madverts

Since becoming pregnant, I have taken up a new career as a sloth. I move slowly, expand rapidly and spend approximately twenty-two hours a day asleep. (Well, I would, if I had my way.) My widening arse is permanently attached to the sofa, and I have to be practically peeled out of my pyjamas when the need to go outside becomes urgent (i.e., when I am late for work).

The consequence of being glued to the sofa is an exponential increase in TV watching. With a wedge of Edam in one hand and half a pizza in the other, I alternately goggle and doze through Come Dine With Me, The Origins of Us, Supernanny US, Snog Marry Avoid and endless repeats of Jeeves and Wooster. And naturally, many of these choice televisual morsels come with Adverts, many of which are repeated over and over and over again until I am maddened to foam-mouthed rage.

So, in the spirit of sharing my pain with you, dear reader, here are five adverts that are driving me buggering mad at the moment:

5. Perle du Lait, and other yoghurty rubbish
It is yoghurt. Just yoghurt. Slightly soured milk with a flavouring mixed in. It is not a sex aid. It will not make you substantially more beautiful. It is not a secret to share with your friends. If you did, they would think you were a bit demented. Getting Martine McCutcheon to sell it doesn't make it any better than basically, Munch Bunch for grown-ups. Don't try and sell me yoghurt as a treat. Have a Ben & Jerry's Cookie Dough and shut the fuck up.

4. Uniform Dating
Now, I'm not against internet dating. Some people find it a valuable way to meet a partner, getting the chance to try out interaction before having to meet people in person. Which is valuable, and believe me, I have no intention of knocking it. But dating someone purely because they're a police officer, or a nurse? You are basically wearing a big internet label that says "SHALLOW AS A PUDDLE IN A DROUGHT." Why anyone in a uniform would sign up to be loved for the clothes they wear is beyond me, although I'm betting that traffic wardens probably don't get much loving on there.

3. Mazuma Mobile
Be persuaded to sell your barely-bought smartphone by cockneys shouting euphemisms for money until you want to put your foot through the plasma screen. Only worth it if your phone is a very new model indeed, otherwise you'll be lucky to get the price of a Wham bar.

2. Anything with car insurance
I don't drive. (Well, I'm just learning now, but I have to fit my lessons in around the nervous breakdown I give my instructor every time.) I have never driven. And yet, every time I turn the television on, I'm inundated by yelling moustachios, talking meerkats cynically marketed to the lolcat generation and people singing to the tune of YMCA. I have never used a price comparison website. I have no issues with third party indemnity. Why would I? I've never driven. And yet, due to exposure, I could probably get car insurance in a hurry quicker than I could whip up a treacle sponge. It's frigging ridiculous.

1. Kindle
Remarkable less for the product than for the hugely ire-inspiring advert, the Kindle ad features a smug gadget-twat slagging off a woman for carrying an oversized handbag. She retaliates by listing all the millions of books, magazines etc she can fit in it and eventually agrees that it would be oh so much better to get a Kindle. I have no issue with Kindles. I do have an issue with know-it-all wankers telling me I'm a Luddite for carrying a modest paperback in my smallish bag. If he comes near me, I give you fair warning that I will snap his stupid Kindle into and use it to sever every vein in his testicles.

You have been warned.

bump in the night

Change can be scary. There's no two ways about that. For male teenagers, change can be so frightening that they forbear even to change their mucky knock-off Calvin Klein pants for days (or weeks) on end. For me, an alleged grown-up, change is less scary than that, but still, y'know, pretty unnerving. I don't like moving house. Come to that, I don't like moving desks. So it's kind of odd that I find myself undergoing the biggest change a person can go through...
...I'm growing another head in me.
Now, the boy and I have been hoping this would happen for a while, and so it's not a total surprise that I am, in fact, pregnant. Even so, it is part amazing, part, wildly exciting and part rather scary.
I'm not scared by raising a child. Rather, I'm scared by what's happening to my wardrobe. I'm now fifteen weeks pregnant and already have a sizeable baby bump. I went into maternity clothes very early, and this is my primary irritation. Maternity clothes, unless you're able to pay Isabella Oliver prices (ie, sewn from cloth-of-gold by nuns), are almost universally ugly. Leggings feature prominently, as do horizontally striped tops - surely the last combination of garments to put on anyone who is expanding rapidly. The clothes veer between "plain and utilitarian" or "hysterically fashion-conscious". The selection for alt or goth mums consists of ugly slogan t-shirts with coy, bump-related slogans. I'm 29. My days of suiting slogan t-shirts went out years ago. In blue jeans (the only alternative to leggings) and whatever black tops I can get my hands on, my much-loved alt identity is subsumed.
Why, though? Why aren't clothes made to flatter and hug the beauty of the pregnant shape? To play up the enhanced boob and play down the bloated cankle? Instead, we are offered clothes that tent, not skim; played down versions of the latest fashions which frequently uglify the body enceinte; and slogan t-shirts and pyjamas which feel kind of undignified when you're nearly thirty, and in any case, forget that the primary aim of clothes is for the wearer to look deathlessly chic, rather than to advertise that she will be giving birth within the sixmonth.
If I had the chance to design my own maternity range, it would be full of v-neck tops, long fishtail skirts and not a single pair of fuck-ugly leggings in sight. Anyone who wants to employ me to do this, I'm available now. Go on, you'd be doing a favour for pregnant women everywhere.

