The Fate We All Fear- Or Should.

Walking through a Sussex town on a summer evening, crowds hovering moth-like outside the pubs, their cigarette smoke marring my refreshing walk, something struck me.

It was something I had considered earlier that day, eating a sandwich on a bench which faced the glass front of a supermarket. During the 15 or so minutes I was there, I did a few things to pass the time. I looked around the square. I checked my phone. But the supermarket cashier through the glass drew my attention from time to time. Perhaps it was because she had just sold me a sandwich, in such an overtly polite manner it was almost obsequious, but I began to wonder how she came to be behind that counter and how she, if she was sitting on a bench watching herself work, would feel about her place in the world.

This is the point at which I begin to feel that I should justify myself. Say something like- ‘Of course being a check-out girl is a noble profession.’ But that is not the purpose of this post. The purpose of it, the thing that struck me as I walked through the hazy evening, that which I had ruminated on over my egg mayo at lunch, is to acknowledge that statistically speaking, the majority of the population cannot have a career that fully stimulates them. The overwhelming majority must inhabit the menial jobs or the manual labour. This is a fact that we have perhaps acknowledged- and rebutted with platitudes “Work isn’t everything” “Whatever pays the bills”etc. But this goes a lot further than whether or not you enjoy your job.

The fact is, most people in those clouds of cigarette smoke, slowly earning their £7.50 an hour and then casually spending it on pints and club entry fees, will never achieve their brain’s full potential. They will never push hard enough, run fast enough, swim against the current of the tide that is bills and rent and laziness to do something truly creative with their minds. This is because the world we live in is a machine that needs humans, incredible, malleable, inspired creatures that we are, to do things like serve french fries or enter data. And where there is demand for something in exchange for money, that thing will inevitably be supplied.

Careers where money is not easily given, where years of dedication and study are required before you can break even, tend to eventually offer more scope for creativity and originality. But most of us live in the short term, as long as we break even on our payments, tread water so to speak, we put our attention on other, easier to develop pastimes, we concern ourselves with our relationships or our facebook pages.

Most people will probably die with one or two things they are truly proud of. Raising kids or running a marathon, whatever it may be. But I look at people treading water, people working meaningless jobs to keep this machine running for those people canny enough to go against the current and do something they care about, and what I see is an immense and saddening waste. Sure we need bin men, and factory workers and everybody else. But by laws of economics, or nature, these jobs will always be filled. I am talking to you, and asking whether you are treading water, or are you doing something that is pushing your grey matter to it’s limits? To make new discoveries, you must first understand those that went before. To write a symphony, you must know the depths of music theory. To build a successful business you must have a network, and relevant experience. These things might not pay right away. It might start out as a voluntary thing, you might need to pay tuition fees. Do it. You are your biggest investment, and your time is your currency. Think about where you’re spending it.

“The trouble is, you think you have time.”

Why Music Is More Than Background Noise

A writer I have great respect for once wrote Music “has two uses..to drown out people eating and drinking noisily”, and “a decent numbing effect on the mood…After all, it is not easy to think properly when you have someone chanting and wailing in your ear.”

Most people I would say, disagree with this outlook on the whole. A lot of people have a favourite band or song that ‘means something’ to them. Sentimentality, you could say, is music’s saving grace. Sentiment, or fanaticism, is what sells T-Shirts, Arena Tours, and ill devised come-back albums. It is this same emotional tie that causes people to have lyrics tattooed on their skin, and posters of people they have never met on their wall. So some people feel music significant to them. It gives them identity, a voice for feelings they could not themselves express. However, this isn’t the sole reason why music is a valuable Art form.

When it comes to emotions and music, the connections are well established and well manipulated. Want to feel upbeat? Four to the floor. Want to wind down? Something featuring an acoustic Guitar. Want to ‘forget about tomorrow’? There are a thousand factory made dance tracks to make you feel that way.

