Category: Society, Media & Politics

In which I think about words and their toxicity or lack thereof

This morning Maria Miller MP resigned as  Culture Secretary. This was not unexpected. She’d clung on for a week since being forced to apologise to Parliament for over-claiming expenses and for failing to co-operate fully with the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards’ investigation into her expenses claim. Many column inches will now be spun out on every conceivable element of this story: precisely how much Miller should have had to repay*; whether the loss of one of his very few female ministers will be an electoral blow for Dave and his massive shiny forehead**; and whether the press launched a vendetta against Miller, the minister tasked with seeing through changes in press standards and complaints procedures***. So I’m not going to expend any more energy on all of that.

What did catch my attention was a single sentence in this morning’s Today programme report on Miller’s troubles. The reporter described the word ‘expenses’ as the ‘most toxic’ word around in discussion of MPs and politicians. And he may have a point. ‘MPs’ expenses’ has become a shorthand for the general perception of sleaze and dishonesty around our elected representatives. But is it really that toxic? Since the expenses scandal broke in all its duckhouse and moat-cleaning how-the-other-half-lives glory in 2009, seven cabinet or junior ministers (including Miller) have lost their posts as a result, twenty-one MPs were either deselected or chose to stand down, and six MPs and two Lords have been found guilty on criminal charges, all relating to expenses. All in all it’s been a pretty poor show, and yet the word we use is ‘expenses’, which, when you think about it is a pretty benign sort of a word compared with some of the alternatives.

Let’s think about a couple of much much more toxic words for a moment. Fraud. Now there’s a nicely toxic word, but it isn’t the word we usually use when talking about MPs’ expenses. We say ‘expenses’ and we roll our eyes, or we say ‘scandal’ which brings to mind heavily stage managed photo opportunities where wronged wives stand by their high-profile man. It doesn’t bring to mind individuals routinely and dishonestly claiming thousands of pounds of public money. Dishonesty. Forgery. There’s two more toxic words, both of which appear in criminal charges brought in relation to MPs’ or Lords’ expenses claims. Cheat. That’s another really toxic word.

In the same week that Miller was clinging by her fingernails to the last tiny threads of both her reputation and her job, her cabinet colleague, Ian Duncan Smith was announcing yet another crackdown on people who overclaim welfare benefits. If we’re applying the same standards to those overclaimers as to Miller, I’m assuming that Duncan Smith’s ‘crackdown’ will involve a system whereby people stand up in the waiting room at their local JobCentre+ apologise briefly for their mistake and then pay back around about 10% of whatever they actually owe. It would only be fair, and we are all in this together, after all. But that isn’t what will happen, because when it comes to the pot of public money we call welfare benefits we’re very happy to use words like fraud and cheat, and those words have force. Those words make us think of deceit and criminal intent and those things lead to condemnation and punishment.

In the heat of the expenses scandal the same logic was applied to MPs. Criminal charges were brought. Jobs were lost, but more recently, the heat has gone out of the conversation. Miller has resigned as cabinet minister. I’d be stunned if she stood down as an MP, and David Cameron has already expressed the hope that she will return to cabinet at some point in the future. The  language about Miller from Downing Street uses words like ‘mistake’ and doing ‘the right thing’ by apologising. So maybe ‘expenses’ is the most toxic word bandied about at present in relation to MPs and politicians, but maybe, it isn’t quite toxic enough.

 

* £45,000 like the Parliamentary Commissioner said

** Hopefully

*** Possibly, but morally it’s all a bit pot-kettle at this point

 

And if that’s enough politics for one day and you’d like to branch out into some of my made up musings instead this is the place to go buy books.

In which I wonder whether it’s even worth having an opinion

There are some truths which, in this little hippy liberal corner of the interweb at least, we hold to be self-evident. Things like the idea that extreme weather events definitely aren’t caused by Katy Perry kissing a girl and liking it, and that the welfare state is, on balance, A Good Thing. Other Good Things would include the NHS, the BBC, free movement of people across borders and the recognition that newspaper headlines that are phrased as a yes/no question can almost always be answered, ‘Probably not.’ (EG ‘Is your iPod giving you cancer?’ ‘Are floods of immigrants going to establish sharia law in Melton Mowbray?’ etc. I made those two up, but you get the idea.)

