How to: Start a riot and upset the bandwagon.

I have been extremely amused over the past couple of days by heated debate which this article triggered. http://www.wessexscene.co.uk/features/2011/01/04/say-no-to-nestle/

In the 48 hours since its publication, the huge volume of commentary and hatred directed towards it and its author has staggeringly overwhelmed any positive/negative implication of the issue at hand, and so, without further ado I give you How to start a riot, lose the plot, become hated, become loved, overshadow the issue at hand and achieve very little but become a legend of sorts. (As a note, I bear no malice to anybody involved, and hold great respect for some, but still find the whole thing pretty hilarious).

1. Create a persona. This need not be who you really are, in fact it helps if it is disingenuous as this will give your supporters/critics a label to throw around or vehemently reject. Ways to achieve this include sit ins, student rallies, political heckling, paint throwing etc. This must be as high profile as possible or else people will struggle to find the relevant information when attacking you.

2. Choose a cause. This should be well known so that people can consider themselves informed enough to disagree with you. Check if there's information on google about it so that people who want to get angry and righteous can find some basic information and get involved without having to work hard. It must be something people can get sympathetic over, African babies, kittens, alcohol prices, tuition fees, Asian babies, babies in general and global warming are good places to start. Avoid anything religious, political, foreign or globally relevant as this will alienate the less informed haters, and also spoil the later comparisons which some pompous numpty will inevitably provide.

3. Write an article/make a petition/impassioned speech, in a heavily biased, didactic tone, and post it somewhere exposed with an amusing picture and an inflammatory headline. This way lots of people who otherwise wouldn't care will find it and make it their duty to join the discussion. Don't include too many facts, especially statistics, as people are uncomfortable disagreeing with numbers which may actually prove them wrong.

4. Have lots of friends/frenemies. These will support you when people begin to attack you personally after they get bored of shredding your arguments. They will also 'like' the link to your story on facebook and twitter and spread the rage/adulation amongst their own circle of friends.

5. Sit back and watch the fireworks. If you have successfully completed the above four steps, then by now you probably have a fan club (composed largely of the member of the step 4 brigade) and a hate page. At best, the original issue will be buried under allegations of agenda,brand hatred and personal attacks, and will be briefly supported/trashed for the duration of the bunfight. At worst you will have created enough opposition that whatever you were arguing for will inevitably be blocked by people who want to do what you were fighting against, people who enjoy being difficult and people who just don't like you very much.

Either way, you become a legend (for 15 seconds), but it may well be to the detriment of your cause.

XX

The Naked Truth

Dishonesty is a way of life. Simple, convenient and awful.

I cannot remember the last time I went a day without wilfully concealing something or misleading someone. Whether this arises from a need to protect myself, to shield others or simply to make life easier, it is something that never ends. While I am far from a pathological liar, I hate that I accept dishonesty as a convenience on a daily basis.

As the first untruth that passes your lips more must follow, to conceal the first foray in to the realm of the not quite true. And by the naively experienced age of 19, you are surrounded by people and circumstances who only know as much of you as you dared to show them at first, and now believe in somebody who doesn't really exist.

From here on out, I want a detox. If I can change my body by controlling my exertion and diet, why can't I take down my façade by controlling what leaves my mouth. I feel false, and I want to be clean again. I know that removing the trace of all lies is impossible, people who have departed will forever believe the stories I spun them years ago. Doubtless I will lie again. But from this moment onward, I am vowing to myself that I will practice truth with my words to the best of my incredibly flawed ability.

Starting here, a few truths, unexpressed or previously twisted, for some clarity at bed time.

1. I am constantly afraid that the fragile balance I have found between home and university will be ended by a disaster at either end.

2. I hate Ricky Gervais. He is an idiot, whether or not I have ever watched The Office.

3. Last week I skipped work to sit alone in the living room eating crackers, my granddad is ill, but I wasn't with him.

4. That I very occasionally look at a facebook profile picture for a couple of minutes and appreciate very good looks whilst contemplating the poor timing of the summer holiday.