So if a cynical song-writing team can make you feel empowered, or heart-broken, like a cheap novel or a throw-away Rom Com, does music really have any lasting Artistic value? Is it really just ‘background noise’?

I recently attended a casting call, the brief being that they were hoping to find the next Mega-Stars of Pop-Rock. And it got me thinking. If a Record Label put together a band of people who have never met, and give them songs written by a team of people guessing what the general public want them to sing about, and they dress how the label think they should dress, then this defeats the whole point. Allow me to explain what I mean; Art, in my opinion, whether that be literature or sculptures or cave paintings, is a two pronged thing. The one side is the message or emotional content. The other key ingredient is the historical authenticity.

Jane Austen didn’t write about 19^th Century Society because a publisher thought it would be a good idea. She did it because that is the world in which she lived. The same can be said for any truly great Artist. Zora Neale Hurston, a hugely influential writer of the Harlem Renaissance, once said- “I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.”

The rattling wagon of wishful illusions is a nice way of describing the music industry. If everything currently being played on the radio is what labels think we want to hear, what they have had written and found people with pretty faces to sing, then we are not getting art of true value. I would argue that music is valuable so long as it is created in the spirit of authenticity. That way, it gives us a historical, contextual gem, a glimpse into what someone, somewhere, truly thought and said. Nirvana were not a great band because they were made up of perfect instrumentalists, or because they wore fashionable clothes. They were a great band because at the time, they encapsulated exactly what it meant to be a teenager, to be an outcast, living in a bleak town in America. We can listen to their music today and know in a little bit more detail what life was like for people at that time. The same is true for most musicians, Bob Dylan, Sam Cooke, Billie Holiday, all the way up to bands like Radiohead.

Understandably, the ‘Meghan Trainor’ style of music can perceived to have little value other than as a meaningless background noise. However, it is worth remembering that it is the lowest form of it’s art, it is what Fifty Shades is to Literature. But authentic music, music that sums up a way of life, has the power to change the world. Just look at the birth of the teenager with Rock n Roll. The Punk Movement. Protest songs during the Vietnam war. Perhaps, then, I agree with the notion that a lot of music is ‘background noise’, but rather than covering our ears to the whole art form, we should be searching for a sound that has meaning. For those sounds give us a rich cultural history akin to that of the fields of Literature, Fine Art, or Drama, and it would be wrong to under-estimate the importance of that.

An Argument With A Vegetarian

“So, have you always been vegetarian?” Is a question that I am often asked. The answer is no. No, my parents were not vegetarian, no I wasn’t spoon fed Quorn from age 1, with ‘Meat Is Murder’ spinning on the record player. In short, people are often confounded when I explain that my Vegetarianism is a choice. This is tied in with a strongly held belief that meat-eaters and Vegetarians are entirely different breeds, set in early childhood and only diverted from in the case of an occasional fad or that one bacon sandwich (we’ve all been there).

So I have a few questions to go through here. Why do meat eaters take offence to my decision to stop eating meat as an adult? Why is meat eating so ingrained in our national psyche? And why do people believe that they just couldn’t give up meat.

When you reject meat eating, you reject the accepted ‘Alpha’ or mainstream choice. In the least hipster way possible of being ‘not mainstream’, of course. So, why do humans conform? As Breckler, Olson, & Wiggins wrote- “Conformity is the most general concept and refers to any change in behaviour caused by another person or group; the individual acted in some way because of influence from others.” However, this only applies to the social behaviour of eating meat, and not the personal beliefs which some people hold regarding meat- ”Note that conformity is limited to changes in behaviour caused by other people; it does not refer to effects of other people on internal concepts like attitudes or beliefs.” (Breckler, Olson, & Wiggins, Social Psychology Alive, 2006). So for this to work, Meat Eating has to be the Alpha behaviour (which, if you’ve ever seen men order competitively large steaks at a restaurant, you might agree it is).

