to be satisfied with life, happier and more successful in their professional lives. 

"But there is a worrying cultural divide linked to deprivation. There will never be a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to social mobility, but reading plays an important role - more action is needed to support families."

 Yet there are no suggestions about what this support entails. So here are mine:

1. Keep libraries open and promote what they do to the wider community, including the increasing stock of ebooks and audiobooks you can borrow on-line.
2. Promote ebook, braille and audiobook formats, to broaden the spectrum of people who can access literature. Audiobooks also raise the possibility of reading as a group activity, which makes it more appealing for people low on time and energy to spend with their loved ones. (Historically, people read out loud much more, but audiobooks are the low-energy option).
3. Relieve poverty with a living wage and decent affordable housing. However one feels about the inevitability of material inequality, we should aim towards a world where everyone at least has a chance to have a little culture in their lives. People can read in all kinds of places and situations, but having space, peace, time and the absence of immense pressure, is sure going to help.

Also, you know, sort out education so that people grow up enjoying reading, rather than seeing a book as a job of work or a task to be completed for some reward other than its own sake. 

On Hamlet and Hip Hop

Oh dear! Tory Conference: Hip-hop Hamlet "racist and evil"

Curiously-bearded Lindsay Johnson has been speaking at the Conservative Party Conference about a strawman school production of Hamlet with a Hip Hop soundtrack.

"Hamlet doesn't need a hip-hop sound track for young people to enjoy it." 

Mr Johns added: "It's been doing just fine for the last 400 years." 

Same production, same costumes, same accents, same set.  All the women played by men in dresses. As Tara tweeted, "we know exactly how it was staged due to Shakespeare’s excellent notes." Johnson goes on:

"It's not only incredibly patronising, but also viciously racist to think that black and brown kids in the inner cities will only 'get Shakespeare' if it's set to a hip-hop beat and presented in three-minute, MTV-Base-style chunks." 

"It is positively evil to deny inner city kids access to the manifold joys of hearing their national poet's true voice, in essence their birthright, simply because of a culture of low expectations."

Presumably, our national poet's true voice had a Midlands accent. Lawrence Olivier could never pull it off.

Right. There are reasons for teaching Shakespeare in school other than it's always been that way. Shakespeare is a major part of our metatext. Shakespeare's plots are much older than Shakespeare, but they're still present in our books and movies. Shakespeare's language is not ours, but it is familiar. Learning Shakespeare teaches us a lot about the effective and expressive use of language.

If all of this is being taught, however it's being taught, then everything is fine.

Next. Johnson, who looks about my age, accuses teaches of "genuflecting at the alter of youth."

I'm thirty two - old enough to have a kid in high school, plenty old enough to be a high school teacher and yet younger than Hip Hop. As a white kid writing poems in primary school, I called them raps. Teachers liked poems, but raps had credibility. I wrote a rap about my class and it was, by popular demand, blue-tacked to the classroom door. Everyone was impressed. Oddly, the kids in the other classes said I couldn't have written it because I was girl and girls didn't rap.

Okay, so, I didn't - I had to ask a boy to perform it. I always had a slow calm voice, more suited to recite Tennyson than 2 Pak. But rap is no more removed from the modern grammatically-correct British English I express myself in than Shakespeare. In fact, rap is much closer to Shakespeare because of adhering to meter and the fact it often rhymes. For example:

I pour a sip on the concrete for the deceased
But no, don't weep. Wyclef's in a state of sleep
Thinking 'bout the robbery that I did last week.
Money in the bag; banker looked like a drag
I want to play with pellet guns from here to Baghdad.
Gun blast, think fast - I think I'm hit.
My girl pinched my hips to see if I still exist
I think not. I'll send a letter to my friends
A born again hooligan, only to be king again.

 Ready or Not - The Fugees. 

This is not Shakespeare, but it has much in common with Shakespeare. And like Hamlet, Wyclef Jean, who in this context speaks with the indifference and self-centredness of youth, considers the violence of his world, his desire to be in charge and the eternal sleep of death. Now, my heart has an indie beat, but if I can think of that off the top of my head, someone who actually knows this music could come up with much better evidence.

If you can't connect Shakespeare with Hip Hop, the poetry of all our pop music, movies plots, soap opera or something that exists in 2013, then what is the point?  Hamlet is not about a prince in medieval Denmark, it is a play about young angry masculinity. Some kind of pop music soundtrack is entirely apt, but perhaps especially Hip Hop; Hamlet's world is absorbed in a violent power struggle, he has a love/hate relationship with the women in his life, all the people he respects are in show-business and he believes that the arts - in this case, the dramatic arts - have the power to retrieve the truth and finally set him free.

I loved Hamlet as a young person because it seemed to be about teenage angst.  I felt as miserable and misunderstood as the next person, but noticed that this was an irritating quality, taken to extreme in some of the boys around me. I had a massive crush on an older boy who became suddenly ridiculous in my eyes when he stated he would kill himself before he turned twenty, because after that, what was the point of going on?  It seemed to me that Hamlet was the story of such young men, who didn't want to die at all, but indulged themselves in petty jealousies and rage towards their parents, and wore self-pity like a beat up leather trench coat. Hamlet moved me deeply, because it is a tragedy; Hamlet is a twit, and his failure to pull himself together (learn guitar, put it down in writing, join the Elsinore Amateur Dramatic Society) results in his destruction.

There's plenty else going on of course, but the point is I saw that it was relevant to my life. Of course, I wasn't typical. We never studied Hamlet - I read Shakespeare for fun. It was on at the local theatre with a bloke in from The Bill and I asked to my Mum to take me to see it. If other kids need a few extra pointers, then hand them over. We were studying Romeo and Juliet for GCSE and saw two theatrical productions; one in a converted warehouse in Norwich, one by the RSC at the Barbican, with lavish sets and Elizabethan Costume. We chatted, fidgeted and sniggered at the Barbican: Juliet was an eminent actor, but she was thirty-five and had the voice of a cut-glass chain-smoker. In Norwich, with younger actors, looser annunciation, plain costumes and minimal sets, we were transfixed. Had we seen Baz Lurman's Romeo + Juliet, which came out at the cinema around this time, "Do you bite your thumb at me?" would have replaced "What're you staring at?" in form-room fracas.

Shakespeare lies dead and decomposing in the adolescent memories of so many adults, because it didn't seem relevant and was never presented as relevant. If we truly believe in its relevance to the modern world, as opposed to a mere source for quotations and self-congratulations, we need to show the kids. A Hip Hop soundtrack doesn't sound like a gimmick, but the placing of a play in a living context.

Dancing on the Edge & Colourblind Jazz Fans

I greatly admire Stephen Poliakoff.  He's not perfect, although some of his television work - particularly Shooting the Past - is as very nearly.  He has a luxurious way of film-making, instilling his characters with both curiosity and his own passion for story-telling.  His films are always beautifully shot (he has an ability to make every actor look so beautiful) with a great use of music and point of view.  He's done a few I couldn't sit through again, but I can't name many directors who haven't.

