Blue magnolia

Important news about Blue Magnolia - please read

2007-02-04T22:50:00.000+00:00

For a variety of reasons that may be discussed in an upcoming post, but mainly on a whim, I've decided to move Blue Magnolia over to WordPress. This decision has cost me several hours of my life and probably will many more, but hey, it feels pretty good. My blog can now permanently be found looking lovely at bluenettle.wordpress.com.

I may come to regret this decision, I may not. But that's for another post.

RSS readers: redirect your reader to http://bluenettle.wordpress.com/feed/

Alas, poor worms, I knew them well

2007-02-04T09:27:00.000+00:00

A while ago I reported with much excitement the new friends to be found under my kitchen sink - I got worms. It was with innocent green enthusiasm that I set up my little wormery, fed my composting buddies daily, and fed the 'worm juice' to my plants.

I'm sure you can sense the 'but' coming.

Sadly, my wormies died. I'm not completely sure what happened - they may have drowned because I didn't empty liquid often enough. Alas, they just seemed to not be there any more. So my wormery composted what waste it already had slowly without worms for a while, survived a move to a new flat and has sat unattended under the sink for a few months.

Until yesterday. I cleaned it out in the bathroom (the joys of living in a flat), and was pleasantly surprised to find some good quality compost lurking at the bottom. It's now set up ready and waiting for some new tiger worms to arrive in the post. Yes, in the post.

Is there anything you can't buy on the internet?

Needless to say this time around the little things will be getting extra loving attention because I don't want to feel like a failure again. More importantly, I want to report my amazing successes so that I can persuade other people to go out and get worms. Worms are great.

Pan's Labyrinth

2007-02-01T20:34:00.000+00:00

Pan's Labyrinth was not the film I thought it was going to be. It wasn't a fantasy-fest of amazing costumes, creepy characters and spooky lighting. It was sometimes those things, but it was so much more as well. It wasn't another Labyrinth at all.

Ofelia is a young girl with a dead father, a sick mother and a murderous step father. The world she lives in is a constant struggle of misery and fear. So sinister fairies and a pale, hooved faun don't scare her when they come beckoning - they are portends of another world she longs to escape to.

Unlike Labyrinth, a large proportion of the story takes place in the real world, where the Spanish civil war is barely over and guerillas are hiding in the hills. Only Ofelia knows the secret of what lies in the woods behind the makeshift army base that she is forced to call home. If she can complete the tasks the mysterious faun has given her, she will become a princess, the heir to a hidden kingdom with all the happiness that entails. Or will she?

Pan's Labyrinth is a magical tale of hope and innocence. While everyone around her is preoccupied with death and violence, Ofelia perseveres for something better. The film is dark, brutal, but ultimately uplifting. A real original.

Back again

2007-01-30T18:49:00.000+00:00

Where have all my comments gone? This must be my punishment for nelgecting my blog for three months.

I've been busy. I can now knit socks and play Ode to joy on classical guitar. Thought the blogging thing was gone for ever. I was wrong. Oooooooo, that was all a bit W.H. Auden.

Wish I could think of a 'thing' for this post. But I can't. Oooooooo, that was all a bit Keith and Orville.

I think I'd better stop now, and come back when I've got something sensible to say. Ooooooo, that was all a bit..... No, really. Stop. Talking to myself now. Stop it. Stop. 'Stop' spells 'pots' backwards. Stop. .

WeeMee Librarian

2006-09-29T18:29:00.000+00:00

My blog now has a WeeMee, and the wee me has a pile of books. I might have mentioned that I'm a Librarian.

I'm not to sure what this thing is for, but it certainly brightens up the page, don't you think? Sunshine and grass and a butterfly. A cartoon version of me looking a bit embarrassed and shy, holding a pint of Guinness.

I feel a rant coming on: It's crap being shy and being a Librarian, because everyone nods knowingly when you tell them what you do. For your information, smiling-knowingly people, all the librarians I work with are incredibly loud, outgoing and wouldn't say ssshhhhhh if you paid them. Well, maybe if you paid them.

librarians|WeeMee|stereotypes|shyness

It's almost like being a Librarian

2006-09-24T18:23:00.000+00:00

Want to find out what it's like to be a Librarian? Visit LibraryThing and catalogue all your books. Copy catalogue that is. Don't worry, it's LibrarianSpeak.