“Is it ’cause of moral reasons, or do you just not like meat?” Is the typical follow up question. For me, it is for ‘moral’ reasons, whatever that means, at least I know I stopped eating meat around the time my conscience started speaking up. This is when the conversation teeters dangerously on the precipice of becoming a sermon, at least in the ears of the questioner. People seem incapable of listening to one persons ‘moral’ choice without hearing it as judgement on their own actions. This is despite the fact that they have asked 2 minutes previously “What about eating meat do you disagree with?” Or some variant of that. *Sigh*.

So, my sensitivity to animal slaughter aside, are there any logical reasons to be a Veggie? Well, there’s health. The American Dietetic Association reported that – “appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases” (Journal of the American Dietetic Association, July 2009). Meat eaters love to talk about the missing protein and other nutrients in a Vegetarian diet, as if all Vegetarians are pale waifs existing on a lettuce leaf a day. While meat is indeed packed with protein, this can be easily substituted for things such as Lentils, which are protein rich, and contain more iron, magnesium, and potassium than the same quantity of beef.

Other reasons might be the environment- it takes 78 calories of fossil fuel to make one calorie of beef protein- compared to just 1 calorie for each calorie of soy beans. Or, more selfishly, your pocket- being a Vegetarian is a whole load cheaper. Whenever I eat out with friends, their steaks or whatever meat dish will typically cost a tenner or more- something a restaurant wouldn’t dare charge for the butter nut squash burger or whatever it may be, which usually comes in around £7.50. Win Win!

So that’s the argument anyway, and without me mentioning any of the reasons I am actually Vegetarian (that would be my ‘airy-fairy’, moral reasons). Hopefully this will do something to shift the perceptions of those obstinate people who counter my arguments with simply- “I just couldn’t give up meat. I love it too much!” Well, bacon sandwiches used to be my precursor to a great day, Roast Chicken used to be my Sunday special, and bangers and mash was a delicious dinner. And I can confirm that it is entirely possible, if you have the inclination, to give up something in spite of your taste buds. So next time someone asks me “Why on earth would you give up meat?!”-Rather than repeating my tried and tested arguments, I might just tell them to read this article.

Did Travel Broaden Some of Britain’s Great Minds?

I love travelling. I am at my most creative when I have just come back from somewhere, or even when I’m waiting for a plane in a clean cut airport lounge. And the adage ‘travel broadens the mind’ is so inherent in our ‘Gap Year’ culture, we rarely even question whether or not paying 6 grand to STA Travel is going to publish us with an enlightened and insightful view of the world.

I believe that until I have seen more of the world, I cannot write about it with authority, or develop a complete political ideology. If I have never seen Tiananmen Square, or the Dharavi Slums, never walked the streets of Washington D.C, or set foot on African soil, how could I really know all that much? How could I make any lasting decisions on how to view the world, if viewing it from the porthole of a window that is South East England?

Historically, I am not alone in this feeling. A plethora Britain’s great thinkers took time out to ‘find themselves’. So, let’s answer a few questions like- where did Lord Byron go on his Gap Year? Who discovered the humble potato? Is travel really necessary to broaden our minds when we have access to the panorama of the Internet?

The first person to organise a round the world trip, before Thomas Cook opened on the high street, was Ferdinand Magellan, a Spaniard in search of good spices. This was in 1521. Even on this maiden voyage, things were discovered that were pioneering in 16th Century Science, such as the size of the Earth, making an International Date Line necessary that is still in effect today.

So how about the Brits?

A legacy of Exploration has given Britain a leading role in the discovery of new lands and knowledge. Adventurers like Mary Kingsley provided the first empathetic account of African tribal culture. Francis Drake carried out the first British voyage of discovery to the New World. Walter Raleigh introduced Britain to the potato. All of these early explorers where learning from travel like curious children asking questions. Can we go a bit further? Learn a bit more?

