I don't need a job, but I want to be a paperback writer

Despite giving in and returning to Hampstead Theatre a second Equal Opportunities Monitoring form they still have not got back to me. Assuming that I won't, I welcome any suggestions about what to do with the 23,000 words worth of short stories that are currently filling up my computer's memory.

Inadvertantly I seem to have got rid of the archives menu on my blog, or at any rate it has disappeared. This is annoying, so if anyone can enlighten me, please do.

I am off to Rome in a few hours' time. In my absence I expect the menu will miraculously reappear and render this post unnecessary and confusing.

Am currently watching a BBC4 programme about public information films and how generally ridiculous they were. Ah, my life is so wild. I have also just been informed that next week is 1973 week on BBC4. I'm not sure how we will tell the difference, as BBC4 is sweetly polite and gloriously timeless. Am also confused as to why particularly 1973. Not that I object, it just seems a little random.

I have given up learning Italian. I will be fine asking for the way to the post office or for a room with a bath, but if I need to say anything else, or if anyone replies to anything I attempt to say, I'm screwed.

See you in a week.

A Night At The Opera

I don't do opera. This is probably because I am a fairly uncultured person and I simply don't see the point, though I'm sure there is a [very worthy] point to it all.
Yesterday, though, I went to see a "little-known" opera by Schubert called "Alfonso and Estrella". UCL always perform little-known operas, presumably because when they screw it up nobody will realise because they've never heard it done any better. However, there is also usually a reason why they are "little-known" in the first place.

One of the things that I don't get about opera is the need for everything to be repeated 10 times. Take one particular episode, where the Bad Guy (aptly named Adolfo) is planning to overthrow the king and shouts (well, loudly sings) "I shall have my revenge!" throwing his cape over his shoulder with suitable aplomb.
We all got the point - he will have his revenge (except he won't, obviously, because it's a happy opera and he is the bad guy, but the thought is there). Actually what he sings is:
"I shall have my revenge! Revenge! Revenge! I shall have..... my revenge!"
And then, just in case we've missed it, a whole chorus of soldiers burst into,
"He shall have his revenge! Revenge! Revenge! He shall have... his revenge!"

You can't help feeling that the characters in the opera might have been a bit more successful in achieving their aims if thet'd spent less time singing about it and more time actually going for it. For example, the Good Guy decides at one point (and we could have told him right at the start that he was going to do all this and bypassed all the musical soul-searching) that he is going to go and rescue the Soppy Girl's father, who has fled the Bad Guy, who is trying to kill him, so that he and the Soppy Girl can get married. He does, eventually, but he sings about it for about ten mintes beforehand, and you just want to shout, "if you don't get on with it, love, he'll be dead before you get there!" (if only from old age.)

Actually the surtitles were the best bit, throwing up all sorts of gems such as "Ah! A man! Shall I flee?"

And she wonders why she's single.

But, of course, it all ends happily ever after, and, to (grudgingly) give UCL credit, they were absolutely brilliant, if you like that sort of thing.

Having placated F by going to see said opera, I dragged him along to see "Transamerica" this afternoon, which I would also recommend. It's a sweet film, it doesn't shove the politics of transsexuality in your face (if you'll pardon the expression), and it's fairly sensible and thought-provoking - and funny - about the whole thing. Plus it's a thought-provoking film about such issues where nobody ends up being brutally killed (or indeed killed at all) which is always a bonus.

Every now and then something happens, or several things happen, that make you feel entirely confident that, really, life is great, people are generally wonderful, and the world around you is beautiful. Actually, maybe it's the drugs. But anyway, sometimes tiny things of absolutely no significance just make you feel nice. These things are:

1. Missing my bus a few days ago because I was so fascinated by the pigeons copulating on the pavement that I didn't flag it down.
2. Getting a huge hug from a very inebriated Irish guy at the shelter, because I correctly guessed that he was named after Francis of Assisi.
3. Waking up to find the sun streaming in through the window and blue sky.
4. Ringing the Home Office and having them sort out a crisis in a record time of TWO MINUTES!!!

