You did ask

In my previous post I said en passant that ‘I liked the Berlin Wall’ and someone expressed surprise and dismay. I was going to answer it was obviously a joke and since my post was about my being bad at geography it just meant that before the fall of the Wall in 1989 and the dismantlement of the USSR the map of Europe was much simpler and easier to commit to memory. But, it wasn’t a joke: it was a serious remark ‘masquerading’ as a joke.

Why on earth did I not rejoice – like everyone else, it seemed – when the Wall was knocked down and all those people freed themselves from the yoke of Communism? I try to be honest on this blog so I will tell you why.

This is why:

Because for every one German who was murdering Jews in the Ukraine during the war ten local people were volunteering to help with their dirty work and murder Jews in broad daylight.

Because Slovakia, under Jozef Tiso (a Roman Catholic priest), adopted its own version of the German anti-Jewish laws in April 1939, long before it was occupied by the Germans, and deported 70,000 Jews.

Because Hungary and Romania became Nazi allies very early on, in 1940. When the war was already lost, between April and June 1944 (D-Day was on 6 June), 435,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to concentration camps with the help of the local population.

Because Serbia was declared ‘free of Jews’ in 1942, thanks to the efforts of the government.

Because Lithuania had auxiliary military units under Nazi detachments.

Because there was a Latvian volunteer police unit that shot 26,000 Jews at various locations.

Because there were local Nazi collaborators in Estonia... Croatia... Bulgaria...

I cringe and feel queasy every time I hear any of those names on the radio or the television, and I would rather the inhabitants of those countries were still safely hidden away behind the Iron Curtain and I wasn’t aware of their existence so much. Anti-Semitism was never eradicated during the Soviet years but it wasn’t allowed to flourish, as it is now once again. The Orthodox Church (and the Catholic Church too) has regained its influence over the population, and nationalist movements are getting stronger by the day. Hundreds of magazines are once again spreading anti-Semitic propaganda all over Eastern Europe.

In July 1946, i.e. minutes after the true horror of what had happened in Eastern Europe was revealed to the rest of the world, there was a pogrom – a pogrom! – in Kielce, Poland. Germany, where 44 per cent of the population voted for Hitler, has apologized and made amends. But the other countries haven’t and continue to deny their part in the Holocaust. If it’s ever shown where you live, watch the shocking Channel 4 series Holocaust, which recently broadcast hitherto unseen footage of Nazi sympathisers committing the same horrific deeds as their German counterparts. And if you haven’t seen it yet rent out Shoah by Claude Lanzmann and see how Eastern European peasants who lived a few miles from Auschwitz or other concentration camps acknowledge they knew what was going on and at the same time refuse to feel any remorse or shame about letting it happen. See how people live in houses still bearing Jewish insignia. ‘How did you get to move into this house?’ they’re asked. ‘The Jews “went away”.’

And, then, there’s France, where, before the war, my father had a business, a business that was taken over by the Vichy government. The first document below, dated 4 June 1941 and issued by the ‘Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives’, says that a Monsieur Georges (may he rot in hell!) has been appointed to manage my father’s business. The second document, dated 12 June 1941, says the business doesn’t belong to my father any longer and he’s now just a ‘technical adviser’. He must stop using any of his bank accounts immediately, give Monsieur Georges complete access to his premises and his account books, and provide him with any information he may need in order to manage the business. Furthermore, he must be at his disposal in situ until further notice.

Needless to say, my father left Paris at once and hid here and there for the duration of the war. By some miracle, he managed to recover his looted flat cum workshop several months after the end of the war.

I should cringe and feel queasy when I hear the words ‘France’ and ‘French’ – just as I do with the other names mentioned above, but I can’t: my father chose to stay in the country and that's where I was born. The French are only just starting to come to terms with the fact that, contrary to what they have told themselves and others over the years, they weren’t all in the Résistance and quite a lot of them in fact have a shady past. If you want to know more about the German Occupation in France, watch Le Chagrin et la Pitié by Marcel Ophüls, and listen to shameless ex-collaborators lie and try to justify their crimes.

Perhaps, in time, I will get used to hearing those names and stop wondering what the people concerned or their parents were doing during the war, but it’s still a bit too soon.

Addendum (28/11/06): I should probably have mentioned this before: I have a personal grievance against those unrepentant Eastern European Nazi collaborators: I'm not just outraged on behalf of other Jewish people or because I've seen film footage of what they did.

In July 1941, the Germans occupied a small town in Belarus, called Shklov. By the end of the year, they had killed almost all the Jews. Local fascists killed 6,000 men, women near the town. According to an eyewitness, ‘the children were put alive into a pit with their murdered parents and the pit was filled up’. My father’s family were probably thrown into that pit.

During the night of 13 July 1942, the inhabitants of the Rowno Ghetto (Ukraine), where there were still about 5,000 Jews, were liquidated. According to an eyewitness who testified at the Nuremberg Trials, ‘shortly after 22.00 hours the Ghetto was encircled by a large SS detachment and about three times as many members of the Ukrainian Militia.’ My mother’s family were probably among the people who were massacred that night.

Where am I?