Then there are the creatives. Art and travel have always seemed intertwined. The Romantic Poets are a good example for this. Percy Shelley eloped with a different girl practically every week, to Europe, to Scotland. Travel was a Romantic tradition, and often discussed is the legendary Swiss retreat that the Shelleys went on with Lord Byron, on which they all wrote and Mary Shelley began ‘Frankenstein’. Byron, who went on the traditional ‘Grand Tour’ of the world from 1809-1811, wrote “With these countries, and events connected with them, all my really poetical feelings begin and end.” He surmises further, writing- “What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.” In short, one of Britain’s greatest poets doesn’t think he would have written if he had not travelled.

Popular Culture is not exempt from the ‘Travel Inspiration’ phenomenon. The Beatles perfected their craft in Hamburg. J.K Rowling finalised The first Harry Potter manuscript in Portugal. Even Prime Minister David Cameron took a pre-Oxford Gap Year in Hong Kong.

Travel in 2014 no longer means discovering the Americas, but Space. In a month where Europe has faced Economic troubles, talk of referendums and curbing immigration, it has also collaborated to land a spacecraft on a comet. Scientific discovery is the true golden egg in the exploration nest, and without the curiosity it takes to launch missions like this one, we would never make Scientific progress. And ultimately, isn’t that ability to look outside ourselves what makes us special as humans?

There is a line from the film Good Will Hunting that comes to mind, as said to the young genius-  “So if I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I’ll bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel.”
Well, I’m not sure how smelling the Sistine Chapel is helpful in life, but there’s definitely value in experience. An empathy perhaps, that has coloured the works of many great writers, and shaped the ideas of individuals. Inspiration to create something new. Or discovering something that you would never otherwise have found.

How Farming Became A Battery Operated Economy

Our Economy started with Factory Farming. It all began when a chicken farmer called Anthony Fisher went to New York and met right wing economist ‘Baldy’ Harper. Harper introduced Fisher to the idea of Factory farming his chickens, already an established method in the US. (So the story goes, a farmers wife was delivered an excess of around 200 chickens sometime in the 1920s. The chickens spent the winter in her house and all survived. It was the first evidence that chickens could be farmed indoors on a mass scale.) Fisher went on to create Britain’s first Battery Farm, and his company Buxted Chickens was a success. Fisher used the profits to found the Institute of Economic Affairs, a Free Market think tank which Margaret Thatcher said “created a climate of opinion which made our victory possible.” So there you have it, an economy founded on chicken farming. Who’d have thought it?

Research Factory Farms and you will drown in a barrel of pathos, force feeding, and pollution. So finding straight economic figures for this article has been tricky. Nevertheless, I will try to keep this free from a welfare angle and just focus on one question. What does the economy of Factory Farming really look like?

Origins

Factory Farming, we often forget, has only existed in the UK for around 60 years. After the Second World War a lot of impetus was put into the UK being self sufficient. Incentives lead to farmers creating bigger, consolidated farms, and higher output expectation lead to factory farming being adopted across the board to meet demand.

Effects On Local Farming Communities

Factory Farms tend to be owned by big companies and usually buy machinery and other supplies from conglomerates their own size. A University of Minnesota study compared the local expenditures of small and large farms. It found that farms with gross incomes of over $900,000 spent under 20 percent of total expenditure in their local community. In contrast, smaller farms with gross incomes of less than $100,000 made 95% of expenditures locally. It is worth considering this wider economic effect when calculating the cost of Factory Farms.

The True Price of Higher Living Standards

The go to rhetoric of the Intensive Farming Industry is that they are feeding the people, and at a low cost. How heroic. However, there are a lot of hidden costs equated with bigger farms that use more mechanised farming methods, despite their apparent efficiency. Monoculture Farms produce more food per worker, which shows efficiency in some respects. However sustainable farms produce more food per acre. This means that sustainable farms create more jobs and more food. But what’s the cost?

The answer is interesting. A major study by Jonasson & Andersson, (1997) showed that giving pigs more space led to more use-able food being created, and less cost on veterinary bills. More recent studies are suggesting the same thing, such as an Exeter University sustainable agriculture study of 9 million farms showed it increased productivity by an average of 93%. In fact, when assessing the most productive way to introduce farming to Africa, a UN report found that small, sustainable farms were best. So why do we still cling to factory farms in the UK?

