Middle Narnia: Have I Got An MP For You

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Rachel

So, as most of the planet knows, our Member of Parliament, Nadine Dorries has signed up to appear in the ITV reality show I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. She’s a sitting MP and has (apparently) done this without the agreement of the party at either local or national level. So they’ve suspended her until she comes back and explains herself.

Meanwhile, those of us who live in her constituency of Mid-Bedfordshire (Middle Narnia), are left to twiddle our thumbs between now and when the British public vote her out of the jungle.  If certain sections of Twitter have their way, that’ll be never.  But we’re not downhearted. We’ve hit upon a cunning plan, employing the tactic used by Have I Got News For You, when presenter Angus Deayton blotted his copybook and was ejected from the show in 2002.  Not wanting to rush into finding the right replacement, they got in guest presenters; a move which became so popular that they kept it and now there’s somebody different at the helm every week.  So we’re going to do the same thing and have a series of guest MPs to look after our interests until Nadine gets back.

First up we have Ampthill campaigner Matthew Dear, who is going to hold the fort from now until Sunday.  Matthew has been spearheading the campaign to tell Central Bedfordshire Council exactly how unhappy we were that they decided our town centre was the perfect place for a lapdancing club.  Matthew has already drop-kicked the leader of Central Beds into touch on BBC Three Counties Radio, so we believe that he’s the perfect choice to represent Middle Narnia for the rest of the week.  Of his first day in the job he said: “NOBODY has contacted me except Hello, OK, the Daily Mail and a Mrs. Trellis of North Wales. And these MPs always moan about how busy they are! Putting this together with Nads month long sojourn in the undergrowth, I have drawn the conclusion that MPs are actually not needed at all and we could save more than a few squids by just abolishing them altogether.” You can follow Matthew’s week in office via his blog.

From Sunday, next week’s guest MP will be parachuting in at great expense from the neighbouring kingdom of Costa del Keynes and she may well bring free chocolate.  Currently at No15 on the UK bestsellers chart with her new book With Love at Christmas,  Carole Matthews has sold a further 3.5 million books worldwide and  has been translated into over 30 languages, including American.  She knows Middle Narnia well, can recommend Ampthill Fireplaces, but would advise that you avoid that mad woman on the Woodlands estate.  No… wait.

As Queen of Middle Narnia I am working to secure cover for the rest of Nadine’s jungle jape, but I’m confident that we really won’t realise that she’s gone, with this fine selection of people working on our behalf.

Chin up sweetie, we’ll get through.
Love n’ stuff
Queenie xx

Posted in Comment | 1 Comment

I’m a celebrity now, vote me out of here!

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Rachel

I saw it first last night on Facebook; a rumour that my MP, Nadine Dorries, had signed up for the new series of the ITV show I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!  My instant reaction was that it must be a joke.  But this is Bedfordshire and I should know better.  After all, it’s only a few short months since lots of us thought an application for a Sex Entertainment Licence in the centre of Ampthill was a joke.  We made the mistake of assuming our elected officials at Central Bedfordshire Council were rational, sensible people and would throw it out. No such luck.

Nadine Dorries is another elected official in (Patricia Hodge in Miranda moment), what I call Middle Narnia and I can only assume that she’s completely taken leave of her senses.  Why on earth would you risk your entire future career (either political or non-political), by appearing in that load of tripe?  Is there something in the water in Central Bedfordshire that allows people to make utterly mad decisions?  Nadine, what are you thinking, woman?  Are you thinking at all?

I don’t watch I’m a Celebrity and having Nadine on it isn’t going to make me start watching it.  I’m not impressed, I’m saddened that she’s going to take time out of a busy Parliamentary session and sit on her backside in an Australian jungle.  I frankly expect her backside on a bench in Westminster, representing the concerns of the people of this area.  In addition, what message does it send out to any woman wanting to be taken seriously in politics?  Nadine can forget anyone wanting a comment on a serious issue from her in the future; all they’ll want to know is whose backside she thought looked best in a bikini and whether her beauty routine was compromised.  Great, striking a fabulous blow for the sisterhood there Nadine, nice one *eye roll*

But there’s an upside to this for many. Twitter predictably exploded this morning and you can’t move for the relish with which large sections of it are looking forward to voting for Nadine Dorries… to eat Kangaroo testicles, or whatever it is they eat on there.  Surely she knows that it’s more than likely that she’ll have to perform every single one of the bushtucker trials; because if there’s one thing British public can be, it’s a sadistic lot.

