Katie Hopkins and a new year resolution

‘Feed the Goat and he will score!’ That was what Manchester City fans of a certain vintage used to chant/sing of our legendary striker, Shaun Goater, who banged in 84 goals in 184 appearances for the club.

But it occurred to me today that it could equally be said of internet trolls: feed them, and they will score. Starve them, and they will die.

The trigger for this was waking this morning to find that Katie Hopkins was trending on Twitter once more. At which ‘news’ my heart fell, but I admit to also clicking to find out just why.

Now Hopkins is a remarkable specimen who makes a living – and a pretty good one – from being vile.

It is an unfortunate fact of the world we live in that the internet in particular allows trolls not merely to survive, but to thrive.

Imagine for a moment what would have happened today if nobody had retweeted Hopkins’s latest bout of bile; if nobody had commented on it; if no petitions had been started; if nobody had clicked on the relevant links: what would have happened?

The reality is that Hopkins and her ilk feed on our outrage. And I make no apology – I can be as outraged as the next person.

I can read tweets and other things, and react before my brain has chance to render me sensible. I can also thus allow my knee to jerk like the next person – and I’m not proud of it.

Today’s comments were about Scots and Ebola – and they were bang out of order.

But it’s also slightly disturbing to see so many people believing that when someone talks derisively of any group (in this case, Scots) it’s racist.

It’s not – and no, you cannot ‘harass’ an entire people, as someone suggested when I raised this on social media earlier today.

We should be grateful for that. No matter how ‘right on’ we want to be ourselves, we should not welcome or encourage the state to further demonise free speech.

Incitement is illegal: calling the Scottish people ‘sweaty socks’ and pretending that the Scottish NHS is inadequate is not. And nor should it be.

There is a danger that, the more we evolve – or some of us, at least – the more we forget the common sense of knowing that, however unpleasant such terms are, they are not and should never be made illegal.

For goodness sake – under what law?

Can we no longer refer to the Germans as ‘Krauts’ of the French as ‘Frogs’?

Personally, I wouldn’t. But I’d be deeply worried if we actually made such phrases – and more – of themselves illegal.

Just as I’d be damned worried if we made the expression of racism – or homophobia or sexism or any hatred on the basis of religion of ability/disability/size illegal.

Think about that: do you really believe that outlawing words and sentiments, creating – in effect – thought crimes – is actually the basis for a healthy and whole society?

But this isn’t just about Scottish people. Hopkins has long form for targeting many groups, including fat people. Now I’m far from skinny myself: am I calling for her to be indicted on the basis of some imagined law? Absolutely not.

After all, if I did, it would rather stop me calling her a pathetic, ugly (in the spiritual sense) little cunt ... although clearly facts are on my side. But then again, I’m fat by today’s un-Rubenesque standards. And ain’t that the truth.

I have been bullied on the basis for almost half a century. Well, at least until a burst of confidence saw off the trolls before they dared comment.

And there indeed is a lesson.

But in the here and now, I do find myself wondering whether, after packing her children off to bed at night, Hopkins cries into a glass of wine at what her life and work mean. I cannot personally imagine making a living out of being such a vile individual. I cannot imagine having such a lack of personal morals/ethics.

But that’s the world we live in, where such people are magnified my both mass media and social media.

Which is precisely why I say that there’s an easy solution.

Those of you who have read this blog for some time will know that I do not do new year resolutions. But I’m changing tack this time around.

I will, in 2015, try my damnedest not to feed the trolls. I politely suggest that you all try to do the same, no matter how outraged you – and I – are by what they say.

That is the way to get rid of the nasty little fuckers. Not by petitions that give them far greater credence than they should ever have.

At the end of the day, why would you give oxygen to a troll?

Porky Pickles and the biscuit syndrome

'Please God, can somebody bring me a custard cream.'

Welcome to 2013 – and the season of resolutions. Or put another way, the season of post-festive guilt and denial of pleasure.

