There is now a diet for everything and everyone. The market for this stuff is huge and there are people cashing in and buying up all over the world. Depending on what you want to do with, or rather TO your body, there is a diet that is specially tailored to help you achieve your “body goals”. If you want to build muscle and burn fat, there is high protein; if you are an athlete or something, you might go more for complex carbs and protein together. Most people who just want to lose weight are carb-sensitive so they go for something that has no carbs and, quite often, features a prevalence of a certain kind of food. There is, to my knowledge, a grapefruit diet, a whole range of juice diets, a cabbage diet, a baby food diet, an all meat diet (hello Dr. Atkins!), a “zone” diet (whatever the hell THAT is), a feast and fast program (where you eat like a pig one day and then starve the next), and any number of others.
I mean, some of this stuff might work, if it’s used correctly, and some of it may even be scientific. But, for the most part, the diet industry is a load of crap, because it’s all produced by companies who are just out to make a fast buck. They target desperate people who have been taught to think, usually by similar industries, that there is something wrong with the way they look. Let’s face it, no one in their right mind would actively choose to live on grapefruit for two weeks, or to “cleanse” their body with foul tasting kale juice unless they had been systematically taught to hate themselves for a good long time and made to believe that they needed help.
But, see, the thing is that there is now so much advice about what not to eat that we are all thoroughly confused to the point where we no longer know what to do. In order to decide what to have for breakfast, some of us have to lie awake agonizing over it because the world might actually end if we choose wrong. I’ve been through this myself, you start thinking that your whole body is going to dissolve into some sort of cancer riddled blimp on the spot if you so much as look at a bar of chocolate, and it’s ridiculous because yeah, ok, healthy eating is important, but it’s not medicine. You know? Food is just food. You eat it, it keeps you alive.
We’re all parasites on this earth – the food doesn’t grow for us to eat it, it just grows; we’re not even supposed to be here. So there is no “right” thing for us to eat, we can eat whatever we like – if you know it’s going to kill you then stay away from it, sure, but otherwise, you have to eat, so just eat what you want.
What annoys me though is not so much that the world is obsessed with diets, because that is what it is and has been for some time. What’s been annoying me more recently, is that now there are all these other people debating the necessity for diets and the problems that this multi-billion pound industry has caused for people all over the western world, and I’m just baffled by it. Because, I mean, surely it’s obvious that we don’t need all this stuff?
It’s a senseless argument to say, is the diet industry necessary? Because obviously it isn’t. And it’s an even more senseless argument to ask if it’s damaged people, because of course it has. Having your thinking twisted by faceless corporations who make you think you’re a bad person because you eat carbs, is not nice for anybody and OF COURSE IT’S DAMAGING! HELLO!
I was listening to a radio programme the other day where they had this so-called “expert” on to talk about this book that she’s just written which is, apparently, all about the need to scrap diets and just re-educate yourself about how to eat normally.
Well, ok, in the main, I’m on board with that. It’s a good message. But it just shouldn’t be necessary, because this is just common sense isn’t it? It wouldn’t be necessary for anyone to re-educate themselves about food if they hadn’t been confused to begin with. And I find it most irritating of all that, instead of just scrapping the whole system and forgetting all this crap about no-carb, low-carb, high-protein, green stuff, we are now living in a world where half the messages are about diets and slimming and the rest come from books about why you shouldn’t diet.
It’s just another way to cash in. The woman on the radio actually had the nerve to plug her book, openly on the air, after listening to a distraught listener who had called in to talk about her lifelong dieting hell and the psychological scarring it had left her with. Now, I mean, this woman was crying live on air about how awful her life had been because of all the teasing and bullying and dieting nightmares she’d had in her life and at the end of it all, all this “expert” doctor woman had to say was “Go and buy my book, it’ll help you sort yourself out.”
Newsflash people: We don’t need any more books about food or dieting! We just need to be left alone to eat like normal people!
I get angry now if someone tries to sell me a new diet book or, worse, if they tell me I need to go on some kind of diet to make me better or more acceptable, because, you know, I’ve had this all my life! I’m tired of it now. I just think, after years of dieting and obsessing about food and worrying that I might get fat, I just wish that everyone would leave me the fuck alone!
I was anorexic for a couple of years – well, actually, no I wasn’t anorexic all the way through – I have discovered quite recently that there is actually a term for what I started out as, which is “orthorexia”. If you haven’t heard of this, you might be forgiven because it’s quite a new term, I think, and it, also, would not be necessary if the world was not so fucked up – but I digress. Basically, “orthorexia” is an obsession formed by the constant teaching about healthy eating, whereby you become so obsessed with eating the “right” food, or the healthiest food for you that you can no longer eat anything without worrying that it might kill you or make you gain weight. It’s obsessive label reading, basically, but taken to a complete extreme so you have panic attacks in the middle of supermarkets because you can’t figure out if the 1 gram of salt in something is justifiable against the fact that it has only 12 calories in it. The result being that you then decide that you don’t want to risk it and leave said supermarket with nothing except an organic turnip and some bottled water.
It sounds ridiculous, but this a real thing, and people suffer from it. And it’s because, largely, we live in a world that gives us so much conflicting advice about what is good for us and about what will or will not make us fat and age faster. It’s everywhere and it is literally driving everyone nuts!
Now, here’s what I’m going to tell you. For free now, I’m not asking you to pay for anything here, this is free advice, you ready? Ok, here goes:
The world is full of crap. There is someone trying to sell you something you don’t need on every street corner and in every possible medium they can find in this world and the only thing you can do is recognize that when someone else gives you advice on what to do with yourself, your body, your diet, or anything else, they are probably full of shit. Nobody knows you like you do and what you look like is SO not important in comparison to what goes on inside you.
So fuck the lot of them. If you see an advert on TV for slimming aids, or Weight Watchers or whatever, just switch it off. If you see a magazine article about some celebrity who’s lost a ton of weight and made a DVD to show everyone else how to do it, just deface the picture. Skinny people who want to promote themselves as role models just BECAUSE they are skinny deserve nothing less than a pair of devil horns drawn on their head and a stupid black moustache scribbled across their top lip. It’s all crap. The media is full of images of seemingly perfect people but that doesn’t mean that that’s what WE have to look like. We’re humans! We just have to be what we are.
To quote a very old message: just say NO!!!
Friday 17 January 2014
Friday 20 December 2013
Scrooge
I resent being called a scrooge.
I mean, it’s true, I hate Christmas, but I have my reasons, you know? Coming up, as we are now, to the festive time of year, I have been subjected to the usual yearly round of fun-poking and insults (let’s face it, that is basically what they are, no matter how good natured) from friends and family who can’t understand why I hate this time of year. This, despite the fact that some (although not all of them) have contributed to that hatred; some of them, in fact, are downright responsible for it.
I’m not going to go on about why I hate Christmas because I think that I’ve already sort of done that in other blog posts and I don’t want to bore anybody with all of that because I’m not THAT miserable.
But here’s the thing though: I don’t understand why everyone who hates Christmas, and says so, quite legitimately, to other people, automatically gets called a scrooge. I’m not talking about the literary allusion because I know, and I think we all know, where that comes from; I’m talking more about the way that people apply that term in this almost jeering way because they think that it’s somehow appropriate or humorous. In my experience, if people hate Christmas it’s usually because they’ve had very bad experiences of it (as did Scrooge, in fact, in the story). And yet when people encounter such Christmas-hating individuals in society, they do not show compassion, or attempt to understand that happiness is not universal or innate to people at this time of year. Instead they poke fun and point fingers.
So here’s what I want to say now:
People who look miserable often are miserable and they are miserable for a reason.
This is something that’s always bothered me about the Dickens story, because Dickens was, apparently, a great one for Christian charity and compassion, and he was clearly very into the Christmas spirit. But, even though he does show the reasons for Scrooge’s miserly behaviour – the bad childhood and neglected upbringing, the lack of love etc. etc. – he does nothing to inspire sympathy for that character because it is generally accepted that it is Scrooge’s own doing that he became that way. It’s considered that it will be his own fault if he dies without a friend or a loved one near him and the onus is placed very much on him to change his ways because he’s ruining things for everyone else.
Now, of course, it’s not good to be bitter, but the question should really be WHY he is so bitter, and whose fault is that? Someone in the story should at least ask and try to understand it because the people around him really don’t do that – even his nephew makes fun of him, mercilessly, in public for not liking Christmas, which Scrooge is then forced to watch from his invisible place in the room. I mean that’s hurtful isn’t it? That’s a truly mean thing to do to someone, regardless of whether you think they deserve it, and it doesn’t set a great example of the “Good will to all men” that supposedly does the rounds at Christmas – Bob Cratchitt and Tiny Tim are probably the only two who remember this.
By and large, Dickens seems to want to mock Scrooge, and this is the really dangerous thing about the story because it means that very few people think about the reasons for Scrooge’s behaviour; they just take it at face value and assume that it’s ok to condemn the miserly old guy. The upshot of that, then, is that a lot of the depiction of the merry and jolly cast of characters that go around Scrooge – with their parodying and overall dislike of him – ends up producing this modern day humour (barbed as it definitely is) where people get branded with the term “scrooge”. Because these people are, like the original Scrooge, just having a really hard time with the whole concept of Christmas.
It’s like people think that it’s funny, you know? But it’s vindictive too. Other people don’t want to be brought down while they’re having a good time so they point and jeer at the people who aren’t participating because they think that, by shaming people that way, they can just get them to join in out of sheer embarrassment or weary resignation: “Yes, alright, if you’re going to humiliate me I’ll put some up some tinsel and eat some mince pies. Anything you want, just stop laughing at me!”
But it’s not funny, you see, because sometimes when people hate Christmas they really have good reason. Some people feel genuine despair at this time of year and more people kill themselves in December and January than any other time of year.
They didn’t really know about depression or consider the impact of home life when Dickens was writing – although Dickens, more usually, did seem to comprehend these things. But, I mean, we know about it now! We’re all, I think, a lot more aware of how depression and mood swings affect people – we have understanding of SAD and the harder forms of mental illness and, more widely, we know that not everybody in the world has a happy home or family.
Christmas, for a lot of people, is a wonderful, beautiful, jolly time of year where you get to celebrate with family and friends and enjoy every single second of the festivities – but a lot of people just don’t have that experience and, I think, it’s just as legitimate, under those circumstances, to be able to say that you do not like Christmas and to just opt out. It’s not that I want to spoil it for other people, I just don’t want it shoved down my throat while the whole world goes totally nuts and decides to stage a light show around me using tinsel and twinkle-lights. I just don’t want to see it, you know? It depresses me.
So when people call me scrooge it really hurts me, because I have my reasons for feeling this way. I’ve never had a good time at Christmas and even less so now that I’m an adult because I’m more or less on my own. It’s just not a great time for me and I have a hard enough time, with my SAD problems and everything else, just getting through the winter months without this great fiasco going on at the same time. And I’m not alone in that, right? A lot of people feel the same way and just want to get rid of the whole holiday and spend the time with the curtains shut just having a good sleep. Yes? I mean, that’s not just me, is it?
As I said, I don’t begrudge Christmas-lovers a good Christmas, really I don’t; if that’s what they want to do at this time of year then great. But it really makes me angry when those people call me a scrooge just because I don’t join in with their fun while they’re planning their Christmas dinner, complaining about the shopping they have to do, or figuring out what to buy their kids for Christmas presents – because that’s not going to be my experience.
I was disallowed from having much of a Christmas as a kid, and I was discouraged, really quite strongly, from enjoying it too much. So now, when Christmas rolls around, I do just shut myself away and hide. That’s what I have to plan for in the run up to it while everybody else is buying turkeys and putting up trees. But I tell people that and it’s like suddenly I’m the one who’s ruining their Christmas by being miserable and not doing the same things they’re doing? Never mind compassion and understanding, which is supposed to underpin the whole ethos of Christmas, my friends will actually sit there and tell me I’m being miserly and mean because I’m not at least pretending to be happy in front of them as they tell me what a great time they’re about to have.
It almost makes me want to say “Fuck you” to all these people and just never speak to them again.
. . .
But then New Year rolls around and it’s all over and everyone’s miserable again anyway because it’s January. And then it’s like we’re all in the same boat again, so I keep going with the same old friends.
. . .
So that was all I wanted to say, anyway. Don’t call anyone a scrooge this year just because they don’t share your love of Christmas. There’s probably a reason for it, and maybe that person is just not very happy. Rather than making fun of them or labelling them and dismissing them, why not try to understand and be considerate of that person’s wishes to be left alone. If they don’t want to pretend to be happy for your benefit, don’t treat them like shit. That’s not fair on anyone and there’s no Christmas spirit to be found in that.
That’s all. Have a good one guys.
I mean, it’s true, I hate Christmas, but I have my reasons, you know? Coming up, as we are now, to the festive time of year, I have been subjected to the usual yearly round of fun-poking and insults (let’s face it, that is basically what they are, no matter how good natured) from friends and family who can’t understand why I hate this time of year. This, despite the fact that some (although not all of them) have contributed to that hatred; some of them, in fact, are downright responsible for it.
I’m not going to go on about why I hate Christmas because I think that I’ve already sort of done that in other blog posts and I don’t want to bore anybody with all of that because I’m not THAT miserable.
But here’s the thing though: I don’t understand why everyone who hates Christmas, and says so, quite legitimately, to other people, automatically gets called a scrooge. I’m not talking about the literary allusion because I know, and I think we all know, where that comes from; I’m talking more about the way that people apply that term in this almost jeering way because they think that it’s somehow appropriate or humorous. In my experience, if people hate Christmas it’s usually because they’ve had very bad experiences of it (as did Scrooge, in fact, in the story). And yet when people encounter such Christmas-hating individuals in society, they do not show compassion, or attempt to understand that happiness is not universal or innate to people at this time of year. Instead they poke fun and point fingers.