Yeah, on second thoughts, I'm sure it's the drugs.

But before you worry that I have become some sort of hippy or slipped into sentimentalist drivel, I do have a rant, and today's rant is a big one!!

Something else that should have made me feel fuzzily happy (if light-headedly so) in a smug sort of way is giving blood, which I've done on several occasions entirely successfully. So yesterday I mooched off to do it again, and that lovely organisation that is the National Bloody Service told me off then poisoned me.
I know a lot of people who boycott the Blood Service on account of their outdated, bordering-on-homophobic donor policies, but I have always been of the opinion that the Blood Service being arseholes is not the fault of people unfortunate enough to require blood transfusions, so have given them my blood anyway. But I am never doing it again.

Am ranting here partly in the hope that my seething fury will somehow translate into some sort of coherent order so that I can write a letter to the Blood Service:

First of all, I was told off by one Dr Lima for not filling the form in incorrectly. I mean properly told off. I had ticked the "no" box for a question that began "for men only". I maintain the answer is still "no" since I have not had anal sex, and am not a man. I could hvae understood her worrying if I had put "yes". But she didn't see it this way: "Why did you tick that? Hmm? Why? You're not a man! Did you not read it? It's a very important form, you know. You MUST read it properly. Now I'm going to have to ask you to sign this to say that you made a mistake." Evidently having to get me to do this ruined her day, but I wasn't too worried as she seemed to be telling off most of her staff too. Afterwards she told me off for having low iron, which obviously is entirely my own fault, in fact I went in explicitly to piss them off on account of my low iron. She hummed and haaed for a while as to whether I could give blood at all, and I expect this was the reason for the resulting fuss.

Giving blood, as always, was fine, though I was unimpressed with my time of 5 minutes 20 seconds (last time I was a whole minute faster!) I got up to leave and was told off again because I hadn't gone to the "recovery area", where they made me lie down, even though everyone else was sitting at the table. This seemed a little daft not to say a tad melodramatic. I was then ordered to drink "something with sugar in it", and was given a choice of lemon or orange. For some reason I wasn't allowed tea like everyone else. I asked if they had artificial sweetener in them and was told they were ordinary squash.
"In that case, I can't drink them, I'm allergic to sweetener."
"You have to drink."
"Can't I have something else?"
"No, you've been given a choice of orange or lemon."
"But I can't have sweetener. I used to get convulsions as a child and was told not to have it. Now it gives me migraines."
"I can water it down for you."
"That doesn't make any difference. I'm not supposed to have it."
"Well, I'm not letting you leave here until you have a sweet drink."
I felt like a kid that was being told by the school dinner lady "just try one brussels sprout then you can go."
The upshot was I drank half a cup of sickly-sweet whatever-it-was (lemon, purportedly). Later on (and it might have been partially psychosomatic, in which case I'm impressed with the power of my psyche) I had the most impressive aura: a high-pitched whine in the back of my head, a big shadow on the corner of my left eye so i kept thinking I was bumping into something, a strange detatched feeling a bit like when you blow your nose too hard and your ears pop, then pins and needley tingling all down my right hand side (usually it's just my arm but this went all down to my foot). Then I got a headache at the back on the left side of my head, kept losing my balance like you do with a hangover (hmm, must have looked pissed) and, to add to the fun, threw up twice in an hour. Yay!!!

My gripes then, in no particular order:
1. If there was something wrong (low iron or whatever) and this was why they felt i needed a drink, wht didn't they explain it to me?
2. If this was the case, why endanger my health by letting me donate in the first place?
3. Why not believe me when I said I couldn't have aspartame?
4. Why are they even employing someone who thinks that "a little bit" is ok?? Try telling a veggie it's ok if they eat just a tiny bit of meat, or, for that matter, an anaphylactic that it's just "a small peanut". (Actually aspartame is a fairly common migraine trigger.)
5. And anyway, what right have they got to tell me what I can and can't drink? Even if I just didn't like sweet drinks (which as it happens I don't, I don't even have sugar in tea) then they shouldn't have made me drink them. I am an adult, it's my body, it's my decision.

