Who talks in riddles, who talks in reasons?

Denny and I are on holiday in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria - our apartment is a stone's throw from La Playa de las Canteras. The waves were huge today!

It was 23 degrees, glorious sunshine with only the occasional cloud, and the breakers were enormous. The bay is a perfect crescent with a line of rocks making a D out of it, visible at full tide as an unbroken line of white wave crests. At low tide you can see the rocks forming an eerily straight barrier. The big waves usually wear themselves out on it, so the water that arrives at the beach is usually nice and calm. But this afternoon at full tide the waves were so high they rode straight over the barrier, massive breakers twelve feet high - and it felt a lot higher when you were right in front of one.

Denny and I had done some lying and walking on the beach in the morning, but there had been more clouds than sun, so we went to the gym instead and lifted things. We came out again to blazing sunshine, so we dashed back to the apartment and changed into our beach things, bought giant protein shakes and walked along the beach in the shallows swigging them out of the bottle and feeling happy. The waves were making grabs at our shoulder bags, so we put them on the top of one of the sand dunes and splashed back into the surf in our swimwear and sunglasses. The waves were proper playful. One got our bags wet after only a couple of minutes, and we had to rethink how far back they needed to be. I watched a young man near us run gleefully into the ocean and do a dive roll forward somersault into a wave right as it crested. I wanted to play too!

So I left Denny with the bags and went for it. I can't remember the last time I swam in waves that big. It took me a while to get the hang of it. The pull back out to sea in the shallows was so strong it was hard to keep your footing, and then when the foam rushed in it was so powerful it swept me off my feet more than once.

Out a bit deeper and it's vertical walls of dark blue water rushing towards you. If they break before they reach you, you just have to try and stand firm; if they haven't broken yet you can jump up and float over the top. But if they break right on top of you then there's a risk you'll be pushed under and tumbled head to toe along the sea bed, the force of the water pinning you down until the wave passes and you can splutter back up. The first time that happened I lost the green heart shaped sunglasses I bought at Head Space Stores last year. They were sacrificed to the sea god.

After the second time I got pushed under, I remembered how to do it; if the wave is about to break on your head you hold your breath and swim straight through it under the crest. It only takes a second because the wave is moving faster than you are, so you emerge on the other side an instant later in smooth waters. Albeit without your sunglasses. I thought I saw them floating in the distance a couple of times, but I must have been imagining it; the sea never gave them back.

Out past the breakers, treading water, the waves are magnificent. Rolling mountains and valleys moving much faster than you, immensely powerful, so all you can do is bob up and down on them like a ship. I felt like a tiny speck, at the mercy of immense forces. It's a fantastic adrenaline rush to watch a cliff face of water twice your height racing towards you, not knowing if you're going to be able to ride over it or have to dive through it.

Salt in my eyes and my nose and my hair, the sun dazzling, the waves beating down on me faster than my heartbeat, each one treading the heels of the next without giving me time to get my breath back. Fucking incredible.

Once my foot struck rock and I thought maybe I should head back in, I realised it was easier said than done; the undertow was powerful and the breakers hazardous. The ocean pawed at my feet, not wanting to let me go. I managed to escape eventually, and then after breathing hard, laughing my ass off and telling Denny how brilliant it was, I dived right back in for more.

I'm always in awe of the immensity of the ocean, but the experience of it up close, towering over you, about to lift you up or smash you down, is unlike any other. Those moments when it tumbled me down under water were profound. There's nothing you can do except stay calm, hold your breath and wait for it to let you up. It's like being played with by a giant, deadly predator, braving a dash between its paws until it catches you and pins you down, and that's it, you're helpless until it decides to let you get up again. The booming splendour of its growls, the crushing strength of its pounces. I wrestled the waves for a while, surrendered to their power and emerged unscathed, and they wanted to keep playing long after I was exhausted. Walking back up the beach, exhilaration coursing through my body and salt crusting in my hair, I could swear I heard the ocean purring.

I've recently taken up parkour/freerunning. denny got into it a year ago, and I've spent most of the intervening period tolerating him incessantly showing me freerunning videos with varying degrees of patience. (Most of the videos are of people with very advanced skills, and I find them more off-putting than anything else: I'll never be that much of a ninja, so what's the point?)

A few weeks ago, sick of never getting to see him on Sundays, I went along with him to a training session. I had a good time, despite being relatively unfit, started learning about how to jump, and enjoyed throwing myself with determination at various walls until I managed to scale them.