So Nadine, take part or don’t take part, that of course is your perogative.  Obviously, you must have squared this with Parliament and your own  Mid Beds Conservative Association* and checked that’s it’s OK.   I’ve seen at least seven people on Twitter this morning voicing concerns as to whether it’s right for a sitting MP to do this kind of thing and I personally don’t believe it is.  Obviously, you couldn’t ask your constituency if we minded, but not to worry; our opportunity will come when you stand before us at the next general election and ask us whether we feel that you are the best person to represent the issues of the residents of this area.

Just don’t be surprised if we exercise our democratic right and vote you out of our particular jungle.

* EDIT:  Perhaps not. It was announced later this morning that Mid Beds Conservative Association were calling an emergency meeting to discuss the matter.

Posted in Comment, Entertainment | 3 Comments

Cheer up, it’s nearly Christmas

Posted on November 4, 2012 by Rachel

If you’re a regular visitor here, you’ll realise there’s been a  change.  Winter has come to Lewis Lodge.  I say ‘winter’ but by that I don’t mean a British winter of rain, sleet and gale force winds; I mean an imaginary winter, where the sky is clear, the air is cold and the snow lies deep and crisp and even.  I love that kind of winter, so that’s the winter we’re having right here, regardless of what it’s actually doing out there.   This is curl up with a good book and a hot cup of coffee territory.  This is the place to snuggle up under a furry throw – which sadly in this house means that the cat’s slept on it first.

In that same vein, my thoughts are turning to Christmas and this year I’m allowing them to.  In previous years, my attitude to the great festive season has been akin to being caught out by an early arriving period – damned inconvenient!  There’s the rushing about getting all hot and bothered, there’s the smash and grab raids on stores to get what you need and there’s the post-event exhaustion when the thing’s bled you try and you’re left with all the cleaning up.

But not this year.  Oh no! This year I will embrace the festivities when previously I’d be sat on the sidelines with two paracetamol, a hot water bottle and wishing the damn thing would go away.  I am going to put more effort into it and expect to get a whole lot more out.  That doesn’t mean I’m going to spend more, eat more and veg out infront of the TV more; just that I’m going to stop acting like a giant humbug.

We are Christians and Christ being the focus of the word Christmas (the clue’s in the title), everything will be focussed on what Jesus’ birth means and sharing that incredible gift with everybody around us. It’s a cold, dark time of year and what better way to banish that with light, warmth, friendship, hospitality and general good cheer.  The King James version of the Bible (the old one, with all the thees and thous in), tells us in John 16:33 that Jesus says “… Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” So let’s get on message!

Despite our rather arms-length approach to Christmas, Simon and I have amassed a quite staggering number of Christmas tree decorations over the time we’ve been together.  We do love a good Christmas tree, but we’ve never done much else in the way of decorating the house. So one of the things we’re going to try this year is sprucing Lewis Lodge up for the Advent and Christmas season.  We’re going to have a ‘ski lodge’ theme.  Yes, I know this is Bedfordshire and snowfall is a little unpredictable, but I think the general ski lodge principles of rest and relaxation after a hard day on the slopes of work, can apply just as much as spending the day careering down the side of a mountain on two planks of wood.

This isn’t some plan to bankrupt ourselves with gargantuan amounts of food and presents and other stuff; but to use what we have to good effect and start building some fun things into what can be a very stressful time of year.  We’ve never really established what Christmas means to us as a family, we’ve always been operating according to how other people do Christmas. When’s the right time to put the tree up, Advent Sunday or Christmas Eve?  When’s the right time to open presents, before dawn or after lunch? Exactly how pissed off will people be if we don’t buy anyone a present, but buy a herd of World Vision goats instead, or send a donation to help the work they do with sexually exploited girls – a subject rather close to home right now.

Hacking through the Centre: MK in Milton Keynes on a Saturday before Christmas, it’s entirely possible to forget what Christmas is supposed to be about.  I’m sure any visiting space alien would be totally bewildered, picking up only the notion that it’s about giving the perfect present and eating as much chocolate as it’s physically possible to consume.  We might not end up giving any presents at all, although it’s nigh on impossible for chocolate not to feature.  But what we do want to get out of Christmas is all the things that we believe that Jesus stands for: Love, warmth, friendship, fellowship, light, good cheer and good news. That won’t leave us exhausted and bled dry this Christmas, but happy, filled up and ready for 2013.

Now excuse me I have a list to check twice. :D

Posted in Christmas | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Not so Shiny Happy Seventies

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Rachel

The picture says it all, I am a child of the 70s and for the most part I’ve been quite proud of that fact.  I remember Space Dust, how vile Rise ‘n’ Shine was, how much fun Space Hoppers were and how utterly terrifying Doctor Who was – and not just because of the wobbly sets.  I am from the generation that was outside morning, noon and night and who thought that the jammiest kids were those who Ron Pickering was shouting ‘away you go’ at, at the end of We are the Champions.  It was the decade of Glam Rock, Punk Rock, Disco, Grease and the Bay City Rollers. Underpinning most of it – at least as far as radio and TV were concerned, was a blond-haired man with a fondness for too much gold jewellery: Jimmy Savile.