Dancing on the Edge is his new BBC series charting an all black Jazz band in 1930s London. It has a few problems. It's been criticised for slow-pacing, but that's cool with me; it's all very beautiful, as usual, and the actors are flawless. There are however four glaring problems. The first two have always been there with Poliokoff but become really obvious in this miniseries, the second two are unique to Dancing on the Edge and the forth really matters:

1. Rich people spend their money on things ordinary folk can't afford. Thus rich people are treated as eccentric and fascinating, even when those characters are in no way eccentric or fascinating.
2. When something interesting or notable is happening, characters will say so, in case its not obvious. "Isn't this an amazing party?", "Isn't it fantastic that we should all be here together at this time and place, especially what with us living in a poignant historical context and all?" And perhaps worst of all, one character actually says, "Other people's private lives. One never knows what goes on!" 
3. The inexplicable compulsion on the part of all characters to say the name Stanley in an emphatic way at least once every two minutes, and every sentence if the character of Stanley is in the room.
4. Apparently, nice white jazz fans in 1930s London are magically and completely colourblind. 

Here's the deal.  In 2013 UK, there are white people, who are good people and have black friends or even family members, who love music, films and books by black people, but who sometimes say and do the wrong thing around race; they make an assumption based on stereotypes, they use clumsy language or make an unwise joke. Same with straight folk and queer folk, non-disabled and disabled folk, even - perhaps especially - men and women. Most good decent people make awkward slips. We live in a prejudiced world, we grew up here and even if we have no prejudice in our hearts, this stuff is part of our culture, so part of us we all have to keep an eye on.

In 1930s London, there were white people, who were good people who loved jazz and had black friends and lovers, who fairly often said and did the wrong thing around race. They would have been far more conscious of race, living as they did in a very racist mono-cultural world. They would have grown up with racial stereotypes being put forward to them as scientific facts.  We see it in the literature written by groovy, progressive white folk of the time (Waugh, Lawrence et al.), and forgive the language and racist humour because it is of its time. It was a very racist time. It's not like Nazism succeeded in Germany because they were the only racists in Europe - they were just the most desperate and demoralised racists around.

Poliokoff has created a world in which only negative characters ever remark upon or behave clumsily about race. White characters who love jazz are immune from racism. When racism is discussed, all the nice young white people find it utterly incomprehensible.  I have the sense that there will come a breaking point in the narrative, where the white folk may well close ranks to scapegoat their black friend, but while the going is good?  Only sinister characters and money-minded squares give so much as a raised eyebrow when the band leader forms a romantic relationship with a middle class white girl.

This is not an unusual world for television and film, where prejudice is often seen as something individual, rather than cultural, even in narratives which hinge on prejudice being a massive issue in the lives of its victims (this is particularly remarked upon in science fiction and fantasy, where writers often create a sexist or racist world, which they people entirely with egalitarians).

It's perhaps most noticeable in something like Dancing on the Edge because it is a rare British drama with people of colour at the centre of things, it's beautifully made and because it is about a historical period - would it really make the audience uncomfortable to imagine that people in the 1930s had very different, contradictory ideas about race?  If the history of 20th century music teaches us one thing, it is that it is possible for privileged white folk to dance, cry, worship and make love to the music of black folk without eliminating racism by the sixteenth bar - or the sixteenth album.

You know how I feel - art matters dreadfully!  I believe that many people will have overcome some of their own prejudice by listening to beautiful music produced by black people or gay people especially, other marginalised groups as well.  Music demonstrates that we all feel a great deal, and often some of our highest, lowest, deepest and most personal feelings are shared by song-writing strangers.

But for many people, music is a product to be consumed, its production a little like a clever trick, not the expression of something both essentially human and essentially higher than that. Racist ideas around black music were never - are still not - exclusive to people who dislike the music black folk make.

The early years of British jazz provide such a good opportunity to explore these issues, or at least demonstrate the likely reality. So far, no exploration and an . The jazz band live in a racist world with very few racists in it - and so far, no truly powerful racists (even though they met the future King Edward VIII, a vile racist and personal friend of Hitler).

Two episodes to go.

32

Today I am thirty two, which is a happy number.  When I said last year was the happiest of my life, I meant it sincerely. And when I say that 2012 has been even better than that, it really has.

So much has happened this year that I'm in danger of sounding like one of those awful smug Round-Robin Christmas Letters (the family recently received one with the line "According to my calendar, I didn't do anything in September - but I expect I was simply too busy to write it down!"). But I am proud of what a full life I have now, and memories of arriving at so many birthdays with a sense of disappointment, shame and the desperate hope that next year would be better, make me want to celebrate the fact that I now enjoy my birthday and only hope that next year will be half as good as this one.

Of course, this year's not been plain sailing; my health is more stable than it used to be, but there have still been several periods when I've been stuck in bed all the time. Stephen's health has been up and down, there's been stress, serious illness and death in the extended family, and earlier in the year we lost a special family friend.  However, today is all about the good stuff.

My thirty-second year in bullet points (but no particular order):

Stephen, a beautiful white man with dark wavy
hair and glasses, behind a birthday cake with
number-shaped candles reading "30".

• Between us, Stephen, my sister and I organised a surprise party for my Dad's 60th birthday - which remained a surprise until about twenty minutes before the event. This was a massive undertaking, negotiating with my mother, organising food and drink and smuggling a gazebo in the boot of Dad's car under the pretense that the weight was just books and clothes. I also made a great deal of bunting in the early spring, not realising that, with the various events in the summer, I would have been able to buy bunting for a few quid a mile. 

• Stephen himself turned 30 in May. That was a fantastic day. 

• Stephen had his graduation in March. We traveled into the centre of London (the first time in seven years for me) and attended the graduation at the Barbican. 

• We made our first music video, which went viral and became the ukelele precursor to (and possibly the inspiration for) Gangnam Style.

(Click CC button for closed captions.)

• I entered a painting into the National Portrait Competition. That was exciting. I dragged Stephen and Mike to Shoreditch as a detour on our way to Stephen's graduation and about a month later, Mum went on a railway odyssey to pick it up again.  As expected, nothing came of it - the winner was very well deserved - but it was a very positive and interesting experience. 

• I didn't do a great deal of painting this year, but I did paint an A1 (about 600x800mm) portrait of Dad for his birthday. It's very tricky to paint on a canvas that size without an easel (I have a suitable easel, but I didn't have it with me). It's also fairly tricking to move such a painting and its frame around without a person you live with noticing. Fortunately, he's not very observant.

• I made cards and things as I always do, but my favourite artsy things this year was designing a plate for Alex. I bought Sophie a melamine plate with a lion on for Christmas and decided to look for something similar, but a bit more grown-up for Alex. I couldn't find anything I liked even slightly so with Stephen's help, I got a plate made from a design I had drawn on paper and coloured in on the computer.

• The plate was partly inspired by the fact that this year, one of us got the best diagnoses ever.  Find physical impairment emasculating? Fed up with bodily difference being considered a sign of weakness? Try Viking Disease! 

