Patriarchaic

The other day MsP asked why Siri had to be female. I didn't say so at the time, because I'm easily distracted, but I imagine it is something to do with the fact that many men (if no longer the majority consumers of iPhones, I would be willing to guess still the majority producers) still see women as providing their 'support' role. Traditionally this 'support' role has meant feeding, clothing and organising the life of a man, so that he can do pretty much what he likes and designate it as important. Obviously the 'pretty much what he likes' bit was not quite so free and easy when jobs involved greater manual labour, but since the middle class emerged and the vast majority of jobs became devoid of any kind of manual labour, men have had to pretend that their 'work' is in some way special in order to sustain the system of surrogate mothering that they appear to expect from the opposite sex. I am not saying that men are alone in perpetuating their infantile state: too many women support it too, perhaps fearful that telling men to grow up will brand them as man-haters - or any of the other childish epithets men ascribe to people who don't let them get their own way. However trying to blame women for the failings of men is exactly the kind of feeble excuse men hide behind.
There appear to have been a number of articles and even books recently that stitch together isolated incidents of discrimination by women against men and some observations about the impact that increasing sexual equality has had on the areas of life that men used to be able to rely on (not having to wash up, not having to help with the children, not being prosecuted for beating their wives, etc.) in an attempt to show that the pendulum has swung too far the other way. So just to clarify, they're saying that a shift towards a slightly more equal society has led to discrimination against men. Although, reading between the lines I think they might just be whinging that taking a bit of responsibility for one's life and one's actions is hard. Didums. For want of a better phrase, the only response I can find is 'man up!' And I don't mean 'man up' in the sense of 'do something spectacularly dangerous and/or stupid and, if you survive, brag about it afterwards'.
Unfortunately the people presented as male role models are all too often the kinds of people who can only celebrate their success due to some spectacular gamble having paid off. With hindsight it is easy too see their recklessness as strategy because it paid off. The countless other people who have pursued such 'strategies' and failed/died in the process don't get to write history and so do not appear on our radar. Men have therefore assumed that recklessness is the key to a fulfilling life and for centuries have been playing a kind of Darwinian lottery based on this assumption. I'm not saying that we should live a life devoid of risk - life is a series of calculated risks - I am simply saying that the (largely male) attitude to measuring risk and return should be reconsidered. Financial products always state that past performance is no indicator of future performance, yet the men who run those products take the exact opposite approach to risk: considering that a risk that has paid off in the past must therefore do so again, and to think otherwise would be in some way 'un-manly'. The implicit complaint is that mitigating risk by exercising due caution is boring. The only response to this I can think of is 'grow up'.
This is, of course, unlikely. Every generation since X has systematically failed to grow up, hence why we spend most of our spare time at festivals, or in the pub, or playing computer games, or at least we would if our responsibilities didn't get in the way. Many men tend to associate such responsibilities with their partners, and so the lingua franca of such men when away from their partners becomes utterly objectionable. Phrases such as "night off from the missus" or "free pass" portray the other (usually female) partner as undesirable and reinforce the gender roles as a direct male/female child/parent dichotomy. This is not healthy, either for the relationship or the general wellbeing of society. It creates schizophrenic behavior in that these infantile men, who effectively only behave when with their wife/mother substitute, yearn to get away and misbehave.
As usual, I am not solely an impartial observer of this condition: I have on occasion been guilty of using MsP as a kind of pressure valve for my worst excesses, knowing that her reason will eventually assert itself. By doing so, I inevitably paint her as the 'boring' one, creating resentment on her part and adding an element of dysfunction into our relationship. I am genuinely trying to mitigate this behavior by setting my own boundaries and sticking to them. Most importantly, I need to remember that this doesn't make me boring. Just an adult.

Pantone

OK so it seems like the good weather is bringing out a fine selection of bad footwear. Perhaps whilst groping around in the backs of their wardrobe for their summer trousers, people are finding long forgotten pairs of shoes and thinking 'why haven't I been wearing these recently?'
Here are some possible reasons:
1. You sobered up.
2. You lost your job as an extra in Babylon 5.
3. They were in the back of the wardrobe when you moved in.
4. Your mother got them for you (from her job as an extra in Babylon 5).
5. It was winter and you thought one-tone ugly pointy shoes would be more appropriate.

I want it to be understood that I am in no way anti two-tone footwear, indeed I own two pairs of two-tone brogues myself. However, these are the detail jeans of two-tone footwear, i.e. naff and much cheaper looking than they actually were. I image the poor fool that bought these paid a reasonable amount of cash, thinking being on-trend was worth the money. I'd be willing to bet he'd have got a decent pair of Loakes* for about half the price. I guess then though his shoes wouldn't have been so on-trend**, they'd have been timeless and stylish.

*Other brands of classic leather shoe are available.
**The trend in question here apparently being the clown-assassin look.

