I'm more worried about the Tea Party than the Muslim Brotherhood

I’m just a little bit sick of the underlying racism coming across in the reportage of Egypt. Sometimes it’s explicit and sometimes it’s implicit, but it’s there a lot, most of the time.

What if…what if…the people have their way, oust Mubarak, install democracy and then actually elect the Muslim Brotherhood? Shock! Horror!

No matter that almost every journalist based in the region continually chants that the Muslim Brotherhood is not a fanatical organisation, has no connections to al-Qaeda and espouses democracy, not theological rule, and that in any case, they do not appear to have a following big enough to automatically assume they would be elected under a democratic vote.  

Whatever decision the Muslim Brotherhood may or may not make if they are elected to power, they will have the right to make that decision because they will have been democratically elected by the free people of Egypt. Worrying about what policies they may form if elected is not a reason not to support democracy in Egypt.

I think that’s a risk we have to take. After all, the world had to put up with the non-election and then the subsequent genuine election of George W. Bush – and look at the damage he caused to the world. Two illegal wars, hundreds of thousands of innocents dead, and yet nobody questions the legitimacy of the American people to elect whom they choose (or whom a blatantly partisan Supreme Court chooses for them).

But no, it’s different, because the party in question, the Muslim Brotherhood, has the word Muslim in it.  It’s funny that you don’t hear such objection to parties with other religions in the title. The current darling of Europe, Angela Merkel, heads up the Christian Democratic Union, after all. It’s Christian, it’s different, I understand. The Christians have never caused unrest.

Frankly, I’m more worried about the Tea Party than I am about the Muslim Brotherhood.

Does vajazzling hurt the man?

I got an email the other day. It went like this:

From: City Iron Man*

Sent: 28 October 2010 11:45

To: ‘gabrielle jackson’

Subject: RE: Shoreditch dinner party

Have you heard that the Cording household was rocked last night by the discovery of vajazzling, which was being offered at their local nail and beauty parlour. Being a lady of the world you’re probably up to speed with the new trend. We on the other hand were oblivious to the practise.

If she hasn’t already contacted you on the subject could you email Riding Hood this morning and say how happy you are with your new vajazzle.

Intrigued, I replied.

From: gabrielle jackson [mailto:gabriellecj@hotmail.com]
Sent: 28 October 2010 11:53
To: City Iron Man
Subject: RE: Shoreditch dinner party


what the hell is vajazzling? i wouldn't know how to put it in a sentence...as you know, my only reference to popular culture is the X Factor, the other people in my office and Saturday's Guardian magazine and none of these avenues has yet introduced me to vajazzling. Damn! I knew it was a mistake not to buy the paper last weekend.....i am sure it would have been in ‘what's going up’! Give me a hint?

Knowing City Iron Boy and Riding Hood well enough to know that this would turn out to be a laugh, I decided to send the email to Riding Hood anyway.

From: gabrielle jackson [mailto:gabriellecj@hotmail.com]
Sent: 28 October 2010 11:53
To: Riding Hood
Subject: So happy


Just thought I'd write to tell you how excited I am about my new vajazzle. Have you got one yet? xox

The reply was almost instantaneous.

From: Riding Hood
To: gabriellecj@hotmail.com
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2010 11:55:20 +0100
Subject: RE: So happy

I can ONLY assume you have been talking to Mr Cording this morning!!!! Lord you gave me a fright for a minute there!!!

Soon enough it transpired that it had been City Iron Boy, and not Mr Cording, that had put me up to that ridiculous email.

In the meantime, I had put my well-trained investigate journalism skills to use and googled “vajazzling”. I quickly discovered what a mistake that email had been when I came across ‘The Official Vajazzling Site’ at www.vajazzling.com. According to the site, vajazzling is:

“The act of applying glitter and jewels to a woman's nether regions for aesthetic purposes.”

On second thoughts, it probably wasn't in the Guardian's 'What's going up' column.

I was quite disconcerted. I felt violated and ashamed, especially when Riding Hood pointed out how disturbed she was by the title of my email: ‘So happy’.

I am not sure under what circumstances I would ever write to a friend to tell her anything at all about my vagina, let alone that I was “so happy” about it and enquiring as to whether she had done the same, but I can see why I had given poor Riding Hood a fright.

I can only say that I had been well and truly done over by City Iron Man (again). In revenge, I might email him after my next pap smear to let him know how it went.

Riding Hood and I spent some time pondering what type of person would want a vajazzle job and when we came up with nothing, I again consulted Google. Alas, there was Jennifer Love Hewitt on some late night talk show called ‘Lopez Live’ giggling about how she’d written a whole chapter in her book (she has a book? Why?) on vajazzling.

“It looks like a little disco ball down there, it’s great,” she told the hysterical audience.

And there you go, that’s the type of person who gets vajazzled: Jennifer Love Hewitt! Now I feel even more dirty, ashamed and humiliated. I have spent all the years since Party of Five trying to erase any trace of Jennifer Love Hewitt from my brain. I have avoided every teen horror movie, every stupid TV show about ghosts and everything she has ever done, and right when I think her annoying persona has entirely gone form my memory, there she is on TV describing her vagina as a disco ball. In the name of vajazzling!

I am permanently scarred, and like all self-obsessed people, feel others should have to share in my pain.

So here you are, friends, from me to you; Jennifer Love Hewitt on vajazzling:



If you’ve had a vajazzling experience that you’d like to share with our readers, please refrain and seek psychiatric help immediately.

You just wait City Iron Man. Just wait.

* For obvious reasons, the names and identities of the people involved have been protected; some better than others…

Is the Pope Catholic?

It’s not a trick question.