Jim’ll Fix It.

Back in the 1970s (to me) he was merely irritating – a man who screamed naff and seemed to be deliberately trying to be ridiculous.  Now, in October 2012, a year after his death, he’s  been exposed as a downright toxic individual and every image on a news website or in a paper illustrating another set of revelations just makes me feel ill. There’s a predictable amount of scrabbling about going on at the BBC, as they try and work out for themselves who knew, who turned a blind eye to it and why, when questions were asked, was nothing was done.

Savile’s reputed actions seem to go hand-in-hand with the 1970′s male dominated culture. They were the ones in charge, they seemed to think they could treat women and girls as they wanted and most importantly get away with it.  Sex with underage girls was seen as having a bit of fun, not anything particularly serious and those are only the mild accusations levelled at Savile.

Now, sometimes over forty years after these events took place, the most shocking thing (for me) is not that this culture existed – we all knew it did – but that the girls felt that they would not be believed. You can just imagine the questions:  Jimmy Savile did that to you?  You mean that Jimmy Savile?  The man who’s a mainstay of BBC television and radio and does so much work for charity? Surely not. If you say anything the public won’t like you for slandering such a well-respected public figure. He’s a knight of the realm, he’s got this award, that award and helps out in hospitals.  How does a young girl fight against the might of Sir Jimmy Savile and what he represented?  She doesn’t and he gets away with it.  He does it again and he gets away with it again, and again, and on and on it goes for decades.

I could go on for a long time about how horrible this all is and how I wish it would all go away; but for his victims and those who were subject to abuse from his “friends”, it will never go away.  They’ve had to live with that for sometimes in excess of forty years. It won’t magically go away just because everybody now believes them.

Fundamentally, this has to do with the toxic culture that existed in the 1970s and part of it is still out there – the Page 3 girl.  Apparently it’s still acceptable in 2012 for us to be having pictures of girls in their knickers as decoration in a family newspaper.  What does this tell us about the value of women in Britain in 2012?  Does this portray women as valued members of British society or just a means of giving workaday bloke a twitch in his trousers without the bother of reaching for the top shelf?

What, on the face of it was a fun decade for kids like me was just an imagined utopia – a bit like summers that went on forever.  OK so 1976′s did, but apart from that they weren’t really that great. Lurking beneath the happy smiling seventies was a cesspit that we’re only now admitting to and tackling.

Jimmy Savile is dead, he cannot answer for his crimes.  The BBC needs to get to the bottom of what when on and clean up its act. God alone knows what else is going to come out because you can bet your bottom dollar this isn’t the last and I hope it doesn’t take forty years to blow the whistle on wrongdoing from now on.  Investigations and culture shifts take time, but there is one simple and instant thing from the 1970′s that we can easily consign to history – the Sun’s page 3 “feature”.  We’re all now realising that there were some bad things about the 1970s and I think it’s time to admit that page 3 is tarred with the same brush as Savile.

If you would like to sign the petition asking the editor of The Sun to stop Page 3, then you can sign here.  There are also other ways you can help, such as writing to your MP and boycotting the Sun’s big advertisers.  There is a list of how you can help on their website.

Posted in Comment, Daily Life, News | 7 Comments

Drive-by Blogging

Posted on October 22, 2012 by Rachel

So much is happening at the moment.  Loads of lovely blog-fodder is occurring  and do I have a spare moment to sit down and write about it?  No!  I’m watching it all blat by, like from a car window; as the next thing is approaching at warp seven and I never have time to write about any of it.

The beauty of blogging is that it’s a very in-the-moment medium, but sadly; nobody wants to hear your take on something three weeks after it’s happened.  The world has moved on.  So I hope you appreciate that I ditched God for you this morning.  I usually spend the first half hour of my day in biblical contemplation, but I have eschewed the good book for you lot today. This is mainly because I need to write something.  I will start chewing my own fingers off if I can’t type.

So, a quick re-cap.  During October Simon and I are supposed to be doing something different.  Remember that?  We do vaguely. That was before somebody pressed the turbo boost and ejected the wheels at the same time.  It’s all very well doing these things; but in practice, when your days leave you with not enough time to sit down and eat meals, it’s very hard to give part of your mind over to thinking about changing the way you do things. These books assume you have time to think and plan.  No, sorry, thinking is a commodity in short supply right now, we’re just getting through.

