Polly

Nearly thirty years ago now, well, let's call it 25, were Halcyon days for female readers of the Guardian, or Grauniad as we affectionately called it - in the days before desktop publishing and all that goes with that, spellcheck for one, the Guardian was notorious for its typos.

The Guardian's women's page was a showcase for leftwing female writers. Monday was redeemed as a day because of the line-up. The late Jill Tweedie wrote her 'Letters from a Fainthearted Feminist' column and Posy Simmonds' cartoon, 'Posy' ran on that day. Michelle Hansen was in there somewhere as was Molly Parkin.

I can't remember if Polly Toynbee particularly published on a Monday, nor even whether she was necessarily on the women's page, but her writing and journalism were then as now, second to none.

This week there was an article by Polly about Britain's attempt to deal with Child Poverty. It is objective, inclusive and informative. Rather than join the trend towards criticising the Blair Socialism, she says that his ability to envision what is important to the country and to come out and say it, baldly and then to find a way to make it happen is something that can never be taken away from his legacy. She points out that when the government, against a backdrop of a previous conservative government which doubled child poverty, sets a target of lowering it by 1,000,000 in a given year and achieves 700,000, it is nonsense to report this as a failure.

One point that Polly Toynbee makes however really resonated with me from my experience as a teacher who has always taught in inner city and education action zone schools.
She says that poverty is entrenched and cross generational, "Intergenerational poverty is solidifying, so poor children are more firmly anchored to the floor than for decades, their social mobility frozen."

My generation, brought up and living through the years of Harold Wilson's Labour Party, when education was opened up to all, saw for the first time working class children being enabled, empowered to stay at school to fulfill their potential, and able to go to university. I'm not naive enough to think that all working class children who had the ability actually did go to university, but a cycle was started, so that as those people came through we were no longer hearing just Oxford accents on TV, from playwrights to politicians, our public landscape was changing.

But what is it we see in schools, still today? Yes, frequently we were seeing parents who were interested in and supportive to their children's academic achievement, but equally and all too frequently we were coming across parents who felt threatened by it. The rebel child was too often supported by a parent who paid lip service to wanting their child to 'do well' but in reality undermined them at every turn, who challenged the view that the child was disruptive or would do no work either in the classroom or at home. So much teacher time was spent dealing with parents who feared their child overtaking them in life.

What is to be done about this? It is a very difficult phenomenon to tackle. What socialism has given people is access to opportunities that they didn't have before. You can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink. I have heard similar points made by friends who work in the Health Service. Not everyone uses it responsibly, the 'social contract' dictates that rights and responsibilites go hand in hand, but socialism itself dictates that everyone should be put in a position of having equal access to resources. Polly Toynbee in her article mentions the social ideals of Scandinavia, but to achieve such levels of utopia, taxes would also have to be raised to Scandinavian levels.

I feel that as Polly says, it has to be seen as a National target, not simply one for a political party. The Labour Party has raised public awareness on this hot potato over its lifetime in power, but this has to be seen merely as a starting block, the first few rungs on the ladder. Companies and organisations need to sing from the same hymnsheet as the grassroots. Those working in Health and Education see the problem every day, but too much of society is able to, no, is allowed to, ignore it.

Ooh er Missus !

Canadians are bold aren't they? I snapped this picture yesterday outside the Canadian sports clothing shop 'Roots' - no, seriously, it is called Roots, like Kunta Kinte type of Roots, not boy body parts. Here, a toilet isn't called a toilet, but when it comes to lady bits, a beaver is most definately a beaver, even my brother-in-law Trevor can't leave it alone, I told him off and would have threatened to smack his bum only that would have been very creepy indeed even for an Englishwoman. Oh, they do have Bush pilots here too. Goodness knows what they do. Yeah, please don't tell me they fly planes into the forest, that would spoil it, although if you said they explored the interior, that might fit.

Now yesterday, Alex was a bit taken aback, she let out a surprised giggle, at a big old sign on the Nature Park that said, 'Bees in the Bog'.
'They have bees in their bog here?' she asked, 'and they advertise it,'
'Er, yes and no, the toilet isn't called the bog here, the bees are in the...bog, peat bog...that's what the Nature Park is, it's a peat bog.'
'Oooooh.'
I guess I've kinda got used to that one.

I often wonder whether French people think it's funny when they come to England - well or Canada or any other English speaking country and see the sign 'SALE'. Sale of course means 'dirty' in French. I've asked several of them, and all but none said,
'But we know what it means, so we don't laugh.' One once said,
'And in any case, your shops are often dirty.'
Yes. The French sense of humour must be more highly evolved than ours because they certainly used to laugh at the scatalogical, of course, that was in the 16th century.

Ah well, they say that little things please little minds, but heck a BIG beaver sale, now THAT's funny, but I know what could make it even funnier - if someone complained about it being politically incorrect. That would totally rock. It would almost be worth doing - just for the crack you understand..no, not THAT kind of crack, it's AN EXPRESSION! *rolls eyes and raises eyebrows*.

Cockroach

The film 'Team America : World Police' had me crying with laughter, I found it hysterically funny. The film was made by Matt Stone and Trey Parker of South Park fame and is about as reverent. It lampoons anyone and everyone, including themselves. I loved the fictitious 'Film Actor's Guild' led by Alec Baldwin, FAG for short, so that everytime the name of an actor appears on the screen, the letters FAG appear too.

Team America get captured by North Korea's evil mastermind, Kim Jong il who later gets killed by falling from a balcony onto the spike of a Prussian helmet. As Kim Jong il dies, a cockroach emerges from his body and we see that he was only ever a puppet of a higher power.

Until Team America, Kim Jong il had slipped beneath my radar, never had to think about him. Now however, as he is doing the kinds of things that his puppet character would do in Team America : World Police, I CAN only think of him as the marionette who walks as though he has some serious bottom problems and whose spectacles cover his entire face, and of course, who talks like Cartman.

On Independence Day, when the US space shuttle was once again launched after a false start last week, Kim Jong il, anxious presumably to draw attention to himself, launched seven rockets to coincide with the shuttle launch.