After that I started insisting that Denny show me parkour videos made by women, such as Tam with a Cam. These felt a bit more accessible. But the video I found most motivating was by TraceurSteel, one of the Supa XXL Sunday Trainings crew (this is the group that Denny mostly trains with, and which I had gone along to), which showed him warming up, stretching, drilling and conditioning, including trying and failing the same thing over and over again. This was much more immediately inspiring for me than a showreel of successes.

I went back a couple more times. Today was my fourth session training with the Supa XXL crew, but this was the first time I really got it.

The previous two times I'd been out, I found myself getting very easily demoralised. Surrounded by ninjas doing things I couldn't hope to do, I'd struggle to find anything I could have a stab at. You have to design your own exercises in parkour, and as a newbie, without either confidence or competence, I sucked at it. I relied totally on Denny to find things that might be within my range, and coax me through trying them. Failure (which is inevitable) would leave me feeling discouraged and hopeless, and Denny had to spend a lot of time persuading me that it was worth persisting. By the time I achieved what I'd been working at, I'd be so cross with myself for having made such a meal of it that I wouldn't be fully able to enjoy the victory.

Intellectually I knew that failure was inevitable, persistence crucial, but I couldn't flip the switch in my head that found the journey fun and successes rewarding. Everything was just difficult. Finding things I could have a go at was really hard; it all involved throwing myself at new techniques that required skills I didn't have yet, and just failing over and over again until my body started to learn what was required of it.

My second time out, I tweaked my ankle ("ankle thingy" seems to be the technical parkour terminology, or "top bit" - it's when you land a little short of a wall jump and jerk your toe up too sharply, causing a mild sprain in the top bit of your ankle) and it was five days until I could put weight on it properly again.

I've been doing fitness stuff for a couple of years ago now - starting out with pilates and swimming, and moving on to yoga and weightlifting, both of which I now do regularly. Still, in parkour training I struggle with my strength/bodyweight ratio.

Added to that, outdoor urban parkour is fucking terrifying. Everything is made of brick and concrete that will take your skin off if you slip or miss or land funny. The third time I went out, Denny taught me to lazy vault over a rounded railing in the park, which was nice and friendly. When I tried to apply this skill to a brick wall, I skinned the outside of one of my thighs and got a bruise that lasted over a week. Jumps that are perfectly doable on the ground become psychologically impossible when you're doing them from one wall to another, with small, precise take-off and landing areas, two or three or four or more feet up. Every repetition of an exercise comes with a fear of skinning your shins or landing on your face. If you want to practice a jump you just have to conquer your fear, again and again and again.

You don't know what you can do until you try, so you have to try a little bit of everything. And, like the first time I attempted a cat leap, when you square off against something, look at it, psych yourself up to it, try it - and then come nowhere near to it and realise how many months of work lie ahead of you before your body is ready for this particular movement, it's hard not to feel discouraged.

This aspect of parkour - the mental conditioning, the psychological component - is well documented, and Denny wrote about it after his training session the week after my first time out. Anyway, I didn't do a scary double rail precision like he did, so I'm sure there are plenty more revelations in my future, but I felt like I started to get my head around this today.

At the first spot we went to, a kids' playground, everyone launched themselves at different jumps and balances and climbs, and I just looked at all of it and knew it was beyond my level. I had a go swinging from monkey bars, but I'm not strong enough for that, so I had to cheat by kicking one leg up on the far side and hoiking myself across that way - but after a few goes of that I had blisters forming on my fingers, and had to give them a rest.

I talked to another woman who was there for the first time. She was a dancer and had been going to indoor classes, where you could practice things at different heights made of less skin-destroying materials. That seemed like a much better idea. I started to think that I was approaching this the wrong way.

Denny walked with me in search of things for me to do, and once we were out of sight of the others I couldn't stop tears coming. I felt totally despondent, not good enough and not even able to do anything to help myself improve. Why was I even bothering? I just wasn't fit enough.

I dried the tears pretty quickly, and after some hugging Denny found a rounded border on the floor which I could practice balancing on. I sucked at it, but it was something to work on. Then I had a go at railing traverses, at which point the blisters on my hands started popping, and we did some precisions on the square tiled floor.

Thankfully, the next spot was much more friendly, with a lot more options for n00bs. I found a railing to practice my lazy vaults with another lady who was also a beginner. One of the guys, Jonnie, drifted over and started offering encouragement and advice. He taught me the basics of a step vault, which gave me something else to practice. I met TraceurSteel in person, who gave me some useful pointers with the step vault and kindly held my fingertips while I walked along the rounded rail so I could get used to the height and the movement, since I can't yet do it without a support. Basically, everyone was as friendly, welcoming and encouraging as you could wish. I practiced lots of vaulting and precisions, did some conditioning exercises like quadrupedal movement and monkey walks, tried a cat balance on the round railing and fell off. The sun was out, we were clambering and jumping all over things, people were being nice to me, I had things to work on and I was having a good time.

