Lease of life

I’m feeling very integrated this week.

When we first moved here we were a little worried that we might be in for a bit of a “Hot Fuzz” experience after various members of the parish council came to visit us - in the exact order that our neighbours had told us they would arrive, and “casually” mentioned various things close to the heart of the council, planning permission being fairly high on the list - exactly as our neighbours had warned us it would.  To be fair, you can’t blame them for being a little over-cautious about this issue since the first the village knew of the existence of our home was when the original owner knocked down the old house behind which he had been stealthily building the new one, presumably with spectacular disregard of minor issues like the aforementioned planning permission.

Everyone was very welcoming, but we were left with a faint, lingering sense that if we failed to measure up to the village’s high standards, we might well find ourselves entombed under the church with the crusty jugglers and the living statues. 

I had forgotten that everyone loves a lawyer.  Lawyers know everything there is to know about anything.  Lawyers keep you safe.  Lawyers are useful. 

Sometimes they shoot bolts of lightning from their eyes at law-breakers, and they can vaporise the unruly with a sound-wave of words, but they tend to keep that quiet as people will expect that level of service all the time.

Okay.  That last bit wasn’t true.  But lawyers are useful.  There comes a time in the life of any community when someone will have a reason to say “Isn’t whatsername a lawyer?  You know, the one who lives next door to Bob and Joan.  We could ask her.”

I was whatsername and the thorny legal issue in question concerned the grant of a parcel of land by the Duchy of Cornwall to the village for use as a wildlife reserve and recreation area.  The land, heavily overgrown after years of neglect, had already been cleared and a committee had been set up.  We had managed to miss all the working parties and tree-planting days and were starting to get a little embarrassed about our non-participation in something that the whole village seemed to be involved in.  The crypt beneath the church was beckoning once again.  Crusty jugglers, living statues and perfectly able-bodied people who can’t be arsed to plant a tree.

And then the parish council came knocking on the door.  Rumour had it that I was a lawyer.  Was this true?  I confirmed that it was indeed true, wondering if I was about to be served with a summons for the offences of reckless Not Being From Round These Here Parts and Not Getting Involved with intent.  Instead the parish chairman produced a copy of the lease for the land and asked if I would consider checking it over for them.

Now in my defence, I did point out that this was not my area and that I had in fact failed property law the first time round (although I may have omitted to mention that this had the knock-on effect of making me liable to sit a remedial professional ethics exam because allegedly it is not acceptable to act for buyer, lender and last-minute gazumper in a property transaction) but I may have pointed it out in an extremely rapid undertone in between my over-enthusiastic cries of “I’m a lawyer!”, “I can do that because I’m a lawyer!” and “Did I mention I am a lawyer?”  I was going to be useful.

Now obviously this was an Extremely Important Task and needed to be done properly.  So I took it to my office in London and placed it on my desk.  It is a lawyer’s desk in a lawyer’s office where law happens.  Obviously the right place for an Extremely Important Task.  You can’t rush these sort of things so I left it on my desk for a couple of days, occasionally repositioning it, just in case anyone had missed the “Between HRR Charles Philip Arthur George, Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall and Village Where Anne Lives” on the front page.  I did manage to resist the urge to carry it about on the tube and read it pointedly and flamboyantly at every opportunity, but it was a close thing…

Eventually I completed my Extremely Important Task and at the next tree planting day, I organised the Chaos family into a sort of honour guard and we processed through the village with the lease.  With great ceremony I located the parish chairman and other dignitaries and presented my findings.

I was able to confirm that this was indeed a lease.

That was pretty much it, but they were looking at me expectantly, so I ventured a few slightly more detailed opinions.  For example, the Duchy retained forestry rights over the land, meaning that, in theory, Prince Charles could wander down here whenever the fancy took him and chop down all the nice little trees that were being planted with such care.  This was given careful consideration by the committee but the general consensus was that our future monarch probably had better things to be doing with his time and that if he ever should decide to go all Henry the Eighth on our asses, we would probably have bigger things to worry about.

But everyone seemed happy with my Very Official Findings and a photo was taken for posterity, the chairman and I each holding a side of the lease and beaming at the camera while I did my usual Chicken Run pose.

A couple of nights ago, that photo re-surfaced as part of a slide-show about the progress on the wildlife reserve.  There I was, gurning at the camera with Simon milling about in the crowd behind and Thomas scowling on his bike.  The slide show was played at the Parish AGM with a commentary which used words like “valuable contributions” and “community spirit”.

