A cornucopia of issues

So I'll update you on my existence and then we can cover this heartbreaking academies project and other hellish current affairs developments.

Friday night I went to see the Chemical Brothers (or as my 26 year old companion Chris insists on calling them, 'The Chems') at The Roundhouse. Last time I saw them perform live, I was eighteen and had told my parents I was staying the night at my friend Daisy's house but in fact we went to a Prodigy gig at Brixton Academy and took speed that our druggy friend Nick had put in a bottle of Ribena for us because we didn't want to snort it. The Chems were the support act but we'd drunk our Ribena too early and I was completely mental during that forty minute gig and then basically started aching and being tired during the main set. The next day I felt like my bones were eroding and Daisy and I compared notes about how horrific our comedowns were, but in retrospect I'd taken about half a gram of speed dissolved in a sugary drink, a combo which was about as likely to get me high as a Tracker bar. I think I was just unfit and six hours of dancing had given my body a shock. ANYWAY. Fourteen years on and the Chemical Brothers have a lot less hair and, personally, I think their music is a bit less exciting than it was when I first listened to Exit Planet Dust or whatever it was called. But it was a brilliant gig all the same, even without the alleged benefit of speed or Ribena - lots of dancing, lots of holding arms aloft to interfere with the amazing laser shows, lots of spilled pints and excitement about Bono's back injury that was possibly (at that point) going to exclude U2 from headlining at Glasto. Come on Bowie.

Saturday morning I was my own middle-class nightmare as I was awoken at 7.30am by the delivery man from Ocado, and proceeded to make my own garlic bread for the countryside gathering that lots of us went to and cor was it lovely. Old friends, hay bales to sit on, delicious food, Pimms and champagne in the sun, laughing, chinese lanterns after dark... a magical time and a blast from the past. Hungover and giggling uncontrollably on Sunday, work and choir on Monday, work and work-sponsored wine tasting last night - we tried bottles from Greece, Georgia, Italy and France and it was interesting. Apparently wine is thought to have originated somewhere around Georgia in 6000 or 7000 BC. Amazing. More interesting was the conversation I was having with my colleague before we sat down. I'd pointed out a guy from our floor who was also at the tasting, and indicated that he was thought to be a bit of a player. My colleague, let's call him Mike, said that didn't surprise him at all. Mike is in his early fifties and has been married nearly thirty years, and he told me that having a black-and-white attitude to infidelity is fairly naive. My jaw dropped.
"Do you mean that cheating is the norm?" I asked.
"I have no idea," he answered. "But it can't be a deal-breaker. Men are ruled by their pants. If it's going to be the end of your marriage if he fools around with another woman on a drunken night out, then you're going to find it hard going."
"Hang on," I said. "You're telling me that I have to be prepared to put up with infidelity if I get married?"
"I've never cheated, but I think it's not practical to say you will end a 25 year marriage on the basis of a one night mistake."
"Obviously I know he'll want to shag another woman at some point, possibly hourly," I said, just to show that I'm not too much of a purist. "And I'll meet other guys I find attractive too. But I've always hoped that, if he finds himself wanting to sleep with someone else, he'll come to me and tell me, and either we deal with it or we decide to break up."
"It's a nice idea, but I think your standards are impossibly high," Mike said. "These things are - normally - not premeditated. The guy gets drunk, goes home with the wrong person, wakes up remorseful - and just because of that, you're going to end a 25 year marriage, with three kids involved? It's not justified. No one is perfect."
"But that's just such a bad attitude. If he does it once and gets away with it, what's to stop him doing it again, over and over? I see what you mean, that ruining 25 years for one shag seems over the top, but if you can't trust him, then surely the things that make a marriage fun are mostly destroyed? And that's the worst bit - once you've been lied to once, once you've been made a fool of, your next relationship is affected too. You become paranoid and insecure, and having once been a laid-back cool girl, you move to be a divorcee with three kids who can't trust anyone else. Just because your stupid husband fancied a shag with someone else. The cheating moment itself may only last ten minutes but the effects are long-lasting..." Mike looked at me sadly - he clearly understood my point of view but still thought I was being hopelessly unrealistic. I felt totally powerless. And a bit sad. Really quite sad, actually. My first long term relationship ended because I was sorely tempted to cheat on my boyfriend. I didn't though - I spoke to him about it and we agreed that neither of us were happy, and we broke up. If my husband of 25 years wanted to cheat, I'd hope he would come and talk about it with me. But I guess if it just pops up out of nowhere, he's unlikely to phone me from the cab he's taking back to her house, with her kissing his neck as he explains his predicament. Meh, I dunno. I just hate the whole thought of infidelity. It really makes me feel sick. Desire to sleep with someone else I'm fine with - but actually going through with it, and lying to the person who's been there for you for the past quarter of a century... I just can't see how I should be laid back about that prospect. And that whole argument about men being rule by their pants, it's pathetic. It may be true, but it's pathetic. Women have just as strong a need to be loved and flattered and fancied. Maybe the chemicals are different and men genuinely can't control their urges. But I don't believe that's true of all of them. Some of them are honourable enough to keep it in their pants. I won't get married until I find one like that. And I refuse to be grateful if he is. Fidelity should be a given, not an unexpected bonus. Conversing with Mike was unexpectedly depressing. Glad (in many ways) that I'm not married to him.