We moved on again. The next stop had a couple of very high walls over some garages at different heights, a long way apart - twelve feet, perhaps more. Steve, the not-a-leader, ran up to the lower wall and did a cat leap from that to the higher one; then did another cat leap between the two highest walls of the same height. The three second best ninjas lined up at the edge, looking at it. People got cameras out; the rest of us gathered to watch.

Watching these incredibly strong, athletic men sniff at that high, long jump was a revelation. They would walk up to it, look at it, focus, make like they were going to do it, then walk away. They'd go and look at a harder jump, pretend they were going to do it, then walk back to the first one and see if it seemed easier. They'd jog up to it, slow down, bail, jog back. One of them kept clapping his hands, psyching himself up, saying "yes, yes, I'm going to do it, come on" out loud... then still not actually doing it. The other was quieter, more focused. Eventually it was the quiet one who went for it. He made it. The other had no choice after that. Both of them were fine. It was well within their physical limits. It was the mental challenge of launching yourself, off a brick wall six feet in the air, at another brick wall twice as high and just as far away, that was the tricky bit.



Until then, I'd been thinking that the reason I was so afraid, the reason I was finding it so difficult, was that I was unfit, I was a n00b, I was shit. Watching the psychological process writ large with two of the most skilled practitioners in the group, I learned that it doesn't get easier as you improve. It gets harder. The more physically capable you are, the harder the mental challenges you have to face in order to push yourself.

One of the ninjas laughed when I tried to express this to him. "Yep, it never goes away, it just gets more and more horrible." You'd think this would be demoralising, but for some reason it was exactly what I needed to know. This fear I'd been facing, it wasn't an impediment to learning parkour. It was parkour.

I followed a small group down the road in search of more manageable challenges. My fellow beginner climbed up the corner of a wall, three or more metres high, where the bricks overlapped and made regular footholds, and I followed her up. Denny and I found a flat-topped rail, narrow but manageable, where I practiced rail walking until I got more steady. I learned to turn around on the rail, to traverse it sideways, and realised when squatting down to say goodbye to someone that I could squat pretty comfortably with my toes on the rail and my bum on my heels, so that led to me doing rail squats while Denny filmed me. (I tried a one-legged pistol squat too, but those are much harder.)

Back on the road, different conversations helped the pieces fall into place. It's not about comparing yourself with anyone. You just have to learn to see the places where you can practice, and do those things. Persistence is always, always rewarded. It's about not giving up, about having the imagination to see the opportunities presented by the landscape. There's always something you can do and if there isn't a perfectly placed opportunity to push yourself, you can practice things you can already do and work on moving more quietly, more smoothly, with more control and flow.

I got talking to a young woman who had just joined the group and who had also mostly done indoor training. I heard a lot of people saying that indoor training was fun but not really applicable to outdoor, as it gave you an inflated sense of your own abilities and once you were out, the brick seemed even scarier. I started to understand that there aren't any shortcuts: getting out and facing the brick is the only way you're ever going to conquer it.

I was feeling more confident now, and at the next spot my new friend was the one standing around not knowing what to do with herself. It was fun calling her over with a suggestion for somewhere she could practice vaults, and encouraging her to find things to try. I was getting better at spotting things within my range - and at the same time, my range was increasing by the hour.

By the end of the day, I'd improved my lazy vaults and step vaults, done some related conditioning, learned how to do plyos (precision jumps in a sequence, where you use the energy of the middle jump to power the next ones and can go even further than from a standing start) and spent a good half hour hopping from wall to wall like a bunny, had a go at a run-up-and-stride jump and stuck a perfect landing, and worked on getting my landings more precise and more quiet. I'd climbed and clambered and crossed obstacles. I'd been encouraged and encouraged others, and by the end of the day I was happily making precision jumps longer and higher than at the start.


Best precision distance (with a good landing) 12 May 2013: seven of my feets.

Today was five hours of training (six hours out and about in all, but I don't include all the walking between spots). By hour three, I was euphoric. I danced rings around Denny as we walked along, and couldn't stop bouncing. I felt strong and lean and energetic, and I saw training opportunities everywhere I looked. I was full of exercise endorphins, but not only that, I was filled with that confidence and adventurousness that comes from conquering your fear.