• Stephen's photography was featured in an exhibition at Guildford Cathedral. He exhibited two photographs and somehow managed to sell three.

• Another week of photos, and I will have completed a Project 365 (or 366 - I did get in a muddle and I do appear to have lost a day somehow).  You can tell the parts of the year when I was unwell, as I have taken one or two hundred momentously boring photos. 

• We also made an incredibly realistic alpaca puppet. Yes, that is a puppet. No, honestly - if you look really carefully, you can see the strings.

• The low point of the year was, after having had surgery to remove a tumour on his kidney, Stephen's uncle became very seriously ill. For several weeks, we were almost certain that he was going to die, with one crisis after another - internal bleeding, accumulating gasses and MRSA - until he finally turned a corner. And now, despite the fact he still has what amounts to an open wound on his belly, the uncle is fit as a fiddle and has been recently driving round France. Meanwhile, so much of the tissue of his kidney died that it seems very unlikely that the cancer will come back.  

• Stephen invented and constructed the PlyPi, Raspberry Pi Case which has been featured in all manner of geeky places.

• In July, Stephen and I got engaged. We've set a date for next summer and we've talked about it a lot, but to be perfectly honest, that's just about as far as we've got.

Sophie - A pale-skinned baby with dark eyes and a wide mouth
looks up and smiles. 

• Our niece Sophie was born. We went down to the New Forest to meet her, which was a huge day but a really special one. Sophie visited us in Surrey in November. She is an incredibly smiley baby, and my sister's family seem extremely happy.

• I didn't expect to be affected by the Jubilee in any way, shape or form. As it was, the Sunday of the Jubilee weekend with Stephen's Monarchist family was a very special day, I wore my tiara, we violently spatchcocked and barbequed a whole chicken and then had hysterics over the BBC coverage of the Jubilee Flotilla (this coverage was later criticised, but it was as if Brass Eye had done it, so it was great). We fell asleep at some point and woke up to see the chamber choir singing in the rain. Now that's what I call pluck. 

A Union Flag flies amid the greenery.

We ended up watching more sport over a two week period than I have in the last twenty years. I really enjoyed the Olympics, although I felt much less positive about the Paralympics.

• I entered my first novel into a competition to have it read over and assessed by a literary consultancy. It won the free read, and I got such a lovely flattering e-mail about the sample chapters that I printed it off and stuck it to the notice board. I received the report last week and it was really positive - there were weaknesses I knew about, and my reader pretty much spelled out what I needed to do. Enough time has passed that I'm quite looking forward to going back and polishing it up a bit. 

• Despite so much going on this year, my second novel is progressing at a pace, and it feels really good.  Of course I have massive wobbles in confidence, but other times, I think it is bloody good. I never felt that way about my first novel whilst writing it. I hope this is another sign of increased confidence, and not a tragic delusion.

• In the last few weeks, my forth wisdom tooth is on the move.  Yes, I'm still teething.

A very Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and a peaceful, relaxing few days to everyone else. I hope you all have an excellent 2013 - you all deserve it. And thank you, one and all, for your ongoing presence and support.

Let The Right One In / Let Me In

Let the Right One In (2008) was the best horror movie of the last decade. It manages depths of character and visual beauty that few films rival, let alone films within a genre dominated by archetypes and little more than padding between the shocks and thrills. You know sometimes you connect with a film on a romantic level? Well, I did. It comes very close to perfect. Stephen reviewed the film as an adaptation of the original book last year.

You can guess how I felt about the news that they were making an American version. But it was being directed by Matt Reeves, who made the excellent Cloverfield, and the buzz about the remake was that it wasn't quite as awful as it could be. So we had to take a look.

I didn't decide to write a review in which I slate one film for being a pale imitation of another. I decided to write a review because in many ways, everything that's wrong with the American remake Let Me In (2010) demonstrates what is so right about Let The Right One In.

Both films are about a twelve year old boy, who meets a new neighbour of the same age, who turns out to be a vampire and helps him stand up to his bullies. Between them, these two films showcase four excellent child actors, who all did brilliantly with what they had to work with. None of those kids can be faulted. Some other things can be.

Let The Right One In is a brilliant study in how to paint character with very few brush-strokes. We understand the protagonist Oscar, we understand his relationship with his parents – including his love for them and his profound sense of betrayal by them, without more than a few glimpses into his back story. We understand his helplessness against his bullies and the raw impotent rage this draws from him. We know something of Eli's relationship with the man who goes out to murder for her, although there is ambiguity here. We know that he adores her and is not a natural killer - he's a bumbler. The American version was far more efficient, creepy and altogether less likely.

There are very few films that really invoke how it is to be a pubescent child (or at least, the kind of child I was). The intrigues and frustrations of that age, where your own fantasies have taken the place of second-hand make-believe and the world grows a little darker and richer for it. At twelve years old, we knew what we have largely forgotten since; There are dangerous people in the world and some of them are children.

In Let The Right One In, the bullies are sadists, monstrous: ordinary kids. It doesn't matter to us or Oscar what made them that way – unlike his American counterpart, Oscar never needs to ask if there is evil in the world because he encounters it every day. In Let Me In, the bullies talk too much.  Their greater size and strength, together with their preoccupation with masculinity – constantly taunting that their victim is a little girl - make them pathetic rather than menacing. As a viewer, I'm well aware that I am grown up and could shrink them down to size with a few cutting words. I'd also ask their victim what was so wrong with being a little girl? 

But then, apparently, femininity sucks in 1983 America. The boy's father informs him that his mother is sick and has funny ideas about things. We see no evidence of this so I'm not sure if we're supposed to believe it – we never see the boy's mother's face, and we're not given any clue as to how he feels about her either way, just that he can't turn to her in his struggle against the bullies. We know she's religious – perhaps from that we're supposed to assume that she's an intolerable harridan? Elsewhere, we're treated to the horror movie convention that if you've seen a woman's breast, she's thereafter fated to die a horrible death without getting a single line of dialogue. 

All ambiguity around gender and sexuality has been painstakingly removed by the American film-makers. Yes, this is a hobby-horse of mine, but it matters! It's hard to tell ninety minute stories which reflect the full range of gender and sexual variation, but with ambiguity, you feel like you might be being represented in there somewhere.

Twelve year old sexuality is almost always ambiguous. You're twelve! Your own body becomes mysterious to you, let alone other people and their bodies. In Hollywood, this isn't allowed to be the case. On the one hand, they weren't comfortable, as the Swedes were, for the camera to linger on a half-naked twelve year old, because you know, that would be weird – you can only show naked people that the viewer is allowed to lust after! But then, moments after we've first met the boy, we see him using his telescope to spy on his neighbours' making love. So we can see the naked breast of Sexy-Bound-To-Die-Now-Lady. So we can see the boy is normal, because he infringes upon the privacy of people with breasts.

Whereas when, in Let The Right One In, the beautiful androgynous Eli asked Oscar if he'd still like her if she wasn't a girl, we sense the question has two meanings: What if Eli was not human? What if Eli had a different gender?