It’s like the whole business of eating.  I am always amused at the advice to take the time to select your meals and peruse the supermarket aisles for inspiration.  Revel in the delight of lovingly preparing your food and sit down as a family to enjoy the experience of eating together.  That’s all very well, but right now my weekly trip to the supermarket could be interpreted as a smash and grab raid. And as for the laughable suggestion that we enjoy the experience of eating together…  Er, no.  You’re forcing together three stressed people (one straight from a commuter train, one on Planet GCSE, one who’s just struggled through throwing the meal together whilst chasing a cat with a mouse in its mouth), to sit around a table and make polite conversation?

IT AIN’T HAPPENING!

Now I understand why people resort to Turkey Twizzler TV Dinners.  You don’t want to be sociable, you just want to take calories on board whilst some cheery person on TV numbs your brain for a few minutes so you don’t have to think about the mess that is your life.

Honestly, getting out of bed each morning feels like stepping out into the outside lane of the M1.  You have to run so fast to keep up with everything else that you have no time to even notice the roses, let alone stop and smell them.  Modern life may not be physically hard, but it’s relentless.

I tried to plan our holiday for next summer the other week. When I’d excluded all my daughter’s commitments and the point at which my husband has to be back at work to get bums on seats for the next academic year, it came down to one week in mid July.  There were only seven days ten months from now where we could all be in the same place at the same time.  So does it come as any surprise that we’re not doing something different?  We’re going to Padstow again, in the same frigging cottage. Because after the plate spinning of the calendar shenanigans, any contemplation of changing the location would just take forever.  Sometimes at Lewis Lodge you have to wait an entire month to have enough time to talk to a person about something you were talking about the month before. What sort of a life is this?

This turned into a rant, I know it did.  But I think it illustrates exactly what the struggle with doing something different actually is and why if I wasn’t on Facebook and Twitter I simply wouldn’t exist to people. Sometimes 140 characters is all I can manage between STUFF. To really do something different you have to literally break apart your current life and the effort required to do that is not something that is easily accessible when you’re trying to keep what you currently have on the right side of going tits-up.

So excuse me, break time is over.  I have the outside lane of the M1 to join.  Have a good day!

Posted in Daily Life | Tagged | Leave a comment

The world’s worst poem

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Rachel

If you read Monday’s blog entry, you’ll know that during October, my husband Simon and I are embarking on a ‘Do Something Different’ campaign.  It’s an effort to prise ourselves out of the ruts we’ve got into.  Day one went well, Simon had to not watch TV all day.  He went out at 6.45am and didn’t get back in until 9.45pm, so that was an easy one.  I chose not to listen to music all day and it was tougher.  Working on my own in a silent church without music made me feel ever so slightly vulnerable.

For day 2, both of us are tasked with writing something for 15 minutes.  We’re both writers – of sorts.  Simon writes academic papers such as THIS and I write gargantuan amounts of  FanFiction like THIS; so the book’s helpful suggestion that we ‘write a story’ isn’t really stretching us.  I don’t know what Simon’s going to do for his task, but I’m going to have a stab at some really bad poetry. It’ll make Vogon poetry look Wordsworth-esque.

Earlier today, my friend Judi Sutherland, who is a real poet, posted a list of words that are pretty much ‘banned’ when it comes to writing poems.  They’re the ones, that if you use them, make really good poets want to stab themselves.  So that sold it to me.  Why not have a go at writing the world’s worst poem, using as many of the words on the list as I could? There is also an extra word, lozenge, which is apparently abhorred by a judging poet, so I’ve thrown that one in too for good measure.

So here it is. Please note that it is intentionally bad and I think we can now see why all these words appear on a banned list. This is posted with sincere and abject apologies to Gunwalloe, which is a real and very lovely place on The Lizard in Cornwall.

Gunwalloe

She popped a lozenge into her mouth as the sea breeze whipped the hair against her face, tendrils digging out white blobs of snot from her nose as they went.
She felt fortunate to have managed the early evening walk. The festering humdinger of a cold, almost a consumption really, had finally released her from its grip; so she had seized the opportunity and walked the cliff path, to the tiny church on the headland.

Poised by the churchyard wall, she surveyed it, taking in the ammonite buried in the palimpsestic rock.  Above it was the noticeboard, holding the flapping remains of a flyer announcing the epiphany services, some two months ago now. They’d been led by the Vicar, a more sapient idiot she couldn’t imagine. Underneath, a heartbreakingly enthusiastic spider was spinning a gossamer web.

Beyond the noticeboard, the fronds of ferns and a plethora of daffodils, harbingers of Easter, waved in the breeze amongst the gravestones; marking the destiny of souls who found solace in Jesus, and providing convenient cover for holidaymakers who used them as a loo for rectal relief. Stretching away were broken shards of aged tesserae, which made up the path to the church door.  She walked on.