Parkour is about traversing obstacles as efficiently as possible. The thing is, most of those obstacles are mental.

Another interesting thing. When I came to do cool-down stretches, to my utter surprise I discovered that I was the most flexible I've ever been. I've been doing yoga for two years and my hamstring and hip flexibility has always been very poor; I've never been able to touch my toes, and even sitting upright with my legs stretched out in front of me is very painful along my tight hamstrings.

Five hours of parkour training achieved what two years of yoga failed. I could touch my toes from standing, and in a forward bend. I spent half an hour with a group of the others doing various stretches, and I felt looser, more flexible and stronger than I can ever remember.

Today is definitely a day when I leveled up in real life. I want to feel like this as often as I can. I am officially hooked.



Photos © Deepak Dembla 2013

If I see one more high-income homeowner going "middle class? affluent? ME?" after using the class calculator, I will slap them.

Under-estimating your own class status is common. I'd go so far as to say it's one of the social patterns that maintains structural inequality. It's also something we all seem to be taught.

I grew up thinking I wasn't middle class. I'd grown up in tiny urban terraced houses in the Midlands - one of them was even on a council estate! - with parents working shifts in the NHS. We couldn't afford posh holidays or trainers or clothes or a large screen telly, and sometimes we couldn't afford another food shop at the end of the month. But we always got by. Holidays were self-catering in France or the UK, or house swaps. We had a home full of books and computers that my kind, clever dad built from spare parts.

By the time I was 16, my parents were both vicars with multiple post-graduate degrees, so that possibly made us middle class by default. But lower-middle, surely? For some reason, that distinction felt very important; I didn't want anyone to think we were wealthy when, clearly, we weren't.

Except one of the reasons money was short was that my parents were paying school fees. Okay, okay, private school wouldn't have been affordable without scholarships and bursaries, and it wasn't one of the big old posh ones or anything. But still.

Private school meant I was surrounded by kids from families more affluent than mine, and I felt lower class by comparison. The same thing happened at Cambridge. But being able to afford private school is pretty much 100% textbook "wealthy", even if you have to scrimp and save to do so, and no matter what your background, I think Oxbridge is one of those magical middle (possibly upper) class ticky boxes. Looking back, it's amazing that I ever thought there was the tiniest chance I might not qualify.

In the media, people who are, frankly, fucking posh identify themselves as "middle class". I was startled to discover that Miranda Hart's character in Miranda (which in every other way I have come to utterly adore) identifies as such when I would have pegged her family as upper class or old money. If people posher and richer than you call themselves middle class, you must be lower than that, right? The kids of well-educated people working low-paying or insecure jobs in academia, the arts or the public or third sector are reluctant to identify as middle class because they think it means "wealthy", and very few people believe themselves to be wealthy.

Defining wealthy is pretty hard. For a start, pretty much everyone who can afford to rent in the UK is wealthy on a global scale. But within our culture, everyone places the line somewhere different - and most people place it higher than where they perceive themselves. Does "wealthy" mean being able to buy food each month and afford the rent/mortgage? Does it mean being able to take holidays, eat out, run a car? What if someone gives you a free holiday, does that count? Does owning a home automatically qualify you? How about two homes? What if your income is high but all your money goes on debt repayment or servicing a substance addiction?

Class isn't just about financial security; it's about wealth of opportunity, and our relation to power. Are you able to teach yourself new skills, or convince someone of an idea? Those things give you power. Education is a huge part; not just whether you have a degree and where you got it, but how intellectual your home environment was growing up. That plays into the cultural hobbies and interests factor identified in the class calculator. People with educated and/or cultured parents are more likely to have a wide range of social contacts and cultural interests as adults. Those aren't just a measure of how posh you are; social networks and cultural education are a form of wealth.

We are all brought up to underestimate our class. Placing yourself high on the class scale is seen as being distasteful, snobbish or immodest. But it's also a trend that results in people underestimating their own privilege. Thinking you aren't well off when you are - normalising a level of wealth which many people do not enjoy - is what Iain Duncan Smith is doing when he claims he could live on £53 a week. Underestimating the poverty that people in this country live in - poverty not just of cashflow, but of support networks, opportunity, education, confidence - is the first step towards thinking that they can't be that badly off, surely, they just need to buck up/budget better/eat more lentils.

If the class calculator put you higher than you expected, you are probably better off than you think you are. Consider this: you may not feel wealthy, but compared to you, a lot of people in this country are actually, genuinely poor. Poor as in can't afford food, or bus fares, or phone credit, or electricity bills. People on minimum wage, low-paid part time work or JSA are poor, but they aren't even the bottom tier; they're better off than people living on the street.

