Veganuary

I’m a walking cliche - it’s not even January yet and I’m already suffused with self-loathing. I won’t mention the ‘F’ word, as that would make me a bad feminist, but I’ll just say that I feel like a sack of something squidgy and unpalatable.

Anyways, I’ve decided to try out that Veganuary thingummy people keep going on about, because:

1. Because it seems slightly less painful than giving up booze for a month.
2. Because I’m hoping that my significant other; who feted the idea of the veganuary thing in the first place (albeit half-jokingly), will revert back to being a vegetarian and I won’t have to have stinky meat sausages in my fridge any more.
3. I find vegans a bit annoying and want to challenge my prejudice...
4. Because, OK, I’ll admit it, but not in front of my kids, I’m hoping that I might lose a wee bit of weight.
5. I feel really unhealthy at the moment - our household is currently upholding the fine, family tradition of having hacking coughs & stinking colds at Christmas and I think that turning vegan will force me to shovel in more fruit and veg.
6. Because it will give me something to write about

I’ve been thinking about the things I will miss by trying to go vegan:

1. Butter
2. Chocolate!! Yes - there is dark chocolate, which has no milk, but doesn’t it taste the teensiest bit like munching on a vinyl record? (or is that just me?)
3. Cheese - there is such a thing as vegan cheese, presumably made from orange pith and candle wax but I don't hold out much hope...
4. Honey - honey is lush and it feels like a health food, whereas sugar is like the devil’s dandruff or something, isn’t it? Public enemy no. 1. Will have to check out some syrups.
5. Ice-cream - sorbet just doesn’t cut it. I mean, I don’t eat a lot of the stuff; it’s just nice to know it’s there.
6. Tuna - cos, as I’ve said before I’m not a ‘proper’ vegetarian http://msmuddles.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/national-vegetarian-week.html but I can’t really justify eating fish in my month as a vegan.

So, am trying to think of things which are naturally vegan and not masquerading as anything else - pith in cheese’s clothing or anything like that. This is what I imagine I’ll be eating a lot of:

1. Hummus
2. Guacamole
3. Salsa
4. Put the the three together with some tortilla chips and you’ve got yourself a party!
5. Vegetable curry
6. Vegetable chilli - lots of fresh veg and mixed beans, no fake meat.
7. Peanut butter - too much can be somewhat cloying but it’s an option.
8. Tofu - you have to do an awful lot to this stuff to make it taste of anything.
9. Alcohol! (sans finings and all that shizzle)

I'll let you know how I get on - even if it's just a comparison test for vegan cheeses or the best vegetarian wine and if I decide to implement a permanent change I can buy myself one of those 'Vegan Killjoy' sweatshirts! ;)

Food, glorious food!

The most unintentionally hilarious thing my daughter ever said to me, when she was pestering me for more food, was:

“Please, I want something else to eat. I’m still hungry - YOU’RE NEVER HUNGRY!”

To me, the phrase ‘you’re never hungry!’ exemplifies how children view their parents - as these big, spongy providers, with no needs or requirements of their own. But it was particularly funny that my daughter should say this to me because, I think it is safe to say, I am ALWAYS HUNGRY!

I am obsessed with food. I think about food as much as men are purported to think about sex - every six seconds, is it? (And the rest of the time I’m just thinking about sex)

There are two clear, opposing perceptions of people who ‘enjoy their food’: one is the image of sexy, voluptuous Nigella Lawson (before she lost the weight), sneaking down to her fridge (in her fake, BBC studio, home), dipping her manicured finger into a chocolate mousse and sucking her digit with a lascivious wink to the camera.

Sexy Nigella is curvy and creamy-skinned and her hair is wonderfully glossy; possibly as a result of all the butter and olive oil she consumes. Nigella is Betty Boop to Gillian McKeith's Olive Oyl. Nigella is bursting with joie de vivre, she reminds you of the good things in life; of the things necessary to your survival, she is the female version of the Ghost of Christmas present, surrounded by beautiful food and clad in AstroTurf (I think that may just my enduring image of the ghost of Christmas Present). McKeith is like a dried prune, telling you to bin any food which has any flavour [And she made a holy show of herself in I’m a Celebrity…]

The counterfoil to sexy Nigella; the negative perception of free-form eating, is the exemplar of gluttony in the awful film, Se7en. The super morbidly obese, murder victim with his rippling acres of marbled, grey flesh has clearly taken it all too far; there’s nothing remotely sexy about his bloated corpulence.