Reading the press, little cockroach has few if any allies. He is portrayed like an annoying kid that you want to swat away, and not only that, but one who insists on playing with his willy in the classroom. I can only picture the puppet Kim Jong jumping up and down and saying in Cartman's voice but with an exaggerated Chinese accent,
'I get you George Bush, I get you, you try to attack honolable North Korea and I launch annihilating stlike and nooclear war on you and all amelicans.' Conveniently forgetting that he has already upset Japan, South Korea, China and..well pretty much the rest of the planet.
He's both funny and dangerous at the same time. He should have a sign that can be seen from space at the border to his country saying 'Approach with Caution' except that, well he doesn't really need one. I mean, good god, even the UN are prepared to raise their toothless whiskery head to talk.
And meanwhile, so far, little cockroach has been firing blanks, well not so much blanks as suffering a bit of brewer's droop. The missile fired at Alaska plopped into the sea.

But from what I understand, North Korea is in the same position as a good old-fashioned city under siege. No-one has to do anything but wait it out and ignore him. So long as foreign funds are frozen, so is little cockroach and all he can do is jump up and down on his little wooden puppet legs.

Unless it turns out to be more than just hot air and he really does have nuclear capabilities. Then we'll have to choose who we want to save us, Team America : World Police or FAG? And frankly, even Alec Baldwin may not be able to act his way out of this one.

Heat

Holy cow it has been hot here, today we have some respite in the form of a bit of cloud cover and a slight breeze.

Yesterday, Simmi, who reads the right-wing press so that I don't have to ;) sent me the Daily Mail's take on a patronising little bit of research that is today reported equally annoyingly, in less right-wing organs.

One of the compulsory components of my MA course was Research Methods and I did have to teach the Scientific Method paper when I taught A-level Philosophy, so deep down I do appreciate that all research is useful in some way, so long as it is ethically conducted. But yet it still aggravates me no end that money is spent on reaching conclusions like this.

The Daily Mail, or Daily Nazi as Simmi appropriately calls it, claims 'Hot Water Bottle Really does ease Period Pain.' Thank Goodness someone wasted money checking that 'old wives' tale' out. Believe it or not it was the Guardian that called it that.

Now, to my mind, an old wives' tale is something like 'rub a potato on a wart and bury it in the garden when the moon is full'. Whereas using a hottle to ease period pain is something that all women KNOW works.
The Daily Mail says, "The research will be welcomed by millions of women who suffer debilitating period pains, which can leave them bedridden." Get outta here! Are we all sitting around waiting for someone to tell us it works? Uh...no. And here's more news for ya GUYS, it wouldn't do squat diddly for debilitating pain. But we feel so much better now.
And all of that is without mentioning the fact that Boots LONG since brought out a self-heating pad that sticks to your tummy and can be used during the first couple of days of your period.

But perhaps the research itself isn't to blame, but rather the reporting thereof. Well, that wouldn't be a first.
Net Doctor tells us that the research shows that "hot water bottles were effective in killing period pains on a molecular level – in much the same way as drugs such as paracetamol. "
Well, ok, but now I have a new question that I really don't want researched. If, as the Guardian says, "if heat of more than 40C (104F) is applied to the skin near where internal pain is felt, it switches on heat receptors at the site of injury. These in turn block the body's ability to detect pain." then how come burning people at the stake was such a brutal and horrifyingly painful end, and why are burns victims in so much agony that they have to be kept in a coma sometimes until healing is well on its way? Well I guess the answer is that the skin, with all its pain receptors is actually being denatured rather than gently heated or something along those lines.

The next thing the article claims is that the hottle can work for other gyne problems such as cystitis. Do me a favour. The pain in cystitis is from the two walls of the urinary tract being inflamed and touching each other. The other pain possible is due to the infection having spread to the kidneys, calling for immediate use of antibiotics and opiates. In the first instance, I'm not buying that the pain can be relieved by using a hottle. No Ma'am. You can tell me all the science you like, a hottle bottle is not going to relieve that inflamation the way a good old-fashioned delivered-by-mouth painkiller can and in the second instance, if it did work, it'll probably cause you to be hospitalised or die because that amount of pain is there to give you a firm message. 'DEAL with me or die.'

The whole thing is laughable. When Simmi sent me the original article she made the comment,
'Imagine if a man were told to use a hot water bottle for pain.... There would be fucking questions asked in Parliament...' No kidding.

It's summer, it's hot, so all pain should be less anyway now, but this morning Alex wanted to watch the film of 'Evita'. I hate musicals. This reminded me of why. I was interested in the story of the film, but the fact that everything has to be sung in cheesy lyrics makes me lose what the hell is going on. It's slow, it's painful, no amount of hot water bottles are going to help.

I wonder if they're going to waste even more money researching why good old-fashioned rumpy-pumpy relieves period pain. Now that as a general method of pain-relief might be a tad more interesting.

Euronalia

I just can't help it, like a guest at a party who keeps turning their head to see who's coming in the room, I can't help looking Europe-wards and wondering what's going on.

Alex has arrived safely and has informed me that Matt's cousin Grace has been booted out of the Big Brother house three weeks since. I guess that was pretty much eclipsed by you-know-what. Seems like Garce has been dissing Matt's part of the family in the press. That would be the gutter press I'm guessing. So that's pretty much what's going on in Britain - thingy, the game you eat strawberries at and Big Brother. Oh, and an interesting little conundrum involving Gordon Brown. I've never heard the abbreviation 'Gord' in Britain, so he will always be Gordon.

Now Gordon as you know, is Tony's annointed successor. I'd prefer it to be a woman, but even though Tony is well aware of my feelings on the matter, he has chosen to ignore them. Nonetheless.
Now Gordon is Scottish. Well, you might say, Scotland is part of Britain. Yes it is. But Scotland has its own government although not with full powers. For example, they do not, nor do they wish to, raise taxes. Sound reasoning oh wiley Scots, because as I have mentioned before, the population of Scotland has more per capita spent on it by Westminster than does England or Wales.
Some issues concerning Scotland are voted on by Parliament in London and the article I read in the 'Economist' while I was in Scotland argued that the Scots MPs wouldn't have it any other way, because there were certain things they didn't trust their own people with.
Fair enough.
Now Scottish MPs traditionally do not vote on English matters. Except for the labour MPs. And Scotland has been Labour (socialist) since the 1940s. Oh yes. SO this is quite useful to Tony. But where does it leave Gordon ? Even the quality Press have been muddying the waters a bit on this one. I kid you not. I remember clearly when Neil Kinnock, a good, old-fashioned socialist was leader of the Labour Party, the press wouldn't leave him alone because he was sandy-haired and a Welshman.
Gordon of course has more Saturnine, dark looks, but they are doing anything they can to scotch (pun intended) the hopes of a Scotsman as premier.