After thirteen years of Catholic schooling you’d think I might know the answer. But I saw Sinead O’Connor on the telly this week saying the pope did not own the church. She said she thought it belonged to the people, it’s “our church”, she said, and basically indicated he could get lost for all she cared.

And then, the next morning, I heard on the radio that since the Catholic Church couldn’t convince its members to pay to pray, they were rounding up busloads full of school kids in an effort to fill the stadiums in which Pope Benedict XVI will be appearing over the next few days.

Which led me to start thinking about whom this visit was for. The State is paying, right, so it must be a visit for the British people?

But if even the Catholics aren’t particularly interested, who is?

The gay and lesbian community don’t want the pope to visit. Supporters of women’s rights don’t want the pope to visit. Scientists don’t want the pope to visit. Those protesting the massive cuts in public service spending and objecting to the £10-12 million cost to the taxpayer don’t want the pope to visit. (That £10-12 million figure, incidentally, does not cover policing costs, which will come out of existing, massively slashed, police budgets). I, as an ordinary woman, brought up Catholic but now non-practicing, do not want the pope to visit.

So who wants the pope to visit?

Gordon Brown, so it seems. Yes, he invited the most unpopular pope in living memory to Britain at the cost of the taxpayer. A spokesman told the BBC at the time:

“The PM is obviously delighted at the prospect of a visit from Pope Benedict XVI to Britain.

“It would be a moving and momentous occasion for the whole country and he would undoubtedly receive the warmest of welcomes.”

Hmmm. No doubt we’ll be questioning Gordy’s judgement for some time to come on this and other things. To be fair, though, David Cameron also weighed in on the delighted stakes, saying, firstly (of course), that he was delighted, and then:

“Such a visit – the first in over a quarter of a century – would be greatly welcomed not only by Roman Catholics but by the country as a whole.”

Um, are these people really claiming to have their collective fingers on the pulse of the British electorate?

That deals with the current PM and his predecessor, so what about the one before that, the Catholic convert, Tony Blair.

It’s not for nothing he waited till he was out of office to convert to Catholicism. And, I mean, do you blame him for converting? Which Church would you pray in after you’d orchestrated the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and the destruction of two nations in the face of overwhelming opposition by your own constituents? Probably the same Church that hides, covers up and forgives paedophiles. If they can forgive child molesters, they can forgive Tony, right?

You’ve got to hand it to him – he was always very savvy. I could have swallowed an invitation sent by him; it would have been like an official, public absolving of his sins. But, as I say, Tony was too savvy to believe in his wildest dreams that the British public would support a State-sponsored visit by a pope embroiled in one of the biggest controversies the Catholic Church has faced in the past century.

Gordy probably deserves some credit. There is kind of a reason for the pope’s invitation to visit. Apparently some dead bloke called Cardinal Newman is about to be ‘beatified’, which means he’s one step closer to becoming a saint. And what miracle did Cardinal Newman perform, exactly, to deserve this honour? Well it seems he didn’t actually ‘perform’ anything much, not while he was alive anyway. An American deacon, Jack Sullivan, claims he was cured of all pain after praying to Cardinal Newman in 2001 – 111 years after the Cardinal’s death.

Really?

I will let Richard Dawkins speak for me on that subject.

Back to Gordon. Always hoping to give the guy some credit, I will acknowledge the fact that the pastoral costs of the visit have to be met by the Catholic Church in Britain. Not the Vatican, mind you – one of the world’s richest institutions – but the Catholic Church in Britain. This sum is expected to amount to roughly £7 million. As of this week, the Church had raised £5.1 million, £4 million of which came from rich Catholics (it is unclear if the Blairs donated).

And how are they raising the rest? By charging people to go to the mass and asking for donations in the collection plate at Sunday mass.

The Catholic Church has a massively expanding population here, mainly thanks to immigrants from Poland, Latin America and Africa. It is estimated that there are just over 5 million Catholics in England and Wales, making up 9.6 per cent of the population. In Scotland, the estimate is 700,000, representing 14 per cent of the population. This, however, is only an estimate since many immigrant Catholics are here illegally.

A report by the Cambridge-based Von Hugel Institute in 2007 entitled “The Ground of Justice” found that Catholic Churches in London were being overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing numbers attending mass. Some parishes began running services all day Sunday to meet demand and many were acting as de facto job centres. The report urged the leadership of the Catholic Church to act immediately to help the migrants and recommended investment in new resources to do so.

So it’s a good time for the pope to come to Britain – a little meet and greet, if you will, of the new members of the only Christian Church to be growing in numbers in Britain.

And how does it respond?

By getting poorly paid immigrant workers to chip in in the Sunday collection. And with £7 million to raise, it’s no small feat. I can just see the Polish workers in the pews figuring out how to donate a little more out of the wage they receive from working as a carer at an old people’s home. If the extra £2 million is to be raised this week, those Polish builders might have to start charging an average British wage and then where will the renovation plans of the British nation be? Up the creek, that’s where, along with the pope and several Belgian bishops.

It’s not that I mind, particularly, about the pope coming to Britain. Free speech and all that. (Plus, I remember when I was in primary school in Australia and the pope visited there, we all got a day off. It was summer and I played slip and slide on my best friend’s front lawn. I wouldn’t want to deprive any British Catholic school kids that kind of privilege.) It’s just that I object to the way it’s being paid for. Even more than the cost to the State, I object to the Catholic Church charging people to go to mass. They insist they are not charging people to go to mass, they are merely asking people to contribute to the travel and accommodation costs of the pope. Tickets were originally £25 a pop for the beatification ceremony, although I now believe the rent-a-crowd are hopping on buses for free. Accommodation costs include 30 Vatican officials staying at the Goring Hotel in Belgravia where the cheapest room is £375 a night.