Later, we see a fleeting glimpse of a genital scar on Eli. The American vampire is unambiguously feminine. She's blonde, conventionally pretty and romantic and never even bedraggled. When she attacks someone, her face changes shape, in true Buffy tradition, because you can't have pretty girls do monstrous things whilst still looking like a pretty girl.

Finally, Let The Right One In is such a beautiful film. You can smell the fresh snow and taste the cold night air, feel all the textures as well as the warm breath and cold touch of the characters. The Scandavians know how to film snow. Snow and Fairisle jumpers. There are long periods and big wide shots of stillness or relative stillness, but never any drag. Although there is blood, gore and pretty awful (as in both severe and ropey) burns injuries, these moments are chosen and handled carefully. The climax of the film is horrific, shocking and wonderful and involves bright lights and very little blood indeed.

The Americans decided to represent the early 80s by making the whole world a little bit dingy. Despite the snow, there was more a sense of damp than the dry cold of the Swedish film. They did some things very well – in particular, there was a new scene with a fabulous tracking shot, with a camera mounted inside a car as it crashes and rolls down a hill. They did however enter the running for my new film award category "Most superfluous use of CGI in a scene that might have been scary otherwise" when they decided that a small child clinging to a grown man as she sucks the blood out of his throat just isn't scary enough. And although there was much similarity to the original film's climax, they reduced the light, added gore and (literally) threw in a severed head.

I can't discourage anyone (except those who just don't like scary films at all) from watching either movie. The trouble is that of its genre, Let Me In isn't a bad film by any stretch of the imagination.  It's just that it's an Americanised, simplified and straightened-out version of an absolute masterpiece. 

Dog Rest Ye, Terrier Gentleman

So this was by far the oddest craft project of 2011. It wasn't my idea, but when people I care for were contemplating paying up to £100 on a fimo Bull Terrier Nativity Set on eBay, I had to step in and volunteer to make one myself. I used Sculpey, which is cheaper than Fimo, and probably used about £15 worth of polymer clay.

Stephen used a lathe to make wooden cones for me to build the figures around, to stop them keeling over mid-production. Originally, I'd intended to remove the cones once the clay was cooked, but then decided they made the models more stable. Also, they got stuck.

I haven't played with polymer clay for years - perhaps seven or eight years at least - so when I volunteered I was kind of thinking the project would eat up half of December and maybe I wouldn't be able to pull it off. So, whilst it wasn't my idea and part of me keeps thinking this thing I've made could win prizes for poor taste, I'm really rather chuffed about how it turned out.

Stephen made the manger in about half an hour and his Dad made the stable backdrop in a little longer than that.

I hadn't met any bull terriers until this spring, when I made friends with two miniature bull terriers, who are rather akin to albino pig-shark hybrids. They're not nearly as bright as my border collie or poodle compadres and they move around as if there are no obstacles of any kind, anywhere – if your legs are in the way of where they want to go, they're going to go through them. But they are extremely friendly.

The nativity set is a present for someone, who at the time of writing has no idea what's in store for them. They're coming round on Saturday. I hope it makes sense to them.

More pictures on Flickr.

Image Description: Possibly defies description. Models of English Bull Terriers made out of coloured polymer clay, representing characters from the nativity (Mary, Joseph, Jesus, a Shepherd, an Angel and three Wise Men/ Dogs). In the second picture, the wise dogs are bearing gifts; sausages, a bone and a teddy. In the third picture, we see Puppy Jesus, a puppy wrapped in swaddling clothes, in a pale wooden manger with wood shavings for straw.

In bed with my paintbrush

I've been rather quiet here lately due to a combination of computer problems, minor but disruptive health problems and a fair amount of stuff going on. Life, however, is rather wonderful.

As anyone who is anyone in the art world knows, I won first prize in the Aberaeron Holy Trinity Church Summer Craft Fair Painting Competition (Painting of a Flower). It cost 50p to enter and the prestigious prize was £1. And there were, like, twenty other paintings. As far as I am concerned, this makes me a prize-winning artist. Like Tracey Emin, but with better personal hygiene*.

Stephen's Dad made me a device so that I can paint in bed. This is wonderful and has revolutionised the way I paint. No longer must I wait until I'm well enough to sit up in a chair for a while, then paint against the clock with increasing levels of pain, trying to get to a certain point before I have to stop and wait for another window. I can take my time. I can rearrange myself and my pillows. I can take breaks and carry on looking at what I've done while I'm resting, able to reach for a brush if I see that something needs touching up.

Thus my painting has become more relaxed and brave. I'm experimenting much more. I seem to be painting faster, although that's probably just that I can do it for longer at a stretch. And that's much better for me. No more angst about a picture I've been fiddling with for five minutes a day for weeks and have now spent so long looking at the thing that I'm never going to be happy with it.

I didn't think this was possible; of course people can paint in bed (Frida Kahlo did) but only when you can't get out of bed at all. I didn't think anyone would let me. But apparently I can do whatever I like! Almost.

This is a painting of my nephew Alexander (5) and my Granny Kelly (87) and I reckon the best painting I have ever painted.

I've also been writing a very great deal, made some tentative steps into learning British Sign Language and I've been teaching Stephen both Latin and the ukelele. We have four ukeleles now. Imagine! Two at my folks' place, two at Stephen's, so we don't have to transport them backwards and forwards. It's another disability accommodation. When we're in one place for good, we'll downsize the collection. Maybe.

[Image description: Top - a photograph of brown-haired white youngish woman smiling and holding a picture of a slightly decaying hydranga. Middle - a painting of the same white woman with an extremely handsome dair-haired and bespectacled young white man. Bottom - a painting of a young blond white boy cuddling an elderly white-haired white woman, both smiling. ]

* This is a reference to her famous installation My Bed which won the Turner Prize and made her famous - I didn't mean to imply that the lady doesn't clean her teeth or something. Except perhaps for artistic purposes.

Your Kicks For Free

Censorship, within the arts, is almost always a very bad thing. Art not only makes our lives much more enjoyable; we use art as a mirror in whose reflection we can better understand ourselves, our lives and the world around us. I don't really need to defend art or variation within it. Where art is stifled by censorship, life itself is stifled.

And alas, art has to mean everything. Everything anybody calls art, music, drama, creative writing, even if to our own eyes it lacks all merit. This is not to say all art must be revered or indeed given any time or space at all, but it must be protected from interference. And freedom of expression is always a too way thing – we have both the freedom to express ourselves and the freedom to access those expressions.

A far more worthy post than this one would be about budget cuts to the arts in the UK, both in direct arts funding and in education, as well as the closure of libraries and all sorts of other heinous crimes against our culture being committed at this time. But I feel I am a blogger in rehabilitation and I need to pace myself. So let me start with Dire Straits.

When I first heard that Canadian radio stations will now only be allowed to play a censored version of Money for Nothing by Dire Straits, I thought it was a bit ridiculous. The song (unedited version here) is about a removals gang who envy and mock the easy and hedonistic life of rock musicians, referring to one of the musicians as a faggot. This context is self-evident from the lyrics. It's rock musicians mocking their own self-image; the irony is not at all subtle. And it is a classic song.