We were in.  We were officially Useful Members of the Community.

I felt a virtuous little glow as I sat in the AGM.  It only faded a little bit when Ben decided that farting and burping was a valuable contribution to proceedings.  Although to be fair, noisy as he was, he wasn’t the one admonished for unruly behaviour as part of a sniggering, whispering back row, most of whom seemed to share a name, making naming and shaming of the culprits fairly straightforward.

“Annes!  If you don’t mind!”

The proceedings were only a little bit Vicar of Dibley-esque, with the merest hint of Hot Fuzziness, although during the discussion of the not-particularly-nearby travellers’ site a little voice did seem to be whispering in my ear “Crusty jugglers.”

The following day Ben and I attended the funeral of the first person who welcomed us to the village.  Once again, we sat in the back row, but I did not expect the light-heartedness that had been present at the meeting the night before.

Bread of Heaven was sung in about six different keys.  The elderly gentleman beside me joined in the solo, fractionally out of tune and just ever so slightly slower than the soloist who ploughed on bravely.  When the village chairman promised to be brief in his address, a small child in the front row made a noise of assent.  Another elderly man got up in the middle of the service and announced loudly that he had somewhere to be before taking his lengthy and gracious leave.  At one point the vicar was seen holding a leek that she had found on her seat, a look of great puzzlement on her face.  And during the line “And there is a time to be silent” Ben decided to prove that this was not such a time by letting out a full-throated wail.

The consensus was that the deceased would have loved it.  He had lived in the village for forty years.  Forty years, by all accounts, of seeing the funny side.  At the reception after the service, Ben was roundly congratulated on his impeccable comic timing, and appreciative comments were made about the village’s newest resident coming to see off one of its oldest.

Walking home with two of our neighbours, another younger couple, we were accosted by one of the parish councillors who was in search of the slightly confused gentleman who had left the service early and who needed to return to his nursing home.  He was located, just as another lady came hurrying past in the other direction to report that she had found a confused, elderly gentleman who needed a lift back to his nursing home.  After further confusion all round it was established that there were in fact two entirely different confused gentlemen, who had both made off in different directions.  The rescue parties combined forces and, just before they headed off, one of the ladies turned to the three of us.

“You’ll be doing this for us one day,” she said, a distinct note of glee in her voice.

“Yes,” the other lady agreed.  “We’ve got young people in the village again.  Someone to look after us when we are wandering round the village in the middle of winter in just our knickers.”

Looks like we are part of the village at last. 

[Heads off to sign up for the Wandering Knicker-Wearer rota]

The Rules - Part II

It has been a while since I posted the first instalment of what HWSNBN calls “The Anne Rules”.  The Anne Rules are, in my view, a perfectly reasonable and common-sense approach to life which, if followed by everyone, would make the world a nicer, more organised place.  Not everyone appears to agree with this but that is clearly because they want to carry on in their own disorganised way.

I had the unadulterated pleasure of a trip to Sainsburys this morning and it is clear that England's shoppers are in dire need of a little more arse-kicking guidance, so may I introduce you to…

… The Anne Rules, Part II – Supermarket behaviour and etiquette.

1                 This is a supermarket.  It is not a social club.  Please do not congregate in the aisles to talk about what Mabel said to Jane about Margery.  Or if you really must have this conversation, please have it in a part of the shop that no-one visits, like the hat and glove section, or the stationery aisle.

2                    If you really must congregate, make sure that you do so in groups of no more than three with a maximum of one wheeled item between you.  One trolley OR one pram OR one wheelie-case.

3                    If you wish to purchase cheese, please ensure that you park your trolley in the cheese section.  Do not abandon it in the cooked-meat aisle and then tut and purse your lips at anyone who moves it out of the way in order to access the chargrilled chicken pieces.

4                    If someone is surveying the sausages, do not insert your trolley between said person and said sausages.  It is likely that said person is, at some point in the near future, likely to reach for said sausages, and will be most unhappy at having to climb over your trolley to do so.

5                    If a trolley is parked in an aisle, regardless of whether the parking has taken place in accordance with rules 3 and 4 above, do not park your trolley right beside it, effectively closing the aisle to all shopping traffic.