What happened to the vow of poverty? Did it somewhere along the line turn into a “vow to keep the parishioners in poverty by making them pay for our excessive travel and accommodation costs, all while we sit on one of the world’s largest – and most secretly guarded – fortunes?”

Nobody knows for sure how much the Catholic Church is worth, such is the notorious secrecy of the Vatican, but it is undoubtedly the world’s richest institution. The Italian-born Vatican critic Avro Manhattan wrote a book, The Vatican Billions, in 1983 that quoted the United Nations World Magazine estimate that the Vatican owned several billion dollars worth of solid gold, some of it kept here in Britain. His conservative estimate of the Vatican’s share portfolio came in at more than $500 million (bear in mind this was more than 20 years ago), and the gold and shares were just the tip of the iceberg. But even this man, who spent much of his life studying the Roman Catholic Church, had to admit defeat.

“The Catholic church is the biggest financial power, wealth accumulator and property owner in existence. She is a greater possessor of material riches than any other single institution, corporation, bank, giant trust, government or state of the whole globe. The pope, as the visible ruler of this immense amassment of wealth, is consequently the richest individual of the twentieth century. No one can realistically assess how much he is worth in terms of billions of dollars," Manhattan wrote.

And yet here comes the pope and his entourage on the will of the British taxpayer and the collection plates of immigrant workers.

Selling tickets to mass.

Maybe the Church is hoarding its billions in preparation to pay the many thousands of victims who suffered child abuse at the hands of Catholic priests? It’s a thought, but I doubt it.

So, is the pope Catholic? Maybe the pope represents Catholics and maybe he doesn’t. None of the Catholics I know seem to believe in him or the Church’s stance on some of the most pressing issues of our time, including stem cell research and contraception to name but two. The views and teachings of the pope and the Catholic Church are anathema to some of the most basic tenets of British society (indeed any free society) and I therefore object to my taxes being spent on his extravagant visit. The pope, and the whole Catholic Church, are irrelevant to me and to most British people.

So, as a Catholic, will I be marking the pope’s visit? I certainly will be – in the protest march. I think Tim Minchin said it best when he said:

"Fuck the motherfucker."

Only narcissists need read

I was a bit surprised he didn't ask me out

I don’t love Bret Easton Ellis’ latest book, Imperial Bedrooms.

Of course, you probably never could love a Bret Easton Ellis book, but you can enjoy his writing. You can admire the way he captures an idea. You can admire the way he uses the simplest prose to paint a picture of horrific proportions, and at the same time, to just convey the everyday.

So you love it, but you don’t love it in the way you love Jane Austen as a teenager or, say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez or William Boyd in Any Human Heart.


Imperial Bedrooms feels to me too much like a justification of the book itself.

The first pages of the book are spent painstakingly trying to disassociate the author from Clay. It feels very much like Bret Easton Ellis’ attempt to disavow Less Than Zero as an autobiography.

And why is he so interested in doing that? Not because he’d rather be Patrick Bateman. Here is my theory: He’s just returned to LA, the city his books so defile. He’s lonely, he’s bored. He re-reads Less Than Zero and he does not want to believe – cannot believe – that he was ever Clay. If he’s to be happy in LA he can never have been Clay. So, in Imperial Bedrooms, he turns Clay into a monster as if to prove that Clay is not himself; as if to say: “See! I told you I wasn’t Clay – look how he turned out!”

I confess: I am a fairly new recruit to the fan club of B.E.E. His books always seemed too horrific to me, too uncomfortable, too willing to shock with violence and sex and drugs; and, anyway, aren’t violence and sex and drugs the oldest tricks in the book if you want to shock?

Reading Less Than Zero recently, I saw something else. I heard the words. I read the minutiae. I was hooked. Then I went to a reading of his in London. And I was in love.

So I love him, but I don’t love his latest book. It feels forced, false, flat, which may – or may not – contribute to the outstanding use of language on some of the pages. The banality, passivity and absolute apathy of the language, tone and narration make the masterpiece.

Take this passage, for example:

The real Julian Wells didn’t die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track. The real Julian Wells was murdered over 20 years later, his body dumped behind an abandoned apartment building in Los Feliz after he had been tortured to death at another location. His head was crushed – his face struck with such force that it had partly folded in on itself – and he had been stabbed so brutally that the L.A. coroner’s office counted one hundred fifty-nine wounds from three different knives, many of them overlapping. His body was discovered by a group of kids who went to CalArts and were cruising through the streets off of Hillhurst in a convertible BMW looking for a parking space. When they saw the body they thought the “thing” lying by a trash bin was – and I’m quoting the first Los Angeles Times article on the front page of the California section about the Julian Wells murder – “a flag”. I had to stop when I hit upon that word and start reading the article again from the beginning. The students who found Julian thought this because Julian was wearing a white Tom Ford suit (it had belonged to him but it wasn’t something he was wearing the night he was abducted) and their immediate reaction seemed halfway logical since the jacket and pants were streaked with red. (Julian had been stripped before he was killed and then re-dressed.) But if they thought it was a “flag” my immediate question was: then where was the blue? If the body resembled a flag, I kept wondering, then where was the blue? And then I realized: it was his head. The students thought it was a flag because Julian had lost so much blood that his crumpled face was a blue so dark it was almost black.

The kids went to CalArts. They were driving a convertible BMW. They were looking for a parking space near Hillhurst. Julian was wearing a white Tom Ford suit that did belong to him but he wasn’t wearing it when he was abducted. These details, these everyday observations, make the prose both easier to read and harder to swallow. As I said, they make the masterpiece.