I have this little book where I keep newspaper cuttings that have made me go, ‘I don’t believe it?’, and, since nothing majorly annoying has happened since Saturday (if you don’t count the fact that some more of my bathroom tiles have fallen off the walls; I did help by banging them with a metal bar, but they were holding on by a thread and threatening to land on my head while I had my next shower…), since nothing majorly annoying has happened since Saturday (thought you might have lost the thread by now), since nothing, no, I’m not repeating it again, I thought I would take out one of those cuttings and share with you something that stunned me recently.

Apparently, ‘more than 20,000 children in London do not know they live in the capital. One in five six- to 14-year-old British children cannot find the UK on a map of the world and one in 10 was not able to name a single continent. Boys had slightly better geographical skills, with 65 per cent being able to locate countries compared with 63 per cent of girls. Scottish children were the most geographically aware.’ (London Evening Standard)

I was never very good at geography; I’m still a bit vague on quite a lot of countries (I liked the Berlin Wall for all sorts of reasons) and there are some countries I don’t believe in at all, like Colombia. Don’t ask me why. It’s a quirk I have. Still, I do know where I am, most of the time, and when I was between six and 14 I knew I lived in the capital of France. After that, it became more complicated and confusing: a few years here, a few years there…

Slapping those British kids and myself for not paying more attention during those excruciatingly boring lessons!

Being rude in an email is... being rude

I don’t work full-time as a translator any longer. The short deadlines I used to have to meet were killing me – literally. Until recently I was still doing three ‘big’ jobs a year, now I have only two left (hope I didn’t jinx them for next year): you may have read the story of how I lost the third one. Anyway, since those jobs aren’t enough to live on – far from it – I also update a couple of guidebooks a year for a well-known publishing company specializing in helpful tomes (they are rather big and heavy) for the ‘discerning traveller’.

In order to get up-to-date information, I email all the tourist offices mentioned in the guides and kindly ask them to send me their address, phone number, URL and opening hours. Things like that. I leave spaces for them to fill in the details and all they have to do is to return the email to me. Since I need to update information about hotels, restaurants, museums, etc., I also ask them if they would be so kind as to send me any brochures they might have, because, although everyone has a website these days, I’m not paid by the hour and don’t have the time to trawl the Internet and search through hundreds of sites that are all organised differently (some websites are very good at hiding info). Most of the tourist offices understand my predicament and send me loads of literature; I plunder it and write down anything that’s new, before phoning most places to find out what is still missing. There’s always something, but at least it cuts down on expensive phone calls abroad (they’re not paid for by my employers).

I am currently updating the guide to Provence. Last week I emailed the tourist offices and, as usual, mostly got wonderfully courteous responses from them, and a whole pile of brochures is at this very moment sitting my floor, ready to be taken apart by me.

I said ‘mostly’ because this is what I received a couple of days ago from the tourist office of a very very small place near Arles. The person (a woman) filled in (badly) the blank spaces in my email and added this – in bold red type – at the bottom of it, before returning it to me:

Un peu de perspicacité, de curiosité, de créativité, surtout si il s'agit d'enrichir sa culture personnelle et rendre son travail plus intéressant me semble indispensable lorsque l'on travaille dans le tourisme. A quoi servirait tous ces outils fantastiques mit à notre disposition (le dialogue, le téléphone, internet etc. …) si non à l'enrichissement personnel, à la communication avec l'autre, avec le monde ENTIER.

Il est bien plus facile de suivre la culture du pré-mâché, du pré-pensé et suivre le chemin de l'uniformité en recopiant les informations que j’aurais pris le temps de vous transmettre, car mon temps n'est jamais compté.
Avec toute mon compassion

It translates like this:

A little perspicacity, a little curiosity, a little creativity, especially if it means enriching one’s personal cultural knowledge and making one’s work more interesting, seems to me to be essential when one is working in the tourist industry. What would be the use of all those fantastic tools we have at our disposal (face-to-face communication, telephone, the Internet, etc.) if not for one’s personal development, for communicating with others, with the WHOLE world.

It is much easier to settle, like everyone else these days, for what is pre-digested, pre-thought, and follow the path of uniformity by copying down information that I would take the time to send you, since my time is never taken into account.

With all my sympathy

My jaw dropped when I read it. I was so shocked. I felt as if I’d been slapped. That woman doesn’t know me. How dare she assume that I’m some ignorant, lazy and narrow-minded person who is scared of new technology! How can anyone be so rude and patronizing?

I wrote back to her and told her who I was and what my qualifications were. She apologized. She said ‘culture’ is what matters to her most of all; she deplores the lack of it these days and she thought I was one of those people who didn’t have any. What, in my well-phrased email (in French, I hasten to add), with its correct spelling, grammar and punctuation, made her think that, I don’t know (especially since her email contains no less than six grammatical errors). Furthermore, the whole point about what I’m doing is that not much ‘culture’ is required: all you need is to be able to speak and write the language properly and be very thorough. I am not ‘writing’ the guide; I am just ‘updating’ it. Keep also in mind that it is November and that the village in question is most probably devoid of tourists at the moment so the woman is unlikely to be overworked and short of time. Anyway, she works in a tourist office, what else is she supposed to do but supply information about her village?

