Blame it on the name

According to a survey commissioned by parenting club ( no, I haven’t a clue what a parenting club is either) Bounty.com, teachers think they can tell whether a child is going to be well behaved or naughty, brainy or popular simply by looking at their names.

Around 3,000 teachers were polled with more than a third expecting pupils with names such as Connor, Chardonnay and Courtney to be more disruptive, while Alexanders, Emmas, Benjamins and Charlottes were assumed to be brainier. Faye Mingo from Bounty.com said:

"Rightly or wrongly, most of us make assumptions based on something as simple as a person's name and we base these on our previous experiences.”

Now, I hate surveys as I believe them totally pointless as the reason most of them are commissioned is because they are a successful marketing tool. Bounty.com needs to make money, so it needs to attract more subscribers. How does it get subscribers? By getting some press coverage. How does it get its name in the papers? Well, other than commit a crime or be a celebrity, it’s probably got to be:commission a survey, the results of which thrust ill-conceived, dubious and stereotype-reinforcing theories on to the masses. This survey is no exception.

If we are to believe the surveys findings, it’s not good news. Not the suggestion that children with names associated with the working class are badly behaved, but that one third of teachers make assumptions based on a child’s name.

As if it is not bad enough to be named after fermenting grapes, you enter the education system where teachers and officials are supposed to have jumped through all sorts of hoops in order to prove their commitment to equal opportunities and anti-discrimination policies and there you find a third of teachers are going to write you off as a no hoper, probably before they even meet you, based on your name.

That sentence from the Bounty.com representative above: try replacing ‘name’ with ‘height’, ‘size’, ‘religion’ or even, dare I say it, ‘colour’. I somehow doubt if Bounty.com would have got away with that but, if the survey’s results are to be believed, a third of teachers are bigots. Because discrimination is still discrimination – whatever name you want to call it.

Flying without wings.

This time of year, as the evenings draw in and the mornings get colder, I always think that a holiday in the sun might be a good idea, but we never actually get round to having one because my husband is even tighter than I am and the thought of spending hard earned money on lazing about on a beach somewhere gives him the hee-bee jee-bies.

Because of his aversion to pleasure in the sun we haven’t been abroad for four years. This obviously gives me the moral high ground when it comes to the subject of flying, something I exploited fully recently when I castigated my sister, who has logged up six flights in three months, telling her, in the most sanctimonious of fashions, that flying is the single worst thing she could possibly do if she wants a decent future for her children. It fell on deaf ears.

‘One of them was a mini-break,’ she replied. ‘And you’re just jealous because you go on staycations.’ I was speechless and I don’t know whether it was because her protestations that actually made herself look worse or her knowledge of holiday company terminology, which laid bare just how often she goes on holiday.

Mini-break? What on earth is a mini-break? It sounds like a chocolate bar. I’ve heard of the holiday term ‘short break’, which I believe is normally between 2-4 days. So a mini-break must be shorter than that, which means it has to take up just one day. By that process, it would make it a daytrip, then, wouldn’t it?

And what the hell is a staycation? I have holidayed in the UK for the last four years. I have not, and will never ‘staycate’. The very word makes me feel sick. I like words and I’m not against creating new ones. I even tried to create one myself a year or so ago, but didn’t use it often enough for it to spread into common usage. But fusing two words together, one which is an American term and not used over here until staycation was invented, in order to create a new funky-sounding holiday term is an absolute no no.

It’s down there with frenemy and webisode and the person who invented it can take a staycation mini-break to Brighton and take a long walk off a short pier.

Not crochet

I spent Sunday morning at Westpoint with my mother at a show called Creative Stitches and Hobbycrafts.. It was, as you can probably tell from the title, an exhibition for those keen on crafts, but no amount of dressing of that gargantuan metal container could detract from the feeling that the venue would be more suited to housing a few thousand Friesians.

It’s an annual event that once upon a time was just called ‘Creative Stitches’. About ten years ago, the event had a respectable attendance but nothing like that on Sunday where every square inch was filled with all sorts of human life, jostling in order to observe how you can turn a simple duck egg into Cinderella’s coach or how to turn ribbon into gladioli, if you could be bothered. I’ve never seen so many devoted husbands fall asleep standing up.

I went along because of my love affair with the beautiful craft that is crochet. I rightly thought as the title included the word ‘stitches’ that I might find acres and acres of lovely alpaca, merino, linen, silk and cotton yarn that I could caress and sniff. No such luck. The addition of the word ‘Hobbycrafts’ should have been a warning, because the event was largely dedicated to the relatively new but extremely popular craft of cardmaking.