Meanwhile, take the Seacat to Ostend and then drive across Belgium to the Hook of Holland and you would find that the Dutch government is scrapping. This has been bothering me for a few days since I saw it on the French news. They were showing a picture of a very dark-skinned black woman, so I mistakenly thought that the prime minster of Holland was that same woman. This plus the fact that there is no difference in French between the personal pronoun for his or her.

The problem seems to have been caused yet again by the indomitable Ms.Verdonk. Not only does she have a fabulous name, but she was once a prison governor. You may remember that 'Iron Rita' upset many of her countryfolk by trying to bring in a law insisting that only Dutch should be spoken in public. You can't help warming to her. Now she has taken away the citizenship of a popular politician, Ayaan Hirsi Ali because she lied on her original asylum application, putting a false date of birth and name. Except that the name she gave turned out to be her grandmother's surname. Ms. Ali was trying to escape one of those usual women-hating regimes, Somalia in this case, and she has written extensively about the repressive side of Islam.

But one of the parties in the coalition withdrew support for the government, resulting in a domino cascade. A vote of no-confidence against Iron Rita left her barely hanging onto her job, and Jan Peter Balkenende, the real Prime Minister, resigned. Ms. Verdonk has had to give Ms. Ali her citizenship back.

I feel there is a place for Iron Rita, maybe it's cell-block H, but I think she may become a bit of a star akin to Big Brother's fall-from-Grace.

Whilst you're paddling in the North Sea, wade over to Sweden and see that something is missing. The Swedes have given back a very important totem pole belonging to the Haisla tribe from just north of here. I can see that this is enormously important to the band concerned, but I personally am more grateful to Sweden for Ikea, that's like one big old totem to me.

And finally, this morning, Simmi brought to my attention a story from Spain about this amazing 81-year-old's self-built cathedral. The cathedral didn't build itself, Justo Gallego built it on his own.
There is poetry, there is art and there is cathedral building and all can glorify your God or Goddess. Justo deserves admiration in my opinion. Well, I think I can safely say 'in our opinion' and not be emulating the great Queen Victoria.

And so it begins...

That sounds rather doom laden, but far from it. My baby girl arrives today, we have been watching a little plane representing her flight making its way millimetre by millimetre across Greenland and the Atlantic.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the storm that is Laurence has been raging. Well, technically it has been raging in Portsmouth on its way back from his grandfather's home on the Isle-of-Wight, and moving ominously and slowly back up to Woking. In exactly seven weeks today, if he can keep himself out of trouble and his father doesn't throw him out, Hurricane Laurence will arrive at Vancouver airport.

Last time he arrived, we waited and waited and it became clear that his entire flight had gone through and in fact another flight from London had cleared as well. The cell phone rang and it was immigration who had detained him on the basis that...well, to be honest, when I finally saw him, anyone would have detained him. He had decided to see what his hair was like when he allowed it to grow - good timing Laurence - he was wearing a Parka on a warm day and sweatpants with holes in them. His whole appearance screamed 'dope!' Eventually they let him in. This time he will have his immigration documents with him, so I hope to god that the ancestors are guiding him that day. Hmmm.....a grown up child of a lesser god.

SO...today Alex, next weekend two of Alex's friends, Hazel and Lou and then on the 19th, four days before the girls leave, Ben, truly my Benjamin, arrives for almost two months. Full house.

I have a backlog of news stories that have been simmering away on my back burner, but today I'm counting the hours until Alex is here - and since she will have to clear immigration today, there is an element of the unknown about that.

The Beautiful Game

Sorry, it can't be left alone just yet.

We had to leave the house yesterday before the match was over and so Kevin was trying to find out the score on the car radio all the way to Kitsilano. Without success. We didn't find out that England had lost to Portugal on penalties until on our way back, trying to find another place, Kevin missed the turning from shock when we did hear the result.

There is a certain language associated with football. It really hadn't occurred to me that the word 'nil' was part of that language. Kevin told me that the people at work had been commenting on a 'nil, nil score.' We just take for granted ... and I guess he meant 'the lads at work'.
But one of those expressions is what I ended my blog with yesterday, 'we was robbed.' Gamesmanship is everything to the British.

I should take my own advice, it isn't cricket to quote from your friends' e-mails without asking them, but I'm working on the basis that Simmi and I know each other well enough to be able to shortcut that. I was asking my son Ben what had happened and read him out Simmi's comments and he said,
'Yep, that's what happened.'

Now to understand this you need to know, as did I, that Wayne Rooney is England's demi-god and he plays for Manchester United, as does Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo.
The supposed foul was an accident when Rooney - in Ben's words - 'accidentally stood on Carvalho's bollocks when he was on the ground.'

From our reporter in the field...
"I cannot even begin to describe the scenes from ************ during today's football... My voice is SO hoarse I sound like a pre-pubescent boy and my heart is broken... Christiano Ronaldo has now ruined it for me ............... He ran to the ref and actively got his 'Club-mate' (Rooney) sent off.... SHAME...."
"My Grandfather always used to say that "Football was a game for Gentlemen played by Yobs and Rugby is a game for Yobs played by Gentlemen"... (rugby was his Love by the way!)
Ronaldo personified and typified everything that has gone wrong with the game I love and adore..... The beautiful game...
All ruined by a cheat.. I can turn a blind eye to the diving, all teams are guilty of that.... But running to the Ref and screaming for a Red Card, knowing you have to play on the same team as that person next season, is filth... Especially when afterwards you "Wink" to the rest of your team in that, "Ok Lads, job done"

That about sums up what probably most Brits would feel, whether they follow footie or not - like myself, you must PLAY THE GAME. Ok, sure, we would ALWAYS say 'we was robbed', and as far as I can see, no-one's even claiming that England would have won had Rooney not been sent off, but the thing that rankles is the unsportsmanlike behaviour, it colours everything for us, and notice here I say 'for Brits', not 'the English'.

And on that exact same theme, I just want to quote Gary Neville, a man whom I must admit I'd never heard of until today's Observer article, but who is apparently also an important England player and what he says here is also straight down the line, and shows not just the way Brits react, but the way we actually think,

"Gary Neville, who wore the captain's armband after Beckham went off, admitted England were poor for much of the match. 'For England and the expectations of England, and for the people and for ourselves, it is not good enough. I wouldn't want to use anything as an excuse,' he said."