I’m sure she would never have said any of that to my face. Although she signed her name, she must have felt protected by the anonymity afforded by the Internet. That was what allowed her to behave in such an outrageous way.

Slap!

Don't you dare!

As many of you know… oops, sorry, thought I was someone else for a mad second.*

In last Friday’s ES (the Evening Standard’s colour supplement), there was one of those made-up interviews that purport to reveal celebrities’ beauty secrets. It was Jane Birkin’s turn to tell us what she puts on her face to look so young, etc. As if we could believe anything she was supposed to have said; as if the products mentioned weren’t sponsoring the newspaper in some way; as if I cared what an aged nymphette, who couldn’t act herself out of a paper bag and who only acquired notoriety because she hooked up with a singing legend, said. Anyway, her parting shot was:

My best beauty tip is…
Smile and be happy.

Gee, as they say over there, thanks for the advice! Without it, I might have thought I needed to behave like a normal human being and react to any misfortune that might befall me in the usual way and be miserable for a while. But, no, now whenever something terrible occurs I will just put on my best smile and pretend it doesn’t affect me. This goes further than other similar crappy pieces of advice – like ‘Be positive’, for instance: it somehow says that one can be, and indeed is required to be happy, regardless of what’s happening in one’s life.

It’s so dismissive and patronizing. You say something to someone; they listen to you and go, ‘Never mind. Be happy!’ ‘Oh, OK, then!’

At least one person seems to have managed it: Nigella Lawson. She’s determined to find happiness at all costs. Bad things happen to her, but she always bounces back without a backward glance. I find it obscene. (I’ve already slapped her, for that among other things, so I won’t labour the point, but she does annoy me). I thought she was the only cold, calculating, heartless, er, woman, but it looks like she’s got disciples.

Don’t ever say that to me or I’ll slap you!*Women on the Verge of Thinking

Un véritable scandale

Il y a quelques jours, j’ai lu, dans le journal, une nouvelle qui m’a complètement suffoquée : dans un lycée anglais sur cinq, l’apprentissage des langues vivantes n’est plus obligatoire. Que va-t-on enseigner aux élèves à la place ? Comment envoyer un texte au moyen d’un portable ? La meilleure façon de porter un capuchon ? Quoi ? Déjà que les langues mortes ne sont pratiquement plus enseignées du tout ; que le latin, qui est d’une si grande utilité sur le plan de la logique et du raisonnement, est tombé en désuétude, que va-t-il bientôt rester des disciplines qui produisaient jusque récemment des individus cultivés ?

Je ne vais pas énumérer les avantages qu’apporte la connaissance d’une ou de plusieurs langues étrangères : la liste serait trop longue et d’une trop grande évidence. Tout simplement, les langues étrangères ouvrent l’esprit, et si l’Angleterre persiste à se refermer sur elle-même de cette façon, elle ne pourra que produire des individus encore plus bornés qu’ils ne le sont actuellement.

Je ne sais pas comment les langues sont enseignées de nos jours : elles l’étaient assez mal de mon temps. Vers la fin de mes études, j’ai passé un an dans deux lycées anglais : les professeurs de français ressemblaient à mes professeurs d’anglais en France, c’est-à-dire qu’ils étaient un peu ennuyeux et n’obtenaient de bons résultats qu’avec les élèves qui avaient une aptitude naturelle et un goût pour cette langue. Mais, même les autres élèves, ceux qui n’avaient pas d’oreille et dont la mémoire n’était pas assez bonne pour retenir les règles de grammaire et le vocabulaire, même ceux-là avaient au moins un aperçu de la manière dont une autre culture fonctionnait et, au bout de six ou sept ans, il leur en restait quelque chose. Ils étaient au moins capables de commander une tasse de thé ou de café et de lire les étiquettes des produits en vente chez Marks & Spencer ou à Monoprix, quand ils venaient passer un week-end à Londres ou à Paris, de nombreuses années plus tard.

Un jour, je devais avoir treize ou quatorze ans, sur le chemin du lycée, je me suis dit, comme ça, tout d’un coup, combien j’aimais être capable de lire et de parler l’anglais. A l’époque, mes connaissances étaient bien sûr limitées, mais je me souviens d’avoir compris que ce n’était que le début d’un long chemin qui ne pouvait que se révéler de plus en plus intéressant et utile. C’est ce jour-là que je suis vraiment tombée amoureuse de l’anglais. Et, lui, il ne m’a jamais déçue.

Les imbéciles qui ont permis aux directeurs de lycées de mettre au rebus les livres de français, italien, espagnol, russe, etc., méritent une claque bien sentie!

Guest Slapper of the Month X

I hesitated before asking GreatSheElephant to be my Guest because she does quite a lot of whingeing on her own blog, entitled, er, The Great She Elephant, and I thought it might be boring for her to come and kvetch on mine, but she said that being grumpy was one of her greatest pleasures in life - that and speed-dating (at least I think that's what she said; I may be wrong). Apart from living in overcrowded London and being freelance and loving pussycats, what she and I have in common is that we feel murderous on a regular basis. I was nodding furiously when I read her Slap. I bet you will too. Thanks, Jane!

