On Watching Less

~ Sarada Gray ~ Leave a comment

Habits are hard to break, and particularly in the evening when one feels tired it’s very tempting to just flip on the old box, flick through a few channels and just let entertainment carry you through till bedtime. But I’ve been breaking it up a little and I’ve noticed that far from being restful, watching TV actually makes you tired. I’m not entirely sure why; it could be the effect of the screen, it could be that you’re looking at constantly moving pictures, or it could be the passive nature of the engagement. True, it’s not always entirely passive; when watching a good film or drama you can be completely engaged, but mostly I’m only half there, breaking off to check my phone or to talk to OH or make a drink or go to the loo. Most TV is background and the programme makers know this so they increasingly add bright colours and loud sounds to attract our attention. This goes double for adverts, though I hardly ever watch commercial TV.

There is of course a lot that I miss when glued to the box. I miss reading, thinking, playing the piano-keyboard, going outside to look at the moon, talking to others and listening to music. I tell myself I’ll do these things another time but that time only comes when I make it, so last night I decided I would watch a couple of pre-selected programmes and then, rather than filling the time with more TV I would read. I’ve really been getting into Elena Ferrante and last night as I finished the book (review to come I noticed a huge difference in my mind. When I read I was energised rather than tired, engaged rather than passively ingesting; I felt alive and alert and I went to bed feeling pleasantly tired rather than drained.

Paul McKenna suggests turning off the TV at least half an hour before bed and using that time to read. With me this tends to be a custom more honoured in the breach but I intend to practise it from now on.

I don’t want to give up the box altogether, there’s some good stuff on and it’s useful to kick back and watch something when you haven’t got the energy to do much else. But it takes over, so from now on rather than using TV to fill the evening, I shall choose programmes I really want to watch and do something else the rest of the time.

Last night I watched University Challenge (I scored 70 points), Doc Martin and a little bit of Murder 24/7, a police procedural documentary. Total 1.5 hours, much better than my usual three hours. And tomorrow night when OH is out I plan to spend the evening playing the keyboard.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

Kirk out

A Brilliant Weekend

~ Sarada Gray ~ 4 Comments

I had a terrific weekend. Why? Did I fly down to Rio for the remains of the carnival? Did I hop across the channel and spend a couple of days in Paris? Did I try hot-air ballooning, kayaking or climbing a Munro? Did I shoot some rapids? Perhaps I went water-skiing or joined a polo club, or maybe I drove a Formula 1 car with a turbo-charged commentary so I could pretend to be on Top Gear? Did I?

Er, no. I did none of those things, and yet I had a brilliant weekend. How so? Well, on Friday night I made a decision to watch less TV. I decided it was making me tired and lazy and meanwhile I had loads of books lying around unfinished. Saturday morning was my monthly meditation group, after which I had a brisk walk in the wind and sun in some woods overlooking a lake. Well I say lake, it’s usually more of a pond but what with the floods it’s more of a brown lagoon right now. Then in the afternoon I just hung out reading my book (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante) and shared a beer with my nephew who dropped by and happened to be reading the first in the Neapolitan quartet, My Brilliant Friend for his uni course. Then we went to Pizza Express (OH and I, not the newphew.) I’d already had a couple of beers by then and ordered another in the restaurant. We had a long wait for our food but this enabled us to have a really good chat and to enjoy it more when it came. Then on Sunday instead of getting up and going to Meeting I had a really long lie in. Oh, the luxury of a lie in when you don’t normally get one! When I finally tumbled out of bed around eleven I walked down to our local Turkish cafe and had a pot of tea while I read some more Elena Ferrante and read my diary. In the afternoon I went hunting for floor lamps to enable me to read in the evening without straining my eyes. I found one in B&Q but I haven’t bought it yet.

And in the evening I made sure only to watch the programmes I wanted, namely Dr Who (great episode and the guy who plays the Master is amazing) and the ever-enthralling Last Tango in Halifax.