So, it seems that Sven's swansong was a little ignominious, and the article points out that most likely it's also Beckham's last game for England. A few interesting stats at the end tell us that
"16 Number of hours German police officers in Dachau spent learning useful phrases in English for dealing with England fans, such as 'you are under arrest' and 'I need to search you'.

50,000 Number of two-and-a-half pint glasses in the shape of the World Cup trophy bought at Tesco in the past three weeks. 'The most patriotic place seems to be Tunbridge Wells,' says a spokesman."

Tunbridge Wells, who'd have thought it?

Canada Day

My first Canada Day in Canada, although as I said previously, also for the first year ever, Canada Day was being celebrated in Trafalgar Square yesterday.

Although today is the actual day, the public holiday is Monday, so I had insisted on having the whole week off anyway because Alex arrives, but Kevin will be off so it'll be like having two Sundays, magic.

So, Canada Day. The day when Canada became a country in its own right. So, not about throwing out the dastardly British or chucking all our ghastly tea into Halifax harbour or anything, just the day when the wilderness got a name.
I've seen most of the CBC 'History of Canada' but I don't think I actually grasped the enormity of what those early pioneers achieved until I saw the vastness of the landscape they crossed on foot and bicycle. Ok, I made up the bit about bikes, but I don't think you'd have got a horse to go in some of those places. Just jaw-dropping.

So Simmi asked about the First Nations, and I'm going to write down my own observations and perceptions and I'd be more than happy for any Canadians to jump in and correct what I say or add to it.
I guess for First Nations people, Canada Day was the day when the Land that belonged to no-one was stolen.

Kevin tells me that the Canada Day in our capital, Ottawa, most certainly has quite an element of First Nations involvement. I'm not sure how much there will be in and around Vancouver. The big festival for us in Richmond would be the Salmon one in Steveston, and you would think the First Nations would be represented there because the salmon were so important to their survival. It appears a lot as a symbol in their art here.
Yet I wouldn't hold my breath. I don't know enough to understand why some bands are more visible than others.

Canadians are generally proud of the way the First Nations have been allowed to survive and even prosper in Canada whereas further south many more were wiped out. One reason for this may be that the bands up here were possibly less vicious in their treatment of settlers and thus the fur trade on which Canada was built, was as a result of mostly peaceful trading with the First Nations.

Here in Richmond our local band is the Musqueam. I think they have a tough deal in comparison with the band who own the West Bank of the Okanagan.
Once they would have had access to grounds rich in berries, peat bog and fertile land. Now there is little that isn't populated. There are some disputed parcels of land, including the piece on which the Skating Oval for the Olympics is being built, but so far as I can tell there are no big chunks of land that they live on. You can always tell the First Nations' big parcels of land, what would have been originally referred to as reservations, by the giant billboards which border them. The government doesn't allow advertising boards along highways and freeways, but the First Nations are allowed to put them up and sell advertising space.

Probably the best known band in this region of BC is the Haida. Pupils at school learn about the Haida and they were well publicised because they were very prolific totem pole makers. The artist Emily Carr recorded a lot of Haida artefacts and I believe that some can still be seen on the Queen Charlotte islands - I would love to go and see them some day.

There are some problems caused by First Nations status. For example, in North Vancouver, there has been a problem caused by addicts and undesirables wandering on to First Nations territory and littering the woods with drug paraphernalia, but the police have no jurisdiction there, so if addicts prefer to take their chance with the local warband, well, what's to stop them?

Around Vancouver there is a lot of First Nations art, and you can get a real feel for it. The culture is something many Canadians value. What was quite saddening a couple of months ago when we went to the Vancouver museum was that we learned that many young people from within the bands do not themselves value or learn about their own cultures.
I seriously think this is a great shame, one of the very many things I have learned from the Nature Park is a deep respect for First Nations traditional knowledge and their feel for their environment.

We've had a loverly Canada Day, apart from the one moment when we found out the football score. We was robbed I tell ya, robbed.

Late night

So I'm late posting tonight, we had guests, my friends Lori and Beth from the Nature Park and their partners. Which meant we were equal parts Brit to Canadian. I think Perry's Canadian, Edmonton is still in Canada isn't it? I'm just kidding of course. And Kevin did us proud on the scram. This was a tough one to plan, it was like one of those language exercises we used to set.
'Birgit ißt kein Fleisch, aber sie findet Eis lecker. Harald mag nicht Gemüse und er kann nicht Milchprodukte essen...usw.'
Anyway, we had an evening where we just laughed non-stop, well except when eating.

Kevin cooked, I did the shopping, that worked, each of us thought we had the best deal. I did have to spend longer in yesterday's traffic jam than usual, but it was worth it. When I got to the checkout, I carefully chose the most competent looking cashier, my criteria are probably no less lame than anyone else's, I choose a middle aged woman whenever possible. Yesterday this worked well. The man behind me in the queue had only a few items and I asked her to put his stuff through first, as I'm used to in Britain. He seemed to not want to do this, but he was up against two middle aged women so tough, he was going through whether he liked it or not.

As I was paying my bill she said, all in one sentence,
'So, d'you want a free chair, say yes, you didn't hear me say that.' Ok, I got a free Canada day spectator chair with a maple leaf on the back, in a nice carrying case. Not that I wasn't entitled to it apparently, it was in the flyer, but I was supposed to see it myself and ask.
'Happy Canada Day,' she said, 'if you know what I mean.' I assured her I knew.

This morning, at the Office, the painter made a point of saying goodbye when he left, addressing me by name. Why do I even bother to mention this? Because no-one in the Office ever does. They leave, they walk past, they say nothing. Bizarre behaviour.

In the afternoon I had 'booked' a phone call from the BCCT. They were supposed to call me between 13.00 and 16.00 to discuss my dilemma. No phone call came. At 16.10 I decided to phone them, and lo, the secretary hadn't written down the phone number. The man I spoke to was more sympathetic than I had anticipated. It seems they have dealt with British universities before. I could virtually hear him shaking his head.
'Yes, with the British universities we pretty much don't know what we're going to get until it arrives,' he said.
He also listened to my tale of woe about my teacher training and had some helpful suggestions.

It's hot. Tomorrow is the salmon fest in Steveston to celebrate Canada day. Sounds yummy, but is going to be missed by our household, we are packing up Barb's house which is being sold. Sales go through very quickly here, a couple of weeks from offer to completion. And of course, tomorrow is the Big Match, followed by the other Big Match. I'm relying on everyone else to influence the outcome.