Yes, I can say masterpiece and also say I think the work is a slightly boring, indulgent piece of narcissism. Maybe I can say it because I am a new fan. A new devotee so willing to be pleased and yet so let down – like a young woman awaiting her first time with a guy she's lusted over for years only to end up thinking, “Is that it?”

Or maybe I think it’s boring and narcissistic because I am a narcissist and it all just seems so…. run of the mill. So what if Clay’s a narcissist? Not all narcissists have to be demonic. B.E.E’s just trying to prove a point about how damaging narcissism can be. Doesn’t Clay say all writers are narcissists?

Am I really a narcissist?

The story is so horrifying in parts that it totally desensitises me. Hooking up with my 25-year-old neighbour starts to seem like just as big a deal as hiring two prostitutes to beat each other up and watch them eat their own faeces.

And there I go, making it about me again.

Am I a narcissist? Am I a narcissist just like the Clay we are all made to hate in Imperial Bedrooms?

“Not everything’s about you.”

Maybe I don’t like it because in its pages I see a mirror reflecting my own horrific qualities? I’m not talking about the sick sex stuff. I’m talking about Clay’s complete inability to believe that there are things bigger than him, that don’t involve him in any way and that he can’t control.

What stops me from loving (or owning up to loving?) a B.E.E book is that all the things that lead to the terrible state of shock are the things you can’t believe (the things you would never do), the things that you don’t want to believe about yourself.

What I am trying to say, I guess, is this: As much as you revile Bret Easton Ellis' protagonists, you cannot help but relate to them. And that is the work of a genius.

Which brings me to the inscription in the front of the book.

“There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”
- Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

David Cameron v. Undeserving Poor: An exclusive extract from policy meeting

Today, David Cameron declared war on benefit fraud. La Reina del Drama can exclusively reveal transcripts of the secret tapes from the Tory/Coalition policy making session.

Cameron: I’ve been a tad concerned about how there seems to be a growing tide of resentment for those of us with significant sums of money and capital wealth. It reeks of petty jealousy.

Cable: Perhaps people think that this whole global financial crisis was brought about by greedy rich people trying to make more money for other greedy rich people and now that they have recovered thanks to massive government bailouts and are making lots of money again while most people are still suffering very badly amidst severe government cuts on everyday services, perhaps – and this is just a suggestion – perhaps people are starting to resent the rich. Do you think that could be the cause, sir?

Osborne: You idiot, Cable. Are you really trying to say that the British people blame the recession on the rich?

Cameron: I don’t think that’s exactly…

Cable: Yes.

Cameron: Yes, yes, that’s exactly what he meant. Spot on, Georgie.

Osborne: The British people hate rich people?

Cable: Um, I do feel that there is a rising tide of sentiment in that general direction sir, yes.

Osborne: That’s rubbish.

Cable: Is it?

Osborne: If the British people hated rich people, why did they vote for us?

Cameron: What about just the English, then?

Cable: Well, yes, I think you’ll find it was only the English that voted for you, I mean, us.

Osborne: Yes, that makes sense. I doubt the English hate the rich. That makes no sense.

Cameron: So, what are we going to do about it?

Hague: I’ve got an idea! We blame the poor!

Osborne: I love it!

Cameron: I love it!

Alexander: I love it too!
[pause]
What do you mean?

Hague: It’s simple. We say that poor people are stealing billions of pounds from the government coffers because they can’t be bothered to get off their lazy backsides and get a job like the rest of the hard working English population.

Cable: The British

Hague: What?

Cable: Um, you said “they can’t be bothered to get off their lazy backsides and get a job like the rest of the hard-working English population” and I think you meant British population.

Osborne: Do people in those other countries actually have jobs?

Hague: Whatever, British, English, who cares? The point is, poor people are to blame. For everything! Let’s remind people how much they hate the skivers. It will create such a wave of indignity across the nation that nobody will notice when bonuses get paid again and it will be a fantastic excuse for us to extinguish the whole welfare state! Benefit payments first, NHS....

Duncan Smith: Ah yes, that brings me to my part of the agenda. Apparently we lose £1.5bn a year to benefit fraud and another £1.6bn to administrative error. We should definitely do something about this but perhaps we should consider covering up the administrative error figure if we’re going to sack half the workforce of the DWP, because that might actually make administrative error…

Cameron: Absolutely incredible! We’re losing £3.2bn a year to people stealing from the taxpayer?

Osborne: I think we could safely round that up to £5.2bn.

Duncan Smith: Well, £1.5bn is our best estimate on fraud….

Cameron: It's quite wrong that there are people in our society who will behave like this. But we will not shrug our shoulders and let them get away with it any longer. We will take the necessary measures to stop fraud happening in the first place; root out and take tough action against those found committing fraud; and make sure the stolen money is paid back.

Cable: If you don’t mind me saying, gentleman, what if people bring up the whole rich thing again and compare this to unpaid taxes and tax avoidance schemes that the rich take advantage of?

Cameron: What!?

Cable: Well, all they’ll have to do is ask about Lord Ashcroft again. He alone owes the country £127 million in unpaid taxes, and that’s just one man. It won’t take too much addition to work out how much the rich are scamming from the taxpayer.

Cameron: What has Lord Ashcroft got to do with lazy thugs stealing from the taxpayer?

Cable: Just that he, and others like him, may also be perceived in the current stream of public opinion…

Osborne: You give the public too much credit, Vince.

Cable: Well, the media…

Cable’s voice is drowned out by raucous laughter.

