Clare'sLaw? No thanks, just 'the law' for me will do

We are told that Clare's Law, a much talked about domestic violence disclosure scheme, is to be piloted in four areas around the country.

If you are a woman living in one of those and are worried about a new partner's potential violent tendencies you can now stalk him preventively online with the help of the local police force.

Chances are your average violent bloke has never been charged and convicted of any domestic violence offence, so your new squeeze won't feature on the list and you can go ahead and date him, confident that the thing that happens when he has had a few drinks/is bored/ you have PROVOKED him is not domestic violence, just him slapping you around a bit. Congratulations, you got yourself a keeper!

If he is on the list, boy he must have serious form, but when you try to leave him and he starts beating you up chances are the police still won't turn up. If they do and they arrest him, chances are the courts still won't convict him or give him a serious custodial sentence. And sure as hell there won't be any refuges to escape to if he comes after you because they have to shut down for lack of funding.

But you will feel so empowered, because basically it will all have been your fault for having gotten yourself involved with a bit of rough.

As Sandra Horley wrote in the Guardian this week, we do not need new, expensive but ultimately tokenistic schemes - we need to keep spending the serious money and effort needed to ensure the police bother to apply the law as it stands.

The fact that the announcement came on the week when legal aid for domestic violence victims was under threat was the cherry on the manure cake for me.

Just to make my feelings absolutely clear (I know I can be so hard to read sometimes!) I don't just disagree with Clare's Law as a policy. I find it profoundly irritating and patronising as a concept.

Generally speaking one should be highly suspicious of laws with female names attached. For one thing, there is a whiff of impotent (but terrifying) pitchfork-waving about any measure taken in the name of an individual victim. Sarah's Law , as you might recall, pretty soon led to paediatricians being chased from their homes, having been endearingly confused with paedophiles. Not what I would call a result.

Secondly, it almost inevitably constitutes a cheap crocodile-tear-type answer to the genuine grief and injustice suffered by a family (briefly capturing the sympathy of the nation) for a crime that was supremely avoidable. We all feel vindicated; something is being done in the name of brave Clare, poor Sarah - but nothing that will save another Clare or Sarah.

Clare Wood, whose name graces the current initiative, begged the police to save her from her violent boyfriend on a number of occasions, including after a sexual assault, before finally being murdered by him. I know her heart-broken father fought hard for this initiative- something being better than nothing, in his words. But does he not deserve more than this?

Finally it smacks of yet another example of the outsourcing of effort, cost and responsibility from the provider/company/state to the user/customer/citizen.

Being routinely asked to check out my own groceries is insulting enough (I don't work here, Sainsbury/Boots/Tesco!!!!) but I draw the line at being told that, basically, it's up to me to keep myself safe by giving potential or actual criminals a wide berth after conducting my own mini-policing investigations.

We are already been paternalistically advised not to dress like sluts, not to go out late, not to live our lives without some form of male chaperoning and protection. Enough with making violence against us being our problem to solve. (I do not recall for instance an equivalent Sebastian's law scheme for the self-prevention of corporate fraud or theft. Football fans are not encouraged to ring John's Register and stay away from games when hooligans might be present. Men are not told that the crimes they tend to be the victims of are their problem).

So this is Peebi's Message to the Home Office: you do your job and keep the violent crims behind bars. Train the police to recognise women as people, not noisy thinghies or asking-for-it would-be-whores (oh, and maybe have another look at the rape stats while you are at it) and equip them to turn up and fight crime.

I, for my part, will pay my taxes and date whoever I like. Or not, in my case, because I'm already married - to someone, incidentally, who only sporadically does the hoovering, despite the promises of those heady, crazy early days. I don't suppose there is a register I could have him slapped on for that?

I’m sick of eras ending

Last week I found myself back at Bush House, historic home of the BBC World Service, for a celebration of its 80 amazing years. I sat in the audience while a couple of programmes were going on air. The atmosphere was electric if slightly chaotic, but I felt just a quiet sadness throughout.

I was reminded of presenting or contributing to European affairs programmes - which do not exist anymore and would never be commissioned again - in this very building as a fresh faced idealistic young journalist who thought (and still thinks) that the World Service is the closest thing she has to a religion and this country has to an empire of sorts.

