Optimism

Right, so I’m just going to try something here. Get ready, cause you may be about to experience something you have never encountered on this blog before: ABSOLUTE, UNADULTERATED, UPBEAT ENTHUSIASM.

Wheyyyyy.

Don’t worry if that bowled you over, I’ll be back to my usual cynical self soon. An open love letter to Radiohead and a piece called ‘Pissing with the Door Open’ are just a couple of posts in the Siobhan’s Notebook pipeline. But first, I want to tell you all about my new role as a Youth Ambassador for ONE.org. For now, I’m putting on my serious, persuasive, saving-the-world hat (which interestingly fits nicely around my feminist hat – the two make a great ensemble!), and am temporarily striking the words ‘pants’ ‘poo’ and ‘fanny’ from my vocabulary. (Don't stop reading though!)

ONE are an international campaign charity working to influence policy on agriculture, health, business transparency and a variety of other causes relevant to developing countries. All their work is directed at achieving ONE goal: eradicating extreme poverty.

If that sounds like a far off dream, a pie in the sky, a ridiculous flight of fancy, then I have some good news for you. It’s totally doable. IN OUR LIFETIMES.

‘SHUT THE FRONT DOOR’ I hear your cry!

‘Shan’t!’ I gleefully respond, ‘It’s all completely true. Get ready for some truth bombs, imma BLOW YOUR MIND.’

In my short and privileged lifespan, the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide has been cut in half. If we can keep up the amazing progress already being made, keep investing in nutrition programmes, infrastructure and smart aid for the world’s poorest nations, extreme poverty could be virtually eradicated by 2030. 

Think of the immensity of that statement. No families having to survive on under $1.25 a day. No more people working long days to earn less than a pound. No babies born into extreme poverty. Before I’m 40.  

The job of ONEs Youth Ambassadors is to urge the EU to play its part in making this amazing goal a reality. The EU as a whole is the world’s biggest donor of aid, and we want to remind all the newly elected MEPs of the vital role they are playing in global development. We want as many candidates as possible to sign our #ONEVOTE2014 pledge, encouraging them to do their bit to support the world’s poorest countries in their 5 year term. It involves protecting aid budgets and working to increase business transparency and fight phantom firms, which divert much needed money away from developing countries as well as the UK.

3 London MEP candidates signing our pledge on launch day!

I can’t remember when I first became aware of ONE. The earliest marker in my memory is starting uni 4 years ago, and having to explain to every new person who added me on facebook exactly why my profile photo was of an angry, fist shaking baby.

I really got engaged with what ONE are doing two years later, when I attended the ONEshot Student Conference. It was very exciting. I even wrote a guest-blog about it. 

I don’t study international relations. I often saw development as a drastically complex mire, something I would never deign to know about or influence opinion on. The conference, full of passionate aid workers and SOAS students, did not alleviate this anxiety, this feeling of fraudulence. But ONE throwaway comment on the way the UK allocates its aid budget really stuck with me, and changed my outlook. A ONEshot speaker pointed out to us that the UKs aid expenditure in Helmand Province was disproportionately high, and that the reason for it was simple politics: Every time David Cameron made visits to UK troops, he needed to be bringer of good news. So with every Ministerial trip to Helmand, the aid allocation increased.

Aid is a big word, fraught with various meanings and connotations. And it is complex, so much more complex than I will ever understand. But the image of David Cameron reshuffling aid money to fit his upcoming speeches made me realize that although progress in development is influenced by a vast number of complicated issues, that doesn’t mean UK policy always is. Development policy appeared to me at that moment to be just as much at the whim of party politics as pasty tax. And I suddenly felt much more confident getting involved, and felt like I had a right to my opinion. Politicians need to be kept on track. 

With this in mind, I know words like ‘development’ and ‘poverty’ can seem vast and intimidating. But if you feel like this is keeping you out of the debate, or have the impression that this means you can’t make a difference, I urge you to get interested, and get involved. The issues surrounding poverty levels in developing countries and how they can be alleviated is a topic of great interest to me, and I’m learning more all the time. But sometimes getting started is as simple as agreeing with the notion that no one should have to live in poverty.

