Take off!

Wo! Just got my new iMac, happy happy days!

So expect me to be blogging and timewasting far more, possibly...

Hear, hear!

Amnesty International UK Campaigns Director Stephen Bowen said:

“Let us not be mistaken – this is not a good result for human rights. It is
a sad day when Britain’s three major political parties are publicly
bartering over people’s liberty.

“There has been much talk of numbers today – 90, 60 or 28 – but little talk
of principles.

“The period that someone can be detained without charge should not be the
subject of political horse-trading. The right to be promptly charged is the
dividing line between liberty and arbitrary detention.”

Run away from the blogosphere

I try to keep off blogs on the whole as they are like crack cocaine for me. But today Alex referred me to a right-wing website which I had to then look up for work (they were having a go at the Quakers for holding 'parties'/candelit vigils for the 2000 American dead in Iraq).

Obviously I got sucked into the trail. Blinking hell!! It's a minefield out there! I hadn't quite realised the high state of ideological warfare over in America and the sheer volume of anger and bile unleashed across cyberspace every second. I thought it was just Jess :)

I won't go back there for a while.

Still alive!

After all that fuss about buying a scooter, I never managed to post about actually having it till now. This was mainly because I wasn't too sure I was going to make it through the first week unscathed.

Well, apart from dropping it four times, heading the wrong way down a roundabout entry and generally fortgetting all the basic principles of road sense and steering, plus a drenching this morning, I'm pleased to report it's been nothing but plain sailing. I've even made it through pouring rain without skidding and dying. Scooters are brilliant - official.

More on the scooter saga

(or, another reason not to be a journalist)

I had a shockingly expensive insurance quote today, seemingly for being a journalist. Typical.

I have been wanting to do this for over 15 years, since the needles & knives made vetalisting (er, being a vet) impossible. I edited a newspaper for 100,000 students, but that never really seemed to count because we had no qualifications or much clue. Then I spent more time than any other British citizen being an intern, learning the craft from Harry (ha!). OK, so I didn’t want to be a journalist enough to revise enough for the law exams, but even so, happy was the day when I could fill in my first form with ‘occupation: journalist’ without feeling I was somehow pretending.

After all that, I now find it’s a risky profession.

‘Well, what sort of journalist are you?’ they asked, as I tried to reassure them I wouldn’t be using my scooter to investigate the crack dens of East London. ‘Well, I’m sort of a production journalist’, I said, feeling like I was pretending again. ‘I do layout and sub-editing and, er... I work for a religious magazine. It’s really very innocent. I don’t do any reporting really, except sometimes about Africa and I’m not planning to ride there on my scooter’.
‘Can we call you an administrator?’
‘Well, I suppose so’, I bristled, snobbishly. ‘My actual job title is Production Manager, as it happens’.
They perked up a little at that. But the quote was still nearly £1000, so they put me through to a cheaper competitor, the sort who deals with dangerous types presumably, with the advice ‘perhaps best to say production manager, not journalist.’
Bah.

Weeee!

My scooter should be coming today! On the Euston Road a herd of shiny scooters zoomed past me this morning. I shall be one of them! (not on Euston Road, no).

Government by wiki

This is a new theme of governance-by-wiki. Having tested it on the intellectually superior Claire yesterday, I think it may be a bit too advanced to be accepted by society yet. But I’ll give it a go, if only to maintain my current blogging record

Party alignment had a point 200 years ago, when it was most practical for a few people – preferably rich because they had the ships - to rule the world on behalf of all the rest of us, but now that we have wikis, the whole concept of parties, left and right, group membership of any sort is outdated and pointless.

Group machinery is the root of most of the frustration, disappointment and evil in politics. On the other hand, networks of individuals working together to roughly the same aims are not constrained by the same controls, loyalties and bureaucracy that hamper political progress.