Among other cool things you can do with their service if you so desire is create a widget for your blog to show people random books from your collection. I fooled the system to have it show only the one book that I'm reading now, which was very clever of me. I did this by only bothering to add one book to my account. Sneaky.

Tomorrow I get to catalogue things for real, and classify them too. Labels, lots of labels. Tidying. Chocolate biscuits (sorry, that should read no eating in the Library). Talking on the telephone to very odd people. Fixing the computers. Phoning the IT guys to ask them to come and fix the computers properly. Laughing at other people's cataloguing errors. Finding missing books. Writing reports about missing books. Moving things. Writing incredibly informative leaflets and deciding what colour paper to print them out on. Delegating the photocopying and folding of leaflets to someone else. Organisation, that's what it's all about.

Talk to George

2006-09-17T21:11:00.000+00:00

Talk to George. He can be a bit daft, but he's ok. It's a bit like talking to a crazy person.

Is he meant to look like Richard O'Brien?

I love labelling

2006-09-15T06:51:00.000+00:00

The Librarian in me loves Google's new image labeler. I don't care if I'm basically serving as cheap labour for an image labelling project, it's fun an addictive and this post is going to be short so I can get back to it.

The idea is that you and one other person are shown the same image from the web. You both type in tags (or index terms in librarianspeak) that you think are suitable for the image, and when you have a matching tag, the image changes. This goes on for 90 seconds and you get points for each match. When the time is over, you can see your score, the top scores for the day, and a list of the top all time scorers. Note: you'll need to sign up for a Google account if you want to appear in the lists as something more interesting than guest.

Sometimes it's unbelievably frustrating, for a few reasons. The "game" doesn't know what the image is; that's the point - a large proportion of the images on the web appear to be really boring groups of people standing around having their photo taken, or worse company logos and the like. My screen is tiny and sometimes I can't tell what the piccy is actually of. And sometimes you get paired with a complete idiot who doesn't know what the moon looks like.

But I love it. Unfortunately I've spent so long writing this post that I have to go to work now and be a real Librarian. Hmmmph.

Greennettle flies

2006-09-12T18:43:00.000+00:00

Judging by my last few posts you'd think my name ought to be Greennettle, not Bluenettle, as the environment seems to be my only inspiration at the moment. That's no bad thing.

But Greennettle looks silly because it has an annoying double n in the middle and it's plainly dull because nettles really are green. Whoever heard of a blue nettle? Exactly. I'm unique.

Maybe tomorrow I might think of a different theme. Today I'm going to tell you how to feel better about flying (did you know one flight to somewhere not that far away is the equivilant per passenger, pollution wise, of driving a Mini around the world ninety-ish times? I forget the details but it was on the front page of The Independent not that long ago) by "neutralising" your carbon emissions.

Climate Care will calculate your carbon dioxide emissions (not just from flying, but that's where my guilt lies) and let you buy offsets which will go to fund sustainable energy projects to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the same amount. There are other companies that offer similar things, but I liked Climate Care the best. You don't get a fancy paper certificate like some companies offer (nice email tho), but that's nothing to fret over. And it's all so simple.

If you don't know too much about this type of thing and think it's probably expensive - it's not (although Climate Care have a minimum purchase of £5). I don't think it will be long before all airlines are offering offsets as a part of their ticket prices. Although I'm sure they'll get an "administrative fee" in there as well, as always.

Green wars

2006-09-09T21:22:00.000+00:00

No sooner have supermarket giant Tesco announced that all of us loyal and environmentally friendly customers are going to be getting clubcard points for reusing bags (prompting inner cries of We're not just doing it for the points, we always bring our own bags! from Bluenettle. Besides, what am I going to do with three clubcard points?), arch rivals Sainsbury's announce they're going to start using compostable packaging for their fruit and veg instead of plastic. Now, there's nothing more annoying than finding there's no loose tomatoes and having to take home a bunch of unecessary packing too, but at least now I can feed the packet to the worms.

Except I hate Sainsbury's. I'm the exact opposite of a Sainsbury's Snob. So I dearly hope Tesco will follow suit soon, as they surely will. This could be the new supermarket "war" - not petrol, not baked beans, but being nice to the environment.