But of course the dedicated, hard working, badly paid multilingual journalists who make up this institution are soon to leave this building, in the wake of a cynical government move to dump the cost of the whole operation (once paid for by the FCO) onto the BBC’s budget, and of subsequent inevitable cuts to many of its language sections.

BBC bosses will tell you this is progress: most BBC news operations are moving in the state-of-the-art, glass-and-steel complex which has been growing like a shiny tumour off the side of the old limestone building of Broadcasting House.

But at Bush House last week I felt ouse House we were blowing the last birthday candles of some distinguished war veteran about be tossed out of his nursing home, an expensive, embarrassing relic, whose glory and purpose belonged firmly to the past, to another era. Once ensconced in the glass and steel tumour the surviving World Service will paradoxically become more invisible and more expendable. Mark my word,we will not see a 100^th anniversary.

This despondent feeling comes upon me a lot these days, as the apparently endless crisis lurches into yet another week, month and year. In fact, to be honest, I’m sick of eras ending.

Mild mannered intellectual husband notes that, surely, it depends on the era. The end of the Third Reich was no bad thing, for instance. (Despite his intellectual credentials mild mannered husband is a true Englishman in his instinctive invocation of Nazi Germany as the shorthand for all historical evil). So, ok, sure, the end of something horrible is no bad thing per se.

But still I’m sick of being reminded of all the things that are at an end (mainly, the subtext goes, because we cannot afford them anymore): jobs for life, the expectation of employment throughout one’s life, the ability to retire at some point and not starve, top quality, investigative journalism (or even average but neutral and informative reporting),good quality universal medical care free at the point of delivery, the idea that things like policing should be run by the state and not private contractors, like the stuff of some dark 1970s sci-fi dystopia, soon to come to a riot near you.

I’d like to start talking about the beginning of new eras. What are we going to have instead of what someone – but who?- has decided we cannot afford or is not relevant anymore? How are we going to organise our society in a way that still reflects the values most of us hold (if asked the question in the right way and not just as an appendix to the question of their cost)?

For all our ostentatious worshipping of ‘democracy’ for instance, we are witnessing the systematic overlooking of any mandate by those who are slashing and burning eras all over the place.

The NHS is being transformed, and some say destroyed, to its very core by a government who had not put this onto any manifesto and indeed had promised that it could be trusted not to harm it.

A welfare policy which turns benefit recepients into virtual slaves for the private sector at the time when millions are looking for work: who exactly voted for that? When Tesco is ashamed of doing business with a government that offers a slave labour force for fear of looking bad you know something has gone wrong. (Echos of the Third Reich anyone?)

The Leveson enquiry has destroyed any illusion that this country is any less corrupted to the core than your average Italy or Greece, with a journalistic conglomerate (instead of the mafia, the masons or the arms manufacturers) playing the puppet masters.

Plans to privatise “some police services” sound, in this light, almost movingly comical: why, Murdoch was already running his own private police/intelligence service with handsome payouts to several layers of the Met. News International, it now appears, got to spy on people and intimidate them with the active help and protection of a police force whose first allegiance clearly was not the state any longer. NI got to decide what was investigated and what should not be, and to threaten the body politics into line. Allegedly, bien sûr.

Meanwhile the average Sun reader got brainwashed into thinking that the EU was the real threat to British sovereignty. Oh, and that women are either big-titted young sluts or spiteful, hairy harridans too ugly to be photographed, and whose views should therefore be ignored. Telegraph readers got the message too, in a different way and to a different extent. As for Express readers, well, if you are prepared to believe that Lady Di was kidnapped by aliens or that Brussels is abolishing Christmas and ice-cream, congratulations: you are already living beyond reason, in what apparatchiks from the other Bush era called “the post-reality based community” and that is currently all the rage in the US.

Express readers are in fact the vanguard of the post-truth revolution, the canary in the mine of this experiment with not giving a shit about facts. You might think that flat-earthers and racist dim-witted bible bashers are a tiny sad minority and do not matter in the British political debate but you’d be wrong – they set the agenda at every level. Look how the BBC scurries around to lower its own corporate IQ and cater for them, their prejudices, their grotty aspirations.

