Giving up on serious thinking for an evening...

For some reason this always, always makes me laugh...

I Am Not Popular

Whoops, it seems that I have offended. Apparently, somewhere I have written that I am doing a blog because I needed to do something BECAUSE (here it comes) I had got to the point where I was beginning to think I needed to have manicures. I don't know where I wrote it, but I think it all the time, so no doubt it's gone down somewhere.

This comment has ruffled someone's feathers. SO, please let me explain.

I am not against having manicures per se. Indeed, had I time and money and a lifestyle which didn't involve a daily hand-plunge into compost and manure, I might well enjoy the occasional trip to the manicurist. Nor do I think that people who DO "look after their nails properly" (yep, I'm quoting) are in anyway lesser mortals than "lazy, scruffy people" (like me, I presume?). I do not think having a manicure shows any nonexistence of intellect. Manicurists themselves are often talented, creative souls and I could never match their attention to detail.

My point was that MY mind was rotting to the extent that I was beginning to think I SHOULD have them. I was losing touch with what I would normally value with a half hour to spare and £20 to spend in it. I was metamorphosising into some kind of Surrey housewife-via-Stepford. THAT'S what I was worried about, and I was only talking about myself.

To contest your assertion just gently, I don't think there is any problem with taking pride in your appearance. People have done it since time's dawn, and, stopping short of the point where it turns into an internal or external obsession, I can't see what harm is done. And you are no doubt right, I should do it more myself. But I DO think it's terribly queer to spend inequal amounts of time and energy on how you look and what you are. Especially when one dries up far sooner than the other. And of COURSE it applies to me too. I may have days where I think what a frightful state I look, but I am also troubled by how much I don't know about everything, and I'm sure my comment came out on such a day.

However, I do feel strongly on this: since we have this society that, for the most part, allows (even encourages) us to learn what we want, read what we wish and discuss whatever we like, then SURELY we should make the most of it? I don't want to hark back to North Korea or Burma or Zimbabwe, but since one of the first tricks of the despotic controller is to take away people's opportunity to Read and Discuss, surely we should be welcoming our intellectual freedom with Very Open Arms? And doing lots of it?

I think what I meant to say was that I felt I had caught myself mid-slither down into the murky points of non-thinking domestication and I wanted to do something about it. That was all.

It wasn't intended as a veiled insult. At all.

Too Highbrow!

"Too Highbrow!" my self-appointed blog critic now tells me of this blog, belying the fact that he does read it, even though he says he doesn't. "If we want facts and things, we can read the press. You've GOT to be more interesting than that. Be funnier please".

Funnier? How do you do "funnier"? I would love to be a Funny Person but it never seems to work. My friend C is properly funny and people say things like "ohhhh gooodie" and rub their hands in expectation of jolliness when they hear he is coming to dinner. But for me, well, the only time, for example, that R finds me truly funny is when I have absolutely not intended to be so.

I stand accidentally on the end of a garden rake and smack myself in the face. That, he tells me, is definitely funny. Mentioning that it made my nose actually bleed and left a rake handle shaped mark on my forehead apparently scores me even more Funny points. Being caught short at our allotment and having to go amongst the blackcurrants in full view of any passing strollers was "only moderately funny" but when I fell backwards onto an indignant patch of nettles which fought back with all their stinging enthusiasm, I had, R assured me, through his snorts and my wails, dramatically increased the level of funniness.

It's not just my husband. Once, years back, I stood at the end of a Routemaster bus in High Holborn with my boss and took a great jump to the pavement, to clear a puddle. I had been wearing a long woollen dress with lots of buttons up the front (it was a while ago, fashionistas) My boss had, unbeknown to me, inadvertently put his sodding great foot on the bottom of it, so as I leapt off, my dress and my boss stayed together on the bus. I therefore found myself in High Holborn at noon in my pants. The cold-looking Evening Standard sellers, cross van and taxi drivers, and the unsmiling bus conductor all rediscovered their humour most efficiently and simultaneously, and triumphed this with whoops and hollers and enthusiastic blasting of horns. The no-longer dour conductor even sprinted merrily down the bus to bash the window of the driver in order to share the joy. My boss, however, was stupefied. As the bus moved off the road taking him and my dress with it, he implored, in a loud voice which I think suggested to gawping onlookers that flashing was rather a habit, "No, no K-san, PLEASE to not take off dress in street."