[Imagine the casting  call - we want you to play a super-morbidly obese corpse, who has been murdered for being fat. You will be robbed of your humanity, an object of repugnance, and you won’t have any lines...Sound good?]

So, I guess the trick is to try and tread the fine line between gorgeous, plumptuous Nigella and hideously corpulent 'Gluttony' man...

A couple of years ago, I went to the doctor with a hormone related problem. I’d had some tests and they couldn’t find a reason for this problem so I asked my doctor if she thought that acupuncture might help. She told me that, although I was welcome to try it, she didn’t believe in it and saw it as a waste of (my) money.

“Of course, it might help if you managed your weight.” She told me. [This was the pre-Fitbit days]

‘Manage your weight’ - doctor-speak for ‘get rid of some that lard!’

I was duly abashed. Like all the female doctors I’ve ever come across, this one was wisp-thin, probably subsisting on a diet of black coffee and the vapour from the anti-bacterial hand gel. In comparison to this slender sapling, I felt gargantuan.

“I am trying (to lose weight).” I said in a feeble, apologetic voice.

I felt like Anne in Anne of Green Gables, when Marilla admonishes her for talking so much and Anne replies; ‘Oh Marilla; if only you knew how much I want to say and don’t!’

I wanted to tell the doctor - ‘If only you knew how much I wanted to eat and don’t!’ Really, I could be much fatter than this, (I wanted to say). If eating were an Olympic sport, I’d be a champion.

But back to the fun stuff - food. I don’t understand people who just ‘eat to live’ or who aren’t interested in food. What is wrong with them? I do envy them a little, I have to say; those ghostly, luminescent aliens, floating around on their spindly limbs, but I pity them too because (I feel) that they are essentially missing out.

I love looking at cookery books. I don’t object at all to people who post endless pictures of their meals on social media - I love it! I want to see what people are eating (and how much) I want to see which restaurant serves the best looking desserts, I like those (probably passe but maybe coming round the block again) pretentious towers of culinary and engineering mastery, on white plates.

When you ‘diet’ you come to fear food;  like Edward Cullen in Twilight (when he first meets Bella and is intoxicated by her scent), you fear that a tiny taste of food will let loose the slavering beast within; unleash a ravenous, antisocial blood lust.

• I have to stay away from you, PASTA, I just can’t control myself around you….once I rip into your yellow casing...

So sometimes it just feels easier not to eat anything at all.... and that way, lies an eating disorder.

There seems to be no going back to those innocent times of early childhood, when you ate whatever the fuck you wanted and didn’t even understand the concept of weight.
I've written blog posts about losing weight and I've written about trying not to fetishisise food; especially around my children, but I don't think I'll ever be able to have a Zen-like, take it or leave it, 'Oh, is it that time already? I forgot to have lunch.' approach to it. [Obviously because, we need it for our survival, none of us can] And, now that the season of gluttony is upon us, it seems futile to even try...

Eating is a sociable experience and the most fun people to socialise with are not the ones who know the calorie content of everything (and tell you about it). That's fine if you want to subscribe to that, but leave me to my potatoes, please!

Baby Babble

I was in a shop the other day, dithering and trying desperately not to look like a shoplifter. (I sometimes get eyeballed by security staff and snooty shop assistants, who glare at me as if I am just about to palm a pair of sheepskin gloves). A woman came into the shop with a pram and proceeded to have a full-on, question and answer, adult ‘conversation’ with her baby.

“There’s no point buying a passport holder for Grandma, is there? She never goes anywhere.”

She said.

There was a constant stream of this one-way conversation and I glanced at the baby to see if it was actually awake.

The infant in question was about three months old and dressed all in white, with a white woolly hat and had a slightly perplexed look in its huge, round eyes. It was as if it were thinking; ‘You’re presenting me with a complex range of questions here, Mama.’   But the woman ‘chatted’ away with her baby, as if she were talking to another adult.

It reminded me of being advised to talk to your baby as much as possible (when my children were babies) to help bond with them and to advance their speech and development.