No-one thinks of themselves as well off, but there are a lot of people less well off than you. Underestimating your class and relative wealth is to deny the reality of people less fortunate than yourself. And that is one of the ways that structural inequality perpetuates itself.

Zoe Margolis has just posted a crowd-sourced list of female UK comedians, by way of highlighting the gender imbalance within comedy, especially on panel chatshows. I've heard of nine of the women on the list. I don't do to the Edinburgh fringe and I'm not a comedy buff, so unless I've seen them on TV or YouTube, I'm missing out.

I'm drawn to openly feminist comedians like Charlie Brooker and David Mitchell - but honestly, it'd be nice if actual women weren't just an occasional treat. If there was a campaign demanding that comedy shows gender-balance their guests, I would support it. I don't find many of the male comedians particularly funny, so even if the new guests turn out to be a bit pants I don't think it'd be a great loss overall - and at least if I didn't find something funny it'd be more likely to be because it was rubbish, rather than because the joke was sexist.

I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue is guaranteed to make me giggle - always has been - and is usually fairly genteel and "safe" compared to, say, Mock the Week. For a while I was catching up on back episodes on BBC iPlayer while doing my physiotherapy exercises of an evening. Which was fine (although the whole Samantha thing made me grit my teeth a bit) until the "finish the line from a 1920s marriage etiquette book" game. I hoped that the players, decent chaps all, would take the opportunity to play with listeners' expectations and provide some interestingly gender-bending humour. Maybe even some good old fashioned surrealism? But no. Suddenly it was old white men making jokes at the expense of women, and I had to turn it off.

Miranda Hart's Joke Shop

A few weeks ago I sprained my ankle going down some stairs on the tube. By the time I'd limped home I was pretty much completely immobile. Denny was out for the evening so I installed myself on the sofa with my netbook to wait for a few hours, and to distract myself I looked on iPlayer for something to watch. I was feeling a bit sorry for myself, so comedy seemed like a good idea - but I was so not in the mood to have to breezily ignore any jokes made at my own expense. I scoured the BBC website for a show in the Comedy section which included women. Any women would do. Just one would be fine; I mean I find that a bit obnoxious, the token One Woman in a comedy team, but that'd do me for now. I couldn't find anything. Nada.

I ended up on the BBC Radio 4 website, listening to the first episode of Miranda Hart's Joke Shop. I hadn't heard of Miranda Hart before, but she's a big, tall, jolly, posh woman who has a brash, self-deprecating humour - she styles herself as a kind of failed- or anti-Bridget Jones - and the joke shop is sort of a framework for a sketch show, and sort of a bit like Black Books, only with more chocolate willies.

Reactions:

- I liked her; she made me laugh (especially once I warmed up to her style) and her manner is charming and memorable. It was great to have a sketch show about a woman who isn't conventionally pretty, is socially awkward, and owns her own business. All the humour was at her own expense, which was much nicer than listening to a man making jokes at the expense of women like her.

- The primary theme is how bad Miranda is at being a Girl. Her awful overbearing mother continually tells her to pretty up and get married. Her girly public school friends are all getting engaged and having big meringue weddings. So, clumsily and awkwardly, Miranda finds herself whisked along in their schemes, but hilariously and completely failing to fit in and eventually giving up. It's interesting. On the one hand, it gleefully pokes fun at the Cosmo readers of this world who think that makeup and men are the most important things in a woman's life. It's nice to have a protagonist who is a bit oblivious to all of that, and an overall message that people obsessed with those things are more laughable than people who suck at them. But OMG, could we have comedy by a woman that isn't about weddings and boys and dresses? Even if they're about how stupid all that is? Could we have comedy by a woman that's about, I dunno, science or the internet or politics or books? If only Kate Beaton did standup.

- Another running joke is Miranda getting mistaken for a man, resulting in her desperately trying to femme up so she can 'pass'. Again, some bits of this were pleasingly counter-cultural, but I found other aspects of it outright transphobic. I honestly didn't know what to make of the scene where she ends up in a shop aimed at trans people. On the one hand there's the "OMG Miranda you look like a transvestite! I didn't realise it was fancy dress!" punchline which, just, ugh. But on the other hand the whole conversation between her and the shop owner (who believes that she is trans) has a weird sort of sensivity to it. There was a bit that went:

Miranda: And my mum goes on about it all the time, she says, "Miranda you're a woman, you should dress like one!"
Shop owner: Oh, lucky - not many people have parents who that supportive.
Miranda: Um, I guess...