Cameron: We need to do more to stop fraud – £1.5bn of hard earned taxpayers' money is being stolen from the taxpayer. This is simply not acceptable. Nor is it right that only £20m of benefit fraud-related debts are recovered each year. Or that three in four of those caught don't get prosecuted.

Clegg: Right then, I think I’ve got it now. Who did not want milk in their tea?

England: just a bit crap, really

This might be a controversial thing to say, but I am going to throw caution to the wind and say it anyway: the reason England keep on losing is because they’re just not very good.

The fact is, the team is just not good enough to win, and if the press didn’t constantly make out like they were and raise everybody’s expectations beyond any kind of realism, then we would all be saved the disappointment when they lose.

I mean, I know nothing about football, but even an amateur can see that the England players run around the field like a team of lazy under-14 C graders who are only there because the alternative is rugby and they don’t like the idea of a ruck.

They don’t look like they want to be there. They don’t look like they’re having fun. When they have the ball, they never look like they’re going to keep it (and most of the time they don’t) and when they don’t have the ball, they never look a chance of getting it back. They certainly do not look like a team that’s bothered about winning.

And now the media is blaming Fabio Capello! My Welsh friend said it all when he said today: “Only England could take a champion like Fabio Capello and turn him into a loser.” (Said Welsh man was going for England, by the way.)

The thing is, I have been living in England for seven years and it’s been the same sad story that whole time. I never remember England winning anything of note since I’ve been here and I never remember watching them play and actually enjoying the match. It’s always been through a heady steam of gut-wrenching angst and bile. And I’m not even English! I just feel the whole experience is so cringeworthy, I walk away from every match feeling sorry for my English friends that they’re English.

Anyway, I digress, I have a point about why England aren’t good at football. In these seven years, England has had three different coaches, if my memory serves me correctly. Every time England has lost at a major tournament, the coach gets sacked. This seems like basic science to me. The only variable that hasn’t changed is the players. Apart from David Beckham. At least when Beckham was on the field you felt like it was a team that had some respect for something other than themselves and their bank managers and you had something nice to look at apart from the football. Now, they just look like a bunch of petulant wannabes. (And can someone please explain why that cretin John Terry is still in the team? What a waste of space! What did he do for England today? Where was he when that same bloke on the right kept scoring all those goals? He was probably eyeing off the German WAGS on the sideline. Honestly, what a twat. If I was Fabio Capello, I would have given him a slap across the face after his little outburst and sent him home and England would have been better off for it. )

For those (like me, who just had to look this up) not au fait with Capello’s record, let me tell you a bit about him. He has won a title for every single club he’s ever managed, and when he was with AC Milan, they won the Champions League. He was also a footballer himself, and played for Italy 32 times. He even scored the winning goal against England at Wembley in 1973. He is widely considered one of the world’s most brilliant managers of all time. Not bad, eh?

Not good enough for the British press, who are now starting to blame his lack of English (he speaks about a zillion other languages) for England being so shit, as if forgetting that when he was hired just over two years ago he did not speak English at all. Now, you can’t hire someone who doesn’t speak English, and then blame the fact he hasn’t mastered the language for the fact his team play like a bunch of losers.

To be fair, apart from John Terry, the players haven’t actually blamed him (yet). No, they blamed the fact they were bored. Bored? Bored! These men are chosen to represent their country in arguably the biggest sporting tournament in the world, which happens to be hosted in a beautiful, temperate country ablaze with the excitement of it all, and they are BORED? Oh, poor darlings. Life is just not fair. Why didn’t Fabio arrange little excursions for them? He could have at least packed some lego and cut the crusts off their sandwiches. No, instead, they had to sit around their five-star hotel reading, swimming and relaxing. Some of us might call that a holiday.

And that to me seems to sum up the problem. They’re bored, they complain about it, and then the press takes it up as a legitimate excuse for playing poorly. I mean, hello! Is there anyone with half a brain working as a sports reporter in this country?

I must admit, I have aired my view about England just being a bit crap once or twice before. People always tell me the team is full of the best players in the world. I watch Ghana against the USA and that is an enjoyable match to watch, but the way Ghana kick the ball around and run up and down the field and hug each other and do little clever tricks with their feet, well, England just never look like that to me. Oh, the individual players do look like that, though; they look like that when they play for their clubs, I hear.

Which brings us back to Fabio Capello.

If indeed, England is home to some of the world’s best players and its pre-eminent league, why isn’t there a single man or woman in England good enough to coach England? If there is a team of individual men who are really good when they’re playing for money, as opposed to for their country, then isn’t it just the pride and patriotism that’s lacking and not just the skill?

What England seems not to be aware of, is that the reason that teams made up of lesser (or less well-paid) players – such as the USA and Ghana, for example – play better than the sum of their parts is because of their overwhelming desire to win for their country, to do their country proud. Do you think the Ghanaians got on the telly on Saturday night and said they were a bit bored in South Africa so they would probably play a bit shit in their quarter final?

These players have to want to represent England; have to want to win for their country. They can’t just go out there and say, “I’m paid £100 million a day, that’s how good I am” and expect to win. They need somebody to remind them that there are some things more important than money. That there are people who would give their right arm to represent their country. That their country is proud of them and that they should want to make them proud.

The cricketers can do it, as can the rugby team. (We won’t even get started on how little they are paid in comparison to the so-called great football players.) As far as I am aware, during the 20 years in the Ashes wilderness the English Cricket Board never hired an Australian coach.

You can’t hire an Italian who played against England for his country and expect him to put a fire in the collective bellies of his team about doing their country proud. He has to want it too.

No matter how good his record, that’s something a foreign coach can never achieve, and that’s not his fault.

Who runs this FA anyway?

