So what’s new for 2012:
- I’ve tried and failed as yet to get excited about the forthcoming London Olympics.  It might be the greatest show on earth but for me it’s a few months of transport hell;

- My newest novel attempt has reached 28,000 words. Please ask me more about this!

- We have a whole bundle of health issues going on chez Rose22joh, and are praying for a swift and happy resolution;

- I can blog about the EU again if I feel the need – and there’s a lot going on that could do with some reflection.

- I’m TIRED!

So voila: this year’s offerings are likely to be on writing, politics, parenting, faith and of course feminism. Probably.

And the fact that my New Year post is up before February? I’m counting that as a win!

I’ve argued in a previous post that fat is still a feminist issue.  But I think what I’m realising is that the more size-zero obsessed the fashion world gets, and the more airbrushing the beauty industry does, the less I care.

I use the Eraser foundation, the one that Roberts and Turlington were advertising.  But I bought it because I needed a foundation at about the time of the half-price introductory offer Boots ran, and not in any real expectation that I would emerge from its use looking like a super model.  After all, cosmetic industry advertising is not based in reality, even with the warning “filmed using lash inserts” now appearing during mascara promotions.

Really, I know what I need in beauty products.
I need them to make me look less red skinned, less tired, with bigger feline eyes, redder lips.  I don’t expect to look like a rubber doll with shiny skin, nor for my skin to flake.  I’m not worried about wrinkles particularly because of my excess fat!  See, there is an advantage to being overweight.

I don’t have much time in the mornings – I want a haircut that can more or less shower and go, and moisturiser that either goes on in the shower or can be squirted on in a kind of dry oil form but without leaving the bathroom floor like an ice rink.  Leaving my make up until I get to work frees up a few precious moments in the pre-commute morning to help my son into his uniform.  Minimal hassle to me is key… but the proliferation of products like “bottom lash mascara” show that this is not the beauty industry driver.

The point is, by trying to get me to strive for something I know to be unrealistic, my reaction is to think, you know what? Sod it.

The case is made more clearly with fashion.

Just look what a men’s magazine – yes, aimed at men who tend to like a curve, rather than women who apparently don’t – did to Kate Winslet back in 2003. When you look at how slim show was in the first place, why does this sort of thing make any woman go I should try to look like that?
Surely the more natural reaction is to look, blink to reassure yourself you really are seeing that, laugh and go and eat a doughnut if you feel like having one?

The reality is I’m never going to be a size zero, I’m never going to look good in clothes designed for people that shape.  Even when I’m slim, I’m curvy.  It came as a shock when looking at some family pictures of myself aged 17, to realise that even then my skinny size 12 body would’ve been counted as plus-size in fashion world.  At more than three inches above average height for UK women, I’d also have been too short…

Magazines focused on fashion are a bit of a waste of time for me.  It’s not just that many of the items in the magazine shoots in Marie Claire and Elle etc. are designer items costing several hundred pounds, it is almost certain that they don’t come in a size bigger than a 14 at best.  Why should I care what an item of clothing that won’t fit me looks like on a woman half the size of me?  It’s not even sselling me a dream, it’s selling me a fiction.

So used am I to reading up on what looks good on curvy women, I’m never going to buy drainpipe trousers which squeeze the fat or, equally, tent tops which look like they are hiding more fat than may actually be there.   I know my own body well enough to know which style of trousers would cause camel toe, that any dress or top that has a fitted section over my bust will be enormous around my body if I buy it to fit on top.

That’s why I shop for dresses and tops at Pepperberry, despite my recent concerns – and for trousers, well, that takes a it more effort.  I have been known to buy them in Evans.
Take jeans, for example.  Even Evans isn’t too much help here because generally, if I get ones that fit at the hip, they hang off my waist.

I guess I have the American obesity epidemic and population size to thank that AG jeans and DKNY have a curvier fit so I can buy jeans there.  But we don’t go even every other year.  I’m intrigued by Little in the middle and PZI jeans too –  jeans designed to recognise that many of us have smaller waists but bigger hips and bums.  Great that they are available online to the UK, but there’s probably import tax to pay and what if they don’t fit?