Dear reader....

My dad is coming to visit tomorrow. He's driving the many miles between his house and mine to arrive here about 11:30am, and he won't stay past about 3pm. He'll want to go for lunch, then coffee, then cake, so he'll only be in my house for a maximum of half an hour.

So, given this, why have I still spent all evening scrubbing the flat from top to bottom?

Because I have. I've scrubbed the tiles in the kitchen, a job which has only been done about once a year since we've been here, in case he decides to go and inspect the grout. I cleared all the out-of-date stuff out of the fridge, finding in the process a tub of Philadelpia which may well have been older than my son, since it was sprouting a virulent orange mould which made me squeal like a child. I only just stopped short of hoovering the boiler, and that was only because our airing cupboard is so small and full of junk that dear Daddy wouldn't be able to squeeze into it anyway.

It's not even like my dad is some sort of clean freak, either. He'll only be in the house for about half an hour in total between his need for large plates of various foodstuffs, and he'll hardly be clambering up shelves to inspect the light fittings for dust in that time. Because he's normal. (Unlike his only daughter, clearly.)

So why, every time my family turn up, does the place have to be spotless? I haven't got a clue. I generally exist in a state of contained chaos. In that, my house reflects my brain. I don't feel bothered about my friends seeing this, but the imminent arrival of my family awakens long-dormant cleaning instincts, and before I know it, I'm climbing on a chair to polish the light bulbs.

Is this normal?

Poetry in motion

Poetry's got a bad name. At least it has where I come from, which I can sort of understand because local poetry's pretty terrible. Not just poetry local to my home town but poetry local to anywhere. It's always amateurish, and usually about kittens and how this were all fields once but now is full of drugs and guns. I always feel bad criticising local poetry, when I find it printed in local papers next to the letters page. I feel like I'm poking fun at something a bit rubbish but essentially well-meaning, like the cheap market-stall trainers worn by a good but unstylish teacher on school non-uniform days. People who write this poorly scanning, self-consciously rhyming doggerel really value it. So I try not to be a snot about it.

I fail, though, every time. It's not personal. I don't have a crusade against middle-aged men and elderly women in local writers' groups, expressing themselves, getting the brief thrill of seeing their stuff in print. It's because I'm a perfectionist. I hate my own stuff, too. I pick it over, time and again, pulling apart lines, beating myself up over words, hoping that one day, by a sudden miracle, I'll wake up and find I've turned into Ivy Compton-Burnett or Alan Bennett. It hasn't yet, needless to say.

Plus, I love poetry in itself. It started with studying Hughes and Heaney at GCSE. I devoured everything of theirs I could, including their collection The Rattle Bag, which opened the door to WB Yeats, Elizabeth Bishop, Federico Garcia Lorca - the works. I read that stuff and I poured myself into it so much that I memorised so much of it. Through the hell of school (yes, you knew it, school was hell) I kept this stuff near me, like a Bible in the pocket of a Tommy in the trenches. I turned to it time and again, to make sense of the stuff that happened to me in my life, when so little of life seemed to make sense at all. I learnt to lean on that. You've got to have something to lean on, at least.

The thing is, like I say, poetry's out of fashion. I feel so old-fashioned. When my peers are there running to Rihanna, quoting Adele, when they need something, there's me, clutching on to a slim volume of Housman or Eliot. It's like a foreign culture - a huge, complexity of stuff that sits behind my experience, simultaneously soothing me and cutting me off from most of the other people I know. Take what you want and pay for it, says God.

Which is why I adored the poetry-loving eccentric Hector in The History Boys, who has something wondreful to say about reading: " The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours."

A hundred per cent, Hector. A hundred per cent.