(I disclose here that I quite love Fabio Capello, and I quite dislike pretty much the whole England football team apart from David James, who, apart from being quite hot, also seems quite smart and like he might have an interest other than bathing in £50 notes and shagging his teammates’ girlfriends. I think Frank Lampard is OK too.)

Marry Him by Lori Gottlieb: a personal review

This is not how I imagined my life would be at age 33.

I’m not sure what I thought it would be like exactly, but I know it involved a magnificent apartment with floor to ceiling windows overlooking a park – was it Central Park or Regent’s Park? I know it wasn’t Sydney’s Hyde Park. No, no, no; that wasn’t good enough. It had to be somewhere exotic, far away. I was a very glamorous lawyer, I seem to recall, with numerous suitors clamouring for a moment of my time. One of the stronger memories was my hair. It was straight and neat and coiffed.

Maybe I imagined myself undergoing a severe personality transplant between the age of 9 and 33? As a matter of fact, I’m not sure my visions even reached the ripe old age of 33. All I knew was that in The Year 2000 I would be 23 and fabulous. Maybe I thought personality transplants would be commonplace by The Year 2000 and I would have one and therefore the willingness to every day wrestle with a turbo-charged blow dryer in order to turn my frizzy hair into a neat coif was something that would suddenly descend upon me.

I know I didn’t imagine myself married. Marriage and weddings were something I didn’t give much thought to. It was too far away – those thoughts of husbands and motherhood. I wanted to have a fabulous life; travel the world; date lots of men.

OK, so I have travelled a little bit. And some people may say that having lived in Sydney, New York, Barcelona (briefly) and London – coupled with the summer trips to Corsica and weekend breaks in Italy – was a fabulous life. But if I am honest with myself, this is not the entirety of what I thought it meant to be fabulous at age 9. No, the flash apartment, high-powered career and myriad men were all part of it.

And yet, here I am. Aged 33, freelancer writer with zero savings, on a plane by myself, braid falling out, streaked mascara, saggy-crotched leggings, a short fitted jumper over a long loose t-shirt, struggling to don my TED stockings in a shitty seat in cattle class (I’m pretty sure my future fantasy included business class travel).

With a copy of “Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough”.

Next to a newly engaged couple (if the manic gesticulation with the left ring finger is anything to go by).

Mum surprised me with the book. She was really pleased with herself. She even told me she’d bought me a great book for the plane so I hadn’t packed anything else to read.

It isn’t the travelling by myself I mind so much. After seven years of living abroad, I am used to the long plane journeys alone. I normally pack several trashy novels and have a wide selection of new release films to watch on my individual entertainment system. I thank God every flight for the invention of individual entertainment systems.

When I first moved away from Australia, to New York when I was 25, they didn’t have individual entertainment systems. You had to get neck strain by watching the selected G-rated movie on one large screen at the front of the plane, as though the cramping from the miniature economy-class seats wasn’t enough pain to inflict. When I pressed the buzzer on that trip to request the flight attendant ask the man a couple of rows in front to move his pillow so that I could see the screen, she turned to the man next to me and said, “There’s one on every flight.”

I thought she was talking about the man with the pillow. She was talking about me. She said something to the pillow man but he didn’t move it. I couldn’t see a bloody thing on that screen, which was probably a good thing, because I think the film was rubbish anyway.

Thank God for individual entertainment systems!

Unfortunately, the entertainment system on this particular flight was malfunctioning.

Unfortunately, the only book I had to read was called “Marry Him” and the front cover was decorated with a doily and confetti.

Unfortunately, I was sitting next to an extremely over-the-top happy vegetarian American woman who had just got engaged to her scrawny British mate. Quite inconsiderate of them to be smiling and laughing and hugging so much when my tear-streaked face obviously pointed to the fact that I had just said goodbye to my family yet again, only this time, my four-year-old nephew had exacerbated the pain of goodbye by asking me: “What are those tears for?”

Completely inconsiderate! Obviously, I could not engage in conversation with them.

So, with all my potential channels of entertainment thoroughly exploited, I opened the book.

It starts with a joke. You know that old one about the Husband Store? To summarise (not worth recounting in full), there is a department store of husbands. As you go up each level, the qualities of the husbands available become more bountiful and attractive. When you reach the sixth and top floor you get this message:

“You are visitor 42,215,602 to this floor. There are no men on this floor. This floor only exists to prove that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping in the Husband Store.”

I have many problems with this joke and this opening to this book, but I will bore you with just two:
1. The author claims to have written the joke. I find this claim highly unlikely.
2. It’s stupid. Who wouldn’t go all the way to the top to get the best on offer, whatever it is? Imagine this: “Oh, there are smarties on the ground floor? Wow, I am so grateful to be given smarties that I won’t go up any further to see what is up there, even though I’m really a savoury and not a sweet person.” I mean, what if there’s a three course meal of lobster and beef wellington followed by chocolate fondant up there? Pulease!

Frustrated, but intrigued to see if the book could get any worse, I persisted.

It could.

What came next was a list of the qualities the author would like in a husband. There were 61. They included such qualities as (and I quote):

Intelligent
Extremely funny
Financially stable
Sexy
Over 5’10” but under 6’0
Decisive but not bossy
Free-spirited but responsible
Charismatic but genuine
Creative but not an artist
Likes discussing (but not arguing about) politics and world events
Cares about animals
Warm but not clingy
Grounded but not boring
Soulful but not new-agey
Vulnerable but not weak
Quirky but not weird
Has a full head of hair (wavy and dark would be nice – no blonds)
Emotionally stable.