So that was it. It doesn’t sound like much, but small changes to a routine can make a big difference. You don’t have to go water-skiing in Paris to have a great weekend.

Kirk out

I'm So Sorry, You're From Barcelona

~ Sarada Gray ~ Leave a comment

It has often been observed that the comments we make about people change relative to their proximity to us. What’s acceptable when talking about people half-way round the world becomes decidedly uncomfortable when they’re sitting opposite. For example, when I was teaching English in Spain I decided to show my advanced students an episode of Fawlty Towers. I thought they’d enjoy the humour and having a Spanish character in there would give it an extra dimension. But the video had not been playing five minutes when an uncomfortable atmosphere made itself felt, and after a while I began to see Manuel from their point of view; a character whose lack of fluent English made him a comic scapegoat. In the end I realised that to Spanish people the character of Manuel was somewhat offensive. What was acceptable in England became unacceptable in a room full of intelligent Madrilenos. Distance is key. It’s like one of those ‘irregular verbs’ quoted in ‘Yes Minister’ – ‘I’m eccentric, you’re mad, s/he is round the twist.’ There’s a really good explanation of these here.

One of my favourite comments of late has been from a fellow member of the Labour Party. This is a person who frequently disagrees with me, and on the subject of the leadership election they said, ‘I joined the Party to defeat entryists like you.’ I found this very amusing and with it I’ve coined another irregular verb: ‘I am a joiner, you are an entryist, s/he is an infiltrator.’

Proximity is key with insults, but I guess on the internet we’re all in close proximity to each other now. And that’s the problem with social media, that it sets out in print for all to see what was previously expressed in private and in a particular context. It used to be broadcast to a specific audience but now educated students in Madrid can watch it. And find it offensive.

Kirk out

Friday on What I Am Pleased to Call My Mind

~ Sarada Gray ~ 4 Comments

So, as another week grinds towards its end, how is my work going? Good question. I have so many balls in the air I can barely keep track of them: aside from poems there are a slew of short stories, a radio play and of course the novel which I am in the process of editing. God, editing is hard! I’ve got first drafts sorted because I’ve got to the stage where I can I just let it rip; I don’t think about what I’m writing, just trust the process and tell the critical, analytical mind to take a flying leap. But when it comes to editing, my woes begin in earnest. My mind jumps all over the place, thinking where is this going? What sort of thing is it really? Where am I going to publish it? What is it actually about? I am tossed and buffeted by ten different winds until I hardly know which way is up, and unsurprisingly I can’t do it for very long; a couple of hours is about the limit. After that I’m exhausted.

I guess these are the questions all writers ask themselves. What kind of writer am I? Who are my readers? Where do I want to be published? to which my answers would be: no idea, anyone, and anywhere. Not helpful. Some days I’d give my eye teeth to be a writer firmly established in a genre, someone who knows her audience and what they want. Someone with a publisher and an agent. But I ain’t and I don’t.

So what is to be done? One thought I had yesterday, struggling through the choppy waters of a short story, was to be aware of these questions as they arise and record them with a view to analysing them later. This is difficult because they rush by at the speed of light, yelling something indiscernible as they go. They’re like players on a hockey field and I never got on with hockey because apart from being out in the cold and the mud trying to hit a tiny ball with a narrow strip of wood, people are rushing by you all the time shouting things like whazafalabeat! and gizzacobaball! and by the time I’d said, ‘Sorry, what was that again?’ they’d be down the other end.)

This is the story of my life. I didn’t fit anywhere so I became a writer. Then I discovered that I didn’t fit anywhere as a writer. So what’s next?

