Suckling Pig

Reading leftie newspapers is a mug’s game that can only end in impotent rage, but this opinion piece sums up everything currently wrong with that worldview; its grotesque exaggerations, its misleading thesis, its utter vacuous idiocy. I don’t care if someone breastfeeds on a plane, but I do care when the innocent act is misappropriated to make a stupid point. Here goes:

Well, I for one welcome the news: as of this week, anybody asked to cover up while breastfeeding on a KLM flight can now walk, bare-breasted, across the plane, milk firing into the air, their baby howling at their shoulder, and immediately hand that screaming, hungry, suffering child to the person who made the complaint, who must then look after that baby for the entirety of the journey while the previously breastfeeding passenger lies back, watches a film, reads their book, has a glass of wine or enjoys a much-needed nap.

Because, my friends, that is precisely what I would do if someone asked me to cover myself while breastfeeding.

Of course you would. That would be an entirely sensible response to a flight attendant’s question, if you happen to be the sort of person who reacts like a paranoid lunatic to any perceived slight or imposition levied upon yourself and your special ovaries. Your martyrdom and Mother of the Year award will be arriving shortly. Our wine-slurping nudist continues:

This week, the Dutch airline KLM garnered a lactic tonne of deserved criticism after it put out a tweet stating that “to ensure that all our passengers of all backgrounds feel comfortable on board, we may request a mother to cover herself while breastfeeding, should other passengers be offended by this”. This was itself a response to one customer’s complaint, posted on Facebook, that she had been asked by a flight attendant to cover herself with a blanket – you know, like an actual fire – while breastfeeding her baby because someone else on the plane had complained.

Note the modality: KLM are not forcing breastfeeders to enshroud themselves in a hair shirt of shame as a matter of course. Rather, if you are going to breastfeed on one of their flights, KLM might ask you, through the medium of their cabin crew, to cover your exposed breast, just as they may ask you to close the toilet door. Even so, it’s not a given; if someone else on the plane – who has bought a ticket just like you – is offended by the sight of your breastfeeding, there’s a chance an attendant might ask you to screen the protuberance to maintain decorum. Surely, this is in the best interests of all on board? It seems almost redundant to state that temporarily shielding your upper body is vastly preferable and far less inconvenient than a frenzied prude kicking off at 20,000 feet. But, women, victims, patriarchy, how dare you dehumanize me, evil patriarchy that nevertheless allows me to fly on your airlines! However, did someone else on the plane even complain? If so, in what manner and what was said?

Here is the original anti-KLM facebook post in full:

Here’s a warning to all breastfeeding moms: do NOT fly with KLM! A month ago, I was flying with my one year old on a KLM flight from San Francisco to Amsterdam. It was the third flight I’d been on with her. I breastfeed her. It calms her and helps her sleep and makes her comfortable. She’s also a busy toddler who doesn’t like to be covered. I do my best to be discreet, but sometimes some skin shows. Before we even took off, I was approached by a flight attendant carrying a blanket. She told me (and I quote) “if you want to continue doing the breastfeeding, you need to cover yourself.” I told her no, my daughter doesn’t like to be covered up. That would upset her almost as much as not breastfeeding her at all. She then warned me that if anyone complained, it would be my issue to deal with (no one complained. (my emphasis) On any of the flights I took with my daughter. Actually, no one has ever complained to me about breastfeeding in public. Except this flight attendant). The rest of this flight, that flight attendant would not so much as look me in the eyes. I felt extremely uncomfortable and disrespected. When we arrived home, I issued a complaint to KLM. I was told that I needed to be respectful of people of other cultures and that this flight attendant’s response was in line with company policy. So instead of standing up for and protecting breastfeeding mothers and our children, already under the duress faced by flying with our young children, KLM would rather hold up antiquated values that shame women’s bodies.

So far so typical self-important, narcissistic, how-could-someone-as-special-as-me-possibly-suffer-a-minor-inconvenience social media post. Then it gets a bit weird:

It took me a long time to write this, because I’ve never received such a negative response to taking care of my child. I hope that everyone considering a flight with their breastfed child can choose an airline that will respect bodily autonomy and a right to take care of our children the best way we know how.

Well, I can only speculate as to the number of sleepless nights of toil it took Shelby Angel to dredge such a heart-rending screed from the mire of her suffering. It can be perilous to type when the tears of the recently blanket-propositioned threaten the circuitry of the keyboard. Back to modality: it’s interesting she chooses “can choose” rather than “will choose”, as it’s not as if the choice of airline has been reduced. As any Rush fan will tell you, if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice. This business about respecting bodily autonomy is downright peculiar, as if it were simply an end in itself with no consequences. Just how much bodily autonomy is desirable in a confined privately owned space that you are sharing with other members of the public who might have different worldviews and needs does not enter the equation. You are a life-giver and therefore should be able to do as you please, clearly. Masturbating on a plane? It’s natural and relaxing. How dare you be offended by the sight of my pumping fist. No, I wasn’t thinking about you as I was doing it. In fact, it allowed me to completely forget your existence, which perhaps was the real sin. My eyes were closed, why weren’ t yours?

The important part, though, is that no one actually complained. It was a pre-emptive strike by the sinister KLM myrmidons before the actual flight. This was not an edict or a demand, but a request that Shelby Angel was at liberty to decline, one would hope in a less haughty manner than that from her online pulpit of self pity. It turned out to be an entirely hypothetical scenario, a warning that went nowhere, mere words vanishing into the ether. The flight attendant was not “complaining” but simply offering some advice, in the manner of Jacob Marley: namely that if Shelby Angel breast-fed her child on the plane and someone took umbrage, then momentarily covering the exposed breast might be prevent any unpleasantness, or even a confrontation. The Guardian wants one, though, so let’s roll with it… 

Before we get into the pure misogyny of telling total strangers that the sight of a few centimetres of skin, between collarbone and ribs, is somehow unbearably disturbing, impossibly erotic or physically repulsive, let’s just have a quick chew on the cracked nipple of that phrase “passengers of all backgrounds”. I’m no theologist, but even I know that in every major world religion breastfeeding is positively encouraged. In Genesis, the Bible says: “By the God of your father who will help you, by the Almighty who will bless you with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that crouches beneath, blessings of the breasts and of the womb.”

