Dry dry skin

I'm not sure if dry skin co-occurs with AS sufferers a lot (though psoriasis is one condition which seems to affect AS-ers a fair bit) but I've always seemed to have problems with cracked skin, not just on my hands, but most of my body. As yet, I've not found a miracle cure, but, after trawling through hundreds of dubious cider vinegar recipes on the internet, I have found some things which worked for my horrible dry scalp.

On the recommendation of my GP, I bought one bottle of Neutrogena Coal Tar shampoo and one bottle of Nizoral shampoo from Boots, and have been alternating using them over the past two months or so... to my surprise, this is one time when my GP was dead on the money, and my dry scalp has almost completely cleared up.

If buying Nizoral, see if you can get it on prescription because it retails for nearly a tenner, and even if you have to pay for your prescriptions, it will be around £2 cheaper.

Today's headlines

Two female users of Twitter, journalist Caroline Criado-Perez and Stella Creasy MP, have been receiving abuse in which they are threatened with rape for expressing their views.

Twitter executives are likely to be questioned by MPs over the site's handling of abuse, the chairman of an influential Commons committee has said.

It is about time, to be frank. I may only have been alive for a couple of decades, but I have seen attitudes to not just women, but everyone, change, particularly as the Internet has taken off. It has been said before, but it worth repeating: people think they can hide behind internet anonymity and therefore that they can say and act as they want without repercussions.

Worryingly, it sometimes seems as if this is spilling over into our daily lives outside cyberspace. I am not particularly good-looking as a woman. I am short, have a childish face, large shoulders and dress fairly conservatively. Some would say boringly. However, in the past month I have been harassed in the street at least 6 times by men. Normally I swear, flick the Vs, anything to show I am not complicit in their harassment, and that I will not giggle or walk faster (which I feel almost condones harassment). I have not yet been threatened with rape, but I have had some incredibly angry reactions, and I have had men who just will. not. let. it. go. and continue to harass me as I walk.

Who can I report this to? Who will be questioned on my behalf? Who will be punished for ruining my day through intimidation and rude words?

And one day, when I have finally, finally had enough, and pushed that idiot off his bike, or punched him full in the face, will there be justice?

Chatternoster. n. the mix of gossip, advice, screaming over the noise of the hand-dryer and miscellaneous talk in the ladies loos. See also: chatternosing.

The mother of one of my sister's primary school classmates used to wear huge and numerous earrings when she came to pick up her son. Gold hoops, beads that looked like bunches of grapes, diamond studs, loopy chains. I wanted a word to describe what they looked like in her ears: heavy, lobe-dragging, substantial, meaty. It had been a long day, and the best I could come up with was watuung. But it got my point across, once everyone had stopped laughing.

There are loads of books about new coinages of words, websites about new slang terms (Urban Dictionary), or words that exist in one language but not in another (eg Schadenfreude), or even those words that describe seemingly culturally specific concepts (eg saudade). Some coinages last, while some are what are known as nonce formations:  a new word invented for a specific moment in someone's life and that never sticks around for long afterwards. I thought it would be interesting then to have a go at coining some words for the 'female experience', some of which seem to be sorely lacking in English. The challenge was outlined in a book about women's rights published in 1996 as part of a series called What's the Big Idea? If I were a teacher, something like this would definitely be on the homework agenda.

Getting your first period: commencements
(a beginning; neutral; neither curse nor blessing)

The female equivalent of 'stud': brightling
(positive connotations of bright, still vaguely horsey to be in-keeping with 'stud')

A word to describe your best girl friend: kindrel
(from 'kindred', also 'kind'; -el because it is often a female ending in French, analogy with 'elle'. 'Kindrette' would sound too diminutive and cutesy and full of washing machines.)

The craving you get for chocolate when you're suffering from PMT: the zeenans
(the noise in your head when you set your teeth and your internal monologue goes "Eeeeeeee I want chocolate")

A woman who doesn't want to get married through her own choice: rectrice
(a tail feather which is important in the flight of birds)

How you might feel if you had been up all night nursing a screaming baby: geschloggered
(quasi-Yiddish/German, a sounds-like-you-feel kind of word)

From What's the Big Idea?: Women's Rights by Victoria Parker (with illustrations by Andrew McIntyre)

I would add womanine to this list too, because feminine has come to mean one particular set of attributes (flowers, daintiness, kittens --- blergh) and has fairly negative connotations, rather than meaning "being a woman", whereas masculine, seems to me to still mean "being a man".

