Author Archives: rose22joh

About rose22joh

Busy working wife and mother, would-be novelist/screenwriter, European apologist, Christian, good at cakes and doing the voices for bedtime stories

Pondering Harry Potter

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Last week I saw the eighth and final Harry Potter film “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2“.  I strongly recommend you go and see it – this is one of the many official posters…

Having now seen all of them – and read all of the books, yes, despite being an adult – I wanted to stop for a minute and think about what makes Harry Potter so appealing.

1) Language
No matter the language you read Harry Potter in, the love of language is evident.
From the character names which so neatly fit the personalities to the place names, the background research into meaning is evident (witness the straight forward Madame Sprout the herbology teacher, or the more complex traitorous Malfoys – meaning bad faith in Norman French). Hogwarts itself sounds unpleasant and is beautifully translated in the French version to “Poulards” – a “poule” being both a chicken and a spot, and the “lard” element retaining the hoggish flavour of bacon.
The film vocabulary is beautiful too – from the bright simplicity and dodgy CGI of the first two films, the lights of Christmas and the darkness, mists and pounding music of the later films, Harry’s journey of growing up and his rites of passage are also articulated in a clear but entertaining way.
For me, it is the beauty of the words that draw the reader in. But what keeps them there?

2) A fantastical world
There are very few children these days who board a train and disappear to a school world without returning to their parents at the end of the day – boarding school itself is fantastical to the majority.
Throw in brooms, spells, a castle, and fantastical devices (mirror of Erised, time turners), animals (grindylows, boggarts, hippogriffs, not to mention the more mundane pet owls that deliver the post…) and you have an amazingly attractive world. Enid Blyton with magic and less racism.
It’ll be interesting to see if a love of Harry Potter moves into a love of wider sci fi and fantasy in Harry’s generation kids.

3) Love
The brilliant Mark Greene at the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity has blogged on the enduring theme of self-sacrificial love in the Harry Potter books, citing not just Lily Potter’s sacrifice for Harry (making him “the boy who lived”) but also Ron sacrificing himself during the chess game in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Snape’s journey,  as well as Harry’s own game changing action in the last film/ book.
He mentions too Dumbledore in the context of the father figure raising his son for death (rather like God in the bible).  But he doesn’t mention Dumbledore’s own self-sacrifice – saving Draco Malfoy from becoming a murderer by instructing Snape to take control at the critical moment, even though it speeds his own death.

4) Gender Equality -yes, even here
The Don’t Conform Transform blog has produced a neat overview of why the characters, and particularly the female characters in Harry Potter are different from the classical supporting role character roles allocated to women in other books and films.
Given JK Rowling was basically told to hide the fact that she was a woman in order not to alienate readers when the first book was published, this is a massive achievement, and another thing to love the series for.

5) Growing up
I read the first Harry Potter book quite late, in 1999.  I loved it so much, I bought a limited edition version for my then boyfriend and was one of the sad people up at midnight buying the Goblet of Fire (although in my defence, as a twenty-something it was at a station WH Smith at the end of a night out in London!).
Throughout the books, I’ve been Harry’s generation (more specifically I’ve been Hermione, as I imagine most girls are, particularly those that were a bit too clever and not the prettiest, though I’d hope for a bit better than to end up with Ron).
But in the last couple of films, I’ve felt a change in myself.  It is probably a facet of having a baby, you sort of take on a universal sense of motherhood.
In any case, I found that I was watching Harry, Hermione and Ron and worrying about them rather than cheering them on as they faced more and more dangerous situations.
And when a Weasley died (and I’m shocked that I can’t remember which – I had to use my outsourced-to-Google remote internet brain to check that it was Fred), I didn’t feel it as the loss of a friend as I felt it was in the book, but the loss of a child and the horror for the parents of having to carry on anyway.
Just as in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I found that I cried at what felt like inappropriate moments. For me, it is not the battle that triggers it, but the sure and certain knowledge in the preparations that there will be death to follow.  The scenes preparing for the defence of Hogwarts,  Professor McGonagall’s tiny moment of joy when she finally gets to do the “Piertotum Locomotor“  spell bringing the Hogwarts’ statues to life, those moments made me cry.  I hadn’t realised how much until I had to wash the mascara off afterwards!
And there was a moment in the slightly comical 19 years later coda when sensible-haircut Ginny and the others appeared, I turned to my friend and said “you do realise that’s us”.  Because like it or not, in a couple of years or so, it is.

So it’s not just those that were 10 or 11 when Harry Potter and Philosopher’s Stone came up that have grown up with Harry Potter.  While some of the books are a bit long, and as Mark Kermode pointed out in his review it did sometimes seem like Bloomsbury were afraid the magic would be lost if an editor were to prune a little, JK Rowling’s novels have been part of life – little islands of escapism, by turns enchanting and disturbing, encouraging reading and inspiring writing.

If you’re having withdrawal symptoms, I recommend Rick Riordan‘s Percy Jackson series – don’t be put off by the name similarity, the USA setting or the truly dreadful film adaptation of the first book “Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief”, if you want to learn your Greek mythology and be thoroughly thrilled and entertained this is a great place to go next.  There’s a 5-book series already complete and the second of the next series is due out this October.
And don’t forget, in September, there’s www.pottermore.com too…

We came, we saw, we swished!

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When we’re all tightening our belts, it’s time to make sure it’s one that makes us look fabulous…

So Saturday 23 July 2011 was our big day – The Big Swish!

Kent Feminista, the group of feminists I’ve joined, ran The Big Swish, a posh clothes swapping  event in aid of Stop the Traffik.  We also had a cake stall, a pledge wall and a children’s play area.  To help our guests feel glamorous, Sophie from Sophie@Ease in Tenterden offered mini hand, foot, head and back massages from a gleaming white gazebo.

The clothes swap itself went smoothly – most people brought more than one item, and were able to choose an armful of items they wanted in return.  In fact, people brought so many items that we were able to donate the remaining items to the Pilgrim’s Hospice. This felt appropriately feminist, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment.

 Why clothes swapping?
Well, we wanted to prove that feminism isn’t always about being cross about something, or just sitting round talking.  We wanted to do something useful.  Feminism’s interrelations with fashion are well documented (one of our number when interviewed for the local paper was asked if she’d burn a bra for the photo!) The stereotype feminist in the popular imagination is still 1970s: talk to five people about feminism and you’d be lucky not to have at least one mention dungarees…  But dungarees are not obligatory – we’d have been really surprised if there’s any available at the Big Swish!

As the focus on the Duchess of Cambridge/ Sam Cam/ Carla Bruni/ Michelle Obama’s clothes shows, fashion is politically important – the question is whether to oppose this – we are who we are and clothes shouldn’t matter – or to embrace it, recognising that women do care about these things and that feminism without the issues of interest to women is pointless.
After all, psychological studies show that well-fitting, good quality clothes boost happiness and confidence. As the makeover programmes on TV show, helping women feel good about themselves can change their lives.

What’s more, we’ve all done it – bought the fantastic top in the sale that’s a size too small, and never quite slimmed into it.   The Big Swish was a chance to swap clothes that don’t make you feel good – the dress that’s never really fitted, the too short trousers – for something that you love instead.

In tough economic times, the wardrobe of clothes we don’t wear is not just a mess, it’s a waste of money.  As well as being good for wellbeing and your purse, clothes swapping is the green option too – someone else using clothes means that the world’s resources aren’t wasted and you don’t end up sending that unworn shirt to landfill.

Why Stop the Traffik?
Kent Feminista are a group of Kent based feminists who are interested in finding creative ways of promoting equality for women and supporting women in our communities who are subject to the many inequalities present in our society.
Feminism is about establishing and defending equal political, economic and social rights and equal opportunities for women. It’s not just that women need to be more confident – some of this is about redefining what’s normal in terms of work, caring and household responsibilities for both men and women, and obviously that can’t be done without men getting behind the ideas too.

As we know, there are numerous variations on feminism and they are not all united on views on some of the big themes like abortion.  However there are some universal issues such as political representation and equality and human dignity on which we all agree.  So our fundraising focus this year is Stop the Traffik, the campaign to prevent the sale of people, protect anyone that has been trafficked, and to prosecute the traffickers.
This is very much a feminist cause: feminism is about how we interact with each other fairly rather than treat each other as things to be bought and sold, whether that’s selling ourselves by lap dancing, or each other through trafficking and modern day slavery.

