After the love has gone

Usually, I abstain from writing about politics, the main reason for this is that I don’t really feel qualified to offer a rigorous analysis. Mostly, I deal with feelings (an allegation often levelled at women - as if emotions are a shameful, ludicrous and irrelevant notion). And right now, what I’m feeling is concern. No, concern doesn’t cut it - it would be more accurate to say immense unease.

From the jeering triumphalism of the right, to the gloomy comparisons to 1930s Germany on the left, then on to the cynicism and nihilism of (some of) the abstainers, there is scant comfort on social media this week.  I’m scrabbling around for something positive to say and I’m struggling.

It’s not so much that we’ve democratically decided to leave the E.U; an organisation which, even the Remain campaigners acknowledged, wasn’t perfect. It is the horribly distasteful symbolism of the thing. The ugly, racist rhetoric that categorised much of the Brexit campaign, was disturbing in the extreme. Comparisons were made to Nazi propaganda - particularly in relation to the misleading “Breaking Point” poster that *Farage posed in front of on the very day that Labour MP, Jo Cox, was murdered for her humanitarian views; allegedly by a man shouting ‘Britain First’ as he attacked.

*Nigel - hideous, smirking, leather driving-glove of a man!

Whoops, I’ve descended into irrational mud slinging and catcalling, I’ve descended to their level.

[Just as I was trying to write this post, I cam across something far more pithy and succinct :

https://www.the-pool.com/news-views/opinion/2016/25/on-being-a-brown-skinned-brit-in-a-post-eu-referendum-world/on-being-a-brown-skinned-brit-in-a-post-eu-referendum-world ]

So far, so emotional and visceral, on my part. Because, when the arguments used to ‘leave’ are all emotional and visceral, and Michael Gove says that people are sick of ‘experts’, where else is there to go? I’m hoping, in a horribly petty way, that those very right-wingers who are hopping up and down from one leg to the other, waving their flags and mocking and sneering at those who grieve for democracy and for a kinder, more inclusive world, feel the negative effects of Brexit. I hope their haulage businesses go down the pooper and they feel it where it hurts - in their wallets. But the great irony of course in that is that, when it does come back to bite them, they’ll still blame all the bloody foreigners!

Already one of the great lies of the Brexit campaign has been exposed -

• That the £350 million that we send to the E.U would be spent on the N.H.S:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/24/nigel-farage-350-million-pledge-to-fund-the-nhs-was-a-mistake

And here are some more:

http://indy100.independent.co.uk/article/8-of-the-most-misleading-promises-of-the-vote-leave-campaign-ranked-in-order-of-preposterousness

So, what can we do now?

Now, I know that not everyone who voted OUT was racist and/or right wing. In fact, a significant number of Labour voters, that I know, voted that way. Nice, decent people. The Labour party needs to address the problem of a disenchanted (we can’t say disenfranchised) working class. Jeremy Corbyn has acknowledged this (and yet he, of all people, is being blamed and scapegoated for the result, much as immigrants are often scapegoated for the problems that the wealthy elite create...).  His was one of the more honest voices in the campaign: ‘remain but reform’ was his official line. A proper, left wing Labour party, which is seen as a genuine opposition to the old Etonians who are ruling the country (even as one goes, another Bullingdon club bore, is waiting to take his place) needs to woo back the voters, who have gone over to UKIP.  And we, the 48% who did vote to stay in the E.U, need to try and come together and form a formidable opposition. (Maybe some of the Tory 'remainers' might want to think about a shift over to Labour?? Come on, you know we have all the more interesting people on our side - actors, writers, musicians and the like ;) )

#MoreinCommon

(I just need to have another cup of tea first.)

The Joy of Walking

The. Joy. of. Walking.

Yes - you did read that right. I can’t think of any time, recently, when I haven’t felt better after a long walk. When I attended a Mental Health awareness workshop the other day, a recurrent theme was the importance of exercise. We were shown a video, produced by the World Health Organisation, on depression, which stated that exercise had shown that it could be as effective as medication in combating mild to moderate depression.

Now, I’m not really a fan of exercise, that is to say, I’m not really a fan of sport - playing it or watching it. At school, I was such a hopeless duffer (or rather, I had such scant confidence in my own physical prowess) that I ducked when someone threw the netball to me at school. That’s right - rather than risk dropping the ball, or missing the ball, I ducked so that someone else could catch it. One of my school friends was all too fond of reminding me of this. (She might be reading this now, actually, she does read this blog sometimes.) I come from a line of duffers; my mum never begrudged providing me with a note, excusing me from P.E, because her own mother had always done the same for her. I was always the last to be picked for any team - rounders, netball, hockey etc and quite resigned to the fact.