Yes, the same BBC that in one incarnation has been the voice of truth (and thus the hand maiden of democracy and freedom in five continents in the past 80 years) is, in a different guise, on different platforms and channels, happy to chirp along with the Astroturf myth that the deficit was created by benefit scroungers, that the views of five hysterical and well funded climate change deniers are equivalent to the body of opinion of 95 per cent of the world scientific community. And while they are at it, you can see how the temptation to slash the budget for original drama and commission another series of “Young, dumb an living off Mum” or “Snog, Marry, Avoid” might be too strong to resist.

Cheap and dishonest relativism won’t give us a new Renaissance, won’t lead us to the discovery of a new America, a new moon-landing. Where are the new beginnings going to start from, where will they lead us? What does the brave new (cheaper) world we can afford in our reduced circumstances look like and for whose benefit are we forging it, who will run it, to what end? Enough with eras ending, let’s start re-building something, let’s start talking about it at least.

But let’s also remember that in a world without truth there is only power, as someone cleverer than me once said. Chances are that you, reader, like me, are an Average Joe, unlikely to be the one yielding that power. So you want to be careful with that. Just sayin’...

Difficult difficult, lemon difficult

Looking back, I can see that I have taken two major gambles in my life so far.

I left home and country at the then daring, unheard of age of 20 because I thought life would be better away from the restrictions of family control at home and nepotism in the professional sphere. They are two complex issues, of course,  but let me summarise as best I can here: 1) a good daughter is a virgin, who never goes out and has no friends or opinions of her own , 2) if you want to be a journalist but have no familial, political or bedroom connections forget it, basically.

Two decades later I decided that I definitely would not have children after all, despite having found at the 11^th hour that modern Holy Grail, the straight, single, solvent, committed guy who Would Make a Great Dad, because having fought so hard to live the life I wanted, I wanted the rest of that life to be about me and not spent at the service of a new generation of ungrateful little shits.

Both choices were dictated by the need (and god knows where that came from, we are not a family of iconoclasts us, I can tell you), to be free and to be allowed to be the best possible me in this one, short, haphazard shot at life I have been given.

How’s it working out for me? Pretty good, so far, since you’re asking.

No doubt there will be tears and loneliness and much soiling of oneself in a cabbage-smelling nursing home in years to come. Heaven knows there have been plenty of tears and loneliness and demonic boyfriends and flatmates in cabbage-smelling houseshares in the years so far. This was never the point.  The point was not to be happy and safe and loved all the time (although I have been managing ok most of the time), the point was to be my own person, paying my own way and having a stake in the world and a voice in what happens to me.

It’s not that I set out to live my life following some sort of feminist agenda, but as a woman I gradually discovered that it was the only way for me to be allowed to live a full life. I would probably make a Great Dad myself, for instance. The trouble isn’t children, although god knows they get sticky and boring very quickly, the trouble is motherhood.

I am reflecting on all this because I keep reading and having conversations with friends and sister about the horrendous position Italian women are in as the crisis keeps on cutting – thrust out of the labour market as soon as children are in the picture, with fewer and fewer services to rely on, making them hostage to fortune across the board: hostage to the violence of husbands they can’t leave or to poverty if they do leave, domestic slaves in every case, earning very little if they are allowed to hang on to a job. Oh, and all the while they have to look sexy and feminine, of course, it’s the law, and it’s not very feminine to make a fuss and debate vociferously. It’s Afghanistan with air con, as I wrote recently – it is already here!

When you lose earning power you are fucked, it’s as simple as that people! You are not just vulnerable and at the mercy of others but also vilified and ridiculed – look at the British debate on single mothers,  child benefits etc and this in a country where men do some housework and women hold on to full time jobs in much greater numbers and are allowed to keep their clothes on on TV.

The choice is never between happiness and unhappiness – that would be easy.

No, the choice (for those lucky enough to be presented with a choice, and I realise much of this is a middle class rant) is  between agency and surrender. I chose agency, continue to choose agency and  would still choose agency if I were 22 and pretty again and surrender came in the form of a fit, besotted Russian oligarch offering material comforts beyond my wildest dreams.  