Poultry

I seem to spend much of my time in this blog defining what I'm not and what I don't do. Well here I go again: I am definitely not a food blogger.
There are a number of reasons for this, but most of them come back to my general laziness. This does not mean I am not in to food. On the contrary, when discussing my plans for the weekend with a colleague, he pointed out that my spare time revolves around the acquisition and consumption of food. My response was that one's spare time should revolve around food and light entertainment, what else is there?
I guess if I take last weekend as an example, there was quite a lot of food. After the gym on Friday night I went for steak with some friends. After rising late on Saturday, MsP and I tried a new place for brunch (Nude Espresso - very good), and got some bagels from the all night bagel shop, before going to Maltby Street Market. Really we were too late for the market, but we still managed to get chopped liver from Monty's Deli and a chicken from The Butchery. This latter was quite important for me as I've been looking for a good butcher for the last six months, and The Butchery is a bloody good butcher. They were closing when I got there, but I saw enough of their meat to know I'm going back. As we'd missed most of Maltby Street, we headed over to Borough Market to get the vegetables and bread. We roasted the chicken that very night and ate it with rice and a couple of top notch salads that are MsP's specialty (salads, gravy and risotto - I don't even try). The next day after a lunch from the Ribman at the Brick Lane Sunday food market, I made stock from the chicken carcass, some of which I used in the Bolognese sauce I made for eating during the week (a Felicity Cloake/Elizabeth David hybrid since you ask). We finished the weekend off with cold chicken, more excellent salads and 30 Rock. See: food and light entertainment.
OK, so last weekend was an extreme example, but I aim for my weekends to be like that as often as possible. What I love is that I can. This is at least partly due to the fact that I live in a large city that has in recent years gone food crazy, but it is also due partly to how this food craziness manifests itself. As with everything else these days it revolves around the internet and the technologies we use on the internet. I found out about two of the places I bought food from last weekend from Twitter and a third from a food blog.
When I was waiting tables in a hotel as a student in the days before cameraphones, someone told the chef that a diner had taken a photo of his food. The chef's response was "what an idiot, why'd he do that" (I am fairly certain that he used expletives, but as I can't clearly remember how, I have omitted them). To be fair this response was largely because the chef thought the food he was serving that evening was not worth photographing and he was right. However, the fact that anyone would bother to remark upon the fact of a diner taking a photo of their food seems so alien to our current food landscape as to seem ridiculous. Indeed, I am almost surprised to get through a meal in a restaurant these days without someone photographing their food, and half the time it's someone at my table. Occasionally it's me.
Even though I engage in this form of culinary documentation from time to time, I'm not quite sure why. I guess it adds to the conversation when I see friends: "I saw you ate x at y." It could be seen as a sort of brag, as in "check what I'm eating," but it doesn't really work unless you are in some utterly unobtainable restaurant (El Bulli, or right now, Dabbous), and I simply don't know any people who get tables at such places. So I guess it's more a way of sharing joy about food. And that has to be a good thing. Good food should be joyful. I will always remember my first bite of the corn cob at the centre of my main course at Greens in San Francisco. MsP said my face lit up with a look that one only gets from wonderfully surprising food. It is only logical that given the ability, we share the peripheral details of such joy with friends, and through social networks we enable them to find the same food for themselves, even if it's not pinned down. I doubt that the current street-food bonanza would have been anywhere near as successful ten years ago, without Twitter to guide the punters in.
Really I guess that kind of casual food tweeting (instagramming, lockerzing or whatever) is a form of food blogging that requires much less of the time, effort and discernment needed to actually write a proper food blog. Not to mention money. I marvel at some of these bloggers. I mean I spend a fair portion of my disposable income on food, yet many of the serious food bloggers must spend several times what I do on food every month. They must be very well off, or make considerable sacrifices in other areas of their lives. Obviously, not all food bloggers are endlessly chasing the latest high-end restaurant week in week out, many write about the many alternative ways to avail oneself of good food, but all appear equally fanatical. I guess it's just a form of fanaticism that translates well to a blog, or perhaps it's just what I'm willing to read about.
Food can be as faddish as fashion: one day it's all cupcakes, the next it's macaroons (I'm told it's all Lameters right now) and the internet just exaggerates this by disseminating fad further and faster than was previously possible. At least it also means that we all get a chance (in theory at least) to enjoy these fads before they pass.

Post-feline

I saw these and I couldn't resist. They really are special shoes. Not only do they come in one of this year's most fugly shapes (square-nosed extra point), but if you look closer, you'll see that they have additional texturing. Texturing! They have what appear to be tiger stripes on them in what appears to be velvet. No, that can't be right, it must be suede. I'm afraid I was too chicken to make a closer inspection, so the material mystery will remain unsolved. However, regardless of the materials involved, you must agree this is a very 'special' shoe.