The only thing I was any good at was swimming; it must have been something to do with the effect of weightlessness that the water produced, but there I felt at home. My technique wasn’t brilliant but I had masses of stamina (and I really wish that there was a way I could have written that without it sounding like a double entendre). I could swim or float for hours.

In my twenties I discovered running; tried it for a while, loved the endorphin rush but started to knacker my knees so downsized to walking instead. And that first walking holiday - to the Lake District, hiking for hours, in between visiting Beatrix Potter and Wordsworth’s houses and eating wholesome food at a vegetarian hotel,

http://lancrigg.co.uk/

was bliss. Honestly! It was wonderful; it made me want to eat homemade soup all of the time and walk for hours. I’d always been afraid of heights (as you’d fully expect of the sports duffer) but on this holiday I overcame the fear, somewhat. I put this partly down to my super efficient walking boots and partly to a newly purchased walking pole. We were the youngest people at our hotel but I didn’t care - I was happy to be a young fogey. I was also resigned to being overtaken by sprightly old-timers on our hikes; racing past me as I picked my way, gingerly across the stepping stones.

Sour milk ghyll 

I felt healthy, I felt close to, dare I say, ‘at one with’, nature.

But then, the walking fell off a bit until recently when I got myself a fitness tracker, which I’ve already bored everyone senseless with….

Nowadays I walk for health and pleasure and I feel cheated if I don’t have time to walk to work. I always feel better after a long walk, even if it’s raining and I get drenched, there is the pleasure of a hot shower at the end of it (unless I get soaked on the way to work).

This has been a truly horrific week in the news; a week of senseless acts of  violence and hatred. When atrocities happen, they can make us feel utterly powerless, depressed and sometimes guilty. Nothing can make that right, I wouldn’t make that bold a claim for the power of exercise, and in a way, we owe it to the victims of these crimes to pause for thought and give them our compassion - we shouldn’t want to instantly forget about it. But walking through the park today, gave me a sense of groundedness after the surreal horror of the news. At least when you are moving, it gives you a sense of control; even if it’s just for that little portion of your life.

If you are feeling down; it might do the same for you...

Easedale Tarn (if memory serves correct)

Festival Survival Kit

So I did it - I went to a festival, with the kids, and survived. It was fun in parts (a curate’s egg of a concert) and I’ve compiled a list of festival (and camping) essentials, for the uninitiated. Things to bring to keep you clean, sane and healthy.

1. A torch

So you can find your way back to your tent in the dark. Also, so you can go to the toilet safely (and see the disturbing evidence of other people’s lack of torch). Men - if there are no lights in the toilets and you haven’t a torch, could you not at least just sit down to pee?!). 
As a bonus, the kids can entertain themselves with an impromptu lightshow and blind everyone else in the process.

2. Baby wipes

I heard a rumour once; perhaps it is just one of those things that has entered folklore, so wild and fanciful is the idea, that some festivals have showers. Granted, my experience of such things is limited but I have never come across such things, hence the need for the wipes. Akin giving yourself a bed bath…

3) Dry shampoo

You can get little, mini ‘holiday sized’ cans now! Please see above, with regards to lack of shower facilities.

4) Wellies

An absolute must. Then you don’t have to worry about ruining your trainers. I alternated between wellies and sandals at my most recent festival (such is the nature of British weather).

5) Anti-bacterial wipes and hand gel.

Self-explanatory really...

6) A water carrier.

Fill it up at a tap then you don’t have to rely on your essential and rapidly dwindling, bottled water supplies.

7) Brioche buns.

As our friends said - these things would survive a nuclear holocaust, or at least being bashed around in your bag and baked in the sun. They last for ages and make a decent breakfast food. Not the healthiest but then - you is at a festival!

8) A pocket mirror

To make fire

Nah, just kidding, to check for dirt smudges, sunburn etc. Or you could just go totally don’t-give-a-toss and not look at yourself for a whole weekend. It’s liberating (I’m told).

9) A rain poncho

Look, I’m going to level with you here - you are not going to look stylish. You can’t even wash your hair so just go with the flow (man), put on a circlet of flowers and just don that poncho if it rains. The poncho is light and goes over your clothes. It will keep you semi-dry and that’s all that matters. In your sleep deprived, dehydrated and slightly inebriated state, you will think that you look like something from Woodstock ‘69. (Just don’t look at the pictures ‘til you get home, OK, just focus on that image in your head).