The cost difference isn’t even as large as it portrayed by the shelf prices. To get down to numbers, a 2002 study found that a Free Range egg cost just 1.54p more than a battery egg. This equates to £2.51 per person per year. So long as the consumer, and not the farmer, is willing to pay the difference, perhaps a time has come when we no longer need Intensive Farms? It may be time to embrace other alternatives, improving the quality of the meat, the productivity of the land, and the deal for smaller farmers.

The Journey To Atheism: Lucretius, Nietzsche, and the Modern Atheists.

According to studies, the world as it stands today is 2.01% Atheist, and a further 16% Non-Religious. The only places in which the majority of people are non-religious are in East Asia, such as China. In the Western world, we see ourselves as progressive, forward thinking- but an American survey showed that Atheists are the least trusted of any minority. So, in a world that distrusts people who make decisions based on evidence and fact, let’s have a look at the development of Atheism in Europe through the centuries.

As early as 50 B.C Lucretius of Rome was writing philosophical poetry which introduced the Romans to an Epicurean ideology. Although Lucretius does not deny the existence of the Gods, he wrote that “Nature does all things spontaneously, by herself, without the meddling of the gods.” Lucretius believed that fear of divine power over our lives was the root of human misery, and wrote to eliminate the belief that the Gods were omnipotent. I use the example of Lucretius because he was an early voice that delivered a remarkably similar message to that of Richard Dawkins, or Sam Harris. Summed up by Lucretius himself- “O Science, lift aloud your voice that stills The pulse of fear”. This is the message that regardless of personal faith, scientific thought is one unifying advocate of logic and reason.

The next figure in this very selective summary is Nietzsche. I choose the 19th Century German philosopher because, with the Roman Lucretius we established an ideology of reason and science, but did not address the issue of morals. So if humans without interventionist Gods can be free from fear, what happens when it is boldly proclaimed “God is Dead.”? Nietzsche pondered a world after the ‘death’ of God, i.e a world in which fear of Godly repercussions is no longer a moral compass. He described nihilism in ‘Will To Power’, believing that a nihilistic crisis was looming- “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. . . . For some time now our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end.”

So if Nietzsche predicted the fall of widespread faith over a hundred years ago, where does that leave us today? Still religious, if the statistics I sited earlier are to be believed. Let’s narrow that down and focus on the UK. An assimilation of studies taken by bodies such as YouGov suggests that 30-40% of British citizens do not believe in a God. So this is around double the Global figure of 18%. In the UK at least, there is a sense that we have made a gradual shift away from our label as a Christian country, so much so that when David Cameron stated earlier this year that Britain should “be more confident about our status as a Christian country”(The Church Times), 50 authors, broadcasters, comedians and other prominent figures signed their names to a Daily Telegraph article claiming that Britain is in fact a largely “non-religious society”.

Modern Atheists such as Richard Dawkins are treating the existence of a God as they would any scientific hypothesis. The dichotomy of a society educated in the ideas of Darwin that still wears the intellectual shackles of religion is our norm in the Western world, a blind faith no longer enforced but now unthinkingly followed. The New Atheist movement, spearheaded by intellectuals Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and David Dennet, states that “religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises”(The Rise of the New Atheists). We have reached a point on the journey away from theism. Comedian Bill Maher uses the term ‘Intellectual Slaveholders’ to define religious leaders, and it is highly appropriate. The journey to Atheism is increasingly focussed on equality, whether it be women’s rights or gay marriage, and an unbiased education for all. Now who can argue with that?

