Dear Gemma Worrall...

Gemma Worrall
 looking fab!

...I’m sure you’re a very nice girl and all that.

That pink dress is too short and too cleavage-y, but I guess it has the desired effect with the men-folk, and there’s nothing wrong with a knock-off clutch or cheap-as-chips hair extensions... Nothing at all.

Chantelle Houghton looking…
well… not so fab

Seriously... I’m up for a bit of the chav-tastic... look at what that Chantelle Houghton made of herself... No... just look!

Seriously, though, I’m going to ask for my taxes back if you’re a typical example of young womanhood in your age bracket.

Did you go to school? Tell me... Did you? If you didn’t... If you bunked off three days a week, that’s fair enough. I won’t ask for a refund. But if you simply left early on the occasional Friday and were in class pretty well most of the time, even if you did sit at the back plaiting your hair and perfecting your eyeliner, you really should have learnt more than this, and I really do want my money back.

Can I have a refund, please, from the government on Ms Worrall’s education, and, while you’re at it, can I have a refund on all her classmates educations, too, and all the kids who got the equivalent education from the equivalent schools during that decade?

Can I?

Yeah... I thought not.

President Barrack Obama…
With flags and everything!

Prime Minister David Cameron
With… well… a door

Gemma. Barrack Obama... Let’s get his name right for a start... is not your President. I understand you’re from Blackpool. That makes you British, so Mr David Cameron is your Prime Minister, which is a bit like a President, but, you know, not quite. It would take too long to explain the differences here, so you’re just going to have to trust me on this one.

Now, Gemma, on the subject of Foreign Policy...

Oh bollocks to it!

Dear Gemma, dear, sweet, innocent girl. First, give up the fags and the booze, if you partake... Oh, and drugs... Just say NO! 

Now… on the subject of boys... Try as hard as you can to pick the cleverest, funniest boys you can get your claws into. In your case you should be OK because you’re pretty and boys are shallow. Key words (Yep, I can do computer speak too) Clever and Funny! Put 'good looking', 'dresses well' and 'smells good' on one side for a moment and 'popular' too, and concentrate on Clever and Funny! 

While you’re doing that, start reading a newspaper. I know it’s not the web, but AOL News just isn’t going to cut it. Oh, and by newspaper, I mean something that doesn’t have any red colouring-in on the front. The Sun, for example, isn’t a newspaper and neither is the Daily Mail or the Daily Express. If you are in any doubt about what a newspaper is then look for a REALLY big one!

No... I’ve lost her, haven’t I?

Yep... She’s gone!

Bye-bye Gemma Worrall... Bye-bye.

Bye-bye sanity!

Bye-bye World!


For those of you who didn't see it, Gemma Worrall posted this tweet yesterday. It and her very quickly went viral: Why is our president Barraco Barner getting involved with Russia, scary.

When You Know What’s Good For You

I’m writing this blog because I was asked to.

This doesn’t happen very often. In fact, I’m not at all sure that it’s happened before at all.

I do not belong to any writing bodies, and I don’t ever expect to. I’m not really a joiner-in. Not my thing. I also don’t think of myself as a writer of genre fiction, or a reader of it. I like to write and I like to read, and that’s the bottom line for me.

The HUGOs... Yep, that’s where this is going.

The Hugos are among the more prestigious awards in the SF/F calendar. They are taken seriously. They also sell books. So far, so marvelous. I’m very happy for all those lovely writers who have them, and for all those lovely writers who will receive them in 2014 and forever after.

This year there has been a furore about the Hugos, or, more particularly about the ceremony that is to be held to hand them out.

The World generally isn’t made very aware of the awards ceremony. The Hugo people turn up and the nominees, for the most part, turn up, and the movers and shakers in the world of SF/F writing and publishing turn up, and I’m sure everyone has a wonderful time. I wouldn’t know; as I said, I don’t belong to any writers organisations, and I’ve never been to an awards ceremony for any book gongs, genre or otherwise.

This year, there was a chance that the Hugos might have got some press. People, you and I for example, might think this is a good thing. Press coverage, especially celebrating books and writing has got to be a good thing, right?

The Hugo people had a meeting and decided to invite Jonathan Ross to present the Hugo Awards. Jonathan Ross agreed, and even donated his time for free to the cause. Jonathan Ross is a big fan of SF and of comics and movies. He’s a bit of an advocate. He’s made tv programs about this corner of culture. Good for him.

As I understand it, some of the people present at the meeting weren’t very keen on Mr Ross being invited to take on this particular role, and as I understand it they protested pretty vociferously. I wasn’t there, remember, so I can’t be sure what went on.