So, in summary: fucking wankers.

If I knew how to and had the time, I would sue the arses off them. Otherwise, if they want my blood, they can go whistle for it. They've just lost a regular donor, who due to their incompetence is now sitting in her office tripping out on Migraleve.

Does this ring any bells? Does the name My Lai mean anything?

Yes, I know, that was different, 300 died, this is only 15, blah blah. But you get my point...

My spirits were lifted slightly at the fact that the death of 17-year-old Humphrey, the Downing Street Cat warranted an obituary in The Times, which as a result has rather ogne up in my estimation. Humphrey was cruelly evicted from Downing Street, purportedly because Cherie Blair didn't like him. Which is fine. I don't especially like Cherie Blair.

For some reason I am still inexplicably cheerful. Must be something in the Redbush tea.

Saw a play on Saturday in Islington called "Almost Nothing". It did feel something of a rip-off: £8 was the discount rate and the play was only 50 minutes long. The story revolved around two people who shot a child (supposedly because he was about to attack them), then the mother showed up saying she knew all about it, so they hire a hit-man to kill her. All in 50 minutes, with short interludes where the main female character stands silently in front of the audience looking generally dramatic. The acting was fairly good, though, as was the et, and anything unfavourable in my review is probably only bitterness at the fact that this particular theatre company wouldn't do my play on account of them only producing "thought-provoking material", and considering mine to be "froth." (Huh!) It did, however, to give it dubious credit, have the distinction of dragging me away from writing an essay on the ethics of lying on one's CV.

Have a good day.

Hair did it all go right?

Andrew Collins, the ex-NME journalist and Chelsea College alumnus and author of the rather wonderful "Where did it all Go Right?" and "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now: My Difficult Student 80s", has a blog! He also has an entire page on his website dedicated entirely to photographs of his hair, of which I wholeheartedly approve.

Good Night, and Good Luck

Rant #2 of the week concerns ULU. It's the ULU elections this week, and, fortunately, after they extended the nominations period, people actually stood for the positions so there's even a choice of people to elect. The elections have been outsourced to the Electoral Reform Society, for reasons best known to the ULU Powers That Be, no doubt at vast expense which they cannot afford. Voting is all online - you are emailed a password if you get a ULU card, and then you can vote. My rant?

1. I can't vote as I never received a password. This in itself annoyed me as a lot of others will probably not have received passwords so will either be blissfully oblivious that the elections are even happening, or will know they are happening but can't be arsed to chase it up.
2. As I can be arsed, I emailed ULU. They said my card "wasn't registered on the system" so I can't be issued with a password. Now, first of all, I am a student, and a full member of ULU, so in denying me a vote they are actually in breach of the 1994 Education Act. And regardless, if my card isn't registered, then how have I been obtaining student-rate gym membership on it since October? Either I am ripping off ULU in using their gym at cut-rate, so they screwed up.
3. All UCL students recently received an email, whether or not they had a ULU card, giving them a password and allowing them to therefore vote in the ULU elections automatically. So different rules apply to UCL students and Heythrop students, who have student cards yet have to (along with everyone else bar UCL and, apparently, Iimperial) obtain a second card from ULU in order to vote. The card must be registered with ULU, therefore if you didn't get one at Freshers your only option is to traipse up to Malet Street from South Ken or wherever to get one and hope that your details get onto "the system". Basically, "All voters are equal, but some are more equal than others."
4. Nice though it is for UCL students to be able to vote, though I don't expect many will bother, whoever passed on their details to the Electoral Reform Society is in breach of the Data Protection Act. Apparently the decision to do so was taken by the UCL Union Executive Committee, and details had been passed on for election purposes only. However, the UCL Union Executive Committee does not own the personal data (email addresses, names etc) of every individual at UCL and as such it is illegal for them to pass these to a third party without permission.