Sparky wrote about this and has been quite upset. Some folk who are against the censorship have used the opportunity to use the offending word repeatedly and mockingly. Others have attempted to defend the word as inoffensive and still others have used the events to attack gay men as tyrannous and over-sensitive - all those classic rants about political correctness. And reading Sparky's considerable discomfort at the debate (if it can be called a debate), I swung towards his position.

And this brings us to an often neglected but vital part of freedom of expression. Part of the freedom to express oneself is the freedom to be silent. Artists have the right not to make art, the media have the right not to publish or broadcast things. And part of the freedom to access art is, for lack of a better way of putting it, the freedom to remove oneself from the experience.

Nobody has a right not to be offended, but people do have a right to opt out, within reason, of listening to or looking at things which offend them. This is why what is allowed on a billboard is quite different to what is allowed between the covers of a magazine – most people who pass have no choice but to at least glimpse the billboard, whereas a magazine must be bought and a page can be easily and swiftly turned to hide offending words or images. All mediums have different responsibilities according to how active or passive a person has to be in order to access the art.

There are lots of situations where you can't opt out of listening to a radio. In various places of work, in stores and restaurants, in taxis, even in the streets in the summer when folk have the volume up and their windows open. So where a word is well-established as being both offensive and discriminatory, then maybe it is fair enough to keep it off the radio? It is extremely easy to access uncensored music, so nobody is really missing out.

But I'm not entirely happy with this. The biggest problem with this kind of censorship is inconsistency. Sparky wrote a bit about this too, and lists some bizarre examples of words which have been deemed unpalatable. It's a very small list of words which are totally offensiveness in any context *. One of the more difficult words for me to hear is bitch, which is often used in deeply unpleasant contexts, but I've never been upset by Elton John or Meredith Brooks singing it, where it is self-referential. Context does matter with many offensive words, if not all of them.

It isn't such a challenge to edit out individual words, but there are songs where the entire lyric is homophobic or misogynistic or otherwise hateful. This is both far more problematic and usually very difficult to define - at what point does a song about a heartbroken man cursing all womankind slip into actual misogyny? Homophobic songs, at least all the ones I can think of, tend to have such a profound lack of subtlety that they are swiftly identified and more or less removed from radio playlists. There are entire genres of music where misogynist lyrics come as standard.

I have to say that I would distinguish between these arguments, about offensive discriminatory words or content, and arguments about art encouraging certain behaviour - like Money for Nothing encouraging people to use the slur within it. I think the argument that some people can't understand the ironic usage and would think it gives them license to use such language is the top of a very slippery slope.

Art is often about emotional extremes, including hate and violent inclination. There have been lots of popular songs about romanticised murder coming through from folk music, sometimes sung from the perpetrator's point of view. Violence has always featured in gripping and moving narratives, without calling us to violence. That issue is not uncomplicated of course, but this issue of art corrupting our minds is more dangerous when it comes to our freedoms of expression.

Anyway, I don't have a particular conclusion here because I'm still pondering it all myself.

Incidentally, this matter is a million billion miles from the nonsense about taking the N word out of Huckleberry Finn, which has been written about very eloquently elsewhere (such as here). In summary, when a book is being used in education, context is everything, and removing the word dilutes a vitally important context

* My wee nephew was singing a somewhat illegible nursery rhyme and I tried to identify it using Spotify. On one album of nursery rhymes I spotted P*ssy's in the Well. Which did make me giggle. Proving that censorship itself can corrupt young minds – chiefly my own.

On Not Being Beautiful #2 – On Beauty & Sexual Attraction

I continue my rambling and disjointed treatise... (it started here)

Beautiful vs. Sexy

Contrary to what our culture tells us, beautiful and sexy are two very different things. Most people who have spent any time interacting on-line will have had the experience of becoming sexually-attracted to someone whose picture you've never seen. Most people who have spent any time interacting off-line will have met people who are truly beautiful but not in the least bit sexually attractive. You could stare at them for hours - several hours longer if they were naked - but they'd have as much chance of turning you on as a sunset or a rosebush. (And please no, if there is such thing as rosebush porn, I don't want to know).

For some people who are sexually attracted to women, sexy is entirely disconnected from what someone looks like. I think there are very few people for whom the quality is entirely and exclusively visual. For me, looks seem to be quite important, but I've fancied women I've not seen, and I've fancied women who I don't think are even slightly beautiful. Among the sexiest women I've ever met, the cultural standards of beauty don't apply at all - they've tended not to be especially young, they've varied a great deal in height, girth, colouring and disability status and their physical attractions have lain as much in the way they move about, smile and laugh and in their presentation, as in the underlying construction.

The aesthetic rules change anyway. A straight or wonky nose might make the difference between a beautiful face and an ordinary face, but it is almost impossible to remember the shape of a nose on a sexy person because you spend all your time looking at their eyes and lips. Sexy people's wrists, hands and the shape of their fingers can become a source of constant distraction, whereas on merely beautiful people they can be completely overlooked. Whatever colour and texture their skin, you want to paint your bedroom walls to match. Body parts which might be considered too big or too small assume their own integral perfection - people's own bodies generally suit them and make some kind of sense in terms of visually balance. Women's bodies especially so.

Asymmetries, scars, birthmarks, odd hair distribution, strange little folds of flesh, visible physical impairments and other oddities can themselves become sources of erotic delight because they're evidence of the desired person's uniqueness, their organic nature, their reality in flesh. The made-up lovers of our fantasies may be flawless, but they're always inferior to real fleshy sexy people in all their glorious fleshy sexy weirdness. Which isn't necessarily beauty. I am ghostly pale and was once complimented on the “sexy” blue veins visible under my skin - there's nothing beautiful about a giant odourless lump of Gorgonzola.

And we are still on sex here, not love. Romantic love adds layers and layers on top of all this, but even base sexual attraction forgives – and celebrates - very much of what an appraisal of physical beauty would not. And this is all visual stuff of course. As I said, for some people sexy isn't a visual thing at all, and in this respect, sexiness seems to be far more evenly distributed than beauty; most of us are not beautiful, but most of us meet someone's criteria for sexy.

The sexual advantages of beauty are all about getting noticed. Beautiful women get more initial sexual attention. In some contexts, this can be very significant and thus very demoralising for ordinary-looking women (or indeed beautiful women who happen to be not white, fat, trans or disabled*). But there's no evidence that, when all is said and done, conventionally beautiful women get more sex or better sex, let alone better and happier relationships. The only other connection I can think of between being beautiful and being sexy is that in getting more attention, beautiful people often have more confidence. Confidence is quite sexy.

Which puts me in mind of a rather winning compliment I once received from a very beautiful person;

“You're not exactly beautiful,” they said, “but you're very sexy and that's far more important. If I wanted something beautiful to look at, I'd get a full-length mirror.”

It was a fair point.