Woah! Who mentioned religion? Certainly not KLM. Who is it that responds to dog whistles, again? Really, though, this is just an excuse to get to every current Guardian opinionist’s Rosetta stone: the oppression of women. Women, who spend their every waking moment in terror of being raped or murdered, voiceless women, women who are never allowed to write moronic shit in the Guardian… those women. Maybe you recognise them, I certainly don’t, probably because of my privilege. Why aren’t there more women astronauts? Why oh why. So is this about religion or misogyny or capitalism? All of the above? Yeah, let’s go with the evil triangle. This one ticks all the boxes: a private company forcing women to fly naked and caged with exposed breast covered for a few minutes, at the behest of a patriarchal theocracy determined to take away your rights. Your right to make more people, your right to produce another consumer. Oh, wait. We don’t like capitalism, do we?

Whatever you do, don’t play the Guardian drinking game of doing a shot every time their favourite magic word is unleashed to crush all opinions beneath its gender-neutral jackboot – you will end up sozzled and bleeding before you get past the headlines. In this instance, discarding the standfirst, it took 2 paragraphs before the misogyny bomb was dropped, because obviously KLM hate women and wish they’d stop procreating, the trollops. It would be nice if they stopped bringing the squalling little muck-spreaders on planes in the first place and then screeching about “rights” in response to polite requests, though. Yes, yes, your selfish desire to make a tiny epigone trumps (and it’s a fucking miracle this article didn’t contrive to link the non-incident to the POTUS) my right to read my book in peace, I get it, but do you have to be so shrill about it? You’re the one wielding the privilege here, mommy, not me. I can complain, you can refuse to be blanketed, and you take home the trophy every time, as a take-no-shit woman of the type Guardian readers like to imagine themselves as. But then again, there are also the vagaries of supernatural beings to consider. To wit:

According to Islam, breastfeeding forgives you of all your minor sins. Here’s a hadith narrated by Ja’far al-Sadiq: “Every time a woman becomes pregnant, during the whole period of pregnancy she has the status of one who fasts, one who worships during the night, and one who fights for Allah with her life and possessions … and when the period of breastfeeding the child is finished, one of the great angels of Allah taps her side and says: ‘Start your deeds afresh, for Allah has forgiven all your minor sins.’”

Everyone knows we’re talking about Muslims here in terms of which people are likely to be offended by the sight of a nudey breast, so let’s not beat around the bush. And no, that’s not a sexist double entendre. Don’t offend the muslims, they go nuts if you do!  All of them, all the time! After her doubtless extensive Quranic study, Nell Frizzell is now in a position to speak for all Muslims and declare what they may or may not be offended by. It has apparently passed her by that airplane protocol is given short shrift throughout the thousands of verses in that particular instruction book. It actually says very little about women being covered, barely a mention, but I digress.

In Judaism, the Shulchan Aruch (sometimes called the Book of Jewish Law) recommends breastfeeding for 24 months.

See? The Jews are only allocated one sentence. How anti semitic. Well, it is a pro-Corbyn rag. 

In Hinduism, breastfeeding mothers like the goddess Parvati are found throughout the pantheon, and the ancient Sanskrit text Sushruta Samhita states: “May four oceans, full of milk, constantly abide in both your breasts, you blessed one, for the increase of the strength of the child!” So, let’s be clear: these customers of “all backgrounds” don’t appear to have any religious foundation for their squeamishness, fear, repulsion or anger. They are not speaking on behalf of any faith.

Yeah, you’re just like a Hindu Goddess. Again, it is Nell who brings up religion, not KLM, yet seems to think she’s justified in speaking on their behalf, because “background” could only be code for religion. Not simply bland corporate jargon that any company would use to increase profits by not fingering any specific ideology when explaining what they require from their patrons. You pay for their service, you’re a customer. You have no chips to play now. You have signed the contract, Dr. Faustus. Join the line, sign your name, repeat until death. 

Which means that what we’re talking about here is the old-fashioned culture of western, capitalist patriarchy under which a breast is often interpreted as something solely erotic, which must therefore only be visible jiggling nipple-free in music videos, or in its fetished entirety in pornography. Or perhaps we’re talking about the cultural background of angry men who find the very fleshy existence of anybody other than themselves an assault on their very soul. The sort of people who turn puce at the sight of a woman eating in public, speaking in anything louder than a whisper and otherwise taking up all that room they wanted for their own special man things.

Finally, we get to the point: capitalist patriarchy, a contradiction in terms, the same one that allows you to write this drivel. It must be tough, the threat of rape if you don’t get those 900 words submitted on time. Is the penis also fetishised in pornography, or is the male actor given important lines before showering the victim with jism? Do misogynists want women to get their tits out or cover them up? Or not to have breasts at all? “ Consider the existence of anybody but themselves”. Glass house. Stones thrown. Misogynists everywhere mutter “I knew it” under their virulent breath and go back to locking the toilet door behind them. 

Or perhaps KLM is simply protecting the sensitivities of the sort of upstanding fellow passenger who drinks five whisky and cokes, scratches their crotch while watching their little telly, turns their headphones up high, doesn’t flush the plane toilet, pours a packet of cheese and onion crisps straight into their mouth, shouts across the aisle to call their friend Spuggie a “shirt-lifter”, leers at the flight attendant, pushes their knees into the seat in front of them and then, spotting a woman breastfeeding, decides that the smell of breastmilk is making their hangover worse.

A straw man would have to be erected at some point, but this one is particularly ornate and telling in its details. Not only is he an alcoholic, but also a homophobic boor with poor toilet manners. Anything else you’d like to throw in there? Necrophilia? Regicide? It’s paragraphs like the above that are counterproductive when attempting to adumbrate the plight of women. It’s almost redundant to state that such a stereotype applies to a minute fraction of male flyers. It makes the accuser a candidate for mediocracy and belittles any sense of progress by reducing what should be a worthwhile discussion – acceptable behaviour on aeroplanes – to the level of playground insults. If the other party is locked into such a childish mindset, the only appropriate response is, well, what’s the bloody point? Certainly no women would disgrace themselves on a plane.