6                    If you are carrying a banana and a bottle of milk, do not expect the person trying to push a laden trolley with one hand and carry a screaming child with the other, to get out of your way.  You are more manoeuvrable, and probably considerably less angry.  Life will be better if you just make a small detour around them.

7                    Do not undertake long, involved phone conversations while perusing the fresh dip section.  Others would also like to purchase hummous and cannot do so while you reach vaguely towards the shelf before becoming distracted by some particularly interesting bit of gossip and leaving your hand hovering in front of the dips, thus preventing anyone else from accessing them.

8                    If you choose to disregard rule 7, do not, under any circumstances, tut when someone becomes tired of saying “excuse me, excuse me” and eventually bellows “EXCUSE ME!” and treads on your toes in a desperate attempt to gain access to the low-fat guacamole. 

9                    If there are ten people standing in a line behind the self-scan checkouts, you should probably assume that they are not doing so for shits and giggles.  Do not loiter to one side and attempt to sidle up to the next available till.  If you do so and are challenged with the traditional cry of “Oy!  There is a queue, you know”, do not look around vaguely before performing an unconvincing start of surprise.  You know that we all know that you knew the queue was there.  “It’s a fair cop” would be a more appropriate response.

10                Do not allow your small child to scan your shopping.  People in the queue will not be amused by the extra ten minutes of waiting time involved in a 2 year-old trying to find the bar-code on a loose carrot.  This rule is absolute and the effect of breaking it cannot be mitigated by talking slo-o-o-o-wly and loudly to your child about the items in your basket.  “Oh look, darling, the sprout is green.  What else is green, sugarpie?”  Your child’s intellectual development is only important to you.  No-one else cares if she reaches the age of thirty still having to work out colours by reciting “I can sing a rainbow” quietly to herself.  They just want to buy a sandwich.

11                Do not under any circumstances allow your children to indulge in a spot of scooter racing in aisle six.  There is a difference between a supermarket and a park.  One has more rampaging children causing carnage and destruction.  The other has swings and slides.

12                If you do not comply with rule 11 you lose all right to feel hard done-by when fellow shoppers fail to react to your little darlings with the joy and admiration that you feel they deserve.  Anything short of actual bodily harm is both justified and acceptable in such circumstances.

13                Do not unload the contents of your trolley onto the conveyor belt, gaze around vaguely while the shopper in front of you packs their bags and leaves the shop and wait until there are only three items left unscanned before announcing “Oops.  Forgot the Flora” and wandering off towards the cheese and spreads aisle, only to return ten minutes later with a box of teabags, a packet of muffins, some daffodils and a copy of The Da Vinci Code on Blu-Ray, smiling cheerily at the mile-long queue of incandescent shoppers piling up behind your stalled shopping.

14                If you disregard rule 13, do not then look blankly at the just-scanned copy of The Da Vinci Code and say “Oh, is a blu-ray different to a DVD?  I don’t think I want that after all.”  Behind that tight, professional smile, the cashier is wishing death and destruction upon you and everyone you have ever met.

15                If you have vouchers/coupons/printouts of obscure internet-only promotion codes, do not even attempt to shop between the hours of 8am and 11pm.  This type of transaction is best conducted during the hours of darkness when no-one else has any desire to purchase anything at all.

16                If you choose to undertake the aforementioned voucher activity during daylight hours, do not attempt to engage the fifteen people queueing behind you in conversation about how complicated the voucher system is.  They already know that.  They have been waiting for twenty minutes while the cashier tries to find the right button on the till for “Redeem Women’s Weekly Subscribers-Only 10% Off Coupon Valid Only Until Yesterday”.

17                If the cashier informs you that your aforementioned voucher is not valid, do not argue about this for a further ten minutes before demanding to see the manager.  When the manager informs you that the cashier was, in fact, correct, do not then glare at the queue behind you as though it is their fault.  The more appropriate response would be to offer each one of them a hand-written apology card, or possibly a singing sorry-gram.  This might not, however, be enough to stop them ambushing you in the carpark and bludgeoning you into unconsciousness with a baguette.

18                This is a shop.  People buy things here.  Dictionary definition of “to buy”:

to acquire the possession of, or the right to, by paying or promising to pay an equivalent, especially in money; purchase.

Do not wait until your shopping has been scanned and packed and then gaze blankly at the shop assistant as though wondering what happens next.  It cannot be that much of a surprise that you are expected to hand over money at his point.