So here’s what I want to say now:
People who look miserable often are miserable and they are miserable for a reason.
This is something that’s always bothered me about the Dickens story, because Dickens was, apparently, a great one for Christian charity and compassion, and he was clearly very into the Christmas spirit. But, even though he does show the reasons for Scrooge’s miserly behaviour – the bad childhood and neglected upbringing, the lack of love etc. etc. – he does nothing to inspire sympathy for that character because it is generally accepted that it is Scrooge’s own doing that he became that way. It’s considered that it will be his own fault if he dies without a friend or a loved one near him and the onus is placed very much on him to change his ways because he’s ruining things for everyone else.
Now, of course, it’s not good to be bitter, but the question should really be WHY he is so bitter, and whose fault is that? Someone in the story should at least ask and try to understand it because the people around him really don’t do that – even his nephew makes fun of him, mercilessly, in public for not liking Christmas, which Scrooge is then forced to watch from his invisible place in the room. I mean that’s hurtful isn’t it? That’s a truly mean thing to do to someone, regardless of whether you think they deserve it, and it doesn’t set a great example of the “Good will to all men” that supposedly does the rounds at Christmas – Bob Cratchitt and Tiny Tim are probably the only two who remember this.
By and large, Dickens seems to want to mock Scrooge, and this is the really dangerous thing about the story because it means that very few people think about the reasons for Scrooge’s behaviour; they just take it at face value and assume that it’s ok to condemn the miserly old guy. The upshot of that, then, is that a lot of the depiction of the merry and jolly cast of characters that go around Scrooge – with their parodying and overall dislike of him – ends up producing this modern day humour (barbed as it definitely is) where people get branded with the term “scrooge”. Because these people are, like the original Scrooge, just having a really hard time with the whole concept of Christmas.
It’s like people think that it’s funny, you know? But it’s vindictive too. Other people don’t want to be brought down while they’re having a good time so they point and jeer at the people who aren’t participating because they think that, by shaming people that way, they can just get them to join in out of sheer embarrassment or weary resignation: “Yes, alright, if you’re going to humiliate me I’ll put some up some tinsel and eat some mince pies. Anything you want, just stop laughing at me!”
But it’s not funny, you see, because sometimes when people hate Christmas they really have good reason. Some people feel genuine despair at this time of year and more people kill themselves in December and January than any other time of year.
They didn’t really know about depression or consider the impact of home life when Dickens was writing – although Dickens, more usually, did seem to comprehend these things. But, I mean, we know about it now! We’re all, I think, a lot more aware of how depression and mood swings affect people – we have understanding of SAD and the harder forms of mental illness and, more widely, we know that not everybody in the world has a happy home or family.
Christmas, for a lot of people, is a wonderful, beautiful, jolly time of year where you get to celebrate with family and friends and enjoy every single second of the festivities – but a lot of people just don’t have that experience and, I think, it’s just as legitimate, under those circumstances, to be able to say that you do not like Christmas and to just opt out. It’s not that I want to spoil it for other people, I just don’t want it shoved down my throat while the whole world goes totally nuts and decides to stage a light show around me using tinsel and twinkle-lights. I just don’t want to see it, you know? It depresses me.
So when people call me scrooge it really hurts me, because I have my reasons for feeling this way. I’ve never had a good time at Christmas and even less so now that I’m an adult because I’m more or less on my own. It’s just not a great time for me and I have a hard enough time, with my SAD problems and everything else, just getting through the winter months without this great fiasco going on at the same time. And I’m not alone in that, right? A lot of people feel the same way and just want to get rid of the whole holiday and spend the time with the curtains shut just having a good sleep. Yes? I mean, that’s not just me, is it?
As I said, I don’t begrudge Christmas-lovers a good Christmas, really I don’t; if that’s what they want to do at this time of year then great. But it really makes me angry when those people call me a scrooge just because I don’t join in with their fun while they’re planning their Christmas dinner, complaining about the shopping they have to do, or figuring out what to buy their kids for Christmas presents – because that’s not going to be my experience.
I was disallowed from having much of a Christmas as a kid, and I was discouraged, really quite strongly, from enjoying it too much. So now, when Christmas rolls around, I do just shut myself away and hide. That’s what I have to plan for in the run up to it while everybody else is buying turkeys and putting up trees. But I tell people that and it’s like suddenly I’m the one who’s ruining their Christmas by being miserable and not doing the same things they’re doing? Never mind compassion and understanding, which is supposed to underpin the whole ethos of Christmas, my friends will actually sit there and tell me I’m being miserly and mean because I’m not at least pretending to be happy in front of them as they tell me what a great time they’re about to have.
It almost makes me want to say “Fuck you” to all these people and just never speak to them again.
. . .
But then New Year rolls around and it’s all over and everyone’s miserable again anyway because it’s January. And then it’s like we’re all in the same boat again, so I keep going with the same old friends.
. . .
So that was all I wanted to say, anyway. Don’t call anyone a scrooge this year just because they don’t share your love of Christmas. There’s probably a reason for it, and maybe that person is just not very happy. Rather than making fun of them or labelling them and dismissing them, why not try to understand and be considerate of that person’s wishes to be left alone. If they don’t want to pretend to be happy for your benefit, don’t treat them like shit. That’s not fair on anyone and there’s no Christmas spirit to be found in that.
That’s all. Have a good one guys.
Monday 16 December 2013
Social Media
Well, this is more about the rules around social media than the actual thing itself . . . if “thing” is the right word. Can you call social media a thing if it’s not tangible? Semantics, word issues, ok, moving on . . .
So, I wanted to write something on this because it’s been occurring to me lately when I’ve been interacting with friends or, rather, in most cases “friends” who are not really actual friends on Facebook or Twitter. Well, ok, Twitter is a different thing really because the barriers are looser and there is no actual “friending” going on, it’s just basically a big free-for-all. So, I guess I’m really just talking about Facebook.
If you’re on Facebook you’ll know that there are basic online safety things that the guys who run the site make you subscribe to; things like not friending people you don’t know (although most people do that anyway on a minor scale, but if it gets out of hand and people start reporting you for sending out friend requests for no apparent reason then they send you semi-threatening messages to say please don’t do it any more). There are also rules about posting offensive content, although I’m not sure about the stringency of these rules either since things still seem to get posted anyway. But still, by and large, there are rules of sorts.
But, if you are on Facebook, you might also be aware that, among your “friends”, there are a number of unspoken/unwritten rules that rely, basically, on common sense and common courtesy. Nobody tells you these rules, they don’t come from Facebook as requirements of usage, and your friends don’t make you aware of them in any overt sense. But they are there.
These are some of the things I think are pretty obviously in need of rules, spoken or otherwise:
1. Commenting on pictures of other people’s children. Ok, so if you know the person in real life, or have actually met the child themselves, then this is acceptable. But, if you’ve never met any of the people in the picture, and particularly if it’s a personal picture from someone whom you’re only friends with in a work or acquaintance sort of a way; if it’s a picture of someone’s kid playing with another family member or something, then that’s not appropriate, is it? I think that one’s probably most obvious of all because we’re all, obviously, hyper-aware of the vulnerability of kids on the internet and for a complete stranger to comment on your kid’s picture, even, or perhaps especially if it’s to say something complimentary, that’s just going to freak people out. Right? So there are judgments to make there about what is acceptable – maybe liking the picture is acceptable if you’ve established a rapport with the person, but that also might be pushing it a bit.
2. Commenting on extremely personal posts. Again this is down to if you know the person and it really relies on a judgment call because if they’re commenting on their personal lives, or making statements about their relationships then a) it’s not right for people to comment if they know nothing about it and b) it’s very awkward if they do and the other person doesn’t appreciate it. I mean you could say that Facebook is not the right place to put such personal stuff anyway and, to be honest, most of the people I know don’t do that, but when they do it’s tough to know what to say and often the best thing is just to ignore it and move on.
3. Business talk. I have a mix of friends on my Facebook page. Most are to do with work or professional interest; you know, writers, publishers, people with academic or literary backgrounds mostly. But I have other friends on there too; people I’ve known from school or college, or just people I used to hang around with who I like to keep up with every now and again. Now, mostly when I put things on Facebook about what I’m reading, I will get responses from the former group, the professionals and the academics, some of whom agree with me and some of whom just want to argue with my taste or opinions. Every now and again though, I have comments on these things from other friends, some of whom do not read the same kind of things as me or take nearly the same level of interest and, often these comments will show a lack of understanding or just general boredom at me putting that kind of status out there.
What this proves, I suppose, is that work and personal life don’t really mix. And it works vice versa, of course, because the work people don’t necessarily want to read/join in with the nonsense me and my friends spout on Facebook when we’re just trying to relax and unwind at the weekend. True there’s a bit of leeway there, of course, because a lot of people use Facebook to relax at the weekends and many people choose to mess around on there, but there is still a huge grey area surrounding how much of the personal you really want if your page is, primarily, being used to gain and maintain professional contacts. Maybe it’s just because social media isn’t really intended for that purpose, that’s probably what makes it so tricky, but if you try to separate it out completely and use one of the business networking sites for all the work stuff then that just becomes impossible because you don’t want to be moving from site to site all the time, do you?
4. Offensive content. Obviously, I’ve already mentioned there are bans on offensive content and you can be reported for putting that up on Facebook, but there are more minor things that need to be thought about beyond that. Again, judgment call: how much do you want your friends to see you swearing or being tagged in less than flattering pictures? This is an image thing, I guess, you don’t want people to get the wrong impression of you and you don’t want to offend other people just by letting off steam in a Facebook status, so you have to be careful here. I myself don’t swear much in my Facebook posts unless it’s just a really necessary part of what I’m saying, and even then I’ll usually asterisk out several characters (although, I don’t really know what this achieves as it’s still really obvious what the word is . . . anyway it’s a gesture, let’s people know I don’t really want to offend them . . . I hope.)
I also get really angry when people tag me in unflattering photos without asking me first – although it’s only happened once or twice, it’s left me seriously considering unfriending the people who did it, because, you know, everybody else can see it, and I might not want that! So there’s a courtesy issue, as well, you have to be aware at all times that what you put online can be seen by everyone else and will have an impact on other people – they’ll react to it and not always in a good way.
5. Politics. This might not be such a massive issue, but there’s only so much political stuff that even the most avid follower of current events will want to put on their page; people don’t really like to have other people’s views shoved in their faces, although it is nice sometimes to know that they’ve got some. I don’t put much to do with politics on my own page because I’m not that bothered about it really, but if other people do then I’ll sometimes comment. Most of my friends are Labour supporters or just liberals of some vague descriptions. I don’t think I’ve got any Conservative friends (or, if I do, they haven’t admitted as much to me). That’s one thing that does seem to be ok across the board of social media: mockery of David Cameron is acceptable no matter what your interest in politics. It’s almost on the same level as Thatcher-bashing now and it’s quite funny too, if I’m honest. But that’s as far as it goes really, you don’t want to turn your social media time into a big political forum and debate the problems of the nation; I mean, it’s still supposed to be fun for God’s sake!
6. Moaning too much about your day-to-day hassles. This is something a lot of people do. I’ve got friends who use Facebook, principally, so that they can update everybody on all the household chores and different meals they’ve had to deal with during the day. One of my friends puts these things up in a great long continuous stream on her statuses – no punctuation of any kind, just a great long string of a sentence: “cleaned the house hoovered the carpets bathed the baby ate breakfast then off to the shops”. I mean, I’m not criticizing her or anything really, but this is every day that we get these updates, and what are we supposed to say? “Yeah you have a really hard life, we all feel so sorry for you?” . . . She’s not going to be reading this by the way, just in case anyone’s wondering.
But then, she’s not even the worst one, I’ve got other friends who do this as well, tell me and all their other friends about the horrors they have to deal with when their shower breaks or they get a cold and still have to go to work. I mean I know everybody needs to moan about things every now and again, but is Facebook really the place to do it? Surely they’ve got real people to talk to about these things, there’s no need to bother the rest of the world with it is there? What bothers me, personally, is that when they do this they actually expect a response, as if we’re all going to be fascinated by this stuff. Anyway . . .
That’s all I can think of right now, but it seemed to me that there are a lot of things about the internet that we’re still kind of feeling our way around because, as yet, the kinds of rules and etiquettes that we would have in the course of normal social interaction have yet to be defined online. It’s obviously something that’s being looked at right now, because there are so many concerns about the inappropriate content and the amount of unsavoury things you can find on social media and online search sites. The UK government has recently been talking about revising the laws for online media and I think there are far more concerns about it in the US, but the truth is there are probably always going to be concerns about the smaller issues of privacy and security online and things like common courtesy and good judgment will always be necessary tools for the modern internet user. I suppose what I’m saying is that we now have to think far more consciously about the fact that, just because we’re online, doesn’t mean we have the right to invade or comment on all aspects of other people’s lives. If you saw that person in the street, someone you didn’t actually know in real life I mean, then you wouldn’t just go up to them and start commenting critically on their outfit or telling them all about what you had for breakfast would you? You wouldn’t say things about their kids or try to take pictures of them so you could “tag” them and make some kind of personal connection with them that way. Because that would be inappropriate and wrong.
The rules around social media should be no different to rules present in society. But if you can’t see people then things change, apparently . . . It’s a grey area. Be aware.