I actually know someone who is not only giving up booze for January, but going vegetarian for the month too. Did they really indulge that month over the festive period?

Of course it tallies rather nicely with the Anglo-Saxon predilection for a spot of masochistic mortification.

It also tallies with the current – and increasing, to judge from the plethora of stories on the subject – obsession with the issue of rising obesity. And this also translates into a morbid terror of being – and, at least as importantly – being perceived to be even slightly over one’s supposed ideal weight.

Only two days ago, the Telegraph had a clergyman writing on the subject. He chose to rail against the idea that government should do anything about the issue, and said it was all a question of the lazy getting off their backsides and doing some exercise.

Apparently, everyone who is obese spends their entire day in front of the telly, stuffing their gob. You’ll never see anyone working who is overweight.

Now this was an opinion piece – but wouldn’t you expect opinions be at least a teensy weensy bit informed, most especially in a serious newspaper?

However, the Rev Dr Peter Mullen doesn’t like that route. And as for any Christian charity ...

But with the new year barely four days old, that’s far from the end of it.

It seems that, if you’re claiming benefits and live in Westminster, you’ll have to shed the pounds unless you want to lose that money.

In the first example of what might happen now that public health policy has been devolved to councils, local politicians have decided that it would be a right laugh to make attendance at a gym/fitness class a criteria for anyone who is claiming benefits, who also happens to be obese.

The real laugh – well, a chuckle at any rate – will be when that recipient of much public cash, Eric Pickles, the rotund secretary of state for local government, makes any comment on this new example of ‘localism’.

Perhaps he’ll keep quiet and decide to act on his own department’s reported £10,000 increase in its annual biscuit bill.

That's biscuits, right. More than £10,000 on biscuits? I can’t even begin to imagine how you’d spend that sort of money on biscuits. What sort of biscuits were they – golden garibaldis?

For all this demonisation of the unemployed – and the working poor – there seems to be one rule for the rich and an entirely different set of rules for the poor.

For Pickles, who is presiding over many of the cuts to local government and for whom the 'localism' ideology that is allowing Westminster to moot it's 'lose weight or lose your benefits' scheme is a particularly important idea, being fat and eating loads of biscuits at the taxpayer's expense is not an issue.

This is the same man who told councils to save money by not having mineral water at meetings. And yet ...

The widespread condemnation doesn't exist, because weight is popularly considered a choice – and because he isn't unemployed or claiming benefits, even though his wage and expenses are paid by the state, by the taxpayer; even more so than the low-income cleaner's housing benefit is paid by the taxpayer.

But the first two stories help to create or feed the idea that only the unemployed and benefit recipients – ‘scroungers’ – are obese, and that they’re getting fat on ‘our taxes’ and clogging up the NHS with their laziness and greed.

And judging by some of the comments on both the Telegraph and BBC websites – and on the basis of other comments on other sites at other times – the wheeze is remarkably effective.

There is absolutely no mention anywhere of:

• the cost of fresh food;

• the lack of cooking skills;

• the use of such calorie-loaded ingredients as high fructose corn syrup – used in many, unexpected ways, such as giving a glaze to a pizza base;

• the wider use of sugars and ingredients such as MSG in processed foods – even ones that are characterised as ‘healthy’, such as breakfast cereals or yogurts, many of which are disingenuously marketed as ‘low fat’, with the implication that that makes them healthy;

• the issue of working people with very low incomes;

• the issue of working people who are obese.

Nope. This is an entirely one-sided relationship, where big business has no responsibility and we, the customer, must shoulder it entirely on our own; and where obesity is simply the product of sloth and greed – a pair of comfortingly traditional sins for this period of mortification (which will be followed by Lent, another period of mortification and denial).

Now just to be clear: I personally cannot understand how parents can allow a child to become seriously obese. We’re not talking ‘puppy fat’ or a little tubby, but seriously obese. What is going through their minds?

Do they actually not see the weight gain? Do they not think it’s an issue? Do they not care – or are they actually deluding themselves?