19                Once your shopping has been packed and your card and receipt handed over to you, this is not the most appropriate time to scan your receipt to ensure you received your full quote of multi-buy savings and the correct number of loyalty points.  Nor is it the appropriate time to inspect the contents of your wallet while picking your nose contemplatively.  The reason the shopper behind you is subtly nudging you with their trolley is that they would LIKE YOU TO LEAVE RIGHT NOW.

20                If, however, the shopper in front of you is proceeding through the checkout procedure with all due expediency, do not stand half an inch away from them so that they can feel your damp, slightly creepy, breath on the back of their neck.  It will not make them go any faster.  It will, however, probably make them call the police.

If all shoppers agree to abide by these simple Anne Rules, I feel that we will all have happier shopping experiences and probably come home with what we all actually intended to buy and not two tins of beans and a packet of crisps to feed our children for  a week, due to our intense need to get out of the supermarket as quickly as possible.

Since this will mean more money in the coffers of the supermarkets, I am hopeful that Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury will agree to sign up to a “Shoppers’ Code of Practice” allowing those who infringe the above rules to be detained indefinitely in an industrial freezer as a warning to other miscreants.

Testing Times

The Chaos household won’t be going to the Olympics due to our spectacular lack of tickets.  HWSNBN managed to get tickets for the cycling test event, but to misquote Cool Runnings, which I am embarrassed to admit is one of my all-time favourite films, “I am not feeling very Olympic right now.”

But this morning, I was very excited to find myself right in the thick of what must have been an Olympic test event.  I must admit that I missed the press announcement about the introduction of a new Olympic sport, but now that I know about it, I am very excited about Great Britain’s medal chances in Competitive Bad Driving.

The test event took place at various venues across south London and really was a fantastic showcase of British Bad Driving at its spectacular best.

The men’s event showed that there is real depth of talent, particularly in the Mid-Size Mini-Cab category.  There was a dazzling performance from Silver Volvo Man who made good use of the wrong side of the road to drive to the front of a row of queuing traffic.  There was a slightly tricky moment when the front car in the queue was a little sharper of the lights than SVM had expected, but he quickly rallied with a foot-to-the-floor manoeuvre which saw him hurtling back into the lead. 

There were also strong performances in this category from Audi-Man, who scored well in the pull-out-in-front-of-oncoming-traffic event, while People-Carrier Man showed real promise in the turning-left-from-the-righthand-lane event.

In the Open Men’s Smaller Vehicle category, Wanky Sportscar Man had an unexpectedly good run in Drifting-Across-Lanes, pulling off a particularly tricky back-and-forth manoeuvre on a sharp bend for maximum collateral carnage.  Cheaper Sportscar Man had a disappointing result in Failing-To-Drive-Through-A-Green-Light, after he revved away just fractionally too quickly to prevent the car behind him from making it through before the lights changed.  He did rally with some good, strong Accelerating-Pointedly-Away-Into-Oncoming-Traffic, but that slip at the traffic lights must surely have lost him his chance at a place in the team for the Olympics.

The Learner Drivers were also well-represented.  Floppy-Haired Student Type is certainly one to watch after his almost perfect Slow-Speed-Emergency-Stop right on the apex of a left turn.

However, despite the undoubted strength of the contenders for the men’s team, it was the women who really carried the day at this test event.  Arguably the star of the show was Four-Wheel-Drive-Woman, vying for a place in the highly competitive Unfeasibly Large Car category.  FWDW blew the opposition away with a u-turn from the left-hand lane of a dual carriageway.  The nearest of near misses ensured that she walked away with the honours in this category, which must have come as a great disappointment to Big Shiny People Carrier Mum who put in a good, solid performance which would, in a less competitive event, surely have seen her walk away with the honours.  Her Drive-Really-Really-Slowly-And-Occasionally-Stop-For-No-Apparent-Reason could not be faulted, and if she lost a couple of points in the Completely-Blocking-The-Carpark-While-Dithering-Wetly event by allowing another car to slip by into a parking place, she certainly made up for it in the Entirely-Failing-To-Get-In-The-Parking-Space event.  The moment when she realised she had managed to block herself into the car by wedging herself against a pillar was a real highlight of the whole test event.