The moral maze

Possible triggers warning: discussion of child and sexual abuse

The fall-out from the Jimmy Savile scandal continues as Max Clifford and Rolf Harris are the latest high-profile men to be involved with the off-shoots of Operation Yewtree. In each case, accusations of abuse and, in some instances, rape of underage girls have been alleged. These recent revelations have prompted me to think about my own links with these stories. You see, I was taught by a paedophile. And Mr X was one of the best teachers I ever had.

I was 9 years old when I was first taught by him, but well into secondary school when Mr X was convicted of producing and viewing obscene images of children, some of which were photographs of his pupils (all under 7s) who were changing for PE.

When the local newspapers printed details of his arrest and subsequent trial, I was disgusted and horrified, and I still am now. I cannot begin to imagine how his actions have scarred the very children he was supposed to be looking after. And it is even stranger because he taught me so much about Judaism and Israel, facts that have stayed with me for years, that I rely on in conversations and arguments. He encouraged my creative writing, allowing me to spend hours writing a ridiculous story about non-identical twins on the ancient classroom computer. There was nothing strange that I remember about him, no inkling of any shame to come. The technology for his crime was not really available either (primitive internet, obvious camcorders and Kodak disposable cameras). Had this not been the case, I am sure my memories of that classroom would have been far more tarnished than they are today.

The trouble is, I am struggling to see things as purely good or evil. I can't square things in my mind without concluding that either my old teacher was a good teacher with a dark, horrible side, or a horrible, broken man who somehow managed to impart knowledge, or both. It's not a new idea. Yin and yang, the vast majority of "human sinners", the antihero... it's something of a cliche, and like the cliche of cliches: it is a cliche because it is true.

I condemn child abuse with all my heart. I cry and taste bile at the experiences that stronger people than I have endured. In some of my darker moments, I ponder the merits of the death penalty. But I cannot read the papers or watch the news, switch on the radio or the computer today without thinking of my old teacher, and the lives he ruined, and the lives he enriched. How can a bag of flesh and bones - like me, like you - be capable of both? I wonder how, and I wonder why.

Petrolheads

This week I had my first encounter with Racemax, a motorsports round-up programme shown on Sky Sports. It's one of those shows which are unintentionally thought-provoking, in that you start worrying about the future of mankind.

Sidecar racing (from the Waganui Chronicle Website)

It's hard to know, for example, whether the person who decided that the world needed a Formula 1 for 5.5 tonne trucks deserves a medal or a brain scan. And if you were trying to come up with a new sport and alighted on racing motorbikes and specially crafted sidecars around a cemetery in New Zealand, sorry to break it to you, but someone's done it already. And lastly, if you want to give the impression that someone in the Mercedes F1 team hasn't quite grasped the meaning of irony, stick Nico Rosberg in a rainforest and have him discuss climate change before jetting off halfway across the world to drive really fast for 50 laps.

Blast from the past

I was sorting through old notebooks today and found a little piece I'd written about AS. I'm not sure what prompted it, whether I was planning to send it to somebody (although who, I don't know) or whether something had just happened and I was feeling angry. It's pre-anti-TNF treatment, so some of it is slightly inaccurate now, but I thought I'd put it here for a (teeny-weeny) section of the world to see.

Sometimes it's easy to get bogged down in the detail. Take a look in an anatomy book and you'll see cervical, thoracic, lumbar, sacral and coccygeal vertebrae; bifid spinous and superior articular processes; sacral promontories and pedicles and foramen... but what it boils down to is this: spine. Men and women in the UK have back problems. Some are the result of bad posture or heavy lifting, some from accidents or previous illnesses, and some, like mine, are a little more mysterious.

I suffer from a condition known as ankylosing spondylitis, a type of arthritis, and it took me nearly long as it took to be diagnosed as it did to master the pronunciation (but not quite. I waited nine years to be told what the source of my pain was, and some wait even longer). AS (official shorthand, not just laziness) is an autoimmune disease, which may be triggered by an injury, but as often as not seems to have no real environmental cause. Some AS-ers, including me, possess the gene HLA-B27, though a large number of people have the gene, but not AS. If there is a correlation between having both, it seems it might be that the gene codes the tumour necrosis factor white cells which attack any intruders. But in AS, they go a bit mad and attack any part of the body showing inflammation. Consequently, areas around the joints which become inflamed can fuse together. In the past, therefore, it was called “bamboo spine”, which sounds almost romantic. Personally, I think ouch-ouch-#?!@*-I-can't-move disease, while being distinctly less poetic, is probably more accurate.

