WLTM

Bugger! The joy that could have been mine if I did not have a mortgage and longstanding codependency issues with a medieval Latinist!

I will not quote. Because how can I take anything out of the context of such perfection? Go on then, just this bit.

‘What I seek is an exquisite Love Dance in which my male role is to lead (as in ballroom dancing) and my Goddess’s female role is to surrender in ecstasy. She IS the dance. (At a ballroom dance event, who does the audience mostly look at?—the girl!) My interest is NOT in controlling her, but rather in creating ecstasy in her, and (as in ballroom dancing) that requires a strong male lead.*’

And this bit.

‘But I’m funny! I will make you laugh… lots.’

I just have this feeling that Mark and I don’t quite share the same sense of humour. I suspect his might involve zaniness. I might be wrong. I might just be bitter that I can’t be the goddess to be lifted into extreme ecstasy FOR LIFE. Because I am afraid, readers, this is in the list of qualities his perfect Goddess must possess:

‘Her home is clean, orderly and uncluttered.’

Ah well, it’s sad that my dreams of tantric sex without being distracted by a telly or a dog (or rock music) will not be fulfilled at least in this lifetime. But if anyone feels differently there is an email address and a little questionnaire at the bottom and you can send him your thoughts (I am joking).

* Oh honestly look, I can’t let that one pass. It does not.

Annoyed Anew by Heat

I have many anxieties. I am worried about things like, for example, did Partner really once see a big ginger rat sitting on our dustbin, and if he did will it come back and should I take anticipatory steps: should I take more stringent action to deter the squirrel who comes and eats the birds’ nuts: will I look directional and stylish in my new sequined eighties butterfly top or will I look a bit odd, and will anyone tell me, if that is the case, in a way that does not offend: is the world doomed: am I really trapped in a job which is increasingly like Wuthering Heights, and, if so, am I the older Kathy who had to die or am I the young one who (kind of) escaped?: will the car get through its MOT (doubtful).

You see, lots of things. And that is only a top slice of the things which are near the surface of my tortured consciousness, if we dug deeper I am sure it would be most unsavoury. However I will tell you one thing which does not cause me anxiety. My weight. I do not care. I would not entirely say I do not give it a second’s thought because occasionally the realisation that recent biscuit eating may not have contributed in an entirely positive fashion to the comfort of present skinny-jean wearing forcibly thrusts itself upon me, but beyond that, no, I am honestly not bothered.

I cannot be completely alone. So how on earth have we ended up with a magazine industry that’s predicated on the idea that women really, really care about all this? We can’t all do! I don’t! There must be others like me! I know I always have this realisation when I’ve been standing in the queue at Boots, but it’s seeing them all – Closer, Heat, etc etc – together. Is Jordan miserable and thin enough, is Cheryl any fatter, how can Fern Britten go roaming free with her great big shameless fat backside. What a load of rubbish, honestly. How can we be that interested? We’re not! It’s like, if you think, every time you see your friend, or your colleague, or your sister, or your mother, how often do you ask her about her weight? You don’t! You don’t say, never mind telling me about your lottery win etc etc because all that is nothing to me. What I want to hear about is how fat your thighs are. Are they fatter than this time last year would you say? Do you feel emotionally crushed because of your thighs? No, honestly I really don’t want to know that you’ve just qualified as a brain surgeon and you’re going to be appearing on Oprah and also you’ve adopted triplets, because all this is as dust in comparison to, do you wish you were a DD rather than a C cup? Do you? Do you? Don’t you really, though?