Reaching the steps down to the beach she paused again and harked a group of shrieking, candyfloss-coated children building a ziggurat in the sand with a turnip snedder. Beyond them, the lambent sunset caused the sea to shimmer in a myriad of mango sparkles, hiding the milt of fish beneath the surface.  Spring was here and all life was returning to Gunwalloe.

:D

Posted in Daily Life | 3 Comments

How Britannia got her groove back

Posted on September 11, 2012 by Rachel

She’s an old girl is Britannia, she’s been kicking around a bit.  She’s also been kicked around a bit, which is why she doesn’t have the gleam that the modern world likes to see.  She isn’t your latest model and admittedly, there are some dents.  She’s seen it all though, she’s done it all and most likely invented the t-shirt along the way.   She was fashionable back in the day; that day being when the world was moving from horse power to steam power. Since then, she’s had to look on wistfully, as younger, faster people overtook her and left her behind.  She was ‘Mum’ to some of them, but some of her children kicked against her, fought against her and some of those who didn’t like her, tried to bomb the life out of her.  But somehow, they never quite succeeded. Britannia is as tough as old boots.

So she went away and quietly got on with her own thing. She left aside her trail-blazing past and became known for being reasonable, accommodating, dependable and deeply boring.  She was gracious in defeat, a lot of defeat and let herself become the byword for heroic and sometimes comedic failure. But she was still there. Occasionally she’d make the headlines, but by and large, Britannia became one of life’s also-rans. She stopped believing in herself, stopped caring about herself and forgot what it was that she could do.

But a Lord wasn’t for giving up on Britannia and decided that what Britannia really needed, was the opportunity to remind herself and the rest of the world just who she was.  But who was she?  She didn’t have a clear identity anymore because she was a rag-tag assemblage from here, there and everywhere.  She was good at inventing and organising, but didn’t think she was as good at it as other people were. Anything she did looked at bit ‘dowdy’, like your Gran had done it, complete with doilies and bunting.  However, the intrepid Lord could see something she couldn’t. But Britannia didn’t really believe him.  It had been a long time since the glory days and she shook her head and said, “I’ll never manage to do that. I’m just not good enough anymore.” When you’ve been around as long as Britannia has, it’s not easy to start doing or think about things differently.  But the Lord insisted that she must and took her to Singapore; where a man gave her a chance and told her that she had to produce this really big event in 2012.  Back home she cheered her heart out, she was so thrilled to have been given a chance again. And then reality came to smack her back down, as people tried to bomb the heart out of her once again.

“No!” She said. “Not again. I can do this.  I have all these talents and abilities that have lain dormant in me for decades.  I may be old, have grey hair, be a bit wrinkly and a bit more saggy round the middle, but I’ve still got it… somewhere.”

So she believed and she built; and two thousand and twelve years after she’d told some upstart bloke off for wandering all over her green and pleasant land, Britannia threw open the doors of her home and let the world in to see who she was now and what she could offer.

They never remembered her being this good.  They never remembered her being this colourful.  More than that, they never remembered her walking about with her chin up, with a twinkle in her eye and what’s that… a wiggle in her hips?  Yes, for an old girl by God she’d still got it.

She believed and she showed the world and herself what she can do when someone gives her the chance to shine.  She can light up the world with a golden smile and that feel-good factor radiates out, not just to every corner of herself, but around the planet; spreading her unique mix of common sense and buffoonery wherever she goes.  She’s Britannia and thanks to Ben Ainslie, she still rules the waves.

But these days she doesn’t just rule the waves. She also rules the roads, the tracks, the arenas, the pools and the fields.  She’s also showing the rest of the world what it takes to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and remind yourself that you absolutely CAN DO THIS! And yes, it’s possible to do it with a creaky, two thousand plus year old body that not always works as you’d like it to. Sometimes, bits even drop off.

Britannia will be the first to admit she’s not perfect, but she’s finally got her mojo back.  She’s looking in the mirror and seeing things in herself that she’d forgotten were there.  She has a spring in her step and a new resolve to never again let herself fall back into the place she’d found herself in.

Yes, she’s old.  But with age comes wisdom, experience and the realisation that she doesn’t care what the rest of the world thinks of her because she’s not anybody’s puppet. She can be level-headed and serious when needed and she knows when things are wrong.  She has a voice, an opinion and she’s damn well entitled to be heard.  But she’s also full of fun.  She has gorgeous bits, scuzzy bits, funny bits and bits that make even her scratch her head in perplexity.  But she loves it!  She loves this mad, irrepressible thing that she is!  She wants to run to the top of Beachy Head, to the tip of Land’s End, to Cromer, to Whitley Bay, to John O ‘Groats, to Rhum, to the top of Scafell Pike and to the end of the Lleyn Peninsula; to yell to the rest of the world that this is her and she is back in business!

