Star(bucks) People

I spent a few productive hours on Tuesday morning hooked into the WiFi in Starbucks while the o2 store next door tried to fix my comatose mobile phone.

That much time in a coffeeshop makes for an interesting people watching exercise. Who are you, my Starbucks-bound friends, and what brings you to this high street store at 10.30 on a Tuesday morning?

A sad man in a business suit sat at the next table to mine for the best part of an hour, staring out of the window and occasionally scribbling a brief note in the dog-eared pad that sat beside him. Who are you, sad suited man? Are you a small part of the chaos in the City, escaping to your coffee-house haven to decide what to do next?

A group of screaming tweenie girls whirled in like banshees about 10.45, grabbed all the croissants left in the place and swept out, a distant cry of “he said WHAT” dissolving in their wake. The sad man watched them go and made a few notes on his pad.

A woman with a laptop came in and settled on one of the large twin sofas. We caught each other’s eye briefly, but she looked away before I could offer a co-conspiratorial smile. Two other women with enormous but empty pushchairs wheeled in and sat around her on the sofas, sipping milkless coffees and talking a bit too loudly for the comparative quiet of the morning. The woman with the laptop ignored them stoicly for a while but eventually gathered up her things and departed.

As she walked past me I couldn’t help noticing that her shoes needed reheeling.

By now the sad man was engaged in an industrious spot of notepad-scribbling. He barely looked up as two twenty-something creative types walked in, all trendy jeans and spiky hair. “I can’t believe she put that forward,” one of them was saying. “I mean, isn’t that exactly what she suggested for the campaign last year?”

Curiosity made me watch them to the counter, where they ordered eight takeaway coffees between them and left, trays in tow. One of them ran into a pushchair on the way out; he didn’t stop to apologise, but the women on the sofas barely noticed.

The sad man stopped scribbling again. Elbows on the table and chin in his hands he was staring out of the window and slowly sloshing the dregs of his coffee around the bottom of the cup. With a sigh, he got up to leave.

“Have a nice day,” I said to him on impulse, giving him my best-and-brightest smile, the one I keep for special occasions and presents I really wanted.

He looked around for a moment, surprised, before focusing on me. “Oh… thanks,” he said, and smiled back.

And then he was gone, and I got back to work.

Does sexism still exist?

Emily posted about this a while ago and it’s been playing on my mind for a while.

I have a number of friends – most, interestingly, made through my professional rather than my personal life – who tease me affectionately about calling myself a feminist, and ask me why I think I need to defend a cause that our mothers already won.

So, after some thought, here’s my explanation.

I rarely experience sexism in either my personal or professional life. I’ve been very lucky. In fact, the only incident that springs instantly to mind is a business pitch from a year or two ago where I was the only woman in the room. The potential client – a 50-something white male, self-declared success story and “industry visionary” – sat at the head of the table, winked at me (or rather, at my cleavage) when I entered the room, and spent the rest of the pitch looking through me, cracking crude jokes and ending each one with “well of course if there wasn’t a young lady present I could tell you some REAL stories, ho ho ho”.

Just thinking about it is making my blood boil all over again. But that’s beside the point. The point is that I can count those experiences on one hand, and I try to remember every day that this is a rare, rare thing. I have friends in other industries who can top my little handful of stories with one petty insult for every day of their working lives, one comment that made them uncomfortable, one little example of how they’ve been taken for granted, put down, laughed at or patronised simply because they are women.

My friends and I represent a very, very small sample of the world. I try to remember that, too. I try to bear in mind the hundreds, thousands and millions of women who aren’t as fortunate as me. The unlucky ones who fall into a job where they are undervalued, sidelined and bullied because of their gender, or who find themselves in a destructive or abusive relationship they can’t escape from. And, of course, all of those who are born and brought up in cultures where being a woman automatically makes you a second-class citizen.