We all know what went on afterwards, though, and we could all have predicted it.

In this internet age, in this age of social networking, what goes on inside a room where people disagree, a lot, doesn’t stay within those four walls for very long. Pretty quickly people who had been in that meeting, protesting about the choice of Jonathan Ross to present the Hugos were voicing their opinions outside those four walls all over Twitter, and, I imagine, FaceBook and other networking sites, too. Naturally enough the SF/F world and his or her partner began to join in, and suddenly in no time at all there was a debacle.

Jonathan Ross resigned.

Not everybody likes Mr Ross. Not everybody likes anybody.

I like people to stick to the thing that they’re good at, and, for me, that pretty well means that Jonathan Ross should stick to presenting things and interviewing people and being a chap off the telly who talks a fair bit. I think there are much better comic book writers and he should leave people with that particular talent to get on with that particular job.

Not everybody in the SF/F world, by which I mean women, likes Jonathan Ross, because they consider him to be non-inclusive and misogynistic. There is some evidence for Mr Ross taking cheap shots at women, and some of them have backfired on him pretty spectacularly. One of them actually got him fired from a pretty decent job at the BBC. We all know the man’s track record. The people on the Hugo committee knew it when they invited Mr Ross to present at their awards ceremony. They also knew his track record as a presenter, as a celebrity who would draw in the news media and as a bona fide SF/F enthusiast.

The committee made a choice, and I’m guessing they made a choice under the rules of the committee with a quorum at that meeting.

Now comes the bit where I’m ambivalent.

I’m all for grassroots reactions to things. Without protest, without us all standing up for what we believe in, and without generations of good men and women resorting to some pretty drastic action over the past century the women’s suffrage movement would not have prevailed in Britain and neither would the civil rights movement in the States.

This isn’t on that scale, but, on the whole, it’s only right that people stand up and are counted on the things that matter to them.

In the end, it’s what happened in that committee meeting in that room that really counts. The women on that committee might well have had a point. I wonder if they couldn’t have made their point more convincingly, though. I wonder whether the men in that meeting might not have listened more attentively if those women hadn’t used their imaginations instead of getting angry and spreading vitriol across the internet.

Jonathan Ross and Jane Goldman
at another awards ceremony

I wonder if they shouldn’t have simply lobbied for Jane Goldman to present the Hugo Awards instead of Jonathan Ross, or maybe the two factions might have compromised and made the whole thing into a family outing and got two for the price of one, which, let’s face was, apparently nothing. 

I wonder how rewarding it is to label a man a misogynist with his gorgeous, hugely successful wife standing next to him.

Who knows?

It’s all rather moot now, isn’t it?

The First Lady Debate

Politics in the United States of America are pretty conservative.

So conservative in fact that I think the left wing party there is pretty much in tune with the right wing here, and that America has no genuine left wing in mainstream politics at all.

Of course, here in Blighty, we’re heading in the same direction, but that’s probably a blog of another stripe.

In any case, America is not known, by me at least, as being terribly politically progressive.

You might wonder if that’s why that little infant nation has never had a woman president.

I don’t wonder. I have a theory.

Well... of course I do. You’d expect me to... I have a theory about pretty well everything, after all.

I call this theory ‘The First Lady Debate’.

We don’t have a First Lady. The wife of our Prime Minister has no defined role in our political leader’s life in office. Why should she have? I’m not sure that anywhere else in the World is such a role the accepted norm. But in the United States of America the wife, or should I say the spouse... No, definitely The Wife... of the President has a role in the Whitehouse, and therefore in the country.

The very fact that the President’s spouse is expected to be a ‘wife’ or more particularly the ‘First Lady’ is a problem to begin with. It suggests by its very nature that the President is expected to be a man. It institutionalises the role of the leader of an an entire nation as essentially masculine.

Where do I begin with the sexism? Aren’t there laws about this, even in America?

The first really credible female candidate for President of the United States of America was Hilary Clinton. She was running against a black man.

Of course America doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to racial discrimination, either, so, frankly, I was pretty happy when it looked like the job was going to go to either a woman or a racial minority, the last time around. That would make them stand up and take notice! 

The black man won, and I’m down with that.

Hilary Clinton was at a disadvantage though, and here’s why.

The United States of America has a role for a First Lady. It has a role for the President’s spouse. This suggests that the office is, in some way, held by a couple. The Family rules in the USA, and in any patriarchal society the man rules the roost. The man is the head of the household. What on God’s green Earth is a man to do in the role of ‘First Lady’, and, what’s more, what is the President to do if she happens to be a woman and her husband decides to swing his weight around.