10) A good book

If you need to escape to a quiet corner (as I did, when my 3 year old daughter wanted to go back to the tent for a nap) the book is your friend. (Although this puts me, rather disturbingly, in mind of The League of Gentlemen - Pauline’s pens, pens are friends...) When you are away from home a good book can be your solace and your escape. I’ve read of travellers who take their well worn favourite books away with them, to turn to in times of homesickness and that sense of spaciness and alienation that sometimes attacks the most seasoned of travellers. I’m not suggesting that you would get homesick at a festival, just that, it’s really handy to have some portable, peaceful entertainment with you; when the noise and the drinking all gets a bit too much.

11) Earplugs

There will always be a group of wankers staying up far later than you, playing loud music and talking and laughing long into the night and early hours of the morning. Ideally, you should try and be one of those wankers, yourself and then it won’t bother you. However, this isn’t really an option when you have kids, so draw straws (if there are two of you) on who gets to wear the earplugs*

* Sadly, I wore them at the weekend and they didn’t really work, but they might work for you!

12) A bonus one

A guide to the nearest hotels/B&Bs - for if it all gets too much or you are planning for the next year.

The disparity between the real and the ideal

Many years ago I realised that there was a great, yawning gap between the vision of the person I wanted to be and the stark, sobering reality of the person I actually was.

As a teenager, I revered the 1960s, had an idealised view of it and wished I’d been around then. I loved the music, the fashions, the people and I wanted to be a hippy. I duly donned some love beads, had my nose pierced, bathed in patchouli oil and bought shares in henna as I fruitlessly attempted to turn my jet black hair, pillarbox red. I chucked around phrases like ‘I’m a free spirit’ and ‘go with the flow’and fantasised about having a string of Bohemian love affairs and living on narrow boats. I thought that I wanted to travel extensively and rough it along the way; sleeping under the stars, preferably accompanied by a man with long hair and a beard. 
Who was I kidding? I hate ‘roughing it’. It’s not that I want to surround myself with expensive things or anything like that; it’s just that I’m a neurotic, germ-hating fusspot. I want to sleep in a structure which has four solid walls and a proper roof and I want to sit on something comfortable. I don’t even like putting my bag down on the floor of a public toilet so (if you have any experience of toilets at music festivals) you can imagine how I feel about using them.

My first experience of camping brought me to earth with a bump. My boyfriend and I had got the train and ferry to Amsterdam, massive backpacks strapped to our spines like Teenage Mutant turtles. It was a blazing hot day in May so we pitched our tent under a tree for the shade. That night there was a massive thunderstorm and I spent most of the night worrying that we were going to get struck by lightning, this was in between was trying to avoid rolling over onto my mud-caked Doctor Martens. Which brings me to one of the crappiest things about camping - having to have all your chattels piled up around your ears - backpack, baby wipes, toothbrush, sopping wet towel - the whole crappy lot!

My wannabe Bohemian spirit deserted me - I wanted to sit on a proper sofa and sleep in a comfortable bed, at a reasonable distance away from my muddy boots.

My first (and last) music festival was a similarly sobering experience: although the music was amazing - I very much enjoyed the  magical experience of watching Bjork sing with fireworks going off in time to the music - ditto, sitting at the back of a field, listening to Neil Young, surrounded by mini bonfires, the toilets were like something out of a horror movie! Plastic boxes with a bucket full of crap and some bloody tampons perched upon the poo (sorry to be crude but this is what they were like!). People left those cubicles looking as traumatised as I felt.

“The trick is,” My boyfriend said. “to go into them just after they've been emptied.”

But I don't think that I ever quite mastered that trick.

I have to say that the experience put me off festivals for life (although I’ve been camping since and to day festivals, where I could go home to my comfy bed and my own, somewhat cleaner toilet, at the end of the day.) and I’ve never really felt that I was missing out. The thing is, I’ve made my peace with the fact that I am not a chilled out, festival-loving, laid back hippy. I don’t like dirt and germs and I’m not particularly keen on crowds.

So why, you ask, dear, sweet reader, am I writing about this now? I’ll tell you why - my other half has booked us all to go to a two night, yes, a two night festival! And when I say us, I don’t mean just me and him, I mean me, him and our two children - aged 5 and 3 respectively, one of whom is still in nappies! So I won’t even be able to get so wasted that I don’t care about the state of the toilets. I think the whole thing will be a make or break experience, in that if I make it out in one piece, I won’t break his nose!