Now, far be it for me to come over all superior and I realise I’m going to upset a lot of people out there in the middle of sticking a couple of sequins on piece of A5 foil printed luxury felt card but it’s not a proper craft – carefully honed and handed down through generations - is it? It just involves sticking stuff on to other stuff. In fact, the show should be called ‘Creative sticking and Hobbycrafts’.

On top of the fact that it is just an exercise in glue handling, aren’t there enough cards in the world? Really? There are stores selling cards everywhere. Cards for birthdays, for Christmas, for graduation, for Valentines, for Easter, for grandparents day, for condolence for the loss of a budgie, for flips sake. Now people are making these pointless things destined to spend a couple of weeks on your mantelpiece and then make their way to the recycling bin.

I beg of all you card makers out there. Ditch the hobby. It’s fleeting, it’s facile and it’s most definitely not crochet.

Keep it down, will you...?

As I get older, the list of things that drive me to distraction continues to grow, to the point that I am, to all intents and purposes, a grumpy old woman.

I hate crowds and have to take a deep breath when in town because I am acutely aware that I am going to encounter an obstacle course in the form of hundreds of people walking straight at me, stubbornly refusing to alter their trajectory as if their path has been ordained by God. Now, as much as this irritates me, it does not come close to my number one aggravation – levels of noise in shops, pubs and restaurants, exacerbated by the fact I am partially deaf.

There is a shop called Fop that sells CDs, games and DVDs. It opened a few months ago promising to beat all high street retailers on price. I gave it a visit but left very quickly empty handed because they were playing hard core death metal so loudly, I could feel my ears starting to bleed. Loud music is one thing. Loud death metal is another. Surely, if they want to sell goods, they should make the shopping experience a pleasant one – not drive you out with your hands over your ears.

Even worse than shops that play loud music is crowd noise in pubs and restaurants. There is one boozer my husband likes to visit – it’s a real spit and sawdust place serving real ale at room temperature straight from the barrel. It’s my idea of pub heaven. But I can’t go in because the noise from the crowd stops me from hearing any conversation, which sort of defeats the social aspect of going out for a drink, really. The reason it is so loud is because there are no curtains and carpets which means sound is being bounced from one wall to another with none of the din being absorbed leading to unacceptable decibels that make your ears ring.

Far be it for me to come over all precious, as health and safety initiatives irritate me almost as much as noise pollution, but landlords would not dare let anyone light up a fag in their establishment but, for some reason, it is perfectly acceptable to inflict hearing damage on their customers.

Passive smoking is one thing, but there is nothing passive about having 70 decibels of bellowing, babbling and squawking forced on you.

I hate Guy Fawkes

Lock up your cats! Chain up your dogs! November the 5^th is here again and still, I wonder what the hell we are doing celebrating a failed attempt at blowing up the Houses of Parliament. It’s been four hundred years for goodness sake! Isn’t it about time to let it go?

I speak as someone who resents being forced out of the house just as I am about to curl up and get cosy in front of the telly so perhaps I am a bit biased. I normally twitch and blink when the dog barks so it really is a bit much to expect me to get dressed up in waterproofs and wellies to go and stand in the rain, in the dark, and listen to a prolonged series of explosions. While everyone else ‘ooh’s and ‘aahs’, it is all I can do to suppress a panic attack followed by a loud, blood-curdling scream. Not only is Bonfire Night scary and uncomfortable, I also find it rather crass.

Guy Fawkes was a terrorist. It was his intention to blow up the Houses Of Parliament, along with all of the people inside because he felt that those who followed his faith were getting a raw deal. Is it just me, or does that resonate ever so slightly with what happened in London back in the summer? Are we likely to commemorate July 21^st , as the day that terrorists failed to blow up the underground? Somehow, I really don’t think so.

Obviously, Guy Fawkes failed in his attempt at reducing the Houses of Parliament to a mound of smouldering rubble. But, like any other demented, extremist intent on causing widespread destruction, I am sure that Guy Fawkes would be rather pleased to know that some four hundred years after trying to kill the government, he has been immortalised and his name will be remembered forever more.

Some will say it is tradition. In some parts of the world, burning witches and female circumcision is traditional. Just because something has been done for a very long time does not make it right.

