Why I hate the Mail

There are many things I love about my adopted city, such as the ability easily to attend the theatre, concerts and interesting pubs. I also love the ready availability of public transport and taxis. I am glad that tonight, for example, I can have dinner with some girl friends and not worry (unlike in Perth) that I will be unable to get home safely. I know that in London the buses will still be running, no matter how late I finish up. And, at worst, there are always plenty of taxis. It's not like Perth, where I may find myself standing on a windy street waiting for hours for the taxi I pre-booked to finally arrive. Generally, I love London.

Perhaps because I do love London, it makes me even angrier than it ought when London shows its ugly side. And, unfortunately, like every city it does have its ugly side. Often that ugly side is conveyed by the headlines on the front page of the Daily Mail.

I am proud to say I have never read the Mail. However, when travelling on the tube or bus, I am still assaulted by its headlines, which I assume give a general gist of the content of the publication. This morning, for instance, when travelling on the tube, I was confronted with the headline of a Mail held in another commuter's hand, reading in part "Baroness Shameless". Presumably the article was about the recent controversy to engulf the Attorney General, Baroness Scotland (controversy largely created by the Mail). In case you are not from England, and so have not seen the recent headlines, Baroness Scotland accidentally employed an illegal immigrant for six months as a housekeeper. She didn't keep a copy of the worker's identity documents, as required under a law that Baroness Scotland (rather unfortunately) had helped formulate when in the Home Office. As a result, she was fined £5,000 (a civil penalty). Baroness Scotland apologised, unreservedly. However, she then made the further mistake of trying to clear the myth that she had been convicted of a crime, by explaining the fine was a civil penalty, analogous to a fine for a failure to pay the congestion charge.

Admittedly, the mistake of failing to comply with the legislation was foolish. Baroness Scotland's attempt to then clear the confusion as to whether she had been convicted of a crime was also ill-advised. Nonetheless, both errors are arguably understandable. Particularly when Baroness Scotland is someone who is juggling a busy job with the pressures of family life. While I consider that law officers and government ministers should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us, I do not think they should be held to an impossibly high standard. And the backlash Baroness Scotland has had to face is over the top. Worst of all, some of the backlash is clearly racist and sexist. For example, the comments of the Timesonline reader who, in response to an article on the topic, wrote that Baroness Scotland should be fired because it was clear that she (as a black female) was only ever given the position of Attorney General due to positive discrimination!

I should be upfront about my own bias here and admit that I am a fan of Baroness Scotland. She's a hard working, dedicated law officer and, on top of that, is arguably the only person in the Labor government qualified and suited to the role of the Attorney General.

The headline about Baroness Scotland was not the only irritating headline the Daily Mail offered this morning. Below that headline appeared another: "why I hate feminism". I can only guess at the content of that article. Particularly knowing, as I do, that the Daily Mail insists that any woman photographed in the paper in relation to a story wear a skirt. If she happens to be wearing trousers, she will be asked to change into a skirt.

The worst part of all of this is that the Daily Mail is one of the most popular "newspapers" in England. And, guess who reads it? Primarily women.

Sometimes, I really do despair.

Sunningdale

I have today returned from a work mandated five-day residential training course. It was a general course for new lawyers to the department, covering all sorts of issues new lawyers are likely to face throughout their working careers.

The course ran each day from around 9 am through to 6 pm, followed by a talk at 6.30 pm and dinner at 7 pm. It was five days of being lectured to and participating in group activities. And yes, it was as boring as it sounds.

Unfortunately, I have discovered that the older I get, the less I am able to mask my boredom. In particular, I have recently developed an awful habit of falling asleep the moment I become bored by something. This rather middle-aged-like habit means I now have carefully to consider my likely interest in an activity before I commit to it, as I have in the past managed to embarrass myself by sleeping through movies, plays and even parties. Perhaps the worst occasion was once when, during a very dull day at work, I popped off to the loo, only to later wake as my forehead hit the metal toilet-roll holder. I then had a rather large red mark on my forehead, which was difficult to explain to my colleagues.

Staying awake during the course was, therefore, a struggle. Several times I nodded off for a moment before regaining consciousness. At one point, during a particularly boring lecture, I succumbed entirely and fell fast asleep, for perhaps ten minutes or so. I had a rather bizarre dream involving a juicy red apple that the lecturer was trying to steal from me and awoke with a start, beginning to shout out the words “not my apple!”. Thankfully I only managed to get the “no” part of that statement out, before fully waking myself up. I then managed to hide the word behind a feigned coughing fit.

The upside to the course was that it was held on rather lovely grounds in Sunningdale. The facilities consisted of a large university-like set-up, tailor-made for such courses, with function rooms, a dining area and halls of residence.