It has always been impossible for me to align myself with any party and I used to think that was because of my loyalty to journalistic neutrality. Now accepting that this isn’t true, I think that it’s more likely to be my discomfort with the shortcomings of groups. I find it unbearable when people tie themselves into knots over whether they should be working with this or that person or group because of a perceived set of beliefs and background. It’s no fun to think that I am lumped in with the same ‘British’ who invaded Iraq and throw chips at waiters in Spain and I see no reason why a friendly Conservative might be incapable of good, even if he is a Conservative. Basically, I think, everyone wants peace, security and opportunity, even if their means of getting it are different. If those aims are the basic principals that guide us, we can hammer out the detail to make sure our own interests aren’t detrimental to the interests of others and conflicts are resolved creatively instead of destructively.

Wikis make it possible for mass participation in decision making and consensus building. The common directive is Be Bold! and people are encouraged to make change instead of engage in tedious stonewalling. The results can be messy but also inspiring. They are a lesson in multiple truths and how different cultures and beliefs can come together if people are willing to work on it. Individuals are empowered to take action, instead of being blocked.

I found a website a couple of weeks ago that seemed to be promoting democracy by wiki, and now I’ve lost it. However, I’m sure I’m not the only one to have thought of this.

More purchasing madness

Why oh why oh why am I sitting in stinking Hanley bus station waiting
for a bizarre timetable to bring itself to pass?

There is good news! Not only am I now the proud owner of Lambretta shoes, I now have the scooter to go with it. Not a Lambretta, I hasten to dampen your excitement, but a fine silver Aprilia which will be delivered to me on Wednesday.

That means - no more buses! Those of you who quail at the idea of my daily journey have no idea of the irritation at the sheer stupidity of flying nearly 200 miles in little over an hour and a half in majestic red livery, followed by the agonising hour long shuffle to get the final 8 miles home. The tree kicking frenzy that sets in as you watch a stray 29 sail past as you wait at the cash machine behind hundreds of poverty stricken students preparing themselves for a night of hard graft in the union. The desperate uncertainty: was that a late 19.05 or - feckitpleaseno - an early 19.20? The daily seething irritation at the lack of thought that didn't go into timing a bus to arrive at a (fairly) major intercity station at the very minute a popular train is scheduled to leave. Integrated transport is but a tragically distant memory from a civilised, Oystery age. It's a form of madness, inflicted on the poor or carless of Stoke. Don't get me wrong, driving a car is pretty bad there too.

But no matter. Expect to see a new Clare, stylishly dressed in Italian tailoring, zooming at a high pitch along the speedy routes home (it'll get up to 75 mph, he said. Are you insane? said I) to the minimised pad in Burslem, where steaming pasta & goats cheese await. La Dolce Vita-on-Trent beckons.

Till it gets robbed, of course.

Twenties kicks

Yesterday the unthinkable happened and I became 25. Like Jess before
me, I pondered on the significance of passing a decade since what many
of my friends from the time consider our 'awakening'.
This was sharpened by an evening spent with the Undertones, whose
Teenage Kicks Chloe and I bought a while before we were 15 and which
is currently buried amongst the chaos of my belongings. The Undertones
were great and, being possibly twice my age, rounded off a much better
birthday than I anticipated.
The future will be the era of the supercity, the global society and
there's still 70 years of adventure, hopefully, before I even reach
the age of some of my magazine's most enthusiastic readers. Working
for Quakers is a great antidote to ageing.

Cash and cows

Kind and lovely White Llama readers: the Never Again fundraising drive
starts tomorrow: if you would like to make a donation please visit
http://www.neveragaininternational.org. We are struggling to manage
all our projects as a network of volunteers, so the money raised will
allow us to have an office and a full time organiser, which in turn
will mean we can get many more wonderful projects off the ground in
Rwanda and globally.

Not trying to spread you too thinly, but I did also want to mention
that the Send a Cow Christmas catalogue is out now and it's as
gorgeous as ever. Give goats this Christmas!