In fact, the more divorced from reality the fashion industry makes its images, the less I feel like it is trying to talk to me.  I don’t feel like dieting, or sticking my fingers down my throat, I just feel meh.  If they want my disposable income, they should realise I have it and selling me something that won’t make me look or feel good is a bit pointless. And telling the potential customer that they’re wrong is doubly bad business.

And yet so many women fall for it.
I know I’m not perfect.  I’m not happy with myself either.  I look in the mirror and see a woman that’s fatter than I convince myself that I am, and that’s a sort of body dysmorphia.
We have anorexia, increased plastic surgery, teen self-harm on one hand, and junk food, comfort shorts, and super-sized ambulances to carry the cardiac arrest sufferers literally eating themselves to death on the other.
And if that weren’t bad enough, as Natasha Walter put it in “Living Dolls”, there’s a whole computer savvy generation coming for whom their point of reference for what is normal is pornography.  Fake boobs on scrawny body, talon nails and iron blond tresses.

Airbrushing?  Sometimes it’d be good to think we could just airbrush ourselves,  but… it’s not worth it.  It’s just selling stuff. Until we learn to accept ourselves, no matter what our flaws are,  we’re vulnerable.

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…

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.

(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.

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?

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“.

So we’ve been cooking at home too. He corrected my crumble the other day (I’d made it with flour and butter and his help but just as I was about to use it he said “no Mummy, you need to put sugar in it now then rub it some more”) and told me the timing (“it goes in d’oven from 11 to 12″ – in actual fact it took about 50 minutes).

So we’ve started baking cakes. It’s great fun when he has friends round, and an easy and tasty way of spending some time together in the afternoons. To date, we’ve made peaches and cream cupcakes, and adapted the recipe to be banana and toffee, triple chocolate, summer fruits, and vanilla and raisin. Baked at 180 degrees in a fan oven for 15 minutes (for mini cake cases) or 25 minutes (in the standard size silicone cupcake cases) these are speedy and fun.

Here’s the basics:
150g sugar
150g butter
Beat these together with an electric whisk.
Beat in 1 egg.
Add 150g self-raising flour – I’ve never yet found a need to sift it.
Plus a pinch of baking powder.
Beat in 2 further eggs.
Add in your flavours. I recommend big chunks of chopped banana and bits of dark chocolate (put half a bar into a plastic bag, seal the top and bash with a rolling pin to break into suitable chunks.
Stir in so these are distributed evenly.
Spoon into cake cases – I’ve found it fills 12 larger and 12 smaller cake cases usually, but sometimes a few fewer.
Cook as described above.
These timings will give a slightly soft and springy centre.
Cool on a rack, after peeling off the silicone cases.
These can be eaten just as they are, or with a buttercream cupcake icing (butter beaten into icing sugar and cocoa powder) piled on top, or a frosting (water or and appropriate fruit sauce beaten into the icing sugar and drizzled over).

Yum.

It’s not often I am moved to write a film review, but I had a chance to see a lot of films over Christmas what with all the flight time I racked up…

I saw lots of films I enjoyed (principally, it has to be admitted, cartoons as I was sitting next to my toddler and couldn’t watch things with too high a rating).
“Scott Pilgrim vs the World” was sublime, laugh out loud funny and so clever.
“The Social Network” is worth the Oscar nominations.
“Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang” was make-you-cry feelgood at the end.
I want a “Despicable Me” minion.
My reaction to “Avatar” was “meh!” but I expect it is suboptimal on an aeroplane seat-sized screen rather than a giant 3D screen…

But the film I want to review is “Skyline“.
This $10m  alien invasion film (i.e. made for peanuts and with no big star – often the sort of film-making I like…) is the one that has affected me most, and mainly because I hated it.

I don’t mean I disliked it, or found it boring.  I actually hated it.