Bringing in the May

May at Bodiam Castle

I've been racking my brains over what to write about. I try to blog at least once a week. More as an exercise for myself, than for the benefit and edification of my ‘audience’. Possible topics have included ‘male nudity on screen’ (in view of the recent piece of flaccid putty that made a ‘blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance in Game of Thrones last week) ‘American vs British sitcoms’, ‘the issue of race’ (which will definitely be visited at some point).

But there it was, a suitable topic, twinkling away under my nose all the time: old English traditions. It’s the second May bank holiday weekend and there is rich material to be had in our recent visit to Bodiam Castle (as if I haven’t bored you enough with the photos).

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/bodiam-castle

Bodiam is said to exemplify the quintessential medieval castle. It has a moat around it, a portcullis and four towers. No one has actually lived there since the seventeenth century, but it's last private owner, Lord Curzon, bequeathed it to the National Trust in the early twentieth century and they have lovingly restored it. 
At Bodiam we learnt about ‘Bringing in the May’;  a custom from the Dark Ages when there was no Netflix and no pistachio Magnums, where life expectancy was around forty, so twenty was considered to be middle-aged! It wasn't all bad, though, once a year you got to dance around the maypole, get plastered and go into the woods with the spotty youth of your choice - presumably to identify different berries and hawthorn plants by moonlight...

Of three things you can be assured when you visit a National Trust property: 
1) Some lovely, home made cake.
2) A gift shop, selling jams, curds, plants and things with a flowery covering (diaries, soaps, garden implements). 
3) Sprightly, keen staff who know the history of the property, inside out! Some of these people dress up as historical characters and can answer any question you pose to them (although they seem a bit fuzzy on the whole Brexit debate).

I spent twenty minutes with Sir Edward Dallingridge’s ‘washerwoman’. She never came out of character and we bashed some snowy white shifts with her washing bats. She gave me a comprehensive history of the castle, talking about the role of women: past and present and the way in which the last owner of the castle - Lord Curzon M.P, was opposed to giving women the vote. She told me that there would be an exhibition on the Suffragettes, next weekend - June 4th 2016.

I was surprised to learn that some women in the Middle ages became powerful while their men were away at war (The Hundred years war). Women also had to take over traditionally male roles, in the workplace, as they did in WW2.

Financially a woman could flourish under certain circumstances. She said that there were no restrictions on how many shares/gilts a woman could own but men were only allowed one.

I used to view history as an upward line of progress, and indeed, I think that was how we were encouraged to think of it, at school,  but I now more commonly (and depressingly) view it as a wheel.

The ‘washerwoman’ had a life of hard work but had travelled to France with her employer (Dallingridge) to ensure that he had the whitest shirts. (He sounds like a bit of a show off - very found of stained glass windows).

So, going back to the ‘Bringing in the May’ talk, which we had in the ‘Great Hall’, which is now carpeted with grass. My daughters made a beeline for the ‘thrones’ so the older one was rewarded with the title and crown of May Queen.

May symbolised the end of a hard winter; where food was very scarce and they had no good methods for storing and preserving food. Where they’d been ploughing the land, doing all this hard hard physical work, fasting for Lent, then May came, bringing warmer weather, longer days and more light. It helped that we were having this talk on a brilliantly sunny day. Of course, May Day was about a reversal of social roles, where the plebs could be nobs for a day. And we plebs experienced it that day as the guide referred to us as ‘my lord and my lady’.  

So, all in all a great day out, where history nosed up against the present and there was a sobering portent for the future, with a sign on the grounds that  read, 'flood zone' and the message that in 50 years, they expected that area to be under water because of climate change!

Trying not to pass it on

As soon as my daughter was born I made a mental pact to try not to pass any body neuroses on to her. I wanted our house to be a ‘diet free’ zone where nobody talked about weight and where nobody ever said: “ooh, I've been really ‘bad’ today; I've eaten so much!”

Of course, this was slightly naive as I couldn’t control what anybody else said around her and a depressingly large number of conversations seem to centre around this issue (and here I am - writing about it again!).  But we still try to conceal any preoccupation with weight and  associated issues in our house.This leads to some very bizarre conversations. Things along the lines of:

“Does this make me look F.A.T?”

Or

“How many C.A.Ls does this have?”