The fact is that cabin pressure within a plane sends babies into a frenzy of discomfort. While adults make be able to suck mints, chew gum or drink water, the roaring pain within an infant’s ear canal can only really be soothed by feeding – either from a bottle or a breast. With airport security as it is, those parents who can may well choose the simple, healthy and free option of breastfeeding while on a plane. The idea that some self-appointed moral arbiter can then go around the plane ordering a flight attendant to throw blankets over anybody they deem “unsuitable”, like patches of sick on a student corridor, would be laughable if it wasn’t so tiresomely bigoted.

Right, so maybe not take your beloved offspring on a plane in the first place? If doing so causes them to suffer to such an extent, then maybe think about whether or not that holiday is even necessary? In the tragic case of Shelby Angel, who suffered greatly, horribly, like few have suffered before, is her trauma worse than her child’s, given what actually happened?

As passengers you have two options: respect the right of all parents to feed their child however they want; or sit in a plane full of screaming babies and toddlers, strapped into seatbelts, disoriented, overstimulated and potentially scared, as the change of air pressure rips through their skulls like a drill. I know which I’d choose.

No. As a passenger you have one option: to choose the airline that meets your needs or not fly at all, as unfathomable as that may seem. You hysterical lunatic. Being offended isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you; if you are offended before noon I’m willing to bet that you’ll still have an alright sort of day. Nobody has a right to never be offended, but neither should anyone misunderstand rights and refuse minor interruptions having signed a contract.

Leather and Lace

Another one from the archives. The incident in question happned in 1998. I wrote about it a few years later. Little I’ve seen during subsequent nocturnal promenades has been as diverting.

Allow me to set the scene. 3am, Tollcross, Edinburgh. Staggering merrily home from an after hours drinking establishment. Returning home to hearthless, sterile university accommodation. Walking past the building site that served as an idyllic backdrop to our studies.

We’ve all experienced that sensual buzz of sweaty pleasure when new shoes fit perfectly and conform with every pair of slacks, from frayed corduroy to pressed jodhpur. These special shoes that not many others have which distinguish the wearer’s personality are a rare treat indeed. They don’t squeak, rub or chafe. They don’t cause the bottom of one’s trouser leg to bunch up leading to anxiety, self harm and unsightly ferreting. They’re so comfy you could sleep in them, and you find yourself wearing them proudly around the kitchen as your slippers lie dusty and neglected upstairs. Well, the fellow we’re about to meet was all too aware of this unique pedal euphoria, but it wasn’t enough. He craved more. He had to be at one with his shoes. A mere tongue lashing would not suffice, he needed to winklepick the very sole.

Well, hello Sailor! We encountered a confused, drooling individual wandering around the entrance to the carpark which lay in the centre of our uniform towerblocks. The wayward stranger approached my acquaintance. His speech was so slurred and rambling it was difficult to tell what he wanted. Not money or the time of day, but the Adidas training shoe shielding the foot of my companion. The unusual request having finally registered, the stranger was rebuffed. He then blundered through the leaning mesh fence into the deserted building site. With our sobriety coaxed and interests roused we decided to lie in wait round the corner for the return of the sneaker-coveting stranger. Would he find a suitable item of discarded footwear by the cement mixer? Would any other innocent revelers be accosted? We had to know. When we emerged from hiding, having grown bored of waiting, the sight that met us would shatter our adolescent assumptions of human sexual parameters. Were this a Stephen King novella, we would bear witness to the titular body, but on this night there was no mere MacGuffin.

Our man was now lying on his stomach, his hands concealing an object pressed into his crotch. One foot was nude, the missing shoe nuzzled into his groin as the man humped away at it, moans of pleasure sneaking from his lips, his arse bobbing frantically. We did what any self respecting admirers of life’s rich tapestry of sexual practices did and burst into fits of giggles. Our mirth interrupted the man’s rhythmic thrusting and he suddenly arose to scuttle over the cobbles, slip through a dingy archway and vanish into the folds of the Edinburgh night. 

What had we just seen? An act so personal, tragic and tender that guilt and jealousy mingled like jittery guests at a party. Recalling the scene now it occurs to me that this man’s grubby old boot probably received more care, attention and sheer manic energy than many an unsatisfied wife, shunned after a bad day at the office. There will be no shortage of lip-chewing teenage Clarks employees whose idea of sexual ecstasy does not match that of their boastful young shaver of a boyfriend. The shoe fucker’s lust was palpable and unapologetic. He was not crouched over rubbing his Kickers round his cock. He was making love to his shoe, hurting nobody and having a wonderful time doing so. To draw such a performatory yet fleeting sense of delight from an inanimate object must be wonderful. I hope our intrusion made his fetish, for that brief moment, accepted, if not acceptable.

Closed Mouths and Addled Minds

“Indonesia always does well in the Department of #YouCouldn’tMakeItUp” – Elizabeth Pisani

Sometimes one awakens to a juxtaposition so perfect it would make the Super Furry Animals weep into their rarebit. Let’s go to the well-dressed Bruce Buffer for the introductions:

“Ladies and gentlemen this is the MAIN EVENT of the evening! This bout is set for several paragraphs of varying lengths, and is for the Indonesian Rational Championship. FIGHTING out of the red corner, this man is a former member of the human race, and a specialist in scrutiny and clarity, from the great state of Reason, this is Sutopo ‘Pak Topo’ Nugrohoooooooo! And his opponent, FIGHTING out of the blue corner, she is a singer, child abuser and one of Indonesia’s foremost specialists in dangerous gulibility, from the darkest reaches of Humbug, ‘Sexy Snake Oil’, Andieeeeeeeeeen!”