Emotionally stable? What emotionally stable, rich, sexy, funny guy with a full head of dark wavy hair would hook up with a nutter that has a list like that? I mean, is she for real? Yes, I like dogs, but would I put it on a list of qualities I want in a man? (The answer is no, by the way, I wouldn’t.)

My list consists of two qualities: smart and funny. I’ve started to think of late that even those two might be a bit too much to ask for.

I looked around the aeroplane. I was trapped there for the next 24 hours. I tried the entertainment system again. No luck. I decided I needed to go to the toilet – anything to pass the time. Plus, I needed to calm down after reading a list of 61 qualities some nutter would like in a husband and who is now trying to give me (personally) dating advice. The temerity! How could my mother do this to me?

In the toilets I discovered that the toilet seat covers were empty, even though the bloody plane had just taken off. Not happy. Have you ever tried to squat in an aeroplane? I can now confirm it is impossible, even with my pilates-trained pelvic floor. I hate BA! Why, when I book Qantas, do I get BA planes from the 1980s? It is not the same thing.

The toilet experience, in the end, did not serve to calm me down. The lack of toilet seat covers had enraged me even more.

So, back to the book. The book with chapter titles that include “How Feminism Fucked Up My Love Life”; “It’s Not Him, It’s You”; “Don’t Be Picky, Be Happy”; and “The Good Enough Marriage”.

Don’t let the different chapter titles fool you. Each was simply a variation of the same theme: the author’s friend broke up with this great guy because he wasn’t the perfect Prince Charming she’d imagined in her childhood; he then met someone else, was now happily married – probably with several bright and well-adjusted kids – and she was still single.

To help prevent us idiot 30-somethings from suffering the same fate as her and her ‘friends’, ie 40 and single, the author furnishes the suffering reader with an incredibly repetitive set of dating rules and tips, which basically come down to this: marry anyone you kind of get along with because there are more single women than men and any boyfriend you break up with will go on to have a fabulously happy marriage with another, less picky, woman.

The problem with modern women is that we’re all just too fussy. We have an incredible sense of entitlement and unrealistic expectations of happiness. And what’s to blame? Feminism.

We simply must forget about our childhood fantasies and be realistic about who’s good enough for us to marry. I mean, marriage is the point of a century of woman’s struggle for equality, isn’t it?

As I read on, I became more and more livid. I mean, as a child I fantasised about myself with coiffed hair. Did I get to 23 in The Year 2000, discover it was still frizzy and shave it off? No, I tied it back!

What does my mother think of me if she thinks I need to read this book?

Just when I thought the book couldn’t get any more implausible, it did.

The author tells the story of her ‘friend’ Lisa. Lisa is 35 and single. She had a great boyfriend a few years ago. He really loved her. He said she was pretty. He called her in the middle of the day to say he loved her. But she didn’t feel he loved her enough. So she decided to test him.

One day, in the car, Lisa asked her boyfriend if something happened to her and she died, would he ever love another woman as much as he loved her. He said it would be different from the love he had for her.

“Different, as in you loved me more?” Lisa asked.
“Different as in…different,” her boyfriend said.

Wrong answer boyfriend! Lisa broke up with him after that because she didn’t feel he loved her enough. She wanted to be with someone who would be “absolutely crazy” about her.

This is not a dating problem. This is a mental health problem. Can you imagine anyone getting “absolutely crazy” over a woman who hounds a man about what he’d do if she died young? An absolutely crazy man, maybe, but nobody sane, surely? The absolutely crazy part falls squarely on Lisa’s doorstep in my humble opinion, which incidentally doesn’t count because I am 33 and single.

The author puts Lisa’s story into the book as an example for all of us of what not to do. What not to do, in my irrelevant opinion, is to let this woman loose on the streets. Instead of telling us that this friend is normally considered reasonable (by whom, I would like to know?) she should telling us about her efforts to get Lisa committed for severe self-obsession.

And then, just to make matters worse, a Hindu meal arrived in my row. And for whom would it be for, I hear you ask? None other than Ms Newly-Engaged sitting next to me, flashing her stupid ring around like a glow stick. Yes, that’s right, the white, blonde American woman. She did not eat a morsel of her Hindu meal when it arrived. No, she waited almost a full half-hour until her scrawny fiance’s meal to be placed in front of him to get stuck into hers. How sweet. I almost spewed all over them.

I ate my meal in silence and reflected on the relationships I’d had with men. Mum obviously thought I broke up with people unnecessarily. She obviously thought I was some kind of nutcase on a voyage of self-destruction.

Maybe it was true that in my 20s I judged the men interested in me a little too quickly. Mum maintains, to this day, that I broke up with someone for having rosy cheeks. I don’t remember the exact reason I broke up with that particular person, but it definitely was not for having rosy cheeks.

There were some men she barely knew and loved, and some she never knew and hated. Of course, she always loved the nice guys and hated the creeps. Even from all the way over there, she could tell the ones who loved me and the ones who didn’t. But I love to have my heart broken. If it’s not unrequited, it’s not love in my book.
This is obviously the reason she’s bought me the book. She thinks I should stick it out with the rosy-cheeked guys and steer clear of the self-obsessed ones. But how can I make myself feel something I don’t feel? How can I, for the first time in my life, find rosy cheeks attractive when I’ve always liked dark, hairy men with cheeky grins?

My brain hurt and I was grateful to hear over the PA: “Cabin crew, prepare for landing.”

It was only Bangkok but it would allow me to stretch my legs, lose the losers next to me for an hour and stop thinking about marrying men I don’t love.

