Ossamenta

Well, here I am. Yesterday was an agreeable bus ride, then I walked from the Union to the Concourse, it being not unduly hot, not raining, and my backpack not completely resembling that of Christian ascending the Hill Difficulty.

I was obliged to wait a while in the lobby for my room to be ready; however, an upside, besides the water and chips they comped me, was running into 1crowdedhour.

Room v nice once I had shifted the bedside table to the more convenient side.

Agreeable early dinner of tapas with 1crowdedhour, and an early night.

Good sleep, breakfast of Swedish pancakes with lingonberry jam (in quantities that defeated me in the end), encountered pennski and bookzombie.

Had booked a massage yesterday for this morning, which was marvellous and just what I needed. Highly recommended.

Weather bright, but atypically brisk.

Well,here I am at Heathrow, having my coffee. Cab arrived Really Early but traffic was a bit heavy, so it wasn't by any means the best ever time.

However, when I turned my phone on, there was a message from the airline to say flight was delayed (?Chicago thunderstorms?) so I have undue amounts of time hanging about Terminal 3.

But, anyway, my dearios:
DON'T FORGET TO FEED THE PARROT!

I was not going to pick up on clanwilliam's exhortation to flap a cod at Mariella's latest, but it segues neatly into something else that my attention has been drawn to, via Petra Boynton posting on Facebook about how problematic it is, and and also by swingeing critique by Hadley Freeman: this 'Get Britain Fertile' campaign .

(Do I wake or sleep? Is this 2013 or has there been a time-slip back to 1923 or even 1913?)

Because, you know, somehow in spite of all these years of being told about their ticking biological clocks and their dwindling ovaries, women are still, oh horrors, delaying motherhood.

Or, as Hadley so justly remarks:

All those twentysomething women across Britain with their massive houses, their steady jobs that allow for maternity leave and flexible hours for childcare and all those millions of cheap nurseries on their doorstep without any waiting lists at all. Seriously, it's just a mystery why more women aren't having babies younger

And see also Barbara Ellen on the elephant in the room other gender in the equation.

There's an encouraging amount of WTF and pushback happening, at least.

Plus, of course it's also predicated on those women not being teenage mothers.

But, really, why is it selfish not to want children? Wanting them can be just as selfish a desire. We also note that the 'broody' other half has been getting a PhD and do we just passingly wonder whether she has been doing the major support of the household thing, and might want a little time for leisure and pleasure now he has a permanent job, rather than buckling down to breeding?

And, really, I don't think depopulation is that big an issue, surely? Rather the reverse?

Exasperating article today on whether Prozac b teh deth ov ART, horrors horrors.

Which has so many unexamined assumptions festering away in the subtext...

One thinks that there have been many creative artists who were not, in fact, bipolar, or suffering more than the kinds of normal unhappiness that are part of human existence, and it is really not necessary to have distressing problems of brain chemistry to produce worthwhile works of art. No, really, not all artists are 'tortured' and it is not the precondition of entry. Mi Romantyk Phallusy, I show u it.

One also considers that there have been artists who have needed a certain degree of uproar and upheaval in their personal lives to get them going, which I think of as Robert Graves syndrome, and recommending marriage guidance counselling would probably be beside the point, alas. (One perhaps feels less sympathy for these artists than for the people within their ambit who are dealing with the fallout from this.)

Above all, however, one wonders whether people were going around, following the discovery of salvarsan/penicillin, and the introduction of isoniazid, bewailing the likely effects on creativity of the eradication of cerebral syphilis and consumption.

I am also, about the allusion to Freud committing suicide, seriously WTF: Freud was over 80, terminally ill with cancer and in excruciating pain for which medication was no longer working; this surely comes under the heading of self-euthanasia rather than being assimilatable to the 'suicidal artist' model that precedes it.

Also, depression is not some romantic gothic black pall, pierced by occasional amazing shafts of light: it's a grey slime of apathy covering everything. At least one of the cited descriptions of the effect of some psychotropic drug sounded exactly like depression, which suggests that it wasn't actually working.

I am never about magic bullets, and there are problems of individual response to particular medications, of an overly pharmaceutical quick-fix approach to mental distress, and, ultimately, it's always more complicated.

But: the drugs can help even if they're not the complete answer.

Oliver Burkemann on 'norm policing' against queue jumpers etc vs Lucy Mangan on microaggressions.

Okay, perhaps one could slot people who violate norms into the category of microaggressors?