The baked beans war was exciting though, wasn't it? You arrived at the supermarket each week holding your breath to see how cheap the beans were. 1p! 1p for a tin of beans! The best bargain of all time. Some small teenie weenie chain that I completely forget the name of actually started paying their customers 1p to take a tin of beans away. With limitations, of course, which was a shame.

Back to the point, it's a good state of affairs to be in when people are so concerned about taking care of the world that supermarket chains are using environmentally friendly ideas to woo customers. Or at least to keep the ones they've got.

Little Miss Sunshine

2006-09-08T23:25:00.000+00:00

Go and see Little Miss Sunshine. Now.

Never since I heart Huckabees have I felt so happy after seeing a film. Time and money well spent.

Here's how to go to the cinema if you're uninitiated in the film-going ways:

Arrive nice and early to buy your tickets, because you don't want to miss out. While you're waiting for the film to start, wander around the corner to Borders and sit on the floor in the knitting section. It doesn't have to be knitting - whatever your current obssession, indulge it. At the alotted time saunter back to the cinema and pay close attention to the trailers, because you never know what's coming up (currently liking the look of Children of men, Right at your door and The Queen. Enjoy the film. When it's over, enjoy the sights and smells of a city centre late at night, dodge the crazy people and head for a quiet pub. Order a pint of real ale and discuss the film and anything else you fancy with your companion(s). Buy some chips from the kebab van while you're waiting for the bus home if you must.

Write a blog post about it when you get in.

No more almost-vegetarianism

2006-09-08T18:19:00.000+00:00

A few months ago I wrote a post about my gradual rise from murderous meat eater to hypocritical, fish eating, leather shoe wearing almost-vegetarian.

I am happy to report that since then I have graduated to real vegetarian with non-leather shoes and a couple of pairs of leather shoes that will be biting the dust as soon as they're old and battered enough that getting rid of them isn't incredibly environmentally unfriendly-ly wasteful. My cool brown retro Skechers are going to be replaced by this fantastic number from Vegetarian Shoes, who have already happily supplied me with my boring normal works shoes (I also considered buying their wacky clown shoes and wish I had, just to make people go Oooooo) and the best vegetarian walking boots in the world ever.

I also own a pair of vegan Earth Shoes (beware, not all of their range is vegan) that are a bit shiny red for me but I got for an absolute bargain price so I can't complain. Good for the back apparently, but I'm too embarrassed by the redness to have worn them enough to notice. Also, the fact that the inverted heel is so low means that my trousers drag even more hopelessly along the floor than usual when I wear them. What can I say, I'm short. But I do love them, I love them a lot.

So, shoes. I wrote a post about shoes (which so isn't what I was planning on writing about today). I have therefore also graduated, in a slightly longer period of time, from football obsessed tomboy to almost-girl, who still likes football quite a lot but has also taken up knitting and sometimes wears a top with flowers on it. Flowers.

Got worms?

2006-09-04T20:16:00.000+00:00

So, you recycle your paper, tins and glass, maybe plastic if your local council are so inclined. You give your old clothes to Oxfam, or perhaps you take them to one of those big metal bins that say DO NOT ENTER on the giant flap, and wonder who is was that did. You probably send off your used printer cartridges for recycling, maybe your old mobile phones too (check out Envirophone, who will not only recycle your phone but pay you for the privilege... unless it's really crap like my old Sony J5, in which case they'll still take it, but you'll get nowt. Either way, come to think of it, you're probably better off selling on ebay, which is a kind of recycling when you think about it). Basically, you're doing your bit and you feel pretty good about it.

Still, there's probably one type of waste that you stick in the trash without even thinking about it: food. No matter how much you try not to be wasteful, sometimes your eyes are bigger than your belly and you end up with half a plate full of stir fry/omlette/stale chocolate cake that no one is ever going to eat. And even the best cooks leave behind skins and peelings and horrible hard bits on a daily basis. How can you get rid of this without filling up landfills and incinerators? One word: worms (unless you have a greedy dog. If you do, read on anyway).