And then she’s going to kick off her shoes and go to the pub, ’cause organising stuff and being made of win is tough at her age.  But she’ll come back tomorrow better than ever.  Because Britannia knows who she is now and she’s out to make her mark.

If I were you, I’d start running now. :)

Posted in Comment, News | Tagged | 3 Comments

Olympic Legacy? What’s yours?

Posted on August 19, 2012 by Rachel

So, the Olympics is over… sigh.  That the opening ceremony was good, we all pretty much agreed.  That the closing ceremony was iffy in places, we all agree on that too. I also can’t find a single person who thought that George Michael made a wise move in choosing to sing his new single.  I think most people would rather he’d focused on reminding us just how good he is as a singer rather than making us sit through his near death experience.  Not that I’m taking anything away from something so personal; but there’s a time and a place and the closing ceremony of the Olympics is not it.  Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, would’ve struck precisely the right tone.  We could all have had a bop about, thought lovely things about him and run out to buy his new single in the morning.

Anyway, the first bit of our Olympic / Paralympic double bill went well. Seven years of wondering if it was all going to be a horrible example of how badly it’s possible for us to get it wrong and it was all unfounded.  Barring some minor unpleasantries over seats and a handful of positive drugs tests, we nailed it!  I absolutely loved that must-see TV on a Saturday night became roaring Mo Farah home in the 10,000 and 5,000m races.  And can we roar?  Can we ever!  The decibel readings coming out of the stadium and the Velodrome were insane!  Health and Safety people must have been hyperventilating in a back room somewhere.    But the award to the loudest crowd went to the Irish, as they screamed the boxer Katie Taylor on, to win Ireland’s first gold medal since the Atlanta games in 1996.  I watched it and I thought several members of the crowd were going to self-combust with excitement.

I’d never have ordinarily watched women’s boxing, or men’s boxing for that matter; but there’s something I greatly approve of where it’s so highly regulated and doesn’t resemble two elephant seals slugging it out in a ring.  But the sheer variety of sport on offer via the BBC’s six million channels of coverage, meant that there was never a moment when there wasn’t something very exciting on.  I mean, sailing.  No idea how the thing worked, but heck it was absorbing. There was a very strange day when I found myself shuttling between the Sailing, the Boxing, the Dressage, the BMX and the Rhythmic Gymnastics.  I lapped it all up, like a cat given the water out of a can of tuna (mine don’t do cream – it spoils their figures ;-) ).  It wasn’t just about cheering on  TeamGB it was about watching everything.  For instance, I never knew that Rhythmic Gymnastics was so big in Eastern Europe; but they absolutely trounced everyone else. And I take it back that it’s not a real sport.  I couldn’t do that with a length of ribbon. Well, not sober.

Perhaps the one big casualty of the Olympics has been the men’s professional football game – soccer to those of you outside the UK.  Apparently, Michael Owen said to his wife that he expected football to be given a good kicking after the Olympics and he was dead right.  You look at what we saw for 16 days and you look at the sheer horribleness that is football and you almost say ‘urgh, why are we putting up with this rubbish?’  It’s not just the players; it’s the clubs, the managers, the media and the fans who have serious questions to ask of themselves. In the same article in the Evening Standard where Michael Owen say he predicted what would come football’s way, he gave it the biggest kick in the teeth that it’s possible to give a sport.  He said that he wouldn’t take his children to watch a match.  How sad is that?  He plays a game that he feels it’s not fit to take children to see.    You contrast that with the numbers of children who went to see the TeamGB women’s football team play Brazil at Wembley. 75,000 people and I didn’t see one piece of behaviour on or off the pitch that would mean I wouldn’t be happy for my daughter to go and watch a women’s side play.

As a nation we’re all now a bit obsessed with the ‘Olympic Legacy.’  I think this has repercussions for each and every person in the UK,   Certainly, the comment was made that the GamesMakers (the volunteers) did more in two weeks to advance the concept of a Big Society, than David Cameron ever managed to do through nearly two years of speeches.   We now have wonderful regeneration in a part of London that had been forgotten about and world-class sporting facilities there to aid us as we bring through our 2016, 2020 and 2024 Olympians.