Credit must also be given to Crap Little Car Woman who managed a very creditable Four-Lane-Swerve on the notorious Wandsworth one-way system, one of the most exciting of the Olympic venues for this sport, starting off in the left of the four lanes on this stretch of road, crossing sharply in front of a bus and a lorry and arriving in the right hand lane just short of the lane closed sign, and performing a really special reverse-swerve back into the next lane.  A little bit of oversteer at this point cost her a few points, but still a good result for a relative newcomer to this sport.

In the team category, the Fulham School-Run Mums team gave a beautifully orchestrated demonstration of Bringing-The-Whole-Of-South-London to a halt with some really quality Double-Parking and Not-Knowing-How-Wide-Your-Car-Is.  Their Putney-based rivals, the Daft-Uniform School Mums team did not perform quite so strongly, although their Pulling-Out-In-Front-Of-People-And-Then-Doing-A-Half-Hearted-Indication did show some promise, and they gained some valuable presentation points for their confident mastery of the Looking-Indignant-While-Doing-Something-Stupid-As-Though-It-Is-Someone-Else’s-Fault expressions.

In the Cycling category the plaudits must go to Proper Pillock who was head and shoulders above his opposition in the Cycling-Really-Slowly-In-The-Middle-Of-The-Lane-While-Fiddling-With-Helmet event, and White Van Man gave a strong performance in the Commercial Vehicle category with his Going-All-The-Way-Round-The-Roundabout-In-The-Left-Hand-Lane.

All in all, British Bad Driving has surely never been in better shape.  If this continues then our Bad Drivers must be heading for great things this summer.  Watch out for them on our roads!

Write-Off Mondays

Since I have been blogging and reading other people’s blogs I have seen various references to “Silent Sundays”, “Off-grid Sundays” and “Meat-free Fridays”.

I would like to introduce you to “Write-off Mondays”.  I briefly toyed with the idea of calling them “Utterly Crap Mondays” but I didn’t think that quite fitted given the idea behind this concept.

Basically, Write-off Mondays involve you coming up with the nicest possible ideas and plans for your Monday…and then accepting that there is no realistic prospect of these plans reaching fruition and giving up and returning to bed for the rest of the day, ignoring all whinging and begging by small children who want to actually leave the house.

The impulse behind Write-off Mondays is simple.  For some reason, my Mondays always go horribly wrong and finish up costing me vast amounts of money, sweat and tears.  Last Monday I stopped at a particular shop I had been driving past for months, paid for parking, unloaded children from the car, and promptly dropped my phone and broke the screen.  This was on the same day that I finished up spending vast amounts of money on lunch as the cheap, child-friendly place we were heading for turned out to be closed, necessitating a detour into the nearest food-selling establishment – not cheap, and not child friendly.  And despite my best efforts, Thomas decided to practice his Spawn of Satan impression and scream, kick and flail all the way round South-West London.

He Who Shall Not Be Named claims that I was actually rocking back and forwards very slightly by the time he got home.

So unnecessary costs accrued last Monday:

£2.60 – parking

£7 – extra food costs

£30 – new phone screen

This Monday was even better.  It was special.

I had a perfectly reasonable plan.  We would drive across London to meet my friend and her two children at a soft-play centre, park in the supermarket carpark for ease of grocery shopping, have lunch there and then drive back home, no doubt with two sleeping children which would allow me to park outside the fabric shop and run in for a few bits and pieces unencumbered by a rampaging toddler. 

It was a great plan. 

Unfortunately, Thomas also had a plan.  His plan involved subjecting the unfortunate occupants of the soft-play centre to some of his finest whinge.  He kept plonking himself down in the middle of the floor and wailing so heart-rendingly that other mums would rush up to him crying “Oh, what’s wrong, darling?”, at which point he would sniffle and whisper incoherently, occasionally breaking into a fresh round of pitiful sobbing.  Inevitably, when I wandered over and pointed out that absolutely nothing had happened and he was just suffering from a chronic case of Pointless Whinge, they didn’t believe me and glared at me, sporting their best cats-bum mouths.

Eventually the soft-play torture ended and we went via the car-park to drop my overstuffed general crap changing bag before walking up to the supermarket.

The click of the closing boot hadn’t even had time to echo round the car-park when I realised what I had done.  Keys and pretty much everything else inside a car with a boot that opens independently of the doors and locks automatically.  Me outside with wallet, phone, toddler, baby and sling.  It was like an episode of the Krypton Factor.