I know, I know, you haven't got room for a wormery, you haven't got a garden. What if I told you you can keep a wormery indoors? Really, I didn't know either. Still not sure you've got space? Small kitchen? My thoughts exactly, before I did a bit of research and discovered Original Organics' Junior Wormery. Now I have worms worming away under my kitchen sink!

Here's how it came together:

1. I surfed the net and bought the wormery online from Original Organics website. Because we were going to be away for a few days after its arrival, I chose to get the worms later by voucher (included in the price), but they'll send with as well.

2. My boyfriend stayed at home to take delivery, and as promised it arrived the very next day.

3. I sent off the voucher when we were ready and waited for those worms.

4. I was worried the worms wouldn't fit through our post box, but they just came in a fairly small, ordinary envelope (and a plastic pouch inside that). I wonder if the postman knew what he was carrying???

5. We set up the wormery as per the instructions (everything you need is included), and finally added the worms.

6. Wahey, wormery!

You have to slowly build up the amount of food you add, and after just a few weeks they really start getting through it. The Junior Wormery is only designed to cope with the waste of one person, but it does pretty well with the two of us. The worms are happy with just about anything that used to be alive, although meat is not a great idea, and too much citrus can make for an unhealthy wormery. But it's not just for food - any organic waste can go in: garden waste, paper etc (how much obviously depends on the size of your wormery - our small one manages the odd kitchen towel, some bonsai clipping and the occasional handful of dead leaves). There's very little maintanance involved, but you do have to sprinkle a handful of a special lime mix (also included) every few weeks to keep the pH in the right range.

So, what do you get out of it, except knowing you're wasting less? Well, the best bit for most people is that after about two months you'll be able to get "worm juice" from the tap. This is very rich fertilizer (and boy does it smell like fertilizer!) that can be diluted and used on your plants. The other thing you get after about eight to twelve months is a bin full of compost. (Do you get all of that from a greedy dog? Maybe in a slightly less useful form...) As we haven't got a garden I'm not sure what we'll we're going to do with the compost yet, but we'll cross that bridge blah de blah.

I really think a wormery under the sink is a fantastic idea, and I'm only sorry I didn't know it was possible earlier. I really feel a whole lot greener. One question though: do you think our landlord would class worms as pets?

The wicker man - why?

2006-09-02T18:58:00.000+00:00

The trailers for The wicker man, a new remake of the 1973 British classic, looked promising.

I've never seen the original, so I'm completely out of my depth making comparisons, but I think I can say with some confidence that the 1973 version was better than this pile of incoherent codswallop. There are worse films than this remake for sure, but it must be hard to take a reasonable actor like Nicholas Cage, put him in a solid, sinister storyline and come up with a movie as dull and disjointed as this. I think I was meant to be scared, but only the usual horroresque slow, building strings playing in the background in every other scene could put me slightly on edge. Pavlov's syndrome, maybe?

The obvious question is whether this remake was necessary at all. From what I hear, the original is pretty good - I added it to my LoveFilm list as soon as I got back from the cinema. I suppose that's a plus point for the new film - it's at least entertaining enough to show that the basic premises could make for a good story in the right hands. It's just already been done.

If they wanted to make a glossy colour film, Americanised and all Hollywooded up to whet modern appetites, then my first instinct is to say think of something original. I'm not sure, however, that I can shout that out and mean it, because there are some old films that I think should be made new for a fresh audience (and me) to enjoy. I'd dearly dearly love to see a new version of To kill a mockingbird, great as the original is. Why? Because the film missed so many important things out of the book that I want an even better one that does it justice.

My conclusion must therefore be: remakes are fine if they're an improvement on the original (and I would generally count an equally good version in colour as an improvement, with all apologies to those who would disagree), but pretty pointless if they're worse.

The wicker man is very pointless.

Unabandoned

2006-09-01T16:25:00.000+00:00

I abandoned my blog, and I didn't think I'd be back. For more than three hundred days, these pages have been alone, silent, and let's face it, barely visited.