Lilith

Now, this may turn out to be a weird one, because I can already see the whole thing dipping and bobbing away like a balloon taken by the wind, its string trailing beneath it, available for anyone who can fly to catch hold of.

So, Lilith Fair was a women's music festival that started in Vancouver in 1996. Our very own Sarah McLachlan was one of the leading lights. Anyway, that's not the Lilith I was thinking of, however fascinating.

Nor was I thinking of Frasier's ex-wife Lilith, the laced-up tight enough to squeak shrink we learned to love and hate, nope, not even her.

And also not the Greek Lilith, Goddess of the dark moon, although she is pretty fascinating you have to admit, the very idea of the dark moon can make me shiver. Is she calling us like a siren from the dark side, inviting us to join her in her madness? Mmmm....I wondered what that was.

So is it the mythical first wife of Adam? Created as his equal, what happened to her that Eve should come along and steal the show? The women are so often the more interesting ones in stories, Lilith, a whisper, a shadow, did Adam ever think of her when he was sinning? I BET he did.

Or the other Lilith of legend, the Mesopotamian earth and fertility Goddess who protects crops, both those of the Earth and those of woman. Fecund mother, ripe like the full moon.

No, the Lilith I was thinking about was the one of Jewish myth, the succubus who seduces men in their sleep and drains their life away with her kiss, who steals Jewish chidren and eats them. The dark temptress that none can resist, the excuse for temptation yielded to. The one who stalks a woman's fear and a man's fantasy.

But it's not what you're thinking.

Last night, through no fault of my own, sleep evaded me and I lay awake listening to the sounds. Eventually I must have drifted and then got stuck between the two worlds. I was standing on the bank of a river and I felt overwhelmed with a sense of unknown fear. I could hear the strange sound of a child whining like a cat. I could feel, actually feel the darkness around me and yet I knew my forehead was itching. I needed to scratch it because I was neither fully awake nor fully asleep. I was in sleep paralysis. This is the time when scientists think we experience strange phenomena like alien abduction and visitations by Succubi. I remembered that. My arms wouldn't move. I knew I was in bed but I could do nothing. And then I did, I willed myself awake and my forehead really did itch, and outside there was a noise, but not the one I thought I'd heard.

Who knows what inhabits the darkness, the sliver between the worlds. I visited it last night, but it's not a place I'm anxious to fall into again.

Standoff

Oh for some German efficiency, or some French run bureaucracy - they invented it you know. I'm in the midst of a British - Canadian Mexican standoff.

Yes, it's my Qualified Teacher Status again, but now it's getting me down. Just to recap, Surrey County Council, the Education Authority I worked for when I qualified, also provided my training. Then they allowed themselves to be annexed by private industry, or at least their education services, only I didn't know that. Two of the schools I worked in for Surrey County Council were taken over by private industry, and I DID know that. I have a feeling that it may even be the same company, but that's for me to discover.

I asked SCC to provide an outline of my training, they batted it over to the private company, who batted it back to SCC. Someone in there got back to me today and said, although not in so many words,
'You have a DfEE number, you couldn't have that unless you had completed the training, surely the Canadian Authorities must realise that.' Well, ok, maybe it wasn't too far from what they actually said. And of course they're right, but it doesn't help me. Letters will have to be written.

I watched the French News on the computer at the office while I was doing something mindless. I could find little sympathy for Dominique de Villepin wringing his hands and telling us that he certainly wasn't seeking out the mantel of presidency, but well, he was dedicated to working for the good of the French people and he would rise to whatever task they decided he should have. Yeah, me too Dominique, the first e-mail I get from the French nation asking me to pop over and run the country and I'll be there. I refuse to ruin my skin for it though.

And Tim Garton Ash in the Guardian, reckons that Canada would be an excellent candidate for joining the EU. His opening argument seems to be based on Canadian interest in the World Cup, and I must concur with him there, I have been mightily impressed with the number of Canadians who now refer to football as football.
His second argument is that they understand the age-old tension between the English and the French. For some reason he thinks the Canadians are more religious than Europeans, which I find a rather bizarre comment, but then has a whole checklist of attitudes we have in common. He tells us a little tongue-in-cheek that Europe could be sort of linked to Canada via ice-floes. And he kind of hints that if we let Turkey in, why not anyone?
The main plus and the main minus to his arguments seem to be the US. On the one hand, we could gang up and counterbalance their power, on the other hand, to join the EU you must be prepared to not allow 85% of your exports go to the US. And then he gets all concerned because in fact the 'blue' part of the US - strange colour-coding to us Brits for whom blue means conservatism, red socialism - could also be asked to join.

Ah, it's all so confusing this little planet we live on. Borders open, borders close, we share languages, we are divided by languages. And somewhere in there we all have to suffer the French....and love them at the same time. After all, where would we be without Norman Bureaucracy (no, he's not a person)? Although, the Normans were really Norsemen, and the Gauls were Celts....so if the French win the World Cup again, who is really winning, and if England win because Beckers scores, is it really Real Madrid who wins?

I'm beginning to think that some of these borders and labels are rather arbitrary. Thank Heavens for honest to goodness bureaucrats.

Sour grapes anyone ?

Men at work.

Tis a strange thing, but I have been observing men at work, or to be more accurate, the men where I work. They never talk. Now in contrast, when I worked at the Nature Park, all women, we talked a lot. We even had methods of talking to each other without speaking, for times when speaking was inappropriate. Feedback was instantaneous. Wow, sounds like I'm saying that one way of working is better than the other.

At the place, the office, there are three men and me. One man is the rainmaker and he is on the phone all the time, but I wouldn't say he talks. He doesn't even schmooze very much, but by thunder he gets the job done. There are two engineers who both work in labs, sometimes separate labs. Both really nice blokes. I know virtually nothing about them. They also get the job done, by thunder.

At the Nature Park, where we talked all the time, by thunder we got the job done there too. Sometimes we just delivered. So let's call that bottom line, bottom line was, we achieved what we set out to do. That was quite a rare occurrence.
Most of the time we did really well. We would tell each other,
'That was fantastic, this was a great way of presenting that...etc,' and we'd go back to the office and talk it through, share what went well, offer ways of improving anything that didn't. That was - well yes - most of the time.
Sometimes we stormed it, we were unstoppable as a team, we knew it was all working at celestial level. We all patted each other on the back. That was not as often as the middle one, but a great deal more often than the first one.