As disabilities go, it's particularly difficult to pin down, which is ironic, seeing how slowly I move when I'm going through a bad patch. In the Top Trumps of Life, it scores fairly low, and means I don't get any DLA* or a blue badge to put in the car windscreen. Considering I can't drive anyway, the latter is no skin off my nose, but I am a student, and travelling to and from hospitals around the country can get a tad pricey, so DLA wouldn't go amiss. However, in the long term, even with physio and medication, you're pretty much destined to resemble Quasimodo for the rest of your life**. Now me, I've nothing against pavement-gazing, but I never signed up for it. Nor did I envisage a future of permanently bent knees***, and pain from sitting, standing or lying down. I really, really like sleeping.

So don't stand there and disbelieve me when I say I'm disabled****. Just  because I don't limp doesn't mean I've not known more pain that you ever will. And don't mock me when I do walk strangely. But most of all, don't ignore that twinge in your lower back, or those stabbings in your legs. Don't be fobbed off with “It's only growing pains”. Don't just gulp down ibruprofen like there's no tomorrow. Go to your GP and get referred to find out if there's something more serious going on. Use the NHS while you still can*****.

*you can actually get DLA in some instances. NASS are very good at supporting people with applications and helping obtain funding.
**I know now that this is actually unlikely, especially with anti-TNF treatment. Getting a hunchback is really rare, especially now that people are diagnosed and treated properly and quickly.
***some people have this, but again, see Quasimodo point above.
****I don't say this anymore, not even on those equal opportunities forms that come with job applications, which sometimes causes problems when Occupational Health come calling and want to know why you didn't declare it. 
*****Yup, they were still trying to wreck the NHS 3 years ago.

Definitely not eavesdropping

Some more London-centric language, this time on the bus. Imagine the scene...

A highly-pierced woman of about 17 at the front of the bus, shouting on her mobile and mouthing off about her pervert boss to a friend. This goes on for some time, and she gets more and more agitated. She pauses for a moment mid-rant and suddenly explodes:

"BIG MAN TING!!! Big man ting!"

I spent the rest of the journey wondering why she was yelling about giant male genitalia. It took Urban Dictionary to let me down gently and explain that "big man ting" is a phrase used to mean "in all seriousness" (see also: "you get me", "true say", "swear down").

Not to be confused with a big man's ting-a-ling (a giant male's genitalia), a big man, an' ting (a really really giant man), or ting-ting! which is your stop...

N.B just to make tings really confusing, big man ting can be used to mean what I first thought it meant... It seems only London, at the minute, uses it in the you-get-me sense.

Pagan

Channel 4's The Fried Chicken Shop: Life in a Day is a one-off documentary about a fried chicken franchise in Clapham. Over 24 hours they speak to the staff and customers as well as eavesdropping on their conversations. At one point, one of the kids from the local college says something like, "Don't be a pagan, pass the ketchup".

Exhibit A

It's been a fair while since I was last in contact with the real word(s) on the street, but now and again, a friend who is still in higher education brings me up to speed. It was from him that I first heard pagan  to describe someone who would grass you up or betray you quicker than you could say "follower of a nature-based religion". He said it doesn't just have to mean a two-faced snitch, it could just mean some kind of loser, and that seems to be the way it was used in the programme. The negative aspects of being a snitch have broadened to describe anyone acting in a negative way.

It seems that many of the people who use pagan in this new sense, however, are not really aware of its other connotations, so it's not clear exactly if this term is coincidentally the same as pagan in the sense of wicca, or if someone with a grudge against non-Abrahamic faiths decided to equate them. (the latter scenario might not be implausible: at school, where there were a lot of Muslims, infidel was a pretty bad word, as was heathen, so pagan isn't really that far off).

It's the century's remedy/For the faint at heart, a new start...

Over the weekends, visiting my sister at university, I got to stay in a 17th century thatched cottage with thick ochre-painted walls, sloping floors, exposed beams and a tiny staircase. I had not been so excited for a long, long time.

Apparently the countryside
has washing machines too these days.