My mother is now online

Well. Internet purveyors of beige cardigans and brown skirts had better get prepared for a busy summer. They had better check their stock levels. They had better consider their bandwidths. Because: my mother has now got broadband. We (this is my brother and I who are longsuffering) have been saying to her for years, mother, you need broadband. My brother has had a much worse time of it than I, because he lives just down the road and thus has been sucked into researching ISPs etc and explaining the ins and outs. But up till this point my mother has insisted that her dial up connection is adequate, despite all the evidence to the contrary, which is that, when you are trying to load a site on her computer, you don’t just have time to go away and make a cup of tea while you are waiting, you could go to Ibiza for a fortnight and have a marvellous time in one of those parties where they have foam. And then if you press things in the wrong order it confuses it and you have to restart. Anyway, all that is now behind us, my mother has broadband and anticipates a happy summer tracking every online retail related move I make and emailing me mad things (I am sure I have done this one before but, when I was at university my mother once sent me a letter which began ‘Dear Susie, your dad has run over a squirrel.’ And you see, that was with the additional self-analysis necessitated by the delay of having to write it on a bit of paper and stick a stamp on it. Email is very immediate. There will be no stopping her.) Anyway, I rather foolishly gave her access to my etsy profile so that she could see what my favourites are, and of course that also gives her access to my feedback so she can see what I have bought (‘I think that’s too short, Susie. When did you buy that? I’ll have to email your Aunty Kath. Are your feet really a size eight? American sizes? Are they different? That’s no excuse’.) I anticipate the inevitable Facebook profile with trepidation.

Matchy matchy

T , who is our accountant, is reconciling our bank account. To say I am crucified by a mix of pity and relief that I am not the one having to do it is an understatement. I think it would be fair to say in broad terms that bookkeeping, and the kind of accounting where you have to engage very strongly with phrases like ‘writing it back into the profit and loss’ and ‘crediting the suspense account’ are not my strong point. I do have financial strong points: I am very good at knowing what goes where, in what year, in what new and surprising ways, and the potential implications of it not doing so. (I also have a blind spot about creditors and debtors because these are things where the normal English terminology is not correct. So, when I think of ‘creditor’ I think of men going round initimidating hardworking women who were just borrowing a bit of money to buy their children Bratz dolls or similar and have been sucked into loans with hideous interest rates as reported in Take A Break. And when I think of debtors I think of Dickens. So then I have to think back to a training course I once did on finance where the trainer told us to remember, Creditors Are Creeps (because you owe them) and Debtors Are Darlings (because they owe you). I wish she had had a similar mnenomic for Prepayments and Accruals. Perhaps I should email and suggest.) Anyway, to go back to T our accountant, it appears at the moment that, whenever he has finished reconciling something, the urgent and sudden need arises for him to reconcile something else, in a new and complicated way, and sometimes backwards. So, he prints out an enormous list from Quickbooks, and goes and sits sadly in a corner from whence drifts the occasional cry, I am up to January! Gosh, we say, well done, and then doubt strikes me and I think: but which direction is he going in? Anyway when I left tonight we were on February, and if we are approaching the financial year in the direction one would normally expect that sounds extremely encouraging. So maybe T’s days of reconciling are almost over* and we can return to business as usual, which is going to involve the Re-Entering of 0809 in the New Ledger, which sounds so dreadful I think we are all actively in denial.

* I think that is doubtful if I am honest. I think it is one of those things best done little and often, like Hoovering.

Newsflash. Fairies are real.

One of the things I quite like doing, which is ironic given the quality of my participation in bibliography seminars when I was at university (imagine me hungover with lots of eyeliner + mouth curled in contemptuous sneer, thinking, Derrida would not have cared if this was a quarto or not so it does not matter) is reading early editions of books and seeing what mad things are then taken out in the later editions. And I am pleased to tell you that I have now read to the end of the Andrea Dworkin book Woman Hating, and I can tell you exactly why it did not make it to later editions and also is not easy to lay your hands on. Chapter on Gynocide: The Witches. I quote:

‘The origins of the magical content of the pagan cults can be traced back to the fairies, who were a real, neolithic people, smaller in stature than the natives of northern Europe or England…They set up communities in the inlands and concealed their dwellings in mounds half hidden in the ground. The fairies developed those magical skills for which the witches, centuries later, were burned. The socioreligious organization of the fairy culture was matriarchal and probably polyandrous.’

