Category: Rants

In which Anne disappears down the rabbit hole

11/5/2020

At 15.55 one Sunday in mid-April, Anne decided to go stark raving bonkers. Of course she was conscious of the contradiction: madness that’s chosen, isn’t madness at all. Nevertheless, she was earnest in her objective, if unclear how it would be achieved. She even made a note to that effect on the information sheet for the novel she’d just been reading. The novel about depression with rabbits in the title that had just made her laugh out loud.

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I’m fuming (furious, irate, incensed, enraged, seething, mad, livid, cross)

17/4/2020

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Life’s changed so quickly, it’s been hard to keep track. I’ll admit my initial response was childishly self-centred. Woe is me, my favourite conference is cancelled; I won’t be able to give my talk and sell half a dozen more books. But, soon after, I saw the point when large gatherings were banned (although it was a shame my Wednesday afternoon choir couldn’t do its final concert). Next came concern for the mental well-being of those whose lives were restricted and livelihoods lost.

I felt grief when schools and pubs and restaurants were closed, despite not having much use for any of them; and guilt when a minor health issue kept me from my usual outdoor volunteering, with staffing already low as the over 70s were advised to stay at home. I welcomed the lockdown in bringing some order to an atmosphere of chaos and confusion, despite being appalled when I saw it happening to my publisher in Spain. I found a host of silver linings and even admired the most egotistical prime minister and the most extreme right wing government’s management of the crisis. And then the doctors and nurses began to die.

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The positives of pessimism as we await the pandemic peak

10/4/2020

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What character have you played in the early chapters of the dystopian novel we’re all living? Were you the sensible one whom the others ridicule or were you, like me, the seven-stone weakling who follows the trail into the ramshackle warehouse without telling her colleagues where she’s going or charging her phone? Although I’ve contracted no symptoms and stuck to the letter of the law, I look back in horror on my attitude of only a month ago; I ought to have been more cautious right from the start.

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Reason is irrelevant. ‘The people’ demand their pig in a poke

9/9/2019

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For over three years, British politics have been a pantomime that gives democracy a bad name. A referendum dreamt up to unite the Tory party – spoiler alert, it didn’t – fragmenting the entire electorate with a just-over 50% vote in favour of economic self-harm[1]. The nettle grasped by a vicar’s daughter[2], and boy oh boy did that nettle sting. Still, she tackled it with robotic determination, while Rome burned[3], until she finally got the humbling she’d been rooting for since day one[4]. Now, for those of us bludgeoned by the Tory leadership contest[5], the victor’s blundering first week in parliament has been a joy. But will we find, amid proroguing parliament, sacking twenty-one of his mates – including the longest serving MP – and an apparent willingness to break the law rather than ask Brussels for an extension if he can’t secure a new deal, the final straw that will bring the country to its senses? I hope so, but I can’t believe it will.

[1] Leaving me and many others feeling homeless inside.
[2] Is that relevant, Anne? It is if she considered that a stamp of her morality, then went on to railroad through an agenda even she didn't want, having voted Remain.
[3] Or London did, in the Grenfell tower
[4] See Humbled Theresa puhleeeassse
[5]AKA a fascist plot to demoralise the Left

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Is the #ToryLeadershipContest a fascist plot to demoralise the Left?

19/6/2019

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In the late 1960s and early 70s, American psychologist Martin Seligman and his colleagues subjected dogs to inescapable electric shocks. Later, when the same animals were placed in a situation where the shocks were avoidable, they didn’t attempt to get away. If you can stomach the cruelty, the concept of learned helplessness derived from this research is a useful way of thinking about depression and – although I don’t recall ever seeing it referenced this way – the experience of a baby left to cry. Right now, British politics makes me feel like a dog given uncontrollable electric shocks and I can’t help thinking it’s a fascist plot to demoralise the Left.

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Mothers watching over their offspring from a distance: Zeina & She Would Be King

21/5/2019

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Two novels, set primarily in the continent of Africa, in which women are separated from a child and must resort to looking on from a distance. In the first, set in Egypt, Bodour can’t admit that a famous singer is her illegitimate child. But at least they’re in the same city. And both alive. Which is not the case in the second novel, set in Jamaica, the USA and Liberia, where the deceased mother’s voice is carried on the wind. So she does get to guide her son and his two companions, all of whom have supernatural gifts. Intrigued? Read on!

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The Enigma of Gender

23/4/2019

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Women love shoes and shopping, or so the stereotype goes, but since I prefer tramping the moors in my walking boots, I can’t be one of those. But, given that I’m not so keen on getting drunk while watching football, I can’t be a man. That’s the problem with binary categories, they don’t allow for “a bit of both”. They reduce the world to black or white, no room for shades of grey.

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Young idealists: Godsend & Deviation

25/2/2019

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Two novels about eighteen-year-old women who abandon the advantages of their previous identities to make common cause with oppressed peoples, at great risk to themselves. In the first, set in 2000, Aden travels from a secular society in California to study Islam, and to join the jihad. In the second, set in 1944, Luce leaves her bourgeois family in Italy to experience first-hand the Nazi labour camps. Are these rebellious adolescents idealists or deluded, or a little of both?