Nobody is saying that the solutions are easy. I’ve talked to people who, for instance, have made a conscious decision to switch from eating a lot of processed and fast food to cooking freshly for themselves and their family – even when obesity is not an issue.

It takes time; it takes dedication. And it also takes work to convince children to eat fresh foods that are not full of sugars and other additives. Because those things are addictive and of course, if you start them young …

Well, you all know the adage about the Jesuit saying ‘give me a child’.

But the equation is NOT one-sided and the issues are not as straightforward as some believe and others would like to pretend.

In the UK, we spend 10% less, per household on food than anywhere else in Europe. It’s probably fair to say that most people would accept that our fellow Europeans eat better than we do, in general.

And obviously we have an increasing number of people being forced to use food banks simply to get by – although there is now at least case of a politician trying to say that this is only a symptom of people’s inadequacy too.

Part of the problem here is the high percentage of anyone’s income that they have to spend simply on somewhere to live.

When government complains about the cost of housing benefit – much of which is paid to people who are working, but are in low-income jobs – then what it should really be pointing out is that landlords can simply choose to hike rents as much as they please. And they do so.

This is exactly the sort of behaviour highlighted in Hackney butcher Henry Tidiman’s story – we need rent control for both the commercial and residential sectors.

We have also, in the past 30 years, seen massive rises in the cost of basics such as domestic bills for fuel and water.

These things, combined with three decades of downward pressure on wages, do make a serious difference to what many people now have available to spend on food, with cuts beginning to bite.

Add into that that many people believe the con that highly processed food is more convenient than fresh and that they do not have the time to cook properly on a regular basis – and even that for some people, where they live is a dessert in terms of decent, fresh food choices.

There are also cases of homes – bedsits etc – where there is no kitchen.

Indeed, in recent years, some of the new flats being built in London with the target market of young and trendy professionals do not even have space for a proper oven, but are designed with just a microwave in mind.

In Joanna Blythman’s Bad Food Britain, she tells a really rather amusing story about a developer who built a series of holiday homes in the UK for foreign visitors. But it all hit a snag when such visitors arrived to find only a microwave and no proper cooking facilities. But that’s a mindset that exists – a mindset that believes that nobody really cooks or wants to.

After all, when Iceland, say, offers boxes of party food at £1 each, it’s easy to see how people would think it far cheaper than anything they could hope to make.

Still, at least Jo Swinson, the minister for equalities and women, was speaking a little bit of sense when, at the end of the tail end of last year, she called on magazines not to publish faddy diets that promised miracle weight loss.

It didn't go remotely far enough, but it was at least an acknowledgement that the problem is not limited just to the individual.

Personal responsibility is a good thing and to be encouraged. I doubt anyone would suggest otherwise.

But a great deal of the current talk about that is actually just a cover – in a Victorianesque language of morality – for ignoring any sense of corporate responsibility, which is precisely the area where a government that actually works for the whole electorate should be acting.

But that might just tale the biscuit.

Being resolved

This time of year, by tradition, involves resolutions. Well, not here, of course – apart from a sense of resolve that no resolutions will be made and, therefore, none broken.

Have you noticed how the bulk of the resolutions that you hear about are negative? In effect, they are about denial; about changing behaviour that was, presumably, quite enjoyable, to behaviour that is, following this logic, less enjoyable.

So someone’s giving up booze, for instance, or chocolates. Or going on a general diet.

Why now? Do a massive number of people really eat and drink so much over the festive period that they actually need to diet just to get back to where they were before Advent?

And if they do, will these be some of the same people who, after the flush of new year’s resolution self-satisfaction has worn off, will find Lent cropping up to keep them on the straight and narrow?

If anything, Lent is even more confusing than these new year resolutions.

In recent years, one of the glories of the internet has been the discovery that the popularity of Lent seems to be growing among those who have no religious interest in it.

It has become a time to give up something for something you don’t believe in.