For all my life, I've lived in a city. My idea of villages and country life is about 300 years out of date, having been gleaned from Alison Uttley books, Loreena McKennit songs and the Constable print that used to hang in my grandmother's toilet. The bemusing reality then was Tesco lightbulbs, pitbull terriers and perma-tanned women driving Nissan Micras at 100mph down high-hedged lanes.

I was sort of relieved to realise that the smell of manure is the same no matter what century it's being spread.

(Not) workin' nine to fiiiive

I like reading Terry Pratchett's books, but I sometimes wonder if he's ever done a night shift. Some of my favourite characters work nights: Sam Vimes (in the Night Watch) and Glenda Sugarbean (in charge of the Night Kitchen at Unseen University), and Pratchett makes it sound wonderful, exciting and with its own unique glamour. Unfortunately, in my experience, it's nothing like that.

Nights are disorientating, confusing to the digestive system, and no matter how much sleep you manage to get during the day, exhausting. That's not to say there aren't good bits. I like having the ladies loos pretty much to myself. I can go in and stretch and pretend to be a ballerina (there's a full-length mirror and the sinks are about barre-height, I think), without worrying that someone from accounts will walk in and freak out. In the top trumps of employment, working nights usually wins in the hardship stakes, now that there aren't any chimney sweeps or workhouses. It also means you can look at your fellow commuters on the early morning train with a certain air of weary superiority. And, on slow nights, although I don't think we're really supposed to, you can catch up on all the TV you missed during the week.

It can get really spooky though. We work on the ground floor of a large five-storey building on an industrial estate packed with warehouses and a weird nightclub where machete-wielding men are commonplace. Many a Monday morning I've had to jump over "do not cross" tape to get inside while the police aren't looking. Wandering around in the wee hours is scary. It's not fear of the dark per se, more fear of who or what might hiding in it. I'm a bit of wuss really and tend to run through the deserted offices in case someone jumps out of a cupboard and tries to kill me with a circuit board.

It turns out that working nights is just like working day shifts, only a bit more crap than normal, and with more coffee/energy drinks and things that go bump in the night (or bump-bamma-bump-de-bump. I can hear the basslines from the nightclub in the toilets while I'm doing my best impression of a hippo in a tutu). Let's just hope Pratchett got it right about the other stuff. It would be terrible to visit Ankh-Morpork and find it's a tiny village with no werewolves, dwarves, vampires, zombies or dragons at all.

Highway to Hell

Found this on my bus seat.

I thought maybe someone had lost a photo of their grandfather (although an odd kind of grandfather. Is the little girl giving him money? "Here you go, gramps. Buy yourself something nice.") So I turned it over in the hope of finding a name or address for the owner, but instead found this on the reverse.

Is it an appeal to fellow bus-using Catholics to support the beatification of GK Chesterton? A really long-winded attempt to convert commuters? A prayer card left on the seat by accident?

If you visit the first website, it has a direct link to prayer cards to "ask him [GK Chesterton] for a miracle" because "the Church would like some proof that GKC is a saint". It does not give any clue as to what these miracles might be though...

The fact that it was left on a bus would seem to indicate a desire to reach the un-Catholic masses (no pun intended) who in this area at least, probably don't need Catholicism to be anti-abortion because most of the major religions round here are never ever ever going to be pro-choice (whether Islam or Hinduism).

The second website link leads to an organisation who have apparently saved "100's of Babies" but have never worked out how to use apostrophes or capital letters. Presumably GK Chesterton would have had something to say about that. Incidentally the website also has a lot to say about the apparent evils of homosexuality and condoms in general. In fact the letter which rants on about this actually makes me quite sick. Apparently an AIDS worker must "SUFFER the AIDS-related deaths [through using infected needles] that addicts inflict upon themselves instead of FORMALLY COOPERATING in the moral evil of degrading the addict further by helping him to solve his problems in practising the addictive behaviour" [sic]

I'm sorry, but I'd take hell any day if it meant not having to spend eternity with GKC and these venom-filled loonies.

Les Miserables

I finally saw it! And it's true, it is sad. For all those film critics wondering why everyone comes out of the cinema crying, the clue's in the name, bozos.