So, I wanted to write something on this because it’s been occurring to me lately when I’ve been interacting with friends or, rather, in most cases “friends” who are not really actual friends on Facebook or Twitter. Well, ok, Twitter is a different thing really because the barriers are looser and there is no actual “friending” going on, it’s just basically a big free-for-all. So, I guess I’m really just talking about Facebook.
If you’re on Facebook you’ll know that there are basic online safety things that the guys who run the site make you subscribe to; things like not friending people you don’t know (although most people do that anyway on a minor scale, but if it gets out of hand and people start reporting you for sending out friend requests for no apparent reason then they send you semi-threatening messages to say please don’t do it any more). There are also rules about posting offensive content, although I’m not sure about the stringency of these rules either since things still seem to get posted anyway. But still, by and large, there are rules of sorts.
But, if you are on Facebook, you might also be aware that, among your “friends”, there are a number of unspoken/unwritten rules that rely, basically, on common sense and common courtesy. Nobody tells you these rules, they don’t come from Facebook as requirements of usage, and your friends don’t make you aware of them in any overt sense. But they are there.
These are some of the things I think are pretty obviously in need of rules, spoken or otherwise:
1. Commenting on pictures of other people’s children. Ok, so if you know the person in real life, or have actually met the child themselves, then this is acceptable. But, if you’ve never met any of the people in the picture, and particularly if it’s a personal picture from someone whom you’re only friends with in a work or acquaintance sort of a way; if it’s a picture of someone’s kid playing with another family member or something, then that’s not appropriate, is it? I think that one’s probably most obvious of all because we’re all, obviously, hyper-aware of the vulnerability of kids on the internet and for a complete stranger to comment on your kid’s picture, even, or perhaps especially if it’s to say something complimentary, that’s just going to freak people out. Right? So there are judgments to make there about what is acceptable – maybe liking the picture is acceptable if you’ve established a rapport with the person, but that also might be pushing it a bit.
2. Commenting on extremely personal posts. Again this is down to if you know the person and it really relies on a judgment call because if they’re commenting on their personal lives, or making statements about their relationships then a) it’s not right for people to comment if they know nothing about it and b) it’s very awkward if they do and the other person doesn’t appreciate it. I mean you could say that Facebook is not the right place to put such personal stuff anyway and, to be honest, most of the people I know don’t do that, but when they do it’s tough to know what to say and often the best thing is just to ignore it and move on.
3. Business talk. I have a mix of friends on my Facebook page. Most are to do with work or professional interest; you know, writers, publishers, people with academic or literary backgrounds mostly. But I have other friends on there too; people I’ve known from school or college, or just people I used to hang around with who I like to keep up with every now and again. Now, mostly when I put things on Facebook about what I’m reading, I will get responses from the former group, the professionals and the academics, some of whom agree with me and some of whom just want to argue with my taste or opinions. Every now and again though, I have comments on these things from other friends, some of whom do not read the same kind of things as me or take nearly the same level of interest and, often these comments will show a lack of understanding or just general boredom at me putting that kind of status out there.
What this proves, I suppose, is that work and personal life don’t really mix. And it works vice versa, of course, because the work people don’t necessarily want to read/join in with the nonsense me and my friends spout on Facebook when we’re just trying to relax and unwind at the weekend. True there’s a bit of leeway there, of course, because a lot of people use Facebook to relax at the weekends and many people choose to mess around on there, but there is still a huge grey area surrounding how much of the personal you really want if your page is, primarily, being used to gain and maintain professional contacts. Maybe it’s just because social media isn’t really intended for that purpose, that’s probably what makes it so tricky, but if you try to separate it out completely and use one of the business networking sites for all the work stuff then that just becomes impossible because you don’t want to be moving from site to site all the time, do you?
4. Offensive content. Obviously, I’ve already mentioned there are bans on offensive content and you can be reported for putting that up on Facebook, but there are more minor things that need to be thought about beyond that. Again, judgment call: how much do you want your friends to see you swearing or being tagged in less than flattering pictures? This is an image thing, I guess, you don’t want people to get the wrong impression of you and you don’t want to offend other people just by letting off steam in a Facebook status, so you have to be careful here. I myself don’t swear much in my Facebook posts unless it’s just a really necessary part of what I’m saying, and even then I’ll usually asterisk out several characters (although, I don’t really know what this achieves as it’s still really obvious what the word is . . . anyway it’s a gesture, let’s people know I don’t really want to offend them . . . I hope.)
I also get really angry when people tag me in unflattering photos without asking me first – although it’s only happened once or twice, it’s left me seriously considering unfriending the people who did it, because, you know, everybody else can see it, and I might not want that! So there’s a courtesy issue, as well, you have to be aware at all times that what you put online can be seen by everyone else and will have an impact on other people – they’ll react to it and not always in a good way.
5. Politics. This might not be such a massive issue, but there’s only so much political stuff that even the most avid follower of current events will want to put on their page; people don’t really like to have other people’s views shoved in their faces, although it is nice sometimes to know that they’ve got some. I don’t put much to do with politics on my own page because I’m not that bothered about it really, but if other people do then I’ll sometimes comment. Most of my friends are Labour supporters or just liberals of some vague descriptions. I don’t think I’ve got any Conservative friends (or, if I do, they haven’t admitted as much to me). That’s one thing that does seem to be ok across the board of social media: mockery of David Cameron is acceptable no matter what your interest in politics. It’s almost on the same level as Thatcher-bashing now and it’s quite funny too, if I’m honest. But that’s as far as it goes really, you don’t want to turn your social media time into a big political forum and debate the problems of the nation; I mean, it’s still supposed to be fun for God’s sake!
6. Moaning too much about your day-to-day hassles. This is something a lot of people do. I’ve got friends who use Facebook, principally, so that they can update everybody on all the household chores and different meals they’ve had to deal with during the day. One of my friends puts these things up in a great long continuous stream on her statuses – no punctuation of any kind, just a great long string of a sentence: “cleaned the house hoovered the carpets bathed the baby ate breakfast then off to the shops”. I mean, I’m not criticizing her or anything really, but this is every day that we get these updates, and what are we supposed to say? “Yeah you have a really hard life, we all feel so sorry for you?” . . . She’s not going to be reading this by the way, just in case anyone’s wondering.
But then, she’s not even the worst one, I’ve got other friends who do this as well, tell me and all their other friends about the horrors they have to deal with when their shower breaks or they get a cold and still have to go to work. I mean I know everybody needs to moan about things every now and again, but is Facebook really the place to do it? Surely they’ve got real people to talk to about these things, there’s no need to bother the rest of the world with it is there? What bothers me, personally, is that when they do this they actually expect a response, as if we’re all going to be fascinated by this stuff. Anyway . . .
That’s all I can think of right now, but it seemed to me that there are a lot of things about the internet that we’re still kind of feeling our way around because, as yet, the kinds of rules and etiquettes that we would have in the course of normal social interaction have yet to be defined online. It’s obviously something that’s being looked at right now, because there are so many concerns about the inappropriate content and the amount of unsavoury things you can find on social media and online search sites. The UK government has recently been talking about revising the laws for online media and I think there are far more concerns about it in the US, but the truth is there are probably always going to be concerns about the smaller issues of privacy and security online and things like common courtesy and good judgment will always be necessary tools for the modern internet user. I suppose what I’m saying is that we now have to think far more consciously about the fact that, just because we’re online, doesn’t mean we have the right to invade or comment on all aspects of other people’s lives. If you saw that person in the street, someone you didn’t actually know in real life I mean, then you wouldn’t just go up to them and start commenting critically on their outfit or telling them all about what you had for breakfast would you? You wouldn’t say things about their kids or try to take pictures of them so you could “tag” them and make some kind of personal connection with them that way. Because that would be inappropriate and wrong.
The rules around social media should be no different to rules present in society. But if you can’t see people then things change, apparently . . . It’s a grey area. Be aware.
Saturday 7 December 2013
A Book List
This is a list of all the great books I’ve read this year.
In no particular order:
1. Donna Tartt, “The Goldfinch” – a great novel that will probably take you some time to read, but which is totally worth it. See my review of it, if you want to.
2. Elizabeth Jane Howard’s “Cazalet” series – if you haven’t read this, or even heard of it, it’s one of those big, sweeping family sagas that goes across five books (the fifth one of which has only just been brought out). If you have a lot of spare time on your hands then I highly recommend this one.
3. Margaret Atwood, “Maddadam” – actually I was a little bit disappointed with this one, but I thought I’d better include it anyway because it’s Margaret Atwood and because it is the long awaited conclusion to her sci-fi (ish) trilogy.
4. Matt Haig, “The Humans” – a funny, sad and touching book about being an alien on planet Earth and trying to understand human life. If you’ve ever felt like you didn’t belong here and no one else could possibly understand you, read this book.
5. Gavin Extence, “The Universe vs. Alex Woods” – an entertaining read with a good ironic streak and a sad ending.
6. Michael Chabon, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” – this book is the best thing I have ever read that had anything remotely to do with comic books. It’s about the ascendancy of two Jewish comic book creators in New York around the time of the Second World War. Basically they are called upon to design a rival for Superman, which they succeed in doing against a backdrop of wartime worries and unseen atrocities. It’s a great book, honestly.
7. Ruth Ozeki, “A Tale For The Time Being” – I wanted more from this in the end, and would have liked it to go on a bit longer, but the story had me gripped all the way through and, I have to say, I think it was worth reading. It’s about a Japanese girl who sends her diary out into the world in a Hello Kitty lunchbox, sort of like a message in a bottle, to be found by another woman on the Canadian coast. Cue the obsessive reading of the diary and the need for said finder to locate the girl so she can a) give it back to her and, b) make sure she’s ok. It’s an interesting read, certainly, and has a lot to say about the nature of time and the medium of writing. It also references Marcel Proust quite heavily.
8. Ransom Riggs, “Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children” – what can I say, this one’s just plain weird. The next instalment is out next year and I can’t wait to read it.
9. Susan Hancock, “The Peastick Girl” – I read this one as a review copy and thought it was great. Very subtle story about a woman with psychological problems. Very well written.
10. Edwina Preston, “The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer” – Also a review copy. Great if you loved things like Erin Morgenstern’s “The Night Circus” or if you love anything that features a travelling circus of any description.
11. Charles Dickens, “Martin Chuzzlewit” – Ok this is a long one, but it’s a classic and I love the characters. I read it very easily and would quite happily have gone back to the beginning when I finished it and started again, but I had other things to move on to, not least . . .
12. Charles Dickens, “Our Mutual Friend” – whose characters are not as rich as the ones in “Martin Chuzzlewit”, in my own opinion, but which still has a highly compelling story and which kept me hooked up until the end.
13. Marcus Sedgwick, “She is Not Invisible” – This is a new book, out this year, and it’s written for children, but it has a complex structure that hinges on the number 354, and which tells the story of a blind girl and her little brother who go all the way from the UK to America on their own in order to save their dad who they know to be missing. It’s a great story, well told and I highly recommend it to everyone.
14. Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., “Kick Ass” – I LOVED this! I don’t really go in for comic books much, you know the sort of superhero, traditional comic strip stuff, but graphic novels about superheroes can sometimes be really cool and “Kick Ass” just has a bit of a twist on what we think of as the traditional superhero story. It plays with the clichés a little bit and, really wonderfully, it gives most of the action to the girl character, Hit Girl, who I love completely; I think she rocks. There is also a sequel (or prequel, I’m not quite sure), all about Hit Girl, which is also fabulous and I think there will be more out next year.
15. David Jason’s Autobiography – Ok so, if you’re outside the UK, you might not know what this is, or who David Jason is – but then again, you might if you have BBC America or something. He’s a very famous television actor and more prominent in comedy than anything else. He’s also a national institution in the UK and he’s finally written a book all about his life as he is now, I think, in his early 80s and has something of a story to tell. He’s great and the book is great, so much so that I spent hours reading it and found that I’d lost half a day (which, for someone who usually gets bored with autobiographies by about page 20, is pretty good going).
16. Neil Gaiman, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” – This was a weird one. But I love Neil Gaiman and all his books are pretty weird in some way or another. I’m not sure I totally understood the plot, because I read it very quickly, but I think it’s supposed to be semi-autobiographical and, in true Gaiman style, it keeps you reading to the end.
17. R.J. Palacio, “Wonder” – This is a short book for kids that kept me gripped all the way through. I can’t recommend it enough. It’s an inspiring story of the kind that doesn’t make you feel sick or humbled, but which really makes you feel the necessity to recognize brilliant people for who they are and not what they look like. This is a story about a boy who has had to have several facial reconstructions following a birth defect. He goes to school, finally, after being home-schooled for some years, and is treated largely as you might expect him to be treated by the other kids. It’s a coming of age story that is really all about overcoming the cruelty of school, with a bit of a twist thrown in. The ending is uplifting as well.
18. Stephen Chbosky, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” – Ok, I read this purely because I was going to watch the movie and I thought that I should check out the book first. I didn’t expect to like it just because it’s all about the teenage years and how hard it is to be a 17 year old etc. etc. But, boy was I surprised! This is a gem of a book that had me turning the pages so fast I think I got paper-cuts on my fingers. I read the whole book in one sitting and loved it. It’s witty, it’s got great dialogue, the character dynamic just works. (And yes, I saw the film and thought that was great too, but this book was SO much better than any movie!) It’s a must read. I promise you.