It is possible that Lucy M has already captured some of this ambivalence:

And, like political correctness, it is both a) a brilliant and fundamentally sound idea that would, if properly practised, result in greater happiness for a greater number of people; and b) capable of quickly leading practitioners down spiralling corridors of guilt, anxiety and negativity that hide the original departure point from view.

And while I rather like her concept of 'microniceties', I regret to say that I am probably not going to notice people who are holding their parting conversation in such a way that they are not blocking the top of the stairway to the egress (something I came across in the course of this week) as much as people who, neglectful of the fact that people might want to get past, do thus hinder the free flow of traffic.

Niceties, perhaps, are about reducing the friction and not negatively snagging one's attention.

I suspect that niceties have to rise above the level of micro to be noticed.

Cool Thing I discovered - glancing through an auction catalogue at work and riffling fast through the section on medieval illuminated manuscripts, my eye caught a woman's name and she was the person to whom this particular ms was attributed and A Known Artist. Apparently this was not entirely unknown in ye medievalz: women were making books in the Middle Ages and illuminating them, some in convents and some in family workshops in the secular world. Okay, hit me again with that explanation about the very limited possibilities available to women in The Past...

Annoying thing: someone, in the debate on women TV presenters and ageism, referring to Mary Beard as 'an old woman'. Beard is several years younger than moi, and still in that phase I would consider middle age.

Puffins: not entirely cutesome. In the course of five-yearly survey of puffins in the UK 'The amount of bites and scars [National Trust rangers] are going to have will be interesting." Though I feel the puffins may have a point, as the census involves people reaching into burrows to see if they are a mated pair with an egg.

I was thinking, as I walked up the road to the Tube (I will not, dr rdrs, recount the preceding sequence of thoughts that got me there) that you don't find the concept of 'nymphomania' around these days to the extent that it was in my younger days.

Which led me to wonder whether morally-loaded terms such as 'slut' had replaced a medically-pathologising, if still pejorative, one (which was always a bit confused between the idea of a woman with a high sex drive and the poor creature who was desperately seeking an actual satisfaction that eluded her).

However, a quick google suggests that it is still at least in vernacular use to some extent, though the top hit is all about debunking the concept:

Calling someone a nymphomaniac or accusing them of nymphomania isn't something that can be defined by science. Nymphomania is a layperson's term used to label a woman, or a nympho, whose sex drive or sexual activity is subjectively deemed too high. The term "nymphomania," is not scientifically meaningful simply because there are no specific criteria that would define a nymphomaniac. In other words, there isn't a way to determine how much sexual desire or activity is too much.
....
The label of nymphomania is used in a pejorative and derogatory manner, almost exclusively in reference to women. To many men, the idea of a woman with a greater sex drive than their own is somewhat threatening, so they may use the label to preserve their own egos by "proving" that the woman is abnormal.
Similarly, men with sexual dysfunction might accuse their partners of being oversexed in an effort to hide their own fears or sense of inadequacy

Many years ago - it must have been c. 1970, the summer I was in New York - I picked up a copy of Playboy which was lying around the place I was sharing, and in the correspondence columns, presumably in response to former discussion about the female sex drive, was the brilliantly circular argument, 'The only women I've ever met who were as horny as men were nymphomaniacs'. And that was back when Teh Menz prided themselves on being the logical sex...

Recent report in the Daily Mirror: Two men were left exhausted and crying for help after being targeted by a nymphomaniac in Germany - but what exactly is nymphomania?

(The metamorphoses of the vampire*, what?)

I also note that the latest Lars von Trier film is Nymphomaniac.

So the concept seems to be about, still.

Sigh.

*Edna St Vincent Millay translates Baudelaire: squeeeeeee.

A couple of friends have been making ecstatic posts on FaceBook about dining at a Certain Upscale Restaurant where I have also been with partner (Project Posh Food Lunching), and, besides waxing lyrical about the food, have massive praise for the wonderfulness of the front-of-house staff.

And yes, that's been pretty much my experience too, fairly generally in our adventures in fine dining.

Yet I wouldn't be entirely sure that I don't have lurking somewhere some vision of superior maitre d' and snarky waiters, just waiting to put down anyone who is NQOSD and should probably be down the local chippy rather than sullying their elite premises.

While I'm sure there must be other literary sources, I feel this is probably down to my mother singing to me the song about 'you get no bread with one fishball'* in my youth.

*A version of which gets cited in the Katherine Mansfield story, 'Je Ne Parle Pas Francaise'.