It’s time we commemorated the birthday of somebody of worth – a Great British hero - like Aneurin Bevan, Emmeline Pankhurst or Alexander Fleming. In short, people who changed all our lives for the better.

And let’s make sure we commemorate it without fireworks and in the summer!

Debunking detoxing

At last! The British Dietic Association has rubbished the very popular and fashionable concept of de-toxing. They claim that de-toxing is nothing more than a marketing myth and a complete waste of time and money, and that a simple glass of tap water will have the same effect.

I have always viewed anyone that partook in such a stupid, pointless and extremely restrictive fad as being either gullible, into self-denial or in need of a biology lesson. I once had a friend who had spent about £30 on some naturally extracted, seaweed-infused, gingko based, batwing flavoured, blind-worm’s sting essence, believing that it would flush out all her free radicals and toxins, leaving her innards fresh and pure. I told her that she should have saved her money – what on earth did she think her liver and kidneys were for?

I am hoping that the British Dietic Association will go one further and call all the self-appointed experts and dubious opportunists who are making millions out of this quackery to account. Yes – I’m talking about you Carol Vorderman. Is there any field that that woman doesn’t claim to be an expert in? Even Su Doku isn’t safe from her bid for world domination I can’t even look at a 9x9 grid any more without seeing her smug, over-painted face!

As much as I’d like, I can’t just lay the blame at Carol Vorderman’s door, however. I just logged on to Amazon and there appears to be nearly 30,000 diet-related books listed. Everyone’s at it – from celebrities to doctors and back to celebrities again. Everyone’s making a mint out of people’s desire to be slim.

The solution to losing weight is so, so, simple – it can be written on a postage stamp. Literally. Eat a healthy diet and exercise regularly: Just seven words that, if followed, will show positive results. Nobody needs to go out and buy a diet book or talk about glycaemic indices ever again! Nobody has to drink wheatgrass juice and no-one has to buy Slim-fast bars ever, ever again.

What a blessed relief!

While the answer to a long-term healthy weight is easy, I seriously struggle when it comes to finding out why we still continue to be conned to the tune of billions by celebrity-endorsed diets and food fads.

This isn't just bollocks..

It’s been seven years since those Marks and Spencer’s food adverts first appeared on the telly. You know the ones:

‘This isn’t just lentil soup; this is spicy lentil and Mediterranean tomato soup. This isn’t just fruit salad. This is hand-prepared blueberry and pomegranate super-fruit salad.’ And so on.

Year upon year they have driven me to distraction, like some subliminal video designed to make the viewer suffer from some sort of paranoid psychosis. I know the Christmas ones are almost upon us now and I have been trying to avoid the advertising channels because of it. If I accidentally catch one I’ll probably smash the telly up.

I know they aren’t supposed to appeal to skinflints like me who would no sooner do their weekly shop in Marks and Sparks than pay over £3 for a bottle of wine. I am in the wrong demographic, as it were. The correct one being, that which contains the MMTS brigade – More Money Than Sense.

My mum has a friend who does all her food shopping at Marks and Spencer’s, or Marks Expensive, as I call it. The reason is that she not only has MMTS, she also can’t cook. Apparently, it is a haven for people like her because most of the shelves are packed with ready meals: convenience food for the chattering classes.

The advertising agency responsible for Marks’ over-the-top ads have failed to grasp that they have outgrown their use, because spoofs are popping up all over the place. I myself have used unnecessarily verbose terminology in order to lull my family into thinking they are getting something far more exciting than I am actually going to dish up

‘This isn’t just cottage pie,’ I say. ‘This is hand-prepared, Aberdeen Angus minced beef slowly cooked in a finger-crumbled Oxo jus, lovingly topped with hand-peeled Wilja potato and ‘I can’t believe it’s not butter’ mash.’ And I say it in a deep, husky voice but they just look at me like I need locking up and repulsed at the same time.

Similar descriptions can be found in posh restaurants. The confusing, gaudy menus where ‘blades of beouf nestle on a bed of fondant potatoes dressed with a balsamic reduction’ just make me want to run out screaming: ‘I just want egg and chips!!’

I wonder if the pretentious, rambling descriptions are going to appear on adverts for other M& S goods – underwear, for example. Imagine not just buying pants, but organic, freshly picked hand-spun cotton, Matisse-blue hyacinth petal embellished, comfort briefs.

Let’s hope not, I couldn’t take it. It’s not just flowery, pretentious, overblown balderdash. It’s Marks and Spencer’s flowery, pretentious, overblown balderdash.