While the film is stunning, full of earworm, barnstorming tunes, glorious costumes and tremendous acting (I have a new, glowing respect for Ms A Hathaway), it uncovered some uncomfortable truths for me. I spent more time than I really should have half-wondering why they bothered to make Hugh Jackman's fingernails so authentically dirty but no-one who was crying had a red, puffy face, bloodshot eyes and hands full of snot-filled tissues (like the audience). But I also found myself thinking back to an interview with Anne Hathaway, where she worries that young fans coming to see the film will try to starve themselves in emulation of her emaciated frame. And you know what my first treacherous thought was, as Fantine was carried through the snow, ill and distraught and freezing to death? "Oh. She doesn't look *that* thin."

What the hell is wrong with me?

I worry that my brain has been finally captured by the body-haters, and I now think it is normal for a body to be bereft of  a single ounce of fat.

It's not hard to think that sometimes. Anyone slightly overweight, or not long-legged, tight-tummied and white-teethed, and who is in the limelight, is quizzed over their body image or held up as wonderful and astounding just for having a body shape LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE. It's not hard to see the people that men find attractive - whether celebrities, or porn stars, or someone else - and come to the conclusion that anyone else is abnormal, because they couldn't possibly be attractive.

And women are just as bad, in my view. Pinterest is full of women who want to be somebody that their body frame is just not going to accommodate. I am just a shade over five feet, and I sometimes dream of being 10 inches taller, with endless legs. But I've got to face it: no diet or exercise regime in the world will turn me into a supermodel.No lifting weights or doing 30 lunges a day will shrink my broad shoulders, get rid of my spots or make me less hairy.

I wonder if one day I'll overhear something like this as I'm waiting to buy popcorn:
"Oh, wowww, a thin/fat/egg-shaped/upside-down woman starred in this film. Big frickin' deal. I look like an egg too, but I can't act."

For the sake of womankind and the sisterhood (not the travelling pants one, bleurgh), heck, for everyonekind, I hope so.

Teenage wisdom

Overheard on the tube:

"Nah man, allow protein bars. You know what you should eat instead?
Pistachios and bare s*** like that."

Gillian McKeith, eat your heart out.

Don't try this at home*

After a crazy few days where the fridge broke (I opened it and felt warm air rush out. Also the thermometer read 15 degrees celsius...), all my precious and expensive anti-TNF injections had to be thrown away, and I ended up phoning the injection company several times a day, I finally got a batch of new jabby things.

Jabby things

So on Saturday night, three days after I should have had all those antibodies in my own body, really tired from work, and with half an eye on the TV while grabbing a lump of stomach to inject, this happened...

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... a bruise!

The anti-TNF forums are full of people comparing photos of their battle scars, but this is my first proper bruise as a result of self-injection, though site-specific swelling the size of tennis balls was a frequent occurrence before I discovered the miracle-working benefits of cheapo anti-histamines. I sort of feel quite proud. I don't really know if it could have been avoided, but I probably shouldn't have been watching Pirates of the Caribbean at the same time...


*multi-tasking with needles.

Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young

£170 Alexander McQueen skull scarf
which encapsulates his
"dark and dramatic style". Whatevs,
Selfridges. I can buy dramatic
in Primark for peanuts.

Seems lately that everywhere you turn you cannot move for skulls, bones and death stuff. Be they Mexican Day of the Dead style tattoos on rockabilly girls or t-shirts, skull bracelets, or just a mayfly-like sentiment found in Ke$ha's Die Young or any of Lana Del Rey's songs, death is everywhere. Literally, of course, but also fashionably.

Is this a bad thing? Probably not. It means that a goth is totally on-trend and that anyone who is naturally interested in the subject of death (i.e. me) looks like less of a weirdo. On a deeper level too, it could be a good sign. If people are more comfortable with death and bereavement then it might not be such a scary thing to talk about and experience. It might make people more determined to live life to the full (woo, you go Ke$ha, get drunk and kiss some randomer in a club, we're all gonna die anyway).

And for some closing words, how about these:

No people who turn their back on the dead can be alive. The presence of the dead among the living will be a daily fact in any society that encourages its people to live.

From: C Alexander with S Ishikawa, M Silverstein, M Jacobson, I Fiksdahl-King, S Angel A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction New York (1977). Found in this book.

The thinking woman's tampon?

That bastion of good-taste, the late Bernard Manning, once complained that the only things female comedians ever talked about were “periods and f***ing tampax”. The irony here of course being the fact that the only thing most women won’t mention in earshot of men is menstruation. Female comedians seem to be the only ones with enough balls (ovaries?) to actually say the P-word in front of a bunch of Y-chromosomes. The fact remains that talking about the time-of-the-month in male company is still about as taboo as you can get. 