I would raise it at the next ULU Council; unfortunately this isn't until May, and if it's like the last two, nobody will bother to turnm up, so it won't happen anyway.

Going back to the film in the title, The film is short anyway - we were in and out in two hours including adverts - and huge sections of it are made up of McCarthy speeches and interspersed with a (pretty good) Jazz soundtrack, so I'm not sure how much of it was actually original dialogue - I don't think it can have been more than 40 minutes at the most. Now, the timing of the film's creation and release are clearly intended to make the parallels between McCarthy and our current situation blindingly obvious that the whole thing is almost one big, in-your-face cliche, but, fortunately, it's quite a good one, and anyway, it has George Clooney in it, and I would certainly recommend seeing it if you have a spare couple of hours. It does somewhat imply that at the time CBS was standing alone against McCarthyism, when, actually, intellectuals and artists, from New York Times journalists to Arthur Miller writing "The Crucible" were taking the witch hunts and running with them, but the fact remains the people who should have been doing something about it were either not bothering or had already been branded as Communists, and, it's true, the programme's actions were courageous, or political suicide, depending on how you look at it. Either way, there was an irony that while America was espousing the view that Russia and China were evil in the way that they were denying freedom of speech, political opinion, and denouncing anybody who didn't agree with them, America was, in fact, denying freedom of speech, freedom of political beliefs, and publicly denouncing anyone with even the most tenuous link to Communism (and often no proven link at all); it's just that America didn't have gulags.

Now, of course, it's doing quite a lot of that again, even to the extent of keeping tabs on what their citizens check out of libraries, but this time it has Guantanamo Bay.

On a somewhat random note, one of my Christian Ethicist Mates (doesn't that make us sound trendy?) has some sort of connection with a new initiative called Pray-as-you-go, which sounded suspiciously evangelical but, I was pleasantly surprised to find out, is actually the work of the Jesuits, who seem to be "getting down with the kids" now that even the Pope has an iPod. The general idea is that you download a prayer a day onto your iPod and listen to it on your way to work. As I have set aside my daily commute to indulge in such deep and meaningful stuff as The Clash and The Kaiser Chiefs, I'm afraid I have been unable to make room on my MP3 player for Celtic music and a Jesuit homily, but you can listen online as well, and for eight minutes a day, if you're looking for something Lenty to do, check it out and let me know what you think so I can pass it on to Ang.

Peter Kay in Doctor Who

Apparently Peter Kay is going to play a baddie in Doctor Who. I am now absolutely intent on watching the next series as it will now feature the rather lovely and generally gorgeously fantastic David Tennant AND the simply wonderful Peter Kay.

The only site that seems to have reported this so far is the Guardian's Blog (so it must be true.) They have taken the opportunity to encourage audience participation by asking people to post who they think would be a good choice to play Doctor Who baddies. Typically, most people have taken the opportunity for a bit of Tory-slamming (I love the Guardian!) I especially like the person who posted as Carol Thatcher whose comment simply read "My Mother."

Anyway, it's worth a look.

On a related note (in that it's reported on the same blog)George Galloway is apprently set to host his own radio show. And here was I thinking he was being paid to be an MP.

This story (NOT from the Guardian, to prove that I occasionally do allow myself to look elsewhere) is rather sweet.