But then today, in a fit of nostalgia/boredom, I visited the lonely pages and read many (ok, all) of those old posts. Like rereading an old diary, I smiled, laughed, and cringed helplessly. Most importantly, I thought (with ten months of hindsight, of course) I'd actually done pretty well at the whole blogging thing, even if I was a bit scatter-brained to actually get a loyal following. You've got to have a theme to get on in the blog world, and I just don't want to bore myself that much. But hey, who cares? I'll write about anything and everything and hopefully win people over with my witty charm... Maybe not. How about some interesting stories, useful info and a little bit of self indulgent musing? Possibly more of the latter, let's face it.

So much new is going on these days that I don't know where to start, so I won't. Except to mention the fandabidosy Performancing plug-in for Firefox, a sublime blog editor that may well have sealed the deal in my return to blogland.

Watch this space. Future topics may or may not include any of the following: Knitting, growing tomatoes, my shiny new flat, Ireland, vegetarianism, walking, a new job, films, jala neti, poetry, nonsensical ramblings, football (soccer), recycling, composting with worms...

In fact, I'm so excited about that last one that I just have to get in a little teaser: there are worms living under my kitchen sink! Trust me, this is a good thing :-)

Not giving up

2005-11-17T18:19:00.000+00:00

So, I had given up on my blog as wasting my time and draining my life essence, but it seems I'm back.

It's just going to be short and sweet today, because I really need some hobbies that don't involve sitting in front of this computer for extended periods of time. I think I'm going to learn to play classical guitar. Haven't got the guitar yet, don't know how to play, but I'll learn.

Wait, I bet there's lessons online! Guides to choosing a guitar, free sheet music, online guitar shops galore...

My typing finger has a pain already.

Who do Google think they are?

2005-11-01T19:46:00.000+00:00

I'm not sure what there is to say about Google and their digitisation project, except do they think the rules don't apply to them? I don't think I've ever seen such blatant disregard for the law.

Whether or not Google intend only to make small portions of the texts available to users, they're missing the point that the very act of making the unauthorised copy is illegal. Now they seem to think that out of print and out of copyright are the same thing.

Maybe I should start downloading pirated films from the internet. Using Google's logic I could justify my actions by publishing a small amount of my illegal download on this website and claiming it was all good publicity for the film. I could announce it in press releases and make sure the whole world knew about it, and surely all the film companies would be falling over each other to thank me.

I used to have a great deal of respect for the way Google operated, but now they seem to be just another faceless corporation, bulldozing their way through the law and common decency in pursuit of money.

Don't get me wrong. I don't equate illegality with immorality, and I don't think copyright law is perfect, but it's there and it's there for a reason. Authors have a right to protect their work from exploitation, and to that end to be able to control who is authorised to make copies of it and for what purpose. Google need to acknowledge that authors have that right, if only because it's the respectful thing to do.

It's not about money. As far as I'm concerned, all they have to do is ask. Or is that too much effort?

Does that look like spinich to you?

2005-10-29T16:56:00.000+00:00

My new found status as an almost-vegetarian was placed in jeopardy last night, when I may have accidentally consumed a small amount of something that in many ways resembled beef.

Who would have thought that the contents of a pastry slice labelled Spinich and Ricotta would in fact be a brown beefy sludge? It sure wasn't cheese and there was nothing green about it. Someone at Sainsbury's having a laugh?

If I didn't so hate the litigious nature of modern society, I might put something here about suing the supermarket, but I do so I won't. It reminds me of the time I bought donuts from Tesco, and the custard ones were filled with apple and the apple ones were filled with custard. I didn't sleep for a week, I can tell you. If you can't rely on the contents of your donut, what can you trust?

Back to the plot, I have decided to be less of a hypocrite and make the next pair of shoes I buy cow friendly. Vegetarian Shoes seem to be well made, stylish and generally free of dead animals, which is pretty much all I can ask for.

Random Billy Bragg quote (don't sue me Billy):

I dreamed I saw a tree full of angels, up on Primrose Hill
And I flew with them over the Great Wen till I had seen my fill
Of such poverty and misery sure to tear my soul apart
I've got a socialism of the heart

And, goodnight.

Doing something more than nothing

2005-10-20T20:41:00.000+00:00

I'm trying to cut down on internet use. No more evenings spent aimlessly surfing, no more reading the bbc pages exhaustively without actually gaining in knowledge because after five hours I'm kind of bleary eyed.