We’re going to look at this in more detail soon, but just quickly, what did we learn that can help you set up your own Big Swish?

  • The style of event requires a premeditated decision to attend, not passing traffic and that means advertising.  Our posters were great and we got them out to the places we knew would take them plus a few more original locations (shop staff rooms in town).  We used Facebook, Twitter, got an article in the local newspaper, bits in a church newsletter, did what we could to tell everyone.  And so we did get people we’d never met before choosing to come and take part!
  • We went for a Saturday when most people were likely to be available. Early evening, somewhere with an alcohol licence might also be good.
  • We charged £2 entry and allowed unlimited clothes donations.  This works but you could also consider £1 entry and 50p an item to swap to encourage really good quality items.
  • We of course ended up with loads left over, but took a decision to donate these to another charity, the Pilgrim’s Hospice.  Old age and caring are much overlooked areas of life (and also within the feminist movement), but given the propensity of the current elderly generation to be women, we should care. Old age is a feminist issue.
  • Having pamper treatments there gave a real feel of glamour – a definite recommendation for any future event.


Euro(w)s… Democracy versus Sovereignty

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Croesus Pyre urn – if only his money were available to the Government in Athens right now and not burned up…

A few thoughts from watching Greece…

If one sixtieth of the population turns out on the street (e.g. marching against the Iraq war), our recent experience in the UK is that this is not sufficient for our government to change its policy.

There are riots, anti-cuts camps etc. in the streets of Athens.  The Greek Prime Minister has sacrificed his Finance Minister for someone that the Daily Mail tells me is “a populist” whose biggest achievement to date was delivery of the 2000 Olympic Games along with the crippling expense and squandered legacy that when with them.
But will the Greek government change its policy requiring more austerity measures?

I very much doubt it.
For much the same reasons.

There is understandably a lot of news coverage of the unpopular measures that the Greek government is going to need to take in order not to default and thereby avoid a financial crisis worse than 2008.

Much of the coverage has chosen to put the street protests in Athens in the context of the “Greece as cradle of democracy” story.

The question is whether the Greek government can or should decide that they don’t need to make the cuts being talked about (including 20% cuts to services and jobs in the public sector).  Given there is already 16% unemployment, this scares an enormous number of people there. According to Professor Peter Morici, writing in UPI:

Greece is slipping from a liquidity crisis into downright insolvency. Bond investors are demanding yields 20 percentage points higher on Greek debt than on comparable German debt. Rolling over existing bonds, as those come due, will be prohibitively expensive and the collapse of Athens’ finances seems inevitable.

But even if not inevitable, could Greece just be allowed to declare itself bankrupt? Could it default, if it were the will of its people?

This is where the difference between democracy and sovereignty comes into play.

Wikipedia defines democracy as:

a form of government in which all citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal (and more or less direct) participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law. It can also encompass social, economic and cultural conditions that enable the free and equal practice of political self-determination.

There are concepts that sit alongside democracy, such as the rule of law and moral behaviour codes which require the honouring of commitments undertaken.

Wikipedia defines sovereignty as:

the quality of having supreme, independent authority over a geographic area, such as a territory. It can be found in a power to rule and make law that rests on a political fact for which no purely legal explanation can be provided. In theoretical terms, the idea of “sovereignty”, historically, from Socrates to Thomas Hobbes, has always necessitated a moral imperative on the entity exercising it.

While ancient Athenian democracy was direct democracy (open to all men who had done their military service, but not to women, slaves, freed slaves, resident aliens etc.), modern democracy is generally representative democracy, with decision-making passed to elected representatives of the people on the basis of the greatest number of votes gained at democratic elections.

While the United Nations requires only that a State is sovereign by having effective and independent government within a defined territory, modern states are – needless to say – a bit more complicated than that.

Money is behind much of the complexity.  The money required for a state to operate is equally international, with each country’s balance sheet containing in addition to its citizens taxes loans from the private sector and other purchasers of gilts and bonds.

In a democracy, sovereignty is granted to the government by the people and actions are carried out by the government in their name.
But countries can be seen to give over some of their ability to act independently (sovereignty) to their financial creditors – the added finance available to the country being for the general benefit of the people of the nation.

Greece’s position as a sovereign nation is also in the twenty first century inter-connected world context.  In addition to the national we also have supranational (e.g. EU and euro) and international (e.g. UN, IMF) layers of governance, providing us with both responsibilities (defence, finance, market access, honouring of commitments) but also support (financial, market access, political and military).  This is made contractual through Treaties – pooling of sovereignty granted by the people to the government shared with others at supra- or international levels for the general benefit of the people of the nation.

The question is that old point of “no taxation without representation”.  In a bailout situation between states, it is not only the taxpayers of Greece who have a legitimate interest in how Greece handles its debts but the taxpayers of the countries providing the help via the IMF and the Eurozone… welcome to the complicated world we live in.

So who can legitimately tell a country what to do is indeed a bit more complicated.

There is talk of just “letting Greece default” and cutting Greece loose from the Euro.
This is not something to be flippant about.  While a Greece-with-Drachma could devalue its currency against others in a way that Greece-with-Euro cannot, Greek default could cause a shockwave across the economy in the way that Lehman Brothers collapsing did.

If the Greek government were to default, it would not only be Greece that was affected – in taking money from others, Greece is part of an inter-related global political and financial system.

Nor would it only be Eurozone countries affected – French, German and American banks in Greece’s market and with Greek government gilts and bonds would be hit directly. This would affect the network connections between banks (that’s the way in which banks hold national debts, lend to each other and buy and sell loans).

And while Eurozone countries would be hit because of the common currency they have with Greece and the money they have put up to keep it afloat, it would also because of the inter-relatedness of their economies.
If Greece has its debt restructured (i.e. it pays out on its debts at less than 100 cents to the euro), Eurogroup leader (and Luxembourg Prime Minister) Jean-Claude Juncker has already warned of the contagion effect and potentially bleak prospects for Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Italy and Belgium. Greek debt restructured would be the mark-to-market of other European countries’ national debts.  And as Norman Lamont pointed out a couple of days ago on Radio 4 – it would beg the question whether a Euro in Ireland, Portugal etc. was worth the same as one in Germany – and when that happens the Euro itself fails. No sensible person could want that.

While the UK is not part of the Euro, we are also bound into this.  The UK has loaned money to the Greek government – we’ve already done so as part of our IMF responsibilities and would have to do so again.  It’s part of the deal in our pooled sovereignty at  international level.  And in case we are telling ourselves we should just think national, we ourselves have had an IMF loan within my lifetime, so it is part of our international role and responsibility.  The wider interconnectedness of international finance means our banks and our pockets would be badly hit by a destablised Euro.

That said, it seems the £95bn loan last year didn’t help because the cuts hit any prospect of financial growth and the markets don’t want to loan money to Greece.  Evidence of this is that Greek government bonds are already at 30% return rates (compared with 3% for the UK and 5% for Spain).
It remains to be seen whether throwing more money (another £196bn?) is enough to tip the balance or simply good money after bad.

But is there anything else that can be done?
In May 2011 at a conference in Lisbon hosted by Left Block and GUE/NGL, Unitarian Left at the European Parliament, French researcher Benjamin Coriat proposed an alternative to IMF bailouts:

  • the European economy should “break with financial markets”, imposing “conducting audits on public debts so that can be identified who owes and what owes and so we would see that after all creditors have to pay more than borrowers“;
  • The “European Central Bank must buy government bonds on the primary market in order to lower interest rates and leave the rating agencies out of the game”;
  • This would be accompanied by establishing a fair and balanced tax base in order to “reverse the counter-revolution” in which the rich get tax breaks;
  • there should be changes to macro-economic coordination in Europe towards achieving a balance between the centre and the periphery because “Germany can not only take the benefits of Europe and leave the disadvantages to the others”.

But this is in the realms of fantasy – and I can only assume that there were neither Germans (who are pretty annoyed with bailing everyone else out) nor anyone with a grasp of the sums of money involved in actually doing any of that in the audience?
Realpolitik also suggests that if the Euro is not seen to be functioning brilliantly, politicians are unlikely to want to grant more powers to the ECB.