19. Marian Keyes, “The Mystery of Mercy Close” – Chick-lit, as they call it, is not something I generally read. (I went through a phase of reading it in my teens and then, snobbishly, turned my back on it forever in order to pursue higher things.) But Marian Keyes is a writer that I LOVE (emphasis there) with a passion because she’s just so bloody witty. Her writing is smart, clever, funny, and addictive. If you haven’t read her before then you won’t know, but you must try her books. This one here is the last book to complete a set of five (I think it’s five anyway) that cover the lives of the fictional Walsh sisters. I first read “Watermelon” (the first of the five) when I was about 14 and, even though it was really meant for grown-up women with all its sexual references and its context of post-marital-break-up, I howled with laughter and cried at the sad bits all the same. I really think she’s worth reading, so go, read!
And finally,
20. Bryan Talbot, “Grandville Mon Amour” – This is another graphic novel, very well drawn and just, brilliant to read. It’s about a detective in Victorian England – who also happens to be a badger with a shady past and a broken heart. It’s beautiful to look at and has a great story. Kids will love it, too I think, but, speaking as a grown-up, I couldn’t put it down!
Ok I’m going to stop at 20 now, because I think it’ll just go on and on otherwise, but just let me say that there have been some great books around this year, and I have read plenty that were great (new or old), across this twelve month span of 2013. I’m really looking forward to next year now so that I can get cracking on all the new stuff that’s going to come out and, although the highlight of this year for me has to be Donna Tartt’s new book – the likes of which we probably won’t see again for at least another decade because she is a painfully slow writer it seems – I think next year is going to be great.
Let me know on Twitter what you’ve been reading this year (@Authorlady2013); if you like my choices, or agree/disagree with my appraisals of them. I’m interested to know what you think of this year’s books and maybe you’ll tell me what you’re excited to read next year.
Have a good one guys
In no particular order:
1. Donna Tartt, “The Goldfinch” – a great novel that will probably take you some time to read, but which is totally worth it. See my review of it, if you want to.
2. Elizabeth Jane Howard’s “Cazalet” series – if you haven’t read this, or even heard of it, it’s one of those big, sweeping family sagas that goes across five books (the fifth one of which has only just been brought out). If you have a lot of spare time on your hands then I highly recommend this one.
3. Margaret Atwood, “Maddadam” – actually I was a little bit disappointed with this one, but I thought I’d better include it anyway because it’s Margaret Atwood and because it is the long awaited conclusion to her sci-fi (ish) trilogy.
4. Matt Haig, “The Humans” – a funny, sad and touching book about being an alien on planet Earth and trying to understand human life. If you’ve ever felt like you didn’t belong here and no one else could possibly understand you, read this book.
5. Gavin Extence, “The Universe vs. Alex Woods” – an entertaining read with a good ironic streak and a sad ending.
6. Michael Chabon, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” – this book is the best thing I have ever read that had anything remotely to do with comic books. It’s about the ascendancy of two Jewish comic book creators in New York around the time of the Second World War. Basically they are called upon to design a rival for Superman, which they succeed in doing against a backdrop of wartime worries and unseen atrocities. It’s a great book, honestly.
7. Ruth Ozeki, “A Tale For The Time Being” – I wanted more from this in the end, and would have liked it to go on a bit longer, but the story had me gripped all the way through and, I have to say, I think it was worth reading. It’s about a Japanese girl who sends her diary out into the world in a Hello Kitty lunchbox, sort of like a message in a bottle, to be found by another woman on the Canadian coast. Cue the obsessive reading of the diary and the need for said finder to locate the girl so she can a) give it back to her and, b) make sure she’s ok. It’s an interesting read, certainly, and has a lot to say about the nature of time and the medium of writing. It also references Marcel Proust quite heavily.
8. Ransom Riggs, “Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children” – what can I say, this one’s just plain weird. The next instalment is out next year and I can’t wait to read it.
9. Susan Hancock, “The Peastick Girl” – I read this one as a review copy and thought it was great. Very subtle story about a woman with psychological problems. Very well written.
10. Edwina Preston, “The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer” – Also a review copy. Great if you loved things like Erin Morgenstern’s “The Night Circus” or if you love anything that features a travelling circus of any description.
11. Charles Dickens, “Martin Chuzzlewit” – Ok this is a long one, but it’s a classic and I love the characters. I read it very easily and would quite happily have gone back to the beginning when I finished it and started again, but I had other things to move on to, not least . . .
12. Charles Dickens, “Our Mutual Friend” – whose characters are not as rich as the ones in “Martin Chuzzlewit”, in my own opinion, but which still has a highly compelling story and which kept me hooked up until the end.
13. Marcus Sedgwick, “She is Not Invisible” – This is a new book, out this year, and it’s written for children, but it has a complex structure that hinges on the number 354, and which tells the story of a blind girl and her little brother who go all the way from the UK to America on their own in order to save their dad who they know to be missing. It’s a great story, well told and I highly recommend it to everyone.
14. Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., “Kick Ass” – I LOVED this! I don’t really go in for comic books much, you know the sort of superhero, traditional comic strip stuff, but graphic novels about superheroes can sometimes be really cool and “Kick Ass” just has a bit of a twist on what we think of as the traditional superhero story. It plays with the clichés a little bit and, really wonderfully, it gives most of the action to the girl character, Hit Girl, who I love completely; I think she rocks. There is also a sequel (or prequel, I’m not quite sure), all about Hit Girl, which is also fabulous and I think there will be more out next year.
15. David Jason’s Autobiography – Ok so, if you’re outside the UK, you might not know what this is, or who David Jason is – but then again, you might if you have BBC America or something. He’s a very famous television actor and more prominent in comedy than anything else. He’s also a national institution in the UK and he’s finally written a book all about his life as he is now, I think, in his early 80s and has something of a story to tell. He’s great and the book is great, so much so that I spent hours reading it and found that I’d lost half a day (which, for someone who usually gets bored with autobiographies by about page 20, is pretty good going).
16. Neil Gaiman, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” – This was a weird one. But I love Neil Gaiman and all his books are pretty weird in some way or another. I’m not sure I totally understood the plot, because I read it very quickly, but I think it’s supposed to be semi-autobiographical and, in true Gaiman style, it keeps you reading to the end.
17. R.J. Palacio, “Wonder” – This is a short book for kids that kept me gripped all the way through. I can’t recommend it enough. It’s an inspiring story of the kind that doesn’t make you feel sick or humbled, but which really makes you feel the necessity to recognize brilliant people for who they are and not what they look like. This is a story about a boy who has had to have several facial reconstructions following a birth defect. He goes to school, finally, after being home-schooled for some years, and is treated largely as you might expect him to be treated by the other kids. It’s a coming of age story that is really all about overcoming the cruelty of school, with a bit of a twist thrown in. The ending is uplifting as well.
18. Stephen Chbosky, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” – Ok, I read this purely because I was going to watch the movie and I thought that I should check out the book first. I didn’t expect to like it just because it’s all about the teenage years and how hard it is to be a 17 year old etc. etc. But, boy was I surprised! This is a gem of a book that had me turning the pages so fast I think I got paper-cuts on my fingers. I read the whole book in one sitting and loved it. It’s witty, it’s got great dialogue, the character dynamic just works. (And yes, I saw the film and thought that was great too, but this book was SO much better than any movie!) It’s a must read. I promise you.
19. Marian Keyes, “The Mystery of Mercy Close” – Chick-lit, as they call it, is not something I generally read. (I went through a phase of reading it in my teens and then, snobbishly, turned my back on it forever in order to pursue higher things.) But Marian Keyes is a writer that I LOVE (emphasis there) with a passion because she’s just so bloody witty. Her writing is smart, clever, funny, and addictive. If you haven’t read her before then you won’t know, but you must try her books. This one here is the last book to complete a set of five (I think it’s five anyway) that cover the lives of the fictional Walsh sisters. I first read “Watermelon” (the first of the five) when I was about 14 and, even though it was really meant for grown-up women with all its sexual references and its context of post-marital-break-up, I howled with laughter and cried at the sad bits all the same. I really think she’s worth reading, so go, read!
And finally,
20. Bryan Talbot, “Grandville Mon Amour” – This is another graphic novel, very well drawn and just, brilliant to read. It’s about a detective in Victorian England – who also happens to be a badger with a shady past and a broken heart. It’s beautiful to look at and has a great story. Kids will love it, too I think, but, speaking as a grown-up, I couldn’t put it down!
Ok I’m going to stop at 20 now, because I think it’ll just go on and on otherwise, but just let me say that there have been some great books around this year, and I have read plenty that were great (new or old), across this twelve month span of 2013. I’m really looking forward to next year now so that I can get cracking on all the new stuff that’s going to come out and, although the highlight of this year for me has to be Donna Tartt’s new book – the likes of which we probably won’t see again for at least another decade because she is a painfully slow writer it seems – I think next year is going to be great.
Let me know on Twitter what you’ve been reading this year (@Authorlady2013); if you like my choices, or agree/disagree with my appraisals of them. I’m interested to know what you think of this year’s books and maybe you’ll tell me what you’re excited to read next year.
Have a good one guys
Friday 6 December 2013
An End of Year Reflection
It’s the end of the year. Soon it will be a new one. So I just thought that now would be a great time to think back over my year and try to make sense of it, you know, starting with the question:
“Where the hell did all that time go?”
This time last year I was having a nervous breakdown. I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean an actual nervous breakdown. Last year, and most of the two or three years before it, had been something of a denial period – in every sense. I was doing my PhD, whilst juggling a continually morphing eating disorder that vacillated between bulimia and anorexia. My PhD wasn’t going very well for a really long time, but I kidded myself all through that it would turn itself around at some critical point and I would just get it, and everything would be fine.
Anyway, cut a long story short, that didn’t happen (boo hoo), and by the time it got to the end of last year, when I was supposed to be finished with it all, I was about ready to crack up. This, especially, became clear when I was then told that I couldn’t submit my thesis as it then was because it was just not good enough. Cue several more months of fighting and arguing and rewriting to get to the point where I could submit it.
So, in November last year, I remember being at breaking point. I was crying all the time during the day, driving around in my car like a crazy person whilst screaming obscene things at myself and generally just plotting my own demise. I thought that if I couldn’t get my PhD and be deemed some sort of genius with an accolade then I would no longer have anything to live for and that, basically, my mother would have been proved right all along in her, largely unspoken, opinion that I was just never going to amount to anything and I would end up just like her (bitter, alone and mentally ill with an unwanted child that never said thank you for anything . . . you get the picture). Right before Christmas last year I was desperate and suicidal and, basically, that whole breakdown culminated in my trying to starve myself to death – not an easy thing to do and, as I soon discovered, bloody painful. I had first thought of overdosing, but I couldn’t face the prospect of it not working and I didn’t know how badly I might screw it up. OD-ing, when you’re trying to do it, is actually quite hard; I’m told it’s very easy when you’re NOT trying (maybe that’s where I went wrong?).
Anyway, I’m getting off the point, I know. I was supposed to be writing about THIS year, not last year, but I guess, because I’ve been thinking so much about where I am now in relation to where I was then, I wanted to set the scene a bit. You know, because it’s not obvious if you don’t know me and you don’t know all the whys and the hows . . . but then you probably don’t want to, ok, moving on.
This year. This year kicked off with me coming out of my anorexic phase, whilst still trying to rewrite my thesis and figure out how I was going to pay for extra tuition fees at university to cover the time I was going to need. All I remember very clearly from New Year’s Day 2013 is that the highlight, for me, was staggering, bleary-eyed and sleep deprived (due to insomnia rather than anything actually fun sadly), across a freezing cold shopping centre car park to go and buy a box of breakfast cereal which I then ate, completely and straight from the box, while I wrote a book review for my friend Gillian. I wrote the whole review and, in fact, read the whole book on New Year’s Day, and then was awarded major brownie points from said friend for doing it in such a rush. It wasn’t actually necessary for me to do it for months, but I really desperately wanted to do something with my day rather than sitting around doing nothing and twiddling my thumbs and generally just going mad.
I hate having nothing to do now, that’s one thing I have learned, work stops you driving yourself nuts thinking about all the shit that you don’t want to think about, like how fat you’re getting or how much money you owe people or how much your mother drives you crazy. It’s good to have a focus.
So that was New Year anyway. Not fun, exactly, but fruitful (and fibreful too, thanks to the cereal, so that was good!) Then all I remember after that is several weeks of cold and snow – which was still around in March, if I remember correctly. I didn’t think it still snowed in March, even in this country (the UK, for those not in the know). But, yep. Snow on the ground, ice all around, and me stuck at home because, for numerous reasons, I couldn’t go outside. Well, ok, three reasons really: a) I hate the cold, b) I can’t walk on snow and ice because I fall down A LOT! and c) I had some kind of strain injury going on with both my hands so that, for the life of me, I couldn’t do anything even as simple as opening a letter or stirring a cup of tea. I mean, it was actually really bad, I woke up one morning and it was like my hands had been bashed with hammers – I suspect because of all the typing that I’d been doing although I also suspect that it had something to do with the lack of nutrients that I’d had for such a long time while I was anorexic. I’m still actually worried now that I might have done some damage to my tendons or something, but the doctor couldn’t find anything majorly wrong with me and, anyway, it got better in the end. I can operate all my fingers now and I only have very marginal twinges in my arms and hands (so I guess I was lucky). But I remember I had this problem on my birthday, which is in early March, and even I, who am not remotely into birthdays and usually don’t care what happens, could see that this was not a good thing.
Anyway, that happened. And passed, despite the constant worry of my mother and the absolute ignorance of my PhD supervisors who had no idea, and did not bother to ask, how I was.
[Incidentally, I may, at some stage, write a blog post on the unsupportive nature of my PhD supervisors and the awful experience that I had during my foray into academia, but I feel that this might also seem a bit vindictive and moany and, with the benefit of hindsight, I really don’t think there’s much to dwell on there, so perhaps I won’t.]