What is depressing this little corner of the interweb today, is the unfortunately equally self-evident fact, that none of these opinions matter. My opinions, like most of yours, are irrelevant to my political overlords. I’m not rich enough to be likely to donate significant money to any political party. I’m not a hard-working family, being childless and generally quite lazy, and therefore, it would appear that very few politicians see me as a demographic worth pursuing.

Having said that I do live in a relatively marginal parliamentary seat with a current majority of less than 3000. Marginal seats are the places that actually matter in general elections – the seats where the sitting MP has a small lead and where the seat could plausibly change hands. That should mean that I’m one of the people who politicians are spending stupid amounts of money trying to please. So why aren’t the papers full of stories about politicians competitively trying to outdo one another over how lax they want to make our border controls, and aggressively trying to give passing unemployed people free monkeys and tv licences, and maybe a nationalised railway to play with? All of that would appeal immensely to me, but none of it is happening.

And it’s not happening, because although I live in a relatively marginal parliamentary seat, I’m not an undecided or swing voter. The problem is that I know what I think, so when my hereditary Tory MP turns up on the doorstep, our views are already too diametrically opposed for there to be any significant risk of me voting for him, so, although I might berate him lightly for a while, neither of our hearts are really in it, and in the end we just shrug at one another and he pops off to try to woo someone more plausibly wooable. Essentially the people whose opinions matter to politicians are the group of people who:

a) live in marginal constituencies;

b) are undecided about how to vote (and ideally are undecided between the 1st and 2nd place parties – people umming and aahing between the Greens and a friendly looking Independent are less relevant); and

c) are definitely intending to vote for someone.

In the 100 most marginal seats in Britain at the moment (based on 2010 electoral boundaries and results), the total number of votes between the 1st and 2nd place parties is just over 120000. If we keep things simple (simpler admittedly than they actually are) and just think about votes shifting from the 1st place to the 2nd place party, you only need half (plus one) of those voters to move to change the result. So that’s 60000ish voters whose intentions politicians are actually interested in. The current population of Britain is roughly 64 million, and the number eligible to vote in general elections is around 46 million. That means, in practical terms, somewhere around 0.1% of the electorate actually have the electoral clout to influence political debate and policy. Obviously that maths is massively dodgy and oversimplified but the conclusion pretty much holds. A very small section of the population actually cast votes that make a difference to the outcome of major elections, and I’m not one of them, and if you’re not one of them there is very little incentive for career politicians to care what you think. And I find that rather depressing. That is all.

In which I have a book out and undertake the pondering of various things

Ahoy.  Good afternoon and howdy there. I have been remiss of late in the tending of this little bloggy corner of the internet. I’ve been gadding all over the shop writing blogs for other people left (What make’s a hero? for Choc Lit), right (Letters to my younger self for Serendipity Reviews), and centre (Adapting Shakespeare for The Romaniacs), and my first novel has come out.

Waaaaah!

Yes. Indeedy. It is true. Much Ado About Sweet Nothing is now out there in the world and is all buyable for your kindle (or your kindle smartphone/tablet/PC app). So you could buy it if you wanted. I’d be delighted if you did.

All of which explains why my head is a bit all over the place, but does not excuse the lack of good blog maintenance. Now I’m back at it, I can see that there are cobwebs in the corner, and the occasional table needs its doilies freshening. Yes. My blog has doilies and an occasional table. Please feel free to make up your own jokes about what the table is the rest of the time.

So in order to get up to date on the blog I’ve done a whistle stop tour of the internet to identify the main concerns of the day, generated some arbitrary opinions on them and arranged the whole thing into a numbered list. Here we go:

 

1. Tom Daley is dating a guy. I have two opinions on this. Opinion 1: Lucky guy. Opinion 2: This shouldn’t be news. I’m slightly sad that it so clearly still is. Tom Daley is famous for being unusually good at jumping prettily into water. That would seem to be an activity that can be achieved equally competently whether the jumper in question is gay, straight, bisexual, asexual or entirely undecided. So it’s nice that he seems happy. If there are kids who are questioning their own sexuality who gain strength or a sense of solidarity from his announcement that’s brilliant, but really really sad that it’s considered Big News.