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Why #Metoo conversations are everybody’s business #amreading

20/11/2017

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My real-world promotion of World Toilet Day yesterday was somewhat eclipsed by a surprise conversation about #MeToo. Surprise because, having personally experienced only “mild” forms of unwanted sexual attention, I hadn’t jumped on this particular bandwagon, the conversation left me feeling I should have. After all, one doesn’t have to have experienced direct gender discrimination to be a feminist. One shouldn’t have to have experienced the trauma of rape to oppose the culture of misogyny that so often enables it.

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Cry, Baby, Cry!

16/1/2017

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Sue Gerhardt's book nails the argument much more clearly than I can.

Knowing I’ve never had children, readers have expressed surprise that I’m interested in reading and writing about mothers and babies. To me, however, it makes sense politically, (past) professionally and personally. A socialist by inclination, I believe in collective responsibility for the vulnerable, and who could be more vulnerable than a neonate? In psychology, although there are different and opposing models of the impact of early months and years, curiosity about the human mind necessitates at least a passing interest in our origins. Finally, I’m very much in touch with how it feels to be totally dependent on someone who doesn’t heed my cries. So, yes, I give a crap about attentiveness to babies, and not just when they’ve soiled their nappies.

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It’s not humbug, I just don’t like Christmas

17/12/2016

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If you trade in trees and turkeys, I wish you a prosperous one. If you’re a Christian, I wish you a divine one. If you can’t get enough bling, I wish you a glittery one. If you like old movies, I wish you a nostalgic one. If you’re an extrovert, I wish you a carousing one. If you’re happy to devote hundreds of hours to food creation and consumption, I wish you a gastronomic one. If you’re skilled at shopping, at giving and/or receiving presents, I wish you a gratifying one. If you have children, or an uncomplicated relationship with your roots, I wish you a familial one (and if you don’t, you might appreciate this flash from Sarah Brentyn). If you appreciate being nudged to consider others less fortunate, I wish you a charitable one. If you’re getting to know a new partner, I wish you a romantic one. If you’re in need of a break from a hectic job, I wish you a tranquil one.

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Humbled, Theresa? Puhleeeassse!

12/7/2016

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How quickly time moves on in politics if I can go, in under three weeks, from hoping that someone will speak out for diversity and social justice to relief we’ve someone who doesn’t come across like an embarrassing uncle (or, in my case, nephew) to negotiate us out of the EU. When the country appears on the brink of Trumpification, I’m grateful for crumbs of sanity wherever they arise. So thank you, Theresa May, for enabling the speedy departure of the chump who gambled his own and his country’s future on a game of dice with his backbenchers, although I feel for the Campbell children having to move house with so little time to pack their toys. As for Andrea Leasdom’s own goal against childless women (of which I’ll have more to say at a later date), all she’s done is demonstrate she’s in politics, not for our collective futures, but for the sake of the genes that will live on in her offspring after her death.

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Homeless inside

27/6/2016

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The Carrot Ranch is on the move and, sadly, not by choice. Forced out of her home and on the road, Charli has nevertheless grabbed the reins for long enough to deliver another flash fiction challenge. Fittingly, the topic is home and she’s served up two brilliant examples from her own novels in progress. While a collection of 99-word stories might not provide the much-needed bricks and mortar, there’s a virtual round-the-campfire homeliness on her blog when writers ride up with our responses to the prompt.

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The Wacky Man by Lyn G Farrell & a rant about punishment

5/5/2016

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Fifteen-year-old Amanda is in a bad way. Unwilling or unable to leave her bedroom, unwashed and unloved, she sits on the grubby floor, pulling out the hairs from her head one by one. She has no need for relationships, no use for her mother except that she leave her meals and cigarettes outside the door. Curtains drawn, with little sense of time, her head is full of thoughts of how intolerable the world is as she relates the story of her own unhappy life.

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11 reasons I might give up on a novel #amreading

28/3/2016

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As I’ve mentioned before, I was surprised when a literary agent who turned down my debut novel did so because the sample I’d sent her was written in the first person present tense. But if you read for a living, being familiar with your preferences and prejudices can save a lot of time. After all, we can’t all appreciate the same thing. Reading for reviews is helping me clarify my own likes and dislikes although, despite the title of this post, a sense of accountability to publishers who’ve provided me a free copy and a belief in the value of diversity will see me rarely abandoning a book. (I think I ditched three out of well over 100 books I read last year.) But since “11 reasons I don’t want to read your book” has a nasty ring to it, for the purposes of this post I’m extending the definition of “abandon” to encompass books I’m not even tempted to start. Practical or blinkered, considered or arbitrary, undoubtedly contradictory, in reverse order of annoyingness, these are my 11 reasons I won’t give a novel my time.

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