So tra-la-la, I am going to talk about periods and good causes and charity all in one go, and to hell with all of youse who feel uncomfortable. 

Recently I bought some of these in Tesco (don't judge me. It is the only supermarket within walking distance of work. Actually, there is a Costcutter, but it tends to be staffed with men whose eyes are permanently attracted to breast-shaped things). I normally can't be having with amazing pearlised scented handwoven sanitary pads, which tend to be jaw-droppingly expensive and just as good as own brand ones, but I will admit I got a bit excited when I saw these.

"Feminine Towels" (according to Tesco) - it will be interesting to see if we
can manage to euphemise things further in a few years time (lady sponges? No?)

15p from each Halo Initiative pack goes to three difference charities: the Eve Appeal (which researches gynaecological cancers), ageUK (which makes life better for older people), and Straight Talking (offers help, advice and support to pregnant teenagers). Sounds great: I buy something I would have to buy anyway, and help lots of other people without much thought or effort. 

However, I knew that some people object to this on the principle that charity should not be this easy because you get complacent about it, and because it removes the "guilt factor", so you end up thinking "Oooh, panty liners" (yeah, right, but work with me here) and forget about the thousands of women suffering with cervical cancer, for example. An interesting article on this can be found here (though I don't think I agree with everything in it, it is still pretty thought-provoking). 

So, I stood there with arguments raging round my head, among all these feminine hygiene doodahs for about 10 minutes, trying to do the maths.

1 x Halo pack at £1.20 (they were on offer, which made me wonder about that 15p to charity and what profit margin they were making)

1 x Tesco own brand at 80p

What it boiled down to was this: if I bought the own brand ones, I saved 40p per pack, three times the amount that would go to charity if I bought the Halo ones. I could then donate that 40p to charity and do more good for the charities in question than if I had bought the explicitly charitable ones.

In the end, I bought the Halo ones. Why? Because I liked the idea of them better. I didn't want to discourage them from making products with a charity focus, and also the pads themselves are less bulky than the own brand ones. In the future, though, when I next to stop by the euphemism aisle, I think I'll ask myself again how much I really care about charity, and I think I might just choose a different way to use my money.

Sunday Assembly

I’ve been to church a couple of times: High Anglican, Catholic, even Quaker prayer meetings (long story). I’ve never been to a church quite like Sunday Assembly, however, because it’s not really a “church”. In fact, it has nothing to do with Christianity or religion, because it’s for atheists.

The Nave at St Paul’s is a huge deconsecrated church which seems to be in the process of being re-built and/or demolished, and is next door to a tiny church which has absolutely not been deconsecrated and which was in the middle of a more conventional Sunday service. This led to a mild case of panic on my part, as I contemplated having to ask a pastor, “Which way to the atheists, please?” Thankfully there was a woman giving directions and everyone who was supposed to be non-worshipping this morning made it inside the right building. There were far more non-worshippers than anyone expected. I tried to figure out if any of them were a) reporters or b) anti-atheist gatecrashers without much success, especially as once the chairs had been filled up, people started sitting on benches down the sides of the room, on the floor, on the balcony and on their friends.

The whole idea of Sunday Assembly is to “live better, learn often, wonder more” by bringing together atheists (I am shamelessly paraphrasing here because my memory is poor) into some sort of community where good things might and should happen. Led by Sanderson Jones who was the kind-of preacher/compere (“Thanks for being here tonight!”), and supported by a fantastic house band (guitar, drums, bass and, more esoterically, oboe, glockenspiel and maracas) and Pippa Evans (a comedian I saw on TV once or twice, but who is even more brilliant than I remember), we were treated to hits including singing the Oasis classic Don’t Look Back In Anger (“another of our favourite hymns!”), Sanderson’s frenetic interludes, and Pippa’s anecdote about drunk men being tasered on the Moscow underground system.  The misses, apart from a turn by children’s author Andy Stanton (part-banal, part-bizarre, wholly uninspiring), were harder to pinpoint, but there was definitely something missing.