5. I exaggerate anecdotes in an attempt to impress teachers.

6. I never read A.J Ayer fro my IB coursework, thanks for the A though!

7. You were number 2 in male influence, but I thought you might be hurt given how bummed you seemed the day before.

8. I am obsessed with certain television shows and cyber stalk my favourite actresses until I move on.

9. I have never been in love, despite having told past boys otherwise.

10. I always hope that the people who occasionally filter in to my blog will read it, then am simultaneously terrified when they do, and relieved when they fail to recognize that they appear more than once.

Life Carries On

Today the ceiling fell in. Again.

I also stewed apples and made pork with apple ginger and shallot compote.

Then I did laundry.

It seems strange to think that for 5 days, your life can stop. Everything which usually spins by so fast, is thrown in to focus in a sickening jolt. The eye of the storm is a strange place to stand, with chaos in every direction, where stillness gives you the time to recognize the many places you can fall down and disappear.

And when the spinning starts, it is almost a blessing to forget the cliff edge for the moments it takes to make a gingerbread man, to iron a shirt or even to try and stop the ceiling falling in.

The forgetting process proves that time stops for no man. Tomorrow doesn't care if its arrival is dreaded, it just keeps ticking on, callous in its refusal to acknowledge even the most beloved in their moment of pain.

Life just carries on.

Bleak House

Yesterday I walked in the valley in the shadow of death. I was afraid.

I came home to escape from the hell-hole my life had become in the last week, and was confronted with a more terrifying reality. What happens, when a part of your framework can no longer stand? The rest tumbles in is what.

I have spent the last two days in and out of a hospital, watching somebody I love more than myself fight his way back from the edge. To see someone so big, and immortal, looking so very small and vulnerable makes everything else meaningless. This is the farce of the hospital. The wards in visiting time are full of people, hiding their pain from their loved ones, to save them pain. The loved ones hide their terror, to help the patient. In the corridors, behind closed curtains, both parties can silently break. The empty sobs of an old man, holding on for his young. The silent tears of a son, wiped away for a brave face to hide the truth which is death. Because there, the only constant companion is death, whether you can escape it, or welcome it as an escape, it is there. And all we can do is push it away for those few minutes, and live that lie.

Even the tiny light of the maternity ward, cannot illuminate the darkness of the crying football team outside intensive care. Through those hospital doors, the immortal, the youthful and the brave, become so many dearly loved pieces in a cruel game of give and take.

Dear God, whatever you are. Please give him back to us.

Amen

Small Beauties and Secret Places

Life, for the most part, goes by in shades of grey. Days roll together, not happy or sad, just happening as the things we have to do fill up the hours. But within all this averageness, there lie those things which can make life beautiful. Some of them are planned, holidays, birthdays, the fruition of long laid plans, all of these are wonderful in their place, but nothing compares to the magical moment in which you experience a small beauty.

Dozing off in the sunshine in the library and waking to a sunset, catching leaves as they blow off the trees in the garden, sitting at the piano and picking out a tune. It is these moments that make me so profoundly grateful for the life I am lucky enough to lead.

But when the shine fades, and I'm left without direction, I can run to my secret places. The secret places are not necessarily private, perhaps they even hold little beauty to other people, but they are the places I love. A windy hillside, a bookshop, the end of a garden, the top of the world, or just a bench hidden in the middle of a busy world where I can sit and think, and catch a leaf from the liquid amber above me. And then looking at the leaf burning red in my hand, I remember the beauty in the world, and I can get up, and move on.
XX

The Way We Write

Yesterday somebody asked me why I began writing this blog, and I had to think about it. I am not a person who writes with agenda, I do not aspire to be a great writer, I have no expectation that my words will change the course of history, or if they will even make sense to those who stumble upon them. And yet I write.

Some days I write for self discovery, to force me to be cogent in my thoughts. The process of typing arranges whispers of ideas in to a web and holds them for me to better understand. But this is not the reason.