Blogging is allowed, because this is productive. I actually have to have my brain in gear to do this, even if it doesn't seem like it sometimes. Sometimes it's hard work to get the words down; sometimes the amount of time and effort that goes into writing and rewriting a post seems entirely under represented by the number of words that end up getting published. Sometimes I can spend half an hour staring at a blank screen and then give up. But at least I'm thinking.

Doing nothing makes me tired, and I won't do it any more.

This evening I read a bit of Nineteen eighty-four, listened to Vin Garbutt and Billy Bragg (I'm loving Billy Bragg at the moment. £7.99 for a double cd? Bargain.), and thought a lot about doing yoga. All of those things require a degree of intellectual effort. I might have felt better if I'd actually done the yoga, but baby steps, baby baby steps.

Child of the eighties

2005-10-18T17:50:00.000+00:00

You know those quizzes, those You know you're a child of the eighties when... quizzes?

They invariably list a number of popular (children's) culture icons from the said era, such as My little ponies (#My little pony... skinny and bony...#), He-man and Transformers. If you ever owned these, played with these, or fantasised about playing with these even though your parents were too stingy to actually buy you any, then you surely are a child of the eighties. I had fake Transformers and My little ponies from the charity shop, but I'm not complaining.

And He-man did have the power.

I've always known, thanks to these quizzes, that I am a child of the eighties. Well, thanks to the quizzes and the indisputable knowledge that I was born in 1979.

My status as such a privileged child was reinforced finally and indisputably today. There can be no doubt, if there ever was any, that I grew up in the decade of Button moon and Cabbage patch kids.

Today, I correctly identified the song Suddenly wafting through the drafty corridors as being the song that was played at Scott and Charlene's wedding in 1987. #Suddenly, every part of me...#

If you don't know who Scott and Charlene are, then you're clearly not a child of the eighties, or else you live in a part of the world which is culturally barren. What sort of people have never seen that great Australian soap Neighbours? Making tea time interesting for the last twenty years.

If you do hail from such a poor deprived place, then you might be interested to know that tomboy Charlene was played by none other than Kylie Minogue. The show also launched the career of Russell Crowe, although nobody actually remembers him being in it.

Not even me, and I'm a child of the eighties.

Three day weekend

2005-10-16T17:15:00.000+00:00

There are reasons why two days is not long enough for the weekend, and these are they.

There's two. The first is that Saturday is next to Friday, and the second is that Sunday is next to Monday. The whole weekend is contaminated by contact with the not-weekend.

Anybody remember Dinosaurs? Not the momma! Ahem. Where was I?

Ah yes, a three day weekend, that would be perfect. All that's needed is one day in the middle and two days to act as a buffer zone on either side. One pure, pure day of nothing except relaxation and wine.

Now, I'm not necessarily asking for a four day working week here. I've no problem with working five days in a row. What I'm suggesting is that we get this extra day off by making the week eight days long, which is surely the perfect solution.

What's that you're saying about science and moon cycles and the solar system and stuff? I don't understand. Or maybe I just can't hear you.

Flames

2005-10-15T16:59:00.000+00:00

This morning I was walking down an alleyway I've never walked down before, a long, winding medieval back passage with steep side walls and smooth worn cobbles, when I rounded a corner and a saw the most amazing sight.

There, sprawling across a wall in this grey, lonely alley, was a bright, autumnal mass of red, orange, yellow leaves, a beautiful fiery work of art hidden from all but the few of us who decide to seek out new places and walk a different way sometimes.

The picture is just the teaser; if you want to see the rest then go for a walk. Who knows what you might find.

Meat Loaf looks like who?

2005-10-14T17:54:00.000+00:00

Has anyone else ever noticed that Sam Allardyce looks an awful lot like Meat Loaf?

More importantly, does anybody care?

This post has no rhyme or reason except Bat out of hell was just on the radio. After my epic post last night I'm clearly suffering from inspiration draining blogger lethargy that has left me incapable of posting anything of meaning.

How many of you know who Sam Allardyce is anyway? How many of you even read this far? Truely, there are times when I oughtn't be allowed near my blog. Don't worry, things'll get better tomorrow. #The sun'll come out.. tomorrow.. tomorrow...#

Annie? I'm singing Annie?