Dirty pig

I’m at Leicester Square tube station, waiting for a female friend, when I see him. He has just passed through the Piccadilly Line barriers and he seems to be walking straight towards me. He’s handsome in a debonair, terribly English sort of way. No, let’s make that gorgeous. I can’t stop staring. Our eyes lock. Casually he reaches into a pocket as he nears me, brings out a piece of paper…

And as he walks past, he screws it up and throws it on the floor. “Pig,” I mutter.

In the novels of Carl Hiaasen baroquely awful things happen to people who litter, mostly at the hands of the deranged, bath cap wearing, heroic ex governor of Florida. In fact, for Hiaasen, littering is a signifier of a weak or often downright bad moral character and I can’t help feeling that he’s right.

So, to the business man on the Tube sitting opposite me who takes an orange from his briefcase, peels it, eats it and carefully leaves the peel on the seat next to him, I say, “Death by alligator is what you deserve.” If the orange complete is clean enough to put in his briefcase, why isn’t the peel?

Here, I must make a disclosure. I leave newspapers on trains when I’ve finished reading them. And I love to find newspapers on trains that other people have left for me to read. A copy of Vogue or Harpers would be nice occasionally too, maybe a good book. But not orange peel, water bottles, juice cartons, burger wrappers, salad containers and stinking, half eaten packets of chips, still smeared with ketchup.

Littering shows a complete disregard for others, a lack of consideration for others who share your environment. Litter isn’t just physical rubbish – it can be noise leaking from headphones, overly loud (and never interesting) conversations, the smell emanating from unwashed, undeodorised armpits during rush hour.

London may be one of the largest cities in the world but at the same time, it’s a small, crowded place and we all have to live here. Don’t take up more than your fair share of space and pick up after yourself.

Or my alligator will get you.

Really maddening

Big problems with Blogger. Stop. Might not be able to post for a while. Stop. Dealing with it. Stop.

Update: Problems resolved (it looks like). Stop. Wasted masses of time trying to work out what was wrong and what to do about it. Stop. Blogger might have said. Stop. Scrogneugneu (really useful and funny French swearword). Stop."£!$%^&*!

There is no justice!

So what else is new?

No, no, there really is no justice.

In a normally quiet London suburb there is currently a man who thinks he can do whatever he wants to whomever he wants because he’s just been found not guilty of harassing his neighbours.

For years he has abused them verbally, shone lights into their bedrooms, listened in on their telephone conversations, played very loud music in his garage so everyone can hear it, generally made their lives a misery.

Finally, finally, three weeks ago, he appeared in front of a magistrate. All his neighbours – except one, who didn’t think she could bear the stress of testifying and who is now being shunned, quite rightly in my opinion, by her neighbours – stood up in court and gave evidence about the years they have spent battling with this man. The police made their case too.

The ‘trial’ lasted over a week. It looked like a sure bet he would be found guilty. What else could the magistrate do, those people said to themselves?

He could say that, yes, listening equipment was found in the man’s possession but there was no abiding proof that he’d used it to eavesdrop on his neighbours’ telephone conversations. He could say that because he played loud music in the daytime no one was really disturbed by it. He could say that all his neighbours were neurotic old women (they were mostly elderly women, but women are the ones who find aggressive males threatening) and he’d never heard such a load of rubbish in his life.

He could say all of that and he did.

I haven’t got the strength to slap that magistrate as hard as I would wish to. There’s no point trying to slap the man: he’s invulnerable now. His name is Norman and he lives in Ruislip.

Yes, that woman again!

Ok, when you’re called Marie-Antoinette, your name has a hyphen and you cannot be called Marie or Antoinette. It’s Marie-Antoinette or nothing.

I hate the woman but I don’t see why she should be insulted – spellingwise and namewise – by all and sundry.

Slapping all and sundry! And stupid Sofia Coppola.

(There! I feel better now.)

There's no 'right' way

October is Breast Awareness Month, and breast cancer is in the news again today: apparently, a study has shown that screening may not be the perfect solution:

Researchers looked at international studies on half a million women. They found that for every 2,000 women screened over a decade, one will have her life prolonged, but 10 will have to undergo unnecessary treatment. The report, published in the Cochrane Library, involved a review of breast cancer research papers from around the world. The scientists found mammograms did reduce the number of women dying from the disease. But they also discovered it was diagnosing women with breast cancer who would have survived without treatment, meaning they were undergoing unnecessary chemotherapy, radiotherapy or mastectomies. …. They also revealed a further 200 women out of every 2,000 experienced distress and anxiety because of false positives – a result that indicated a cancer was present but was later found to be wrong. (more info here)

I was one of those ‘false positives’ and I underwent a double mastectomy for nothing… or maybe not… who knows? I’d had symptoms of something being wrong. I told my story at length last year (see A Tale of Two Titties) so I won’t bore you with it again. I think it will be up to individual women to decide whether or not they want to be screened, in the absence of any symptoms. Nearly eight years on I am very glad I did what I did.