Sutopo Nugroho was ” the voice of the [national disaster] agency for nine years. But it was really in 2018, when Indonesia had one of its worst years in a decade in terms of disasters, that he rose to prominence. At a time when he was battling his own disaster, lung cancer, he single-handedly provided constant updates on two tsunamis, numerous major volcanic eruptions, landslides and earthquakes which all hit Indonesia last year.” Such figures are rare in Indonesia, a theocratic kleptocracy that thrives on superstition and implusivity. If Indonesia, the “invisible nation” ever makes it to Western news outlets it’s usually because either something utterly dreadful has happened – terrorism, natural disaster, outrageous miscarriage of justice – or something so bizarre and unlikely, like the time a fisherman rescued a floating sex doll and it was subsequently mistaken for an angel, it would usually be in the “…and finally” section of the TV news, alongside ghost sightings and epigram-squaking parrots. So, while it’s pleasing to see a prominent Indonesian receive a lauditory obituary of sorts on the BBC’s website, it is entirely appropriate that the eulogy is interrupted by the latest nincompoopery from the world’s largest archipelago.

I must admit I’d never heard of Andien before she started torturing her family, but a quick briefing on youtube confirms that she is much like the rest of Indonesia’s blandly wistful pop music, which is to say nothing that would cause you to flee Starbucks. It’s so, well, personable, that I won’t make the obvious joke about how it would be best for everyone if she just kept her bloody mouth shut, the child harming harpy! As it turns out Andien Wholikemanyindonesiansgoesbyonename, to give the chanteuse her full title, is following a practice known as Buteyko, not to be confused with a credulous Indonesian singer:

Patrick McKeown, founder of the International Buteyko Clinic, told the BBC that “mouth-breathing is a big contributing factor to obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA)” because it can push the tongue back and obstruct the airway. Taping the mouth closed, he claims, can prevent this from happening.

Yes, mouth-breathers certainly are a problem, Patrick. Oh, come on! Like you wouldn’t have…

“But doctors disagree, and say that this is a simplistic understanding of the condition.”

It’s not just real doctors who were horrified by Ambien’s mistreatment of her 2 year old son, even Sudoko’s Buteyko’s own Patrick McKeown was alarmed:

When it comes to young children, Mr McKeown explicitly warns against taping their mouths. He said he had seen Andien’s Instagram photo of her toddler, and that it’s “not at all recommended” by Buteyko practitioners… He says that Andien taping her two-year-old child’s mouth is “the last thing we would advise anybody, because there is a significant danger of cot death”. Well, who knew?

Then again, Indonesia has long had a turbulent relationship with the act of breathing. As Jakarta became the world’s most polluted city (at last – invisible no longer!) it caused a hardy group of Sisypheans to sue the government, perhaps in retaliation for the Indonesian government’s blustering over the 2015 Southeast Asian haze which caused 140,000 Indonesian people to suffer respiratory illnesses as a result of reckless and illegal slash-and-burn forest clearing methods in Sumatra and Kalimantan. On a more micro level, there is the cosntant threat of being struck down by a bout of the dreaded masuk angin. Meaning “entered wind” in English, this is the sort of thing smug expats like to chuckle about to solidify an image of an uneducated, face-masked, wind-fearing Other, but it is quite wrong to do so. Rather than holding the wind in a Paganistic awe, Indonesians are rightly concerned about air-borne maladies in a land of exhaust fumes, cigarette smoke and dragon fire, and use masuk angin in a colloquial sense as a catch-all term for feeling under the weather, much like the British use “lurgy”. It covers everything from indigestion to fever, and as such is very useful if one is reluctant to go into too much detail about why you’re not in the office that day. In my case, the entrance of wind last night forbade sleeping, so I write this from my deathbed (never buy one), mouth taped firmly shut.

Vince and Donald

It is 1988 and Wrestlemania IV has recently concluded to general disappointment to all who bore witness to its interminable tournament. We are at the Trump Plaza in New Jersey and two rather horrible men are about to set in motion a chain of events that would have dire consequences for humanity some decades later. Vince McMahon and Donald Trump are having a quick pow-wow after the latter hosted the former’s pay-per-view circus. We are backstage…

Vince: Donald! How the hell are ya, pal? How was the show? (a 2 minute handshake ensues)

Trump: I’m good, Vince, I had a blast. You’re doing good work, super. Let’s do it again sometime. I like that Macho Man fella…

Vince: (chuckling) He’s a character! Helluva wife he’s got, Miss Elizabeth, “the first lady of wrestling”. Now there’s a pussy you’d never tire of grabbing! Now, don’t you dare tell him I said that, old Randy’s the possessive type – and he should be! Haw haw!

Trump: Oh, quite the looker. She’s the Donald’s kind of gal, alright.

Vince: Damn right, pal. So how’s the casino business? This place is wild. Prichard and me’ll be hitting those sluts tonight! Did I say “sluts”? Where did that come from? Slots, goddamnit! We’re gonna be rollin’ high!

Trump (chuckling): You’re too much Vince! Yeah, business is good. I’m doing well. This wrestling thing, though? It’s all fake, right? “Flimflam” my father used to call it. How do you get these people so hooked? I like what you’re doing, but what’s the business model? I get gambling, but this stuff…

Vince: It’s all sports entertainment, pal. There’s a word we use, “kayfabe” – it means you can lie to people, but the marks don’t care. They’re part of the show. What they want is… they just want to be entertained. We put smiles on families’ faces…

Trump (interrupting): Wait, you mean they don’t care it’s fake? They just like the, the… what’s the word I’m looking for? The show? The… spectacle?

Vince (laughing): There ya go, pal! That’s it exactly! I lie to them and they can’t get enough… I let them forget their troubles. Those people out there don’t want reality, they want a show, a dream, that’s all it is. 

Trump: Interesting, interesting… the American dream. Reminds me of The Million Dollar Man, what a guy! But, Vince, why were those idiots booing him? He’s what they all want to be!

Vince: Ted’s what we call a “heel”. It’s an old (puts on a disgusted drawl) Southern “wrasslin’” word. People love seeing ‘em get their butt kicked. Sometimes I think about going heel myself, just screwing ‘em right in the ass and laughing while I do it… that’s the beauty of having independent contractors – none of that whiny liberal responsibility garbage…

Trump: You’re blowing my mind, Vince! This is great stuff, just great. What did that Roman fella say about bread and circuses?

Vince: You’ve lost me there, pal. I don’t care much for history. It’s been a pleasure, Donald. Ever think about getting into politics? You’d get my vote, pal, haha!