Perhaps the answer to religions resiliance lies in man’s fear of their own impermanence. In other words, people want to believe in the afterlife. I’ll leave you with a segment of Lucretius’ On The Nature Of Things, which sums it up beautifully-

   Moreover, within the hollows of the earth,
When from one quarter the wind builds up, lunges,
Muscles the deep caves with its headstrong power,
The earth leans hard where the force of wind has pressed it;
Then above ground, the higher the house is built,
The nearer it rises to the sky, the worse
Will it lean that way and jut out perilously,
The beams wrenched loose and hanging ready to fall.
And to think, men can’t believe that for this world
Some time of death and ruin lies in wait,
Yet they see so great a mass of earth collapse!

You can join the debate in the comments section below.

On the Ramifications of Conventional Wisdom, UKIP, and Mark Twain.

For the past few years, I have felt increasingly distant from that vacillating mass that politicians and journalists call ‘the general public’. Public opinion (another intangible yet firm notion in news reports-where do they get their statistics?), has been swaying slowly but surely into more right wing territory ever since the Labour government* plonked us firmly in the worst financial pothole since World War II. If history is to be observed, then it is not surprising that in times of economic downturn politics becomes much more polarised, from Roosevelts far reaching democratic policies in the US after Wall Street to the rise of the Nazi Party following the German depression of the 1920s. Extreme politics are what people want to hear when they feel helpless, and poor, and unemployed. This however, is a dangerous tonic.

Let’s return to the UK. We see ourselves as a moderate country, a welfare state with a confident control in foreign affairs. And most Britons were happy with this. Until it appeared to ‘stop working’, and the news was filled with nightly graphs depicting how poor we all were. Now we all know that this is because the profligate Labour government were practically giving benefits away*, and they left the nation with a crippling deficit.*

Then there were the Conservatives, whose austerity measures have been successful, but who want to get rid of the NHS.* Meanwhile UKIP have skyrocketed in support because UK pays £55 Million pounds a day to the EU* and in return all we get are leagues of unregulated immigrants stealing British jobs*.

Notice anything? *This is all conventional wisdom. These are the viewpoints presented daily in the media, which the average British citizen absorbs, they are facts in our national consciousness. We are all barraged with sensationalist newspaper headlines that we may never research or look into enough to discover the truth. So when I ask someone why they think Scotland gaining independence would have been a good idea, they will confidently babble about Westminster’s death grip on Scotland, because that is ‘public opinion’. They are much less garrulous when it is pointed out that Scotland elects it’s own MPs for Westminster and that numerous British Prime Ministers have been Scottish. How’s that for English supremacy?

So let’s right some wrongs. Here goes the demystifying…

1) Only 70 pence of every £100 given out as benefits is fraudulent.

2) The Labour government of Blair/Brown actually kept spending at a record low, 14/15 in the EU at the time. As for the deficit, until the global crash in 2007, “national debt levels were lower than when Labour took office”

3) The Privatisation of the NHS! Horror! Or is it? In fact privatisation has been shown to economise, meaning that things get done more efficiently and therefore spending is reduced. It could also be argued that it is in the spirit of Capitalism as it gives independent companies contracts rather than clinging on to a large centralised system. Meanwhile, the poor are still given free healthcare, unlike the the myth that we will adopt a USA style healthcare system.

4) The EU. While UKIP claimed £55 million a day was our ‘membership fee’, in fact when all is counted (rebates etc) the figure for 2013 was £24 million a day. That’s half the widely publicised figure and just goes to show how quickly misleading statistics become ‘fact’.

5) Immigration is a subject 77% Britons will say is a negative thing for our economy. However, government reports show “little evidence in the literature of a statistically significant impact from EU migration on native employment outcomes”- ie, they don’t take British jobs. A CEBR study suggests that tighter controls on EU immigration could cost the UK £60bn by 2050. Including illegal immigrants, figures on costs vary so dramatically that differing camps suggest we may either lose £3.8bn a year or gain £5.6bn per year if all immigration were halted.

So there you have it. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I do actually research before voicing my opinion (notice how think comes before speak in the blog title). I think we all need to acknowledge how much conventional wisdom we have adopted without ever researching the topic fully. A person who does not read has no advantage over someone who can’t read, to paraphrase Mark Twain. Reading, researching, and being sceptical means that come election time you will not be swayed by fear-mongering political rhetoric. Until next time folks, keep reading.