If I’d actually had cancer after all, I probably would have fought the disease with all the means at my (and medicine’s) disposal – up to a point, though, ‘life at all costs’ is not a mantra of mine – but I hope I wouldn’t have been made to feel a failure if I’d died in the end. I’ve said it before, cancer is the only disease that makes people use words like ‘battle’ and ‘fight’. No one talks about ‘fighting heart disease’, do they?, and when the person dies they’re not said to have ‘lost their battle with heart disease’. Having a life-threatening illness is difficult enough without being made to feel as if one’s not trying hard enough. If you know someone who’s suffering from cancer, please be gentle with them and let them cope with it in their own way. Sometimes the body wins regardless of how strong the mind is.

Slapping the ‘cancer bullies’! Hello, Debra!

It won’t wash

For two weeks, while I was in purdah, working from morning till night, the BBC inundated us with programmes about Iran. The series was called Uncovering Iran, and its aim was to persuade us that we do not have to fear anything from that country and its demented leaders.

It was so depressing: Iran was on the way to becoming a great place, especially for women, and then, pouf!, it reverted to the Dark Ages. I once met a young Iranian writer, whose wealthy family had got out of Iran in 1979. A few months ago, Harpers & Queen (for which she contributes from time to time), published a long article about her ­– complete with rather attractive photos, in which she expressed her love for her country (she was a small child when her family emigrated here) and her immense desire to go back as soon as possible to play her part there. As far as I know, she hasn’t left London, where she leads a life of luxury and is free to do whatever she pleases.

I don’t care how beautiful Iran’s poetry is, how marvellous its art and how articulate and imaginative its writers. The Germany that spawned the Nazis was one of the most ‘civilised’ countries in the world and look what happened! So this blatant and cynical attempt to make us see Iran as a wonderful, civilised country didn’t work on me. I cannot forget that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier who has called for the elimination of Israel and thereby of the rest of the world’s Jews (because what do you think would happen if Israel didn’t exist?). First show me that Iran isn’t a country full of people who want the destruction of my race, then I too might ‘challenge some of the perceptions [I] still hold about this intriguing country’ – as the BBC expects me to – and marvel at its achievements in the arts, etc. Until then I will reserve my admiration for more deserving subjects.

Slap! The name of the Iranian woman mentioned above is Kamin Mohammadi.

And on the 11th day...

...Bela went out.

I met my deadline on Friday (what did I tell you!) and came out of total hibernation yesterday. I didn't leave my postcode, but still... Most of the places I wanted to visit where closing early so I got rather frustrated, but I was pleased to see that my legs were still in working order and that the area hadn't changed too much in the meantime. I intend to venture farther in the course of this week.

I haven't been completely insulated from the news, though: guess what my position is on the 'veil' question!

I was going to slap someone, but maybe she's suffered enough. Hello, Micki!

Guest Slapper of the Month IX

Sometimes, when I'm introducing a Guest, I have so many facets of their personality to choose from and present to you that I don’t know which ones to emphasize; this time I can say without hesitation that WinterWheat of Triticum Turgidum is above all a mother. Oh, and she’s very tall. I think that’s it. Isn’t it?

Slapsterhood of the (Downward) Traveling Pants

I’d like to slap whoever thought it would be a good idea at the turn of the millennium to revive the ‘60s hip-hugger look by stocking our department stores and online shops with ultra-lowrise jeans.

Back when unleaded gasoline was introduced, I remember being confused that consumers had to pay more for a product that contained less. Ditto for organic foods. The same principle applies to ultra-lowrise jeans. For the service of cutting away 4 extra inches of waistline (with high-tech, diamond-prism lasers, presumably), jeans manufacturers get to command $200+ per pair.

But it’s not the price that earns them a slap. It’s the designers’ decision to keep the rise ridiculously low regardless of the length. A 6-inch rise might make sense on the body of a 5-foot-tall woman who wears a 28-inch inseam. I, on the other hand, at 6 feet tall, wear a 36-inch inseam, so I’m attracted to jeans by lowrise manufacturers like Hudson, True Religion, and Notify because their pants fit my legs. But, well, er… okay, how do I put this? The rise is the length between the crotch seam and the top of the waistband, right? On a human body this represents a curved surface. Six inches curved barely clears the top of my pubes (sorry Bela). Now, I’ll be the first to admit that nothing says SEXY like an exposed butt crack or a peek of c-section scar, but not both at the same time. That’s blindingly sexy, and it’s rude to go about blinding people.

Due to their construction, ultra-lowrise jeans must be worn tourniquet-tight to keep them aloft. They sit at the widest part of the hips, so they have nowhere to go but down. Anyone with enough subcutaneous body fat to menstruate is bound to look like a “popped can of biscuits” and be accused of sporting a “muffin top” if she wears her jeans snugly enough to keep them up. To add insult to injury, she becomes a potential target for that woman, you know the one I’m talking about, who walks around scrutinizing other women’s bodies and snarkily murmuring things like, “She should NOT be wearing those jeans.”

Derrick Shepherd, a legislator in Louisiana, must have been channeling Snarky Woman when, in 2004, he attempted to drum up support for a bill (HB 1703) outlawing lowrise jeans on grounds of obscenity. People showing their “whale tails” (thong backs) would be forced to pay a $500 fine. According to Wikipedia, the Times-Picayune editorialized on May 8, 2004: “Some Louisiana lawmakers seem determined to make us the laughingstock of the nation. But even ideas that are dumb and comical can have dire consequences. A bill that would pull into the criminal justice system children and adults who wear their pants low is not only dumb -- it’s dangerous.” I would add: especially in a state that allows booze to be consumed in moving vehicles and women to walk around topless in exchange for beads. A slap to Derrick Shepherd! (No, I take that back. He lives in Louisiana. He’s been slapped enough.)