After the inevitable waving of arms and jumping up and down, I realised there was only one thing to do.  Well actually, there were two things to do, but the first was to shout at Thomas to please stop asking “You lock the car, mummy?” with a definite note of glee in his voice, which didn’t really make inroads into getting the car open, but did reduce the possibility of my head exploding and rendering the whole problem moot anyway.  The second thing to do was to trek across London for an hour, get the spare keys to the flat, collect the spare car keys, trek back and then retrace the journey by car.

Now I know my limitations.  I should do.  I come up against them plenty of times.  So I phoned through a frantic plea for assistance to Thomas’s nursery, and half an hour and two buses later, I was de-toddlered.  Things were looking up.

Briefly.

If this was the Krypton Factor, someone had clearly decided things were starting to look too easy and responded by ordering a wholesale cancellation of the trains into central London.  I was assured by the station staff that this was a temporary blip so I comforted myself by buying a Greggs cheese and onion pasty and a wispa bar before heading down to the platform.  I was headed off by an employee of South-West Trains.

“Next train platform one.”

“But the thing says platform two.”

“No.  Platform one.”

“Is it definitely coming before the 12.34 on platform two?”

“Yes.  The thing is wrong”

I went to platform one.

The train arrived on platform two. 

I paused in the midst of the obviously fruitless stampede towards the stairs to wail “But he said it was platform one” at another staff member who regarded me disapprovingly.

“You should have looked at the thing,” he said.

Can I hastily reassure my regular readers that I didn’t push him under a train.  But it was a close-run thing.

Things took a turn for the better when He Who Shall Not Be Named came up with a solution that would short-cut proceedings considerably.  He would cycle to the flat, pick up the spare keys and took them back to his office and meet me there.

I therefore took myself into the City.  It was raining.  Ben had wee-ed on me.  I had looked better.  As I trudged down the road, a particularly coiffed city-boy type tripped past, twirling his brolly merrily.  I half expected him to burst into song and swing round the nearest lamppost a lá the city scenes in Mary Poppins or the eponymous scene from Singing in the Rain.  As he past me he looked at me with a mixture of pity and distaste.  I swear his nose wrinkled a little bit.  I garnered several similar looks while skulking in the imposing entrance to HWSNBN’s office.  I shuffled into the corner and tried to look unobtrusive. 

As I lurked there I was overcome with a slightly insane urge to grab the arm of some passing city-type and shout “I used to come into the City when I was a lawyer.  I wore a suit and everything.  Sometimes I even I had files.”

But now I was a woman with no keys, no coat and a Tesco carrier bag containing half a Greggs pasty, being wee-ed on by a baby in a silly hat. 

It was one of those “How did I get here?” moments.

Eventually the keys arrived, the baby was changed (On the floor of the posh visitors’ toilets.  Ha!  In your face, smart city people), and I made my way back to retrieve the car and the toddler.

Today cost me:

£9 – extra parking costs

£4.60 – bus fares to nursery

£7 – travel pass for train and tube

£29 – nursery fees

99p – unnecessary Greggs pasty

This is why I am instigating Write-off Mondays.  In future I will come up with a plan for a lovely day of educational, enriching activities.  And then I will write them off and take to my bed.

It will be considerably cheaper and probably won’t involve shouting and arm-waving.

Or if it does, at least it will be horizontal shouting and arm-waving.

Toddler Speak

I never intended to be a lawyer.  My undergraduate degree was in English Language and Linguistics and I also did a M.St in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology.

And no, I don’t really have much idea what that means even now.  That might have something to do with the fact that I very rarely attended classes – well, except my tutorials which were about 100 yards away as my tutor lived on the other side of my college quad and didn’t mind me rocking up in my pyjamas.  On one course (very complicated theoretical syntax thingumybob), I turned up for the exam and someone asked me who I was.  (Fortunately it was multiple choice and I am good at those.)  I was actually a little offended, as I had been fondly imagining myself as a sort of non-conformist philologist, the maverick of the Oxford Linguistics Faculty – a rebel without a clause.  [pauses for self-congratulatory snigger at own joke]  Clearly there is a fine line between bucking the establishment by subversive non-attendance and no-one noticing because, by definition, you are never there.

