Wednesday, February 23, 2005

10 things I hate about You (Thatcher, that's You)

I'll admit it was quite hard to narrow it down to just ten, but in the interests of space and time here is an eclectic mix of things I have gleaned from my MA reading (and are entirely irrelevent to my essay, so I'm getting my rant over with so I can be "impartial" in my coursework.)

1.In the month I was born unemployment reached 3 million for the first time since the Great Depression. (NB the ironic slogan "Labour Isn't Working")
2. In 1980 the Miners' Union had around 180,000 members. Now it has less than 5,000.
3. She allowed council tenants to buy their council houses BUT didn't replace them: Net capital spending on housing was cut by 52% in cash terms between 1979 and 1984.
4. She was the main reason David Shepherd never became Archbishop of Canterbury. (She refused to work with him, having criticised "Faith in the City" as being Marxist without even reading it.)
5. Having said the state should not intervene where people can look after themselves, she then introduced Section 28.
6. Under Thatcher the poorest fifth of families became poorer than they had been 10 years earlier.
7. She put VAT on the Live Aid record (created because the UK, then the world's third largest economy, could have single-handedly sorted out the crisis in Ethiopia but chose not to.)
8. She stopped our school milk (actually I hate milk, but it seems to be the one everyone else remembers.)
9. In a television interview, when asked who she would most like to be if she could be anyone in the world, she said she would be Mother Teresa (because obviously Thatcher's record with the underpriviledged and poverty-stricken was spotless.)
10. She is a heartless, miserable, selfish, conniving, arrogant, two-faced, patronising, sanctimonious cow.

But I'll tell you what made me laugh: I was in Waterstones looking for a biography, and Thatcher is next to Trotsky on the shelves.

Px

Friday, February 18, 2005

Let's Talk About Sex

If you type my name into Google, I've discovered that, amongst other irrelevent snippets of student politics, you still get this rather bizarre conference paper from the Sex and Sexuality Critical Issues conference 2004. Enjoy!

http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ci/sexuality/s1/mackwood%20paper.pdf

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Bad Poetry

I am not You
I fail before I start
I cannot be
Myself

I cannot see
the Beauty in all Things
just as they are
or might be

I cannot love
with unquestioning Love
nor give without
Receiving

I cannot sleep
and dream unfettered Dreams
in case the dreams
go wrong

I cannot know
the Truth unless I know
it to be true
or Not

I cannot cry
pure, unaffected Tears
(nor have I dared
til now)

I cannot grieve
for You without You there
to comfort me
and guide

I cannot rest
I can't forgive the Past
for what it did to You
and does

I cannot bear these things
I cannot find...
I cannot...
I...

* * *

I am not You
but if I were I'd thank
God every day
for Me
as I thank Him for You

What the hell are "unfettered dreams"?!

Monday, February 14, 2005

The Government Knows Who You Are!!!

...which is ironic, since it's more than I do. At some point in the near future I will be posting a play (or rather bits of a play) up here called "Hell and High Tide" (it's a line from a Smiths song so alternative suggestions will be very warmly welcomed!) You are of course welcome to ignore it, in fact ignoring it will probably be a good bet. But the background to it is...

This year the Government, in its infinite wisdom, put forward proposals to change the adoption system. At the moment, adopted people can trace family members but not vice versa. Technically speaking... however, some manage to. The upshot is that under new proposals birth parents and relatives, however distant, of people put up for adoption are welcome to trace them, through an intermediary (the government insists this makes it ok). Roughly what happens is the intermediary contacts the adoption agency who are obliged to pass on the details of the adopted person. Then they contact the adopted person and asks them if they want contact (all very well but how do you say No and not let it bother you once someone's asked?!) But here's the best bit: if you do say no, it is "at the discretion" of the intermediary to pass on "non-identifying" information about the person who doesn't want contact. As an adopted person, quite frankly, that sucks. The lovely Margaret Hodge (what is it about politicians called Margaret? They should be banned) did reassure me, mind you, by telling me that they had "consulted widely" with interested parties. (My parents and myself are apparently not interested parties: the relevent consultation document, which we never got anyway, listed academics and social workers above even birth parents, then adoptees at the bottom.) I am quite happy to cling to the Brontean notion that my father was an Emperor of China and my mother an Indian Princess (even though I was born in Blackburn and have fair skin and insipid light-brown hair that keeps trying to turn blonde.) Perhaps I am a psychological misfit, but I have no desire to meet up with random people I've never even heard of and discover that I was unwanted/ruined someone's life/killed my mother/have relatives strewn across East Lancashire. Well, would you?

So...