Trump: Interesting, Vince. I like the cut of your jib…

A raging quasi-fascist accused of numerous historical sex offenses. And Donald Trump.

Something is Rotten in the State of Flavortown…

To call most of the content of the Food Network “food porn” is an insult to pornography. To make a living by acting in stag movies requires both physical and psychological strength beyond the reach of most mortals. Being a presenter on the Food Network requires little more than an endless supply of verbal effluvia and a carny’s lack of scruples. It’s a bad day on this midway. Rather than porn, the Food Network is essentially a wallpaper merchant, its presence marginally preferable to yawning emptiness, playing endlessly on the walls of hospital waiting rooms, prisons, airport departure lounges, my living room and other places where stupefication is desirable lest the audience become overly aroused and start chucking cutlery about.

I have watched a great deal of the Food Network over the past year. I have become a student of its tropes, its occult machinations, its siren-like hold over me, and I believe I could hold my own in any dinner party discussion of its vital role in distracting its disciples from the horrors of matters political, familial, or any matter that necessitates more than cursory reflection. It is the televisual equivalent of sweat pants. The Food Network’s output belches into 3 categories: competitive cooking, instructional cooking and descriptive eating. It is the latter that enthralls me most and inspired me to start writing this in the first place, mostly because its practitioners have a zen-like approach to the “descriptive” part, preferring merely to list ingredients and moan.

As far as I can tell, the odious Guy Fieri jump started this trend for faux-enthusiastic hosts visiting crappy restaurants, eating the food – or the fluorescent oozing matter playing the part of food – and reviewing it by boorishly chanting the ingredients in the manner of an auctioneer. Whatever ludicrous confection masquerading as dinner he is attempting to wrap his lips around, enmeshing the remnants into his polychromatic Van Dyke, Fieri will then dutifully ejaculate his praises to the cook. “Ye’ve got yer cheese, you’ve got the patty, you’ve got the bun… ” Nothing Fieri samples is ever in need of improvement or reduction, never is it considered that any sandwich – that once easily handled convenience food— requiring impalement is perhaps overstuffed, perish the thought that macaroni cheese belongs in an entirely different vessel than a hamburger, all is ambrosia. Scrutiny is defenestrated in favour of unquestioning gluttony. As Frasier Crane once exclaimed, “If less is more, then just think how much more ‘more’ will be!” The Food Network has grasped this epiphany to its swollen bosom and made a factory for it, showcasing food that requires no skill to cook, only a a tedious conformity to excess. Endless commercials for its own shows spin on a loop. Prandial pleasures have of course now become secondary to the vicarious thrill of photographic bragging rights. All the umami bombs and secret spice blends in the world will not nullify the aftertaste of gloom.

While he has his fingers in many revolting pies, it is Fieri’s flagship ode to abject standards, Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, that foisted this garishly dressed drooling monster onto an unsuspecting world, both the man himself and his hideous progeny of imitators. The show’s title is a misnomer. GF may visit a diner or even a drive-in, but never does he set foot in an actual dive. The idea of the perma-ebullient GF attempting to find common ground with sunken-eyed, suicidal alcoholics in an actual dive bar in, say, Boise, Idaho does intrigue, though. Let’s look at what goes down in “Flavortown” as Fieri constantly and ingratiatingly refers to his milieu. Before the show proper starts we are granted snippets of what’s to come. As the cloying pseudo honky-tonk theme tune draws to a close, an avatar of Fieri slaps the animated DDD signpost so it spins around and then he grins inanely, the scamp, like a toddler who’s just shat itself. After all, he’s not shooting at the sign like Cool Hand Luke undergoing an existential crisis in a godless world, he’s merely giving it a friendly twirl – barely a misdemenour, let alone a felony. Really this is the first indication of the man’s mendacity as there is nothing even slightly roguish about Fieri, his stock in trade being gushing sycophancy devoid of considered reflection, gastro-tweets from a guffawing dudebro. To really solidify his being, to establish a solid harbinger of his Guyness, he should have saluted the sign before declaring, “That pole is so vertical! That writing is just what you need! Then you’ve got that whole kick of the giving directions thing going on!… Man, oh man! You, inanimate object that shepherds us, are a god amongst signs, lemme give you a hug, as we are one and the same!” This is a man who is not adverse to treating hanging pans as bongo drums in an attempt to amuse.

Now, why you may well be asking, why pick on such an easy target? Aren’t there bigger fish to fry? Don’t they reside in larger barrels? Of course, and plenty of people have vented spleen about GF before. What it boils down to is the notion that food shows used to be better and despite all the progress that has been made, the likes of DDD are a retrograde cultural step. The masses used to watch TV chefs who would, miraculously, share their knowledge and clue the viewer in to to the often arcane and intimidating world of cooking, perhaps even articulately.  This lurch backwards into gawping rather than learning is a horrid retreat into vacuity. Where is a necromancer to summon the ghost of Keith Floyd when you need one?

A ridiculous overstuffed confection. Here pictured with some food.

A Very Short Story from 2007, The Winch

Look, I was 27. Reading it back, though, I think I was driving at a hamfisted metaphor for blogging and capitalism something something. I probably just wanted to use the word “boon”. And now here we are…

A month ago I bought a winch and carried it home. It’s in the garden now, all glimmering steel and tightly coiled potential. It’s been a tremendous boon to me as I now have a sense of duty that had been lacking from a life that was veering toward the chaotic. I can now spend the afternoon winching and the evening thinking about new things to winch. It is hard work but rewarding nonetheless. How pleasant it is to spend so much time outdoors, working up a sweat! The unhappy young man who spent all that time talking turkey and bringing home the bacon is now but a ghost. In his place is a fit and resourceful winch master, alive, vigorous and full of ideas. Winching brings with it a tranquility that bubbles and soothes away at the clatter of city life. Neither rain nor sleet nor gloom of postmen can dull the throb of delight I sense when there’s winching to be done. Sometimes when I’m winching I feel my spirit self rise above the suburban Eden and view the surrounding lawns unfenced. I see Mr. Gladstone smiling by his water mill. I see Mr. Pollard wipe the sweat from his plough. I see Mr. Bent giving a fatherly pat to his sundial. I see my neighbours and myself, honest and wise men, every manjack of us, and I see the captains of industry.