I walked around the terminal wondering why every airport looked the same. If I’d been dropped in here unaware, would I know I was in Bangkok? Probably not. Was it necessary for every airport in every city to have that sterile, banal atmosphere that told nothing of the city itself? Chain restaurants, the same perfumes, make-up, alcohol and tobacco.

It would be nice to have someone to talk to in stopovers instead of wandering around aimlessly, feeling depressed about the effect of globalisation on the airport experience. Was this a reasonable thing to feel depressed about, I wonder? I felt like I was losing perspective fast and I didn’t know if it was the flight or the book.

I made my way to my departure gate. While feeling a little dishevelled, at least I’d brushed my teeth, changed my knickers and stretched. And the depression about airport banality had at least taken my mind off my husbandless state and that awful, awful book, even if only briefly.

I stood in the queue staring high up into huge glass walls that reflected the rows of seats beneath into infinity. It was a beguiling sight. The girl next to me was taking photos of it. I turned to look at her, maybe ask if I could see the result, and that’s when I saw him.

He was standing in the queue reading the Harvard Business Review. Just casually reading along while crawling slowly forward like the rest of us.

The Harvard Business Review? This guy is perfect for me!

I worried quickly about my book. Was it on show? I could not be seen to be reading this book in front of a potential future husband. I should have a copy of the Economist or something, even though I have never spent a penny buying the Economist in my life. Why don’t I have a copy of a good magazine, I worried? The New Yorker would do it, and I’ve spent lots of cents buying that over the years.

He wasn’t my type, look-wise. He was tall and thin and blonde. I go for dark men who are usually a little short (you can’t have everything – dark and handsome without the tall had always seemed like a reasonable compromise to me). But I don’t care, do I? Tall and blonde. Who cares? I can live with that! I’ve read the book! The most important thing is that he is reading the Harvard Business Review thereby indicating intelligence: my one-and-only criteria (I could live without humour if it meant never having to read a self-help book on marriage again).

Maybe this is a sign? Mum getting me this book, and forcing me to think - for eight hours straight – about my attitude to men and marriage. It made me realise that I can compromise! Who cares about dark hair and foreign accents? The most important thing is to be able to hold an intellectual conversation! To be able to learn things from my boyfriend and to be able to teach him things too. I would be able to teach him all about the things I read in the Guardian and the New Statesman. I do subscribe to the Economist’s podcasts. I bet he reads the Economist. I’m sure it’s a good publication despite its capitalist rapture. I am sure we would get on well, even if we didn’t agree on everything. Who wants to agree on everything? I have no problem arguing about politics. In fact, I love it. (See how reasonable I am?)

I gathered up the stray strands of hair around my face and re-braided it. I put on some lipgloss. I pulled my leggings up, smoothed out the t-shirt beneath my jumper. I turned slowly, casually to face him.

He was still reading the Harvard Business Review.

I turned around to face the front again. I waited as long as I could. I turned slowly, casually to face him.

He was still reading the Harvard Business Review.

Is it that interesting? Well, anyway, now that I knew this was meant to be, I was sure I would be seated near him. I mean, what else could all this mean?

We got our passports checked and moved into the lounge. I found a seat and just as I sat down, he walked past. He looked for a seat but there wasn’t one so he carried on. He definitely came toward me in order to sit next to me.

I blushed, my heart pounded. I tried to calm down, and then, when I did, I stood up. I looked out across the crowd and there he was, across the other side of the lounge, looking at me!

I blushed, my heart pounded, I sat back down.

They called my row and as they did I saw him stroll into the jetway and disappear. I tried to catch up to him, but the crowd was too thick. Oh well, I was sure he would be sitting near to me on the plane. He had to be. It had to be that way.

I got to my seat, shoved my bag in the overhead compartment and sat down all under a distressed pretense of casualness. I tried to act as I would if I wasn’t just about to meet my possible future husband.

He was nowhere to be seen.

My eyes darted frantically, tragically up and down each aisle. I used three different toilets within half an hour. He was nowhere. Disappeared. Phumph. Into thin air.
So I finished the book. And hated it even more. I thought about when I was 9 and what I dreamed about. And then I thought about now. I didn’t have neat hair, I wasn’t a lawyer. I didn’t care. OK, I am kind of disappointed that I don’t travel business class but all the rest I could take or leave. I like my life. I like my freedom to freelance and not answer to anybody. I would hate to work 80 hours a week for a corporate law firm. All those things I dreamed about; I don’t care they didn’t come true. So why is the romantic aspect of my life so depressing?

It can’t be because of what the book says. It can’t be because I am unwilling to give up my dreams of my fantasy husband. I never had a fantasy husband. I still don’t!
And what if that is it?

What if the precise reason I am not married is because I never dreamed about it? Perhaps, in order to get married, you have to want to get married?

Do I want to get married? Or is this just what everybody else wants? Apparently Mum wants me to get married, if I’ve taken the hint from the book with proper insight. I do want to have children. I would like to have a boyfriend I loved and who loved me and wanted to share things with me, like a child and political discussions.
But marriage? I’m not so sure.

I hated the person I’d become on this flight.

As I heaved my bag off the baggage carousel in Heathrow airport, I spyed the tall, blonde, thin man who was briefly my potential future husband.

Thank God for that poor man he was not seated anywhere near me. Who knows what I was likely to do under the influence of doilies, confetti and my mother’s expectations?
I know a century of woman’s struggle for equality does not boil down to the achievement of an OK marriage, but it shouldn’t boil down to torturing each other either.

I like my life. I don’t like that book. I do understand that you can take some, if not all, advice from people who love you. And for that reason, I will never, ever break up with a man for having rosy cheeks again. In fact, if I happen to meet one, well then, I’ll buy him a glass of red and ask him his thoughts on proportional representation.