There’s no denying that those jobs, those relationships and those cultures exist. That’s why I can’t let the small slights go. To me, it’s just an insult I can shrug off; but it’s also part of a bigger, nastier picture that stretches across the world. And it’s not just the world three thousand miles away - this is the world just down your street, where these things are happening every day, whether we see them or not.

So yes, I’m a feminist, and I’m proud to say so. What does that mean? It means I believe that we are all equals, that we deserve the same opportunities in life, and that we should be be judged on something beyond our genders.

Sadly, that's still a lot to ask.

Mortal... Kombat?

Thanks to Bateleur for bringing this video to my attention. A must for anyone who was brought up on the same heady mix of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat as me.

I knew this was what happened when the cameras stopped rolling.

And while we're sharing... Hello, Kombat!

I'm not sure which is more twisted.

Hormonally yours

Can you tell me why PMS is so bad? Really? Every single headache-inducing, broken-nighted time?

For me the bar-none worst bit has got to be the mood swings. Sunday/Monday was doubtless not improved by a lack of sleep out in gay Amsterdam (of which more later), but a bit of tiredness neither warrants nor excuses the split-second transition from homicidal rage to "someone ran over my cat" wobbly lower lip and tear-filled eyes.

Nor does it help knowing what's going on. You may well be able look at your grey-faced reflection in the PC screen and tell it that you know it's only hormones making you want to beat the postman to death with the photocopier toner cartridge - but it doesn't stop you wanting to do it.

The best solution I've found for when the Crazy descends is to consume vast quantities of chocolate as quickly as possible and let the endorphins do their thing. I'm told that to actually get any kind of high from chocolate you'd have to eat more than twice your body weight or something equally ridiculous - still, I'm prepared to give it a go. But surely there must be a better way to deal with it? Last week we recreated the Big Bang - can we not sort out PMS next?

Now I come to think of it, the Emergency Chocolate stashed in my desk drawer was actually provided by a forward-thinking colleague who sits next to me... perhaps my inner emotional turmoil isn't quite as discreet as I'd hoped.

(On the streets of) Philadelphia

Even as we speak, my sister is sitting on a plane on the tarmac at Heathrow, waiting to take off for pastures new. It's a very big adventure - she's moving to Philadephia for two years to take up a post-doc position at Penn University.

People often ask me what it is my sister does. High-energy Physics is the answer, although that's about the sum total of my knowledge. She spends a not-inconsiderable period of time two miles underground in Canada (and sometimes Texas) looking at particles, but exactly what she's up to or why she's doing it has always been a bit of a mystery. At least it was, up until this weekend, when she admitted that her Physics crew is connected to the Physics crew who are trying to bring the Universe to an end on Wednesday. She kept that little gem to the last possible minute.

"If the Big Bang happened as we think, then the Universe was created from the collision of two forces," she explained for perhaps the hundredth time over lunch. "For every piece of matter, there has to be the same amount of anti-matter. Think of it this way: for every one Almostalady, there's an anti-Almostalady somewhere. We're just trying to find her."

"Doesn't sound like a very good idea to me," I muttered dubiously, poking the remains of dessert with my fork.

"What they're going to do is fire two different kinds of particles at each other to recreate what we think happened," she said, ignoring my glowers. "They're hoping to see the Higgs particle. Or get some more insight into the nature of antimatter."

"Isn't that rather like inviting the Apocalypse?"

"Would you like me to refill your wineglass?"

And so off she goes to associate with the great and the good of the Physics world. For the most part I'm looking at it not as losing a sister but gaining a holiday home 45 minutes from New York. Still, I'm a bit sad. It only feels like five minutes since her Starburst She-Ra doll kicked seven shades of crap out of my Thundercat Cheetara on the bedroom floor. Where does the time go?

On PR

Contemplating work
Thinking that press releases
Should be in haiku.

Ladies of leisure

Yesterday Dr Almostalady Jr and I were ladies of leisure, cruising through London town on my long extravagant pre-birthday treat. We're great believers in extended festivities; it's not the actual day for another month, but since she's leaving the country on Monday to pursue an academic career in the States she won't be around for the real thing. (Ungrateful wretch.)