Lift to Experience

Entering a lift is fraught with danger. There are certain rituals one must follow so as not to upset the applecart of commonly agreed upon behaviour concerning perpendicular travel or else face the End of the World. There are also various personality types one can observe while steadfastly trying to avoid eye contact, often difficult when the door is mirrored. Is it better to acknowledge the presence of one’s fellow man, or simply to pretend they don’t exist? I suppose it depends on how you do it. A brief glance is probably acceptable and reassuring, but raising one’s eyebrows in a manner that could be construed as lascivious is quite beyond the pale, as is a demand for a high five or a fist bump, especially if you don’t know the other person. Similarly, facing backwards from the door is also very much frowned upon as it is pretty intimidating in such a confined space. 

I take many lift journeys during my working week and I generally loathe them, but good luck looking for staircases or sidewalks in Indonesia. Unless you’re Steven Tyler, it’s very unlikely anything actually good will happen within the hurtling cell. At best you’ll arrive at the floor of your destination unmolested, at worst you’ll have someone you know strike up small talk. I become a stammering wreck when this happens, pathetically unable to remember names and other such trifles. Rather, I tend to nervously stroke my gun instead while umming and erming. Beyond a “Hi, how are you?” it’s quite aggressive to do anything more than that in a lift, much less expecting the conversation will flow as you both alight and skip gaily down the corridor together. Or am I being misanthropic and unfair? Is a little bit of chit chat really that much to ask? How about waiting until I’m prepared and my mind is less blank than usual? But then again, smalltalk is always an act of outrageous sabotage, done to establish control of the unwary and meek to show who’s really the boss.

Then there’s the throny issue of who gets out first. Who receives the honour? The person who entered the lift first? The elderly? The female? Doe she appreciate my gentlemanly conduct by lingering, or is she worried I’m going to check out her bottom as I walk behind her? It’s a minefield. If you wait too long and do the dance without a get-out clause in this strange unspoken contract, then the doors will envelop you both in a special kind of hell usually reserved for people who like Coldplay. Oh, me and my insults… What the lift buttons should actually do is pump out a narcotic to pacify evyone to a point of benign stupificaton. Just like the media does, eh? Well, no, not really. What the media does now is enflame and enrage people with nary a glance at responsibility, but that’s another post for another time.

In the lift, you get your stoics and you get your extroverts for whom this momentary diversion is some sort of experience in which a performance is the default setting. These are the people who frantically mash the buttons to keep the door open and scream while their more slow-footed friends scurry towards their ingress, consequently rendering the rest of us sardines concerned about body odour and rapidly applied eyeshadow. You also get people for whom waiting 5 seconds for the door to close automatically is an unfathomable torment and so frantically push the close button to indicate how important and busy their lives are. Such people are almost certainly necrophiliacs. Probably even worse are those who attempt to enter the lift without considering that its passengers would like to get out first. They seem almost surprised that anyone else could possibly be using it. I suspect they’re really into Instagram. 

The lifts in malls are even worse. Every time there’s some family with a pram shoehorning themselves in to my discomfort. I also look back in scorn at the time some Europeans complained about my childish backpack entering their space: “You are crushing her!” cried one, using pretty impressive English but in an accent I couldn’t discern. This slight has haunted me ever since as “crushing” was a grotesque distortion designed to make me feel bad. I did actually want to crush her after that remark, but a cooler head prevailed as I hastily apologized. Give me an escalator any day, terrifying as it is to actually regard how far up one can ascend above the the other shoppers, and how easy it would be to either be tossed off by a psychopath or perhaps simply swoon over the rubber handrail to an unintended suicide. That’s before we even get to the millions of people who have their trouser cuffs snagged by malevolent conveyor belts and meet a spectacular death with blood spraying everywhere as they’re swallowed whole. There’s a great film ready to be made about a madman throwing people off shopping mall escalators, and here I am just throwing it out there to the wolves…

When the Recession is Bogus and Ducks are Fat

I wrote this 10 years ago. It’s nice to see that both I and things haven’t changed all that much. I’m a bit ambivilent about resurrecting the witterings of my younger self, but heck, why not? Might as well keep a record. I was really into free market capitalism, P.J O’Rourke and exclamation marks at the time, less so now but still a believer:

“We are in the midst of a recession. Our credit has crunched. The chips are down and our goose is cooked. Woolworths is a vacant husk, ghostly notes from former workers pasted forlornly in the window. Well, thank goodness for that, Woolworths wasn’t all that great. It sold nothing that wasn’t cheaper or better elsewhere and was 5 minutes’ further walk from my home than Asda, so excuse my absence of wailing and teeth gnashing. Those of a masochistic bent who can watch the BBC for longer than half an hour will soon be accosted by a soothsayer proclaiming the apocalypse in the form of factory closures and bank bailouts, facilitated by a spineless government. This is the collapse of western civilisation, the death of value. That tinnitus that gnaws at your eardrum is, in fact, the death rattle of the capitalist gravy train, greased with the snake oil of the financial mountebanks. The masters of the universe are yesterday’s plaything. Oh, how we cry, oh how we tremble.

We turn in such doom-laden times to cheaper food. We traipse mournfully past the prophetic statues of Lenin and Loman to Aldi. This, at least, was the premise of Channel 4’s latest diatribe against supermarkets, The True Cost of Cheap Food. Presented by fearless restaurant critic Jay Rayner, this programme sought to expose the horrors lurking in our smartprice chickens: water, mostly. We should all now think twice about what we place in our shopping basket. Are we really getting a bargain, hmmm? It was all thoroughly scientific, of course. There was a lab and everything. Heston Blumenthal popped up with his syringe. Tomatoes were analysed. The cheaper tomatoes were, shockingly, found to contain fewer micrograms of something or other than their costlier cousins. It’s a wonder the human race has lasted this long. Well, no longer can those unscrupulous supermarkets pull the wool over our eyes like so many battery-farmed sheep! The consumer has been vine-ripened to wisdom! No longer shall we be seduced by those cheap, naked breasts inflated with skullduggery. Instead we shall flock to our local butcher to buy more expensive meat and thereby renourish our spendthrift souls. Hey, it’ll do wonders for the economy. Stupid.