Postscript

I'm not really a 'real time' blogger. I don't really respond to events as they occur. At least that hadn't been the case until earlier this week, when I responded to my own organisational stupidity with a post hoping (genuinely in my despair and self-anger) to persuade someone serious enough to register but casual enough not to bother, that they should vote because I was going to fail to do so (due to nothing other than poor personal organisation). Due to the brilliance of the internet and the vagueries of Twitter, I find a reference to one the greatest television shows ever made lends unjustified weight to my simple attempts to vent at my own stupidity via my smartphone.
I feel like I need to go off piste a bit here and explain a ridiculous amount about the multi-party system in Britain to (both of) my US audience, but I think they'd probably understand it fine if I just explain that the popular press can't count above two. Hence most people in the UK aren't actually aware of the multi-party system.
Perhaps more embarrassingly, I made a plea (to my 20 Twitter followers) for more people to vote, and on Thursday night the radio said we averaged 33% voter turnout in the local elections across the country.
I would love to say shame on you, but it is shame on me. I can blog and tweet about this stuff all I like, but when it came to it I was not in the polling booth. I disenfranchised myself, along with 77% of the over 18s in this country*, although, in my defence, I did so not through an active desire to abstain, or as passive indecision, but through gross incompetence that I blame myself for. That is the only way, in the 16 years I have been allowed to, that I have found not to vote. I genuinely don't know how the rest of you live with yourselves.
'Largely, very comfortably' I would imagine to be the answer, except I doubt it is so. Increasingly disaffection with mainstream politics means that people in western democracies don't bother to vote, and like me, they wake up the next day with the impression that their inaction has changed nothing. Even without their vote, the system has perpetrated itself and government has prevailed. This is a very dangerous assumption. As has been proven time after time, voter apathy allows politicians with a small but motivated following to get elected and change things, and even when minority or extreme parties don't win out, the establishment can use voter apathy as an excuse to create their own (totally crappy) mandate. I wouldn't be massively surprised if many of the horror stories we have read about dodgy politicians have gone a fair way to actually consolidating their positions. Whilst the fair cannot always rely on the 'casual' voter, the corrupt can always rely on their cronies.
What has all this got to do with my plea for someone to vote as my randomly selected proxy? I guess in a way some people would see what I attempted to do as a form of subversion of the democratic processes. If I'd done a full 'Donna Moss' and wondered the streets around the polling station trying to get people to vote, I wonder how long it would have been before someone complained. But actually I couldn't do anything more subversive than encourage people not to vote. I did not attempt to unfairly influence people's opinion in favour of one candidate or another, I simply tried to encourage them to vote. Was I successful? I don't know, I rather suspect that the few people who do read my blog were all going to vote anyway. Certainly no one got in touch to say they were going to vote purely out of sympathy for my predicament, in an attempt to redress the balance as it were. Because it is a balance, and choosing not to vote shifts that balance. By not voting, we are not abstaining, we are giving undue weight to the votes of those who do. I guess that's what's bugging me most, but I've no one to blame but myself. I guess next time I just need to be more organised. Or befriend people who are more casual about their voting.

*This is a forced statistic, as all of the voting age public were not voting tonight - this round of local elections is for certain types of council only.

Poll Axed

At the earliest opportunity after moving in to my flat, I registered to vote. I was relieved when my polling card arrived some weeks back, as the worry that my registration details have somehow slipped through the system occasionally dogs my thoughts until I get my first polling card in any new flat. I am a democrat, I believe that the very least I can do is cast my vote; I once unleashed a tirade at a very dear friend who admitted to repeatedly spoiling his ballot. So I was relieved to know that I could vote on the 3rd May, which in my head was a totally different 3rd May from the first day of my holiday 200-odd miles away.
Except of course it isn't, it is exactly the same 3rd May. This fact was only brought to my attention a few days ago, which it turns out is too late to register either for a postal or proxy vote. For a while I railed against a system so antiquated that it required postal votes to be registered at least a fortnight before polling day (I would still like to understand the reason why I can't pick up my postal vote from my local polling office and return it by hand before polling day). But really I can only blame myself, and that is the worst thing. I feel that in my failure to adequately plan for the elections, I've failed as a democrat. Of course if I was really bothered, I could delay my holiday. I have very seriously considered this and if it had been an election that mattered more, I would have done so. Had it been my local council elections, or national elections I would have stayed at home, but London mayor... Besides, whichever person finally wins the London mayoral race will be unlikely to be the candidate that I would have voted for.
Am I convincing you? I'm not convincing myself. We cannot ascribe different democratic weight to different elections, as all have an impact on our lives. Equally, I don't believe in only voting for a win (I don't believe in tactical voting) as democracy only works properly if we vote honestly with our hearts and minds. My arguments were merely an attempt to salve my conscience and they have failed. It is slightly ridiculous how angry I feel at myself whenever I catch sight of an article about the London elections at the moment.
I can only hope to do a Donna Moss.
In an episode of the West Wing, Donna accidentally votes for the wrong candidate, and spends the rest of the episode trying to persuade a military officer (played by Christian Slater if memory serves) to vote for her choice.
So here is my plea: if you live in London, are registered to vote and weren't going to bother, could you get in touch and I'll tell you my choices. In fact, even if you don't get in touch, please go out and vote, it might help to ease my conscience a tiny bit. Besides, there are people all over the world who dedicate their whole lives, give up their freedom and sometimes their lives just to have a chance to vote, and we're so casual about it we don't even bother. I know this, that's why I feel so guilty.