How to be a bad vegetarian (or hypocrisy for beginners)

2005-10-13T18:23:00.000+00:00

So, I don't eat meat any more. No more dead animals for me. Except fish, because I'm clearly a hypocrite.

I feel, looking back, like my whole culinary life has been a gradual journey to this point. I've never been a big meat eater, although until a few weeks ago I was happily enjoying KFC with the best of them. Still, there's been no single event that made me make this decision; it just... happened. There was no sudden revelation, no dodgy burger, no pet lamb cooked for Sunday dinner. But there are reasons for this if I think too hard.

This is where I have to explain myself.

First and foremost, I don't like meat much. Chicken's never been a problem. Or a nice crunchy bit of back bacon. But real meat, a thick chewable steak or hunk of baby sheep, has never done it for me. It has an awful texture, it's hard to digest and it's surely very similar to eating a dead person. (Interesting aside: Bill Bryson once said that he'd never eat a doner kebab because he didn't want to consume anything that looked so remarkably like it was "calved from a dead man's leg." Still hungry?) So, red meat was the first to go a couple of months ago. Although by red meat I clearly don't mean bacon, because I'm a hypocrite.

Of course, so far I've only excluded the meat I don't much like, and chicken's still on the menu. But at the back of my mind there's always been the niggling knowledge that this is wrong. Always. It can't be right to cause suffering to another thinking, feeling, sentient being for no good reason whatsoever. And before you say it, it isn't a good reason. Very few people on this earth have no alternative to eating meat. You can argue all you like about food chains and the order of things, but the fact remains that we can all live quite happily and (even more) healthily without dead flesh in our guts.

Do you know how they killed the pigs that made your ham sandwich? They stunned them with an electric stunner, and hung them upside down by their legs. Then they slit their throats so they bled to death. Now, pigs are very intelligent creatures, at least as intelligent, if not more intelligent, as your pet dog. Would you do that to Lassie? Personally, I wouldn't do that to a chicken.

Which leads me to my next reason. How many times have you heard people say, in the face of squeamishness, that if you eat something then you should be able to kill it? It works both ways: if you wouldn't kill it, don't eat it. Stick most people in front of a cow and tell them to slaughter it, get blood on their hands, and they'd be horrified at the thought - but meat comes in such sanitised supermarket packages these days that it's easy to forget it ever had a face.

To me, the thought of strangling a chicken, taking it's neck in my hands and squeezing the life out of it, watching it die helplessly, is no less awful than the thought of strangling a cat, or a monkey. I just couldn't do it. So, yes, if you would take the knife in your hand and slit its throat yourself, then by all means eat that dead pig. But if you wouldn't, then you shouldn't. Come help me dig up some potatoes? No problem. Going scrumping? Sounds like fun. Fancy coming down the abbatoir and slaughtering a few cows? No? Well then.

The final nail in the meat eating coffin came a few weeks ago, in a bookshop. Aren't books great? I picked up In defence of animals: the second wave by Peter Singer, and started reading. I didn't get very far, but the bit I did read was brilliant. The basis gist of it was that the drawing of a line, a don't eat it because it's morally wrong line, at the level of species is quite arbitrary. Why not at genus, or even higher? Other species have the same levels of cognition, sentience and ability to feel pain as small children, but because of this arbitrary line most people would eat one and not the other. In the other direction, why don't we draw the line at whatever subgroups of human we might belong to? Perhaps, as a woman, I ought to start eating men. They may think, feel, cry and hurt like me, but they don't belong to the same exclusive biological group as me. Therefore it's ok to kill them for food, isn't it?

So, no more meat for me. Ish. Sorry for preaching, because I really have no right to. My shoes are made of leather and I eat fish. It's a gradual journey, as I said, and we all know I'm a hypocrite.

Procrastination is the thief of my soul

2005-10-10T20:57:00.000+00:00

After days of unproductiveness, self-induced lethargy and a general leanings towards laziness, I actually had quite a productive evening this evening.

I spent two hours sliding pieces of paper into plastic wallets and putting them in files. On occassion, just for variety, I took documents out of one file and put them into another. I also introduced some brightly coloured file dividers to my folders, which will surely be the thing that clinches my status as a fully-fledged chartered librarian.

Tomorrow, I may make lists.