I sensed something was afoot when a family, foolishly squandering their money on cheap supermarket food, was used to illustrate this recession that necessitates such reckless consumerism. In these cruel and unforgiving times this polite nuclear family were stuggling through their lives, hopelessly unaware of the evil lurking in their budget scran. The sqaulor they lived in was heartbreaking. There was only one trampoline in the back garden of their suburban semi. The man had recently had to downsize his business. They were then shown feeding the ducks at a park. The viewer can only presume that before the recession held sway over all this family spent their Sunday afternoons more glamourously, lighting cigars with 50 pound notes from the comfort of their jacuzzi while muttering darkly about the degenerate lower orders. But wait a minute! There’s something wrong here… We are told there is a recession and yet here’s this family, this living family, standing defiantly in their finery, throwing bread away as if they were kings. So that’s why the commies in Russia’s ruins used to queue up so patiently for the stuff! Who could possibly care about starvation and unemployment when there’s ducks to feed? Ducks! In a recession! Give a man a fishing rod and he will put it in the loft and forget about it. Give a man a net, however, and he will dine on duck nightly. Poundland is doing a thriving trade in nets these days. It’s the recession. Duck!”

The Curious Case of Hallie Rubenhold Vs The Online Trolls

Hallie Rubenhold’s book The Five – The Untold Lives of Jack the Ripper’s Victims certainly put the cat among the pigeons in the world of Ripperology when it was published in March, and no doubt boosted her sales as a result given how her carny narrative has been swallowed by the mainstream press. That term makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist, but hear me out. The book was not well received by her fellow Ripperologists – which we’ll get into later – but perhaps the most interesting thing about the whole kerfuffle is how it was, with grim inevitability, roped in to the current discourse on misogyny and male-dominated fields, whether they be tech jobs in Silicone Valley or amateur sleuths obsessed with a Victorian serial killer. The narrative Rubenhold has sought to propagate before and after the book’s publication, eagerly taken up by newspapers like the Guardian, goes like this: plucky feminist historian enters the lion’s den of Ripperology and debunks some longstanding “myths” about the case, namely that 3 of the Ripper’s canonical victims were not prostitutes, as commonly believed, and also, somewhat bizarrely, that the women were sleeping when they were murdered rather than standing in a secluded spot with their client/murderer. Unsurprisingly, such claims were met with skepticism by the people who have spent, in some instances, decades researching the case and who had originally unearthed the evidence that the Ripper’s victims had, in fact, been forced to resort to selling themselves on the squalid Whitechapel streets in order to make enough coin for a temporary roof.

In promoting the book, Rubenhold made some bold claims: that no one before her had bothered to look closely at the lives of the victims, and that they were only labelled prostitutes by a misogynist police force, a mantle that was then unquestioningly adopted by the apparently equally misogynist, mostly amateur, historians (Rubenhold has letters after her name) who wrote books and articles about the case over the intervening 130 years since the crimes. Some people are apparently unhappy with the word “prostitute” itself, preferring the more euphemistic phrase “sex worker”. That is its own can of worms, but referring to JtR’s victims as “sex workers” is silly and misleading, implying as it does that it was some sort of career choice rather than an act of abject desperation, as if they clocked in at a sex factory every morning, produced some sex and then strode home at sunset with idle thoughts of dinner on their minds. Anyway, consequently we now get book reviewers earnestly lamenting that: “A landmark study calls time on the misogyny that fed the Jack the Ripper myth. Why has it taken 130 years for a book telling the stories of the women to appear?” Why indeed? Well, there’s actually a fairly simple explanation. To quote Ripperologist in chief, Paul Begg, doubtless writing between bouts of maintaining the patriarchy and lashing his caged handmaiden:

“I think the pre-publication publicity puffery for Hallie Rubenhold’s book is unfortunate. It should be self-evident why the unidentified murderer receives oodles more attention than the victims in books that are primarily concerned with the identity of the murderer. We all knew the victims weren’t born in Whitechapel and that they had full lives before they ended up there. We all knew that these women had been married and had children, so there was nothing to question. The puffery makes the author sound like a total novice excited to discover something they didn’t realise everyone already knew, like a child telling everyone there was a battle fought near Hastings in 1066. Or it suggests that the book is aimed at readers who have little or no prior knowledge of the case, who will react with a ‘gosh, wow’ and be conned into thinking that Rubenhold has uncovered something new. It’s to be hoped that neither is true and that the publicist was trying to make something sellable.

Begg, perhaps unwittingly, hits upon the crux of the matter here: the book is aimed at a readership who only have a sketchy knowledge of the case; it is clearly an attempt to ride the wave of the shift in popular consciousness concerning how women are portrayed in the media/thought of in real life and textually, specifically regarding the true crime genre – of which Saucy Jack is the Methuselah – and how due consideration should be paid to the victims if one is going to drag what would otherwise be private suffering into the public sphere in an attempt to make money. Fine. That in itself is no bad thing, however it doesn’t have to be a zero sum game: true crime authors can write respectfully of the victims as well as paying heed to facts and matters of historical record. They certainly don’t have to erect giant strawmen and yell from the rooftops “I know the truth! Only me! Everyone else is talking bollocks!” before immolating Edward Woodward, here playing the role of common sense. But I digress. Back to Begg:

I recently reviewed an awful book by Rebecca Frost which looked at the way the victims have been portrayed in books over the years. But Frost clearly had little or no grasp of the history of Ripper writing – that authors had no access to the official files until the 1970s and no easy access until the 1990s, no easy access to newspapers other than The Times or to genealogical databases such as Ancestry until the late 1990s, and so on and so on. And, apparently like Hallie Rubenhold, she didn’t appreciate that books largely concerned with attempting to identify the murderer were not much interested in the victims other than for the clues they provided to the killer’s identity (pretty much as in real life). It didn’t help that Frost was manifestly biased and determined to present Ripper authors in a poor or bad light.