I have strong libertarian leanings and I think that people should be able to wear what they want, however uncomfortable, unflattering, offensive, or shocking it may be. I recently saw an adolescent boy riding his bike in a t-shirt that read “I F*CK LIKE A BEAST.” Huge red letters. I hate what he was wearing but I’ll defend his right to wear it. (Although I do pity his mother. Unless she’s the one who bought it for him.)

Anyway, back to the jeans: I’m happy to say that fashion-forward designers are attempting to revive higher rises, although I’ve seen some truly horrible pleated ones that push the boundaries of fuglitude. I don’t want my waistband grazing my ribs either, thanks. Whatever happened to the waist?

PS. I've just been told I'd be slapped myself if I didn't mention that WinterWheat is also an academic and a feminist and a perfumista – all in all, a ‘well-rounded’ human being. There! Happy now, WW? LOL!

PPS. I case you're wondering, I don't let myself be bullied by my guests (or anyone else for that matter). WW has railed (on her own blog) against women who define themselves purely through motherhood so I thought it might be fun to, you know...

Who knows?

I used to think – erroneously – that I worked best under stress so I used to procrastinate like mad: any mundane or even boring activity was always more pressing than the work I had to do. Deadlines were mythical dates that didn’t have any significance and no attempt was ever made to meet them. In fact, they seemed to be there just to be missed. I worked like that for years; my Paris employer used to send me desperate pneus (the equivalent of telegrams, but for local consumption) asking me to get in touch with her a.s.a.p.; I let the phone ring for hours (you weren’t allowed to leave it off the hook and it was fixed to the wall so you couldn’t unplug it); I ignored every entreaty to finish the work (I never let on that I hadn’t even started); finally, finally, when I judged I had driven everyone nuts for long enough and it was actually time to do the work else there would be no more work to do, ever, I did it – in three weeks instead of three months. At the end of the marathon I used to collapse in a heap on the floor, swearing I would never put myself through that again.

And then I began working for a translation agency (my more faithful readers will be familiar with it) and I started being given deadlines that were two or three days apart. There was no time to procrastinate so I knuckled down and did the work. I haven’t missed a single deadline for 19 years now – where’s the beaming smiley when you need it? – and I know that no one is at their best under stress. It’s an illusion.

I’m currently doing a couple of translations for the BBC. It’s a recurring thing and years ago I used to have at least two whole months to do it, which enabled me to combine it with my agency work. More recently, the BBC deadline (which is decided by someone else) has been getting shorter and shorter just because everyone is always on holiday or on attachment or has a mild cold (see previous posts I’ve written about it), and because producers are the least decisive people in the entire world. As I said, it’s a recurring thing and they know it’s coming every year, but they always act surprised and keep me waiting and waiting and waiting. Until this morning I didn’t have a deadline at all for my current work. It paralysed me completely for a few days. I had the material to work on but I couldn’t do it: I needed to know how long I had so I could pace myself and work out what to do and in what order. The deadline I have now been given is a bit too short to be comfortable but as soon as I got it I felt as if an enormous weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I did more this afternoon than in the past three days.

We need to know. There is of course a big deadline for each of us; a huge deadline by which everything we’ve always wanted to do should be done if we are to be at peace, but, except in some special cases, it will be kept secret until it suddenly comes upon us. Everything would be so much easier if we did know. Mine is apparently Wednesday 7 July 2027. That’s one deadline I wouldn’t mind missing. (Wanna check yours and get depressed? Log on here)

Slapping the BBC – again! And my old self for making my life more difficult than it should have been!

Call back your troops, archy!

i shall organize the insects
i shall drill them
i shall lead them
i shall fling a billion
times a billion
times a billion billion
risen insects in an army
at the throats
of all you humans

Thus spake archy the cockroach.

Because of him I have an infestation of moths and no means of eradicating them efficiently.

Don’t tell me to use cedar chips or lavender oil: they make my clothes smell lovely but the moths don’t mind them at all. The only things that used to work were plaquettes Vapona but they were taken off the shelves several years ago. Since then, I’ve been regularly finding moth grubs in several corners of my very small flat. I only wear natural fibres and I fear for my pashmina (who says it’s not fashionable any longer?), and for the other fine wool shawls and beautiful cashmere sweaters I bought in TK Maxx over the last couple of years.

Rather than spending money to develop new and effective anti-moth products, the makers of Vapona et al. have chosen to stop production completely and go on to something else. Maybe they only wear Lycra.

It’s a ridiculous situation: I am an adult; I can be trusted with noxious chemicals; I wouldn’t ingest them or rub my face with them or do whatever it is one shouldn’t do with a Vapona thingy. I’m hoping that it might be possible to buy some more in the future because the World Health Organization now supports the indoor use of DDT to control malaria. The W.H.O. supported indoor spraying with DDT and other insecticides until about 20 years ago. The controversy about its use had been going on since the early 60s, when an environmentalist called Rachel Carson managed to persuade most people that it damaged the environment, although it probably presented no health risk to humans. And DDT was banned. And malaria-carrying mosquitoes flourished. Like my damned moths. I hope people will come to their senses and stop equating a ‘potential’ harmful effect with an ‘actual’ bl**dy nuisance, and allow the use of anti-moths again.