It was really odd. I mean the whole "Miranda looks like a man! She must be trans!" aspect of it is obviously horrendous and transphobic. But there was also clearly an awareness of her cis privilege. Odd.

Vous Les Femmes

This evening denny and I were looking for something to watch on iPlayer while we ate our tea, having monstered our way through the three Frozen Planet episodes already published in about as many days (neither women nor comedy, but OMG, so highly recommended). Anyway, he suggested comedy and by unspoken mutual agreement we flicked past all the stuff solely featuring blokes, and ended up with 'WOMEN!' (Vous Les Femmes). It's a French language micro-sketch show in which each sketch is only 1-2 minutes long, with an entirely female cast.

Reactions!

- This is baffling, surreal, hit and miss, with so strong a miss at first that we nearly turned it off, but definitely worth persisting with.

- It has a LOT of physical humour, and on average I enjoyed the sketches which involved over the top, slapstick physical fooling much more than the wordier ones - although perhaps that's because some of the humour is lost in the tones of voice if you're following the subtitles more than the French. I seem to remember reading something a while ago about the way physical comedy in particular is male-dominated, in which case this makes a refreshing change.

- The jokes are a mixture of social and situational comedy with low-brow toilet humour, absurdism and slapstick. A lot of it is gendered - like the "sex bomb" showing off her figure at the beach and the way other women react to her; ranting about queues for the ladies; the absurdity of a woman trying to modestly get changed in public - but none of it is sexist. Some of it is 'girly' (cocktail nights, dating, relationships, parenting) but some of it is just gloriously silly - and sometimes both at once. The 'dogwalkers' sketch starts out with a dodgy girlfriends=dogs reference and ended up making me laugh more than any other moment in the entire show, as the two women hare around in the woods like mad things, looking persistently stupid and having a lovely time.

- So the silliness/absurd physical comedy sort of forgives the genderedness, and while there's some poking fun at gender stereotypes it does mostly seem to be good-humoured, hitting sideways rather than hitting down. And there's some lovely fucking with gender expectations, too - as with the repeated lowbrow toilet jokes, and the 'bad parenting' sketches with their deadpan delivery.

I've also recently discovered Helen Arney, also via @denny, who took me to my first Festival of the Spoken Nerd show the other week. She seems awesome, and yay, female musician geek! ... But somehow I don't find her quite as funny as I'd like to; her songs all seem to be morbid romances, and they aren't quite morbid enough. It's also musical comedy where neither the music nor the comedy stands out - if her musicianship was really outstanding, it would make up for the bits that are only averagely funny. But she's young, and certainly doing better than I would, and I'm sure she'll get better. And I did enjoy her improv and banter on stage when she wasn't singing. But I think I'd like it if fewer of her songs were about failed love affairs and more of them were about science. Since she's part of a science troupe and all.

Oh! I almost forgot: the other female comedian I've encountered recently is performance poet Alison Brumfitt. She's wonderfully, challengingly, outrageously queer and a lot of her poems are about rejecting received cultural expectations and gender stereotypes. Listen to When I am old, her take on Jenny Joseph's famous poem. She's a feminist sex positive dyke and she doesn't give a fuck.

My life is currently all about getting ready for the pub's first art fair next weekend - the Mad March Fair. If you aren't planning to come and could make it down, please consider it! Sussex is only an hour and a bit from London or Brighton on the train, and we'll have lovely foods, real ales and live folk music as well as arts and crafts by awesome people. Confirmed exhibitors/collaborators so far include Deirdre Ruane, Nikki Tompsett, Lucy Kennedy, Ailbhe Leamy, JV Mallory, Ara McBay, Lynnette Jackson, Laura Clark, Sam Kelly, Andrew May, Catriona Mackay, Laura Jayne Kemsley, Joldine Moate, James Hooker, Gemma Wells-Colyer, Pauline Louch, and moi.

The big messy making weekender I hosted t'other week (a trial run at the sort of art and crafts workshop I want to put on at the pub) went brilliantly - here's a write up with loads of photos if you're interested. We produced an astonishing amount in the time available, including several collaborative paintings (my first in a while - always something I find hugely energising) and I'm really proud of what we achieved.

Since we started planning the pub arts programme back in January, I've been motivated to spend my minimal spare time trying to produce a few more paintings to show at the fair, some smaller pieces to complement the bigger ones I already have.