Sadly most of us give in for much less – the thrill of taking some mediocre man’s surname, carrying some mediocre man’s children, with the added bonus feature of cleaning after him and helping him find his car keys for the rest of their lives. Which then leaves them too exhausted to run for political office or whip up a storm in the blogosphere.  

Yes it’s difficult. Lemon difficult. But we have to make the best of what we’ve got I suppose. Will you at least try to raise your sons not to be such selfish pigs and your daughters not to be simpering demi-vierges eager to learn to pole dance to capture and hold on to some moron who would Make a Great Dad some day? Just asking.

Help! My garden thinks it’s spring

The camellias are out, and some other flowers too whose name is beyond me (I know camellias and I know roses and daisies, that’s it. If you are in search of beautifully evocative descriptions of nature you are reading , once again, the wrong blog).

A mysterious bird (once more, see above) has been calling out all morning from some secret hideout deep in the barren branches. Flocks of green parakeets squawk back and forth, like they are doing rehearsals on the set of Rio.  (I don’t suppose cartoon characters actually do rehearse but you get the gist). The squirrels have been training hard for the birdfeeder-raiding Olympics.

The sun goes in and out, like a caring but distracted manager with too many meetings to attend. The air is mild, smells sweet, and resonates with the plaintive cries of toddlers.

Obviously it isn’t spring, not remotely, yet spring is not far off. Others (husband among them) hate it but I’m very fond of this time of year, with its grey-white skies, imperceptibly lighter mornings, a certain suspended hush in the air.

I like it because we still have them all in front of us, those theoretically pleasant six months of spring and summer. It is all still to come and therefore it hasn’t disappointed yet, it is all still potentially wonderful:  bright sunny days, branches heavy with candyfloss blossoms, blue skies. But also, a sudden surge of energy and optimism, the taking up of some long dreamed about sporting activity, a new wardrobe of light, feminine, flirty clothes, hems hovering above knees on newly slimmed down frames, un-quarrelsome visits to or from the parents.

None of that will actually happen. But it’s all just about still possible now.

Gotta go. Husband is back from the drycleaners with lots of little bunches of flowers (yes, I know, I’m blessed).  I’ll arrange them in various vases around the room as he scrambles eggs for our lunch. Then it will start to rain.

That sinking feeling

By the time your father-in law (who is your blog’s first reader and greatest fan!!!) emails you suggesting you explore the succulent metaphors about your country’s predicament still bobbing up and down in the vicinity Isola del Giglio, you know the horse has well and truly bolted.
(Apologies for the mixed metaphors there but I thought “that ship has sailed” would be too brutal in the circs.)

So to recap, while the real life ship was going down, all through the horror of the botched midnight evacuation, the queasy, German expressionist daylight images of this huge broken toy thrown against the rocks next to the tiny harbour, all through the feverish media speculations and the viral U-tube clips of the – by now surely - most public dressing down in history, (translated here but without the expletives unfortunately) I was away from the office to my alternative place of employment, for my monthly dose of what feels like playing table tennis with a drunken but hyperactive octopus.

Therefore this story of Italian cowardice and ineptitude, followed by the tiny resurgence of some national pride thanks to Capitano Gregorio De Falco, (a man so damn upright and just plain wonderful that even as he was tearing strips out of Schettino, the farcical fugitive ship captain, urging him to “get the fuck back on the ship, for fuck’s sake”, never strayed from the polite/formal “lei” third person form of address) sort of passed me by.

I was aware of it, but dimly, lost in the background noise to my round of meetings, followed by cascades of contradictory emails, resulting in a cacophony of several more conversations conducted in second and third languages, and hastily scribbled to-do list for when life in the regular office begins again.

Catching up with the sorrowful tales of the survivors on a two days old newspaper on the train back home I was struck, as usual in these cases, by the casual spitefulness and vengeance of the god I do not believe in, so vicious to his own flock. The devout, retired couple from some US backwater who raised a large family and never had a penny and were now soooo looking forward to trip to Europe: dead. The nice woman who let the wheelchair-bound passengers get ahead and into the lifeboats: dead.