 

2. Men and women’s brains are wired differently. No. No. They’re not. Firstly nobody’s brain is wired. I know this. It’s why as a freelancer who goes into lots of different organisations I am required to have professional indemnity insurance, but have never had to have my head PAT tested. The study the headline is based on is here. Just from the abstract you can see that the study only looked at people up to age 22. The study also noted that differences are greatest during puberty but reduce during adulthood. So interesting stuff medically for anyone studying neurological conditions that are more common in one gender than the other, but not a reason to sack your female CEO and hire a man or vice versa.

 

3. The University of Kent were tad rude about children’s and genre fiction. Clearly what we have here is what used to be known as a storm in a teacup, and is now just known as Twitter. Having said that, university level courses in creative writing have expanded massively over the last few years, and if you’re serious enough about writing to do a BA or MA then you do need to think about choosing your course carefully. I did the sort of broad covers-a-bit-of-everything course that Kent so obviously don’t offer, and it was brilliant for me. I started off thinking I was a playwright, and left as a rom com prose writer. If I’d done a narrow playwrighting MA I would never have known.

 

4. Michael Gove still doesn’t understand how education works.

 

I think that’s all. Presumably some real news has also happened while I’ve been distracted, but you know better than to look for coherent thoughts about serious things here. Ta-ra for now.

In which I wonder when showing one’s actual face became laudable

Now from that title you might be expecting me to weigh into the issue of Muslim women wearing a full face veil. Well, sorry if I disappoint but that ain’t going to happen around here.  Wear a veil if you want to; don’t if you don’t. I really have nothing more to say on the issue.

What I do have something to say about is this – the Children in Need Bearfaced Campaign. Not wearing make-up has, apparently, become so socially abhorrent, so embarrassing for women, that they can get sponsored to spend 24 hours without foundation. Hold the front page! There are pictures of some women showing the actual unadorned skin on their noses and foreheads. Try to control your inevitable feelings of horror at the sight.

What? I’m sorry. We’re all familiar with Children in Need sponsorship options – you can sit in a bath of beans; you can wear a duck costume to the office; you can undertake some form of physical task (sponsored walk, bike ride, swim, hop etc etc). Leaving the house without make-up on isn’t a sponsorable activity. In fact, at the risk of causing horror amongst whole sections of society, for a huge number of the women, and nearly all the men, it’s just normal. We get up and leave the house without painting on a better face than the one we’ve been lumbered with every single day. And here’s another shocker – nothing bad happens as a result. No children are scared. The police aren’t called. We aren’t carted back to our homes and required to mascara-up before we venture out again.

There’s nothing wrong with choosing to wear make-up. I personally only paint it on a couple of times a year – in the photo on this site, for example I believe I’m wearing lip gloss, but I think that’s it.  Wearing make-up every day just makes me feel sweaty and like my face is on too tight. There is, however, nowt unfeminist about an interest in sparkly pretty things. Some women enjoy wearing make-up, in the same way that I enjoy stroking shoes I can’t afford to buy (and would probably break an ankle in if I could). That’s fine and dandy. But wearing make-up shouldn’t be such a self-evident expectation of womankind, that not wearing it is viewed as hardship or faux pas. There shouldn’t be anything brave about not bothering with eyeliner.

To nick a thought from Caitlin Moran, a good basic starting point for rooting out sexism is to ask yourself, “Are the men worrying about this?” Are male office workers, or indeed male tv presenters, actors etc, getting up half an hour earlier every day to paint out their blemishes? Well on TV, to an extent they are, but we’re talking a brush of powder to take the shine off, rather than an intricate layering of primer, concealer, foundation, bronzer and more.

Your face is your face. If you like to paint bits of it pretty colours, then that’s fair enough, but as soon as we start applauding women for being prepared to show their faces make-up free, we accept that doing so is an act of courage, and it just shouldn’t be. A face is a face is a face. Some of them are a bit blotchy. Some of them are spotty. Some of them are wrinkly. Some of them have slightly hairy top lips. And none of those things matter, and all of them are entirely ok.

So, wear make-up if you want to; don’t if you don’t. Just don’t embrace the idea that not wearing make-up is brave or empowering, because as soon as you do, you also accept that it’s Not Normal, and the bigger, broader and more inclusive we make our notion of normal the more people we share common ground with and the happier we will all be.

And that ends this week’s sermon on the subject of lip gloss. Thanking you all muchly for your time.

In which I acknowledge and extol the virtue of doing a Good Thing

It cannot be denied that this little blog can, on occasion, be a place where I have a little rant or moan about one or more of the irritants I have noticed around me. Those irritants range from major (Michael Gove) to minor (excessive book promotion on twitter), but I have had a little moan about them all.