Seditious libel: it's time for the swine to hit back

It's becoming clear that the government are becoming a bit sensitive these days. On Martin's blog he says it will soon be an offense to 'be offensive', while 82 year old Walter Wolfgang (a Quaker, hooray!) went one step too far by shouting Nonsense at Jack Straw yesterday.
It's all getting a bit like the 1790s and, as then, the only useful response is to be as offensive as possible and, preferably, to ridicule those in power. This is vital if we are to hold onto our freedoms. Here are some things you could usefully do:
- shout Nonsense! every time you see an MP
- write to your MP, dropping in offensive remarks about their parentage
- create large posters, in the old style, with your favourite politicians photoshopped into pigs and anti-semitic characatures (oh, Labour already did that)
- write offensive letters to right-wing newspapers, subtly worded as Outraged Reader Engulfed and report the editors to the police if they print them
- Mutter offensive words under your breath and then look innocent when people look at you
- Put up posters saying Bullets Not Ballots on Polling Day (but don't let anyone see you, policeman cary guns these days, you know)
- If you have a bit of holiday time you can take, try any of the following to see if you get locked up: say some really offensive things about the poor, justify terrorism for all sorts of trivial reasons, insult kittens, smell very bad, write rude words on political documents
- make a mockery of the entire political system however you can, accepting that whatever you do will have little real impact on the governance of this country for at least the next thirty years or until we all drown.

More suggestions welcome and there's at least one reader of this blog who can really make a mark with some of this, but I wouldn't want her to lose her parliamentary pass...

Pride and excitement

Pride and Prejudice has been keeping me inspired for days. Some films make me walk a bit taller afterwards: this one seemed to have beauty and love and energy all wrapped up in a world that just cannot exist in reality (except maybe in New York).

Such films make me want to make more effort to look fabulous, to work harder, to make films, to create something that will be as inspiring as a gorgeous love story. Some of which might translate into action. After a fairly dire summer at the cinema, it's good to feel like that after a film again.

Arnold Bennett (whose diary I'm still reading) felt similar about Charles Wyndham, who made him 'insanely inspired' every time he was in a play. Arnold was always considering taking on the life of people he admired.

Chloe is going to see it tonight, but she's nervous about Keira Knightley. Personally I like her, but any of her failings are more than made up for by Matthew MacFadyen and the set, which includes an appearance by the Peak District, where I have been, but it didn't look as nice as it does here. Perhaps she will tell us what she thought of it afterwards?

Musings from the train

My 360 mile a day commute across Britain means I can speak authoritatively about the British countryside, or at least the bit between London and Stoke-on-Trent. And there are two inescapable conclusions to be made:
First of all, the countryside is very beautiful. Second, there are lots of empty fields.

But, Britain has many conflicting features.
1. The British are, relatively, very rich.
2. We work too hard and moan too much about our minor problems
3. We don't have enough houses so those who have them are rich without really deserving it and this doesn't stop them working incredibly long hours alongside everyone else.
4. Our farmers are (a) taking all the EU cash, (b) dumping their surplus on people who don't want it, (c) killing the rainforest by growing vast amounts of soya to feed cows and (d) moaning all the time, rather like the wealthy homeowners
5. We don't eat very well

My solution to all this lies in one little animal: the chicken.

It is my proposal to fill Britain with vast amounts of free range chickens, which would feed the nation and alleviate our dependence on beef. Chickens can live in most types of land, eat anything and even live amongst cows, if you must.

When we have enough chickens, we start giving some of the fields over to houses. I'm all for the countryside, but Britain has plenty of room for more pretty, well designed little village type estates with greens and, for good measure (this is my vision) a fabulous local train network connecting them all. The farmers get the money for their land and then they'll just have to get on with it on their own, for the first time.

Other land would be given over to the continuing projects to revive our forests and wetlands, leading to part three of my cunning plan: to free the British worker from his slavery and get him out being a tourist. Walking in the fields (for nobody is scared of a chicken), trailing through the forests, spending money in the bars, teashops and patisseries of New Britain. Still, I expect, heading for their clone towns on a regular basis but I’ve lived without a Starbucks for long enough, I miss Clonetown! Flying around the world, spending their riches and earning money through happier pursuits such as running teashops, herding chickens and providing local services and trains. Hard office graft will still continue - though most of it will have gone to India, that's just the way things are - but employers will enforce proper hours, holidays and a more productive working ethos with more people employed, instead of less people overworked, and more imagination being released with regular time out of the office helping with conservation of the forests and wetlands.