And another thing: It’s so hard to do good and so easy for things to go to shit, have you noticed? It’s as if some sort of moral gravity force was a play: after weeks of pushing tiny incremental changes laboriously uphill,  an economic reform here, a sober press conference there, the new, grey haired, dark-suited Italian PM had nearly managed to make people forget for five whole minutes what a country of chancers and scoundrels we are.  But it takes a tanned imbecile a moment’s stupidity and a long night of cowardice and arrogance for this to all come crushing down.

Maybe I’m feeling particularly despondent because a person I really respect quit her job this week in exasperation and disgust: years of pushing tiny boulders uphill, with few results, against increasing odds, eventually got the better of her. All that effort, what for? You may well ask. She did and stopped pushing and the boulders are crashing back down even as I write.

It helps, I suppose, to have a sense of humour and not to be too afraid to laugh through the tears.

My compatriots are now buying t-shirts emblazoned with a myriad of variations of the De Falco’s outburst: “Pay your taxes, for fuck’s sake!”, “Get in the queue, for fuck’s sake!”).

Mild mannered intellectual husband, who I have missed more than words can say, has just cooked a celebratory dinner. We are celebrating the fact that I’m back home, not from a death cruise but from an ordinary working week which had its share of banal evils for both of us, that we are together, alive and make each other laugh.

Tomorrow boulder-pushing resumes as normal. Tomorrow we have to – as Capitano Gregorio De Falco would no doubt put it- “get the fuck back out there” and do our best, probably pointlessly, against ridiculous odds.

For the love of J and other theatre tales

Today’s Guardian told us that people are now queuing up all night long outside the Apollo theatre in London to get their hands on tickets for the multi-award winning play Jerusalem whose run is about to end.

I saw the play for the first time two years ago and was so transfixed, both by the themes explored and by Mark Rylance’s mesmeric performance, that I got tickets (presciently early enough) as soon as this latest run was announced. In between, the play went on to win every award going in both the West End and Broadway. My second viewing of the play didn’t disappoint, in fact sharpened my pleasure and awe at the writing, the performances, the set design.

The Guardian piece thus cheered me up for three distinct reasons.

I’m a great fan of queuing, as you know, and this almost loving description of the agony and the ecstasy, the quirkiness, the sense of satisfaction and camaraderie, the sheer anarchic power of a good, long, honest overnight queue is joyous for me to behold. Well done England!!!

Which brings me to my second point. The miracle of this play for me is its rendition in front of your eyes of what England and Englishness is about, in flesh and blood.

Having spent my first three years in the UK in Scotland, which has a strong, definite, in yer face identity, then decamped to London, a metropolis, unique in its own right, I’ve always had a problem perceiving what Englishness was all about. I have travelled around England, I’m familiar with the sites, I can just about tell the accents apart, I know the stereotypes...I just could never feel the place.  

I seemed to be suffering from a particular form of mental colour- blindness which meant that when I moved to England I could just about make out that it was Anglophone and not Scottish but,  to misquote Gertrude Stein, there was no there there...

All my references were historical and literary, and pretty much, well, dead, (William Shakespeare, George Orwell, Winston Churchill, stiff upper lip, the Queen Mother relieved after the bombing of Buckingham Palace  to be finally able  “to look the East End in the eye”, Ted Hughes’ magic in nature stuff , Chesterton’s  “people of England who haven’t spoken yet”), apart from a few nasty modern ones, like the violence of football casuals and the racism of the English Defence League.

Jerusalem made me see the connections between a lot of dots I had not joined and brought tears to my eyes in the process (good theatre does that to me but more on this later). The weird druid-like mysticism (achieved by most of the characters by assiduous drug-taking, true, still this is not German, Italian or even Scottish drug-taking, not a bit of it),  the love of nature coupled with a complete acceptance of small time urban squalor, the fascination with and revulsion against The Outsider, a timeless quest for freedom seen as the ability to live life in one's own terms, a certain  heroic “my-word-is-my-bond”- type proud stance coupled with the dullest of reflexive, unthinking prejudice and a philistine compliance with the lowest common denominator take on anything  - all is here.

The dumbing down of the BBC, Top Gear, an eccentric erudite professor, Morris dancing as (double genius) a brewery marketing ploy,  all get a mention or play a part in the play. Not to mention, well, the song.