Unless, of course, you do believe in it – and then you get to play pick and mix. I recall an incident a few years ago of a young woman on an internet forum arriving online to declare, with great pride (a sin, surely?) that she was giving up something or other for the duration.

Now, this was someone who had also declared, more than once, her core religiosity.

So, because sometimes I can post faster than it takes my brain to re-think myself out of writing something, I asked whether she hadn’t considered giving up sex outside marriage first (or at least contraception) since these two were far higher on the list of her chosen religion’s ‘bad list’ than the consumption of a few Mars bars.

Then, just as you’ve reached Easter and been able to cheer yourself up a bit, it’s time for the new diet to give you your ‘beach body’.

If you’re really desperate, there’s the much-advertised one where you substitute two proper meals a day for a bowl of torn cardboard pieces, as recommended by a certain major manufacturer of said cardboard bits in a nod in entirely the opposite direction to really sensible and sustainable eating habits.

So it seems that culturally, we spend half the year at least in a state of denial of pleasure – and let’s face it, in the UK, ‘use up your flour and eggs) doesn’t even offer a meaningful blow-out before Lent kicks in.

It all begs a few questions. A cycle of binge, purge, binge, purge is no more healthy than binge, binge – so why not just get your lifestyle sorted out if you really believe that’s a problem?

But then again, is it any coincidence that so many resolutions – at new year and later – involve dieting?

In Western Europe, sales of weight-loss products, excluding prescription medications, topped £900 in 2009. In the US, the weight-loss industry is apparently worth more than $50bn – that’s a whopping £32.4bn. [Story]

The cycle of diet and binge may not do us any good, but it's not bad for some businesses and, therefore, for the economy as a whole.

And when we realise that faddy diets, the desire to be ultra skinny and the obsession with celebrities’ weight are not new, but can, in part at least, be viewed as products of an era that has been characterised as generally puritanical, then it’s hard not to see something inherently unhealthy and unbalanced in the entire matter.

So the only thing I’m going to resolve this January is to try to make this as voluptuous a year as possible.

Here’s to 2012.

Testing our resolution for pleasure

The new year is a time for renewal, for starting again: for a kind of spring clean for the mind. I’ve long liked the sense of newness that it offers, but then I’ve always seen it as positive.

Even standing outside, early this afternoon, on a cloudy day where the blue could only hint at breaking through, I could feel the pull – almost physically – of the future; of the coming year; the returning sun: the cycle of life. Even now, only a few days on from the winter solstice, the days are getting longer.

All the snow before Christmas set me thinking. I love it; feel drawn toward it. In the very corner of my mind’s eye are snow-covered plains and forests stretching endlessly; a moon above and only the sounds of the occasional animal or bird and the crunch of snow underfoot. It’s something elemental and ancient. New year is the same.

My father managed to make it something else – a sort of groveling and miserable thing. Not on New Year’s Eve itself, when he’d stick to less religious tradition and conspire to have a piece of coal to bring into the house at midnight.

But later, on the first Sunday of the new year, when he’d take the annual covenant service. It was, as I recall, a Methodist’s formal opportunity to re-commit themselves to God.

I have no concrete memories of the service itself, just an abiding sense of it being miserable and depressing – although I doubt that was the prime intention. Mind, it was probably a bit like the Christmas that we’d just left behind: my father’s favourite carol is In the Bleak Midwinter – which must have one of the highest gloom quotients of any Christmas hymn. I was at my happiest when descanting away to Come All Ye Faithful and Hark the Herald.

Way back when, the midwinter feast would mark the last of the decent grub that had been stored: then would come the hardest times, before spring started bringing forth fresh foods.

A month or so after that midwinter fattening and celebration is the perfect time, when you think about it like this, for a formal period of fasting. For Lent, indeed. You didn’t really have a lot of choice, so clerics didn’t have to invent it, but merely turn it to a new use, to suggest that you do what you had no choice about for The Big G. Which would make you feel a lot better. If only in the next life.