Answers on a postcard, as ever…

Kirk out

Women and Power

~ Sarada Gray ~ Leave a comment

Browsing in Waterstone’s lately (yes I know they’ve dropped the apostrophe but on this blog standards will never slip) I came across a book by Mary Beard. I was actually looking for something political but they don’t have a politics section as such (hm) so I was directed to hover between history and philosophy. I also wanted to know when the new Hilary Mantel would be out (March) and how much it would be (£20-something, not bad for a 900-page hardback but I’m not sure I can afford it) and I ran into Mary Beard’s thoughts on Women and Power.

Like many such books it addresses the problem in all its aspects but neglects to ask why. Why do some men just want to shut women up? Why are they triggered by a woman expressing opinions in public? Why do some men get in a froth about putting Jane Austen on a bank note? Why, after you’ve expressed a complex and well thought-out view, do some men still act as if you haven’t spoken? And why does this sort of thing still happen?

https://i0.wp.com/dvvj4iu11jqpj.cloudfront.net/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/0/0/001_206.jpg
originally from Punch magazine; image removed on request

Mary Beard’s thesis is that throughout recorded history patriarchy has silenced women in the public sphere. There are exceptions to this: she may speak in order to defend her family or tribe or to speak for the interests of other women, but she may not voice opinions on any topic as though she were a man. To do so is to invite ridicule, censure or even death.

Sadly, this attitude is still prevalent. I am frequently interrupted by men in meetings where men have been heard in silence, and it spills over into the arena of mansplaining where some men become like one-way radios set to transmit but not receive. In Waterstone’s the man who served me, though perfectly helpful and informative, was deaf to my replies that I had ‘already read’ the Guardian article about Hilary Mantel or that I ‘already knew’ about Mary Beard’s work. He could hear my questions but not my speech.

Along with many women in the public sphere, Mary Beard has had a bellyful of this. Female politicians frequently get death threats and Diane Abbott, being black as well as female, gets a double dose and has to send death threats in weekly batches to the police. This is not funny, yet she does her job week in and week out and will not be silenced. Why should she?

Many men have of course taken on board the demands of feminism, and thankfully in my experience the badly-behaved misogynist is in a small minority. But why do they do this in the first place?

i have a theory – it’s no more than a theory at present – that in the minds of these men is a binary system in which people are given a value of either 1 or 0, with no space in between. Therefore, under this system, if you’re not number one you are nothing. I read once that slave owners in the Southern states feared giving up their slaves would result in their own enslavement. They feared becoming slaves! Why? It seemed a ridiculous fear – after all, if they gave up their slaves nothing would happen except that they’d be obliged to pay people to do their work. I was completely baffled by this until I saw it as a binary system. In the minds of the slave owners there were only two positions, slave or master; and if you ceased to be one you would become the other. And so I think it is with misogynists: they fear their own subordination. They fear becoming nothing instead of something because in their binary system there is no such thing as equality. It does not compute.

As for what we do about this – well, I guess we just keep talking and refuse to shut up and go away.

That’s all. Now shut up and go away.

Just kidding. Happy Thursday.

Kirk out

To Like and Like Not: My Views on Labour's Plan for Trans Rights

~ Sarada Gray ~ Leave a comment

A couple of weeks ago a 12-point plan emerged on the rights of transgender people. It has not yet been adopted by the Labour Party (this would presumably have to be done at Conference) but two out of the three remaining leadership candidates have endorsed it. I’d like to say why I have problems with it.

The first part of the plan is perfectly fine; it deals with protecting people from abuse and discrimination due to their ‘presentation’ or ‘identification’. That is all of a piece with general anti-discrimination policy, so for me, points one to three are fine. The problems begin with point four which asks us to ‘accept that trans women are women, that trans men are men and that non-binary people are non-binary.’