Or even, on one occasion

“Does this make my T.1.Ts look massive?” (This is not a desirable thing. And, yes, a number 1 is used to conceal the ‘i’, sophisticated subterfuge, eh?)

All of this spelling out is far less effective now that the older one is learning to read!

We’ll have to work out a new code, start asking the questions in Spanish or something -

“¿Si esto me hace ver gordo?”

“Si, muy gordo!”

Or stop asking altogether. It’s not always me, asking the questions, by the way, although predominantly  me, I suppose. And the answer to that first, loaded question is never, ever ‘yes’. We have an unspoken contract that the other person (usually him) never says - “Yes, actually, those new culottes make you look colossal!” Why bother asking, then? Just for a bit of (meaningless) reassurance, I guess. Also, you learn to rely more on facial expressions than actual words, to gauge whether something is horrendously unflattering.

“I try not to talk about weight in front of my children.”

I once told someone, rather sanctimoniously. “They’ll still notice, though.” They replied. “It’s surprising what they pick up.”

It’s not like I’m trying to make them fat or anything, although I do want them to know that it is not the worst thing in the world to be overweight. But I think that the more you obsess about weight, the fatter it seems to make you. You know, in the same way that diets make you fat, thinking and talking about it the whole time also makes you fat!  (Joan Collins always said that you never see a thin person drinking Diet Coke and she’s right!) I realise that we are in the middle of an obesity epidemic right now but I think this is partly down to the fact that we have such a f*cked up attitude to food. I really try not to offer food as a reward to my children or as an inducement to do something. I don’t encourage them to clear their plates and I think that this message is sinking in as, when we were out at lunch the other day, the older daughter told the younger one, ‘no, it’s all right, you don’t have to eat everything.’ The amount of food that ends up in the green food waste bin is testament to this. (Although I have to admit that I did find myself telling them that they couldn’t have any pudding as they hadn’t eaten any of their vegetables the other day). No, they have far less trouble wasting food than their mother does.

Anyway, I digress, the point is that I’m trying to foster a healthy attitude towards food and body image but how do you get the balance right? How do you convey that food is fuel but can also be enjoyed as part of a social experience? But that it is just food, not a form of entertainment, comfort, distraction or approval? That it’s good to exercise for your health rather than your hip circumference?

I’m sorry to bore on about this but I really need an answer before I can move on and start writing about biscuits again...

The Week in T.V

Like most people I know, I don’t watch a lot of ‘live’ T.V.  Instead, I clog my recorder up with hours of television that I rarely get around to watching, watch a few things on ‘catch-up’ or whatever my package provider calls it, a few shows on Netflix, Amazon Prime and Now T.V. So, it is slightly inaccurate to call this post ‘a week in T.V’, it would be more apt to term it; ‘My week of viewing’.

First up, a thing that was actually on live T.V last week: 

Upstart Crow

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07bp62s

Written by Ben Elton, starring David Mitchell. A comedy about Shakespeare trying to break through in his early career.

So far, quite likeable and funny. I saw David Mitchell being interviewed by Richard Herring last year, for one of Herring’s Leicester Square podcasts:

https://www.comedy.co.uk/podcasts/richard_herring_lst_podcast/episode_94_david_mitchell/

Mitchell was talking about this upcoming project and, when he found out that it was penned by Ben Elton, Richard Herring asked;

“Is it shit?”

Mitchell handled the question with good grace, I thought, and said that he hoped not. He also said that Ben Elton was very aware that that was what people were saying about his recent output.

My first impressions, of the program, are that the cast are very good: particularly David Mitchell, and (rather surprisingly) Liza Tarbuck. It is very similar to Blackadder (which to my mind is no bad thing) - the character that Mark Heap plays could almost be brother to Stephen Fry’s Melchett in Blackadder II. I'm not really sure what they’re trying to do with the ‘Ricky Gervais’ character; the actor who has made it big in Italy. That particular joke could wear very thin but overall the program isn't bad. There are clever jokes about Shakespeare letting Christopher Marlowe pass off Shakespeare's plays as his own but I'm not sure whether that would alienate the audience or draw them in. There are also plenty of what Elton calls his 'knob gags', or in this case, gags about men playing women and shoving coconuts down their dresses.