I was still writing my thesis up until the end of April, and I was bloody glad when I finally finished it. I knew it wasn’t going to be any good, I think, but nonetheless I was quite proud of what I’d done with it since it did, in the end, make a logical and coherent argument . . . or so I thought. I submitted it in May and then waited, dutifully, throughout that month to be told about my Viva.
By the way, a Viva, or Viva Voce, as it’s called in full, is the final exam for a PhD; it’s where you go to meet with two or more examiners (who you’ll probably never have met before) in order to defend your thesis against the grilling that they will inevitably give it. I was nervous about this, of course, but I was prepared for it, I thought, and would have been totally fine to go through with it, until I was told, albeit rather belatedly due to an admin cock-up, that I would not be Viva-ed at all because the examiners had read my thesis and decided it was crap and they didn’t see the point of giving it the credence of an examination.
Needless to say, at this point, I gave up. I wasn’t upset and I was just really pissed off with the whole thing; I mean I was tired, you know, and I felt like I’d been treated badly, so I sort of rode the wave of righteous anger for a while and then forgot it. I had other problems at this point, anyway; life was getting in the way. My uncle died in June, which really upset my mother and left us in a little bit of a mess. And I just didn’t feel like I could go on with writing a thesis that, fairly obviously, was never going to be any good when I’d already re-written it twice and nearly lost my mind (and the use of my hands) in the process. No one at my university seemed to appreciate this, but there we are.
By August I was signing up for the dole (otherwise known as social security), at the behest of my mother who would not allow me to live under her roof and not have some sort of status. “If you don’t study and you can’t get a job then you’ll have to join the ranks of the unemployed and stick your hand out for money like the rest of the losers.” Or something along those lines anyway. So, it was during this time, while I was casting about looking for actual jobs doing anything from cleaning to home helps to admin workers, that I started to write.
It was always something I had wanted to do and I knew, even while I was doing my PhD, that creative writing would be something I would eventually move onto when I was finally finished with my not so great thesis on Iris Murdoch. My plan, initially, was just to take the novel I’d been tinkering with on and off for years and put it up on Kindle.
But then I decided to try to do things properly and, not only did I put up my novel, but I also wrote quite a hefty amount of short stories and a few other things besides that, and put them up too. This all happened in September and I’m thinking now that it could, with a bit of hard work, become a career.
I didn’t rule out proper work, and I still haven’t now. But this is what I want to do, so there we are.
It’s now the end of the year and I’m thinking about where I’ve come to after all of this. It’s weird, isn’t it, how the beginning of the year and the end of it seem so different – the person you are in January, looking forward to the blank slate of the year, is always so different from the person you are in December when you’re looking back and wondering just how the hell all that happened in just twelve short months. I remember myself in January this year, being thin, sulky, miserable, cold and desperate to prove that I wasn’t stupid. Now, in December, I’m . . . well . . . no longer thin, I’m angry rather than miserable, and I really don’t give a damn now what anyone thinks.
When I was at university, I was convinced that that was the only way I could prove that I was worth something. I didn’t want to be out in the world because I didn’t think that I could handle it. University was all I knew and I guess I’d just spent too much time there. I did a PhD because I thought that staying at university forever was the only thing for me, because I’d never be employable in the real world. But what I found there, really, was that, although there were people who were prepared to accept me for my weirdness and specialist knowledge of books and movies, and while there were people who were quite happy for me to read all day and learn everything that I could in the anticipation of some great and wonderful accolade at the end, all I was doing was kidding myself. I didn’t really belong there either, and in the end it was just embarrassing because I could see people looking at me, feeling sorry for me, willing me to just get on with it and do something so that they could get rid of me too. They could all see that I didn’t fit.
Academics are kind of a closed group, you see; they’ll let anybody in, in theory, if they want to learn badly enough and have the ready wit and the keen attention to do it. But it’s a bit like being a politician in the end; if you don’t play the game then they shun you. They like people who hold the same opinions, who uphold research standards and who band together and agree with each other on important points that, in actual fact, are pretty miniscule and irrelevant in any real life context. There’s a code of practice and a mode of behaviour that you have to sign up to, and I was just the wrong fit. I didn’t want to change myself and I didn’t want to morph into some sort of myopic middle-class freak. Because that’s all most academics are really. Some of the ones I hung around with were really awful to talk to actually; I mean, I thought they were great to begin with, and I was attracted to their glamour because they were so different from the people I usually mixed with – I just couldn’t believe they’d let me into their world. But that soon wore off. I hated them in the end for being so ignorant and theoretical and, basically, just detached from real life.
I wanted to get out in the end.
So now here I am. Not giving a damn. I’m writing. And I’ll keep writing. And I’ll write whatever I want. If people don’t like what I write then they don’t. But I think that people, REAL people are better placed to judge what they do and don’t like for themselves and, for the most part, if they don’t like it, they just won’t read it. I’m not scared about that. If I find a few people who like what I write then I’ll be happy and, even though I don’t know what the hell next year is going to bring me (and really don’t want to right now), I still think this is what I want to do.
I’m still dreading New Year though so stay tuned for another blog-post of “AAAAAHHHHHHH!!!! IT’S ANOTHER YEAR WHAT THE FUCK AM I GOING TO DO WITH IT HELP ME” on January 1st.
Adios amigos and thanks for reading. See you again soon!
“Where the hell did all that time go?”
This time last year I was having a nervous breakdown. I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean an actual nervous breakdown. Last year, and most of the two or three years before it, had been something of a denial period – in every sense. I was doing my PhD, whilst juggling a continually morphing eating disorder that vacillated between bulimia and anorexia. My PhD wasn’t going very well for a really long time, but I kidded myself all through that it would turn itself around at some critical point and I would just get it, and everything would be fine.
Anyway, cut a long story short, that didn’t happen (boo hoo), and by the time it got to the end of last year, when I was supposed to be finished with it all, I was about ready to crack up. This, especially, became clear when I was then told that I couldn’t submit my thesis as it then was because it was just not good enough. Cue several more months of fighting and arguing and rewriting to get to the point where I could submit it.
So, in November last year, I remember being at breaking point. I was crying all the time during the day, driving around in my car like a crazy person whilst screaming obscene things at myself and generally just plotting my own demise. I thought that if I couldn’t get my PhD and be deemed some sort of genius with an accolade then I would no longer have anything to live for and that, basically, my mother would have been proved right all along in her, largely unspoken, opinion that I was just never going to amount to anything and I would end up just like her (bitter, alone and mentally ill with an unwanted child that never said thank you for anything . . . you get the picture). Right before Christmas last year I was desperate and suicidal and, basically, that whole breakdown culminated in my trying to starve myself to death – not an easy thing to do and, as I soon discovered, bloody painful. I had first thought of overdosing, but I couldn’t face the prospect of it not working and I didn’t know how badly I might screw it up. OD-ing, when you’re trying to do it, is actually quite hard; I’m told it’s very easy when you’re NOT trying (maybe that’s where I went wrong?).
Anyway, I’m getting off the point, I know. I was supposed to be writing about THIS year, not last year, but I guess, because I’ve been thinking so much about where I am now in relation to where I was then, I wanted to set the scene a bit. You know, because it’s not obvious if you don’t know me and you don’t know all the whys and the hows . . . but then you probably don’t want to, ok, moving on.
This year. This year kicked off with me coming out of my anorexic phase, whilst still trying to rewrite my thesis and figure out how I was going to pay for extra tuition fees at university to cover the time I was going to need. All I remember very clearly from New Year’s Day 2013 is that the highlight, for me, was staggering, bleary-eyed and sleep deprived (due to insomnia rather than anything actually fun sadly), across a freezing cold shopping centre car park to go and buy a box of breakfast cereal which I then ate, completely and straight from the box, while I wrote a book review for my friend Gillian. I wrote the whole review and, in fact, read the whole book on New Year’s Day, and then was awarded major brownie points from said friend for doing it in such a rush. It wasn’t actually necessary for me to do it for months, but I really desperately wanted to do something with my day rather than sitting around doing nothing and twiddling my thumbs and generally just going mad.
I hate having nothing to do now, that’s one thing I have learned, work stops you driving yourself nuts thinking about all the shit that you don’t want to think about, like how fat you’re getting or how much money you owe people or how much your mother drives you crazy. It’s good to have a focus.
So that was New Year anyway. Not fun, exactly, but fruitful (and fibreful too, thanks to the cereal, so that was good!) Then all I remember after that is several weeks of cold and snow – which was still around in March, if I remember correctly. I didn’t think it still snowed in March, even in this country (the UK, for those not in the know). But, yep. Snow on the ground, ice all around, and me stuck at home because, for numerous reasons, I couldn’t go outside. Well, ok, three reasons really: a) I hate the cold, b) I can’t walk on snow and ice because I fall down A LOT! and c) I had some kind of strain injury going on with both my hands so that, for the life of me, I couldn’t do anything even as simple as opening a letter or stirring a cup of tea. I mean, it was actually really bad, I woke up one morning and it was like my hands had been bashed with hammers – I suspect because of all the typing that I’d been doing although I also suspect that it had something to do with the lack of nutrients that I’d had for such a long time while I was anorexic. I’m still actually worried now that I might have done some damage to my tendons or something, but the doctor couldn’t find anything majorly wrong with me and, anyway, it got better in the end. I can operate all my fingers now and I only have very marginal twinges in my arms and hands (so I guess I was lucky). But I remember I had this problem on my birthday, which is in early March, and even I, who am not remotely into birthdays and usually don’t care what happens, could see that this was not a good thing.
Anyway, that happened. And passed, despite the constant worry of my mother and the absolute ignorance of my PhD supervisors who had no idea, and did not bother to ask, how I was.
[Incidentally, I may, at some stage, write a blog post on the unsupportive nature of my PhD supervisors and the awful experience that I had during my foray into academia, but I feel that this might also seem a bit vindictive and moany and, with the benefit of hindsight, I really don’t think there’s much to dwell on there, so perhaps I won’t.]
I was still writing my thesis up until the end of April, and I was bloody glad when I finally finished it. I knew it wasn’t going to be any good, I think, but nonetheless I was quite proud of what I’d done with it since it did, in the end, make a logical and coherent argument . . . or so I thought. I submitted it in May and then waited, dutifully, throughout that month to be told about my Viva.
By the way, a Viva, or Viva Voce, as it’s called in full, is the final exam for a PhD; it’s where you go to meet with two or more examiners (who you’ll probably never have met before) in order to defend your thesis against the grilling that they will inevitably give it. I was nervous about this, of course, but I was prepared for it, I thought, and would have been totally fine to go through with it, until I was told, albeit rather belatedly due to an admin cock-up, that I would not be Viva-ed at all because the examiners had read my thesis and decided it was crap and they didn’t see the point of giving it the credence of an examination.
Needless to say, at this point, I gave up. I wasn’t upset and I was just really pissed off with the whole thing; I mean I was tired, you know, and I felt like I’d been treated badly, so I sort of rode the wave of righteous anger for a while and then forgot it. I had other problems at this point, anyway; life was getting in the way. My uncle died in June, which really upset my mother and left us in a little bit of a mess. And I just didn’t feel like I could go on with writing a thesis that, fairly obviously, was never going to be any good when I’d already re-written it twice and nearly lost my mind (and the use of my hands) in the process. No one at my university seemed to appreciate this, but there we are.
By August I was signing up for the dole (otherwise known as social security), at the behest of my mother who would not allow me to live under her roof and not have some sort of status. “If you don’t study and you can’t get a job then you’ll have to join the ranks of the unemployed and stick your hand out for money like the rest of the losers.” Or something along those lines anyway. So, it was during this time, while I was casting about looking for actual jobs doing anything from cleaning to home helps to admin workers, that I started to write.
It was always something I had wanted to do and I knew, even while I was doing my PhD, that creative writing would be something I would eventually move onto when I was finally finished with my not so great thesis on Iris Murdoch. My plan, initially, was just to take the novel I’d been tinkering with on and off for years and put it up on Kindle.
But then I decided to try to do things properly and, not only did I put up my novel, but I also wrote quite a hefty amount of short stories and a few other things besides that, and put them up too. This all happened in September and I’m thinking now that it could, with a bit of hard work, become a career.
I didn’t rule out proper work, and I still haven’t now. But this is what I want to do, so there we are.
It’s now the end of the year and I’m thinking about where I’ve come to after all of this. It’s weird, isn’t it, how the beginning of the year and the end of it seem so different – the person you are in January, looking forward to the blank slate of the year, is always so different from the person you are in December when you’re looking back and wondering just how the hell all that happened in just twelve short months. I remember myself in January this year, being thin, sulky, miserable, cold and desperate to prove that I wasn’t stupid. Now, in December, I’m . . . well . . . no longer thin, I’m angry rather than miserable, and I really don’t give a damn now what anyone thinks.
When I was at university, I was convinced that that was the only way I could prove that I was worth something. I didn’t want to be out in the world because I didn’t think that I could handle it. University was all I knew and I guess I’d just spent too much time there. I did a PhD because I thought that staying at university forever was the only thing for me, because I’d never be employable in the real world. But what I found there, really, was that, although there were people who were prepared to accept me for my weirdness and specialist knowledge of books and movies, and while there were people who were quite happy for me to read all day and learn everything that I could in the anticipation of some great and wonderful accolade at the end, all I was doing was kidding myself. I didn’t really belong there either, and in the end it was just embarrassing because I could see people looking at me, feeling sorry for me, willing me to just get on with it and do something so that they could get rid of me too. They could all see that I didn’t fit.