I have attended a few residential training courses in my time. It’s an odd experience, as all participants find themselves spending 24-hours a day with one another. In many ways, the social dynamics are like those of school. This was particularly so with this course, where all of us were strangers at the beginning of the course. Much like school, therefore, the first few days were full of awkward getting-to-know you conversation. The geeks and bores were not, at least initially, identifiable. There were therefore the inevitable awkward moments of finding oneself stuck in an indeterminable conversation with an excruciating bore, while looking longingly at other course participants, seemingly having far more interesting conversations punctuated by bursts of laughter.

By the third day, the participants naturally divided, into the like-to-banter-and-drink group (the cool kids); the far-too-serious-and-earnest group (the geeks); the I’m-much-older-than-the-majority-of-participants group (OAP group); and the very-nice-but-a-little-bit-boring group (the blandies). My level of alcohol consumption meant that I was a member of the cool kids’ group, helping to prop up the bar of an evening. I must stress that the title “cool kids” is a self-appointed one, as such titles inevitably are. It is more than likely the case that someone from the blandies is currently blogging, referring to the "cool kids" as the obnoxious-drunkards-who-aren't-in-the-least-bit-funny group.

Nonetheless, I'm going to stick with the title "cool kids". Admittedly, when talking of a bunch of lawyers on a training course, it's all relative, and it therefore doesn't take that much to fall into the cool group. Nonetheless, it's so rare that the word cool even comes close to my name, that I'm going to claim this one.

It was with a little bit of sadness that my train pulled into London today, and I realised that I had left Sunningdale, and the moniker "cool" behind. Instead, it's back to work, napping and toilet-roll indentations in my forehead. But at least I have the memories ...

Rounds

According to drinkaware, one in four adults in England is a “hazardous” drinker. (This is, apparently, a rather more technical, and troubling, categorisation than ‘happy drunk’ or ‘angry drunk’). The government is regularly contemplating ways to curb drinking, from increasing the tax on a pint through to boring the public out of a desire to drink by education campaigns. In recent times, I have become something of a drinking expert (for research purposes only, of course) and have uncovered a hard truth: none of this will make a difference to the nation’s drinking problem. The real issue at the core of binge drinking is simple: rounds. Until we dismantle the seemingly ingrained culture in England of buying rounds at the pub, one in four adults will remain a hazardous drinker. And, indeed, I will be one of them.

Perhaps Australians are, by nature, a bit less organised and haphazard with their drinking. It is usual to buy your friends a drink and return the favour but, at least amongst my circle, there wasn’t a rigid approach to buying rounds for the group. This is in stark contrast to England. In England, everyone takes a turn buying a round for the group. And everyone keeps a close eye on whose round it is. If someone foolishly tries to depart the pub for the evening without taking their turn to purchase a round, there will be a few raised eyebrows or a pointed “on your way to the bar for your round, can you get me a …”

The system of rounds works quite well if there are only a couple of you: everyone has a drink, everyone buys a drink, and everyone goes home feeling jolly. However, when it’s a regular post-work drinks get-together, involving ten or so of you, the evening gets messy.

Being a petite 5ft 2 (and so having a proportionately petite liver), I’ve tried to escape from the rounds. I’ve tried to bow out at the first drink, insisting “I’m only having one tonight” and have bought my own. But it just doesn’t work. I might escape at the first drink, but before I’ve finished it someone will notice what I’m drinking and I’ll find another glass of the same thrust into my hand. And that’s it, I’m caught in the round. And once you’re in the round, there’s no escaping. No matter how many advertisements I see, telling me about the damage occurring to my liver, and no matter how expensive the pints become, the fear of raised eyebrows is going to mean I’m beholden to the round.

In short: it’s not me. I do not have an alcohol problem. I’m just a victim of English culture.

DIY disasters

This weekend G and I decided to dip our toes into that national craze: DIY.

DIY is a British obsession. Every weekend seems to see Britons packing into their local B&Q to purchase the latest DIY accessories. And Mondays are therefore spent listening to colleagues trying to impress one another as they brag about the new terrace decks and the like that they erected over the weekend. The DIY craze is so rampant in this country, it extends beyond household renovations to include dentistry: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7881865.stm. G and I decided, however, to confine our initial DIY experiments to the house.

I will admit that, like many others in this country, I had been lulled into a false sense that DIY was easy and even rewarding. I blame the profusion of home improvement shows with their white teethed presenters. Watching Hot Property and other shows of its ilk made me think that I too could so easily single-handedly transform my home into a paradise (improving the value ten-fold of course). And, what's more, that I would find it enjoyable. Like those presenters, I could slip on a pair of very short denim shorts, white singlet and would begin sanding and drilling all while looking gorgeous and showing off my chemically whitened teeth. The fact I don't have chemically whitened teeth was the least of my problems in achieving this DIY dream, as I soon discovered.