I also tried to watch Love, Nina

But I'm afraid I fell asleep, not because it was boring but because I was exhausted. I read the book this was based on and really loved it; (Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe) about a nanny in the 1980s who works for Mary Kay Wilmers - editor of the London Review of Books. In the book, Alan Bennett comes round regularly for dinner and helps to fix a broken washing machine. The family borrow drills from Jonathan Miller and various other ‘famous’ literary neighbours make appearances. The ‘Nina’ of the letters is unimpressed and tells her sister that she thinks Alan Bennett ‘used to be in Coronation Street’! There is no ‘Alan Bennett’ character in the T.V adaptation, instead there is a dour, humourless Scottish writer. I can’t really write a review of how that works as I only saw about ten minutes of the program but one of the joyful things about the book was that, whenever one of the characters tried to be nasty about someone or pass on some scandalous gossip about one of their neighbours, Alan Bennett would interject, like a character from one of his own works, with something dampeningly mundane! I can’t help but think that the exclusion of the Alan Bennett 'character' would be to the detriment of the program.

Now, to move on to something not on general T.V, I'm going to talk about Girls

http://www.hbo.com/girls

Created and written by Lena Dunham, this program follows a group of twenty-somethings and their travails through life in New York. This program could, potentially, be intensely annoying; the characters are narcissistic, relatively affluent and, often, not very nice, but I found it totally addictive. I've just watched it up to the end of season 5 and they haven’t released season 6 yet. 

There we have one of the double-edged joys about modern T.V viewing - binge watching! All well and good when you are so captivated by a program that you just have to download one last episode before you go to bed but then you find you have vacuumed it all up and you have nothing left to watch. You are left feeling bereft (well, you are if you are me, anyway). And just why is Girls so addictive? I think, for me, it is the pull of the central character, Hannah Horvath, played by Dunham herself. Hannah is a writer, sometimes successful, often hapless and usually, despite her narcissism, self-aware. And, in almost every episode, Hannah is partially or completely naked and this is brilliant and this is brilliant because Hannah/Lena doesn't look like a Hollywood star. Hannah looks like a regular human woman; she is slightly chubby, her breasts are smaller than her hips and she is covered in tattoos.

It is so refreshing to see a ‘normal’ looking woman having sex on T.V. I read an article once where it said that we are so used to seeing ‘beautiful’ people shagging on film that it made the rest of us mere mortals feel that we didn't have the right to a sex life. Compare this to the recent T.V adaptation of John Le Carre’s The Night Manager (which I loved, BTW) where the two leads looked like Greek gods and displayed some pretty impressive thigh muscle control in their sexual shenanigans.

I guess that was in context, the characters were supposed to be beautiful; they are described so in the book (also brilliant) but it is kind of cool to see someone who doesn't look like a mythical being getting their kit off. So, thanks for that, Lena Dunham! And thank you, Nancy, for recommending Girls to me - you are right, I loved it!

One thing that I’ve been watching in an ‘old school’ way; as each episode is released and as soon as it’s been released, to avoid spoilers, is Game of Thrones. Obviously I can’t say too much about this, to avoid spoiling it for my *cough* multitude of readers...but I, too, have been affected by the...er, revival of a certain character and the reunion of certain family members and the magically uplifting and anti-ageing properties of a certain necklace….

Anyway, Game of Thrones has often been criticised for its gratuitous sex scenes and, (mainly female) nudity and it led me to think - why is the nudity acceptable (to me) in Girls but rather tiresome in GOT? It’s not just because Lena Dunham looks normal and the women in GOT look like Marvel comic women. Is it about plot? Girls is about relationships and sex, whereas Thrones is about….war, intrigue, other stuff...so the sex often seems tacked on and unnecessary. 

I think that my objection to the amount of female nudity in GOT is that, to my mind, it makes the women seem exposed and vulnerable. After all, it is even used as a punishment, in one of the episodes for one of the characters, to walk through the streets, naked, and get pelted with rotten vegetables! (I know that this scene comes from the actual books so don’t take me to task on that). There is definitely something to be said about power play, in an environment where the men remain clothed and the women are naked. GOT often looks like a mediaeval lap-dancing club! 

The notable exception to this, *spoiler!* I'm sure the program makers and the actor, Emilia Clarke, would argue, would be the character Daenerys Targaryen’s recent triumph, where she burns down the place of her captors and stands, magnificent, before its people, naked, with a striking backdrop of flames. In this context, Daenerys' nudity makes her look powerful and is symbolic of (another) rebirth.

I feel that there is something political about Lena Dunham’s nudity in Girls: look at me, she seems to be saying, I don’t fit in with Western society’s supposed ideal of beauty but I still have a right to display my body. There is definitely something empowering about that.