Ossamenta

London garden bridge project collapses in acrimony after £37m spent.

And I can't help wanting to say to Boris J that in Ye Bygone Days when people built follies they did so on their own estates and with their own money (though on reflection this was probably ill-gottens from the Triangle Trade and dodgy dealings in India) and didn't ask the nation to pay for them.

(And aren't there already memorials to Princess Di? How many do we need?)

And, you know, it's a pretty idea and in theory I am there with Thomas Heatherwick that 'London needs new bridges and unexpected new public places': except that that is not a part of London that required Yet Another Bridge, there are so many that taking the boat journey along that stretch of river is more like going into a tunnel.

Also, it was not properly a public space:

a link that would be privately run, would be able set its own rules for access, and would close at night and be available to hire for private events.

I am also boggled by the suggestion that the river is not already pretty much 'centre-stage' in our great city.

I think Mad William would have had things to say along the lines of

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

I might go along on the line suggested by this to comment that what good is a garden bridge if the land lies waste?

So, farewell then, printer which has been with me some dozen or so years, also previous computer.

Take it away Bessie Smith:

The usual sturm und drang over setting up the new All In One Computer and the printer which purports to be wireless, but refuses to connect thusly: however it will connect by cable.

Though alas, all the USB ports are on one side of the computer, the one away from where the printer has to go (unless I do some major rearranging), but I think I have contrived.

And of course, various other things still to get sorted.

But, getting there, sorta.

The Long Read in today's Guardian is on 'clean eating' and how problematic, not to say, entirely woo-woo, it is.

However, I think the author misses a trick because, even though she cites to a mid-Victorian food reformer:

In the 1850s, a British chemist called Arthur Hill Hassall became convinced that the whole food supply of London was riddled with toxins and fakery. What’s more, he was right. Hassall had done a series of investigations for the medical journal the Lancet, and found that much of what was for sale as food and drink was not what it seemed: “coffee” made from burnt sugar and chicory; pickles dyed green with poisonous copper colourings

He started to see poison everywhere, and decided that the answer was to create a set of totally uncontaminated food products. In 1881, he set up his own firm, The Pure Food Company.

I also wonder how many people, and of what demographic, are actually into 'clean eating', given that most people don't even manage their 5 a day (I'm not honestly sure I achieve this every day myself). Well, presumably people with time and resources enough to worry over what they put into their mouths, rather than where the next meal is coming from.

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And apparently some German politician has been complaining about the decline of the good old German nudist tradition. I remember some years ago at a conference when someone who works on sexuality in the former GDR was talking about the perception among its former citizens of the loss of body positivity of that kind when the Wall fell and exposure to consumerist capitalism happened.

- because that's where I've gone to.

No, really, I am boggled.

So I bit the bullet and ordered a new desktop computer, a new notebook, and a new printer: because I realised that my existing printer, the one that is acting affectingly consumptive, was one that has been doing service for 12+ years and thus I think putting out to grass is the sensible thing to do. And if I'm getting a new printer, and I already had it in mind to get a new desktop, rather than having to faff twice over to get computer and printer to make nice to one another, I might as well combine getting these things and just have a massive getting up to speed with new electronics session.

And My Favoured Retailer did not have the desktop model I wanted so I had to go Elsewhere, but they did have the Yogabook and printer model I wanted: but then it turned out that these come from separate places, and there was some suggestion that the printer might take up to a week to arrive.

But, lo and behold, mirabile dictu: the desktop and the Yogabook arrived pretty much within 5 minutes of one another at a civilised time of day, and the printer at mid-afternoon.

What're the odds, eh?

Today's ODNB Life of the Day: Marje Proops by Katharine Whitehorn.

I daresay that many of my dr rdrs were in the wrong country to know of or born just a bit too late to recall Dear Marje, so I will copy a few choice bits here, as those links do not last:

[T]he editor of Good Taste magazine asked her to write an article on the problems of mothers coping on their own in wartime. A pamphlet on venereal disease for female servicewomen and other commissions followed.

[A]t the end of the war she joined the Daily Herald as fashion editor, later graduating to woman's editor. And when the existing advice columnist, writing as May Marshall, left, Proops, unable to find a replacement, started answering the letters herself.

So began her career as an ‘agony aunt’, which gave her ‘Dear Marje’ column iconic status in journalism and the country, a role she continued when she moved back to the Woman's Mirror under Hugh Cudlipp in 1954. He had been impressed by the witty, forthright replies of American columnists Abigail van Buren and Ann Landers, and reckoned Marje could emulate them, and more. At first she was alarmed by how little she knew, but her friend the psychiatrist Dr Eustace Chesser let her bring round the letters in his lunch hour and gradually schooled her in their interpretation. She built up over the years not only increasing experience but a vast knowledge of the organizations and agencies where her troubled readers could go for help. She answered, or caused to be answered by her team of trained helpers, every one of the 50,000 letters she received each year; other readers telephoned her, and occasionally she was compelled to take practical action, for example when one girl rang from a call box to say she had taken suicide pills; Marje kept her in conversation for long enough for her staff and the police to locate and rescue her.