People longed for meat, for cream, for butter. Instead, they grew bored of the fish that was the religiously-sanctioned staple and one of the few things available.

It’s funny really, that in our generally rather secular days, Lent hasn’t just stuck around as a time for religious fasting, but as a period when even those who are not particularly religious get to boast about what they’re giving up. And boast they do – which is why we all get to hear about what they’ve foresworn.

Then again, if they didn’t tell us, who would know? Those they tell are, in effect, the new gods that are looked to for approval of a self-denial that is chosen, not forced by the reality of a lack of modern food preservation techniques.

But if people boast because they need someone to see their self-denial and they don’t believe in a divine entity to do so, then it also begs the question of why they’re bothering with the giving-up malarkey in the first place.

Before we get to Lent, we have another ‘giving-up’ period with the start of the new year and the resolutions that go with it. And since that increasingly seems to mean: ‘I’m Giving Up X, Y or Z’ (or all three) it effectively extends Lent to something close to the first quarter of the year.

This year, just as your resolutions are wearing off, you get another little splurge on 8 March – the chance to use up your left-over eggs and flour for pancakes – and then off you go on Lent. As a slight aside, have you noticed that Brits gets diddled on this one? Look at what other people get to do before Lent while we get to toss pancakes.

But back to new year resolutions. Most of all, this is the time of year when you start The Diet. If you pigged out during the festivities in the olden days, then the unavoidable period of limited food to follow would get rid of those excess pounds. But now we have to artificially create the dietary impact of those old shortages.

Striving for the body beautiful is a perfect way to do this. Add in ideas where the only indicator of health is body shape and you have a potent mix. And indeed, it’s even better, since it gets to be used again, later in the year when you’re encouraged to get your body ready for the beach.

Let’s take things a bit further. If we have, as Nietzsche claimed, killed God, then does there have to be something in his place? Or even if there doesn’t have to be, has a vacuum been created that is being filled by other things?

And do those “other things” succeed most when they involve control, discipline, guilt, societal judgement and the promise of a distant reward, in much the same way that religion involves such things?

Do we now worship a certain body type in a pseudo religious manner, forcing ourselves through un-natural and not particularly pleasant behaviours in a quasi-religious quest for that always-just-out-of-reach ideal?

Because, no matter what anyone tells you, a diet made up, for instance, of two bowls of cereal a day or constant grapefruits is not actually a healthy one and all it’ll do is leave you with pangs of hunger and constant thoughts of the food that you cannot eat. Suffering is good for the soul, of course.

Mind, if we’re going down this road, then it could also be argued that the level of consumerism that we’ve reached (and which we need to maintain or increase for the sake of the economy) demands constant spending.

If we splurged loads on Christmas eating and drinking, then we can spend loads more in the new year on diet products (always more expensive than proper food anyway) and fitness products and services that will help us shed the weight that we put on with the economy-sanctioned spending binge at the end of the previous year.

If you think that all this is a bit far-fetched, just remember that during 2010, one of the senior officials of the Bank of England pleaded with us all to spend more for the sake of the economy – even if that meant dipping into our savings, which were worth less and less anyway because of the low interest rates that are intended to encourage us all to spend more ...

So while the tyranny of the perfect body might not have actually been created by the Establishment, it can be of service to some surprising things. At present, the economy.

Now please don’t get the idea that I’m saying that this is all An Absolutely Bad Thing per se. I make an effort to look after my skin decently, for instance – never more so than now, as I watch carefully on the horizon for that nearing half century. And in between checking the mirror as I apply a good moisturiser, I Google to see how old are assorted women on TV, as I compare their necks to mine.

It’s the sense of extremes that I find interesting: on the one hand, the cult of a certain very specific type of physical ideal. On the other, the puritanism that we’ve mentioned previously, that condemns, for instance, the enjoyment of food.