Academics are kind of a closed group, you see; they’ll let anybody in, in theory, if they want to learn badly enough and have the ready wit and the keen attention to do it. But it’s a bit like being a politician in the end; if you don’t play the game then they shun you. They like people who hold the same opinions, who uphold research standards and who band together and agree with each other on important points that, in actual fact, are pretty miniscule and irrelevant in any real life context. There’s a code of practice and a mode of behaviour that you have to sign up to, and I was just the wrong fit. I didn’t want to change myself and I didn’t want to morph into some sort of myopic middle-class freak. Because that’s all most academics are really. Some of the ones I hung around with were really awful to talk to actually; I mean, I thought they were great to begin with, and I was attracted to their glamour because they were so different from the people I usually mixed with – I just couldn’t believe they’d let me into their world. But that soon wore off. I hated them in the end for being so ignorant and theoretical and, basically, just detached from real life.
I wanted to get out in the end.
So now here I am. Not giving a damn. I’m writing. And I’ll keep writing. And I’ll write whatever I want. If people don’t like what I write then they don’t. But I think that people, REAL people are better placed to judge what they do and don’t like for themselves and, for the most part, if they don’t like it, they just won’t read it. I’m not scared about that. If I find a few people who like what I write then I’ll be happy and, even though I don’t know what the hell next year is going to bring me (and really don’t want to right now), I still think this is what I want to do.
I’m still dreading New Year though so stay tuned for another blog-post of “AAAAAHHHHHHH!!!! IT’S ANOTHER YEAR WHAT THE FUCK AM I GOING TO DO WITH IT HELP ME” on January 1st.
Adios amigos and thanks for reading. See you again soon!
Saturday 30 November 2013
A Book Review
Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch”.
There are SO many things that I could say about this book, and I apologize in advance if this blog post reads more like an essay in the end than a simple book review. But it’s a long book and extremely detailed (and it’s been ten years in the writing for the author) so it really deserves a proper appraisal.
First let me say that I am a MASSIVE Donna Tartt fan – have been ever since my teens when I read “The Secret History” – and I have been waiting for this book almost since I first discovered her. “The Little Friend” was a book that I liked, in the end, but do not love and I was starting to think that maybe she just didn’t have it any more and had nothing left to bring to a new story.
Boy was I wrong!
This book of hers, the 700-and-something-page tome, “The Goldfinch”, was published a month ago and is now being named one of the hottest books of this year. And, while for some, it seems that this author is considered to be overhyped – I’ve heard many people say, in reaction to this literary phenomenon, that “Hey, no book is THAT good” – I have to say I think it’s brilliant. (I won’t quibble with people who just don’t want to bother, or don’t like it. To those people I will just say: go and write your own blog post!) This book is truly great, in my view, just because it captures so much and sweeps so beautifully across the life of the main character and in such a way that – and I have to agree with some of the other reviews I’ve read here – with this book, Tartt could easily rival Dickens.
It’s a bold claim, but when you understand something about this book – and particularly when you’ve read it – you might understand.
So, ok, brief plot synopsis, if such a thing is possible here:
The story begins with the 13 year old Theo Decker being taken to an art gallery by his mother after he has just been suspended from school. Whilst there, he is introduced to new paintings, culture etc. and, at the same time, catches the eye of a pretty young girl who is there with an old man – her uncle. All of this meanders along for a few pages before the sudden interjection of an explosion, which caves in part of the building and kills several people, including the old man and, as is later discovered, Theo’s mother. During his time in the gallery, Theo does several things – beyond surviving the horrific event of being caught up in an explosion – the first of which is to talk to the old man and be given a ring which he is then charged with returning to a man called Hobie. This encounter with the old man will take Theo on a journey throughout the rest of his life and will still be with him as a potent memory many years later. But the other, seemingly more important, action that he commits whilst in the gallery is to steal a particularly famous painting: Carel Fabritius’ “The Goldfinch”.
It is a small painting and, from what I can make out, not overly impressive at first glance, but it makes a huge impression on Theo and the belief that he owns it, for so many years, is something that gives him hope even in the most awful periods of his life.
In later years, we see Theo moving from the relatively good care of a family in New York to an empty and neglected existence with his feckless, gambling, ex-alcoholic father in Las Vegas. Theo’s time with his father is pivotal because it takes him from being basically a good kid to being lumped in with his incredibly crooked father, while it is also allows him to form the relationships and overall outlook on life that will take him on to his later, and far more catastrophic adulthood.
In Vegas, Theo becomes a drug addict, meets the boy who will become his lifelong best friend and, in many ways, corrupter, but he also learns the valuable lesson that his family and, indeed, most of the adults in his life, are not dependable and that the foundations of his life are really not very solid. What struck me most about the teenage Theo was how vulnerable he is, and how he places his faith in all the strangest places; presumably because he has so little that is concrete to hang onto. There is no love or trust or loyalty in his life after he loses his mother; his father clearly doesn’t want him; the Barbour’s, whom he lives with for a while in New York after the explosion, clearly have problems of their own and are, despite their best efforts to hide it, glad to see the back of him. Until he meets Boris, then, he really doesn’t have anyone who loves him – and all he has instead is the picture.
The comparison that Tartt draws on most heavily here, or so it seems to me, is the one between Theo and Harry Potter. I’ll admit, this shocked me a little bit because it seemed to be so at odds with the kind of serious, emotive piece that she’s going for here (not that “Harry Potter”, as a series, was not serious or emotive in its own way, but, you know, it was fantasy, and this is adult fiction). Nevertheless, the fact that it is so clearly drawn out throughout the book, to describe the dynamic and overall relative characters of Theo and Boris, is interesting. Of course there are a lot of other comparisons to be drawn here, such as Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger, David Copperfield and Steerforth maybe. But, for me, it is the Harry Potter allusion that stands out. Boris is the first to give Theo the nickname of “Potter” because of his appearance – he wears glasses, and has a similarly slight build, etc. And I suppose that this could, in itself, be a minor and isolated thing. But the name sticks and is still being used in Theo’s adulthood.
Plus, given the fact that Theo’s relationship with Boris is what ultimately changes him and, in the end, makes him look a bit like a Bret Easton Ellis character (Patrick Bateman without the obsession to murder prostitutes, or one of the guys in “Less Than Zero” perhaps), it just kind of made me think that you could see this book as, in part, a more realistic take on what would happen to kid like Harry Potter in the world we know. I mean it’s basically the case that Theo experiences the same sort of meeting that Harry experiences with Draco Malfoy when he first attends Hogwarts in “The Philosopher’s Stone”. Theo has a similarly fateful meeting with a kid who is really just like himself – a kid who gets kicked around by life – and, rather than saying that he wants to go and hang around with the good kids (as Harry does), he just bands together with the not so good one and forms an alliance that will stay in place for the rest of their lives. If you think of it that way then, Theo’s story is the story of what would happen if Harry Potter became friends with Draco Malfoy and they just looked out for each other first and above anyone else. In a weird way, it kind of works.
At times, Boris and Theo’s relationship is quite sweet. They have a love for each other, which probably comes out of dependency and the lack of ability to find anybody else who cares. (There is a homosexual implication in there somewhere too, but I don’t think that’s the point. It’s more like they’re brothers.) And, even though Boris later becomes a drug dealer, steals from Theo, gets him involved in all kinds of trouble (including murder) he is still looking after his best friend right up to the end. All through this book, there is something very loyal and tight about these two guys, and you really get the sense of feeling sorry for Theo, despite the awful and sinister things he does towards the end of the novel when, quite frankly, he starts to look like he’s become a bit twisted; because, inside, he’s just a kid who goes through something truly terrible and needs to cling on to anything and anyone who will love him.
His love for Pippa, the girl in the gallery, with whom he has a very sporadic interaction right up until the end of the book, is something that verges on desperation and which almost everyone tries, gently, to deter him from. It’s almost like a PTSD thing, whereby you believe that you’ve gone through something awful with another person and so they are, quite naturally, the only person who will ever understand you. Theo experiences that for Pippa and goes a little bit crazy in the process because he can’t work out why she does not feel the same way about him.
It’s a tortuous thing to read, but it’s compelling and, when you feel his despair in the end, you can’t help but feel terrible at his absolute devastation.
Mostly I felt sorry for Hobie though – otherwise known as James Hobart. The guy is just a furniture restorer – the business partner of the old man who died in the gallery – and he’s somehow roped into being one of Theo’s guardians during his late teens. (He then goes on to make Theo his new business partner and things go downhill from there.) In many ways, Hobie reminds me of another character from Harry Potter, because he has this kind of big, good natured aura around him, and there is this overwhelming feeling of him being slightly blinkered where other people are concerned, particularly Theo. All of this makes me think that he is, in some way, modelled on Harry Potter’s great friend, Rubeus Hagrid and it just seems to me that you have to feel sorry for him because, like Hagrid, he puts so much faith in other people – some of whom he believes the sun shines out of – and should, in a perfect world, be rewarded for his pains.
As I read, I could almost imagine the good natured, optimistic beam of a smile falling from his face as he realized what a mess he was left with because of Theo – a boy that he’d plumbed so much hope and energy and love into, because he thought it was all going to be worth it – and it really broke my heart. (I suppose, again, you could draw all kinds of Dickensian allusions here too, Mr. Micawber for example, whose joviality should really be rewarded with kindness and prosperity, but who finds himself in a debtor’s prison and reliant – this time with a positive outcome – on David Copperfield, who is one of his only friends. It is heartbreaking that nice people like that have to suffer; you really feel it.)
I suppose what I loved about this book most of all though, was the way it seems to mix old and new styles. There is still the same feeling that this is a Donna Tartt novel. I read it with the remembrance of all the things I first loved about “The Secret History”. The rich, majestic descriptions of the art work and the culture, and the experience of learning about all of those things, are very similar to the evocative description of academia and classical learning that comes through in her earlier novel.
“The Secret History” was written in the 1980s and published in the early 1990s. It is, therefore, set in a time when academia still had a kind of grandiosity and hardworking quality (or at least it was still thought of in this way by some) with people slogging away at typewriters in old-style college bedrooms, staying up until the small hours to read Greek and sitting around in small tutorial groups during the day to talk about it with funny old classics professors. Even in her early phase, Tartt could make a college in Vermont sound like an American version of our Oxford and her first book really gave a sense of the golden time that those college years formed for the narrator, Richard Papen.
When I first read that book it inspired me, it made me want to go to university and have this experience. Although, in the end, I didn’t quite because, as I discovered, it’s not really like that in most higher learning institutions now. And I suppose that’s why, in “The Goldfinch”, all these things are slightly lost on Theo, who really only cares about art and learning, I think, because of the painting he has stolen. In the course of the book there is a move towards the more modern social and cultural concerns – terrorism being the key theme in the book with the destruction, desecration and theft of artworks hanging at the centre of the plot. But there are also more minor references to books and movies that make it feel more contemporary, as well as, more bleakly, to DVD players, iPhones and laptops; all of this makes the world in this book seem markedly different to the one she describes in “The Secret History” simply because, now, it really looks like our world.
I’m making this sound good, and in some ways it probably is, although, in a small sense, I was a little disappointed by these updated, contemporary references. I accept that it’s probably necessary, but, still, the introduction of an iPhone into a book about art, and even a long description of the anguish someone feels when the things dies out on them at a crucial moment, seems a little sad and sell-out to me. It’s the kind of thing Dan Brown would do.
Anyway, I digress . . .
This book is the best I’ve read this year, by far and away, and I would encourage anyone to read it. I know that a lot of people shy away from long books and, in many cases, I am the same. But, if you read one long book this year (what’s left of it), read this one. I promise you, you will not be sorry.
There are SO many things that I could say about this book, and I apologize in advance if this blog post reads more like an essay in the end than a simple book review. But it’s a long book and extremely detailed (and it’s been ten years in the writing for the author) so it really deserves a proper appraisal.
First let me say that I am a MASSIVE Donna Tartt fan – have been ever since my teens when I read “The Secret History” – and I have been waiting for this book almost since I first discovered her. “The Little Friend” was a book that I liked, in the end, but do not love and I was starting to think that maybe she just didn’t have it any more and had nothing left to bring to a new story.
Boy was I wrong!
This book of hers, the 700-and-something-page tome, “The Goldfinch”, was published a month ago and is now being named one of the hottest books of this year. And, while for some, it seems that this author is considered to be overhyped – I’ve heard many people say, in reaction to this literary phenomenon, that “Hey, no book is THAT good” – I have to say I think it’s brilliant. (I won’t quibble with people who just don’t want to bother, or don’t like it. To those people I will just say: go and write your own blog post!) This book is truly great, in my view, just because it captures so much and sweeps so beautifully across the life of the main character and in such a way that – and I have to agree with some of the other reviews I’ve read here – with this book, Tartt could easily rival Dickens.
It’s a bold claim, but when you understand something about this book – and particularly when you’ve read it – you might understand.
So, ok, brief plot synopsis, if such a thing is possible here:
The story begins with the 13 year old Theo Decker being taken to an art gallery by his mother after he has just been suspended from school. Whilst there, he is introduced to new paintings, culture etc. and, at the same time, catches the eye of a pretty young girl who is there with an old man – her uncle. All of this meanders along for a few pages before the sudden interjection of an explosion, which caves in part of the building and kills several people, including the old man and, as is later discovered, Theo’s mother. During his time in the gallery, Theo does several things – beyond surviving the horrific event of being caught up in an explosion – the first of which is to talk to the old man and be given a ring which he is then charged with returning to a man called Hobie. This encounter with the old man will take Theo on a journey throughout the rest of his life and will still be with him as a potent memory many years later. But the other, seemingly more important, action that he commits whilst in the gallery is to steal a particularly famous painting: Carel Fabritius’ “The Goldfinch”.