In other news... It's my country's economy that's going down the pan, but I did laugh when I read this extract on The Graun's website, detailing some very-much-predicted issues with the Conservatives' budget in yesterday's Queen's Speech:
'Osborne was forced to abolish child trust funds altogether after the Tories overestimated savings that could be made on the basis of advice from the Whitehall efficiency experts, Sir Peter Gershon and Dr Martin Read. Gershon had said that £1bn of the £6bn cuts would come from savings in government IT projects, while up to £1bn would come from a recruitment freeze across the civil service. The Treasury said yesterday that IT had produced savings of £95m, less than 10% of the amount initially identified, while the recruitment freeze would produce savings of £120m, slightly more than 10% of the amount estimated by Gershon in that area.
Labour had lampooned a two-page document produced by Gershon during the election campaign outlining his efficiency savings. Liam Byrne, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said tonight: "We warned the Tories that their plans were wrong. Now they're having to break both parties' manifesto promises and wipe out child trust funds because they wouldn't listen."'
I've no problem with child trust funds falling by the wayside, but it does show that complex descriptions of proposed financial savings made by a party while in opposition should pretty much always be taken with a shedful of salt.

Meh, no energy to carry on typing - suffice to say, this new academies drive by the Tories (and, yes, the LibDems) is exactly what I feared most - schools being run outside the jurisdiction of the local councils, ostensibly to free up teachers from national red tape: a good aim but a terrible solution. Academies are privately funded by businesses or individuals - how can this fail to create a massive disparity between different schools in different areas? It also opens things up for a plethora of faith schools. Agh. It's a disgrace, seriously. I can't even really believe it's happening. The whole thing makes me massively disappointed and LIVID with the LibDems for sanctioning such a lot of bollocks. I'm still glad I voted for them, because the vaguely-hinted-at referendum on AV in 2011 will mean the next election is slightly fairer than it would have been, had the coalition not been formed. But the Labour leadership candidates look pretty uninspiring at the moment so right now I really have no idea who I'll be voting for in 2015. With the education system going down the pan thanks to a 'solution' that will make the existing postcode lottery situation look like a pleasant dream, this country might be so freaking scary that I might not even be here next time around. Grumpy grumpy.

Ill Behaviour

Sometimes something happens in front of me, and although it is fascinating and extraordinary at the time, the thought that pops into my head is not 'Ohmygod, that's fascinating and extraordinary,' but 'Ohmygod I can't WAIT to write about this.'

That happened this morning.

I was on a fairly packed commuter tube northbound, standing in the central atrium bit, leaning against the glass partition that separates the standing section from the seats. Despite the high density of people, I'd managed to angle myself so that I could read my book, the brilliant River of Time by Jon Swain, tales of 1970s Cambodia and Vietnam so potent and engrossing that I momentarily forgot where I was. But suddenly, across the width of the carriage, by the opposite doors, someone sneezed - a strange, cracking noise that jerked my attention. I looked up from my book. There, a metre or so away, was a young man who, from the mouth down, was completely covered in opaque white vomit. It had clearly taken him utterly by surprise. Several people around him had been splattered by the force of the eruption. It was all over him, down his chin, his shirt, over his suit jacket which he'd draped over one arm; thick, smooth emissions like emulsion paint, but with small yellow items flecked within. I'm guessing he'd had something like the world's largest ever bowl of Ricicles for breakfast. A matter of seconds later, we pulled in to a station and he exited. The remaining people looked around, some horrified, some smiling, all silently listening to their own world, white headphones snaking into their ears. It was British tolerance at its best.

The space vacated by the puker stood empty for a couple of stops, and in that time, I was able to secure a seat, three away from the vomit-covered partition on the same side. The girl sitting next to the partition had a good half pint of vomit sliding down the other side of the glass to her left, but she appeared to be calm. Then a man boarded the train, saw the rare area of space, pushed through to stand in it and then leant on the partition, covering his dark jacket in another man's sick before 9am. Disappointing. When another passenger alerted him to his nightmare, he dealt with it well, blushing and giggling rather than getting angry, and later helpfully pointed out the offending matter to another young man who had been about to make a similar mistake. It was all rather cheery. And a tube first for me.

It brought to mind my old hairdresser, Helen, who told me that when she had been pregnant she'd suffered really badly from morning sickness, and was always ill on the train to work every morning. At first, she'd held it in until a station, and then got off and been sick into a bin, and got back on the next train, but eventually she just took a plastic bag on board with her every morning and was quietly sick into it without even getting up from her seat. I was fairly disgusted at the time but if I'm ever pregnant, maybe I'll understand. Somehow I don't think morning sickness was the cause of the sneeze-chunder explosion I witnessed this morning, though. Unless science has moved on very quickly in the last week without my knowledge.

On an unrelated subject, last night I went to see Trash City at the Roundhouse. It was a weird cabaret spectacle with a fantastic set and bizarre performances including a vast black man dressed head to toe in white tulle singing a terrible version of Fix You by Coldplay, several strange transvestite geishas doing dance routines to what Chris described as nineties-influenced big beat, whipped cream, Alice Cooper, an hilarious song called something like 'Everyone's Fucking But Me', weird acrobatics, pole-dancing robots, nude women smeared in something resembling Marmite and then eating fire, heart-shaped balloons, feathers, and a vast dinosaur made out of reclaimed metal and a motorbike engine that thudded its way through the crowd as a finale. I love things like that. I don't really understand them, I don't have a clue what motivates people to put them together, but it's good to be out of the usual headspace, a bit like a legal LSD trip without the comedown or the panic about violent flashbacks which clearly never really happen but which we were warned about so persuasively at school that I have never done acid - something about a woman who was driving her kids down the motorway twenty years after she took a tab, and started seeing huge insects flying towards her and swerved to avoid them and wrote off her car, killing herself and her kids. And then another girl who stabbed herself to death in the bath with nail scissors, which, in retrospect, I'm not sure is even possible. Still, the horror stories worked. And Trash City is cool.