The Pope's Visit

Groups of pilgrims stand in Victoria Station. African nuns wear yellow 'Papal visit 2010' bags. They look so happy. Two priests walk past me. A gold cross shines light into my eye from the breast of one, a reminder to me of the wealth of the Catholic church before I cite its symbolic meaning.

Underground, a father is explaining to his young children that it's busy because the Pope is in London today.
'But daddy,' one proclaims, 'the Pope's old.'

I smile as I board the tube to travel away from the epicentre.

Defining PC Games and Media of Old.

I've always been interested in the paranormal. God, ghosts, lake monsters, yetis, time portals, telekinesis and everything else 'unexplained' fascinated me from the minute I was aware of them as concepts (if a toddler can grasp the concept of God, which I suppose is not necessarily plausible).

This evening I was talking to @oye_billy on Twitter and I brought up a PC game I loved as a kid. I had to look it up. It was based on Sam & Max, comic book characters created by Steve Purcell in the late 80s (I'm an 80s kid). The game was called Sam & Max Hit the Road and I loved it because they went across America solving mysteries in weird places. Like at the giant ball of yarn.

Another game I played, again on the PC, was 'WeiRd.' In this game you went through various levels solving puzzles and reading about things like the woman with asthma, which for some reason caused her breasts to glow blue. The game was a place of different dimensions that were fantastically designed, from holes that descended miles underground with stories to unearth as you went down, to labs and misty mazes. It was magnificent.

I even enjoyed the Goosebumps PC game, One Day At Horrorland which was neither cool nor magnificent.

On TV, The X-Files was a seven-year-old revelation. From the first episode I found my mother watching in our living room (Mulder running a tooth through a supermarket check-out and alien code screwing the system) to the the hole in the smoking man's windpipe near the end.

And with a backdrop of Fortean Times Magazine from the age of eleven, all these things were absorbed with a lot of love. Yet somehow I still don't think I've turned out as a geek. Not really.

No One's Infallible

So... Yesterday I bet everything (I'm not sure entirely what I bet) that I'd be okay commuting to London and using the tube on the day the staff went on strike.

To be fair, I was acting under the advice of older, wiser people than myself.

The train from Bristol to Paddington was fine, emptier than usual but on time.

@Biltawulf had tweeted me, 'go for it. It's fun!' which gave, I think, a slightly false sense of hope. But he'd somehow managed to get into work earlier than he had in years so it was coming from a good place.

I arrived. I walked past this queue on my way to the tube.
And then I was told there was no tube from Paddington. The tube trains may have been running but if they weren't running from where I was it was no use.
I asked for help. A friendly Transport-helper-person (I've no official name to hand) told me to get the 205 bus from outside. Lovely, I thought as I bounded to the bus stop full of hope.
I was greeted by this at the bus stop:
So the upshot was, over an hour and only two simultaneously-arriving-and-quickly-filled 205 buses later, I turned around and went back into Paddington. I was too late to meet the person I was meant to.

But it was alright... at least I wasn't a doctor or other important integral cog in London's Big Ben... or something.

The Tube Strike Won't Affect My Train Travel

Monday morning and typing ‘tube’ into Google brings up ‘tube strike’ as the second most searched for tube related thing after ‘map.’ BBC news is tops in the results with advice to, ‘take an alternative way of getting home’

TfL have allowed ‘Around a hundred extra buses, escorted bike rides, marshalled taxi ranks, and capacity for 10,000 more journeys on the river.’

On Twitter people seem more annoyed about the Guardian’s ‘obvious’ headline, ‘Tube strike to cause mass disruption across London.’ Some are excited about having an excuse to cycle and @therealmilesyuk is: ‘Secretly a bit looking forward to London anarchy caused by tube strike.’

Royal Maritime and Transport (RMT) and the Transport Salaried Staffs Association (TSSA), (maintenance and engineering staff) go on strike at 5pm today, and other RMT and TSSA Tube staff, ‘including station staff and some drivers’, begin at 9pm. They’re facing 800 job cuts because of Oyster card success – In a similar vein to supermarket staff who’ve been replaced by self-service check-outs and cinemas where you only need your bank card to pick up tickets.
I’m particularly interested in the words ‘some drivers.’ The strike is predominantly maintenance and engineering staff, so I’m thinking ‘most drivers’ will still be driving my tube trains.