It is a small painting and, from what I can make out, not overly impressive at first glance, but it makes a huge impression on Theo and the belief that he owns it, for so many years, is something that gives him hope even in the most awful periods of his life.
In later years, we see Theo moving from the relatively good care of a family in New York to an empty and neglected existence with his feckless, gambling, ex-alcoholic father in Las Vegas. Theo’s time with his father is pivotal because it takes him from being basically a good kid to being lumped in with his incredibly crooked father, while it is also allows him to form the relationships and overall outlook on life that will take him on to his later, and far more catastrophic adulthood.
In Vegas, Theo becomes a drug addict, meets the boy who will become his lifelong best friend and, in many ways, corrupter, but he also learns the valuable lesson that his family and, indeed, most of the adults in his life, are not dependable and that the foundations of his life are really not very solid. What struck me most about the teenage Theo was how vulnerable he is, and how he places his faith in all the strangest places; presumably because he has so little that is concrete to hang onto. There is no love or trust or loyalty in his life after he loses his mother; his father clearly doesn’t want him; the Barbour’s, whom he lives with for a while in New York after the explosion, clearly have problems of their own and are, despite their best efforts to hide it, glad to see the back of him. Until he meets Boris, then, he really doesn’t have anyone who loves him – and all he has instead is the picture.
The comparison that Tartt draws on most heavily here, or so it seems to me, is the one between Theo and Harry Potter. I’ll admit, this shocked me a little bit because it seemed to be so at odds with the kind of serious, emotive piece that she’s going for here (not that “Harry Potter”, as a series, was not serious or emotive in its own way, but, you know, it was fantasy, and this is adult fiction). Nevertheless, the fact that it is so clearly drawn out throughout the book, to describe the dynamic and overall relative characters of Theo and Boris, is interesting. Of course there are a lot of other comparisons to be drawn here, such as Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger, David Copperfield and Steerforth maybe. But, for me, it is the Harry Potter allusion that stands out. Boris is the first to give Theo the nickname of “Potter” because of his appearance – he wears glasses, and has a similarly slight build, etc. And I suppose that this could, in itself, be a minor and isolated thing. But the name sticks and is still being used in Theo’s adulthood.
Plus, given the fact that Theo’s relationship with Boris is what ultimately changes him and, in the end, makes him look a bit like a Bret Easton Ellis character (Patrick Bateman without the obsession to murder prostitutes, or one of the guys in “Less Than Zero” perhaps), it just kind of made me think that you could see this book as, in part, a more realistic take on what would happen to kid like Harry Potter in the world we know. I mean it’s basically the case that Theo experiences the same sort of meeting that Harry experiences with Draco Malfoy when he first attends Hogwarts in “The Philosopher’s Stone”. Theo has a similarly fateful meeting with a kid who is really just like himself – a kid who gets kicked around by life – and, rather than saying that he wants to go and hang around with the good kids (as Harry does), he just bands together with the not so good one and forms an alliance that will stay in place for the rest of their lives. If you think of it that way then, Theo’s story is the story of what would happen if Harry Potter became friends with Draco Malfoy and they just looked out for each other first and above anyone else. In a weird way, it kind of works.
At times, Boris and Theo’s relationship is quite sweet. They have a love for each other, which probably comes out of dependency and the lack of ability to find anybody else who cares. (There is a homosexual implication in there somewhere too, but I don’t think that’s the point. It’s more like they’re brothers.) And, even though Boris later becomes a drug dealer, steals from Theo, gets him involved in all kinds of trouble (including murder) he is still looking after his best friend right up to the end. All through this book, there is something very loyal and tight about these two guys, and you really get the sense of feeling sorry for Theo, despite the awful and sinister things he does towards the end of the novel when, quite frankly, he starts to look like he’s become a bit twisted; because, inside, he’s just a kid who goes through something truly terrible and needs to cling on to anything and anyone who will love him.
His love for Pippa, the girl in the gallery, with whom he has a very sporadic interaction right up until the end of the book, is something that verges on desperation and which almost everyone tries, gently, to deter him from. It’s almost like a PTSD thing, whereby you believe that you’ve gone through something awful with another person and so they are, quite naturally, the only person who will ever understand you. Theo experiences that for Pippa and goes a little bit crazy in the process because he can’t work out why she does not feel the same way about him.
It’s a tortuous thing to read, but it’s compelling and, when you feel his despair in the end, you can’t help but feel terrible at his absolute devastation.
Mostly I felt sorry for Hobie though – otherwise known as James Hobart. The guy is just a furniture restorer – the business partner of the old man who died in the gallery – and he’s somehow roped into being one of Theo’s guardians during his late teens. (He then goes on to make Theo his new business partner and things go downhill from there.) In many ways, Hobie reminds me of another character from Harry Potter, because he has this kind of big, good natured aura around him, and there is this overwhelming feeling of him being slightly blinkered where other people are concerned, particularly Theo. All of this makes me think that he is, in some way, modelled on Harry Potter’s great friend, Rubeus Hagrid and it just seems to me that you have to feel sorry for him because, like Hagrid, he puts so much faith in other people – some of whom he believes the sun shines out of – and should, in a perfect world, be rewarded for his pains.
As I read, I could almost imagine the good natured, optimistic beam of a smile falling from his face as he realized what a mess he was left with because of Theo – a boy that he’d plumbed so much hope and energy and love into, because he thought it was all going to be worth it – and it really broke my heart. (I suppose, again, you could draw all kinds of Dickensian allusions here too, Mr. Micawber for example, whose joviality should really be rewarded with kindness and prosperity, but who finds himself in a debtor’s prison and reliant – this time with a positive outcome – on David Copperfield, who is one of his only friends. It is heartbreaking that nice people like that have to suffer; you really feel it.)
I suppose what I loved about this book most of all though, was the way it seems to mix old and new styles. There is still the same feeling that this is a Donna Tartt novel. I read it with the remembrance of all the things I first loved about “The Secret History”. The rich, majestic descriptions of the art work and the culture, and the experience of learning about all of those things, are very similar to the evocative description of academia and classical learning that comes through in her earlier novel.
“The Secret History” was written in the 1980s and published in the early 1990s. It is, therefore, set in a time when academia still had a kind of grandiosity and hardworking quality (or at least it was still thought of in this way by some) with people slogging away at typewriters in old-style college bedrooms, staying up until the small hours to read Greek and sitting around in small tutorial groups during the day to talk about it with funny old classics professors. Even in her early phase, Tartt could make a college in Vermont sound like an American version of our Oxford and her first book really gave a sense of the golden time that those college years formed for the narrator, Richard Papen.
When I first read that book it inspired me, it made me want to go to university and have this experience. Although, in the end, I didn’t quite because, as I discovered, it’s not really like that in most higher learning institutions now. And I suppose that’s why, in “The Goldfinch”, all these things are slightly lost on Theo, who really only cares about art and learning, I think, because of the painting he has stolen. In the course of the book there is a move towards the more modern social and cultural concerns – terrorism being the key theme in the book with the destruction, desecration and theft of artworks hanging at the centre of the plot. But there are also more minor references to books and movies that make it feel more contemporary, as well as, more bleakly, to DVD players, iPhones and laptops; all of this makes the world in this book seem markedly different to the one she describes in “The Secret History” simply because, now, it really looks like our world.
I’m making this sound good, and in some ways it probably is, although, in a small sense, I was a little disappointed by these updated, contemporary references. I accept that it’s probably necessary, but, still, the introduction of an iPhone into a book about art, and even a long description of the anguish someone feels when the things dies out on them at a crucial moment, seems a little sad and sell-out to me. It’s the kind of thing Dan Brown would do.
Anyway, I digress . . .
This book is the best I’ve read this year, by far and away, and I would encourage anyone to read it. I know that a lot of people shy away from long books and, in many cases, I am the same. But, if you read one long book this year (what’s left of it), read this one. I promise you, you will not be sorry.
Friday 29 November 2013
Christmas
Might still be a bit early for this, but I wanted to get it in now because I think that a lot of people are probably feeling the same way. It’s still November (just) and Christmas is everywhere. This is pretty typical for this time of year (in America it might be worse). In the UK, the shops start putting stuff out for Christmas on 1st September and they’re still trying to move the last of it in late January. It becomes depressing more than anything else because it just takes all the joy and spontaneity out of the day. I mean, it’s true isn’t it? The run up to Christmas, and the anticipation of it, is what most people look back on and remember every year when it’s all over. The day itself is just the day when you rip the wrapping paper off and clear the debris out of the way – it’s the three month build up that always makes the impression, because, hey, it lasts longer and it’s got far more time to imprint on your brain.
But, despite all of this, the shiny lights and the tinsel and the nice food all over the place, I still hate Christmas. There are a lot of reasons for this – all of which, I am aware, will make me sound like a scrooge. (Although I really resent being called that!) Basically I think I’ll just list them because it’s probably going to be easier. So here goes. All the reasons I hate Christmas:
1. It’s expensive and wasteful. Think about it. You spend all that money on stuff for other people, ridiculous amounts of money usually that just panders to the commercial roundabout on which we continually pivot and allows companies all over the world to think that it’s ok to try to screw money out of us with extortionate prices one minute and last minute deals the next. Most of the food and plastic, battery-operated junk that you’ll buy in the shops will either be broken, eaten, or thrown away by the end year when, as tradition dictates, people will then be spending whatever money they don’t have to use to pay back their credit card companies on worthless gym memberships and home exercise equipment (to lose all the pounds you’ve put on whilst you were busy eating mince pies and turkey). Why not just save the money and pass that round the dinner table on Christmas Day instead? . . . Ok, moving on.
2. There’s too much food. (I think I’ve covered that one with Point 1 but I thought it needed saying again.)
3. There is SO much shit all over the TV that it’s not even funny any more. Most of it is on repeat and we’ve seen it so many times that we can practically recite the scripts of all those old sitcoms and family films in our sleep. (This one is problematic to me, I’ll admit, because I still fall for it too. Even though I really kind of hate “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Snowman” I still find myself hankering after watching them around this time of year just because I’m tired and it’s winter and I’ve been chasing around so much and . . . yeah, ok forget Point 3 if you like!)
4. Christmas songs . . . Don’t. Even. Get. Me. Started. I don’t mean carols, I mean cheesy Christmas No.1 singles and jingly covers of old pop songs to go along with the cheesy cartoonified, tinsel-happy ads that come on sometime in October and don’t end until the last remnants of Auld Lang Syne have finally rung themselves out of our ears. I HATE Christmas songs and (even though I kind of like Lily Allen and don’t want to slate her for anything) I really kind of loathe any pop star or musician who would actively seek out the place at Christmas No.1. Because, let’s face it, whatever song gets that slot is just going to annoy the shit out of people for weeks on end through early January and then be forgotten again until the next Christmas when someone, somewhere goes “Hey, hang on a minute, what was last year’s crappy single again?”
. . . I could go on with these, but I think, mostly, it’s quite obvious what I hate about Christmas. It’s all the same stuff that everyone else hates about it. But it’s a little bit different for me just because I was never really brought up to like it.
My dad tried to give me proper Christmases – the few times when we would go to his house for it. That was when I was a kid and I didn’t have to do much for it except show up and eat the food – and when most of the presents were for me. Back then I didn’t see much of the pre-Christmas madness either, because I was at school during the week and not usually involved in the shopping nightmares that my mum or dad had to deal with. Christmas was kind of fun then. But my mum wasn’t into Christmas at all. She was a Jehovah’s Witness for a really long time – before I was born and for a while afterwards – and, of course, they don’t really do Christmas, because they don’t believe in all the commercial, overhyped stuff that goes around celebrating “Jesus’ birthday”, it’s just not a thing for them. So when I was a kid, she let me have it all, but she was always kind of sour about it. And she made damn sure that when I spent Christmas with her she didn’t have to do all the decorating and cooking and organizing that my dad would do for the occasion.
Christmas dinner with my mum, if such a thing materialized at all, was chicken and chips (with ketchup). I remember actually eating that for Christmas dinner one year – in my room, aged 15, on my own. It was always just a bit sad with my mum and I was encouraged to kind of ignore it. Now I just think that’s ok.
I don’t begrudge other people Christmas now, before anyone accuses me of that, but I don’t like it . . . or, rather, I don’t see why I should bother. And I kind of wish that I didn’t have to have it shoved in my face all the time by people who think they’re doing me a favour by bringing the Christmas spirit into my life. (Ok, now I do sound like Scrooge.)
But I think that’s just what happens when you get older and you’re suddenly not the one that all of this is for any more. It’s just really all for the kids isn’t it? Christmas? It’s a shiny, bright, happy time in the middle of deep, dark, awful winter, when everything is all about laughter and presents and chocolates and time off school – it’s a time for kids. And when you’re older it’s you that has to think about the logistics and clear up the mess afterwards. That was what I could never understand about my mum when I was younger. I didn’t get why she hated it so much and why she couldn’t just let me enjoy it. But she was just trying to teach me that the joy and brightness was only a fleeting thing – a flicker. And that soon enough I wouldn’t be the centre of attention any more and I’d be the one standing over my kid (possibly) holding the bin liner and waiting for the wrapping paper while, simultaneously, worrying about how to cook a turkey the size of a bread bin in time to eat lunch before everyone died of starvation in the middle of the day.