Saturday was spent with G and I happily spending our hard-earned wages in our local DIY store and stocking up on all sorts of nuts, bolts, drill bits and hooks. Already we were brimming with pride at how we'd managed to transform ourselves from dull suited lawyers into DIY gods. We should have stopped there, really. Instead, we spent all of Sunday drilling, swearing, shouting, cutting ourselves and swearing some more. I suspect the DIY trend goes hand in hand with that other great trend in England - the rise of hooliganism. G and I both found ourselves needing a drink or ten and managing to construct entire sentences solely out of swear words. What was worse is that at the end of the day, for all our work, we had only a few crooked holes in the walls, a drill bit stuck in the wall, and three paintings still on the ground and not on the wall. And we felt like failures.

The media complains about magazines setting unrealistic and unobtainable standards of female beauty, but I think the real scourge on society is the unrealistic standards and expectations set by home improvement shows. It's time we took action! We'd be building barricades in the streets, if only we could manage to follow the F%$£*ing instruction manual...

Notting Hill Carnival

I like to think that I'm cutting edge, a little bit alternative and funky. That I get the underground, the "hood" and I do not live a sheltered life. However, I suspect those statements are true only in the same way one could say it is true that The Brady Bunch explored the complexities of modern family life. While most who know me will have come to this realisation some time ago, I only arrived at it yesterday, at the Notting Hill Carnival.

The Notting Hill Carnival is an annual event, which takes place over the Sunday and Monday of the Bank Holiday in August. It began in 1964, a year after the race riots. I understand that it started essentially in response to those riots, as a celebration of the Trinidad and Tobago Caribbean population, many of whom lived in and around Notting Hill. It is the largest street festival in Europe, attracting (on average ) 250,000 - 300,000 people on the Sunday and about double that on the Monday. It is a celebration of Caribbean food, music and culture and involves a large street parade full of colourful costumes and traditional dance. Or at least that's how it is advertised. In fact, as we discovered yesterday, the festival does have a colourful street parade, but that is overshadowed by the hoards of people on the streets (very few of whom appeared to be Caribbean) drinking, smoking weed and converting what is (at least during the rest of the year) a very nice and upper-middle class area into a warzone-meets-Woodstock. It was complete chaos. The "music" largely consisted of drunk people singing their own tunes. The ethnic food seemed to comprise a few grubby guys who had set up camp on the front verges of others' houses and were selling home-made jerk chicken for £8 a pop. As for the dancing… well, I saw a lot of drunk wobbling from side to side. And there was one girl who had propped against her a sign saying "will dance naked for drugs". I don't think that any of that falls into the definition of "traditional dance".

A group of us wandered around this chaos for a while. Initially, I rather innocently thought that this simply could not be the Carnival, and that at any second we would turn a corner and hit the "real" Carnival. I expected this to be more akin to those great Western Australian events: the Joondalup food festival; the Freo Sardine Festival and the East Perth food festival. All of these, of course, are very sedate middle-class affairs, involving people such as myself wandering from stall to stall, sampling the delicacies on offer and getting a bit tipsy from having one too many tasting glasses of wine.

Due to my conviction that the "real" Carnival was just around the corner, when a large group of 18 year-old men began bolting past us and down the street, I assumed they were simply heading to the "real" Carnival, and were just very eager not to miss the festivities there. I was therefore somewhat surprised when G pushed me against the wall, flattening me against it. I was somewhat outraged, too, as I had rather wanted either to follow the men or stop one of them, to find out where they were heading, so we could go there too. When I expressed my outrage at being prevented from this course of action, G (who has seen a few more episodes of The Wire than me, and who has also read some "crime genre" books in his lifetime) looked rather incredulously at me, pointing out that all of the men had been "brandishing" glass bottles above their heads and were clearly headed to a riot. I still refused to believe him, thinking it more likely the case that these men were wanting to recycle their bottles, and ensure they not get smashed as they headed to the "real festival". To my embarrassment, it shortly dawned on me that G was right on this one, as the police began to "kettle us" (at least I know some of the lingo!) and warned us there were riots happening around the coroner.

I gather the glass bottles were eventually used as weapons, as I later saw a number of people stumbling around with gashes to their heads and blood running down their faces.

Anyway, after discovering that the place was awash with riots, we decided that we had had enough of the Carnival. It took a good 1.5 - 2 hours for us to manage to escape the mayhem, due to many of the roads being shut because of the riots. It was therefore a good 1.5 - 2 hours of G saying "I told you so". By the time I got home, exhausted and longing for a cup of peppermint tea, I realised that my inability to recognise a riot is an indication that I'm just not as cutting edge as I like to think I am.