Now, ok, I am not really comparing like with like here. The Nature Park was basically teaching, the office is engineering, not for me of course, but that is their business, that's what they are doing. Teaching at primary school level is overwhelmingly female, engineering is overwhelmingly male. Secondary school teaching however is pretty balanced these days. I should add that my experience is of course of Britain, I'm not yet sure what the balance is in BC schools. Hopefully I'll get to find out one day.

And in the secondary schools where I worked in Britain, I would say that balance of genders gave the greatest strength to a team, leadership was vital, but that isn't what I am thinking about here. As ever, my science is flawed, based only on personal observation, but it's difficult not to look around you and notice what goes on. You could argue that it's a rather moot point, except that there are more women in the workplace than say 60 years ago, so it is not without significance.

Last night my friend was commiserating with me about the drudgery of office work. She told me that when she finally made it to 'Sales' after several years of secretarial work, she was the only woman in the department and by some strange coincidence, when she turned up for her first day's work, her desk was the only one with a typewriter on it. The typewriter took an immediate walk to the very end of the office.

On Sunday we were having a discussion about doctors. This started because I had met the doctor who delivered Kevin as a baby and I joked to him that in Britain we don't leave important things like delivering babies to doctors, we have midwives for that. This came up again later and I pointed out that one implication of having midwives deliver babies was that women in labour were being almost exclusively delivered by women. As it turned out, everyone around the table, male, female, gay and not so party-like, said that they preferred to have a woman doctor. Ok, we didn't get too messy about the question, or too specific, but it was an interesting discussion and outcome.

So where am I going with this? Nowhere particularly, just stuff going around in my head on the way home while I was stuck in another traffic jam in the suffocating heat.

Driving back

I was surprised last night to discover that England had won another match, not so much that England had won, but that Kevin had taken his England shirt with us to wear on Monday, which we had read was the day of the match. Still, good news anyway and Kevin wore the shirt today as a sort of a retrospective tribute.

Britain needs Tim Horton's. Timmie's sells unpretentious coffee at reasonable prices, doughnuts - yeah, maybe we don't need those so much - soups and sandwiches, croissants, wraps etc. All at - yes - reasonable prices.
This morning we called in at Timmie's to get wraps, filled croissants and coffee before heading off, and I spotted a slight glitch in my plan. My experience so far of Tim Horton's has been that the staff are always polite, patient and pleasant and a little older than your average Mackie D's or Dairy Queen staff. I'm sure this is a deliberate policy.
In Britain, staff in fast food places tend not to be so smiley, although I have noticed that Starbucks staff seem to make more of an effort, so it must be possible with careful selection of staff and training. Probably. But I wouldn't put money on it.

So back to sunny Richmond where the temperature is ten degrees less than the Okanagan but feels more uncomfortable and sticky already. We had a straightforward trip from Kevin's parents house in Surrey back to our home, anyone travelling in the opposite direction had a miserable one. The traffic was backed up further than we could see and did I mention the heat was stifling?
Flexible working means the rush hour starts mid afternoon these days, so goodness knows what it'd be like if everyone still left work at 17.00.

The Guardian's Canadian correspondent Anne McIlroy is drawing attention to a little pickle Canada seems to be in at the moment.
Stephen Harper, the Prime Minister of choice of most Canadians apparently, has been apologising for something Canada did in 1885, and monetary apologies to boot. Now everyone wants a slice. An American journo even jibes, tongue in cheek that 'American Canadians' are the ones who have received most abuse.
Yeah, Stephen, you need to let sleeping dogs lie. Go for a little trip into BC's interior and chill out. Mind you, I have only ever met one Canadian here who voted for you, so the whole thing's a bit of a mystery. Perhaps something else that shouldn't be looked at too closely.

Kelowna II

None of my pictures come close to doing justice to the beauty of this place. When Anne mentioned the lakes in the comments, I just had no idea how spectacular they were.

I reached the point today when I had to say 'yep, this is no longer like Germany.' I also now understand the desert thing. It is a definition based on precipitation. Although there are trees around and plenty of greenery, there is also evidence of dryness and not just in the soil, the air is dry. Kevin had told me, as had other people, that when you go to the desert, in spite of the intensity of the heat, it is not oppressive as it can be in Britain and Vancouver. The temperature today was set to reach 40 here and it certainly does hit you like a wall when you go outside, but I don't feel sweaty and sticky all the time as I am used to in the summer. Well, apart from my habit of constantly slathering myself in suncreme.

We are here to celebrate the 90th birthday of Kevin's great uncle, Des. Astonishing, and his 89 year old sister has travelled with us from Surrey. As well as awe at the landscape I am awed by meeting Des who was present at the D-Day invasion on Juneau beach.

The First Nations band local to here have apparently made a good job of managing their lands on the west bank of the Okanagan and they also preserve their traditions. It is my understanding from speaking to a variety of people, that this is not true of all bands. If we were going to be here longer, I would have liked to go and see the museum which they have set up and maintain themselves.

For my British friends, the Okanagan valley is also an important wine-growing region for BC, giving us a range of good table wines plus the famous ice-wine, which I tried ironically for the first time the last time we went back to England - although we had taken it with us.

Kelowna

We left early this morning to drive up country, and my god it was a breathtaking drive in places, so guess what, I took a picture of a small town we stopped in to have food. Food in small town - weirdness. I have said before how I have been short-changed on the alcohol rations by thinking that cider here is...well, cider. WRONG! Cider here may be cider, but it may also just be apple juice. You need to know this in case you come to Canada and think you are ordering or being offered alcoholic refreshment.

So we're in this restaurant in a little one horse town called Merrit, and there is cider on the menu. So I ask, is it or isn't it? It is, the real deal. Ok, so I'll have that then please. Five minutes later the serving wench comes back and asks what type of alcohol I'd like in my cider. I beg yours? What? I'd like cider alcohol in my cider.
'No, only, I have to make the cider, so do you want vodka or tequila in it?' Holy raised eyebrows batman - I had the vin rouge instead. And even that was a mistake, but there we must end the cider saga.

Back to breathtaking. I have been frequently struck by how similar the paysage is here to that of Germany, and was again today.
'My,' I said, 'how spectacular the mountains are here,' I say,
'Hills,' I am corrected, 'we haven't gotten to the mountains yet, those are hills.' Wow. I'm stunned.

