14 April 2008

I was reading an article about feminism. Now these are Good Things, both feminism and educating myself about it by reading the newspaper.
I am wholly on board with the sentiments and do not shy away from the F-word. I am not afraid of being branded with the whole dungaree/doc marten/man-hating/butch cliche as I know that feminism comes in many forms and that this stereotype is not actually the case of many forward thinking females. I've read Wollstonecraft and Woolf, revere Greer and hold any ambitious, campaigning, strong woman in the highest esteem.
I am also a very bad, bad, shallow, bad person.
There was a picture accompanying the article. It was of a woman holding up a banner in what I would guess as being the 1970's. The banner read 'Judge women as people, not as wives'. What I did not immediately think was 'I hear you sister! Solidarity! A beautiful and universal message that should be acknowledged! Right on!'. What I instead thought was 'I love that woman's headscarf! I wonder if I could arrange my hair like that. And where did she get that fabulous jacket?! Ahh, the seventies was such a cool fashion age!'.
Now this is A Bad Thing. Germaine would be ashamed of me. Must try harder to curb my instinctive habit of concentrating on the aesthetic.
'They may have struggled to get their voices heard, to be treated equally, to have freedom but, damn, they looked good whilst doing so!'. No, Anna, no.

9 April 2008

Big Baby

Ahh, glorious Northumberland! The rolling hills! The rural wildernesses! The inevitable regression...

As I sink my feet back into the mud, I sink back into spoilt brattish child mode. I sit sullen as I watch the teenagers crash off to parties and the pub (of which I will be regaled with tales of later), which is arguably more old womanish than baby-like. However, I chuck my rattle out of the pram whenever possible to assert my juvenile deliquency.
Demanding entertainment (with me in charge of viewing options), parents pandering to my every whim (foot massages), slurping whilst eating and getting it all over my face (though this was the case for everybody, as we were eating melon, so I am just about excused), hoping that I'll sleep through the night (in the foetal position, naturally), throwing tantrums in exasperation over the behaviour of others (though often half-mockingly), using expressive noises and nonsense words in place of the articulate speech that evades my unevolved mind. All symptoms of baby behaviour.

It's a shame we no longer have that double buggy affair that we used for the boys. A seat for each bumcheek and I'd be away!

1 April 2008

Seductive Sentence

I think this may be the most perfect sentence ever crafted:

'The chauffeur, a Russian czar of the period of Ivan the Terrible, was a self-appointed guide, and the resplendent names - Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo - began to glow through their torpid camouflage, whispering of old kings come here to dine or die, of rajahs tossing Buddahs' eyes to English ballerinas, of Russian princes turning the weeks into Baltic twilights in the lost caviare days.'

What a shame I didn't write it.

Sometimes there is just no beating a bit of purple prose. I am green with envy over the writer's style. It makes me smile, and want to nestle further into the folds of my duvet and the folds of my imagination.

Perhaps that's why Fitzgerald's wife went mad. She was driven so far into her own head, pushed too far into her own imagination by the prose created by her husband, that she could never escape, and thus remained entrapped and caged.

If I start going bonkers, wrestle the book from my hands.