Ok, my moths are not the cause of more than one million deaths every year nor have they infected five hundred million people with malaria, but they are very annoying.

Slapping archy! And indifferent manufacturers!

PS. I'm assuming everyone has read archy's life of mehitabel and its sequel archy & mehitabel by don marquis. You have, haven't you?

Têtes à claques XIII

Why Sarah Waters? Because she looks so smug; because she has a PhD in English Literature and chooses to write, as she says herself, ‘faux-Victorian melodrama’. Ha! It’s soft porn. The word ‘bawdy’ is often used to describe her novels; I shudder when I see that word: it represents everything I detest – in literature and elsewhere.

Why Andrew Davies? Because he’s an old lech, but he should know better than to adapt that kind of crappy stuff. Please don’t tell me he’s a wonderful adaptor; I know he is. His recent adaptation of Bleak House was a gem, and so was almost everything he previously adapted for the small screen. But together with Sarah Waters he managed to produce the most preposterous and repellent thing I’ve ever seen on television – Tipping the Velvet. (As a bonus, it also featured one of the least talented offspring-of a-famous-person ever: Rachael Stirling, Diana Rigg’s daughter. That programme really had tout pour plaire, as we say in French.)

They say everything is being dumbed down. No kidding! Sarah Waters and her faux-Victorian melodramas have been short-listed for the Booker Prize (the most important literary prize in the UK). What next? A Mills & Boon/Harlequin ‘novel’?

Slap! Slap!

PS. Don't you think they look like each other too? The same pixie face. Creepy.

Mes deux centimes

I was going to write a ‘Where were you when...?’ post today, but my friend WinterWheat has done one on hers (Triticum Turgidum), so I’ll just say this:

Just as the people who were massacred by the Nazis were innocent; just as the people who were sitting quietly on the underground and on a bus when they were blown up in London last year didn't ask for it ; just as the ordinary people who are regularly murdered by deluded fanatics in Israel and elsewhere are blameless ...

... the 2,800 people who were reduced to dust in the Twin Towers five years ago were not responsible for their horrendous fate.

There are people who take apologies, mea culpas and any goodwill gestures towards them as weakness. As we know from the preposterous ‘Peace in our time!’ comment by Chamberlain, all those years ago, there are people with whom appeasement does not work. It didn’t work then; it won’t work now.

Biting the hand…

Don’t get me wrong: Blogger is great. Blogger enables me to waffle on about my bugbears. Thanks to Blogger I can find out what my friends think. I love it, quirks and all.

But I wish, I wish there was a system of notification that would tell you when someone has commented on any post you contributed to. Darling Bloglines goes dring! dring! dring! when a blog you like to read has been updated or edited, but that’s it.

I wanna know when a new comment has been posted on one my favourite reads.

Slap!

If you say so

I’ve been sitting here, waiting for the next post on this blog, wondering why it wasn’t appearing. Duh!

I’ve been unusually unstressed and peaceful in the last few days, but today a friend told me something that made my blood boil.

Suppose you’ve got an appointment to have a seaweed wrap at a beauty salon (no, I’ve never had a seaweed wrap in my life, nor any other wrap; I haven’t even had a facial; I’m not terribly fond of being pummelled by strangers – anyway, we’re not talking about me, we’re talking about you). Today is Tuesday and you have an appointment for next Wednesday, but when you made the appointment you didn’t know you wouldn’t be able to turn up that day because you’re going on holiday tomorrow until next Wednesday (no, not me: I never go on holiday). So, you phone the beauty salon, talk to Zelda and ask her to postpone the appointment to the following day instead. She says fine, thanks for calling. You breathe a sigh of relief, congratulating yourself for remembering to call: the salon charges the whole price of the treatment if the appointment is cancelled with less than 24-hour-notice .

When you get back on Wednesday, there is a message from the salon on your answerphone. It was left yesterday by Priscilla: she was just calling to remind you that you were coming in tomorrow Wednesday for a seaweed wrap. Aaaargh! You pick up the phone straight away and tell silly Priscilla that you talked to Zelda last week and that your new appointment is now for tomorrow Thursday, and it should be written down in the book anyway. ‘Oh, yes, here it is,’ she says. ‘That’s all right, then.’ Relieved, you can now unpack your bags and rest after your journey.

‘Le lendemain, elle était souriante…’ – don’t mind me: it’s a funny French song that seemed relevant just now. The following day, you turn up at the salon, ready to be wrapped in seaweed, but Priscilla’s not there, and Zelda has had a lobotomy in the meantime and cannot remember anything about your conversation or anything about any cancellation. She’s the boss of the salon and she’d like to get an extra £500 for the missed appointment. Isn’t that what a seaweed wrap costs? Non? I haven’t got a clue. You remain firm and insist that you did cancel the appointment last week, and in the same breath you curse the absent Priscilla for not telling Zelda about it and Zelda for not believing you. You can tell she doesn’t: she’s got this sour expression on her face and she goes, ‘If you say so.’ If you say so?! Is this how you treat a customer? (I’ve just watched a TV programme about how bad customer service is in this country. You don’t say!)