Not sure what I think about the whole Caterpillar thing. My initial reaction was that the Church of England should withdraw its money. The trouble is, the whole argument has revolved around whether to do so would be anti-semitic or not, and that has rather clouded the issue. In fact, Caterpillar's bulldozers have reportedly been used to bulldoze homes and settlements in Zimbabwe and China as well as Israel, killing people in the process. The Church has been outspoken in its concerns regarding each of these countries, and it does seem to me a little two-faced to be profitting out of a company that's involved in some of the atrocities, however indirectly, that are going on there. This is not to say I have a problem with Caterpillar particularly - I don't know anything about them - but, sadly, that is what their equipment is currently used for, and I'm not keen to invest in it any more than in companies like BAE that claim to produce all kinds of stuff but, when you get right down to it, they are in part basically producing weapons. I also don't buy the argument that "only a small proportion" of their products are involved. I've never bought the whole "proportion" argument whatever the issue. As far as I am concerned, a life is a life, and when one is lost unnecessarily, we've buggered things up. That might well be "too idealistic" for you worldly blog readers (and I apologies - I don't do "serious" very often) but we shouldn't live in a world where such arguments can carry so much weight.

All that said, the BBC article interested me in that Caterpillar claim that they sold them to the US, who sold them to Israel. Now, why doesn't that surprise me?

Am having a seriously boring day - there's not much to do when you are a student adviser and the university is completely devoid of students requiring advice.

Have just come across a Scritti Politti album in HMV called "Songs to Remember".

I find this ironic.

Life Is Beautiful

And this is why. Ok, so the world is a bit rubbish. Actually, the world is quite a lot rubbish. But I feel that there's at least a glimmer of hope for it when an animation of a Northern, cheese-eating man and his long-suffering dog made out of plasticine can win an Oscar. Hurrah for Wallace and Gromit!

And as an aside, Hurrah for Brokeback Mountain as well.

Life is beautiful. My flat is now Mouse-free, Mouse And Friends presumably having legged it when they saw F drowning their compatriots. On top of which, I have spent the weekend surrounded by wonderful people and glorious sunshine. It's the best time of year: post-dark, miserable mornings and pre-Hay Fever season. If I knew how to write soppy, sentimental and OTT drivel of the Wandering Lonely As a Cloud variety I would do so now. But fortunately for you blog-readers, I don't, so, in a nutshell, my weekend consisted of:

Playing cricket (well, "playing" in the loosest sense of the word. For a start, we had no bails and were playing with a tennis ball, and I am not too hot on the whole catching/batting/throwing elements, and that leaves only running, which I can do fairly acceptably.) In the process I have discovered muscles I clearly never use, and my legs are still aching just above my knees.

Eating copious amounts of food. Unfortunately, every single meal contained cheese, and the alternative was that wonderful cop-out of all veggie/vegan options, peppers stuffed with cous cous. As one of my mates put it, life is too short to stuff peppers.

Going to Church with the Queen. Actually, not with the Queen, she being graciously separate from the rest of us. The service was Mattins, which has always seemed to me a somewhat pointless service on the basis that nothing very much happens, and on top of that it was all lifted wholesale from the Book of Common Prayer where instead of committing sins or generally screwing things up we "err and stray from thy ways like lost sheep," whilst singing endless chants that don't do what you expect them to do. The Queen didn't even come and say hello, which I thought was the least she could do given that we'd started the service asking God to save her and send her victorious and all that mallarkey, but maybe she's learned over the years to sense when there are Republicans present, (two of us, I think, whose polite protest extended only as far as the wearing of trousers) and thought better of it.

Getting a lift back to London, accompanied by the dulcet strains of the Kaiser Chiefs, which was fun, as I got to see bits of London you don't see from the train, added to which I managed to ward off feeling travel sick until I got to Kensington, after which it didn't really matter much.

Dragged my guitar-laden self back to my beloved Camden, which was as ever awash with slightly odd people, then spent the evening playing scrabble with an ex-paratrooper who looked like Billy Connelly even down to the pink beard. I beat him, on account of getting "quotas" on a triple word score. Ah, how exciting is my life!

Apparently 9 out of 10 students believe they are unconventional. I think I am the tenth, in that I have come to terms with my conventionalness and am quite comfortable with it. Which I think makes me fairly unconventional.