Are there any other ideas out there?  Well, if Greece were a company, others would be sniffing round to buy it up at a bargain price rather than bail it out with the current management.  But happily for democracy, the crossover between capitalism and politics has happily not gone this far yet!

Anything else? American (and some German) economists propose a strong-economy Euro (e.g. Austria, Finland, Germany and the Netherlands), cutting loose weaker economies (e.g. Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain) for the good of all.  I can’t help thinking that one would go down particularly bad with the French…

But one thing is clear – the Greek government cannot give in to the street protesters.
Well, of course they can – but they’d need to think through the global consequences of doing so.
But if the street protesters want to change the government for another, democratically via the ballot box, that is of course their right.  Storming the parliament is not the way to do it.
But in a democracy, sometimes what is for the best for the people overall is not what is going to be popular.
Sometimes we have to elect people to do what we individually could not.
And honouring our international obligations matters, whether we’re debtor or creditor on the ask.

 

 

Hungary for wider Europe…

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(image copied from the excellent http://www.runawayjane.com/first-impressions-of-budapest/ until I can download ours)

Jó napot!  We’re back from a long weekend in Budapest.  I know, leaving it late in the day for the Hungarian Presidency but since I stopped working full time on EU stuff, it has been increasingly hard to visit each country at Presidency time.

Arriving at Budapest airport we were immediately impressed with the efficiency (and price!) of the taxis from the kiosk there.  The half hour trip to the Buda hills took us through the city and across the Danube.
In the last few years I’ve been lucky to travel to several of the newer EU member states.  There’s a lot of difference, and a lot of similarity in the mix of the beautiful past and the Soviet past architecturally.  Like many cities Budapest is a mix of old and new, elegant rococo confections and bunion-topped towers alongside utilitarian boxes and brutalist concrete.   The Buda hills felt a bit like a more verdant Hollywood – they share that orangey-yellow colour on the Spanish-style villas, the beautiful, massive mansions and mansion blocks so at odds with the tiny tenements in the suburbs of the city.

We spent our three days on three different things.
The first day, in 30 degree heat and high humidity, we took our toddler on reins around old Buda. This was a mistake – we ended up carrying him for most of the time.  Definitely take a pushchair even if it uses up some of your flight luggage allowance.
We caught a bus to Moscow Square (Moszkva tér, which has just been renamed in Parliament as Kálmán Széll tér) - a weird transport hub with tatty 1970s kiosks at the centre, crumbling concrete steps and the older, nicer buildings around the outside branded with the universally familiar American corporate logos of McDonalds and KFC.  I liked the fountain and the plastic bottle-and-chicken-wire-filled plaster of Paris seating blobs though.  We though the underground loos – clean, thirty florints cheaper than most, take the prescribed number of sheets off  the communal loo roll at the pay station – was hilarious and very ex-communist in approach.

We walked a bit randomly – we had our map but our hot, tantruming toddler refusing to walk and instead of taking the short walk to the UNESCO protected castle district we ended up down on the riverfront directly opposite the gothic splendor that is the Hungarian Parliament building.  We had a coffee (and a toddler nap) while we found our bearings.  On the way to the castle we found Batthyány Square which includes an old train station that has been converted into a shopping mall and yummy pastries are sold in the entrance hall, and the St Anne’s church – a hidden gem of Buda.
We didn’t visit the royal palace but instead headed for Halászbástya (Fisherman’s Bastion) the light grey stone turreted walls around the Matthias church which look like castles should look if designed by little girls with a craving for real life Disney.  There’s a cafe up one turret if you fancy a drink rather than paying to walk the walls and the views are outstanding.
Amazingly, the steps there are in really good condition and perfectly spaced for climbing in the humidity of a Budapest summer.  The same cannot be said of the crumbling concrete steps and walkway at Moscow Square.
Oh yes, and to stamp your tickets on the bus, the manual ticket punch requires that you put your ticket in the top of the black plastic hole and tip the whole black bit towards you. The electronic ones don’t require you to pull them about at all!

On day two, we borrowed a pushchair, crossed the river on the tram and went into Pest.  We got out at Oktogon (junction of Nagykörút -Grand Boulevard- and Andrássy út – Budapest’s Champs Elysees).  Given that during the Nazi era, Oktogon was named Mussolini Square it seems fitting that the Terror Museum was located nearby.  Having been to the Latvian equivalent a couple of years ago, I knew pretty much what to expect there, but it was still moving.
The museum dedicates roughly equal time to the Nazi occupation and the Soviet era despite the different lengths of each period.  There is a massive black tank in the building’s internal courtyard, and the building itself is significant, having been both the Hungarian Nazi headquarters and used by the Communists.  Taking the stairs or the lift, you walk through a room of exhibits and film footage straight into a Hungarian Arrow/Nazi dining room complete with model in brown uniform, blackshirts on the wall behind you and crockery bearing the Nazi insignia.  Along with the wartime how-to film for correct wearing of your official uniform, Soviet-era listening equipment, the video testimonials of ordinary people and the interactive map of the gulags with prisoners’ belongings in cones, the biggest impact comes from the basement level.  It only takes a moment to realise, but the cells and chambers down there are real – prisoners of the regimes lived, were tortured and died there.
The specially composed music adds to the feeling of terror and you pretty much just want to get out.  The point is I guess that what is being come to terms with is that this was not just two occupations of Hungary, but occupations with which many ordinary Hungarians were complicit.  Confronting the past in this way is part of the healing process.

By way of celebrating capitalist freedom, we walked down Andrássy út which is lined with designer names.  We popped into Alexandre, the big bookshop, and admired its cafe’s ornate ceiling, but headed on down to the square by the National Bank of Hungary so that toddler could play on the play park and run through the dancing fountains there in his pants.  This is one of the top things for children to do in Budapest!  There was also a free music festival going on all over Budapest, and every new area we visited seemed to have something different going on.
We ate at TG Italiano – really lovely oregano bread, very good pizzas and wild boar pasta – but I’d steer clear of the lethal cocktails there if its a baking hot lunchtime…  We also visited the St Stephen’s Basilica, carrying the pushchair up the steps but while we were lucky to see a wedding taking place there, it limited our viewing of the inside of the basilica.  Heading down to Fashion Street we bought ice cream and then braved taking the pushchair on the metro system.  Wow – that was definitely a blast from the past.

On day 3, we pottered a little more – ice cream sundaes and Sajtos Pogácsa (cheese scones) at a local cafe, then a trip on the world famous children’s railway.  Another relic of the Communist era, this is a real railway service operated by 10-14 year old children (under adult supervision!) – we caught a heritage service with a little blue and white engine.
We had to prise toddler out or the driver’s cab once he realised you were allowed to go and see the train being driven!
At the end of the line, we caught a tram back down to a rather lovely little cocktail bar called Majorka – a nice way to round off the day (and just remember that just because the cocktails are a quarter of the price of those in London, you can’t drink four times as many!)

I was fascinated by the Angol shops – shops selling second hand clothes from English high street stores.  The story is that they came about in the immediate aftermath of the soviet era, when British charities sent clothes to Hungary and these became so popular that a secondary clothing market grew up around the surplus.
I also found the language almost impenetrable - not completely true, as a linguist I could pick out how sentencess were constructed and (almost) ordered my peach flavour ice cream correctly… apparently there can be at least eight different pronunciations of each vowel! I picked up “Jó napot” for hello and “Szia” (pronounced see ya and used like ciao) easily, but “Köszönöm” for thank you was hard and I would have been completely stumped by menus – I liked “Uditorial” as the word for soft drinks and guessed that “Naranča” was (like naranja in Spanish) oranges but “gombas” turns out to be mushrooms not prawns! – so we were lucky to be staying with friends and instead negotiating supermarkets and shops where a minimal amount of mime was necessary.

But visiting Budapest again reminded me why the European Union is important, not as a force of tyranny as it is presented in the UK, but as a protector of freedom, liberty and a way of ensuring that we never again see discrimination and oppression as a political force and neighbour turning against neighbour.
Visiting Prague, Riga, Bratislava and now Budapest shows me that when these things happen, its not that the people it happens to are somehow different to us, they are us.  It could have been us.  It’s why we should welcome Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and others that want to join and share our values.

And while we didn’t see everything we’d want to, we did a lot of exploring. I’d definitely go back to Budapest.

Doctor What next?