Today, however I’m adopting a different approach and taking a few minutes to concentrate on the positives and extol the virtue of us each doing a Good Thing. It’s easy to look at the world, see all the problems around us and conclude that it’s way way too big for any one lonesome soul to make a difference. It’s easy to feel a little bit defeated and conclude that when it comes to changing the world it’s easier all round not to try. Recently, however, two things have passed by my butterfly brain that have made me want to whoop and holler in praise of those of us who do try.

The second thing, which for reasons of narrative build, I shall tell you about first, was this tweet from Citizens Advice:

100 people becoming volunteers every week with just one organisation. That’s incredible. Think for a second about how many people must give their time for free across the country, not just in Citizens Advice Bureaux, but in charity shops, schemes to help the elderly, play schemes, animal shelters, homelessness charities, youth groups and all the other random and diverse things people do to help their communities and to help people across the world. Jolly well done all of them, and if you are one of them, really jolly well done you.

The second thing that made me want to run across the internet and give the person involved a big ol’ high five, was this project from Rowan Coleman. Rowan has decided to donate all of the royalties from her next book, a novella titled Woman Walks Into A Bar to Refuge, a charity that works with victims of domestic abuse. According to her blog, she’s aiming to raise £10000.

In my non-writing life I have worked directly with people who were living with domestic abuse, or with the aftermath of past abuse, and I was struck, every single time, by how utterly normal those women, and occasionally men, were. Domestic abuse isn’t something that happens to people who are weaker, or less confident, or less able than us. It happens to people like us. I really hope that the good thing that Rowan is doing makes a difference to some of those people.

So, here’s my suggestion, lets all follow the example of those rather wonderful volunteers, and of Rowan Coleman, and agree that this week we shall do a Good Thing. One Good Thing, for example, would be to hop over to Amazon and pre-order Woman Walks Into A Bar. Another would be to do a spot of volunteering. It is, of course, entirely up to you. Personally I have already ordered Rowan Coleman’s novella, so my Good Thing will be to fill in the final paperwork to donate my brain to the good people at Parkinsons UK to help with research into Parkinsons disease. Obviously they only get my brain after I’ve died. I’ll be using it up until then, sometimes as much as two or three times a week. I’ve had the final forms on my desk for months. This week I shall actually finish filling them in and send them back. Easy. One Good Thing done.

It is, of course, possible that you are not really into doing Good Things and are working more of an Evil Genius lifestyle vibe. In which case,  maybe you could still try a Good Thing just for variety. You never know. You might like it. Either way, lets be a little bit celebratory, shall we? So please, tell us about the Good Things you do, or are going to do forthwith.

In which there is a little scandalette and it gets me thinking

Demonstrating the dizzying pace of the modern news agenda a small political storm has brewed and passed over just in the time I’ve been sitting here trying to decide what to blog about.

The Electoral Commission in the UK releases quarterly figures showing donations made to political parties. The figures released today showed a bequest for half a million which was split between the two Coalition parties. A little bit of light journalistic digging showed that the bequest was made in the will of a Joan Edwards who specified that the money should go to “whichever government is in office… in their absolute discretion to use as they may think fit.” It was speedily pointed out that thinking fit to keep it for yourself was probably not quite in the spirit of the thing, and within a morning both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems had conceded the point and agreed to hand the money over to the Treasury. Cue many editorials about the grasping nature of modern politicians and their lack of engagement with the notion of public funds for the public good. Some of those editorials may even be wise and worth reading, because, yes, if you’re the government and you get a wodge of cash to spend as you “think fit” and your first thought is that you could use it to pay for a better wine selection at your party conference then shame on you.

However, my first thought on reading this story wasn’t about how disappointingly grasping and self-serving the politicians involved seem to be, it was about the bequest itself. Somewhere out there a woman decided to leave half a million pounds to the government of the day, not knowing, presumably, which party that would be or how they would choose to spend the money. I can’t decide whether that demonstrates a refreshing faith in government and democracy or simple naivete. Maybe it’s neither – maybe the woman in question had fallen out with her local cats’ home and left the money to the government just to spite them.