This was something that I struggled with, in the beginning. I’ve never been very good at small talk and I felt a little awkward and self-conscious talking to my baby, especially in front of other people. The chatty woman in the shop obviously had no such reservations and her child will probably grow up to be Prime Minister or a top human rights lawyer or something. (I found her a bit boring and kind of wished she’d shut up - but then, one way conversations can often be somewhat tedious to overhear)].

The way that I approached the issue, initially, was by reading to the children, as much as possible. (We are told that even tiny babies enjoy being read to - the soothing rhythm of the words, the fact that you are focusing on them, etc)

Reading felt far more natural to me than discussing the weather or talking about what we were having for dinner, a far better fit for me. I put a lot of effort into the reading; like my mother did when I was a child, I adopted different voices for the different characters in the stories. I sang the songs, making up tunes for unfamiliar songs, when all I had to go with was the words. The children loved it. I remember my older child’s response when I first read to her, when she was a baby. Her little face was so expressive and went through various stages of delight (it’s much harder to capture her attention these days!). She still enjoys being read to and it’s brilliant to see her learning to read, and reading to her younger sister.

I also sang to them - another thing reported to help the development of speech, and took them to baby music classes and rhyme-times at the library. The younger child begged me to stop singing once, ‘Stop, sto-op! She cried in a plaintive voice, so, tough crowd and all that (but she did learn to speak very early, the ungrateful little squirt!)

I should also mention that, after reading a childcare book that I found very helpful:

Secrets Of The Baby Whisperer: How to Calm, Connect and Communicate with your Baby – 2001, Melinda Blau and Tracy Hogg.

I kept up a light stream of ‘conversation’ where I detailed what I was doing - ‘Now I’m going to change your nappy’ etc. This was after the book had warned - ‘How would you like it if you were lying there and somebody just yanked your legs into the air, without warning?’ (Which is what you do with babies, when you change their nappy) So, after reading that, I used to say to the baby - Now I’m going to lift your legs, now I’m going to wipe you…’ A friend of my mum’s thought it was hilarious (and I dare say, ridiculous) but I still persisted. So, we learned together; me to communicate with my baby, my baby to form their own words. A bystander might have found my own monologues tedious to listen to but it was all to the good.

So, woman in shop, you keep asking your baby what s/he thinks of your Christmas present purchases, this time next year s/he will actually be able to answer you!

Buenas Noches, Fidel

The prostitutes waved at my boyfriend from the shoreline; this was a regular occurrence and he said that he’d never felt so popular.

I was young then and relatively slim and perky. Of course, as a female, I’d been subjected to years of cultural conditioning and been brainwashed into feeling not ‘good enough’, so I didn’t really appreciate my youth and perkiness, nevertheless, I didn’t feel threatened by the prostitutes. (I’m not saying that had I not been young and perky, my boyfriend would have gone off with one of the prostitutes, in fact I don’t know what I am saying actually. I just wanted to recount his quip about never feeling so popular!) We’d been warned about them; the ‘ladies of the night’, as the tour guide referred to them but they seemed good natured enough.

Cuba 1998. A tropical beach paradise - such as I’d only seen in T.V programmes and holiday adverts. White sand, palm trees, azure sea.

Rum and music - music everywhere you went - ‘Chan, Chan’, ‘Che Guevara’. People playing guitars - men and women, in every single place you went to. We were fans of Che Guevara; myself and the party that I was with; my boyfriend was reading a big, thick book about him. We were socialists and, although this was very much a holiday: cocktail-making classes, (I was drinking Mojito’s back in 1998, I’ll have you know) salsa classes, aquafit in the pool with a swim-up bar, we still wanted to see how communism-in-action played out.

What did we learn? That every household had a T.V and a refrigerator, as standard. That the grand, colonial buildings had mainly been converted into schools and municipal offices - there didn’t seem to be a government elite, living in luxury while the rest of the population lived in poverty. We learned that the Cuban National Health service was the second best in the world. (The general consensus is that Castro’s greatest achievements in Cuba were the health service and education https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/27/fidel-castro-dead-revolutionary-history?CMP=fb_gu). The people that we met had aspirations, some of them wanted more; in some cases seemed a little frustrated but,on the whole, seemed happy (I do realise that we would have met a very small sector of the population and obviously I’m filtering all of this through my *Pinko-tinted glasses).

