Review: Shopping
The things women say to help each other justify buying new clothes! It's enough to induce you to write an epic poem called 'On the Endless Wonders of Being Female' and have done with it. I was in a shop in Holborn the other day, considering a pair of shoes, and a woman was saying to her friend, "See, you could wear them with jeans OR with a dress. They're a bargain", as if wearing jeans or wearing a dress is pretty much the sum of all human experience, or the scale, and wearing jeans and a dress at the same time some kind of harmonious middle point where you feel your own oneness with the universe. I left empty-handed, feeling quietly superior, then went to Topshop and bought a pair of shoes that don't actually fit me at all in any way, though I keep on trying them on hopefully, in case my feet have shrunk in the night.
For a while after my Tragic Breakup (TM) (R), I was completely uninterested in buying new clothes and went around wearing glasses and a grey cardigan, for all the world as if they were sackcloth and ashes, and not making eye contact with anyone. But even at the best of times, I'm a pragmatic rather than a talented shopper. Go in, find stuff, buy stuff, leave. This is considered a male approach to shopping, by people who like to ascribe all rational behaviour (shopping sensibly, being good at maths, knowing how to fix things) to men, and all irrational behaviour (pointless giggling, heavy make up, envy) to women.
It deflates the heart to read about yet another female-oriented website/magazine that plans to exploit women's apparently limitless fondness for enthusiastic consumerism, as if that were the main interesting thing about being female. It makes me want to pretend to be interested in quantum mechanics and early Greek philosophy, although if I were being completely honest I'd have to say, "I totally reject your reductive analysis of me! I am interested in KISSING and READING NOVELS." And the proprietor of this fantasy magazine/website (basically I'm thinking of that ohsoyou thing that got profiled in the Guardian a while ago) would look at me, all aglow from a recent orgasm induced by someone mentioning the phrase Web 2.0 in front of them and making them feel, you know, YOUNG and ALIVE, and refer me to the 'Kissing' and 'Books' sections, all prepared and laid out like a boring fate.
Having said all this, my mother and sister share some kind of recessive shopping gene and can buy stuff for hours on end without any visible signs of boredom or exhaustion, unless it's exhaustion of the finite resources of the soul, which you wouldn't notice anyway against the general background of Oxford Street.
Something that would not be any fun at all, but is kind of interesting to think about (very similar in this way to listening to all the stuff on your ipod all the way through, nonstop, for six days, the idea of which occurs to me every time I look at my itunes... I'd be in a completely empty room, just me and my ipod, and people would bring food and water, and I'd keep a diary... "12.56am: Ice Cube (Greatest Hits): Surprised by a feeling of emptiness") is if you piled up everything you'd ever bought, ever, every T-shirt and chocolate bar and mobile phone and tin opener and plastic action figure, and just, kind of, thought about what you'd done. That would be interesting. More interesting than shopping, anyway.
Shopping: Spiritually impoverishing, materially rewarding. It's a toss-up. 5 out of 10.
Review: Being a bit rubbish
I don't update this very regularly, do I?
Being a bit rubbish: Not something I'll think of fondly on my deathbed. Or at all, I hope. 0 out of 10.
Review: Reaching 40,000 on my hit counter
Size isn't everything, apart from when it's the size of your soul, man, or the size of a malignant tumour, or the size of the number of hits that have hit the hit counter of your hit blog. Nearly 40,000! And only some of those (say, 5,000 maximum) are me admiring my own work! Many hits, for example, are directly attributable to my mother, my aunt, my grandfather, and perhaps even the odd brain-damaged boy who has taken an interest. I would like to thank you all. I wouldn't be here* without you.
Reaching 40,000 on my hit counter: It may take weeks, but I have faith. 9 out of 10. *Editing a report about infectious diseases in an office with grey carpets, sickly lighting, and a lovely but essentially useless view of St Paul's out of the window on the other side from mine.
Review: The smell of bubblegum
I was going to start this post with the sentence, "The world can be an exceptionally depressing place", as if I were comparing it to some other, less depressing place - the surface of the sun, perhaps, or the afterlife. The point is I stayed up till 5am last night reading a book called Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, about clones forced to donate their vital organs one by one. If you could sum this book up in a sentence, it would be: "What's the point of it all, when we're all going to die anyway?" When you think of how there are books by people like Dr Seuss and Jilly Cooper that can be summed up in really life-affirming sentences like "Food can taste nice whatever its colour" and "Look, here are some rich people having sex", it makes you wonder why you bother with proper literature at all.
I was in the shower several weeks ago (in Stockholm, which is a long story, a long story involving me living in Stockholm), lathering up a gloopy handful of bright green shower gel, and I realised I'd got it all wrong. All of it! The greatest cultural achievement of recent years isn't a book, or a film, or an album, but artificial bubblegum scent. It's the smell of happiness. The smell of innocence. The natural world has nothing on it. It's like Proust's little cakes crossed with that time in the garage forecourt on a long hot summer car journey with your cousins, when someone bought a pack of apple flavour Hubba Bubba and you blew a perfect bubble for the first time in your life.
I was really pleased with myself for making this discovery, until about two days later when my boyfriend told me that he hated the bubblegum shower gel and it was the least sexy flavour of shower gel ever. I was crestfallen. A few days after that, we had a huge fight and he made me move out for a while to give him some space. (Space?! Space???!!) I'm not sure the two phenomena are necessarily linked, but it's important not to rule anything out in this life (as opposed to all those other lives you'll have, in the afterlife or on the surface of the sun).
The smell of bubblegum: Loses points for lack of eroticism, but otherwise perfect. 8 out of 10
Proverbs were originally composed either by subsistence farmers – “don’t put your eggs in one basket”, “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched” and so on – or Shakespeare. I was forced to go and watch Macbeth in a theatre the other weekend, and bits of it were quite good, even though it had actors in it, which is a shame. And it had a lot of proverbs that I thought were invented by subsistence farmers, but are actually by Shakespeare.
The Bible is another important source of proverbs, as when a bush burst into flames in the wilderness and advised Moses, “What you lose on the swings, you win on the roundabouts.”Many people believe that a judiciously applied proverb can help them win an argument, but they are wrong. What can sometimes work is saying something outrageous, but pretending you read it elsewhere, eg "I believe it was Oscar Wilde who observed that all people who wear lipliner are cunts" or "As far as household pets go, cats are better than dogs, as God said".
Proverbs: They eat the bread of wickedness, and drink the wine of violence. 6 out of 10.
