Symbolic Forest

Diplomat Of The Week award goes to the Israeli Ambassador to El Salvador, who, as you’ve probably heard by now, was found tied up and ball-gagged* by the local police. Note to the Daily Record: it is arguably in the public interest to report on the sex lives of ambassadors and other top diplomats. Charity shop volunteers: not quite the same.

* The Guardian’s sub-editor on that article seems not to understand how a ball gag** works

** NSFW link, if you hadn’t guessed

Keyword noise: Tsuriel Raphael, ballgag

We managed to be awfully productive yesterday. We’d gone to bed fairly early on Saturday night,* so got up bright and early on Sunday morning. We were having breakfast in town when the streets were still deserted, and were wandering around shopping in almost-empty shops. We even managed to get all H’s grocery shopping done, get back home, feel like we’d used up a full day’s energy, and it was still only one o’clock. A whole half-a-day left to do productive things, creative things, imaginative things, limited only by our own imaginations.

So, of course, we lazed around on the sofa and ambled around the internet all afternoon instead. Hurrah!

* after a rather nice Indian meal at a restaurant on Chants Ave.

You probably won’t have read this nasty story in yesterday’s Daily Record, exposing the sex life of someone who isn’t famous and wasn’t doing any harm to anyone. Not many people will have read it, because out of the population of the country not many do read the Record.* That’s not the point, really.

As I said, it’s a nasty story, about a normal, average member of the public, who enjoys kinky sex. There is nothing to justify publishing her full details in the way the paper did. Moreover, it throws a lot of light on the social conservatism of tabloid papers in general - the faux-shock that a young wife would behave that way, would want to behave that way. The only consolation is that few people ever pay attention to anything journalists say.**

The Daily Record presumably think, though, that this sort of story sells papers, especially local or regional papers. And in an effort to sell papers, they’ve let themselves be used. I don’t know NR myself, but I know several people who do know her, some people who don’t like her very much, and I know there are a few people who don’t like her very much at all. I can’t imagine that anyone I know personally would have exposed her to the press, but clearly someone, who knows her well, has done. And in all probability that person, whoever they are, does exactly the same kind of things that she does, and would be treated in exactly the same way if Cara Page Of The Daily Record had come across them first. I don’t know anything about the sex lives of the Daily Record staff, but whoever initially sent them this “story” is very likely a very nasty hypocrite.

* It seems to be widely available in England now, a lot more than, say, ten years ago.

** and they’re mostly other journalists, at that.

Keyword noise: Daily Record, Cara Page

Two things struck me about the coverage yesterday of Patricia Tabram’s drugs conviction. Tabram, in case you didn’t see the news, is the Northumberland woman convicted of growing cannabis for medical reasons. She likes to claim that her conviction is part of a grand struggle for rights, like the right of everyone to vote, which is over-egging her pudding a little. She’s certainly been using her conviction as part of a broad political campaign,* but that’s about as far as the similarities go.

Anyway, interviewed on Radio 4 last night, she said something along the lines of: cannabis is good medicine because it’s natural. Prescription drugs are not because they’re full of chemicals.** Which, of course, is a load of nonsense. Some people like to use the word “chemicals” as if it’s some dark, lurking evil, and like to imply that anything grown on a plant is healthy and implicitly Good For You. Despite this, you rarely find them tucking into a nice meal of potato fruit and yew berries.*** How many different chemicals are in your average pill? A handful. How many different chemicals are in a marijuana leaf? Thousands.

Tabram also said that prescription medicine made her feel suicidal, but cannabis had no side-effects at all. That’s her experience, though. Everyone has different side-effects to any sort of drug, “natural” or otherwise; I’ve known several people who have had bad psychological reactions to cannabis. It may be relatively innocuous, but just because you’re fine with it doesn’t mean the person next to you will be. The plural of “anecdote” is not “data”.

* Standing against Peter Hain at the last general election, appearing on the telly a lot, trying to get people to call her “the cannabis gran”, that sort of thing. I had second thoughts about mentioning her here, because I don’t like giving publicity to publicity-seekers, but frankly this blog is a drop in the ocean.

** Not her exact words, but that was the message she was trying to give.

*** I shouldn’t need to say this, but potato fruit are rather poisonous, and yew seeds are very poisonous indeed.

Keyword noise: cannabis, marijuana, cannabis gran, patricia tabram

As to why I felt quite so ill last night - the previous post was written in a delirious haze, which is why it makes no sense at all - I’m not quite sure. But I’m blaming the stench.

I came home last night, and the first thing to do was feed the cat. So, of course, I go to the cupboard, and find a rather inflated packet of cat food. Not a good sign.

The only thing to do, though, was to move it. And as soon as I took it out of the cupboard, the stench hit me.

Now, some people have smelled horrible smells. Some people work in stenching plants,* or fish factories. I’ve smelled our reception after people from the local fish plants have popped by, and they don’t leave a very good smell behind them. Some people have smelled sewage works, week-old battlefields, rotting seaweed, and many other horrible things. But all these people, when they smell the smell of a rotting pouch of cat food, so rotted it has inflated, would say: “bloody hell, that smells bad.”

It smells awful. It smells disgusting. It turned my stomach. I still felt nauseous several hours later, and there’s still a tinge of it about the kitchen.

The cat, sensibly, fled, and didn’t come back until morning.

* the places where they add the “gas smell” to gas, so that you can smell it when there’s a gas leak. Gas fresh out of the ground doesn’t smell of anything at all, and the concentrated liquid that gets added to produce the smell smells, I imagine, vile.

Feeling too tired to write. Too tired, a little ill. Too stressed with work. Too stressed with life at the parents, too far away from H. And there’s too much love to go around these days.

Not much has been happening to me this week. Which is possibly the wrong way of looking at things: just the same number of heartbeats have happened, but for some reason I haven’t thought them notable.* Maybe I’m not paying enough attention to them.

The other night we settled down to watch a retro-Doctor Who series, from the Tom Baker era,** and reading the back of the box I realised that the first episode was originally broadcast on the day I was born. Strangely, it made me feel suddenly younger.

* at least, not the heartbeats I can write about on a site like this.

** The Invasion Of Time, if you were wondering

Thanks for all the comments on financial equality within relationships. Using the term “sexual equality” was a bit of a red herring, really,* because it wasn’t really anything to do with gender at all, other than that I wanted to find out who would automatically assume that it was all about a man who didn’t want his female partner to have any control over their finances.

And the answer is: it is all good, and there is nothing wrong with what they are doing. P is (so far as I can tell, because I’ve never met R) the more sensible and level-headed of the two. R accepts (I’m told) that he is incapable of looking after money, so lets P get on with it. Moreover, R is unable to get any sort of credit card. Why is a mystery, because he has a mortgage and a clean credit record so far as he can tell; but the fact is, I’m told, that he’s always been turned down. So P is in charge of everything.

It’s all good. What’s more interesting, though, is why we** thought it might not have been. A bare statement of facts never tells the whole story.

* or “mistake”, you could say.

** or, “you, the readers,” rather