So I’m slapping Zelda and anyone who, instead of accepting their staff may have made a boo-boo, assumes the customer is lying and openly expresses their disbelief, thereby making the customer feel yucky and not wanting to be wrapped in seaweed after all.

Guest Slapper of the Month VIII

How do you introduce Katiedid of Seldom Nice Nowadays? Her blog always makes me scream with laughter. It’s not for the faint-hearted, though: it sometimes contains, erm, ‘language’ (and so does her Slap – you have been warned, LOL!). Are there any limits to her imagination? The things she does with words and images! She is one of a kind. It is my pleasure to welcome a true heir of the Surrealists.

Bela is kindly allowing me to guest slap this month, but I'm so anxious about it. Who do I pick for a whole month? What if I pick one target, only to find a better one later? Gahhhhh! So here is a brief list of folks I would like to slap at the moment:

1.) Taco Bell, for their fourth meal campaign:
Hello idiots, this is AMERICA. We couldn't care less about your fourth meal proposal because we're already too busy choking down our ninth meal of the day.
2.) Snakes on a Plane:
I'm not slapping the movie because it isn't geniusly cheesy. It is. I'm simply sick of the hype and the formulaic quality of the concept ("scary things" + "transportation" = "hit movie.") What's next? Clowns on a Plane? If you can squeeze 20 of them into a tiny car, imagine the terrifying possibilities a jumbo jet offers. Or Mimes on a Spaceship? After all. In space, no one can see you scream. No, maybe I'm being too hard on the movie. The formula breaks down when you consider Mice on a School Bus. That'd be kind of adorable, actually.

3.) Galvanized Steel Plumbing:
No special reason, but it's had it coming for a while now.
4.) The "Two-Buck Chuck," aka Charles Shaw, wine cult:
Shut up, already. It does not taste "pretty good." It's cheap. It's potable (technically.) It's like raving about the Ford Escort as a kick-ass ride: we nod not because we agree, but because that's how one politely allows others to their insane delusions.
5.) My next door neighbor:
He's a nice guy. But he carries his pet bird on his shoulder everywhere he goes. Everywhere. Unless you're sporting a matching eyepatch and pegleg, that looks a little crazy to the rest of us.
6.) The very small minority of people who make fun when I quote Shakespeare:
Listen, it's not my fault you can sing his stuff to the theme from Gilligan's Island. Now I'd understand if folks rolled their eyes because quoting Shakespeare comes off as pretentious in some cirucumstances. Oh hell. It beats a round of 99 Beers on the Wall, doesn't it?

7.) I would like to slap rogue racoons, but they'd only bite my hand clean off if I tried.
8.) Open buffet restaurants:
I hate them. So much. My antipathy towards them pains my husband to no end. "Honey, there's no waiting, you get to serve yourself!" Don't we do that pretty much every day at home for free? Sanitary concerns with buffets aside... if I'm going to the expense of eating out, I want someone to serve me for a change, thank you.
9.) Which brings me to, self-serve checkout stands at stores:
I've worked retail checkouts before. I refuse to do it without pay. Manning a register and checking people out can be crummy work, but earning minimum wage while putting up with poorly maintained and obstinate machinery is a perfectly honorable job. I have no desire to revist the salad days of my own youthful employment. I therefore don't care if I have to stand in line a whole three minutes longer to wait for a cashier to ring me up. At the very least customers should receive a discount for doing this work for the store. I know a shell game when I see one. Stores which are introducing it promise, amongst other things, that it will keep costs down so they'll pass the savings onto us. Remember when ATMs were first introduced, and the banking industry promised us that lower charges would swiftly ensue since we'd removed the human element (meaning, someone's job) from the practice? Did that happen? No, now we see charges for ATM card use and for interacting with an acutal teller on top of it all, too. Don't buy into their confidence man's scam!
10.) Johnny Depp:
Were it not for him, as an American I could have lived my life blissfully unaware of the existence of Vanessa Paradis. She's his supposedly beautiful partner, if you go for that sort of "I don't eat sandwiches, I just smell them as they pass by" angle-boned waif look, and as long as she smiles with her lips closed. However, you shouldn't be able to play children's hand games with your face. Games like:
Here is the church, Here is the steeple,

Open her mouth, and see all the people! Gaaahhh!

It's as if her teeth don't exist as a set, but as individual dental entities.

On one hand, I find it refreshing she didn't conform to make it in the modeling and entertainment world. On the other hand... LOOK. AT. HER. TEETH.

BONUS SLAP!
I'd like to slap myself, due to my poor grammar (see #3.) And also for being so depravedly shallow (see #1 through #10.) I'm unable to slap who I'd really like to, the Syrian ambassador to the US, because I'm unable to articulate anything beyond "fuck you" to him whenever he's on the the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer pretending to care about the Lebanese people, or for that matter, peace with Israel. But this is not "Fuck You of the Day," so it's not on the list. (Well, just in case Bela will let me get away with it: fuck you, Imad Moustapha.)