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Scarlet woman, or Why I don't read magazines

I'm a girl. Bring me impractically foot-crippling, fugly, orthopaedic-looking high-heeled shoes in a range of migraine-inducing colours. Bring me nauseating "statement" bags with tassels on them. I can't live without the latest 'sleb news n' pics. Abbey Clancy in her bikini, showing off a rack of ribs that would do credit to a xylophone. Is JenAn wearing sunglasses to hide her tears at yet another doomed relationship? (They'll print her picture next to one of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie looking uxoriously smug, just to ram the point home.) And articles about the latest obscure Amazonian "superfood" said to be relied on by Victoria Beckham, a woman who has made a career out of being a smartly-dressed, blank-faced twig.

Really. Give it all to me. I can't get enough of anodyne daytime TV presenters, empty-headed reality TV "stars" and the girlfriends of oafish, lumpen footballers - all hovering on the edges of fame, waiting for the divorce sacndal or the sex tape that will catapult them into genuine D-list status. I can't get enough of the guilting to starve to fit into the clothes these substandard loo-roll mags tell me I should want to wear, the horrible, creeping feeling that somehow people who happen to have two X chromosomes will have the same three interests in common.

This is why, for years, I avoided magazines more or less completely, bar the occasional peek at Wired or Pick Me Up, providing that the latter had a banner headline about somebody "accidentally" impaling a rusty nail through their penis or finding love in the frozen-vegetable section of Jack Fulton's. And then, I discovered Scarlet magazine.

Scarlet magazine featured nothing on diets or fashions and the people they interviewed were successful businesswomen talking about their fascinating careers, rather than Christine Bleakley flashing an engagement ring and simpering. Sex formed a large part of the topics under discussion - as something you were free to enjoy however you pleased, rather than to be alluded to with the kind of arch tee-hee that is old by the time you leave puberty. I loved Scarlet. And it went under.

That's right. Somebody produced an intelligent, relevant, interesting magazine for women, and it went under. Due to the failure of the distributors, but still, doesn't that sound bad?

Nothing will replace Scarlet in my affections. Nothing. Certainly not Cosmopolitan, that depressing archive where "aspirational" means "guilting you about the fact that you don't have a high-powered career, a cordon bleu in cookery, a small number of well-groomed designer-clad children and an Oxford blue for sexual intercourse." I gave up trying to be perfect long ago, it was far too knackering. And not Good Housekeeping. I haven't got time to launder my dishcloths freshly with angels' tears or tenderise duck breast through the medium of interpretative dance. So what am I to do?

Back to Wired, I suppose. But wouldn't it be nice to find a fulfilling read on the women's shelf?

Murder redux

News broke this week that a skull unearthed in David Attenborough's garden has resolved the infamous Kate Webster murder case. Naturally this is a matter of extreme interest to me, as a student of Victorian crime. Because if you want to know anything - anything at all - about the Victorian mindset, then study this case. It's Victoriana in microcosm. All the fears, anxieties, emotions and relationships between domestic servants and their employers can be found in the Kate Webster case.
Kate Webster was one of the many women who lived their lives on the blurry line between domestic service and criminality. She was a heavy drinker, often violent and a habitual thief. These habits cost her most of her occasional forays into gainful employment - and on the final occasion, came together in a terrifying synthesis.
Middle-aged Kate secured a job as a cook with a widow, Julia Thomas - known for having a vicious way with words. In the days when an employer was free to treat a servant with appalling conditions of privation and hard labour, Mrs Thomas was well known to be unable to keep a servant for any length of time. Had this not been the case, she would no doubt have been able to engage someone better than Kate to cook for her. But she couldn't.
Inevitably, the two women clashed. There was a row. Kate later confessed that she threw her employer down the stairs and strangled her. Panicking, she dismembered and boiled the body, disposing of the head, selling the fat off as "best dripping" and carrying the remains around with her concealed in a large carpet bag. Meanwhile, she tried to sell off the furniture. The suspicions this aroused led to Kate's arrest. She was hanged for Mrs Thomas' murder, but without the head, the body could never be officially identified and the case was never closed...until the skull of Mrs Thomas was discovered during excavations in David Attenborough's garden this week, one hundred and thirty years after Kate buried it.
The case received record coverage in the Victorian press. The relationship between servants and employers was ambivalent in the extreme. Horrified employers followed the ghoulish case with terrified fascination, and, I like to think, were that little bit nicer to their maids thereafter. A servant knew the ins and outs of the house; they could choose to pilfer, or to abet thieves from the outside. Employers were vulnerable to their servants then in ways we often find hard to understand now. Looking at the Kate Webster case gives us a uniue insight into the complex, fearful ties between two classes of people who are far less common now than they were. It's a pause for thought.