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So  we guessed, did you?
A few thoughts before the second half of the series starts in the autumn – I’m not interested in the “I watched the filming and overheard X” spoilers, more in clues already dropped in the shows and in the official teasing by the crew and cast.

The problem with internet commentary on Doctor Who is that half is from old-Who obsessives that want old characters to link in.  In the past few weeks I’ve read about Omega, the Valeyard, the Rani etc. etc. even though I’ve absolutely no idea who they are really – I was old enough to watch Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy’s Doctors in my childhood but most of the mythology stuff seem to be from earlier incarnations.  But I think this might miss the point – the new series doesn’t have to just rely on the past for characters.  For example, when there was a reference to another Timelord in the episode “The Doctor’s Wife”, it was the Corsair – a completely new one!  The much trailed “old friend with a new face” was the TARDIS herself.

Equally some want too strong reinforcement of links to the Eccleston/ Tennant /Russell T Davis era Doctor Who and keep asking for the return of the likes of Captain Jack or Jenny the Doctor’s daughter.  Never mind the filming or family commitments of the actors that played those characters – they are simply not necessary.
Think – Jack enabled the doctor never to fire a gun and has a sucessful spin off series now unconnected to Doctor Who itself.  The Eleventh Doctor has River Song and Rory as weapons-wielders, even Amy shoots guns and flings swords around.
Jenny enabled the Tenth Doctor to talk to Donna about having been a father – which can hardly have been a revelation to the audience (William Hartnell’s Doctor travelled with his grand daughter Susan).  But it is not the Doctor’s daughter but Amy’s that is the focus of the current series’s storyline.  Jenny got to zoom off into space, leaving the door open for a spin-off if the character had been popular enough, or a reappearance if one is ever needed.

Then there are the reviews from people who clearly weren’t listening or watching.
All the stuff about how did he know Madame Vastra the Jack-the-Ripper-eating Silurian who brings a Silurian army on board Demon’s Run to help?  Well, if you watched it, she told us herself – he found her in the underground system of Victorian London taking revenge on the workers for the death of her sisters.  No mystery, but a cool character.
The Stephen Moffatt version of Doctor Who is intelligent TV – the plots are not linear but are always revealed but you need to think about what you’ve seen and there’s plenty to talk about between episodes.

OK, enough of that.  So what are the loose ends?

1) Who is River Song?

  • Yep, River Song is Amy and Rory’s daughter.  ”Melody Pond” was a massive clue, and once you threw in the comment from the dying Idris/TARDIS in “The Doctor’s Wife” that “the only water in the forest is the River” it was clear that – linguistically at least – River was going to be something to do with Melody.
  • She appears to be the Doctor’s wife too if the kissy kissy faces the Doctor pulled at the revelation are anything to go by.  They have already kissed once from the Doctor’s perspective, and for the last time from hers.
  • But what would be written on the cot in untranslatable Galifreyan?  It couldn’t be “Melody Pond/ River Song” – it was old. But hold on – timey wimey wrong order stuff…
    May be names in Galifreyan combine both parents names and she’s the mother of his future children? Or Susan’s mother?
    But equally it could have been the Doctor’s real name, in which case she’d have known it in “Silence in the Library” when she meets the Doctor for her final/ his first time.
    Or she may have known it already if she’s spent a long time with him in the TARDIS?
  • She appears to be able to regenerate: how?
    Well, there are still those little hints that she might be the Doctor’s child in some way.  Amy saying to baby Melody that her father is the last of his kind then clarifying she means Rory “the last centurion”, the Doctor answering “because it’s mine” then clarifying he means the Galifreyan cot… And we’ve had build up to the idea that Amy might actually love the Doctor more than Rory – despite the events of “Amy’s Choice” last season where she realises its Rory and always has been.  In “The Impossible Astronaut”, when in the clutches of the Silents, Amy cries for the Doctor specifically – and only possibly for Rory – the “stupid face” stuff is ambiguous and the pay off unconvincing.
    Stephen Moffatt says in Doctor Who Magazine “You’ll see The Doctor’s life change forever. You will gasp at the true nature of his relationship with Amy and cry out in horror as Rory Williams stumbles to the brink of a tragic mistake.”  Given that that relationship at present appears to be him being her son-in-law, I’m not really gasping, so there must be more to come.
    The whole Time Lord DNA thing that the army were looking for in Melody looks a promising strand of confusion and potentially tragedy in the second half of the series.  While this was explained by the “time head”/ mother’s intuition comment that the Doctor referred back to when discussing the DNA issue with his ragtag army friends, where being conceived in the time vortex might have done to Melody’s genes what billions of years did to the race that became Timelords, neither Amy nor Rory were there. Will Rory conclude that Melody is not his?
  • The Doctor heads off because he says he knows where Melody/ River is… We know too – she’s in a children’s home taken over by the Silence in 1969, then in a New York alleyway six months later. But there are so many things that are going to happen to her – not least being swallowed by a Silents-made spacesuit, possibly being in the forest and regenerating and possibly killing the Doctor…
  • Does River also answer what those sub-TARDISes (in “The Lodger” and in “The Impossible Astronaut/ Day of the Moon”) are for – for her to pilot as an alternative Timelord?

2) How will Silence fall?

  • Anyone else think the Silents fell too easily?  Manipulating humankind from the beginning, even organising for the moonlandings so that a spacesuit would be made but vanquished with subliminal messaging during the moonlanding?
  • We also don’t know how or why they blew up the TARDIS at the end of Series 5 leading to all worlds collapsing.
  • Do Madame Kovarian and the Demon’s Run asteroid army work for the Silents? Building the little girl as a weapon to destroy the famous, great warrior against whom the world must be protected…
  • The thing is, we think of the Doctor as a good man, a fun man, a kind man.  And the character is all of those things.
    He is willing to give a chance to the new species he encounters – New Humans created in the New Earth cat-run hospital, the human-timelord-dalek hybrids, the Flesh Gangers he stablisises.  But he is also ready to exterminate the last dalek in Manhattan, the vampire fish (Saturnynians), even the Timelords themselves, for the greater good of the universe.
  • Other series of Doctor Who have always had the Doctor able to slip in anywhere unknown and disappear before the consequences of events have to be handled.  This series and the last are different.  Fear of the Doctor – the great warrior able to change the world without spilling a drop of blood, the most dangerous being in the universe against whom an all-worlds alliance formed in “The Pandorica Opens” – the Doctor famous throughout all worlds for nearly a thousand years was a totally different perspective.  It fitted the darker Tenth Doctor from “Waters of Mars”, perhaps less aware of his power but completely unaware of the impact he has.
  • It was a neat trick too to have Lorna Bucket – her role was vital in both explaining who River Song is and that the darker doctor, living up to the “oncoming storm”, is a warrior.  It also sets up a forest-based story for the future in which a younger version may feature.

3) Does the Doctor die?

  • Killing the Doctor dead, mid-regeneration, gives us the choice of the series ending when Matt Smith leaves, a time reboot (again) or somehow getting a second Doctor.
    As soon as we saw the Flesh, we knew that the Doctor that dies for good in “The Impossible Astronaut” didn’t have to be the real Doctor.
    Of course, the Doctor is at pains to stress that the Flesh Gangers are real – and that the other Doctor is also the Doctor.  Interesting too that Amy trusted the Flesh Doctor more: was it prejudice on her part because of the shoes (which they had swapped)?  Or was it because she was also of the Flesh and there was a familiarity between them from that?
  • Does River kill him?  All we could see is the Astronaut that emerges from the lake.  We know that Melody is intended by her kidnappers to become a weapon and brought up to kill the Doctor – and that River is in the Storm Cage for killing “the best man she ever knew”, a good man.
  • Is the Doctor a good man? It is clear he’s a just man – think about the Sontaran nurse doing penance for his clone batch and the Family of Blood punishments. But he warns Madame Kovarian that she doesn’t want to see why he sets rules for himself.  The good man, the best man River ever knew is Rory. May be she killed her own father instead.

4) Oh my God, they killed Rory!

On that point, a few thoughts about Rory and Amy.