I'm not sure I quite got about the desert bit here, it is certainly very hot, very hot indeed, 35 degrees today. And many of the buildings here are mock mexican, but it is very beautiful, and to ease the heat there is good air conditioning in the motel, plus a swimming pool.

And now I must sleep. Goodnight all.

Fallen gods

There's a point in every child's development, when their sense of self is being constructed, that they discover that their significant adults aren't perfect. And I can handle that, it'll happen to me someday.

But to find out that Cadbury's have poisoned people, that's just too hard. I can't be doing with knowing such ugly facts of life. It was difficult enough for me when Kieran O'Keefe accused Derek Acorah of cheating on 'Most Haunted', of taking the bait, making things up. I wanted to scratch his eyes out. Kieran's that is, not Derek's.

Then the Guardian started criticising Tony Blair. Saints preserve us. I trusted the Guardian, just like I trust Tony to run the country in my absence, and they poked me with red hot pokers, the bar stewards.

I mean, some stabbings you expect. Like the first time I was in Phantasialand near Köln, and some kid told me that the space shuttle ride was a nice little tour round a kind of museum of spacey things. The little bollox. It was a bloody hellish nightmare of a rollercoaster ride in the pitch dark. But...you expect that.

But not Cadbury's, no-one expects that. That's like...Johnny Depp making a bad film. Or Helen Mirren delivering a line badly. Or Ikea designing something too ornately.
Still, they thought they were doing the right thing, they thought no-one would get sick. But yeah, see that doesn't do it for me, because the very thought of bacteria-ridden dirty water being anywhere near the chocolate ...well, it just shatters my illusions. Who knew that creamy goodness could have you hospitalised? Oh hang on, yes I did know that.

I will have to draw a curtain. I have to believe that the great god Cadbury's will learn from their slopiness and move on. Eventually, and by eventually I mean the next time I step onto British soil, so long as they never transgress again, I will forgive them.

Meanwhile, we're going to Kelowna tomorrow. Yep. Off to the Okanagan, to the Canadian desert, where the polar bears have humps like camels, where the moose wander naked in the street, and even the Mounties sweat. Ok, perhaps I've had a touche too much sun already. I'm not sure yet whether I will be able to report from the outback, but if I can, then I will. How else would you get to sleep? Oh, yeah, Nytol. Well, I'd better not find out anything bad about them. Hrmmph.

Jaded

The kayaking day was divine, and it'll deffo be part of my visitor package. I will say one thing however, organising it is not always straightforward because the company that hires out the equipment is totally dependent on tides and you have to keep ringing them beforehand to check. Still, we did it and it was splendid.

Now though, you can stop being jealous, because my life is being recycled. Well, that's what it feels like.

Once upon a time, when I was ..well, not very young, but young enough to be studying and working and bringing up a child without the help of a partner. I had some dreary jobs in those days. But it didn't matter so much because we got by somehow and like I said, I was studying and so there was a light shining at the end of the tunnel.

I think the most dreary job of all was working for the Singer Co.(UK)Ltd. I had to control the inventory coming into the warehouse in Liverpool and going out to the shops. I did this in an office in Guildford. I also had to bring the freight accounts up to date, because they were not very auditor-friendly.
It was soul-destroying work, it literally sapped the very will to live from me. And it taught me an absolute rock solid respect for the people who spend their whole lives doing those kind of jobs. It was in the days when every position of responsibility was held by a man, all except Personnel, and that was always some head prefect type of woman. And even she was answerable to a 'Personnel Director' who was..yes, a man.

And there I am again, doing office work. The Brit spirit and a mighty fear of karmic retribution keep me going in, even though Kevin keeps saying,
'You don't have to you know.' And of course, when your ship is becalmed, the very air around you seems to set solid. The good ship 'get my qualifications to work in Canada' was positively zipping along despite all sorts of dangerous coral reefs, like transcripts and ..oh, well, more transcripts (I think I've already explained what those are in a previous whinge) and such like and then suddenly...oops, I can feel myself being pulled against my will into a Tennyson poem, 'the Revenge', oh my god, hang on....it's a vortex...

'....Sir Richard spake and he laughed, and we roared a 'Hurrah!' and so...
The little Revenge ran on, sheer into the heart of the foe,
With her hundred fighters on deck, and her ninety sick below,
For half their fleet to the right, and half to the left were seen,
But the little Revenge ran on through the long sea-lane between,
Thousands of their soldiers looked down from their decks and laughed,
Thousands of their seamen made mock at the mad little craft running on and on..
'Til delayed by the mountain-like San Philippe,
That of fifteen hundred tons, o'oer shadowing high above us with her yawning tiers of guns.....
Took the breath from our sails...and we stay'd...'

Yeah, well, I feel like the mountain-like San Philippe, in the guise of Surrey County Council, who have done the most astonishingly half-arsed thing and contracted their 'education services' out to private industry, have taken the breath from my sails, and I've stay'd. And I keep bugging them, and they keep ignoring me.

I'm whining for little reason really, I have been my usual curmudgeonly self and said that I won't go in the week that Alex arrives and that I'll only go in mornings afterwards.

And for pudding? Oh yes, I remember this one too. Tonight, I pull out of the office into a solid line of traffic. An arsehole driving a juggernaut the size of a football pitch whilst talking on his cell phone, oh my dear lord yes, why, just because it's your profession, would you have any standards at all? pulls THROUGH the already grid-locked lanes of cars and makes it even worse. And to add insult to bloody injury, on the radio some person is saying,
'And traffic trying to get from Annacis island is completely at a standstill...' are you trying to wind me up? Because it is so working. Is there someone in an unmarked radio van looking into my car? And then....cyclists pass us, the final nail going in. That should be meeeeee...... That always used to be me. Holy high blood pressure batman, can the situation get any worse? Of course it can. Of course it can. I am upholding road courtesy standards, letting people trying to pull out of their offices into the line. Except the ones on phones, I block them off, make hand gestures at them. Does one single person that I let in either let anyone else in or acknowledge me?
Just one, just one, a smiling Japanese man.
And he made up for all the rest.

Karaoke Kayaking

Oh....my.....god. Kayaking was the most brilliant fun. And we did kind of karaoke...well, we sang.

