Other Women: the problem with Mona Eltehawi’s “Handmaid Tale” comment

First wave feminists told married women that sex was rape and that bras and girdles were oppression. The problem was the vast majority of married women did not feel they were being raped. Many had no strong feelings about bras beyond the trouble of finding a comfortable one that fit for various dress cuts. And [...]

The Thinness of Our Emotional SPF

We live in an age of cognitive dissonance. Where things are what we say they are, yet also their polar opposite, and in which we are all the things we call others. Liberals are simultaneously soft hearted, emotion lead hippies without jobs, yet also mean, non-accepting and media controlling elitists. Progressives who detested the tea [...]

I felt this would help me expand outside of my inner circle. Life is just too big to live from within a circle.

Rituals for the Dead

We try and hold the images of our departed in our minds, paranoid about losing the smallest details. We look at photos, tip the top part of the whisky bottle in their honour, maybe light a candle near their photograph. We remember how they smelt, how they laughed. That nasty fight we had where terrible [...]

We’re human, wi…

We’re human, with every drop of beauty and ugliness that label carries with it. The angel and the demon, all rolled up together. We cry and we crack, inside and outward. We stumble and fall and fail and flail. We simmer and seethe, and also we soothe. We give and forgive. We hold to each [...]

I’m finding tha…

I’m finding that sincerity and trying to be as simple or direct as (possible) I’d like is often taken for sheer stupidity but since it is not a sincere world – it’s very probable that being sincere is stupid. Extract from Marilyn Monroe's 1955-1956 notebook.

Social Collateral Damage

At one point in Oxford I was known as the person who knew everybody. Oxford is a small city, and if you live there a while you will get to know pretty much everyone within your income and education level, even if those are two separate things. I had lived there a for well over ten [...]