What I am fairly sure about is that I wouldn’t do the same. If I had half a million pounds to spare (and a quick rummage under the sofa cushions confirms that I don’t), I can imagine wanting to use the cash for the greater good. I am a proper hippy bleeding heart liberal after all. I believe in outdated stuff like the welfare state and universal healthcare and higher taxes for the comfortably-off. But to voluntarily bequeath half a million to the government of the day like Joan? I don’t think so. And there are three reasons why not:

1. I’m a bit of a control freak. Sure, I want to improve the world with my money but I want to choose how.

2. I want to see what happens to the money. That kind of rules out the whole bequest thing. I think I’d want a scheme where I just went “Here is some money. Please tweet me if you’ve got something cool you’d like to do with it, and I shall pick stuff that sounds good/interesting/worthwhile…” Back to the control freakery again.

3. I don’t quite trust that any political party would definitely use my money for the greater good, and that’s a really bad thing. Polls repeatedly show that the British public lack faith in their politicians. This Ipsos MORI poll from June 2013 is a good example, showing the extent to which we believe our politicians to be self-serving. It is, therefore, really annoying when they act in ways that reinforce that belief. After expenses scandals, and previous question marks over party funding, politicians should be going out of their way to clean up their act, rather than opportunistically divvying up bequests between themselves. Perhaps that perception is that if the mistrust extends across the party divides then there’s no comparative loss if the public don’t trust you, because they don’t trust the other guy either.

And at this point I feel I should have a pithy conclusion as to how to fix the break down of trust between electorate and elected, but I don’t I’m afraid. Feel free to offer your suggestions in the comments. And feel free to share your spending plans for any unexpected (or, indeed, imaginary) cash you might have lying about.

In which I witter on about self promotion and sisterhood

Ahoy, hello and indeed howdy one and all.

Reading it back I suspect that was probably a greeting that needed more commas, but I can’t quite work out where to put them so I’m going to move on and hope nobody noticed.

Right.

I’m also going to skip over my normal paragraph about being a bad blogger and promising to eat my bloggy fibre and be more regular in future. Best laid plans and all that…

So, anyway, this week I am mainly thinking about self-promotion. It’s a bit of a tricky topic for us budding writers out here in InternetWorld. If you hop over to Twitter you will find that the only form of tweet even nearing the ubiquity of “Buy my book,” is the humourous ranting tweet about the number of tweets saying “Buy my book.”

In addition to the relatively benign “Buy my book” tweeters, you also get the real hardsellers who send DMs (private one-to-one messages on twitter) instructing you to buy their book and write an amazon review, or demanding that you like their facebook author page. Those people are beyond the pale and should be rounded up and taken away to a place where someone can have a stern word with them and then they can sit for a bit and think about what they’ve done.

All of which is a bit tricksy for us writerly types, because ultimately we do want you all (every single last one of you) to BUY THE BOOK. Fortunately, I am here to save budding writers from this nightmarish social media stressfest, with my completely considered, not made up on the spur of the moment at all, RULES FOR ONLINE PROMOTION.

1. Tweeting or Facebooking a single line from your novel won’t make anyone buy the book. No single sentence is that amazing. If Shakespeare had been @shakespearebard and had tweeted “‘To be or not to be’ Brilliant new story: HAMLET! Out now ” he would have essentially managed to make Hamlet sound a bit meh. Bad Shakespeare. And Bad Twitterers. Bad.

2. Don’t tweet or message me just to ask me to like your Facebook page. Have a facebook author page by all means. I’ve got one. It’s fine and dandy. It means that you can keep your personal facebook and your public/work/writerly facebook separate. But the point of having it isn’t just to attract likes. Presumably the point of having it is to allow you to engage with readers in a fun interesting way that ultimately encourages them to BUY THE BOOK. Putting all your energy into getting likes for a facebook page seems like putting your cart before your horse, which is stupid because horses are notoriously poor at pushing stuff. Facebook likes aren’t an end in themself. Remember that people.

3. It is ok to tweet or retweet links to reviews, blogposts and news stories about your book, but it’s not ok if that’s all you tweet or all you put on facebook. Twitter’s tagline is “Join the conversation,” not “Shout promotion at strangers.” For every explicitly promo-y tweet set yourself a target of at least three tweets about your breakfast. Everyone loves breakfast. No-one loves having promo yelled at them across the interweb.

4. Be interesting. And if you only adhere to one of these rules, make it this one.

So in summary, facebook author pages are like horses. You need to be careful about where you put your cart, and be interesting. That is all dear readers. That is all.