We implemented a deeply strategic four phase plan for the day, rigorous in its extremes and demanding in its deliverables.

First phase: Shopping

For a successful sibling shopping trip you must follow a few golden rules:
1. You shall not go into shops that make both parties go 'meh'.
2. If one party has found something to try on, the other must try something too (or have something chosen for them by their companion).
3. You shall not go into Barratt's, for it is rubbish.
4. While frequently disputing the acceptable level of boob for office wear, you shall join together to mock people wearing clothes neither of you like.
5. You shall implement frequent booze breaks to maintain equanimity.

Which leads nicely into phase two...

Second phase: Tea for two

Loaded with bags, our next stop was for champagne tea at the Connaught. The house menu boasted a four course sandwich, scone and cake menu (I kid you not), deeply decadent chocolate petits fours and a specially hand-decorated treat for the birthday girl. Yum.

(Pic here for those who have been wondering what The New Haircut looked like. No no, not mine. Hers.)

Third phase: A little self improvement

Late afternoon saw us landing at the Earth salon for a lengthy hair and massage ritual. Three hours of intensive work on the part of my charming stylist resulted in a combination of colour which, while a bit Gothic, is vastly preferable to my natural shade which looks not unlike the dead leaf slush you get underfoot in late October.

Fourth phase: The curtain call

Last but not least, dinner near Charing Cross with maman, fresh from her early soiree at a friend's palatial Cheyne Walk abode. We spent a relaxed hour or so putting the world to rights over a few glasses of wine; also putting in place the first plans for next year's trip to Philadelphia. Only 45 minutes from NYC, or so they tell me.

And finally, home, and the end of a perfect day.

I really must have afternoon champagne more often.

Less fighting, fewer arguments…

This weekend I had a MASSIVE fight with the Boy du Jour.

Let me set the scene.

I’m lying in bed, drifting off to sleep, when he bounces in and starts talking to me about something. In my fuzzy state all I’m picking up is a few key points – just enough to keep my end of the conversation up. That is, until a stray comment drifts across my consciousness: "So then there were less than there had been to start with!"

"Fewer," I mumble. "Fewer than there were to start with."

His brow creases. "What?"

"Less is a volume. Fewer’s a number. S’nothin. Sorry. What happened next?"

"But most people use less to mean numbers."

I’m starting to wake up a bit at this point. Those who know me will be aware that I have a love of the Red Pen and the big less vs fewer debate is a particular bugbear of mine, no less because I came to it shamefully late in life. "Well, then, most people are stupid."

"Why?"

"Because of the grammatical imperative-"

"Surely language is meant to evolve to reflect its usage?"

"Not if its usage is wrong!"

With hindsight, this is where it all started to go a bit tits up. Surely, the Boy said, the OED accepts new words every year based on their usage by we-the-people. So why doesn’t grammar work the same way?

Because we’d rapidly cease to understand each other, I explained crossly, and we’d end up with a nation of imbeciles who communicated only in grunts.

That’s a very narrow world view, he said. I think you’re wrong. We can’t be bound by the rules of a grammar system that makes no sense to anyone anymore. If no one uses it, we’re not wrong - the language is. And it needs to change.

Everything gets a bit hazy here; all I recall is thunder rolling and the red mist descending. And why? Because I couldn’t answer him. I knew with every fibre of my being that what he said was wrong and that I should smother him with the pillow before letting such poison spread into the world – but for the life of me I couldn’t articulate why. (So what exactly did I spend those three years at Oxford doing? Not learning to communicate, that’s for sure.)

So what do you think? Am I too constrained by my preconceived grammatical notions? Do we need to throw the rules of grammar out of the window to reflect the way the nation uses it today (no matter how stupid that may be)? Or – and I really do hope this is the case – does good grammar still have a case for me to argue?