Beauty and the Male Gaze

I've been lucky with this stuff - I didn't anticipate having a male lover until suddenly I did, and before that point the male bit of the Male Gaze went over my head somewhat; I grew up seeing that my face and body did not match the images of beautiful women I saw all around me, but it didn't occur to me that my failure to be beautiful was a failure to be beautiful for men. But I understand that for many androphile women, anxiety around beauty has a lot to do with men and many of the conversations women have about their self-image are around what they perceive men want to expect from us.

So here's my theory about all this, as an in-betweeny kind of person. And in case any chaps are reading and feeling sensitive, this isn't what straight men are like, this is what messages women receive about men's attitude to feminine beauty. Clearly, what straight men are like is demonstrated by the fact that most of them appear quite happy to pair off with either ordinary-looking women or non-standard beauties.

In evolutionary terms, sex is very important, but to social animals, peer-bonding is more so. If you don't make meaningful connections with others, you die. In a society which is often informally gender-segregated, most of us are highly invested in our standing with members of our own gender - thus things like my own status anxiety I wrote about the other day. We prefer sexual explanations because sex is more exciting and of course, our particular culture revels in the idea that men are motivated by sex and very little else.

Now, if you want to press someone's sexual buttons, you have to be either lucky or fairly specific. People's sexualities are extremely diverse and unpredictable. If you want to press someone's status buttons, all you need are easily recognisable symbols of high status – like logos. Some people would buy any piece of crap that had a particular logo which they associate with a certain social standing. If you're going to use the image of a woman as a status symbol, you need that woman to look as much like every other woman ever used as a status symbol. Thus the ubiquity of the tall very thin young white cis woman with the straight narrow nose and so on. She's not an idealised version of womanhood as envisaged by all heterosexual men. She's the Nike tick.

So when she's draped over the bonnet of a shiny new car, you're not supposed to think, “Hmm, beautiful women love shiny new cars; if I buy the car I shall have sex with a woman like that.” You're supposed to think, “Hmm, there's Status draped over the bonnet of this car; if I buy the car I shall be admired by other men.” We know this because the same woman is used to advertise things to women and we're not expected to want to have sex with her. Nor, by the way, does your average British woman, middle-aged 5'4" slightly plump brunette, imagine that she could ever look like her. But it still works because we've all registered the symbol.

So many of the images of beautiful women we see around us have nothing to do with male lust. And even the most sexualised images of women are often more about homosocial bonding that heterosexual sex. Like the Page 3 Girl – it's soft porn, but nobody buys The Sun as a masturbatory stimulus. The role of the topless model is as a topic of light-hearted conversation among groups of men; “You don't get many of those to the pound!” etc.. Having discussed the days' news, each man in the group asserts his masculinity by giving his aesthetic critique of the model, suggesting sexual activities he would like to engage in with her, and comparing her to other women of the group's shared acquaintance.

We know this because these conversations often occur in public and similar conversations take place on-line. Men who go to lap-dancing clubs and the like often insist that this is social rather than a sexual activity. And in the absence of a volunteer on the podium or in a photograph, some men turn to the women around them. It's small comfort when strangers are loudly and publicly discussing the merits of your breasts, that it's really one man's way of telling another man "I love you."

Communal lechery as a bonding behaviour is by no means exclusive to straight men - nor are other versions always benign - but the straight masculine version is much more pressured, more prevalent and more acceptable within our culture. And as well as a shared approval of long legs, big breasts etc., it includes the shared disapproval of the ways ordinary-looking women deviate from cultural standards of beauty. Most of this is done through humour; all those fat bird jokes, jokes about having sex with older or trans women, plus the endless derogatory jokes about the looks of famous beautiful women. The more insecure and status-anxious men become, the noisier they become about their normal heterosexual tastes and the more critical they become of any ordinary-looking woman who strays into their field of vision. And this is largely unchallenged. This is a world where a journalist can complain about the visual appeal of female members of the Her Majesty's Government and get a job as editor for a national left-leaning newspaper.

I think the saddest manifestion of this nonsense is when men who buy into it all inevitably fall in love with ordinary-looking women, and you hear strange defensive explanations along the lines of, "I know she's not very pretty, she's plump and she has sticky-out teeth, but she has this weird thing where she walks into a room and the whole place lights up!"

Now, none of this tells us what men want and I'm not naive about the possibility that this stuff actually impacts on people's sexual behaviour - it probably does. Except, as I observed before, most men have sex with and pair off with ordinary-looking women, and we have no reason to assume that they are made miserable by this. Androphile women need to know that most of these cultural messages are not relevant to considering our own attractiveness.

We also need to identify the bullshit for what it is. Short of their having a Swatzika tattooed on their forehead, nobody should be offended or upset by the appearance of another person. No man is made sick by the sight of a flabby thigh or a hairy calf and if he were, it would be his own problem entirely. Women are not here to give men something nice to look at. Whoever you are, whatever you look like, you have just as much a right to be and be seen as anyone else.

This is not to say that the men we fancy will always fancy us, or that their disinterest won't be based on some aspect of our appearance – that's life and it's nobody's fault. But the same goes for all human relationships; you win some, you lose some and no matter how gorgeous you are, you haven't a hope of winning them all.


Well done to anyone who got down this far - it went on a bit, didn't it? Sorry. Just getting it out of my system.

* Kia Matthews recently performed a social experiment in which she submitted two identical profiles to the same dating website, one with a photo of her own round pretty black self and one with a photo of her thin pretty white friend. Worth a gander.

On Not Being Beautiful #1 - Beauty & Nonsense

I've been thinking about feminine beauty recently and wanted to blog my thoughts, but I had too many of them for one post. So it'll be a few posts, and it might hop about a bit and no promises on how quickly I'll get round to the next one.

Human beings are beautiful. Our faces are beautiful and our bodies are beautiful. The faces and bodies of the people we love are the most appealing visual stimuli we will ever encounter. You're beautiful. Everyone is beautiful. Even this lady, who I've mentioned before, is beautiful in this sense.

But feminine beauty in most social and cultural senses is an elite quality possessed by a minority of women. And I recognise that too. Most people are nice to look at, some people are fantastic to look at, regardless of their personal charms or our relationship with them. We undoubtedly vary in our visual appeal. In this sense, we are not all beautiful. Most of us are ordinary looking. You're still beautiful, of course, but the rest of us are not.

This is also absolutely fine. It is fine to be ordinary looking.


Beauty in Culture.

Cultural standards of beauty are messed up. This is not news. Pictorially, feminine beauty is represented as something extraordinarily narrow; white, young, smooth-skinned, very thin, taller than average, cisgendered with a straight narrow nose, high cheekbones, large eyes, fullish lips and without visible impairments.

Women with such qualities, rare as they may be in the general population, make up the vast majority of images of women we see around us on the front of magazines and newspapers, on billboards and on television, in movies and in popular music. I am perfectly okay to look at, but it is possible to read a magazine or tabloid newspaper, watch a movie or several hours of television without catching sight of a single woman who is as lacking in beauty as I am.