Some of the comments Hallie made on Twitter suggest that she may have had the same intention in mind. I hope not. It would be a shame if someone eventually had the clout to get a major publisher interested in a book on the victims, turned it into another ill-founded attack on Ripper authors.”

How prescient. Of course, that’s not as on-message and supposedly woke as blaming the shadowy tag-team of patriarchy and misogyny for criticism faced by a female author if she happens to be you. If, in the course of hawking your supposedly well-researched non-fiction book, that used exactly the same sources as your bete noires, you accuse those that went to great lengths before you to find out as much as possible about the lives of the Ripper’s victims – lengths that enable you to write your book in the first place – of laziness and misogyny, then you might expect some ruffled feathers and comeback. After all, being accused of misogyny is unpleasant and this is an era where people can lose their jobs for one hastily tweeted message from years ago. To say that the victims have hitherto been ignored by Ripperologists simply isn’t true: a vast effort has been made to glean as much information as possible from the existing data records. Or did I just imagine reading lengthy and meticulously researched biographical chapters on Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly in Philip Sugden’s The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, published in 1994? Was I undergoing some weird auditory hallucination when I listened to hours of distinctly unmisogynist discussion about about the victims’ lives on the Rippercast podcast?

Since the book’s publication it has received mostly glowing reviews that helped The Five become a top 10 bestseller in the UK. Ripperologists weren’t so kind, pointing out the shonkiness of her thesis and numerous factual inaccuracies, politely and soberly, as you would expect such an obsessive group to do. So, who cares? What does it matter that a bunch of supposedly prurient women-hating cranks on the Internet don’t like it? Can’t we just leave them to wanking over mortuary photographs and she to driving around in her golden car? Well, apparently it matters a great deal to Rubehhold, who has taken to Twitter to insult and threaten (with legal action!) those who haven’t bestowed upon her tome the unfettered praise she apparently thought was her right. If I pull up my socks of cynicism, I would venture that Rubenhold is smart enough to know that keeping the “controversy” going for as long as possible will have no ill effect on her sales. It’s not bloody, controversy, though, it’s basic facts. In this case, there is little to lose from biting the hand that feeds considering how grubby said hand is generally perceived. If I were to wallow even deeper into the mires of cynicism, to the point I may well lose my footwear extracting myself, I might even posit the notion that what Rubenhold wants is to be the martyr figure in a Gamergate drama of her own conception. But that’s almost certainly going too far…

Or is it? It’s uncommon for a historian to find themselves thrust into the limelight of popular discourse, or at least online badinage, and it almost certainly wouldn’t have happened without the “feminist attacked by trolls” angle. One may well ask, in classic conspiratorial mode, who benefits? Is it the shunned and marginalized Ripperologists, confined to their epic forum threads and niche podcasts? Or is it the lone voice in the wilderness, feted by broadsheet newspapers and reaping the financial rewards and concomitant status granted by a book more popular than the other group can muster? Remind me, who is supposed to have the “privilege” here? You may have detected that I’m on the side of the Ripperologists, mainly because everything they’ve said about The Five has been measured and even complimentary – they were particularly impressed by the way Rubenhold used a novelistic flair to provide context and colour to the lives of a select few Whitechapel unfortunates. Hallie Rubenhold, though, has not been measured in her response to the criticism, or “attacks” as she puts it. Rather, she has set her phasers on “haughty” and blasted away, quite ludicrously: in response to this review by a fellow academic, she tweeted that it was “petty and misinformed”. Jesus wept.

Rather than misogyny, what this really boils down to, as it so often does when the M-word is invoked, is a social class dispute. Rubenhold has a doctorate in history, whereas some prominent Ripperologists, such as the charismatic and humorous Tom Wescott, did not even attend university. One of the many things a university education will not provide is a sense of humour, as our Hallie ably demonstrates every time she hits “send” or retweets the fawning adulation or “support” of the sisterhood. None of the Ripperolgists (a title that has stuck rather than being demanded), to my knowledge, have a PHD in anything. The horror, the horror. Well, they probably do get loads of Pizza Hut deliveries arriving at their filthy bedsits, the disgusting, lonely woman-haters who must see cooking as women’s work. So, an academic finally lowers herself into the murk of Ripperology and writes a successful book that contains some errors and other more outre assertions. She insults the people who have done the legwork, then feigns shock and genuflects before the alter of social justice when they defend themselves against her rather horrible accusations. Welcome to 2019. 

Gosh, I hate ending on such a trite note, like an NME journalist from days gone by when every concert review of some wan guitar slappers would conclude with “the revolution starts now!” or suchlike. Social justice is basically a good thing, I just can’t stand seeing how it is constantly misused to boost ego and toss insults before walking away having done the bare minimum to support whatever the present crusade happens to be. So what if more men than women are obsessed enough about Jack the sodding Ripper to write books about it? It doesn’t mean women are being purposefully kept out of the “boy’s club” it just means… well, what it means. More men than women like to collect stamps and/or watch boxing matches; more women than men like to watch makeup tutorials on youtube and swaddle themselves in sexy underwear. There are no sinister forces at work when it comes to people’s hobbies and gender. I wonder if this case would have inflamed me so much if it had been a Harold Rubenhold at the centre of the shitshow. I like to think it probably would, because I’ve spent so much time listening to Rippercast and I kind of consider them “my guys (and some women to be stricly accurate)”. It’s more likely a woman would cry “misogyny!” than a man in the first place, but that’s a no brainer given the obstacles women face in daily life that men don’t have to. Often it’s justified, but in this case it absolutely isn’t. Having spent considerable time, too much fucking time actually, reading about a Victorian serial killer, I see no evidence of misogyny in the rank and file of Ripperologists, published or not, and it would be best if everyone just agreed that what happened to the victims was awful, and not to either sanctify or vilify them for circumstances that were beyond their control. 

Having said all that, though, I do eagerly anticipate Rubenhold’s next book, The 250, about the lives of Harold Shipman’s victims – mostly sleeping! Mostly female! Clearly the only reason people don’t know their names and what sort of lives they led before being murdered is due purely to the insidious force of misogyny. Imagine me sighing here.

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