For me, it’s not about rushing out to try a new sport, because I need to be mindful of my physical restrictions in that regard; but I do hear the call to be more physically active. My own personal Olympic legacy is exploring what it means to invest that much time and effort into achieving what it is that you want to.  It’s the single most transferable skill that sport has and it’s a powerful one. Even if we don’t end up being the next Jessica Ennis or Mo Farah, there is something we can do to make our lives that bit more focused, that bit more exciting, by setting our sights on what we really want out of life and going for it.

Did anyone ever do that after watching the World Cup?  I don’t think so.

Posted in Comment | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

The Writing Olympics

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Rachel

We’re coming to the last few days of it, but I’ve been absolutely glued to London 2012.  Getting tickets and going was not an option, but I have been an enthusiastic armchair supporter of Team GB. Apologies to my Facebook and Twitter friends for boring the pants off you with my constant updates.  But, hey, it’s only once every four years. A word of warning though, I shall be exactly the same come the Commonwealth Games in two years time.

I’ve never been the most enthusiastic sports fan, but I love the Olympics and have done since 2000, when I sat entranced by the Sydney games. But London 2012 has made me realise that there’s a lot that sport can teach me when it comes to writing.  Not least, what it takes to achieve at the highest level:  Hard work, determination, self-sacrifice and the development of a good thick skin to cope with the inevitable knock-backs.  There are other similarities too: How, for example, do you line up in the men’s 100m final with Usain Bolt knowing that barring him tripping and falling, you have absolutely no chance of winning against him? Why would you be there?  If you’ve had three successive silver medals on the trot, how do you find the courage to pick yourself up, get back in the boat and keep going for another four years to try again for that elusive gold in rowing? But these athletes do, because they love their sport and they have found the self-belief to ignore what’s going on around them and run, or row their own races.  I don’t run or row but I write and I’m not going to let myself get intimidated by who’s out there. I’m just going to do what I do to the best of my ability.  It’s a mindset that you can apply to pretty much anything.

I’m aiming to compete in a world-class field and I know that I’m no Jane Austen or Caitlin Moran for that matter.  But I’m me, there’s no one else who can write like I can and it’s only me that can get Rachel Lewis’s unique ‘voice’ out there.  The crowd may be shouting louder for someone else, but I’m in this race too and I’m not giving up.  I’m going to finish it even if I’m not the one coming across the line in gold medal place. I may not even finish in the medals, but there are nine lanes available on that track and I want to be in one of them.

The best performances take years to achieve and are a combination of talent and application.  I have a smidge of talent and although you’ll never find me gurning into the camera yelling that I’m awesome, you will find me solidly grafting behind the scenes; turning out the words come rain, snow or shine.  Even if I’m not hitting ‘post’ and sending out a blog, I’ll be working on my latest story or putting in the groundwork for another.

So let any literary Usain Bolt stand next to me, I am not fazed.  I’m going to put my head down and run the race marked out for me, because you never know what’s going to happen in a race – watching the pile-ups in BMX has shown me that.  If you’re sitting in the changing room too petrified to compete and by some miracle there is a pile-up; you won’t be able to take advantage of it, sneak round and get across the line first if you’re wimping out. Sure the favourite’s gone, the world champion’s sprawled on the floor but look at you girl, getting your arse across the line in first place! And who the hell are you Rachel Lewis?  I’m Olympic champion thank you very much!

I can dream can’t I and dreaming is fine. As performance coaches are fond of telling us, if you can dream it, you can visualise it and if you can visualise it that’s usually the first stage in making it happen.

Last week, perhaps my biggest cheerleader left my life after she was admitted to hospital with a serious illness, brought on by a sustained attack of vicious trolling on the Internet.  Her husband said enough was enough and removed everything of hers from the Internet and every social networking site she was part of.  She was the loudest supporter of my fiction writing and was the one persistently yelling ‘come on Rach!‘ at me from the sidelines.  She read everything, she gave me copious feedback and she made me believe in myself.  Before he closed everything down, her husband let me send a goodbye message to her, which I did; in which the words ‘thank you’ were not enough to convey what she’d done for me.  She was my coach, she was my cheerleader and she was my 80,000 screaming fans at London 2012.

So I’m on my own with it, but she’s left me with that self-belief and a love of stringing words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters and chapters into entire stories – even if the finished results are a bit of an embarrassment right now.  I may be more of a writing Eddie the Eagle than Jessica Ennis, but I’ll get better with practice. More importantly I’m here, I showed up and I’m going to apply myself, look for chances and do my absolute best in these writing Olympics…

…For perhaps nobody else right now than my own love of competing at this sport.  But I hope one day my friend is well enough to see a thank you to her, my own personal gold medal: A book with my name on it.