Media representation of women, from fairytales to news stories, feature beautiful princesses and heroines on the one hand and warty witches, ugly sisters and assorted hags on the other. In advertising for clothes, cosmetics and diet products, we are told that our hair, faces, bodies are unsightly, embarrassing and shameful right now but when we buy Product X, we will become beautiful. Women who are successful or notorious for for any reason will have their looks appraised in the media and it will always come out at one extreme or the other. World leader or murder suspect, if you are a woman, you're eye-candy or you're emetic.

Even if you are found to be beautiful, there is no security in your status. Magazines and newspapers constantly criticise the appearance of indisputably beautiful women. If Helen of Troy were alive today, there would be endless articles about her weight gain and loss, her cellulite or blotchy skin, her spots and wrinkles, her ugly feet, her lacklustre hair and so on. If any aspect of a woman's appearance is not perfect, then she is a subject to shame and ridicule.

This is a problem. These are the messages which can make ordinary-looking women feel that our absence of beauty is a problem.


Beautiful = Tolerable

If the absence of beauty is ugliness, then beauty itself becomes the base line for what is tolerable. We must be beautiful, or else we must not be seen at all. An example of this is the use of the oft-repeated tenet that Big is Beautiful.

Not Big can be Beautiful or my preferred slogan, The Size of My Arse is Morally-Neutral. This tenet is so often accompanied by rhetoric and images which suggest that overweight women deviate from the cultural standards of beauty in just one respect - examples of big beauties are predominantly white, young, taller that average and so on. And it's not just big women; occasionally there are fashion programmes or articles, even beauty pageants which magnanimously feature disabled women, but again, these are dominated by conventionally attractive women who are simply sat down. Not so much these women are beautiful too, more a minority of these women almost count as beautiful.

But a failure to be revered as beautiful is the least of the problems faced by women with marginalised bodies. Our bodies are considered offensive, embarrassing, a source of pity, disgust and sometimes even anger*. We are not allowed just to be ordinary-looking, to be of little to no visual interest and thus to be left alone. Our deviation from cultural standards of beauty is, in itself, a point of interest and concern. In the case of big women, this is seen as a willing deviation.

But is the solution to prejudice to argue for our integral beauty? And is the cure for our low self-image to convince ourselves that rather than being ugly, we are in fact completely gorgeous?

If someone of average maths ability feels their maths skills are shamefully inadequate, even if they live in a world which confirms this belief, is it ever helpful to declare them a genius?


Beauty and Status Anxiety

It is difficult to talk about negative things women to do one another, for fear of blaming women for their own oppression. Oh well, let's make it all about me!

Forgive me, Sisters, for I have sinned. It has been a while since my last confession. This is mostly retrospective; I haven't behaved this way for a long time and few of the women in my life behave this way towards me. Even so, I've done it.

I have engaged in self-deprecation like it was a virtue and concealed self-confidence like it was a vice. I have colluded in other women's self-loathing. I have sat with very over-weight women and lamented my own relatively modest girth. I have complained of petty imperfections which may have sewn the seeds of similar anxieties in the minds of others. I have tried to comfort women about their trivial flaws by arguing that mine are worse.

I have given compliments which I couldn't have possibly meant (you know the type – you tell them, “Your nose isn't big at all!” when you absent-mindedly hung your coat off it a moment earlier). I have complimented women on their appearance instead of complimenting them on those qualities I value higher; their kindness, bravery or wisdom. I have complimented women on their appearance instead of telling them that I loved them. And I have received compliments from other women with thanks but without considering for a moment that they might be sincere.

I have feared the scrutiny of other women. I've never much cared what men thought about my appearance, but I have feared the judgment of women I don't even like. Perhaps I even cared about the judgement of women I didn't like more than those I liked - this is about status, after all, the fear of not being good enough. I have spent shameful amounts of time, money and energy on beauty rituals in the hope of looking acceptable. Other times, I have pretended to in order to be seen to have made the effort.

I have received unsolicited criticism and advice about fixing or concealing my cosmetic flaws – even things which I never considered a problem - and failed to tell these women to bugger off. Sometimes I have taken their advice.

I have quite enjoyed those programmes where magnanimous upper-middle class women shame and humiliate working class women in order to reform them, by reforming their appearance. I bought a women's magazine once on a train journey, actually paid money for it, and I have leafed through many others. Most discussions of fashion and beauty in the media are based on status anxiety, about fitting in and the fear of not fitting in. Don't be a frump, don't be a tart, conceal this, reveal that, wear colours and shapes dictated by people with more power but much less good taste than you do. Fashion as something that changes with the seasons is all about status anxiety driven by commercial interest. Alas, we in the West are by far the least exploited in that chain.

I have smiled and nodded and sympathised when I should have argued with women who were being made miserable, poor and exhausted by their pursuit of beauty. I have stood by and let adult women program girls with the same anxieties.

I don't believe I should have ever been angry with other women for hating their own appearance. If vanity is a vice, it is its own punishment. And some women who spend a large proportion of their time unhappily engaged in beauty regimes, calorie-counting and general angst about their looks are understandably upset when they see other ordinary-looking women who don't bother and get away with it.

Yet we do this stuff to one another and we engage in this hopeless pursuit for one another. At least, it's a huge part. And through our relationships with one another, we can maybe sort this stuff out.



* I say our bodies although I acknowlegde I carry a lot of privilege here. My body is marginalised but I am still young, white, cis and not enormous.

Between a rock and a hard place

On Saturday, we went on a cultural excursion to Norwich. No really! Funnily enough, this is only the third time I can remember ever going to Norwich and the last two occasions were to see productions of Shakespeare – extremely good ones at that.

This time was to see a sculpture exhibition featuring the work of Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson at Norwich Castle, which our friend Vic had told us about. Moore and Hepworth in particular are probably the most significant sculptors of the first half of the twentieth century. Lots of public art in the UK is either by them or produced under their influence.

I've realised in recent months that if I don't ask, I would never ever leave the house, and the more extravagant and specific the request, the more likely it is to be granted. Subtle hints are useless. It also helps if, like the snowdrops and this exhibition, the trip has to be made within a given time-frame. Any further obstacles like distance or access only work in my favour. When something requires planning, I can force my minions to commit to the trip in advance, and then tell them exactly what to do, where and when.

So although nobody else had the slightest interest in twentieth century sculpture, I managed to drag both my parents and [...] all the way to Norwich. And it was good, really good. I can't find pictures I can reproduce here - since most of their famous stuff is big public works, I'm struggling to find pictures to even point you to. There were lots of abstract figures in different sorts of stone, very beautiful organic shapes. Several variations on the mother-and-child theme, plus some purely geometric stuff, which didn't work so well for me - except possibly this, which is an absolutely gorgeous object in real life.

My Mum loved it too and now wants to try her hand at sculpture. Dad was ambivalent, prompting an in-depth discussion on the definition of art. He also recounted the tale of the public sculpture he created, which stood outside Suffolk College for six years before being removed because of Health & Safety concerns on account of its moving-parts.