In fact I’m willing to bet on it. I currently commute from Bristol to London. I get into Paddington then take the tube to work. At the end of the day, I take the tube back to Paddington. Miss the last train and I’m in a bit of a predicament.
I can’t ride a bike back (I can ride a bike…I just don’t have one). I haven’t worked out what buses to use. Oh, and it’s my brother’s birthday so I want to get his present to him. The BBC may think me an ‘irresponsible traveller.’ Let’s see if they’re right tomorrow.

Flail

He said I could call anytime
I was starting to fall for him
he can not reciprocate
it would get messy
I'd get hurt
I ran

Thank You.

It's been a tough year. In our last week at Bath Spa we were given a PowerPoint presentation on how many companies were shedding staff because of the recession. Pages of text crammed together. The text just company name after company name.
They told us the stigma attached to signing on no longer existed. Encouraged us to do it. Or leave the country.
I moved home. I volunteered for Oxjam for three months, which I'd recommend to anyone for meeting lovely people and getting experience while raising money for a good cause. I went to Copenhagen for the Climate Summit. I wrote 20,000 words or so of my novel. I put months of effort into applying for an internship I didn't get. I volunteered again for a community based project.
And then I started to get scared. To grow increasingly morose. My family were beginning to believe I'd become a loser. Many of my school friends were in the same boat. We sat in pubs in the rain (it may not have been raining but it adds effect) with furrowed brows, scraping the barrel for mutual support.
Then I applied for a dream job. Combining everything I love. Travel, writing, social media, video and photography. I went to an interview and gave everything I had.

And I got the job.

So I'd like to say thank you.

Thank you to my friends and family for helping me to keep my chin up. Thank you to the many kind people on twitter who have given me support over this year. To Ed. To the two train bloggers Jools and David. Thank you to my tutor Joe, travel writer extraordinaire. Thank you to my friends at Waterstone's past and present. To my old housemates. To my mother, with her boundless love and patience, in spite of being one of the most impatient people I know. To my sisters and brother, not least for helping me make videos. My father. To Kate, whose sofa has been a constant comfort and who has allowed me to become a secondary housemate. To my school friends (Lara, Roxy, Ju, thanks for the cameos). To my grandad, who commented on my application even though he doesn't know what social media is. Who told me I was the best.

To those of you who joined my Facebook groups: Hannah, Tom H, Holly T, Holly W, Leslie, Steve, Ellie, Carly, Katie M, Loralei, Jenny, Gina, Kyam, Laura J, Diego, Sam W, Ruby, Katie P, Tanja, Kimberley, Adam, Amy, Emily G, Emily M, Ella C, Cherry, Annie M, Fran, Becky, Steph, Maria, Mel, Jessi, Rachel B, Shaun, Ed, Greg, Antonia, Nathan, Kwojo, Alice C, Richard, Jalon, Lucy, Olivia, Katherine, Dave, Thea C, Henry, Charlene, Lara, Justin, Tom A, Lu (my wonderful mother), Ben, Ella P, Nieves, Elena, Thom, Daniel, Fikir, Roxanne, Jools, Sian, Kate, Natassia, Lee, Owen, Joe, Fred, James, Annie McG.

To everyone.

Thank you.

Don't Give Up.

I'm thinking about the representation of women in the media, again. There are several reasons. Firstly everyone who still has a television will probably have seen the Sure ad. It features Alexandra Burke, the winner of X-factor a couple of years ago. At the beginning of the advert I think she looks quite beautiful. Then they fire make-up all over her face and stick her on a stage and she looks far less beautiful. And I guess as their target audience I'm supposed to aspire to the latter Burke.
I went to a bar in Bath last night and saw swathes of women walking around in strapless dresses which only just skimmed the underneath of their buttocks. Nearly all of them were wearing impossibly high heels. I wondered at what point women collectively decided they needed to look like this. Would men cease to want to sleep with them if they wore something slightly more flattering? Of course not.
I think a sketch on That Mitchell and Webb Look - Women Sort Yourselves Out


highlights these issues pointedly.
And it's the way women talk about each other as well. In Mean Girls there's a brilliant scene where Tina Fey says to an audience of high school girls: 'you all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it OK for guys to call you sluts and whores.'
How many times have you heard Camilla Parker Bowles referred to as a horse? And what does Charles get? Big ears... If someone told me I had a big nose I'd say 'Yes?' because I do have a quite a prominent nose. But call me equine-features and you're insulting me as a person.
How many unattractive male actors and comedians can you name? And female?
Feminism has achieved a lot - but it's painful to hear people still taking the man-hating whinging woman perspective as its face. Feminism in the original sense is about striving for equality while celebrating differences. I'm still waiting for all women to be celebrated by all women and men for who they are, not what they look like.