  • Is Rory still an auton?  No.  The Doctor used psychology to make him confront his potential fears, access the determination of 2000 years as a centurion guarding the love of his life (memories there behind a door in his head, he said), and wearing Roman clothes enabled him to go onboard the 12th Cyber fleet.
  • Is Rory dead, or going to die?  I think both he and Amy may do so before the series ends at Christmas this year.  Why?  We’ve been prepared many times now for Rory’s death: death-by-old-person, death-by-Silurean, death-by-total-eradication-from-existence, death-by-universe-reboot, death-by-FBI, death-by-old-age-madness, death-by-drowning…
  • Amy’s role is also surely almost done – she was an amazing child growing up in a house next to a crack in space and time which in itself could surely have affected Melody’s DNA. Now she’s a mother – and you can’t have a family with a small child on the TARDIS.  But we don’t know how the Silents got the glowing recorder out of Amy’s hand (easier to remove from the Flesh?), how many days she was gone (was that the real Amy with the Silents?) The Doctor says she was taken some time ”before America” – really? Or did he just notice then.

While many commentators have gone on about a gay agenda (the gay, married anglican marines and the silurian and her maidservant being the latest additions to this), far more interesting is the anti-faith agenda.  Think about it: the Headless Monks don’t need a head as their minds cannot be changed and they are heart over head.  And the religious army thing?  Moffat says the national armies of today are the aberration if you look at human history where they have mainly been religious (well, may be) – but more importantly the religious army is both the enemy of the Doctor and guardian of the prison where River is kept (perhaps she kills Rory when he was going to kill the Doctor, hence making her the enemy of the army?).  There’s an episode in the second half of this season called the God Complex.  Can’t wait to see what’s in that as there is apparently a minotaur and David Wailliams as a mole…

While Stephen Moffat’s series of Doctor Who have been criticised as too dark and too complex, I think it is true that the clues are there – they are just delivered so fast and so staccato that it is sometimes hard to catch them on a first viewing.  And that’s the perfect excuse to watch episodes more than once :)

I’m going to be hugely, embarrassingly wrong about all this in the autumn, aren’t I?

Banking on a better system?

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As DG Markt Director General Jonathan Faull writes to the FT about the lobbying of Basel III and European Commission, and politicians and protesters with their “Banker Wanker” posters (and worse) blame the banks alone for the recent crisis and current financial climate…
the more windows get smashed or buildings occupied… I just wonder whether any of us really know what banks are for?

Put in really basic terms, banks basically do two things: they take in short term deposits and give out long term loans.  This is known as a “maturity transformation”.
But it seems that the major issues that caused banks to collapse were inability to properly manage this basic maturity transformation:

1)  running out of funding (like Northern Rock)
2) running out of cash (like Lehman Brothers)
3) inadequate risk management regarding quality of loans (primarily a problem in the USA).

We’ve heard a lot about the last bit, complex packages of bad debt and whatever.  Gordon Brown as PM blamed this third issue for the whole of the banking crisis.  But it is really quite simple: loans are things like mortgages, car loans, student loans, the sorts of everyday loan we can get our heads around.
Everything else is just a different way of packaging these up – e.g. as bonds to flog on the market.  That gives a different product which attracts a different sort of investor and therefore more money to be paid as interest, borrowed by those needing it etc.  Is this an inherently risky business?  Or is it the lack of transparency and understanding about what’s in the packages that’s risky?
I can’t help thinking it’s both the quality of the original loan and also management of the maturity transformation that are crucial here.

So banks borrow short and lend long.
Northern Rock basically seems to have run out of funding for its 25-year mortgages – for which it was borrowing a month at a time.  D’oh.
Lehmans, meanwhile, ran out of cash – a liquidity problem. As a bank you need to be able to pay up at all times.  Many deposits are repayable on demand, and banks have to assume they will be asked to do and if they can’t, the bank goes bust.
You can imagine Lord Sugar on The Apprentice shaking his head in disbelief that these simple concepts cannot be grasped by the self-proclaimed business experts standing before him.

While in the EU we were affected by the US sub-prime loans, unlike the US where these things were not really regulated, in the EU it was.  It’s not that banks don’t have capital standards – the existing Basel standards have been around for about 20 years.
So the Basel Convention and the European Commission are trying to design two metrics for the other two crisis causes to stop all this happening again.
There’s going to be a Lehmans Ratio – so that payments out can always be made for a month – and a Northern Rock Ratio (known as a Net Stable Funding Ratio) for a year’s funding.  And these new standards are being drawn up in just a couple of years.

Real care needs to be taken that the standards set are not so demanding that they will have a negative effect on the economy.
For example, one impact of the Northern Rock Ratio is that it reduces the amount of maturity transformation i.e. there’s more matching of assets against liabilities.  That means it is more difficult to fund long term.
Good, we might think – that means the wrong people won’t get loans.
But what about large scale infrastructure projects?  If we can’t fund them through banks, other sources of funding will need to be sought, such as the market.  And that brings a whole load of other insecurity…

While banker bashing is fun, it is not going to fix the system.  Nor will breaking up the banks fundamentally tackle this, merely making banking more expensive for consumers.  All these things really do is make it look as though the failure is distanced from the political decision making process – which of course it never can be.  Choosing not to act, failure to regulate or supervise effectively is a political decision just as much as choosing to do so.

The key question is whether our primary aim is to have processes for handling banks when they fail, or whether we should be focusing on building an economic system that doesn’t presuppose this.
As for the idea that if taxpayers don’t have to bail out the banks, we don’t have to pay, that’s to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of our economy.  If a bank fails and we pay for nationalising it through our taxes, it’s a visible cost.

But the overall increase in costs from politically attractive but economically risky metrics also affect us all – as shareholders, as mortgage borrowers facing increased interest rates or higher entry hurdles, as entrepreneurs with start-up needs or business owners looking to expand through loans, and crucially through our pensions.  Yes, you did read that right, reduced bank profits means reduced dividends which directly affect our pensions pots.
Ah, but not every one is affected, right? Mortgages, shares, workplace pensions… not everyone has them and this way the poorest don’t have to pay for the greedy bankers?  But given the lowest paid have been lifted out of tax, they wouldn’t have been hit that way anyway, so that’s just disingenuous.   We all pay.

And we shouldn’t, you may say.  Let the bankers pay!
Bankers get million pound bonuses!  Yep, some do.  In the UK, according to former City minister Paul Myners,  last year it was 5000 bankers out of a million people working in financial services.  Well, if we want to debate the inherent unfairness in pay and reward structures in our capitalist economist, and the value to the economy of farmers,  call centre workers, teachers -v- say, premiership footballers who merely kick a ball around a field for 90 minutes, that’s a whole other blog post.I think we need to differentiate between our sense of social injustice and convenient scapegoating of the bankers.

If we are to think about an economy that is about economic growth and not on bank failure,  then we need to move away from the assumption that nothing can be done and these things just happen – somehow bubbles that burst bringing down the economy are an inevitability.
Alan Greenspan had a mantra that it is cheaper and easier to mop up after an economic bubble bursts.   He’s been proved wrong.
What we really need is a more mature way of thinking about bubbles.
Bubbles are very rarely economy-wide.  So if it’s a property bubble, we need to have targeted measures aimed at deflating that sector.  How do we tell if there’s a bubble?  Loads of economic analysts argue over this, but essentially it’s a bit like pornography – almost impossible to pin down but you know it when you see it…

Is there a bubble at the moment?  Well, not easily seen.
But some food for thought – LinkedIn was recently valued at what equates to $100 a user.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve not put $100 into my LinkedIn use and would withdraw my details before seeing them sold – so unless some people are putting in thousands of dollars, I can’t see how that worth is derived.  Is this a new 1990s style internet bubble?   Who knows?

But will all this activity make the banking system less likely to fail in future? Don’t bank on it.

Faith and feminism: comrades or conflict? Part 1

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There was an interesting article in the Guardian last month showing that women that identified themselves as feminists were much less likely than women in general to identify themselves as belonging to a particular faith.  They were statistically more likely to identify as atheist or agnostic, and to be interested in female-centric paganism, or in alternative spirituality.

 

But the challenge put to me by feminist friends was how is it possible to be both feminist and Christian?  Or, as feminist writer Cath Elliott put it:

“Whether it’s one of the world’s major faiths or an off-the-wall cult, religion means one thing and one thing only for those women unfortunate enough to get caught up in it: oppression. It’s the patriarchy made manifest, male-dominated, set up by men to protect and perpetuate their power.”

