Modern life is rubbish

After yesterday's serious entry, I'm sure today is a good time for light relief. So it is apt that I have some major feminist campaigning to do - always a barrel jam-packed with laughs.

The gap between women's and men's pay is still fairly hideous - on average, full time working women are paid 17% less an hour, or around £4000 per year less than men. That's equivalent to men being paid for 365 days' work while women work for free from today, 30 October, until the end of the year. With stats like that, it's depressing that so many women seem content to put up with this continued inequality. I've written to my MP and my local paper - please click this link if you feel inspired to do something too.

While the mood is sombre, I'll mention that I saw an excellent film about Nazi concentration camps last night. On the way in, the box office attendant asked us if we were aware that The Counterfeiters was a German film. We were. I asked if he had to ask that about all subtitled movies or just German ones. He laughed politely. There's not much new stuff that can be done with concentration camp films - the horror has been recorded extremely well many times before - but it doesn't really matter. We forget so quickly and need to be reminded as often as possible. This was an intelligent and political film made by Germans and I recommend it.

What's genuinely funny? Not the fact that our Royal Family are rewarding Saudi Arabia's appalling behaviour with lavish parties. And not the news that the talented journalist, Dina Ravinovitch, has died from breast cancer aged 44. It's all a bit rough.

What was fractionally embarrassing was being too hot for make-up after doing sprints at the gym with Laura yesterday afternoon and so deciding to go without until I'd stopped 'glowing' - and then accidentally leaving my make-up bag at work and having to meet my ex sans foundation, eyeliner or - crucially - bronzer. Not that I was trying to impress Luke but it would have been nice to turn up looking alright rather than like a pasty, washed out 30 year old with semi-washed-off green eyeliner smeared into my burgeoning crows' feet.

Female inequality at work, the Holocaust, Saudi Arabia's human rights record, breast cancer and an absurdly self-absorbed anecdote about cosmetics. Where else can you get such an inappropriate and unrepresentative cross-section of contemporary existence? Until next time...