The implication is, of course, that if the United States were to vote for a woman as President, they would in fact put her husband in the role, because, as all good wives must, she would, naturally, end up doing his bidding. No one wants the elected President to be overruled by her unelected husband, so, probably better not to elect a woman at all. Women are weak. Women are ruled by their husbands. Love honour and obey... Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be? Isn’t that the natural order of things?

Hilary Clinton was the first credible female candidate for President of the USA, and just look who her husband was... President Bill Clinton. There are term limits in politics in American. He’d served two terms as president and he wasn’t allowed to serve a third. If President Clinton became the first ‘First Gentleman’ wasn’t that just handing him back the reins? Wasn’t that tantamount to giving him a third term in office? His wife, if she was a good wife would bend to his will, surely? And if she wasn’t a good wife then she couldn’t possibly be a good woman and so she had no business being President, surely?

Now extrapolate that idea out and shouldn’t Hilary Clinton as President, and any woman president, bow to the authority of any of her male advisors? Shouldn’t they all stand in the role of husband to her if she were truly a good woman?

The United States has screwed itself.

Hilary Clinton would have been better off without a husband if she wanted to be President of America, except that without a husband all kinds of suspicions would have fallen upon her head. Was she a harridan? A witch? Heaven forbid, a lesbian?

It’s just a theory, of course, but it seems to me that the institution of First Lady presents the electorate of the United States with an impassable conundrum. 

We won’t see a woman in that particular job in my lifetime. I’d put money on it. All the time the American public is more concerned with the muscularity of Michelle Obama’s arms or the cut of her cardigans or the height of her heels, no one is ever going to seriously consider whether a woman is ever going to succeed in this job.

Sam Cam? Who cares? Precisely nobody on this side of the pond, and Mrs Clegg doesn’t even use Nick’s name...

On the other hand, for what it was worth, and it wasn’t worth a damn in my books, we did have a female Prime Minister once upon a time.

Go figure.

Let’s Have More Education

Yes Let’s.

I’m all for it.

I extol the virtues of getting an education. I keep telling people to get one. Well... some of the time. I’m not at all sure that all kids should be going to university. I’m certainly not sure a lot of kids should put their lives into financial hock to get second rate degrees in second rate subjects at, frankly, third rate universities. I wonder if many of them wouldn’t be better off getting jobs and working their way up through the ranks of their chosen careers.

I was talking to a young graduate only the other day. She finished university last summer and got a first in accountancy and management. She can’t get a position in a big city accountancy firm to qualify as an accountant, because she doesn’t have good enough A’level grades... I know! Shocking isn’t it? She has a first in an undergraduate degree in accountancy and management, and accountancy firms are checking out her A’level grades!

This, believe it or not, is common practice. Screw up at school and there’s no making good at university any more.

I was reading recently that one of the Labour Party’s latest initiatives is to extend learning in schools so that all students will be required to study English and Maths until they leave school at eighteen.

My first reaction was that this has got to be a good thing.

Then I stopped in my tracks, because I had the most awful thought. What if... Oh My God... What if the idea actually means that all those kids who used to be required to learn a certain amount of Maths and English by the time they threw in the towel at sixteen now get two extra years to learn the same amount of stuff?

Is that simply a waste of time?

Is that simply a cop out?

And, perhaps worst of all... Is it just totally, utterly demoralising? For the teachers and for the kids?

I just think it might be better to get kids through this stuff fast. It’s a bloody slog for those who hate the academic stuff, and it’s a bloody awful slog for the teachers who have to teach it while spending a huge percentage of their time just trying to keep some discipline in the classroom. Can we make the case that concentrating on this stuff, on the basics, and really getting it done, brutally, in short, sharp, bearable chunks, at least once a day, and possibly even twice a day, might be better than spreading the whole unendurable mess over an extra two years?

What is the drop out rate going to be like? I can’t believe it won’t be higher among the sixteen to eighteen year olds than it already is among the fourteen to sixteen year olds.

The sixth form has always been where kids get to take their electives, stretch themselves in the areas where they at least have some interests, and maybe even find their feet a little bit, both academically and socially. Isn’t this where we at least try to prepare them for something a little nearer to the real world they might end up living in?

Of course it’s useful to be able to budget earnings, and everyone should be able to read, but, beyond that, the bottom third of most classes in most schools isn’t going to have a great deal of use for the more esoteric stuff they are expected to learn in their English and Maths classes.

Why torture them?

Why torture their teachers?

Isn’t it all hard enough?