We had the most perfect day for messing around on the river. The bit of river we went to was in a city called Ladner. Most places here are on the Fraser River Delta somehow. There were five us of and we have two double kayaks and one single. Beth and I shared a double since we were novice kayakers and the larger boat is more stable.

The evening before we went out, Roma (not evil Roma, good Roma) had told me that it takes just twelve minutes for anyone to learn how to kayak. I think she was right. I sat at the back and had peddles inside for steering, and the person at the back has to take their paddling cue from the person in front.

We took off down the river, Lori had us go down little creeks that you would think were impassable. We sang, we laughed, we talked. We got stuck in bullrushes, we got ourselves out. We got swept aside by the current, but we got ourselves back where we wanted to be.
We saw eagles, I have seen them in the sky, but never just sitting on a tree - this one looked like a vulture, I had no idea how huge they can be. We saw marsh wrens, (nothing to do with women in uniform before you ask;) swallows, kites and a heron, a huge heron that looked almost like a pterodactyl as it took off.

After a little while, because you are so close to the water and because the boat is so light and sensitive to your movements, it seemed as though the boat had become part of us. We were out for two and a half hours in the sparkling, silent water. We stopped and listened to the cottonwood trees sighing. It was just the most amazing thing to do and it felt as though we could have stayed in the water for ever, and that the afternoon would go on for ever and that it would always be summer.

Perfick.

The Funny Farm

Scrolling across the screen of the Slimp3 player this morning was the news that our venerable Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, thinks that Canada's ethnic diversity would protect her from terrorism. It doesn't even need any comment really does it? But I can't help myself. Britain is ethnically diverse Stephen and we have lived with terrorism and later the threat of it for years and years. And...where exactly is the logic in that statement anyway? When Britain was attacked last year on the 7th of July, the terrorists were our own people, ethnically diverse if you please.

Now last year, I do remember a case which was reported in the paper of a Sikh boy who was fighting for the right to wear his ceremonial dagger to school. He promised he wouldn't hurt anyone, and then some argy-bargy about whether the ceremonial dagger was really a blunt instrument or was in fact a fully functioning dagger for killing people. Anyway, what everyone was reminded of was the the Sikhs are the warrior offshoot, some say caste, of the Hindu faith. So maybe Stephen means that should terrorists strike, the Sikhs would rise up and do the right thing. Interesting idea Stephen, even if it was mine not yours.

Meanwhile, in Britain, in some kind of completely Frodo-unrelated mouth-frothing insanity, parents, granted not that many, are squinnying because their little darlings are being denied the right to wear their purity pledge rings to school. *Voice of Golum*
'Your precious won't protect your precious's precious.'
You got it, you apply to go to a particular school, you agree to the rules, including the school uniform and then you want to change them. I applaud the schools for upholding common sense against these idiots. Research in the US has already shown that the behaviour of those that take this 'pledge' is much more likely to result in unsafe sex than that of pupils who have experienced the now long-established sex education programmes in schools which attempt to teach young people that when they are legally old enough to have sex, they must feel comfortable about it and all that goes with that.

The people at the front of this discussion have an underage daughter anyway. All she needs to do is let the Marks and Sparks age label hang out of her jumper. She's not abstaining from sex because of some loony purity promise, it's because she's 15 and the law doesn't allow it. Of course I'm not suggesting that no-one under 16 has sex, just saying that there is no need to make a song and dance about it, otherwise we'd all be wearing huge great T-shirts with every law of the country we're living in printed on them to show that these are the laws we're not breaking.

On the other hand, Britain is also re-thinking its policies about IVF treatment. It has discovered that it needs new people to sustain the economy, probably from reading my blog I would think, and that maybe IVF should be offered free to everyone who wants it.

So...later today, Sven's men meet Sven's neighbours - I'm assuming Sven is Danish, if he's actually Swedish then I suppose that Sven's men meet Sven's countrymen. We live in interesting times.

Now, it was kayaking that Lori said we were doing today wasn't it? Not karaoke......

Odds and sods

People often ask me what the weather is like here in BC, and in the part of BC where I live, it's very much like the weather in the south of England. But the weather rules that I'm used to don't always apply.
In Britain, there are certain indicators where you can look at the sky and say with a fair degree of accuracy,
'Yep, it's going to be a scorcher,' or 'ah, it'll burn off later,' or 'think it's going to rain, look at those clouds,' or even,'there's a storm a-comin'.' That last one would be if you are inexplicably speaking with a Hicksville, American accent.

Here, I can look out and say to Kevin,
'It will deffo rain today,' and he'll say,
'Not necessarily,' and it won't. It's because of the mountains, they affect the weather, make it even more unpredictable than it already is, or they alter the rules or something.
Right now you'd think it was blowing up for a storm. It just has that whole 'blowing up for a storm' feel to it out there....and it won't.

Reports of the street party in Simmi's street are that it was 'awesome' and a good time was had by all. Austen told me there was another street party in the next one over too. Nowhere I have lived does celebrating quite like Pompey, sometimes you can't even work out what they're celebrating, or why there are fireworks, although if that's the case then there's a fair chance it's either football related or naval.

The World Cup is supposed to be fun - whilst of course being deadly serious. But there are a couple of things going on that are not at all in the spirit of things.
Firstly, the Dutch being made to take their clothes off all over the place. Simmi sent me this article about them having to take their Lederhosen off, no-one wants that, any nation who are brave enough to wear bloody Lederhosen should be allowed to keep 'em on and especially orange ones. Bloody corporate sponsorship. Apparently last week they were made to take off their T-shirts saying 'We want our bicycles back,' referring to the Germans having confiscated them during the war. If Brits had been involved, within two hours they'd all have been wearing counter-T-shirts saying, 'Look in your bloody canals mate.'

The other appalling World Cup story is about the trafficking of prostitutes. Now I had blogged some time ago about a brothel that was getting ready for the influx of footie fans, but it seems that it didn't stop there.
Dontcha just love the lame idea that if you educate drunken football fans, they will discriminate between women who have chosen the profession and those who have been brought in against their will?
I think this is part of a broader issue anyway about how women are still viewed and treated, but I'll save that for another day when I'm feeling particularly vituperative.

Tomorrow, since the education programmes at the Nature Park have now finished for the summer, we are going kayaking. This is an activity I'm not even sure I can spell, and I have certainly never done before, so...should be fun :) Actually, I think that may be a life rule I've discovered there - if you can't spell it you shouldn't do it/eat it/practise safe sex with it.