I was somewhat mollified when my college friend and fellow faculty member was asked to find three sensible and respectable linguistics postgrads to attend dinner with an extremely eminent visiting lecture who co-authored with the uber-eminent Noam Chomsky.  He invited me on the basis that he could only find two sensible and respectable people at short notice so I would have to do.  Fortunately, the honoured guest appeared to be delighted to have been given a night off from being eminent and within five minutes was animatedly discussing the etymology of the word “fuck”, despite the best efforts of Sensible and Respectable to turn the conversation to medieval morphology or other safe subjects.  He then drank a vast amount and insisted on being taken to the cheesiest club in Oxford where he danced the night away before rocking up to his lecture in a slightly sorry state.

During my postgrad course I worked as an etymologist and proof-reader for a new dictionary.  I should at this point issue a bit of a warning – if you have a large, black dictionary published around 1999 I would view some of the entries beginning with ‘s’ with a certain degree of caution.  Just saying….

Anyway, it was all about language.  Somewhere along the line I got hugely sidetracked and woke up one day to find that I was a criminal lawyer.  I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time. 

But I still like words.  He Who Shall Not Be Named would probably say that I like them a little too much.  These days I don’t study historical language development, or contemplate the theory of proto-IndoEuropean or the Great Vowel Shift (although to be honest I never gave them that much head-space in the first place), but I have noted an interesting linguistic phenomenon which I think needs further study – it is the effect that a toddler has upon the ability of other family members to talk like adults.

If my memory of historical language change serves me correctly, when pronunciation or word-construction changed, it was often because a more prestigious (often foreign) form was preferred.  Where toddler language is concerned, it is not so much that we choose the new form, but that it gets bludgeoned into us by being repeated over and over and over and over again, usually accompanied by screams of “Nonononono” if we suggest that the correct pronunciation is anything other than the one that is being shrieked at us.

No-one in the extended Chaos family goes for a nap anymore – the accepted term is “to nooze”.  This is one of those highly unusual constructions as the noun, verb and adjectival forms are identical.  I am going for a nooze.  You are going to nooze.  He is nooze.

When someone hasn’t eaten for a while, they are “bungy”.  He’s gone bungy.

“Wimming” is the accepted way to discuss the popular aquatic activity.  It is performed, if you are male, in “wimming shrubs”.  The loss of an initial consonant is a common feature of toddler-speak.  It does render some words entirely incomprehensible, but then again when you have two children under the age of three, you probably don’t have much to say other than incoherent gibber anyway.

The imperative form is the accepted way to address someone, and is no longer considered rude.  Man!  Where have all the sheep gone?  Lady on horse!  What you doing?

All plurals are formed by the simple addition of an “s”.  Mans.  Sheeps.  And it is absolutely accepted that everyone shall refer to themselves in the third person.  And it is absolutely accepted that everyone shall refer to themselves in the third person.  Mummy is going nooze.

We have fingers and “lums” on our hands.  We consume “cakey”.  We put tomato “dipdip” on our chips.  The list goes on.

Toddler language change doesn’t just affect individual words.  Its effect can also be noted in relation to phrases and colloquialisms.  A recent introduction to the Chaos family phraseology followed my admission that I recently shouted at Thomas so loud that I thought a little bit of wee was going to escape.  Some people are incandescent with anger, others are speechless with fury.  In this family we are “incontinent with rage”.

This is all very well until you lose the ability to converse in a normal way, and find yourself in a shop saying “Man!  Mummy is bungy.  Cakey!  Before I become incontinent with rage!”

There is also the problem of trying to discourage undesirable linguistic forms.  Thomas produced a wooden screwdriver today and rotated it on my head while shouting “screw you, mummy!” before repeating the action on the baby’s tummy with a cry of “And screw Ben too.”

I’m pretty sure part of my postgrad was concerned with how to artificially influence language change.  Unfortunately I skived that lecture. 

Oh dear.

The language of equality

I had a blog post about the language of children ready to go. 

I got distracted.

A well-known blogger who I have been following on Twitter re-tweeted a comment that had disgusted her.   It was from a young man whose Twitter history suggest that he isn’t going to be winning any prizes for philosophical discourse any time soon.

“fair play to Ched Evans proper lad if theres grass on the pitch play ball haha 5years isnt that long ull be out in no time”

He was, of course, referring to footballer, Chedwyn Evans’ conviction for raping a nineteen year-old girl.  The Sheffield United player was sentenced to five years yesterday, after a judge commented that it was obvious that the woman was so drunk that she was in “no condition to have sexual intercourse”.