So an attempt at answering that challenge.  There’s so much to say on this issue there may need to be more than one post…

1) Do we have a common understanding of what feminism is?
It is fairly clear that Cath Elliott believes that third wave feminists should have no truck with religion.  This is an old argument, and there’s pages of resources which gives an idea of how long the place of women in Christianity has been under debate.

But feminism is not itself a faith system with a common set of beliefs.  Wikipedia defines feminism as:

“a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women’s rights. Much of feminism deals specifically with the problems women face in overcoming social barriers, but some feminists argue that gender equality implies a necessary liberation of both men and women from traditional cultural roles, and look at the problems men face as well”.

So far so good, right?  So let’s look at the definition of Christian feminism.
Christian feminism does not mean being Sarah Palin.  I promise.  It is one of the feminist movements covered in the definition above and looks at the position of men and women from a slightly different starting point, not just as individual units but as beings that find happiness in their relations with others, inherently equal but undeniably different, and that understanding this equality before God is essential to understanding our place in the world.

Essentially, as Helen LaKelly Hunt puts it, faith and feminism are “really different expressions of the same impulse to make life more whole“.
I don’t see these two approaches as being in conflict either, I don’t think Christian Feminism is an oxymoron, and I’ll attempt to explain why below.

2) “All religions oppress women”
This is the first challenge.  I can’t pretend to answer for all faiths – I’m a committed Christian and while I’ve looked at the other faiths because I’m interested in knowing more about what others believe, I can only answer as to why I don’t feel oppressed.

In many ways, the Christian faith as led by the church defines patriarchy. Indeed, the orthodox churches refer to their leaders as patriarchs!  But I’d argue that this was a reflection of the political period in which those structures developed rather than something naturally inherent in the message of Jesus Christ.

The slight cop-out answer, for me, comes from the fact of me being a protestant.  For me, the key is that Christianity is a relationship with God and not a religion.
The ceremonies, the churches’ structures, the stuff that is effectively man-made attempts to impose order – that’s religion.  I can see why you could criticise that.
We have women in leadership roles in my church, and I made the case for female bishops in a previous post and so I respect, but disagree with, the thoughtful considerations of other Christians that conclude that they do not believe there is a bible-based case for women in church leadership.  The message throughout the bible is that God created a perfect world, but that we humans use the free will he gave us and screw it up while he sends prophets and eventually his own son to try to help us get back on track.  I’d suggest that just possibly exclusion of women from positions of leadership in the church may be an element of that?

3) “The Christian message and the Feminist message are fundamentally incompatible”
The Christian message is simply this: we all try to be good.
But we do bad things.  Christians call it sin.
We reason with ourselves that probably most of them are not so bad, but these things separate us from God, who is all good and who cannot tolerate sin.
The price of this sin? Death – eternal separation from all goodness.
But it’s ok – God loves us and wants us to be happy with him.
So Jesus bridges the gap – he died when he didn’t deserve to and paid the price for all of us.  Accept that offer of Jesus, and be happy with God as he intended us to be, living in his kingdom.

Nowhere in that is there an exhortation to treat women as lesser beings.  Nowhere does it say that this is a message for men not women, that women are not equally called upon to be forgiven their sins and help make the world a better place.
So where’s the incompatibility?

I think this slightly depends on what you think the feminist message is.  For me, equality is at the heart of feminism: political, social and economic.  If, for you, the main thread is about sexual freedom, then you will see incompatibility.
But equality is also there in Christianity: equal access to all spiritual blessings through Jesus.
Throughout the bible it is the people that treat women as inferiors, not God.
God’s angels address women directly just as they do men, and when women are in a position to make a difference, while some are consorts like Esther, you also find queens in their own right like Deborah.
Jesus’s attitude to women was truly counter-cultural – we have forgotten just how shocking even talking to a woman publicly was.
And God used the women at the heart of Jesus’s group of followers for one of the most important roles at Easter – it was the women that found that Jesus was gone from and who came to tell the others, this critical role played by women at a time when in the temple courts a woman’s testimony counted for nothing (“Sooner let the words of the Law be burnt than delivered to women” (Talmud, Sotah 19a)).
So equality before God?  Yes, it’s spelt out in the New Testament: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

And yet there is a conflict.  Jesus’s model for changing the world was that of serving others, serving God.
We can talk about rights, demand respect, argue about fairness, protest about a lack of political and business representation, but ultimately in a perfect world everyone, male and female, would seek the best way to serve each other rather than put each other down and get one over each other.  That’s real equality.
For me, feminism is a stepping stone in this imperfect society to build something a little closer to this, to help us to do the right thing.

Next time: sex, and women in society…

Has Pepperberry boobed?

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I own a LOT of Bravissimo clothing.  I’ve been a massive Bravissimo fan over the years… at last, a company that understood that customers like me – hourglass curvy with bigger boobs – are fashion conscious, like stylish, good quality clothes and, most importantly, go in at the middle.  Yep, even though I’ve put on some weight since I started shopping with them, Bravissimo ensured that I could look good and not have to dress in a tent-like top or look matronly to accommodate my bust.
This year, Bravissimo launched Pepperberry, separating their lingerie/ nightwear and clothing brands.  Hooray, I thought, a bigger range of clothes to fit me!
But it seems Pepperberry may not really be looking for people like me to be customers.

The first thing that has changed is that the models have gone super-skinny.
One of the nice things about shopping for Bravissimo clothes was that looking at the models in the catalogue/ online gave at reasonable impression of what the clothes might actually look like on me.  Now, thanks to the models’ skinniness and the online images of the outfits without anyone in them, I’m back to the guesswork I have to apply when looking at any other clothing company.

The next thing to have changed is, it seems, the quality.  Everything seems thin, sheer, and stitching seems to come undone at the seems (my new blue fifties style wrap dress is suffering from this).
It seems I’m not the only person to have notice this – the Pepperberry Facebook page is filled with a mix of fans excited at having received new clothes they love, and those experiencing disappointment.  More of that later, but importantly, many commenters were leaving messages to this effect.
It’s probably worth noting that this issue is not unique to Pepperberry – many high street names seem to be using suppliers that are less bothered about high quality than in the past – perhaps this is connected to the recession?  But given the price point of Pepperberry clothes, this is really not a good thing.

The next thing to have changed is sizing: when you are a company that differentiates itself by producing a range of clothes tailored to customers who have an issue with standard high street sizing it is fairly fundamental to get this right…
Essentially, Bravissimo clothes came in three bust sizes: curvy, really curvy and super curvy, relating to cup size. Clear instructions told you to ignore your standard high street size and measure so that you could get a correct fit.  I never found this a problem.

I ordered my usual Bravissimo size from Pepperberry’s new website in my first order from them.  To my surprise and disappointment, the 16SC was tight on the bust, and the length of the ditsy floral dress would’ve been fabulous if I was 16 but not suited to me at present where it is far too short.  I kept the denim skirt, but will only really be able to wear it with tights underneath for fear of being arrested for indecency. A quick skim through dress lengths in Pepperberry’s current collection showed that I’m too tall for much of it – and yes I’m a little above UK average height, but this was never a problem with Bravissimo clothes!  As for hip sizes, I knew that for shift-style dresses I needed to go up a dress size from my high street standard, and flared skirts no problem at all.