( Paintings so far this year!Collapse )

The Queen's Head is proud to present our first ever arts and crafts fair! We've got also sorts of creative plans for this year, and to kick it all off with a bang we've teamed up with local gallery organiser Nikki to host a big, inaugural Mad March Fair on Saturday 26 and Sunday 27 March.

Artists, makers, crafters, knitters and cooks are invited to book a stall to show their own beautiful creations. We welcome any homemade or hand-crafted item. Soap, cosmetics, jewellery, notebooks, collage, paintings, prints, cakes, chutneys, wood-carving, metalwork, leatherwork, knitting, embroidery, clothing, bags, cushions, masks, greetings cards, painted furniture, painted mugs, pottery - you make it, we'll show it!

Please contact helen@queensheadrye.com to enquire about booking a free pitch. (Instead of charging you up-front we'll ask for a commission on any sales - we want this to be as accessible as possible.)



Admission will be free to the public. The Fair will be hosted in our timber-beamed Function Room and open from 11am-8pm both days. There's a free gig on the Saturday night in the Lounge Bar once the Fair closes, so feel free to hang around and enjoy the mystical medieval folk of local minstrel Kim Thompsett and her band.

Come along, browse beautiful hand-crafted items, buy gifts, sample some delicious handmade cakes and preserves, sit down for a cup of tea, a pint of real ale or cider and a plate of our homemade pub food. Stay around for the evening and chill out with some live music. Invite your friends!

Mad March Fair: facebook event

I stole this recipe from khalinche's cousins, who showered us with excellent food when we were stranded near Inverness during the Great Snow last November. It's so cheap and tasty I've made it twice this week, and we have another haggis in the fridge so it'll probably happen again. They're £1.70 each from our local supermarket, which is also doing mixed bags of winter veg for £1. Together they MAKE PIE.

( Haggis pieCollapse )

Apropos of this link on how to make your 404 page work for you, denny made a tongue in cheek request for a cute mascot for the Shiny Ideas 404 page, sort of like the twitter failwhale. Perhaps a gay shark?

Et voilà:

I made my placard for #payday, UKUncut's national day of protests against corporate tax avoidance, on Wednesday night. I was going to join the Library Bloc, staging a read-in in Vodafone's flagship store on Oxford Street to publically highlight the connection between HMRC's unwillingness to force Vodafone to pay their tax in full, and the budget cuts faced by local councils which will affect hundreds of public libraries. Rye public library is new - I've only just joined it and it might have to close down. It stinks.

Getting the placard to London was a mission - on the way out of Rye it doubled as a windsail, but proved useful as a snow shield this morning when battling through the blizzard to the tube station. After five minutes on the roads I got onto the tube with an inch of snow encrusting hat, coat, bag and placard. Ah well, I thought, at least the shop will be nice and warm.

Self, bags and placard struggled down Oxford Street through slush, ice and snowfall. My boots swiftly proved not to be waterproof and by the time I reached the Vodafone shop my feet were soaked with ice water. I'd given careful thought about how to smuggle a large placard into the shop, and ended up putting it in a big John Lewis bag donated by khalinche's housemates, thereby disguising it as shopping. A picture or something. Look, I'm a good little consumer! Let me in!

The Vodafone store, when I arrived at 1pm, seemed remarkably empty. The read-in was scheduled for 1:04. I blagged my way in pretending I wanted to buy a memory card for my Sony Eriksson, but quickly established that no other activists were around. Hrm. Back outside, I phoned denny and discovered that I was at 127 Oxford Street, and the Vodafone flagship store was at 345. Buggeration! I'd already have missed the flashmob. Forlornly, I trudged back the way I'd come through hail and slush, boots steadily filling with snowmelt and feet growing numb with cold.

I found the protest underway outside the flagship store - which had pre-emptively closed before we got there. Apparently we're scary. So the day was about getting the message out, and get it out we did.

Dozens of people outside with signs saying TAX DODGERS and the Vodafone logo. An enormous banner with the figures: Amount Vodafone owes in unpaid tax: £6bn. Spending cuts to local councils: £6bn.



My placard got a lot of attention, but I'd written it with the intention that we'd be inside the shop protesting to Vodafone. Instead we were outside protesting to the public. "Pay your tax!" suddenly seemed a little accusatory; I didn't want people to think I was accusing them of tax avoidance, so I borrowed a biro and quickly scribbled 'Vodafone' above it. Not sure how visible it was.

Climate Rush had brought a songsheet of anti-capitalist carols. Some were on message, others were about climate change, which obviously I agree with but seemed a little confusing in context. They drifted off after twenty minutes or so. The rest of us stood in the snow, feet freezing to iceblocks, holding up our signs, looking friendly and hopeful and cold.