We learned that Castro’s Cuba was still holding its own amid a sea of hostility. A tour guide told us that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, China sent over a consignment of bicycles as a gesture of support and solidarity. She also told us that they (the Cubans) didn’t have a problem with the Americans, although the U.S didn’t seem to like them!

[*to steal someone else’s phrase]

I spoke to my aunt before we went away and she was incredulous. Obviously remembering the Cuban missile crisis and threat of nuclear meltdown; she cried; ‘Why on earth would you want to go to Cuba?!’

‘It is a Caribbean island.’ I reminded her.

The main holiday makers were Italians, Canadians and fellow Brits,. The T.V.s in our rooms transmitted VH1 (Canadian) rather than the American MTV.

We went on a two-day trip into the mountains, stopping off at Santiago for a show. I saw some short, bald, middle-aged  Italian men holding the hands of a couple of tall, beautiful Cuban women, in a hotel lift in Santiago.

So, to recap; Cuba - music, rum, music, equality, tourism and prostitution.

All photos courtesy of Pixabay - I can’t find my own!

Brown, Working Class

Indian Arms Workers Train in Britain- War Industry at Letchworth, Hertfordshire, England, UK, 1941

Wikimedia Commons

Racism; I was always aware of it, there was never a time when it didn’t happen. I don’t remember a specific fall from innocence or an isolated verbal assault, just the fact that it was always there.

“Your auntie spends loads of money going on holiday so she can go the same colour as you.”

My well-meaning, (white) mother used to say to me when I was little. I felt that she was missing the point somewhat but I couldn’t quite articulate this. I didn’t really feel it would cut it as a counter slur in the playground. I couldn’t say to the other kids - yeah, you’re calling me these names but my Auntie, who you’ve never met, pays loads of money to get a kick-ass ‘tan’ like mine! (She [my Mum] also told me to thump anyone who called me any names, which was quite an effective method, but didn't really offer a long-term solution!)

Years later, a horrible little shit at school told me that my skin was like coffee with loads and loads of milk poured in and I remember thinking - yeah, and that’s supposed to be an insult? It meant that I was a coffee-cream; my favourite chocolate in the box!

“Blackie” was their missile of choice, when I was a kid, and, misguided as this sounds, it had a rather innocuous ring to it, in comparison to the much harsher sounding ‘Paki’.

So, anyway, I knew that I wasn’t living in some all-encompassing, tolerant and lovely Utopia  but what I did assume, again misguidedly, was that things would improve when I was an adult.

And they kind of did, for me. In that I wasn’t subjected to daily abuse. But, as we see every wearisome day, things did not improve on a wider, global level.

I kind of assumed that the world would have moved on by the time I had kids and that people in general would be less racist. How naive of me. I now believe that history moves in a wheel rather than a progressive, upward slant. Every now and then the wheel dips into a shitty puddle. The far-right are on the move again and even a cursory glance at social media; yes, even at what (some of) my own virtual ‘friends’ post or share, shows that racism hasn’t abated.

When it came to class, as a perennial outsider, I never really felt truly ‘working class’, not because our economic circumstances indicated anything else, but because, as usual, it felt like a club I hadn’t been invited to. I look back into the nebulous past and see ‘working class’ as being a group of kids with their backs turned.

“No, you can’t join our gang.” They’re saying. “You don’t call your grandmother, ‘Nan’ and some of your cooking smells funny.”

In addition to this, one of the things I got bullied for, at secondary school, was my supposedly ‘posh’ accent! I don’t think I had much of an accent and perhaps that was the problem; Dad was Sri Lankan, Mum was from Wales and, I hypothesised, my accent was some kind of neutral in-between, I didn’t talk like a local. (Or maybe I got bullied for using words like ‘hypothesised’) This feeling of being outside of the working class seems particularly pertinent at the moment, when people are attributing Brexit and the election of (spits) Trump, to the fact that politicians have too long ignored the concerns of the ‘white, working class’. But, as some commentators are keen to point out https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/17/trump-brexit-minorities-working-class; the working class is made up of all ethnicities. We/they have been there for years; working in the factories, driving the busses, nursing, cleaning, building, engineering etc, etc.

These days I feel more working class than I ever have; despite living in an area that a friend once referred to, scathingly, as a ‘bourgeois enclave’.