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: do not be unfair on Andrea. She is talking about neolithic times, when there were all sorts of things wandering about including Woolly Mammoths, Neanderthals and God knows what, and if she wants to call some of the people who may or have not been around at that time fairies in order to make a point about matriarchy she can do so. For, things were not easy for Andrea, as one might suspect that she was battling not only against the patriarchy but also against the disadvantages conferred by a lack of easy charm. And if you were to say this I would have a degree of sympathy.

Sadly though…

‘The fairy culture was still extant in England as late as the 17th century […] there was communication between the fairies and the pagan women…’

Oh honestly. Where has she got this from? I feel cynicism welling up within me regarding the quality of Dworkin’s scholarship. Lest I lose the faith, I turn to google. Are Fairies Real? I ask. And luckily I get this, which has sorted it out quite effectively for me, or at least will have done when I have been out with my spoon of honey and a teabag, although I am very low on Green Tea at the moment so I hope the fairies won’t mind having some earl grey which is past its sell by date. I then poked around a bit more and I found this. I was very relieved to see it and to know that our jungle of a garden is benefiting someone. In fact we have probably not just got one or two fairies back there, we have probably got a whole community. I hope they are enjoying it. And I shall certainly be getting in touch with the Elves of Fynn (scroll down to comments) to see if they have anything helpful to add about our 0910 cashflow forecast.

Running with scissors

At the moment I am trying to be creative. I go through phases where I try to be creative. I go through various phases, e.g. eating healthily (this one does not normally last long), giving up something very dear to me e.g. coffee, improving my mind by reading things which are not either 70s feminist tracts or knitting patterns, etc, but at the moment I am being creative. Because as we in this post-capitalist post-globalist world know, creating things is a political act. And it is a good job I know the theory behind it because often I am not successful and if I did not know that I was enacting the revoltion with a pair of 4.5mm knitting needles I might become disheartened. For example: I once knitted a jumper with very expensive wool that when worn had sleeves which came down past the ends of my fingers and shoulders which made me look like Guy the Gorilla. I gave this jumper to my mother and I do not know what she has done with it, although, worryingly, she rang me the other day to tell me that she was now wearing a woolly drawstring bag I had knitted her as a hat. However, at the moment clearly the planets are in the right alignment or something because, drum roll, for the first time in my life I have managed to sew something I might actually be able to wear. I have made an a-line skirt. This is it. I am beyond proud. It is made from some African Wax Print Fabric I bought just off Brick Lane. I got 6 yards for £10 and this was a bargain of such staggering magnitude that I shall be talking about it when I am 80, although, if anyone wishes to emulate me and go to the same shop, be warned that they do not take Visa and the shop assistant will walk you to the nearest cash till to draw money out.

A colleague of mine, who I am rather cynically considering promoting to friend now I have realised how talented he is, has given me a symphony he has composed himself. Re-read those words: symphony: composed: self. OMG! Well, it is always difficult when people show you things they have created because you have to pretend to like them even if they are dreadful, and if they are really dreadful you have to hope they do not ever mention it as you will have to sit there with a fixed grin while dying inside. So I slipped the cd into my player thinking, well, this could go one of two ways but I have lived through worse. I have lived through Meetings at Anonymous Developing Organisation which would make Gordon Brown cry and as a consequence I am emotionally robust, and also deal very well with having my expectations dashed. But this is the surprising thing: it is quite amazing. And what’s more it is (and please now prepare for a quite astonishing and shameless attempt to appropriate someone else’s achievement) exactly the kind of thing I would want to compose if I had any musical talent whatsoever. Or understood composition. Or could read music (actually I can read music a bit. I can play the recorder and the Stylophone). Which leaves me with a dilemma. Because if it was someone I didn’t know I might now kind of be a fan. But as it is someone I know I do not really feel I can trot round and say, hand over all your back catalogue. Because then I would look keen. And I do not like looking keen. What to do?