If I’m completely wrong and the Labour Party believes that all school kids require a greater understanding of English and Maths than the last three generations of British school kids had by the time they finished their compulsory round of those subjects at sixteen then I’d like to know why.

As it happens, I studied both of these subjects to A’level and, while I certainly enjoyed my English classes, and went on to study the subject at university, the Maths was a washout for me.

Who needs calculus or advanced trigonometry, apart from mathematicians and scientists? No kid in school in the twenty-first century... That’s who. The same goes for English, no matter my preference for the subject.

Kids need boundaries and routines, and they need discipline and good teaching. They don’t need to be ‘handled’ and they certainly don’t need this sort of initiative.

Work will always expand to fill the time allotted to it. Please, for goodness sake, can we not waste any more of these kids’ or their teachers’ time... It’s far too precious! 

The Truth about Sloppy Reporting

On Mondays I like to pick something from the Sunday papers to talk about in my blog. Today is no exception.

I often pick something newsworthy, or at the very least snark-worthy, and I suppose this counts as a snark, but it’s not exactly topical.

To some extent we all believe we can rely on the news, maybe not the gutter press, but probably the broadsheets. We all pretty much rely on what we read as being some sort of version of the truth.

It isn’t.

Not only is more and more opinion creeping into our daily dose of news reporting. Not only is every news journalist expected to have some kind of opinion, but then this happens:

...arch-villain Auric Goldfinger the quintessential enemy of James Bond, whose closest companion was a fluffy white cat.

Wrong!

Moulin de la Galette by Van Gogh
for sale

The article was about the sale of a Van Gogh painting, which was what made it interesting to me. The painting was owned, apparently, by an American industrialist who inspired Ian Fleming to create Goldfinger. Well, do you know what? I have to doubt that. I have to doubt that because the reporter didn’t know that the damned cat was owned by Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and so the dominos begin to fall, and I have no idea whether anything in the article means anything.

Now, I have to doubt whether anything that Vanessa Thorpe, Arts and Media Correspondent for the Observer, writes means anything... And the dominos keep on falling... And, since the Observer employs Ms Thorpe, I have to wonder whether anything the newspaper chooses to print actually means anything.

I could, I suppose read more articles on this subject. I could, I suppose do my own research and find out about this painting, but that’s exactly why I read the papers: to find out what’s going on in the World. To find out what’s being reported on and to learn something, not to find daft errors and then go on fact-checking missions to discover what else is wrong with any given articles, or to try to home in on the actual facts of a story.

And what about the articles I read where there are errors that I don’t spot because I happen not to be familiar with the subject matter? What about them?

In yesterday’s blog, I talked a bit about Google and fact-checking. It’s not difficult or complicated. Yes, I know, the news moves fast, but this was an article for a Sunday newspaper, and there was time to fact-check. All Ms Thorpe needed to do was type Bond Villains into Google and she was good to go. And, let’s face it, if she wasn’t sure of her facts, she didn’t need to describe the owner of the painting in terms of being the template for Goldfinger at all.

In fact, a Van Gogh selling might be news, but this little tidbit about the painting’s previous owner isn’t. This little factoid is window dressing. When did our news start coming with these fripperies? When did straight reporting stop? When did emotive language and sidebars become a thing?

All this stuff queers the pitch. All this stuff takes up room that could be better utilised reporting on real things, informing us about what’s really going on in the World, without editorialising. That way, maybe we’d all be a little more politically aware and a damned sight more savvy.

Ignorance is Boobs

The internet is a wonderful thing.

I use it a lot.

I am a quick study for most research purposes when it comes to writing. I like to skim the surface for incidentals. Once in a while, if I want to do in-depth research, I find a good book by a reliable source on a subject, and I study it thoroughly, but, for the most part, Wiki, or various random websites, cross-checked, naturally, will do the job for me.

I regularly put key search words into Google, hit return and scroll down for likely websites. I generally get what I’m looking for within seconds and move on fast.

I don’t necessarily think of myself as a visual person, but I suppose I must be. I have half of a Fine Art degree after all. I know it sounds weird, but I broke off my studies when the husband began having seizures four years ago and couldn’t be left alone. I never went back. I might one day...

... Anyway, I don’t necessarily think of myself as a visual person, but some of the things I write involve quite a lot of visualisation, so, when I’m looking for reference or research I regularly hit ‘images’ instead of ‘websites’. Often that’s the quickest way to find the information I’m looking for, quite often the quickest way to the most useful websites. 

Shortcuts are good when you’re as busy as I usually am.

Here’s the thing, though.

It’s all about images.