What’s my beef here? Surely people should be accepted for who and what they are? Yes, I agree – but to accept a person as a fellow human being is not the same as accepting a particular narrative about that person. I’m not sure I even understand what it means to say ‘trans women are women’ and in an environment where it is proposed that people should be simply allowed to self-identify without any kind of medical examination, this is something that requires thought. What is a woman? What does it mean for someone to have male genitalia and say I am a woman? And if we accept this narrative, what follows? There has been little or no public debate on these topics, and without free and open debate how can we achieve any kind of understanding? In the last fifty years or so we’ve had the debate about feminism, we’ve had the debate on gay and lesbian rights and as a society we have come (largely) to a consensus on these issues, one that is enshrined in law. No such debate has taken place on transgender people; the ‘T’ has simply been tacked onto the end of LGB and we are told to accept this or be labelled as haters.

We need to look at the consequences of accepting trans women as women (I’m focussing more on women but there may be problems for cis men as well in men’s groups such as Men in Sheds). We are now obliged to accept the presence of trans women in previously safe environments such as toilets, changing rooms and prisons, and this may present problems for a number of reasons. I’m not suggesting that trans women are likely to be abusers, but that the system itself is open to abuse; that in our rush to be inclusive of some we may actually be excluding others.

But my biggest problem with the plan is point nine, which describes organisations such as A Woman’s Place and the LGB Alliance as ‘transphobic and trans-exclusionary’ hate groups. This is clearly wrong and I hope they will think better of this clause if nothing else. But my plea is this: we desperately need open, tolerant and above all respectful debate. Because without it my fear is that we will be even more divided, both as a party and as a society.

Kirk out

Ballot, Ballot, Who's Got the Ballot?

~ Sarada Gray ~ Leave a comment

Ballots are, as they say, ‘dropping’ at the moment for Labour leader and I still don’t know who to vote for! I’ve been up and down, back and forth, side to side and round and round and I’m currently spiralling towards the outer arm of the galaxy because I just don’t know!!! Every item of news, everything I see on social media, every new thing I learn about each of the candidates, sends me spinning in a new direction like a pinball on a table, and no clear answer is emerging. Opinions are now hardening among the membership and those helpful posts asking ‘still not sure who to vote for? Read this’ are no help at all because they are just a pitch for one candidate slagging off the others.

I’ve tried writing down the pluses and minuses of all the candidates. On the one hand, Keir Starmer has backed the readmission of Alistair Campbell to the party after he voted Lib Dem (and bragged about it) and has declined to say where his funding comes from; on the other hand he has refused to sign up to the 12-point pledge on Transgender rights. (I too am opposed to some of this, for reasons I’ll probably put in another post.) Lisa Nandy has some positives; she’s Northern and down-to-earth and might win back some of the lost seats in that region: on the other hand she lacks experience and until recently most people hadn’t heard of her. The same goes for the candidate who in all other respects I like, Rebecca Long-Bailey. The fact that she is seen as the ‘Corbyn continuity’ candidate is a plus for many, but also a minus for those who see his era as discredited and tainted by huge losses at the polls. But in the end whatever else I may feel, I think RLB lacks the experience to be Leader of the Opposition. So what to do? I still don’t know and in the end a little voice keeps telling me that it won’t matter anyway because it’s probably going to be a walkover for Starmer.

Which brings us to the deputy; and here there’s a wider field to choose from. I’d like it to be a woman, but then again I like some of Richard Burgeon’s ideas and he too has expressed reservations about the 12-point Trans rights plan. Angela Rayner is favourite but she has been critical of both Corbyn and the membership and I’m not happy about that. I’m half-tempted to vote for a BAME candidate, if only because we haven’t had one in the leadership election (I don’t know why Diane Abbott didn’t stand; maybe she’s had enough of the abuse she’s already getting, but I hope it isn’t that.) So I may vote for Dawn Butler but I just don’t know.

Fortunately it’s a different system from ‘first past the post’ so we get second, third and fourth choices which are added up if at first there is no clear winner.

Oh well. My ballot hasn’t come yet so we’ll see. Who knows what I’ll do? In the meantime if you’re a member let me know what you’ve decided – and if you’re not, who you’d vote for if you were.

Kirk out