Oh, and children will be bought up on free range chicken and they will be healthier. Sorted.

Thank you, but we¹re full

(this honestly isn’t an ungrateful post, just an observation, for anyone who might be reading that it might relate to)

Moving into our first house, we have been completely deluged by Stuff.
I was using my parent’s house as a store, but having been gently
reminded that they want their house back (and after nearly 25 years, who can
blame them?), we've really started taking the hit.
I in no way want to sound ungrateful for any of it because I really do appreciate it. That’s  the problem: it’s not in my nature to say no to free Stuff. I share the collective memory of first house-buying meaning no money and no possessions, of building large storage structures from teacrates and making do with a couple of battered cups.
It now seems that this memory is packed away and passed onto the next first-homers. Modern kids, however, are never short of possessions and now we have a house full of boxes with few places to put the contents and therefore no real way of using them. It is very kind, but the time will soon come when I will need to talk about the wonders of Ebay in a more pointed way. Don’t pass on, profit!
The only solution I can see is to wrap everything up and send it all on to the next needy person. I wonder if Jess needs any teacups for her new condo?

New shoes! To get excited about!

I finally managed to break through the men's shoe barrier.

Spurred on by an article in the FT about how fashionable men's clothes are for women, I summoned up my post-feminist courage into my hands and tried on some very fetching Lambretta shoes. Now they are mine. I love them.

I might become a shoe fan yet.

Bursley blues

Inspired by Arnold Bennett, I'm restarting the blog. Yes, again. If he could manage to write a million journal words as well as hundreds of books of varying quality then so can I, even if my Treo is temperamental and I've managed to lose just about every vital element of it.
Arnold, for those who don't know, is the man who made my adopted town, Burslem, world famous for a few decades at the beginning of last century. Looking at Burslem under his influence brings very mixed emotions. It still doesn't take much to imagine a unique place, filled with bottle ovens and covered with black smoke, producing from this soup some of the most sought after pottery in the world. You imagine a place of purpose, creativity and convivial drinking. Now only the latter remains.
An ambitious plan to pedestrianise was, when I went to a consultation on Friday, being torn to shreds with a variety of bizarre objections, including the assumption that it would lead to child snatching. This was even before those that are used to having Burslem as a main road had got their 4x4 paws on it.
The parks may be looking better than ever, the monstrosity Unity House - Stoke's only skyscraper which was abandoned for thirty years - may at last be coming down, but a pervasive sense of suspicion and division is keeping the city stuck in an ugly depression. I just hope the people patiently trying to improve it keep going.

One week on

This is a Blog as Therapy post, please forgive me for adding to the deluge (you can skip to another blog using the button above)

The day after the bombings when I walked through a quiet central London, across the river and past the exploded bus, to work, a phrase started ringing round my head, I can't remember where it came from. All responses are normal. This has helped me get through emotions that I didn't necessarily expect to feel and from judging others whose feelings I may not have agreed with. Now I want to lay all the feelings, all the thoughts, down.

I spent the day itself with a strange split sense of reality and a real sense of the almost euphoric defiance which was so widely reported as typical of stoic London. Despite reporting many of the events as I heard about them to a fellow Wikinewsie who was reporting live, I don't think I actually believed them. The deaths, the carnage, was somehow kept at a distance in my mind and it remained a story as well as an unusual opportunity to speak to people. It has only been in the days since that the reality has increasingly played on my mind. Talking about it has helped, I don't think the incessant media coverage has though I accept that I can limit my exposure to this.

Since Monday, when London were reported as returning to 'normality' but helicopters and sirens made a constant barrage of noise in our office, to this morning when I was approached by a policewoman and asked if I had seen anything 'unusual' last week, I have been in a state of stressed paralysis at work, unable to stop checking the news instead of getting on with work. Not that this is very unusual, but normally I can escape my addictions bywalking away from the computer and walking around the streets. This doesn't work if you fear major roads, people with backpacks and stalling trains, no matter how much you try not to.