You see, I look back on this now and can see, somewhat ruefully, some sense of slapstick here, but the point is, I wasn't trying to get a laugh. Were that the case, I would certainly find other ways which didn't involve charging around London in my underwear and jumping off buses.

If I try to get a laugh, I generally get a polite one, which tells me the listener has, some time ago, actually switched off. Or, they look at me in silence for a second, realise I have made a joke, and in an attempt to cover up any lack of comprehension, throw themselves into a ham demonstration of mock hilarity which quite clearly can stop as quickly as canned laughter, as soon as my back is turned.

I'm not asking for sympathy, I just would like to be funnier. But what is to be done? How does one become a Funny Person? Do I lurk around town in front of a placed banana skin and hope for friends to pass? Do I pull the chair away from under my own backside at the dinner table? Or do I continue to throw myself into physically painful or personally mortifying situations, all for the sake of other's mirth?

Ok, Blog Critic, I really will try. Funny Things to Think of While Houseworking. I'm onto it.

Are we all a bit quiet on the Eastern Front?

I know I am laying myself open to mockery now by referring to another (pseudo? please?) dictatorship, but I DO think, in the run up to June 4th, that everyone's been rather quiet on Tiananmen. I don't mean the media, actually, since there have been all sorts of articles saying what's been said before (what more is there to say, really?) but people round here, in general. It has not been mentioned in the Mother's Queue (ahem!). I don't think I've even really discussed it with R. Which is a bit odd, because I do sometimes think that the silence of the people on the ground, so to speak, is probably more alarming than any enforced silence of the press.

I haven't put this particularly articulately. But I've been chatting to former student who was there on June 4th 1989 and now chooses not to live in China. We were talking about the Tiananmen Mothers' Organization, set up by two mothers bereaved of their sons during the flare-ups at the end of the protest. The strength of the now elderly ladies to keep going is astounding. Living under virtual house arrest, one of the founders of the organisation, now in her seventies, was kicked out of Beijing for the entire Olympics and still has State Security Bureau officers sitting on her doorstep whenever there is a ceremony or memorial they prefer her not to attend. You'd think the image of a frail old lady in mourning for her murdered son being bullied by the Big Bad Boys in Green would be a PR disaster. But, in China, evidently not.

JXM tells me that Ding Zi-Lin, the founder of The Tinanmen Mothers' Organisation, once said she had been energised by her pain at losing her son and that gave her the will to continue fighting. "There are plenty of people who feel strongly about this, " he always says, "but not everyone has an easy platform to say it". We talked of one class we had together, along with 5 or 6 younger Chinese students, when the matter had come up. The younger ones were wide-eyed with surprise to hear what had happened. I was wide-eyed to hear they didn't already know. JXM rolled his eyes and went off for coffee, not seeming to mind too much. He has, he reckons, learnt when it is not worth being bothered.

Back to the Tiananmen Mothers' Organisation. I wanted to see if there was any direct translation of their mandate and came across 2 interesting things in the process. Firstly, a petition on Amnesty's website. I don't usually do these (you could end up a full time devotee to Petitioning of Many Causes) but this one specifically urges that the rights of the Tiananmen Mothers be respected and thus grabbed me, somewhat.

http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/ASA17/023/2008/en

"Using this petition, signatories can express their concern over the ongoing failure of the Chinese authorities to address the serious and widespread human rights violations committed in the military crackdown on the 1989 pro-democracy movement. Signatories urge the Chinese administration to stop all harassment of the Tiananmen Mothers and other such activists and end all policies of censorship to allow full public debate about the events on 3-4 June 1989."

And secondly, a rather magnificient letter written by a Professor at the Beijing Film Academy.
She may well be talking about one specific event and its consequences in one context, but what she says has a poignancy on many levels. The afterglow of the post-reading ponder took me through unpacking the dishwasher, cleaning the floor and making supper. Brilliant.

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/05/cui-weiping-why-do-we-need-to-talk-about-june-4th/


Afterthought:

1. This has reminded me that I've been meaning to learn more about Las Madres De Plaza De Mayo in Argentina. And still haven't. Must try harder etc.