After much chuntering from fans on the Pepperberry Facebook page, Pepperberry – which does actually engage with its customers this way, and full credit it to them for it – put out the following statement:

As many of you will have experienced, there has been a lack of consistency in the sizing of Bravissimo clothes in the past. Last year we reviewed our measurements following customer feedback and some additional research into high street sizing in preparation for the launch of Pepperberry.
In terms of our curvy sizes, much of the feedback that we received from our customers was that our styles were too full over the boobs. Previously we designed our garments to fit a range of bust measurements in each size, and we discovered that over time we had generally been increasing the amount of bust room in each curvy size so that instead of being a perfect fit for someone measuring in the middle of a curvy size (and being correspondingly a little more snug on someone at the top end and a little looser on someone at the bottom end) we were often creating a perfect fit for someone at the very top of the curvy size range instead.  So over time our curvy sizes generally got bigger, although the amount they grew varied depending on the actual size and the type of style – but it meant that many customers were finding they had to buy a curvy size smaller than they measured. The result of this was that customers who measured ‘Curvy’ ended up too small for any of our clothes, even though they found fitted high street clothes too tight on the bust – and we received lots and lots of feedback to this affect.
Following extensive fittings in store and analysis of customer feedback, we adjusted our measurements to provide a consistent fit over the curviness sizing using set measurements from within the original measurement ranges. To further improve the fit we also reduced the amount of gathers we added over and around the boob area in some garments, as this had exacerbated the problem further. As a result of these changes some of you may notice that the curvy sizes in many styles are smaller than they have been previously but you should now find the sizing to be consistent. These changes have mainly affected the Curvy and Really Curvy sizes across the range, with smaller changes being made to our Super Curvy sizes. However, although the changes to Super Curvy garments have not been so great, we know the changes mean some people who used to find a Super Curvy fitted them in some styles are now finding it difficult to fit into our clothes at all. If this applies to you please let us know – we are currently trialling development of a ‘Super Duper Curvy’ size and as well as assessing how well this works and whether people like the garments in these sizes, we need to assess demand to ensure development would be viable.
We have also reviewed our waist and hip measurements following lots of customer comments to say that our clothes were coming up roughly one size bigger than standard UK dress sizes. We have recently adjusted the grading to bring our dress sizes in line with the high street and to ensure consistency across the range so you should now find that if you are generally a UK size 12 you fit into Pepperberry size 12.
I hope this makes sense and clears up some of the problems you have been experiencing. Please do continue to let us have your feedback on the sizing, we hope that you will find consistency across the range now and rely on you to let us know if this isn’t the case. Our aim is to provide fashionable clothes that offer a fit solution for women with bigger boobs who are between dress sizes 8 to 18.

Now, I don’t know, but I have to wonder…  there is presumably a reason why high street shops opt to sell clothes in the sizes they do.  I’d imagine it has something to do with maximising the potential number of customers.  If you ask a widespread number of women what they want, they will presumably come up with something like the high street norm. The problem will be for the outliers – too small or too large in part or in whole to find a good fit at that average.

So what that basically means is because the focus will be on those that are a bit smaller than what had been average Bravissimo sizing, I now need to buy the largest Pepperberry size – 18SC – in everything, and if that’s too small, thank you and good night.  But if a Super Duper Curvy is introduced, that might help a bit.  I might only need to say goodbye to the shift-style dresses.

Bravissimo clothing had a niche market, women who are not enormous blobs (they only go up to an 18), but have big boobs and want more space in their clothes at the bust.
With high street retailers like Monsoon cutting the room in the busts of their clothes, more of us had come to depend on Bravissimo for fashionable, 20- and 30- something appropriate well-fitting clothes.
I will keep buying Pepperberry’s slightly longer clothes in the ego-shattering larger size and hoping that it will fit.  But  I don’t really have anywhere else to go.

I think the reason so many of us seem to be taking this corporate decision quite personally is because wearing well fitting, stylish clothes give us confidence.  To suddenly find your source of these is in doubt shakes the confidence.
Fans know this, and the Pepperberry Facebook page is providing a peer-customer-level support and campaign space.  Real women upload mobile phone photos of themselves wearing the clothes,  which while never as flattering as one might hope when ordering the clothes, they give a much better indication of the fit than the skinny models do.
It’s worth noting too that Bravissimo pieces get quite high “used” prices on Ebay which shows the level of fan love for the clothes.  Some people do actually advertise on the Pepperberry site when they are selling old clothes on Ebay (I’ve found this useful as an Ebay addict! :) )
But it’s the mutual support – the “likes” on the photos, the comments and the horror against the resizing, the “don’t worry it’s me too” that make it a good page to read.  Of course I know that people that feel strongly for or against something are more likely to comment – I write a blog after all – and that they may not be representative of the average customer. Fine, but sometimes speaking up matters.

Pepperberry do actually comment too, thanking customers for positive comments, and now- after a bit of a shaky start – saying sorry to those that are disappointed, and offering their (lovely) customer service staff as the place to turn to.  In fact, they’ve got good social media customer engagement going on there. I’m impressed with that.
I really hope they note that it is not the same 5 disappointed customers commenting over and over again, but different names as different people receive their orders.
It would be great if they took note of the pleas from those of us at the super curvy end of the scale.
And while I don’t need it at present, if they would contemplate doing the size 20-24 clothes they could skim off some of the middle section of the Evans market… just a thought…

Over 1700 people “like” Pepperberry on Facebook, and a fair number seem to be emotionally invested too as I’ve tried to explain.
Reducing the clothing sizes might be good business sense.  Or they might have boobed.
But to us, it matters that we have something good to wear.
After all, as Mark Twain said “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society“.

Europe Day: really a referendum?

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Or how I  stopped worrying and learned to love representative democracy…

Thumb up with EU flag
Thumb up with EU flag Photo: Swissmacky/Shutterstock Images

Today is Europe Day.  While as a good EU citizen the date is of course inscribed on my heart, the other reason for knowing is the press coverage because apparently the European flag will not be flying outside 10 Downing Street today.
But never mind that.  Symbolism matters less than reality.
Otherwise this photo and that oblique Mary Tudor/ Calais reference in the sentence just above are problematic…

A coordinated campaign called #No2EU is trending on Twitter.  The premise is “we defeated the progressives on voting reform, the referendum people didn’t want. We need a referendum to get us out of the EU NOW”.  This is nothing new.  UK anti-EU people at many points on the political spectrum have pushed the idea of a referendum on UK membership of the EU basically since 1973. When the antis lost the last one.  However, there has been a bit of a trend recently amongst pro-EU groups to say that no one should be worried about an in-or-out referendum, and that actually pro-EU people should call for one to get all the nonsenses and half truths out in the open and be able to sweep them away.  The Fabians had a conference on it, the Liberal Democrats championed it at the last general election, Fellow Euroblogger Joe Litobarski even argued the case in the Comment is Free section on the Guardian website.  I think there’s a long way to go between being EU positive now and being ready for a referendum.

Given we’ve just had a resounding “NO” vote in the voting reform referendum – the first full UK referendum in my life time – there are a few ideas that flow from this which it seems to me are worth thinking about in the EU context.  In the meantime, if you want a decent, short analysis of the AV referendum itself, check out this one:

1) Simple questions do not mean simple situation:
While AV is not that complicated, the vote was by:
i) being held on the same day as local elections which – no matter how important the local issues needing to be decided – are nevertheless used as an opportunity for voters bash political parties on national level issues;
ii) being “the wrong question” – while the best question that could be secured in the coalition deal (“a miserable little” compromise), the Jenkins Report (the last Royal Commission on the voting system) suggested AV Plus as AV itself was insufficiently proportional.  Supporters of proportional representation thus found themselves having to support AV on the grounds that it was a step towards what they actually wanted, a position which the NO campaign was able to present both as a reason to vote no to AV itself and as duplicitous;
iii) packaging – any change being linked to boundary changes to constituencies that put off people who might otherwise have vote for change;
iv) being run on the basis of celebrity and with a centre-left focus instead of seeking widespread support. Jon Worth critiqued the arguments as far back as December, and the incoherency of the YES campaign here.

Any or all of these things could happen to an in-or-out EU referendum: tie-up with non-referendum issues or policies deliberately by politicians or more generally by the electorate, a screw-up by one side of the wording of the actual question.
In particular, the personality politics was nightmarish – this vote should never have been portrayed as a choice between prime minister and deputy prime minister.
But the refusal of the YES campaign to stand united was ridiculous.  Where were the pro-AV Conservatives? Nigel Farage of UKIP was a strong advocate – couldn’t he and Miliband and Clegg have stood together to say this is not a left/ right thing but a fairness thing, enabling you to say what you think, but then to get someone you don’t mind rather than someone you really oppose?  We could only hope that the mainstream of politics would be able to get its act together for a pro-EU membership campaign, and that south east MPs in particular whose constituencies need the EU would champion the cause.
Consider this – no one really wanted AV: some were dead against, others lukewarm on that point but keen on a slightly different voting reform. Similarly, no one would really argue that the EU is perfect now, surely, but many would say that it could be really good with some changes.  The similarity is just too much in terms of how arguments would need to be presented.
No one in favour of EU membership should be encouraging a referendum without learning the lessons of why the AV Yes campaign failed.