Does this light-bulb moment suddenly make me love and appreciate England, or even, dear god, feel English in any way? It’s more complex than that.

I despise a number of those traits (say the anti-intellectualism), many more are completely alien to my psychological make-up (the nature worship bordering on the mysticism, the Morris dancing) but the crucial fact is that I know this place, I recognise it and that makes me love it a little bit too.

Maybe like a biologist, who’s been observing but not quite seeing a virulent strain of something or other under a microscope for years- a certain attachment develops, you know?  Or like a sibling you have been indifferent or even hostile to for years but whose instincts, expressions and reactions you are suddenly able to evoke, anticipate, double-guess. To know is to love, for me, to a certain extent.

Now to my third point – the Guardian piece highlights one of the great pleasures of life on earth and specifically of living in London today and one of the few surviving un-digital experiences of our age: first class theatre. Each performance is unique and by and large time limited, transient, un-recorded and thus un-U Tube-able. You have to physically be there to be part of the experience, to witness it and – pace Gertrude – there is definitely a there there which shifts and changes and evolves each time.

In case you are interested, below are some of the top theatre experiences of my life so far, in whatever order I hall happen to remember them. I’d like to hear what yours are or if we miraculously did experience some of the same magic in the dark and did not know it....

Mark Rylance – twice in the last two years – in Jez Buttherworth’s Jerusalem (The National and the Apollo production)

Rufus Sewell in Royal Court’s production of the Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n Roll about six years ago – I sobbed for so long after the curtains came down that my mild mannered intellectual (then) boyfriend was alarmed and rather touched.

Cate Blanchet in the National Theatre production  David Hare’s Plenty thirteen years ago. I laughed and cried so hard I thought I was going to be ushered out.

Every production of Stoppard’s Arcadia I have ever seen (but it’s worth remarking that my love affair with the theatre begun in and was fostered by my sojourn in Edinburgh, and I was there, probably during the Festival that I saw this play for the first time). It just makes your brain hurt and your heart melt.

Every line of David  Hare’s Stuff Happens at the National about eight years ago – plus I did a lovely bit of queuing early that morning to secure the only tickets till going, a small allocation kept back each day under the Travelex £10 scheme which got me the best seats in the house virtually for free. This scheme is one of the most civilised things I can think of in the world. The queue was largely made up of intellectual but penniless pensioners who told me they “were out seeing a play every night”.

A very young, very charismatic Kenneth Branagh in a wonderful Look Back in Anger production with Emma Thompson as Alison.  Beyond bliss. Put me off ironing for ever though. Actually, that was a further bonus. Result!

A still unknown Carey Mulligan weeping silently, effortlessly and hypnotically like only Carey Mulligan can do in the Royal Court’s production of Chekhov’s the Seagull with lots of big shots (Kristin Scott-Thomas, Chiwetel Eijofor, Mackenzie Crooks) who left no lasting impression on me.

The impact of the sheer weirdness of Caryl Churchill’s  Far Away in the Royal Court production a decade ago. I didn’t exactly enjoy it at the time but I have thought about it lots in the intervening years and it now seems to me just genius.

An amateur/student,/who knows play entitled To the Ladies who drive Mercedes,  watched for reviewing purposes in a disused church in Edinburgh during the Fringe twenty years ago. I have no idea who wrote it and what became of the cast and playwright. It was the story of a white middle class female journalist who ends up imprisoned in some horrid black site type prison in a Latin American country. “Where am I?” she asks her fellow prisoner at the very start of the play. “This place doesn’t exist” is the answer.  

To this day no couple of months go by that I don’t think of this play, about which I remember very little, for some reason I can’t explain. I guess it just had a huge impact on my impressionable young mind.  It got me reading Isabel Allende, then Garcia Marquez and reinforced my hatred of US-sanctioned, market-driven right-wing dictatorships.

I could go on but clearly I shall have to stop sometimes so, finally, but by now means conclusively, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot -  in too many productions to remember, in  too many theatres, in different cities (remember Dublin twenty-god help us-odd years ago Oren?).

So, there.

What do we do now, now that we are happy?