Returning to normality takes effort. Perhaps we in London were too complacent in our resilience: I don't think London can genuinely heal while we are so besieged, not just by the police and the security announcements, but by the stream of headlines and pages upon pages of coverage. Security we may need, but I am angry with the press, whose need for daily stories formed the 'missing' culture, interviews with friends and family spread over special editions with a melodramatic sense of tragedy hanging over every 'not seen since getting on the Picadilly Line at 850'. I simply don't believe that this helped relatives of the victims, many of whom were in fact told in private but asked for the information not to be made public until the inquests were begun. Of course the pain of relatives waiting for news shouldn't be underestimated and maybe questions do need to be asked about the speed of identification, but the speed of doorstepping reporters also raises serious questions.

Today we spent two minutes thinking about the victims. In another show of unity and 'we're not scared', thousands of us went out onto the streets and reflected on the tragedy that had happened so close, to people who were so much like us.

We all did that in our own, normal ways and now it is time, for me at least, to really move on.

My heart goes out to all the families and friends of those who died: may you be allowed to grieve in your own way and know that the sympathy of the world is with you. Also to the families of the bombers whose world has been turned upside down and who did not kill anyone, let nobody blame them.

I want to be able to positively contribute to a world where dialogue is possible, where we seek to understand and prevent violence and accept that our view is just one of millions in the tapestry of humanity. We cannot do that from a position of fear but only from love of life. An appreciation of having survived this far, while keeping alive the memory of those who have not. And if we don't make it, at least we will have loved, and been loved in return. As someone else once said.

Thanks for listening :)

We're not scared...

... but the constant sound of helicopters overhead and sirens all around is getting just a tad wearysome now.

London explosions

I'm fine, just in case anyone was wondering :)

We are in the middle of it all in Friends House but unnaffected, many stranded people are here now.

love to everyone xxx

Different impressions of Rwanda

Not good blogging this but still: this was written before the next post and contains some of my very first impressions of Rwanda

We went to the hotel, Milles Collines, where both Hotel Rwanda is set and A Sunday by the Pool in Kigali was written about (as in, real things happened there too). To add to the authenticity, they are now filming A Sunday there and we think that the writer was there, eleven years on still sitting by the pool writing and smoking. Apparently in recent weeks people have come for a swim to find period UN trucks and refugees pouring in, which must be disconcerting for some - this is why much of Hotel Rwanda was in fact filmed in South Africa.*

So from relaxing by the pool we went to see AVEGA who, as everyone I have baskets to in recent months knows is the widows and orphans association and the people who make the baskets!! We gave them the money raised from sale in Britain and discussed a business plan for their future. We were told that since November everyone in Rwanda now has access to retroviral drugs, though this seems to be uncertain and is not the message we got in Britain [and it is not the message we have had since but that is another story]. The money also pays for trauma counselling and help with transport as many of the widows are now giving testimony to the Gacaca courts. The process involves all involved going to the scene and establishing the truth about what happened.

We were then taken to see the house of a woman who makes th baskets. It was out side town and like mose of the houses here, her house was one of a few overlooking a courtyard. Inside a boy was looking after the strangest looking ducks. The woman's house was two rooms, very sparse but prettily furnished and with pictures from magazines on the walls. She looks after her own children as well as some orphans, the oldest of whom was the football fan, a very striking tall boy. We were told that he was too traumatised to play football.

We were able to watch a basket being made and hear how they are dyed with paint. Hearing the translation third hand through French, I couldn't quite establish how long each basket takes to make, it might have been five days and she gets three pounds for each basket. She said that she couldn't always sell as many as she could make as there was no longer a trade in the local market and we tried to tell her that the British market was about to grow. It was difficult to communicate but I would have liked her to know how enthusiastic people were about the baskets. Plans are afoot to import far more of the baskets and I hope this will finally give her a steady income.

After meeting this warm family, back through dirt roads and past waving primary schoolchildren straight to the uncomfortable luxury of the Intercontinental Hotel, Rwanda's most exclusive. Not a happy contrast.

* Postscript: a few days later still we went to find the pool drained, its bottom covered in rubbish. They were filming one of the final moments of the book, when the refugees at the hotel had drunk all the water and eaten the birds from the aviary. I was rather moved by the moment but no-one else found it very believable.