One more thing before I go: this is for my mother. Right, mother. Banoffee pie. 200g normal (e.g. not chocolate) digestives, 100g butter. Melt butter, squash up digestives, mix together, flatten down in one of your round Pyrex dishes. Place on top & smooth down 1 x tin of caramelised condensed milk (this is near the normal condensed milk in Tesco, you cannot miss it). Slice 2 x bananas, place on top (in little rings, don’t slice them longways.) Whip 284ml cream, put on top. Flake chocolate on top if you have the energy. Banoffee pie. Takes 5 mins and you will like it. Do not ask about how much cholesterol it has within as I suspect neither of us would like the answer.

Publish and be damned

Well. I am pleased to announce that I am not dead. I have not fled the country. I am not whimpering in a corner. I have not decided to silence my internet voice. I do not appear to be subject to any gagging orders (yet). No. It has just taken me a while to think of something uncontroversial enough to put on this blog. Yes, readers: it has been an interesting couple of weeks. However. I do not like to get down about things. No, Pollyanna has got nothing on me, and believe me, she too would have found the last couple of weeks a challenge. Anyway I have made a list of things to be cheerful about because there are still many, believe it or not.

1/ It is now completely inevitable that I will write the definitive book on Managing In The Voluntary Sector and that it will be a bestseller and will probably outsell Harry Potter. Moreover, I will probably end up being interviewed on Newsnight Review by Kirsty Wark who will say, gosh that cannot all have happened and you must have made it up, and I will say no Kirsty it is all true. And she will look at me with sympathy and I will look very sad but wiser than the common herd through bitter experience of the folly and weakness of Man. I will probably be wearing an Orla Kiely skirt and perhaps my navy tshirt from Jigsaw.

2/ Our office now consists mostly of cakes. They appear randomly near the post tray. Cream cakes breed in the fridge. We cannot move for cakes and one is inserted into my mouth every time I look as if I might be moved to say anything, because I think it is fair to assert at the moment that the less said the better.

3/ I have persuaded D, who used to share my office when I worked in Sturton Street in peace and happiness, to move into the corporate office temporarily to help out with things. I say temporarily in quotes, and simultaneously I consider the very wise proverb about possession being nine tenths of the law. I hold these thoughts both in my head alongside the hope that D does not have anything technologically advanced like rss feeds which could alert her to my dark intentions. Because obviously I do not want to try to poach people as this is unethical especially as they may not want to be poached. Even when cakes are available around the clock, see above.

4/ I have made the acquaintance of a very friendly new cat. We will call this cat Secret Fat Cat.

5/ I am reading Andrea Dworkin’s book Woman Hating. Well, although as anyone reading this blog knows I am quite the Dworkin fan, I have to say I am not overly impressed by the level of scholarship. However, having read the chapter on footbinding, I am hugely grateful not to have been born an upper class woman in China in the last century. You may feel I am scraping the barrel with this reason to be cheerful, and I would retort that if you think that then you have certainly not read Andrea Dworkin’s chapter on footbinding, and I myself wish I could erase it from my memory.

Well, there we are. I do hope anyone reading has had a better week than me. I think mercury is in retrograde at the moment, so that’s what the problem is, and if we all hold on until after the weekend things will start to look a lot more cheerful. (You see? Bloody Pollyanna.)

I have chickened out

I was going to do something today and I have chickened out of it. I am such a big wussy.

I am very tired

And I have Andy the auditor all day tomorrow. And I have just remembered I have written ‘Susie is in despair over the audit’ on the whiteboard (like a real-life Twitter!) and so I will have to make sure I get in first so I can wipe it off.

Questionable ink

I have got to say, I think this is a tattoo you might go off. In fact if this was on me I would feel a bit of a pratt walking about with it. Newsflash: there are people in the world who are not excited by your Cambridge degree! Most of them are in Cambridge. Everyone has a Cambridge degree here. They are ten a penny. In fact, Cambridge Uni practically rings us up and goes, oh go on, we’ve got this PhD in rocket science going begging that we don’t know what to do with, take it off our hands, and we’re like, PhD in rocket science? Got one already, sorry. But have you got any creme eggs and an NVQ in Doing Useful Things? Because if you had that’d be really great. Cheers.