This is a bleak, doom-laden and ultimately depressing film.  It is impossible to write about it without spoilers, so consider yourselves warned…

We start in an apartment where a group of hungover friends are waking up.  One girl gets up and is sick – it is later established that she is pregnant.  Everyone is transfixed by a blue light – it’s so pretty, no one can resist looking.  But then it starts to suck them in…
And then we’re off into full-on alien invasion mode.
These alien things suck in everyone and come in varying sizes meaning they can get into houses or crush entire apartment blocks.
It has been pointed out in other reviews that the black character dies first – yes, and the character cheats on his girlfriend too as if that somehow makes it ok that he died, in comparison with the hero/ heroine couple who are going to have a baby.
The US airforce sends in a nuclear bomb – boom!
But the aliens are not destroyed and the havesting continues. Our heroes continue, despite radiation poisoning, to try to figure out a way to survive, but ultimately are taken by the alien harvesters.
But that’s not the end.
Ultimately everyone in the world is taken, alive, on board the alien ship, where their heads are ripped off and their still living brains used, Doctor Who Cyberman-style, to power new alien beings.
I’ll leave a mystery over the exact fate of the newly pregnant heroine and the hero, but suffice to say the only way of making a sequel is if the heroine survived nine months of pregnancy in alien hell and the foetus grows up to invent time travel and stop it happening.

And that, if you like, is my problem.  To me, there was no proper ending, just unending horror.
Some reviewers have praised this as “realistic”, or “refreshingly free from cheesy Hollywood feelgood”.

To me, it was evidence to me of how important it is to me to know that there after apocalypse there is redemption.
The longing for a happy ending is hard-wired into our society.  We want to know that wrongs will be righted, the evil to be punished and the good to be rewarded (even if we disagree on when, how and what exactly we mean by those concepts).
In the Strause brothers’ vision of the apocalypse there is no judgement, no fairness, no ultimate purpose to life.
Humankind has no value other than as fuel, and lives on only as the brainpower of another species.  And it is better – as demonstrated by the fat, bossy man (fat? Yep, in filmworld if he’s not funny, he’s going to die), to kill yourself than to be taken.  What kind of a world view is it where suicide is the best option?

Ultimately, in that vision of the world, there is no God.
Well, unless it is a vision of what happens during the book of Revelation, before all the 7-horned cows and whore of Babylon stuff.
But I don’t think He’s there in this story.  I don’t think he was even an afterthought.  This is an apocalypse with a nihilistic world view and a simple message.  We all die.  Earth loses to the aliens.

To people who think that religion is a crutch for those who need a fluffy bunny version of the world, I suggest you’ve not read Revelations – all those years of dreadful things happening that are mentioned there, and they don’t spell out clearly that believers will be spared from all the horrors.
(Well, pretribulationist Christians think it does, with the rapture lifting them up to meet Christ before it all kicks off, but that’s not the most commonly held position – and an atheist website offering to look after the pets of Christians taken away in the rapture neatly satirises this…).

The world of St John the Divine’s book of Revelation is not a cosy place.
Some have suggested that it has more than a touch of the magic mushroom about it.
Frankly, even if it’s an allegorical description, the sort of world described is all the worst of the world around us until the new heaven and the new earth.

But – and draw a deep breath – given I believe that Jesus is coming back, then I would still rather that the vision there is as it will be than subscribe to the world view that is so neatly encapsulated by “Skyline”.

But it’s not 0 stars for “Skyline”, it’s 1 star, and that’s because it made me think.

Was the Sky Sports incident just “banter”?  Erm, no, I don’t see how it can be defended that way.
Two male presenters questioned a woman’s ability to do her job on the basis of her gender.  One also used disgraceful language to talk about a colleague’s ex, the other harasses a female colleague over microphone cable and his trousers.  Even if off-air, they were in the workplace.
If any of these events had been comments made on grounds of race, there would’ve been an immediate outcry – and quite right too.  But because it was gender, people seek to justify – and not just men.

And on a completely different note, while I can go on at length about freedom, democracy and the amazing situation in the middle east, I’m confining myself to this comment: have you noticed the prominent place of young women, veiled or not, in the public demonstrations?

Both in Tunisia and in Egypt, while the clear majority of figures in the crowd are men, there have been more women than you might have feared. Other bloggers have noticed this and commented in detail… It would be good to have a clear, positive role for women in establishing what happens next.
Whatever the outcome, let’s hope that one of the noticeable features will be that the role of women is one of real equality.

PS I read yesterday that the Sky Sports pair might be offered jobs at Al Jazeera.  It’s a strange way for these two stories to be tied together.