Of course I don’t do any of these things now because I don’t have kids, or a large family for which to provide Christmas dinner. (So, ha ha ha! I have beaten the rap there!) But still I don’t like all the bleakness of it now. I notice things far more about the plans and preparations that people, and commercial outlets, go through in the last few months of the year (I just saw the other day that my local Tesco have added a little fluorescent green Christmas hat to their logo and set up a giant Christmas tree in the front of their store – complete with fake Christmas presents underneath it that are probably made from old delivery boxes and discontinued brands of wrapping paper). And I just feel like it leeches so much away from what (I am sure) used to be a far more special day. It was, wasn’t it? Because it came up so suddenly and without so much fussing and talking beforehand. I mean, if it was more of a surprise, it would be far better wouldn’t it? If we all forgot about it until about December 20th and then started getting things together for a nice meal and a few gifts, that would be quite nice. Cut out all the crap and the three month stress-a-thon, and just live normal life until it was time to take a week or so off? Why don’t we do that any more? Where the hell has all this rubbish come from?
Anyway that’s almost everything that truly annoys me about it, but it’s not all. Mostly what I find truly offensive about Christmas – I mean the thing that really rankles with me – is the sheer hypocrisy of people who sign up for it. My mum, for instance. Like I said, she hates Christmas, always has done – and she hates most of our family too (always has) – but still, every year now, she writes out Christmas cards to the family, sends out the same routine presents to people (next year’s calendars and grey woollen socks usually) and gets out the sad little plastic Christmas tree from its cardboard box to stand it up in the living room among the cardboard boxes full of junk that, she insists, cannot be thrown away in case she needs something from them. All of this is her idea of observing Christmas – not participating exactly, but going through the motions for the benefit of the non-existent people that won’t be coming over for dinner or to see what she’s done with place. Nobody would notice, or care, if my mother didn’t do anything for Christmas (least of all me since I now really do have nothing to do with Christmas at all). So I just find her behaviour at this time completely ridiculous.
She writes cards to people she doesn’t like and buys food that she doesn’t really want to eat and knows will only make her fat (and then complains when it DOES make her fat). She watches all the crap on TV and laughs at it as if she’s never seen it before; she hums Christmas carols around the house! And she does all of this with absolutely no foundation and no real interest in having a happy Christmas but just because she thinks that she should join in with everybody else and not look like a miserable cow.
*Ahem* *Stands up and takes a proud bow for being a miserable cow*
I know a lot of people do things like that. I mean the hypocritical thing of pretending that you like people you really don’t like just for the holidays. I know that people send cards expressing best wishes to people they hate and invite people round for dinner when they really don’t want to just because they don’t want to face someone calling them mean-spirited and scrooge-like for not putting their differences aside. But why should we? What does it solve? You make friends for a day with someone you hate and then go back to hating them in the New Year? What does that do for anyone? (It’s like the Christmas in No Man’s Land thing all over again – they still had to go back to killing each other after the football match, so what was the point of that?)
I’m mainly writing this because I found out the other day that my mother is, yet again, sending a Christmas card to my dad. This is a man whom she has always hated, ever since I can remember, and whom she has always said she wanted to get as far out of our lives as possible. Even I don’t send him a card any more because she totally trashed my relationship with him (a detail which she seems to have conveniently deleted these days) and her attempts at making friends with him are, to me, not only hypocritical but possibly even vindictive.
I don’t want to moan on about my parents in every blog post I write – but somehow it always seems relevant. So, pocket history, my mum hated my dad because, as far as she was concerned, he and I forced her out of the equation – she didn’t have a problem with him so much (well, she did, but not THAT much), what she mostly had a problem with was that I loved him more than her and we would rather have been left alone together without her. In the end she took him away from me in the cruellest way possible, by turning me against him, and then tried to place herself in the role of mediator to try to bring us back together again. That’s what the Christmas card is for really – that’s all it’s for. It’s just her way of showing how she thinks she’s still got a connection to him, or that she thinks she has some right to know about him over and above me. It’s been like that for a while now. She asks me about him as if she thinks I know anything and then tries to make out that my relationship with him is somehow her personal business.
But, I’m getting off the point . . . Sorry.
All I was saying was that, if you hate people, then putting aside your differences for one day so that you can eat and be merry is not going to make you hate them less later on. All the problems will still be there and you still won’t want to deal with them. So Christmas is a fantasy really, and all the commercialism that goes around it is just our way of trying to perpetuate the fantasy so that we won’t have to focus on the crap of real life.
I can see why people want that. That’s what books and TV and all the other recreational things we do in life are for. But I don’t care about Christmas any more. It’s just another excuse to stuff our faces and get pissed. Let the kids have it, sure. But otherwise what’s the point?
But, despite all of this, the shiny lights and the tinsel and the nice food all over the place, I still hate Christmas. There are a lot of reasons for this – all of which, I am aware, will make me sound like a scrooge. (Although I really resent being called that!) Basically I think I’ll just list them because it’s probably going to be easier. So here goes. All the reasons I hate Christmas:
1. It’s expensive and wasteful. Think about it. You spend all that money on stuff for other people, ridiculous amounts of money usually that just panders to the commercial roundabout on which we continually pivot and allows companies all over the world to think that it’s ok to try to screw money out of us with extortionate prices one minute and last minute deals the next. Most of the food and plastic, battery-operated junk that you’ll buy in the shops will either be broken, eaten, or thrown away by the end year when, as tradition dictates, people will then be spending whatever money they don’t have to use to pay back their credit card companies on worthless gym memberships and home exercise equipment (to lose all the pounds you’ve put on whilst you were busy eating mince pies and turkey). Why not just save the money and pass that round the dinner table on Christmas Day instead? . . . Ok, moving on.
2. There’s too much food. (I think I’ve covered that one with Point 1 but I thought it needed saying again.)
3. There is SO much shit all over the TV that it’s not even funny any more. Most of it is on repeat and we’ve seen it so many times that we can practically recite the scripts of all those old sitcoms and family films in our sleep. (This one is problematic to me, I’ll admit, because I still fall for it too. Even though I really kind of hate “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Snowman” I still find myself hankering after watching them around this time of year just because I’m tired and it’s winter and I’ve been chasing around so much and . . . yeah, ok forget Point 3 if you like!)
4. Christmas songs . . . Don’t. Even. Get. Me. Started. I don’t mean carols, I mean cheesy Christmas No.1 singles and jingly covers of old pop songs to go along with the cheesy cartoonified, tinsel-happy ads that come on sometime in October and don’t end until the last remnants of Auld Lang Syne have finally rung themselves out of our ears. I HATE Christmas songs and (even though I kind of like Lily Allen and don’t want to slate her for anything) I really kind of loathe any pop star or musician who would actively seek out the place at Christmas No.1. Because, let’s face it, whatever song gets that slot is just going to annoy the shit out of people for weeks on end through early January and then be forgotten again until the next Christmas when someone, somewhere goes “Hey, hang on a minute, what was last year’s crappy single again?”
. . . I could go on with these, but I think, mostly, it’s quite obvious what I hate about Christmas. It’s all the same stuff that everyone else hates about it. But it’s a little bit different for me just because I was never really brought up to like it.
My dad tried to give me proper Christmases – the few times when we would go to his house for it. That was when I was a kid and I didn’t have to do much for it except show up and eat the food – and when most of the presents were for me. Back then I didn’t see much of the pre-Christmas madness either, because I was at school during the week and not usually involved in the shopping nightmares that my mum or dad had to deal with. Christmas was kind of fun then. But my mum wasn’t into Christmas at all. She was a Jehovah’s Witness for a really long time – before I was born and for a while afterwards – and, of course, they don’t really do Christmas, because they don’t believe in all the commercial, overhyped stuff that goes around celebrating “Jesus’ birthday”, it’s just not a thing for them. So when I was a kid, she let me have it all, but she was always kind of sour about it. And she made damn sure that when I spent Christmas with her she didn’t have to do all the decorating and cooking and organizing that my dad would do for the occasion.
Christmas dinner with my mum, if such a thing materialized at all, was chicken and chips (with ketchup). I remember actually eating that for Christmas dinner one year – in my room, aged 15, on my own. It was always just a bit sad with my mum and I was encouraged to kind of ignore it. Now I just think that’s ok.
I don’t begrudge other people Christmas now, before anyone accuses me of that, but I don’t like it . . . or, rather, I don’t see why I should bother. And I kind of wish that I didn’t have to have it shoved in my face all the time by people who think they’re doing me a favour by bringing the Christmas spirit into my life. (Ok, now I do sound like Scrooge.)
But I think that’s just what happens when you get older and you’re suddenly not the one that all of this is for any more. It’s just really all for the kids isn’t it? Christmas? It’s a shiny, bright, happy time in the middle of deep, dark, awful winter, when everything is all about laughter and presents and chocolates and time off school – it’s a time for kids. And when you’re older it’s you that has to think about the logistics and clear up the mess afterwards. That was what I could never understand about my mum when I was younger. I didn’t get why she hated it so much and why she couldn’t just let me enjoy it. But she was just trying to teach me that the joy and brightness was only a fleeting thing – a flicker. And that soon enough I wouldn’t be the centre of attention any more and I’d be the one standing over my kid (possibly) holding the bin liner and waiting for the wrapping paper while, simultaneously, worrying about how to cook a turkey the size of a bread bin in time to eat lunch before everyone died of starvation in the middle of the day.
Of course I don’t do any of these things now because I don’t have kids, or a large family for which to provide Christmas dinner. (So, ha ha ha! I have beaten the rap there!) But still I don’t like all the bleakness of it now. I notice things far more about the plans and preparations that people, and commercial outlets, go through in the last few months of the year (I just saw the other day that my local Tesco have added a little fluorescent green Christmas hat to their logo and set up a giant Christmas tree in the front of their store – complete with fake Christmas presents underneath it that are probably made from old delivery boxes and discontinued brands of wrapping paper). And I just feel like it leeches so much away from what (I am sure) used to be a far more special day. It was, wasn’t it? Because it came up so suddenly and without so much fussing and talking beforehand. I mean, if it was more of a surprise, it would be far better wouldn’t it? If we all forgot about it until about December 20th and then started getting things together for a nice meal and a few gifts, that would be quite nice. Cut out all the crap and the three month stress-a-thon, and just live normal life until it was time to take a week or so off? Why don’t we do that any more? Where the hell has all this rubbish come from?
Anyway that’s almost everything that truly annoys me about it, but it’s not all. Mostly what I find truly offensive about Christmas – I mean the thing that really rankles with me – is the sheer hypocrisy of people who sign up for it. My mum, for instance. Like I said, she hates Christmas, always has done – and she hates most of our family too (always has) – but still, every year now, she writes out Christmas cards to the family, sends out the same routine presents to people (next year’s calendars and grey woollen socks usually) and gets out the sad little plastic Christmas tree from its cardboard box to stand it up in the living room among the cardboard boxes full of junk that, she insists, cannot be thrown away in case she needs something from them. All of this is her idea of observing Christmas – not participating exactly, but going through the motions for the benefit of the non-existent people that won’t be coming over for dinner or to see what she’s done with place. Nobody would notice, or care, if my mother didn’t do anything for Christmas (least of all me since I now really do have nothing to do with Christmas at all). So I just find her behaviour at this time completely ridiculous.
She writes cards to people she doesn’t like and buys food that she doesn’t really want to eat and knows will only make her fat (and then complains when it DOES make her fat). She watches all the crap on TV and laughs at it as if she’s never seen it before; she hums Christmas carols around the house! And she does all of this with absolutely no foundation and no real interest in having a happy Christmas but just because she thinks that she should join in with everybody else and not look like a miserable cow.
*Ahem* *Stands up and takes a proud bow for being a miserable cow*
I know a lot of people do things like that. I mean the hypocritical thing of pretending that you like people you really don’t like just for the holidays. I know that people send cards expressing best wishes to people they hate and invite people round for dinner when they really don’t want to just because they don’t want to face someone calling them mean-spirited and scrooge-like for not putting their differences aside. But why should we? What does it solve? You make friends for a day with someone you hate and then go back to hating them in the New Year? What does that do for anyone? (It’s like the Christmas in No Man’s Land thing all over again – they still had to go back to killing each other after the football match, so what was the point of that?)
I’m mainly writing this because I found out the other day that my mother is, yet again, sending a Christmas card to my dad. This is a man whom she has always hated, ever since I can remember, and whom she has always said she wanted to get as far out of our lives as possible. Even I don’t send him a card any more because she totally trashed my relationship with him (a detail which she seems to have conveniently deleted these days) and her attempts at making friends with him are, to me, not only hypocritical but possibly even vindictive.
I don’t want to moan on about my parents in every blog post I write – but somehow it always seems relevant. So, pocket history, my mum hated my dad because, as far as she was concerned, he and I forced her out of the equation – she didn’t have a problem with him so much (well, she did, but not THAT much), what she mostly had a problem with was that I loved him more than her and we would rather have been left alone together without her. In the end she took him away from me in the cruellest way possible, by turning me against him, and then tried to place herself in the role of mediator to try to bring us back together again. That’s what the Christmas card is for really – that’s all it’s for. It’s just her way of showing how she thinks she’s still got a connection to him, or that she thinks she has some right to know about him over and above me. It’s been like that for a while now. She asks me about him as if she thinks I know anything and then tries to make out that my relationship with him is somehow her personal business.
But, I’m getting off the point . . . Sorry.
All I was saying was that, if you hate people, then putting aside your differences for one day so that you can eat and be merry is not going to make you hate them less later on. All the problems will still be there and you still won’t want to deal with them. So Christmas is a fantasy really, and all the commercialism that goes around it is just our way of trying to perpetuate the fantasy so that we won’t have to focus on the crap of real life.
I can see why people want that. That’s what books and TV and all the other recreational things we do in life are for. But I don’t care about Christmas any more. It’s just another excuse to stuff our faces and get pissed. Let the kids have it, sure. But otherwise what’s the point?
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