Norwich Castle is a bit of a Museum of Everything. There's the castle keep, with battlements and dungeons and exhibits on the castle's nine hundred years history. Then there's the broader local history and artifacts back to Boudica and the Iceni (including a kind of chariot-ride simulator). But then there's a great collection of mostly Victorian paintings – including a few famous names. There's also a modern art gallery, which includes a collection of chewing gum in a glass case but also some truly great art. Then there's an Egypt bit with some poor dead mummy on display, a room all about the history of textiles, another room full of stuffed animals and the Twinings Teapot Gallery (a room full of teapots, in case you couldn't guess).

And I don't think we saw nearly all of it. Which is probably a good thing as I'm sure I learnt a very great deal about all manner of things but can't remember any of it.

Norwich Castle is extremely accessible given it's a castle. You can't go up on the battlements and funnily enough, the Normans didn't think to build an elevator down to the dungeons, but otherwise it is all great and I didn't feel slightly nervous of knocking anything over.

Oh and on the way there, we passed a protest against the closing of a local school. There was quite a crowd, but two placards in particular caught my eye. The first stated that "Weight-Watchers meets here!" which I thought perhaps was a fairly feeble argument. But my favourite was, and I don't tell a lie,

"Down with this sort of thing!"

Picture This

Alexander correctly identified the subject of the latest addition to the Family Portrait Gallery (my Mum's upstairs corridor) as his Mummy and Daddy. That having been said, he has recently pointed to a picture of Sean Bean and declared it to be his Daddy. Rosie, however, responded with a complaint that I had given her grey hairs. It's supposed to be light.

Granddad

This was by far the hardest portrait I've done so far. It is my maternal Granddad, who died ten years ago in February. On top of his shocking failure to visit me as a ghost, I only had very small photos to work from. And well, let's just say that Granddad had a compulsion to pull faces whenever he saw a camera, leaving very few photographs of anything like an ordinary smile.

Added to this, I really miss my Granddad and became rather emotional about the whole thing, afraid that I had forgotten what he looked like. Even now I don't think this is a brilliant likeness, but I hope I've finally got the gist of him.

Granddad W. was a very special person, who I always hoped I took after to some extent. He was an avid reader, the only blood relative who could beat me at Scrabble and the writer of the most appalling that you ever read. And he was always making things, building houses out of brick (which was his job) or making furniture or little curiosities out of wood. Our garden alone boasted a hutch and a run for our guinea-pigs, a bird-table and a bench that he'd made. He always smelt of sawdust and pipe tobacco. I don't, but I feel I share his inability to sit still. Metaphorically at least; I actually sit still a great deal of the time, but perhaps you know what I mean.

But then when I was talking to my sister about this portrait, she sent me a photograph of Granddad when he was in the Navy, aged about seventeen or eighteen. And to my complete amazement, well, he looks like me. If I were ten years younger and less chubby. Oh and much more butch. I hadn't previously seen myself so vividly in anyone before and it came as quite a shock.

One the one hand, Granddad taught me that it was possible to love and respect a person without taking them altogether seriously. People are daft, and they can make you daft if you take every word to heart. Family feuds raged around him, but he managed to appear not to notice (our particular family feuds are especially petty).

On the other hand, Granddad always seemed to take me as seriously as he took anyone else; he always knew what was going on in my life, not just in a general way. He encouraged all my interests, and whilst I was a naïve and opinionated teenager, he would chastise my parents for interrupting me or telling me to shut up. He also took the p*ss out of my parents, which was an absolute joy for my teenaged self. And yes, this was the Grandad who insisted that I would be the next female prime-minister. I presume he took a similar interest in all ten of his grandchildren.

And I really do miss him. I'm sure he would have adored little Alexander (as well as all the other great-children that have come along since he died). If everyone lived forever, the world would be a terribly crowded place, life and love would be less precious, but a time-machine would be handy from time to time.

A Posthumous Cosmetic Dilemma

I am rather pleased of my picture of Grandad Kelly. I had to abandon my first attempt entirely and briefly worried that, because he has been dead for five years and I have no large or digital photographs, I may have forgotten what he looked like. As it is, this is what he looked like. Roughly

I had and still have a bit of a dilemma about this painting. Grandad has something which I understand to have been a type of skin cancer which had to be regularly treated but never caused any harm besides a permanent red make. on the bridge of his nose. I wasn't sure whether to pretend it wasn't there. In the end I decided to put it in, and to be honest it does look somewhat less prominent on the actual picture than it does on the screen - at least on my screen.

But what do you think? I had a similar issue with the mole of my friend Vic who I'm painting, but I spoke to Vic about it and we decided it was best left in. Grandad's cancer or ulcer or whatever you call it is another issue; it's not nearly so becoming as Vic's mole, but it was part of what he looked like. Does it stand out a mile? Does it look like an accident?

It is an emotional business painting dead people. I also wonder what my Granny Kelly will make of the picture when she sees it. They had an excellent marriage for just short of sixty years; in the original photo I used to paint him, he had his arm around her.

Unfortunately, my pain has crept up a lot in the last few weeks and I have been temporarily banned from sitting the chair that I use for painting. I'm not sure that'll make any difference but the pain is beginning to become a real problem again and I'm prepared to try a few things before resorting to harder drugs.

Painted ladies

I'm still struggling to write at the moment. If only I'd have a three day stretch where my energy levels were similar - or even three separate days, at regular intervals, which were roughly the same. Anyway, whilst I've not been writing, I have been continuing with this portrait-painting.

I have painted my two grandmothers and don't really know how to feel about these paintings. Here is my maternal grandmother. The thing is, this is the most cheerful expression I could coax her into (she does smile sometimes, but this was her photoface, as it were). Also, this is someone who laments the ravages of time on her looks and is of a generally sensitive disposition, so I guess I also approached the subject more nervously. It does look like my Gran, but it isn't a particularly nice picture.

This is the famous Granny Kelly. I'm much happier with this painting, but don't really know what it was that I did which makes this so much better than the other one. Or perhaps that's entirely my perception? I don't know.

Shortly, I'm hoping to get fed up of painting portraits at the same time as having the mental capacity to go back to my book. If not then I will probably have painted every living blood relative by Christmas.

I have also been sorting out shopping bags. Plastic-bags are an enormous red-herring in discussions of waste and recycling. For every plastic bag you use at the supermarket, you are probably purchasing two or three times as much waste plastic wrapped around your food and household products. Of course excessive packaging provides advertising space, so the financially interested parties concentrate on plastic bags, and this of course places the ultimate onus on the consumer.

However, these is an alternative you can design yourself; the cotton bags cost 90p each from Fred Aldous and the fabric paint was free on account of my friend Vic giving me all of hers (but you can also get fabric paint from Aldous). Really, I should not use fabric paint at all because I spill every fluid that comes within three feet of me and, well, it dyes stuff. So there are always drops and smudges where there weren't supposed to be. But they fold up real small and fit into a pocket. Not a jeans pocket, but a decent sized pocket you might have on your coat.