Okay, so half the congregation stood like statues instead of singing along with everyone else, and some were a tad unfriendly and cliquey, but these are teething problems, I reckon. I think what was really bugging me was that it wasn’t exactly clear what we were doing there, or what we were supposed to get out of it. The singing was fun, and I laughed a fair bit, but everyone was at pains to point out that it was not a comedy show, and no-one had said it was meant to be an atheist social. Although I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived, I think I was hoping that Sunday Assembly might be some way to show people that atheists are not morality-starved, depraved, devil-worshipping idiots, but ordinary people who behave decently and do good things not because religion inculcates in them a duty to do so, but because of their love for human beings and the world (which, as Sanderson pointed out, is perhaps stronger because we believe that this life and world is all we have, and that there will be no hereafter).  If I had been brave enough to ask around and find out why people had turned up, I’m guessing there would have been as many reasons as people, so without a clear purpose for such a diverse range of views, I’m not sure exactly what Sunday Assembly represents.

Nevertheless, I hope Evans and Jones continue with it. I had an interesting, fun and surprisingly inspiring hour in their company, and would really really really like to go back and hear Lucy Porter speak on 3rd February, but unfortunately I’m working. Also their slogan is way cooler than the British Humanists' one and Pippa is a bazillion times funnier than Dawkins, so you'll have a good time if nothing else.

Things that make me feel all growed up.

1. Paying tax

2. Working night shifts

3. Feeling intimidated by 6' 7" schoolkids at the bus-stop

4. The creeping conviction that "everything was better when I was young" (including but not limited to: Dr Who Christmas Specials, Kit Kats, the weather and erasers)

5. Worrying about: tax, night shifts, kids today, being old before my time and, of course, global warming (those poor polar bears)

Achoo! The sound of the underground

Me and public transport are the best of friends and the worst of enemies. Having travelled on it every day for 12 years now (lawdy, I'm old), with a brief break when I was at uni, you'd think it was marvellous. That the experience of boarding a train or bus would be something like this.

Civilised, perhaps. Certainly warm and bright. Worth the money and worth the hassle. Never delayed or late or broken. Definitely not full of litter and vomit, or painfully slow while they "even out the gaps in the service" and you begin to worry about being even later for work. Definitely not full of people expectoratin' and snot-garglin' and standin' on your poor old toes. I have a big problem with people not using tissues or hankies, who spit their germy saliva (and other stuff) onto the street or who cough in your face. One of my many flaws is that I only have two gears when it comes to tolerance of this: completely passive and full-on gorgon. So far I have managed not rip anyone's head off, but it's only a matter of time...

Over the years, seasoned TfL users seem to converge on a sort of seating etiquette. Most of the rules are based around looking at people (don't make eye contact if you are seated/standing/trying not to get stabbed). Things get oddly weird when people don't observe these unwritten rules. Today I was sitting on the bus home, and the seat next to me was unoccupied. A middle-aged woman gets on. She is looking for a seat. There are two in front of me where she could happily sit and spread out her shopping too. She chooses the seat next to me. I know. FREAKY. Two stops pass without much event except for her elbowing me several times (I don't say anything. See above re: personality flaws). And then it gets even freakier. The woman vacates her seat, not to sit on the unoccupied ones, but to sit next to another woman! The only thing I could think of was that she wanted protection from the other passengers, and I looked pretty feeble compared to the other lady. That or I smell.

There are some good things about public transport though.

Er.

It used to be cheaper than this. And, um, sometimes there are sweet little beady-eyed mice at the tube stations. And you get to eavesdrop on people's conversations. It's nice when kids are sharing sweets, as they were today, and they get all indignant (Hey! This is just coloured sugar!) and five minutes later they're all "Can I have some more?" I like babies when they stop crying and smile at you and you can have brief moment of conversation with their parents without coming across as weird. I like giving up my seat to other people. I like looking at people's clothes, hair, luggage, shoes, books; reading their emails over their shoulders (smartphones + rush hour = no privacy)*, and thanking my lucky stars that I don't go to school anymore (I still get that apprehensive, sickening feeling in my stomach when I see all the students in uniform crushed onto the bus). I like seeing people's lives intersect for a few moments a day: air stewards, tourists, city gents, bunking schoolkids, harassed mothers, lovey-dovey couples, and me,  all bundled together underground or on the street.

What makes public transport so compelling then (besides the small matter that I still cannot drive, nor afford a car)? I guess it has to be the public...




*Yeah, I'm nosy. You can add it to the list of character defects.