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

It takes a bunch of girls to show me football…

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Rachel

I’ve never enjoyed football. The sight of 22 overpaid male egos running around a pitch on a Saturday afternoon has never once made me seriously think that I’d want to follow the sport.  I find the sums of money they are paid insulting, the amount of money sloshing about in the game obscene, and I find the messes they get in when they open their mouths (or their Twitter accounts), laughable.  Football on television for me is an instant turn-off.  I’d rather have a wisdom tooth out than sit through 90 minutes of BAFTA-winning rolling around on the pitch in ‘agony’, which turns out to be a scratched knee.  Mind you, that’s men isn’t it?  They can save the planet from an asteroid, but dab them with some Savlon and they’re dying. Yeah, er guys..? You need to sort out your pain thresholds.

Football does not get my attention, the Olympics do.  I love it!  I love seeing what ‘other sport’ (because that’s what it all is in the UK if it’s not football), can produce off the back of a tenner’s worth of funding, sometimes not even that.   I hear that we almost needed an act of Parliament to get together a Team GB men’s football team; because if we all play together as a nation and not as Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland, FIFA might look at Team GB and ask ‘if you can do it for the Olympics why can’t you do it for everything else?  You don’t need four teams.’  This would force men who can’t deal with the fact that this is the 21st Century and we’re not in the playground anymore, to play together and get over themselves.  Apparently, the planet would stop spinning or something.  So, basically, Team GB men’s football team doesn’t include Scotland.

But let’s leave them to one side, yes let’s – all the time.  LOOK at what you can get IF you take football off the television and stick on all those OTHER SPORTS that exist. OK, so TeamGB might not be pulling out the golds just yet, but bloody hell isn’t cycling exciting to watch?! I’ve been glued to the Kayaking, the Canoeing and the Equestrian.  I’ve watched bits of Weight-Lifting, Judo, Badminton, Basketball, Volleyball, Swimming -  loads of swimming; Diving, Archery, you name it I’ve watched it.  It gets a look in and you know what (and what men’s Football doesn’t want you to discover), is that OTHER SPORTS ARE MORE EXCITING TO WATCH THAN MEN’S FOOTBALL. Yep.  You get ALL THIS for the price of a Chelsea striker!

They also don’t want you to know that the GIRLS CAN PLAY BETTER THAN THEY CAN. They have done their best to not promote women’s football in the UK, pedalling the myth that nobody wants to see women play football.  Er… I think we just called your bluff on that one.  70,000+ in the crowd at Wembley last night and not all of them were girls plus full match on BBC3. As I understand it, Brazil as a football team are IT regardless of gender.  They are the team to beat and last night, Team GB women’s footballers did just that.  Woohoo!  They went ahead after 2 minutes and more importantly kept ahead and locked the Brazilians down. If I’m sounding like I know what I’m talking about, then it’s because I watched the match.  All of it.  All 90 minutes plus a bit of injury time. What’s even more surprising is that I enjoyed it.  Stripped back to what football should be (before it got more money than sense thrown at it), you see it for what it is:  Exciting.  Played by women who also have day jobs AND would never wince at a bit of Savlon, it was a brilliant demonstration of exactly why we’re pushing sport money into the wrong place in Britain.  I say this to British men’s football: Raise your game, drop your demands, stop acting like the world owes you a living and get out there and play like the girls played.  Play as hard as the GB swimmers swim, put as much into it as British Cycling, work as a team like the three-day-eventers, go all out and pull one out of the bag like British men’s gymnastics. Stop being a bunch of egos and start being sportsmen. Perhaps then we’ll take you seriously because you’ve lost all credibility by demanding the entire GDP of a small African nation just to run about on a pitch for 90 minutes a week and put in a bit of training.  Everywhere you look in Team GB there are PEOPLE DOING MUCH BETTER ON FAR LESS THAN YOU GET.  So tell me why should we support men’s football, when we can get all this for the price of just one of you?

It took a team of women to show me what football should be.  I get it now.  What I don’t get is why we still insist on pandering to these primadonnas in men’s football.  I think they have been weighed, measured and found seriously, seriously wanting.

While football spends the summer embroiled in court cases over what players did or didn’t say, do or think (do they think?); I believe now’s the time to say that Britain has a new national sport.  Strike football from the list and where we list our favourite sport, let’s just write SPORT.  All of it, all the time.  Equal shares, equal broadcast time, because if we can do all this off the price of one Chelsea striker, imagine what we could do if we invested some of that misdirected money, built the facilities and inspired a generation to just get out and do some of this ‘other sport’. Pick one, any one, there are so many to choose from!

Actually, mad idea here.  Can we add a bit to our National Insurance contributions and make all sport, like prescriptions, free for all those in full-time education? Now that would truly inspire a generation. :)

Posted in Comment | 1 Comment