So this Twitter member thinks it is “fair play” for a man to happen across a staggering drunk teenage girl, load her into a taxi, take her back to a hotel room and text a booty-call to his friends to come and join in.  If it is “fair play” then the implication is that she was “fair game”.

Oh dear.  Things really haven’t changed that much in some people’s minds, have they?  There have been various developments in the law over recent years to try to deal with the difficulties in prosecuting allegations of rape and sexual assault.  Unfortunately, what the legislators can’t do is change the opinions of people like Twitter-Man and his ilk.

After all, Twitter-Man wasn’t the only one using the social network to give his pennyworth.  Chedwyn Evan’s teammate, vented his rage on the site, criticising the law and attacking the victim in a rant peppered with four-letter words, culminating in the delightful comment:

“If ur a slag ur a slag don’t try get money from being a slag ... Stupid girls... I feel sick.”

Clearly, it is extremely concerning that someone relatively high-profile, no doubt a role model for many young men who aspire to the lifestyle of a successful footballer, holds such views.  But there is something much more sinister highlighted by these two twitter remarks.  It is this: it clearly never occurred to these two men that their views were not something to be paraded across the internet.  It does not appear to have registered with them that there is something very, very wrong with applauding a convicted sex offender and vilifying his victim.

Clearly, despite the undoubted advances in the way the legal system deals with rape allegations, the real problem is the deeply entrenched views that some men, and indeed some women, still hold about women, their rights over their own bodies and the way in which they should present themselves.

I think it is all about language.  Where the behaviour of women is under discussion, there is a vocabulary of contempt still in circulation.

Mr Brown called the victim a “slag”.

A slag?  Really?

Which person in this “liaison” ordered a taxi and took a highly intoxicated person back to a hotel purely for the purpose of sex, notifying a friend about his intentions on the way?  Oh yes, that would be Mr Evans’ acquitted co-defendant, Clayton McDonald who has not been found legally at fault, but is, unarguably, morally suspect, given his behaviour that night.

So who is the “slag”?

The problem is that there is no equivalent term for a man with so little respect for himself and others that he picks up drunken women in kebab shops and broadcasts his glee at his “catch” to his friends by text while she lolls at his side in a taxi.  If this term is applied to a man, it is always qualified – “male slag”.  The implication is that distasteful sexual behaviour is the sole remit of women.  There are sexual words for men, but they are very different in tone – very much light-hearted, slap-my-thigh-and-snigger, old-boys’-club type terms – “player”, “cad”, “Jack the lad”.  Even the term for a male prostitute (see what I had to do there – male prostitute) is rather cheerful sounding, compared with the blunt, no-concessions term for a woman who sells sex. 

Gigolo. 

Whore. 

I do not call myself a feminist.  Partly because it is a term that seems to cover such a wide range of attitudes and beliefs that I wouldn’t know where to start in justifying labelling myself that way.  But also because I believe in the power of words and I believe that the existence of the term is, to some extent, an admission that there is a need for it.  That women need to fight to be equal.  I prefer to think of the activism of women as being a fight against sexism, rather than it stemming from women needing a leg-up.

As long as there is a whole set of words and phrases that attach to women only, there is no real prospect of real, true, completely pervasive equality.  The type of equality that is in the head, not just on the lips, or in the statute books.  The day those words no longer exist, or the day they are used for both sexes, is the day when we won’t need the word “feminism” any more.  But until that day, when a news-story like this doesn’t attract the mindless, misogynistic comments – asking for it, slag, tart, fair game, the day when the point does not need to be made that alcohol does not equal sex, drunk does not mean available, men like Chedwyn Evans will think that they can take what they want without asking. 

Because, after all, there is a name for women like that, isn’t there?

Well there are names for men like Chedwyn Evans too, and thankfully a jury had the courage to pin them squarely on him.

Criminal.

Predator.

Rapist.

Twitter is quite an eye-opener.  It’s all about language.  There’s nothing else there to dress up, or excuse, the views that are put across.  Just words on the screen and the mentality behind them.  Even rich, famous footballers like Mr Brown are reduced to 140 characters and they don’t come across particularly well.  Perhaps the baldness of their messages might make a few others with not dissimilar views actually examine their entrenched opinions a little more closely.

Keep tweeting Mr Brown and Twitter-Man.  You might actually get a message across.  But perhaps not in the way you hoped.