These two aren’t as different as they might appear – or as their respective adherents might wish to think. Both share, amongst other things, a near-religious certainty and a guilt in pleasure, together with a belief in something better that is just out of reach but surely attainable by certain behaviours, which just happen to involve pain and/or self-denial. No pain, no gain, eh?

And for both groups, food plays a central role in all those factors.

You might – or might not – be relieved to hear that I don’t do resolutions. And I’m not going on a diet now or planning to give anything up for Lent.

This place ain’t called the Voluptuous Manifesto for nothing.

And the end of the year ticks away

It's 10.41pm: hardly more than an hour and a quarter until midnight and the end of the year. End of the year - beginning of the year: which? Half empty or half full?

The kittens are playing, Boudi is sitting quietly; there's a Wallender on the telly - good, but a tad depressing - and we have begun our first drinks of the night: bottled bitters.

The Kiwis in one of the upstairs flats are already excelling themselves in the noise department: they seem permanently oblivious to having neighbours. We may well be very glad of the absinthe that will be opened later: and yes, I really do have a bottle, complete with sugar spoons and sugar cubes to serve in the traditional manner. It would also make a pleasantly Bohemian start to 2110.

We're at home because of the kittens, in essence. This time last year, we were sipping cocktails in the Art Deco splendour of the Hotel American in Amsterdam, as Amsterdamers filled the night outside with fireworks. A young boy who had clearly emptied his piggy bank set off little firecracker things - triangles of brief light - on the low wall of the fountain. Later, we stood on the balcony of our room in the hotel, canned Heinekins keeping us warm against eight below temperatures, and watched as the sky bloomed with colour for well beyond half an hour.

I am mellow now. I intend to get mellower.

A very happy new year, one and all.

10 years – what a decade

With little more than two days left of this year, it's difficult not to be drawn into all the backward looking that accompanies this time of any year. And while this is an annual event, the end of a decades gives it yet more than its usual interest.

It's not been the best of decades in so many ways – 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq ...

And that's just for starters. We in the UK could begin by mourning the demise of Labour's promised "ethical foreign policy", which if it wasn't actually stillborn, died the moment Tony Blair was blinded by the lights of Washington DC.

Oh, there's been plenty to depress and even some to cheer. But you can read all about that elsewhere. For those of you who choose to spend time here, I doubt you do it to replicate what can be found in rather larger web fora.

The last 10 years, for me, have been a period of transformation – of growth. It was the time when, finally, I started an adolescent experience, moving away from all that had held me so firmly in place until my late thirties.

All my previous life, I'd let someone else do my core thinking for me – or giving me a 'manifesto'; a purpose: religion first, then theatre (I couldn't do it for fun, it had to be an all-or-nothing lifestyle thing) and then politics.

Finally, in the last 10 years, I've broken away from all that. It's royally pissed off some acquaintances, but I feel all the better for it. It might have started essentially as a sexual liberation – a liberation from the repression of my upbringing, but it touched so many other aspects of my life.

And with the breakthrough in thinking has come things such as an explosion in my vocabulary. I remember standing on a remote beach in Ireland, watching as a layer of fine sand was blown over the beach proper, for all the world like a sort of magic carpet. I stood there, transfixed, and desperate to find the words to describe what I was seeing to myself. When they came, it was like a damn burst.

Then there was photography: something I'd never really considered, even in my more artistic days. Out of the mists of my distant past emerged an eye – an innate ability to see pictures and know, without conscious thought, what I wanted to capture.

Then there was food, and the beginning of an understanding of culinary pleasure, A beginning too, of learning the skills that allow me to express that pleasure.

A beginning of an end to the anti-European attitudes of my family: a discovery of feeling at home on the Continent: perhaps even more at home than in the UK. First efforts to learn other languages – now I can read Asterix in German at least.

How extraordinary: a decade that seems to have been so short – and yet also so long. It seems a lifetime ago that I stood and watched the fireworks on that millennium night.

And here I am – changed almost beyond my own recognition of myself. Not all for the good, perhaps, but generally so, I think.

How has the last decade been like for you?