It doesn’t matter what keywords I put into the search field, if I ask for images that’s what I get, and if I get images I will, invariably get boobs.

It’s a funny old world, isn’t it, when you just can’t avoid boobs?

The internet is a wonderful resource, but heaven save me from boobs.

to be fair, most of the boobs are pretty spectacular. They’re firm and round and pert, and all kinds of good. I would even go so far as to say that I envy some of these women their boobs, except that I rarely see their faces, and it’s hard to envy women that I don't get a chance to look in the eye. 

The bottom line is that I just can’t help thinking that when I type primitive weapons into the search field and hit return I should be pretty safe. I shouldn’t have to expect to be presented with images of breasts, however attractive they might be, however aesthetically pleasing the average red-blooded male might find them.

I’m not an average red-blooded male, I’m a woman writer looking for material on primitive weapons for crying out loud.

A Proper Tit buried among all the other Tits
on my Google Image Search

While I’m at it, I’m going to apologise to all my women readers for the use of the word boobs. A boob is, by definition, a foolish or stupid person or an embarrassing mistake. It is only, informally and ranking last in my dictionary, a woman’s breast. The word tit, by the same token is a type of bird or a noun in the phrase “tit for tat” before it is vulgar slang for a breast. Knocker is short for door knocker, is someone who criticises and, again in last place is vulgar slang for a woman’s breast. Wab, thank goodness does not appear in my dictionary at all. I’m not going to put the word into the search field in Google, but there’s a good bet I’d see an awful lot of breasts if I did, although I very much doubt many of them would be round or pert, given my understanding of the connotations of that particular word.

It strikes me that you might not all be familiar with the colloquialism that clearly is wabs. I urge you not to become familiar with it. In fact, I beg you… Too late.

Like so many other things in this World we live in, the internet has become a male-centric place filled with male-centric imagery, and the most male-centric of all is the innocent, wonderful, life-giving breast.

If only more men would see them that way… and, for that matter, more women too.

Young Love

It will surprise no one when I mention that my parents met in 1954 when my mother was sixteen and my father was twenty-three. It probably won’t surprise anyone very much when I say that they were married two years later when my mother was still only eighteen.

My parents getting married in 1956

How they married is another story, and a romantic one, but something I’ll save for a future blog.

The fact is that in 1956 it wasn’t all that unusual for people to fall in love and marry young. I can tell you that the average age for a woman to marry in 1956 was twenty, and for a man it was twenty-two. My mother was a little on the young side, my father was a bit older than average.

The dort has been dating the boyff for eighteen months and they’re very happy together. We love him, and we like him for her. Recently people have begun to ask if it’s serious. I tell them that they’re just kids, that they’re very young. I tell them that they don’t have to do anything but enjoy themselves. I happen to think it’s good advice.

The boyff is at the beginning of a career and the dort hasn’t finished college yet. They’re both twenty-one. There’s a long way to go and a lot to do before they have to think about being responsible for one another. They barely have to be responsible for themselves yet.

I met the husband when I was seventeen and he was sixteen. The year we met, the average age for a man to marry was twenty-five and for a woman it was twenty-two. We finally did get married just shy of my fortieth birthday... There were circumstances in between... Lots of circumstances. Nevertheless my feelings for the husband have not changed in over thirty years.

The average age for a man to marry now is thirty and for a woman it is twenty-eight. That seems much more sensible on the face of it, but then you start to look at divorce statistics and you've got to wonder. Of course divorce is a good thing, and of course a lot of people stayed in terrible marriages because they had little choice fifty years ago, but I do wonder if there are other factors.

Here’s my point. As adults we might be a little afraid of young people falling in love, of them forming adult relationships and taking on adult responsibilities when they’re too young to know what they’re doing. We did it and we know how hard it can be. The truth is that it’s demanding at any age. The truth is, if you don’t fall in love when you’re young when the hell are you going to do it? The truth is, I’m not entirely sure that dating more people for longer is actually better, that it actually gives a person a better idea of what he or she wants in a partner. I’m not sure it doesn’t just lead to confusion and bitterness and cynicism. 

I can’t help thinking that couples who grow together stay together, and maybe the best chance of that is to follow your heart if you happen to be lucky enough to fall in love when you're young.

@52Betty brought this subject to my mind. She tweeted recently that she has been with her partner for eighteen years, which is precisely half of her life. People said it wouldn’t last. People have been saying that about teenagers in love since time immemorial I suspect.

Maybe we should all stop saying it, wish them well, and just let them get on with it. Some of them will make it and some of them won't, but it was ever thus.