It was a quiet protest - lots of us were just reading, although I'm not convinced that did much to get the message across. But the lack of chanting went down well. People slowed down and read the signs. They were interested. Many were sympathetic. Some were shocked when we explained the situation. Vodafone's waived tax bill could have paid for every single cut to every single council in the country this year.

There were about twenty police officers, all polite and well-behaved, although cold and a bit resentful. ("God, are you lot still here?" Yes.) Lots of people with cameras. A few members of the press. I hid from the cameras behind the placard, but when they weren't flashing I smiled and made eye contact with as many passersby as I could.

The leaflets flew out of our hands - everyone wanted one. We handed out thousands. I shared out mincepies with the rest of the picket. We didn't chant but chatted to people quietly, one to one.

Things shoppers walking past me said:
"Quite right."
"Yes, absolutely."
"Get a job!" (I have a job. Actually I own a company. Which pays its tax. Do you?)
"Well done." (Thankyou!)
"It was £7bn wasn't it?"
To friend "Bloody protestors, they look like they've never paid tax in their life." (Let's just ignore that one.)
To small child "Look, they're angry because Vodafone didn't pay their tax and now the libraries have to shut because the government doesn't have enough money." (Look! They know about it already! It's working!)
"Well, what you're doing is alright, this is fair enough, it's nice and peaceful."
"Yeah well you keep it peaceful, we'll keep it real." (Er, please don't smash any windows!)
"How can I help?"
"What's this about? But what were Vodafone threatening the government with to make them let them off? But that's so corrupt!"
"How did they persuade them to let them off? But that's shocking. That's not fair at all."
"What can we do about it?" (Spread the word!)
"How can I find out more?" (UKuncut.org.uk!)
"Yes, I heard about that, tax dodgers the lot of them."
"It's not just Vodafone you know, they're all at it" (Yes, we know it's a much broader issue, but we're starting with this one and once people know about that, we'll broaden our targets.) "Oh, fair enough then. Good luck!"
"Bravo."
"Solidarity!" (Solidarity!)

The level of support was overwhelming. I have never been on a protest which felt so strongly as if our message was getting through, it was working, people were listening. The publicity over the last few weeks has worked. Lots of people nodded sagely, familiar with our arguments. Most - literally most - of the people who responded were on our side. That's never, ever happened to me at an action before. It was brilliant.

We stomped to keep warm. I changed my socks but the fresh ones soaked through again within minutes. Josie Long and a quiet geeky boy brought everyone tea. A man from Hungary told me that similar protests had happened in his country and they changed the law as a result; I said I'd look it up and find out more. Protestors from other groups popped by to see how we were getting on and share news of the other actions. A couple of posh men in suits told us we didn't understand the economics of the situation. We argued with them. People stopped to listen, nodded, took a leaflet. We ran out of leaflets.



At ten past 3 I decided I needed to get home and into clean clothes before I developed trench foot, handed my placard to someone else and headed off. There were only a couple of dozen of us left by that point but I felt good. People agreed with us. We were representing popular opinion. The campaign was working. We had sympathy, energy, momentum, we weren't stopped by the weather, there were thousands of us all over the country. After we'd been there for a while I found out that a group had managed to close down the smaller Vodafone store I'd started out at. We were winning.

As I left I overheard someone asking a policeman when the shop would be open. "Sorry," he replied, "Not for a while yet, I imagine."

Demo2010: policing and the philosophy of protest - last Thursday on Police State UK

- in which I talk about the tendency of the press to report the methods rather than the message of a protest; attempt to summarise the context of Demo 2010, and offer a comparison of the Millbank occupation and the G20 protest last year.


"Warning: may contain humour" - last Friday on Police State UK

- a round-up of the online response to the Twitter Joke Trial verdict, a brief discussion of bad taste and free speech, and a couple of awkward qustions.


Remember the Suffragettes: a Black Friday vigil in honour of direct action - yesterday on Open Democracy: Our Kingdom

- publicising the Black Friday vigil I'm going to tonight, and explaining why I think it's important to honour the methods, as well as the cause and sacrifice, of the suffragettes. This was a wee post thrown together after a chat with Anthony Barnett before the Open Democracy drugs policy talk on Tuesday ("can you quickly write what you just told me for Our Kingdom when you got home? Doesn't have to be long") and then it was on the front page of Open Democracy, and the most read post on the site for a brief while this morning.

Too much politics this week, not enough paying work. Which makes a difference from the previous five months' schedule of too much pub, not enough paying work. Will get there eventually!