2) Simplicity and the status quo:
This seems the simplest idea – that people voted to keep what is there already as they saw no good reason to change it.  Aha!  This would surely result in a NO to leaving the EU, after all being in is the status quo, right?  I’m unconvinced.
There’s a significant number of people who believe everything negative and nothing of the positive about the EU and who have seen their view reinforced by governments  of all complexions winning-in-the-EU-against-the-odds, and right across the press, for decades.  The only positive messages that seem to have caught the public imagination in recent times have been cheaper calls from mobiles abroad, pet passports and blue flags for clean beaches, but even then the negative aspects (e.g. possibly higher call costs overall, more British beaches failing tougher new standards) are also reported as if the EU has directly caused them.
And if you are looking to April Fool co-workers, the EU is a fertile area as so many people will believe just about anything :)
Being negative about Europe is second nature and lists like this are rare…  So I suspect that the status quo is actually this negativity and not a full understanding of the constitutional arrangements under which the UK is part of the EU.

Plus the EU is complicated.  Complexity is not appealing, and doesn’t fit  the news agenda easily.  There is some evidence that stressing the apparent complexity of AV (which could be summed up as number any candidates you don’t mind representing you, and ) and the comparisons with sports to stress simplicity for FPTP struck a cord.  People are busy, they don’t have time to worry about things of limited interest to them – and we know the EU is simply not of much interest.
So while Jo Swanson’s explanation that AV was like saying “if you’re going to the shop can you get me a Mars bar but if you can’t get that, I’ll have a Twix” was straight forward and clear, much of the other publicity wasn’t.  Of course, the best YES to AV poster I’ve seen online didn’t seem to be official…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3) The role of the media:
I know, I know, the media’s not to blame, if people don’t want to read something then they won’t buy those papers or will just turn to the sports section.
But it is amazing that, election after election, that the party that wins is the one that gets the majority press support and the most positive coverage.  In part this might be because media moguls do not want to be associated with losers, but the coverage over the periods between elections is also a crucial indicator of likely success.  It was hard to find any sustained positive messaging in the press on AV – while the Guardian, Independent and Mirror (all left-leaning) supported a YES as the least worse alternative, most of the rest of the press pushed hard for a NO.  I argued before that this might be because AV makes it hard to call elections in advance and that – as can be seen from the coverage of the current government – coalition politics is subtle, complex, indirectly adversarial and therefore impossible to report with anything close to the reality of how it works…
Now think about UK EU coverage.  If there’s no requirement on the media beyond the BBC to be impartial, and most of the press already takes this tone (e.g. every Treaty creates a superstate and treating campaign group press releases as if they are fact!), just imagine how much worse this would be during an in-or-out referendum. How on earth would the pro-EU membership side get its message any coverage at all?

4) Money, money, money:
One of the earliest posts I read from defeated YES campaigners on Left Foot Forward was that if only every registered political party member in favour of AV had given a tenner, the YES campaign could’ve outspent the NO, even given the massive donations from the Conservative Party’s large donors, use of staff and phone banks etc.
Does money make a difference?
It certainly is thought to in general elections, that’s why there are limits imposed by the Electoral Commission.  Officially, candidates in rural areas can spend up to £7,150 plus 7p per elector. Those standing in urban areas can spend £7,150 plus 5p per voter. Registered parties are restricted in their spending for the 365 days before the election. Parties can spend up to £30,000 for each seat they contest – which adds up to £19.5m if they fight every constituency.  But that’s only during the election period – it’s widely thought that the Ashcroft money that was spent for some time ahead of this made a large difference (although the fact that we have a coalition government shows it was not of itself enough to determine the outcome – Gordon Brown being unpopular and Nick Clegg being telegenic might also have played a part…).
Now bear in mind the sensitivity of an in-or-out EU referendum, the backers, the availability or otherwise of EU money, the fact that anything put out as information by the EU is regularly dismissed as propaganda and you can see that any pro-EU referendum campaign would have a bit of research and serious fundraising to do before launching.

5)  Getting down and dirty:
or, the importance of the message.  Don’t for any moment think that either side in a referendum campaign will feel the need to stay within realms of truth or reasonableness.
In the UK AV referendum campaign we were told by the official YES camp that MPs would work harder.  But they mainly work hard already, child-friendly hours apparently a thing of the past in parliament.  That should have been “harder to secure the support of a wider range of people in their constituency at election time and to keep that support for next time”.
We were told it would help stop corruption and greed, again something that would require a zealous anti-corruption campaign now rather than a change in the voting system.
Neither of these were the best reasons for voting YES to AV.  I set out 10 reasons why on this blog, and none of them came from the campaign literature.
On the NO side, we were told that the cost would be £250m (a number David Blunkett later admitted was plucked out the air) and on that basis, babies wouldn’t get maternity units, soldiers wouldn’t get bullet-proof vests (in which case a YES vote would’ve ensured that the £90m spent was not wasted), that the BNP would triumph (in reality they would’ve found it tougher under AV and opposed it), votes and voters would no longer be equal with extremists getting more say, that Nick Clegg would be a kingmaker forever, that kind of thing.
Coalition government itself requires a certain amount of political maturity to understand – the Lib Dems argued over and over that with under a fifth of the vote they could only really expect to enact a fifth of their own programme as part of an agreed government package.  That makes you look like a 4/5 sellout by the rules of the UK press, particularly if the fifth you get to pursue does not include some of your most popular pledges in the campaign…
And yet in other European countries it is possible for voters to distinguish between coalition partners and not just bash one side.  Are we – perhaps- just not European enough to cope with anything more than Punch and Judy two swords lengths apart?

6) So…
It’s hard to argue that FPTP can’t deliver what the public wants when there is currently a coalition – the public did not want to give any one party an overall majority and that’s exactly what the voting system we have delivered.

Regular readers of my blog will know that I’ve never been in favour of referendums, for pretty much all of the reasons listed above, but hope to be proved wrong by one on voting reform.
But it looks like all of the fears I had have come to pass.
Looking at what happened during the campaign, you had an issue that was not the main priority of the YES campaign, less money available, voter disinterest, a complex argument versus what appeared to be a simple one, and distortion of the issue via personality politics, over-exaggeration and lying. And now that the referendum is lost, discussion of PR is off the agenda for the foreseeable.

If representative democracy, albeit via a non-proportional voting system, provides a better, depersonalised politics than the nastiness and misleading rubbish that failed to actually present the case for or against we witness in these past few weeks, them I’m quite happy to stay away from referendums for now, thanks.
#No2EU want to really shake things up with an in-or-out referendum but present it as the path of least difficulty.
But the YES side?  Too wobbly in terms of leadership and messaging at the moment.  Frankly I don’t think it’s ready for that jelly.

So Happy Europe Day.  May there be many more of them to celebrate in the UK.

True Finns- what just happened?

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Finnish tshirt from www.zazzle.com – election of the true Finns risks a changed position for women in Finnish society

Eek.  Just listened to the BBC world service programme “World Have Your Say” on which friend and fellow Euroblogger Jon Worth just appeared.

The immediate EU concern is that – given the Finnish parliament has to vote on any agreed bailouts (or as Jon rightly points out, long term loans to stricken countries underwhich the lenders actually make a profit on monies loaned) – the Portuguese bailout may be delayed, or need to be changed.
The learning point from this – and the Netherlands, France, and elsewhere where the populist right is on the rise – must surely be that it is no longer acceptable to regard the EU as an inevitable grand projet, pushed forward by an elite with a common mindset, which the public will unquestioningly accept.  There needs to be more open and honest explanation of what is going on, what the proposed solutions are an the consequences of doing them and not doing them.  And while this is no doubt the economic big picture, it goes for wider policy making too.

However, there ought to be concern too because this party that just got 20% of the vote and may end up forming part of the next Finnish government apparently said that Finnish women should study less and stay at home producing more True Finnish children.
I’m appalled on so many levels at that statement.
This can’t be real, can it?  A progressive, Nordic country really just had an election in which True Finns was the only party to increase its share of the vote?
If you want to read a female Finnish bloggers perspective, I’ve just found this one.

In the meantime, welcome to the twenty first century.
We may be seeing democracy as a rallying point outside Europe, but we need to take greater care to remember that being elected is about representation, not just leadership.
And we also need to think about who is being represented.
If ever we needed proof that women’s rights have been hard won and are not inviolable, this is a wake up call.