Pastels? Pastels??? Plus some thoughts on the Thatcher film

A mixed bag of a post this (or should I say handbag) but there it is: the time is short, the churn of impressions and ideas quite incessant, the discipline to take careful notes and write thoughtfully later instead of watching some trash on TV, frankly, non-existent.

So, back to the first matter at hand - faithful readers of this two months old blog, all 13 of them, will know I'm one for the occasional bout of verbal joshing against the vagaries of fashion. Which might seem odd to some because, just like in the matter of having children, there is no actual gun to any woman's head forcing her to take a blind bit of notice on what Vogue says "we are loving" this week.  

On the other hand the magic market fairy which should provide us with all this choice, freedom and opportunity to express ourselves, live life to the max etc works in such a clunky, self-serving, unidirectional, almost Soviet way that you can be sure if Vogue was featuring the ghastly pastel haute couture gracing the catwalks some 6 months ago for Spring 2012 this edict will by now have trickled down, via steadily more downmarket mags, newspaper supplements and so on, to the steadily more downmarket but still strictly on-message designers and retailers.

So that you eventually reach a point when you cannot walk into M&S, John Lewis or whatever store you consider to be suitable shorthand for "the death of style" and avoid buying something pastel-coloured if you wish to wear any clothes this spring.

Why? I mean, why?

At a more general level, why is it that the richer and more sophisticated our societies and economies become the less actual choice about anything do consumers actually seem to have, just acres more versions  of the same kind of thing (in other words no genuine choice at all)?

Last winter my sister wrote amusingly in her Italian blog (what a multilingual family we are)  about Her Struggle to find a pair of dark brown, low heeled boots. No such boots in such a shade were on offer in any of Genoa's shoe-shops on accounts of the fact that boots were meant to be black with a medium heel last winter, end of. A city of 700.000 people could not accommodate the (hardly extravagant it seems to me) preference for the colour brown.

Secondly and more pointedly: why, dear god, oh why, does it have to be pastels this spring? I accept a person might look good in a particular shade of light green, say. Say it goes with her hair colour. But who, over the age of 7, looks good in baby pink or in "pastels" in general? The whole pastels aesthetic is wrong in the grown up woman. Nothing else goes with pastels, no other colour for starters but also no....how shall I put this... job title or pay-cheque worth having.

Now about the Thatcher film :
She is portrayed as having made it to the top propelled by nothing more than extreme parsimony and a gigantic chip on her shoulder (if you could bottle that you'd be looking at green fuel indeed) as well as psychotic (i.e. male) levels of ambitions, of course.
Carol's portrayal, as well-meaning, visually brash but pathetic non-entity, the un-favourite twin, was very sympathetic I thought, and oddly moving.

The only other women featured in the film were tea ladies, seamstresses and Downing St cleaners, a silent, purely visual reminder of how she was so unique that she changed precisely nothing as far as gender was concerned.

In the bonkers phase of her leadership she is seen berating her cabinet for not having the courage to go the whole nine yards with the (clearly regressive) poll tax. It's because they were all privileged toffs, ashamed of the privileges they enjoyed, she argued, while someone from her background didn't feel she had to be apologetic about her success and compassionate about others' failures. She also berated them for being too concerned about popularity, opinion polls and essentially re-election to do the “right thing”.

Now look around today's millionaires' cabinet and tell me whether you can spot either:

A)     a grocer's daughter or

B)      any sense of shame/embarrassment about all that privilege and corresponding compassion for the less well off.

On the other hand the current PM is certainly a master of the U turn and British politics as a whole has been run on focus groups since the early New Labour days. Progress or what???

That said, there was precious little actual politics in the film - in the end it was less about ideas and ideological conflict  and more about one’s failings as a human being through the time honoured method of being cruel/selfish towards those who love you/closest to you.

The scenes with Dead Denis,  so cheerful, so comforting (until he switches to tormentor as she comes to fear the allucinations as a symptom of incipient madness) brought tears to my eyes and made me long for my husband. He's very much alive, and had simply stayed home sulking as he “did not want to see the Thatcher film”. He spent the evening slaying orcs instead.

I tried, but I really cannot think of a funny or clever way to bring this back to pastels. It’s two in the morning, I’m going to bed. I need the full four hours as I intend to take back the Faulklands purchase a pale yellow sweater tomorrow.