Some days I write for the beauty of words. The structure of a sentence, for the glory of expression. It is on days such as these that I am staggered that there are so many to whom this simple means of expression is denied, and the idea that 200 years ago, I would have been one of them fills me with a sense of how blessed I have been. Worthy though this is, it is still not the reason.

On rare occasions, I write for somebody else. A message in a bottle, with little chance of reaching its intended subject, and a slighter yet chance of being understood, so cryptically do I package it for my own protection. The thought that they may read it, understand it, understand me, is a motivation and a fear. But it is not the reason.

The reason is this. I cannot let my life pass undocumented. One of over 6 billion tiny pieces in an enormous game of win and lose, I am essentially unimportant. I have no idea at what point my life may be ended, but should it be tomorrow, I know I will have lived without having left behind anything which will transcend the memories of those who have known me. This is true of most people who have lived and died on this earth. But I cannot accept this as a certainty. In writing myself, I am putting a little of my life in to the ether, where should I disappear, it will remain. It is likely that that is where this simple memoir of a simple girl will remain, but should chance favour me with just one person reading this in my absence, then for that moment, I will live again, and I will be remembered.

Flesh is transient, but words, especially virtual, indelible and quietly desperate words will linger on. Unnoticed perhaps, but with the hope of one day being uttered again. And this, this sad little truth, is why I write.

XX

The Student Myth

When two years ago, I submitted my UCAS application, I felt as if I'd just taken an enormous step towards the sort of life I want for myself. It didn't matter that my family had no clout, no money and no university tradition, I was officially making something of my life. Grades pending, interviews looming, what the heck, I was in the system, headed up.
Unfortunately, in the meantime, I've discovered a lot of pretty demoralising truths that they don't list as side effects of attempting to graduate

1) You are now, officially, bottom of the heap. It makes no difference if you are responsible, intelligent or morally upright, the rest of the world will treat you like a common vandal. Some of the perks will include filthy looks from the elderly, the assumption that you are constantly drunk, promiscuous AND lazy and companies attempting to rip you off because you are a "high risk" human. I could go on but I'd only get shouty and you really don't need to read that.

2) You don't actually have any rights. From the get go the university, your landlord and the government have you the your proverbial balls. They will tell you they care, run for the students, by the students is the favourite tagline (obviously not from the government). But it remains that if any one of those organizations changes its rules, guidelines or even the law, you just have to deal with it. I mean the fact that when you started in 2009 you'd leave with a just about repayable 20k of debt, which for an English graduate is pretty daunting, by 2012, the university could be allowed to charge you whatever it wants. And you can either drop out, and just casually pay back the three years you've already undertaken outside of the governments repayment scheme, or you can take the hike, and leave uni with 20,000 (+undisclosed amount £££) of debt you have no certainty of ever being able to pay off.

3) No one actually cares what grades you get. Sorry, but the completely sterile set up of the lecture hall, is not tempered by the vaguely more human structure of seminars and tutorials. Lecturers may be smart, interesting and driven, but interested they are not. Perhaps once in a while some exceptional young thing comes along to be lauded, branded as a genius and noticed by all. But for the rest of us, sitting week after week in the same room, we will be lucky if the lecturer ever learns our name, let alone what we aspire to and where our strength lies. The homogenisation process is instantaneous and almost inescapable.

Having said all of this, my time as a student has been incredibly blessed, but by the people I have met, not, as I had naively believed by my entrance in to an institution of higher education and intellectual betterment. In eighteen months I will be entering the world of uncertainty, unemployment, tax and ladder climbing, with a 20 grand well in my pocket, a piece of paper saying that I'm mildly intelligent to fight hordes of similarly poverty ridden, former social outcasts for access to one of the tiny pool of graduate careers. If all this should fail, the light I carry with me, is that at least I'll have plenty of friendly floors to sleep on when I finally get out of debtors jail.

XX