Actually no, it isn’t! I’m not usually a fan of blog chainy type things, for similar reasons that I’m not really a fan of blog awardy things, which I explained back here. However, this week I was tagged in this:

by the rather lovely Jane Lovering, and the concept didn’t actually offend me so I shall play along. The idea is that we’re sharing the love between cool and interesting women bloggers who we admire. Jane has already tagged my fellow Choc Lit newbies, Rhoda Baxter,  Janet Gover and Jules Wake, and so I’m going to add the following:

Laura E James – one more Choc Lit Newbie. The Dear Mum post on 22nd July made me tear up.

Holly Anne Gets Poetic – in the interests of full disclosure I’ll acknowledge that Holly is a close personal friend, but she’s also my absolute favourite poetry blogger out there at the mo’. Read her. She is funny and dark and wise.

Neets Writer – I’m not normally a fan of writers blogging about writing. In fact the amount of writing chat around here at the moment is quite putting me off myself. But Anita Chapman does it well – she’s worth a read.

Kate Johnson -And one more Choc Lit girl to finish things off. The delightful Kate Johnson, who I have just about forgiven for taking MY little cup home from the RNA conference this year. Apparently she won it or something…

And that really is all. Bye bye.

In which I think about Europe

So, apparently these UKIP fellows did bally well in the recent local elections. It appears that the Great British public like the beer drinking, fag smoking, only very occasionally photographed doing a Nazi salute, “man of the people” vibe that UKIP candidates portray. Their surge in popularity has sent the Conservatives into their traditional flatspin over all issues that might vaguely relate to Europe, and forced the government’s hand over the question of an EU referendum.

Now, I’m not generally in favour of referenda (as I explained all the way back here). It’s a wariness linked to my general slight unease with the whole democracy thing. It’s all very well letting the people decide, but I’ve met people and some of them are not that bright.

It seems to be quite widely accepted that, given the choice, the British would probably vote against further EU integration and may even vote to leave the EU altogether. There’s some interesting poll stats from last November here. Attitudes to European integration are fascinating, and seem to go right to the roots of how we, as individuals, view our place in society and the wider world. It’s not at all weird or unusual for an English person to be opposed to Irish republicanism, opposed to Scottish independence, and also opposed to the European Union, when, in a sense, those are all questions of where we draw lines on maps, of who we consider part of the “us” rather than the “them.”

And that’s why, purely based on gut instinct, I’m massively in favour of the EU, massively in favour of us learning to see ourselves as European, as well as British. I think it’s a positive thing when we make our mental “us” as big and inclusive as possible. I think drawing lines between people, whether those lines are based on religion, race, gender, sexuality or geography, is just not a particularly nice thing to do.

It’s probably not a terribly practical thing to do either. Big business is now international. Organised crime is international too. Whatever the rhetoric, small national governments are struggling to get multinationals, like Google, Amazon etc. to pay national taxes and work within the letter of national regulation. Government/regulation on a continental scale might have a fighting chance.

So, yay Europe so far as I’m concerned, although it’s not a point of view you’re likely to hear vigorously expounded by too many politicians at the moment, which is a shame. It’s symptomatic of the wider problem of how modern politicians are led by polls and focus groups, rather than being prepared to try to influence and persuade based on their own beliefs. Ho-hum.

I think I mentioned, a few weeks ago, that I was maybe going to hold off the more political blogging in future. I’d say that was going well, wouldn’t you?

In which I think about ChipLitFest and this very blog

So, lovely blog readists, I have had a delightful weekend. Simply delightful. The sun was out. The cake was chocolately. The wine was pink and sparkling, and there was a literary festival to attend. Really, what more could a prematurely middle-aged and unapologetically middle-class girl ask for?

Saturday was spent at Chipping Norton Literary Festival, stroking lovely books and eating excellent cake. We even managed to squeeze in a couple of talks. Both were aimed at writers, one discussing why writers still need agents, even given the self-publishing boom, and the other looking at social media for writers.

To be 100% honest it was really the agent talk that I was most interested in. The Social Media session was something I’d booked because it fit in well with the other things we were doing and I thought it might be mildly time-passingly interesting, but actually, that was the session that provided the most food for thought. Liz Fenwick, who led the session, is a fellow RNA member and a published novelist. She talked, interestingly and with great humour, about a whole host of social media platforms – twitter, facebook, pinterest, goodreads etc.