Her columns were distinguished from the more conventional and moralistic work of previous advice columnists by their frankness about forbidden areas such as homosexuality, impotence, divorce, and incest; she claimed to be the first person to mention masturbation in a family newspaper. She was compassionate but could be tough with her correspondents: her journalist colleague Felicity Green described her answers as being ‘brutally frank, sexually aware, liberal to the point of illegality’ (private information). Her writing bridged in its fifty years a change in public attitudes from that in which wives wrote about ‘submitting’ to their husbands to one in which, in her own words, ‘questions about orgasms are as common as questions about mothers-in-law’. She and those who followed her were even reproached for having accelerated the process, though she saw herself as struggling against hypocrisy and repression and cruelty.

And thinking about the spreading and diffusive effect of that sphere - well beyond the individuals actually presenting their problems - I was reminded of this which I came across linked from somewhere or other: I Was A Hardcore Conservative: What Changed My Mind and that thing about having arguments not to convince the person you're arguing with but the bystanders. Even if the advisees themselves did not take the very excellent advice offered by Ms Proops, I am sure I am not the only person who has picked up valuable life-lessons from reading those responses.

And, with a bit of a sigh - one of the areas that Marje was very active in getting the word out was contraception, still a bit of a no-no in many women's mags in the 50s and 60s, partly because of not wishing to publish an entirely separate Irish editions - I noted this article, The Swedish physicist revolutionising birth control, which is something of a reprise of 'no duckie, I don't think anything that requires 'complex mathematics and data analysis' to create an algorithm counts as 'natural'.

I also boggle at someone who presents the data that 'I discovered that you can see when you're fertile by your temperature' as, 'for me that was really a revelation.'. Nearly 90 years since the findings of Ogino and Knaus and the development of the rhythm method sez, WOT.

[ETA] And just came across this about the agony column in Just 17: 'Where has this fantastic, empowering advice gone?'.

What I read

Finished Buried Heart - well, I won't say, that went in directions I didn't expect, because I'm not sure it was ever that predictable that I thought I knew where it was headed.

KJ Charles, Spectred Isle (2017) - m/m occult thriller, v good.

Gail Godwin, Grief Cottage (2017): unexpected, but very good. At first I thought, this is too sophisticated for a young boy's viewpoint, but it turns out to be a retrospect from rather later in life.

Rose Lerner, All or Nothing (2016): Regency romance novella, was doing some unusual things but perhaps a bit slight (previously part of a themed anthology).

Dana Stabenow, Less Than A Treason (2017) - well, the end of the last one was a bit of a cliffhanger. Pretty much up to usual standard.

On the go

Marcia Muller, The Color of Fear (2017) - latest outing of Sharon McCone.

Up next

And in, Dept of Series that have been going on for quite some time and I have been following for decades, the latest PC Hodgell, The Gates of Tagmeth

We ask ourselves, do we not, my dearios, whether one can genuinely combine a 'social experiment' with a 'reality show': Bullying, cliques and fistfights: secrets from Eden, the reality show that nobody watched.

We feel that certain blokes involved may have been consuming the wrong sort of post-apocalyptic fiction?

Five new episodes document bullying, cliques, fistfights and even outright revolt as male boorishness descended into disturbing misogyny. Some women were picked on for their perceived physical weakness and advised to stick to basic chores while a few male hunter-gatherers did the manual labour. It was claimed that the men controlling access to food were threatening to “starve them out”.
....
What that group of boys had in common was insecurity, a need to prove themselves with a show of ego and arrogance to hide their emotions and nervousness. They didn’t have the emotional literacy of boys like Rob
....
“Some of us thought it might test how we could live closer to nature, others looked at it as a competition. People were trying to prove how tough they were rather than investing time in finding the usefulness of others and helping them through it.

“At the beginning, a lot of the men went for the macho jobs, chopping logs and building stuff, whereas the gardening was ‘women’s work’ – no glory but a daily trudge. They said we were lazy, and these weird words like ‘efficiency’ and ‘cull’ were used. Eventually, if the group thinks something’s OK, it becomes OK.”

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Wow, festering matrimonial resentment: Prince Henrik, 83-year-old husband of Queen Margrethe, says he does not want grave beside hers as he is unhappy at never being made king; though, fair does, in order to marry the crown princess, he 'changed his name to Henrik, converted from Catholicism to Protestantism and renounced his French citizenship to become a Dane'. On another paw, women have been doing that sort of thing for centuries, have they not?

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Wanking about ejaculation (further to stories and comments concerning the decline in quality of the male generative seed). We may point out that while some research supports the argument about 21 ejaculations per month preventing prostate cancer, there is at least one other bit of research that suggests the reverse...