Under the Bonnet: Notes on A Cultural Conundrum.

This post is the first of many to begin questioning our culture. This blog will certainly get to other cultures along the way, but let’s start with ours.

I was topping up the engine coolant in my car yesterday. This is a task, as any sensible driver will know, which must be undertaken fairly regularly along with the other maintenance. Most drivers have to have a look under the bonnet once a month at least. So why, in the middle of southern English suburbia, supposedly one of the best educated regions on the planet, did a man call out to me these two words- “I’m impressed.”?

It is worth noting here that I am a woman. The man in question was middle aged and white, and drove an estate car that looked a bit like a hearse. “I get that a lot.” I replied, because, sadly, I really do. In fact I am yet to complete the simple task of topping up my levels under the bonnet without a middle aged white man having this conversation with me (interestingly they do always fit that description). This man is always comfortably middle class, with a family and a semi in a classy suburban neighbourhood. He looks like he might have an office job, and he walks with an understated swagger that says- “If a fuse goes in my house, I will fix that while the women flutter helplessly.”

At this point this man surpassed all of my previous estimates of his intelligence levels and said, “It’s not often you see a woman with her head under the bonnet.” It was at this point that I realised we are living with a cultural conundrum, one that has been politely patted on the back and asked to sit back down one too many times. Theorist Cheris Kramarae once said “Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings”, and she made a very good point. If we live in a society in which an educated, well to do Family man believes it “impressive” for a woman to pour some engine coolant into her bonnet, then we do not yet live in an equal society.

It was at this point that I reminded this man, “We do have brains you know.” Interestingly, he looked mortified and walked away without another word. Perhaps he was expecting me to giggle and ask him if I was doing it properly, I’m not really sure. Either way this is where the true conundrum lies. We live in a culture which in part, finds it dissonant to see a woman undertake ‘men’s jobs’. But this culture also knows that it cannot be seen as sexist, and does not even view itself that way.

Shortly after my unfortunate conversation with my neighbour, he left the house accompanied by a wife and young daughter. He clearly doted on both, and as they walked down the street they became just another suburban family. I stayed with my car for a few more minutes and pondered what I had seen in my brief excursion behind the net curtains, into the true prejudices of this strangers mind. I wondered if his daughter, when she grows up, will be a mechanic. It didn’t take long. How could she be, with a father so subtly, so inoffensively biased that she may never question it, that she may not even see it, as I don’t believe he did. She may wonder why the idea of being an mechanic never appealed to her, and assume that she was just born disliking cars, while her husband checks her oil levels.

I called this an elephant in the room but it is more worrying that that. This is the problem that cannot be seen for it is behind closed doors. It hides in the back of peoples subconscious, an entity hard to control. It seeps through our culture and into our core. We are living inside this conundrum whilst remaining unmoved by it. Well I’m starting now. Speaking out. Why? Because I want to live in an equal society. Because I want future generations to be free from prejudice and discrimination based on genitalia.

And also, because I want to be able to check under my bonnet without talking to my neighbours.

On Blogs, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Education.

Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote that “Intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.” This is a notion that has stayed with me since I first stumbled upon that quote a few years ago. It is now one of my core beliefs that education is the answer to a whole host of the world’s problems. Studies consistently state that increased time spent in education reduces the probability that person will commit a crime.

For most adults, however, ‘education’ in a formal sense will not be part of their lives once they remove their mortarboard and buckle down to the 9-5. This is why I am starting this blog. Because I think that thinking, and opening up a discussion about topics is something too many people are lacking. Why is it the cultural norm to vegetate in front of the television, to discuss with vigor the latest drama on ‘TOWIE’, yet debating current affairs is almost a taboo?

This blog will be a soapbox, as it were, a space for thought, ideas, and explorations. Thanks for reading.