She also talked about blogs, and what we, as writers, should and (perhaps) shouldn’t talk about on our blogs, tweets and facebook pages. She suggested, quite rightly I suspect, that talking about religion and politics risks alienating at least some potential readers. Now, as the observant amongst you may have noticed, I do, on occasion, get a tiny bit political on this blog. I, it has to be acknowledged, Have Views. Now I try to ensure that those views are reasonably measured and researched, but I’m not entirely above having a little rant about Michael Gove either.

Now lots of you won’t find that off-putting at all, and I, of course, think all the views expressed here are entirely normal and  rational and right-thinking. So how could anyone find them off-putting? But then, if I found a writer who regularly blogged very right wing or reactionary material, I would probably find that somewhat tiresome myself. Generally, we are all much less prone to consider a person ranty and over-the-top if we tend to agree with what they’re saying.

So I guess the question is, what is the point of this blog? Is it just a place for me to write what I like in the hope that you might be interested, or should I be viewing it more definitely as part of my writerly brand? When I started the blog I said it would “be filled with whatever thoughts pop into my brain. My only commitment to you is that I will endeavour, whereever possible, to think only interesting thoughts.” The idea was that this would be a little corner of the internet where I could write things about stuff that seemed interesting or worth mentioning and that possibly there would be people (I was thinking anywhere up to about eight of you) who would find some of those things interesting too.

But I also want to be a published novelist. I have a full novel manuscript out under consideration with a publisher as I type. When that publisher (or any other in the future) googles me I want them to find someone who doesn’t look like a potential liability. So do I need to put a pin in the bigger rantier opinions and create a blogland more in keeping with the wannabe professional writer image I’m trying to project? Or is a bit of opinion welcome? Would losing it make for a duller blog or is it better when I don’t rant anyway? I have no conclusion today, so please, tell me what you think…

In which I struggle to muster the energy to get annoyed with Ian Duncan Smith

So Ian Duncan Smith, Minister for Work and Pensions, thinks he could live on £53 per week. In fact he’s sure he could because he’s been unemployed before and is therefore very much down with the common man. If you’ve missed out on this little news titbit, it’s worth reading the Guardian’s version of the story, not least for the supreme piece of editing that butts IDS’s claim to have experienced poverty right up next to the additional detail that he’s married to the daughter of the 5th Baron Cottesloe.

And clearly, he probably could live on £53 for a week or even a couple of weeks, but that’s not really the point. You can probably get through the first week without needing to go to the launderette and eating only value beans on value toast. The second week is more difficult. By the third week you smell bad, you’ve run out of stuff like soap and toilet roll and you’re starting to want to throw value beans at passersby.

All of that is so utterly self-evident and not really worth the energy it took to type, that it’s making me wonder if I’ve actually reached the point of anger-fatigue with the current state of British politics. I used to get mad about this stuff. There are sufficient ranty blog posts on this very site to show my ability to get a tad worked up about major and minor policy issues. But today I’m struggling to work up a good head of rant. Maybe the triple whammy of Legal Aid cuts, welfare cuts and NHS “reform” is just a bit overwhelming for my poor liberal bleeding heart, but I feel tired. Tired of complaining. Tired of virtuously keeping myself informed, writing letters to my MP, signing petitions, retweeting links to campaign sites, and actually turning up to exercise my democratic whatnot at every election from local council to Westminster to Europe, without it really seeming to make a blind bit of difference.

I feel confused by a political landscape in which poor people and immigrants are unquestioningly talking about as scroungers right across the political spectrum. I feel confused by a set up where jobseekers’ benefit rate is experiencing a real-terms drop, but large companies are allowed to negotiate how much tax they feel like paying. I feel confused by an Education Secretary who talks about the importance of evidence-based education policy only after he’s announced a whole set of major education policies. And I feel like, in voting terms, there’s nowhere for tired confused liberals to go and have out metaphorical wounds licked. Maybe we need a new political party, born out of disenfranchisement, like the early labour movement. A party peopled by slightly over-anxious liberals who’s main contribution to parliamentary debate would be to suggest that it might be a bit more complicated than that. Or maybe I just need to take a break from reading the papers and come back when I’ve got the energy to get properly wound up again. Ho-hum.