The people at the top will always seek to divide and rule, to harness any potential tensions between the different communities because they realise that, as a mass, the working class makes up the biggest proportion of people and are powerful and dangerous. http://www.peterloomassacre.org/shelley.html

So - 'the working class' - you didn’t invite me but I’ve joined anyway (in fact was always there, skating along beside you). Come, comrades, up the revolution!

What difference does it make?

The language of discrimination always seeks to dehumanise people; from politicians, describing people fleeing war zones as a ‘swarm’, to the impoverished sectors of society being dismissed as ‘Chavs’, words are used to lump people together as a mass and diminish them.

So it’s no surprise that when a film comes along which seeks to redress the balance - to show you the individual behind the incendiary headlines, it is met with resistance.

Palme d’Or winner  I, Daniel Blake, directed by  Ken Loach is such a film.

It tells the story of a man who has suffered a near fatal heart attack but fails to qualify for disability benefit, because,  although his doctor has said that he is not fit to work, he doesn’t meet the right criteria. The film follows him as he comes up against frustrating bureaucracy and a nonsensical system, whereby a person who is not fit for work has to be shown to be looking for work, to qualify for jobseeker’s allowance. He befriends a single mother, Katie (Hayley Squires), who is dealing with similar issues. (There was a point in the near past when single mothers were portrayed as public enemy No.1, in the right-wing press, before they moved their focus onto migrants).

The eponymous character, Daniel Blake, is played with great verve by stand up comic, Dave Johns. Hayley Squires is brilliant too, playing a proud parent who will sacrifice anything for her children.

I, Daniel Blake has a clear, some say polemical message.  But, perhaps with the plethora of ‘benefit scrounger stereotype’ programming that haunts the T.V schedules:

Benefit Street

Can't Pay? We'll Take It Away

On Benefits: : 30 Stone and Claiming (lazy, fat scrounger! - my parenthesis)

We need something to redress the balance and encourage empathy, rather than censure.

At the moment it seems as if the people who are the most vulnerable, have the least money and control over their destinies, are the ones most vilified in our society. A change in the system is needed, not charitable handouts. And the character of Daniel Blake is not looking for handouts.

Is I, Daniel Blake preaching to the converted? Will it predominantly be watched by bleeding-heart liberals like me or does it have more of a reach?

According to Wikepedia,The 1966 play Cathy Come Home, one of Ken Loach’s earliest works had the following Impact:

In the light of public reaction to the film, and following a publicity campaign led by Willam Shearman and Ian Macleod highlighting the plight of the homeless, the charity Crisis was formed the following year in 1967.
It also says:

However, Ken Loach has said that despite the public outcry following the play, it had little practical effect in reducing homelessness other than changing rules so that homeless fathers could stay with their wives and children in hostels.

Could I, Daniel Blake have a similar impact to Cathy Come Home? Could it raise awareness and bring about a change in the system? Opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn has urged Teresa May to watch it. Some film critics are dismissing the film as unrealistic or as left-wing propaganda. Conversely, others are lauding it and saying that it’s impact is Dickensian or Orwellian.

I’d be interested to hear of any callous, self-centred Victorian having a road-to-Damascus conversion after reading Hard Times or Oliver Twist and becoming a philanthropist. (I also can’t help thinking of Oscar Wilde saying that you’d have to have a heart of stone to read of the death of Little Nell [The Old Curiosity Shop] and not laugh!)
However, I do remember my history teacher telling us that books like Jane Eyre and Nicholas Nickleby helped raise awareness of how dreadful the school system was and the need for educational reforms, so perhaps art/literature has always had the capacity to transform.

As for me, I came out of the auditorium in tears, after watching I, Daniel Blake (the ladies toilet at the cinema was crammed with women, discretely dabbing at their eyes). I was embarrassed by my tears - after all, I can afford to buy sanitary towels and don’t have to sacrifice my own dinner so that my children can eat.  I can also afford the £12.50 to see a film at the cinema and if you can too, I’d urge you to go and watch I, Daniel Blake. I also donated to a food bank the next day. This article has ideas for other ways people can help:

https://www.the-pool.com/news-views/opinion/2016/43/lynn-enright-frances-ryan-i-daniel-blake-how-to-help