Feeling Weepy Today

I don’t know. I feel hopeless and overwhelmed and weary. Maybe it’s partly because it’s my birthday tomorrow, an anniversary which has had me feeling maudlin every year I can remember, as a teenager and perhaps even earlier than that. I don’t remember ever thinking ‘Yay! I’m a year older!’ even when I went into double digits.

Jacob Is Younger Than Kylie

I saw someone post online in shock the realisation that Jacob Rees-Mogg is younger than Kylie Minogue. And Anne Widdicombe younger than Bowie. It surprised me hardly at all actually.

Is Dating Discriminatory?

Months of – on one level – unsuccessful online dating is the gift that goes on giving. I get glum sometimes, and wonder if there is anyone out there for me, or whether I am doomed to be single and unloved all my life. Other times it is (a) interesting meeting people that would normally never cross my path, which is teaching me so much, and (b) interesting being confronted with my own prejudices. Which is teaching me something, but I am not sure what.

Transfer Of Ownership

Watched a little tiktok of Dr Jessica Taylor about the reason your father’s name and occupation goes on your marriage certificate, and the reason your father walks you down the aisle. She seemed surprised that this is to do with transfer of ownership (he ‘gives you away’) – I was amazed that this appeared to be news to her – but as I was watching I was thinking of the fact that ownership of slaves was transferred (they were sold like cattle) and that they very often took the name of their owner. An obvious point of comparison but not one I had noticed before.

Tavistock Triggering

That building. We used to live round the corner and I literally passed the Tavi every single day on the school run. I hear the name often enough these days in the context of the gender clinic they have there and I’m OK with that, but watching this footage the other day made me go all hot and cold. I don’t want to write today about gender, though I am happy to include the link to the piece in question.

Will You Still Need Me

Reflecting on how much sex my ex has (presumably) been getting since we split. He seems never to be without a girlfriend, and there have been more than a few. Some of them I believe he has had to pay, to a greater or lesser extent. I wonder if that makes it more or less likely that they will help him to improve. Maybe he’s getting better at it.

Lessons From Lockdown

I’ve just come off my zoom writing group. I’m pretty fired up because with the help of the others I have just made what feels like a major breakthrough in the book I am thinking about.

Festivals And Finer Things

There doesn’t seem to be all that much in the middle.

Vacancy

For the first time in over eight years, I wanted to go to sleep with someone’s arm around me. It gave me quite a shock.

Saying It Don’t Make It So

Mark told me half a dozen times in the first few minutes of our call that he was very clever. At one point he mentioned as a certainty that he could have gone to Oxford, only he’d decided not to apply. I suggested that, even had he applied, whether he got in or not was something not entirely up to him? He ignored this. He knew I had studied there, and wanted to make clear, I suppose, that he was at least as clever as I am, only somehow more discerning. When in fact it’s not that much of a yardstick in any case.