I’ve listed five things you can do right now to get involved and have your say, regardless of how qualified you feel to say it:

1) Sign and share the ONEVote2014 petition to get fighting extreme poverty on the agenda at this year’s EU elections: http://act.one.org/sign/one_vote_2014

2) Or this petition, telling European Leaders to fight phantom firms: http://act.one.org/sign/crack_down_on_phantom_firms/

3) Join the ONE Campaign. Remember, they want your voice, not your money: http://www.one.org/international/take-action/dashboard/

4) Share this, and various other Youth Ambassador Blogs. Don’t forget to hashtag! #ONEVOTE2014: http://thechangegame.wordpress.com/

http://www.sasaeniapaul.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/discordant-tunes-of-poverty-and.html

http://danalanclark.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/why-i-became-a-youth-ambassador-part-one-of-three/

5) Write your own! Get involved, get tweeting, get writing, get sharing. The more noise we make, the more important our leaders will realise it is to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030.

So that’s my enthusiastic, optimistic blog post. I hope you found it as reasonable and rational as usual. As Alain de Botton said, ‘Cynics are just idealists with awkwardly high standards’. Well this time, I really feel my standards are achievable. And here’s my crazed optimistic grin to prove it. I’m taking this to the top.

Back To School

Would you look at that. It’s been a WHOLE YEAR since I started my blog! Happy Birthday Blog! It’s nice to think that this little site has now kind of tracked an entire year of my life. And an exciting year at that. With this in mind, I’m going to try and update it more often, so I have more to look back on when I’m old and boring and grey.

Starting blog-year 2 off with a BANG:

It’s 9.30 on a Sunday night. I’m curled up in bed wondering whether to finish reading Henry VI, or to watch a tv programme before I go to bed. If I decide to watch something, I’ll have to choose between the new Attenborough show about the rise of vertebrates, and the documentary about giant animals with Steve Backshall…

Cosy as I am, I can’t pretend this how I imagined I would be spending the night before my first day back at university. My overriding memories from first and second year consist mainly of painting my face like various different animals, and after a few beers roaring ferociously at anyone I met. Apart from that time I dressed up as a zebra…

Today I have divided a 100 page course-pack into sections and bound each one neatly with string, eaten 1 malteasers bar and half a bag of chocolate eclairs, read and made notes on a middle English York Mystery Play, done lots of ambigious ‘computer stuff’, and decided that strumming without a plectrum definitely sounds better when playing ‘Other Side of the World’ on guitar. Oh, and I walked to the postbox. It’s at the bottom of my road.

Had I, all that time ago back in August, followed some crazy reckless abandon and refused to register to come back for my final year of uni, my day would probably have gone very differently. I would have gone to work for the seventh day of the week and run around behind a bar for 6 hours. Then, due to my living quarters being slightly cramped, probably opted to spend the evening in another pub before skipping tipsily home around 11 and setting my alarm for 7.30 to get up for job number 2 on Monday morning. It’s a slightly different lifestyle. I would have eaten less food, and spoken to more people. I would also have read less, and played less music. I would have gone further than the end of my road. Rather than walking to the postbox, I would probably have looked guiltily in passing at a pile of letters and papers yet to be written on and sorted out.

When you come home from work and turn on the tv, you don’t have a constant nagging feeling that you should be doing something else. Here, with two dissertations to write and over 40 Shakespeare texts to cover in 20 weeks, there’s always something else I could be doing. I don’t know which I prefer. They say that spending a year out is a good thing to do, because it makes you appreciate education more. I'm not sure working has made me appreciate education more, but it may have made me appreciate midday starts and student discounts more. I can’t help wondering how many of the things my lecturers say next week will strike me as impractical academic bullshit.  

That said, did you know that H.D. was sent from London to Austria and referred to Sigmund Freud in 1933 due to her increasing paranoia about the Nazis and Adolf Hitler? I found that out this week. Some of the politicians at the time might have benefited from the same condition! I can feel I’m getting my geek on already.

My first seminar is tomorrow. Having been away for a year, it’s unlikely I will know anybody in it. I also have my first meeting back at the uni newspaper tomorrow, and a trial shift in a local bar next week. Give it a month or so and hopefully I will have got myself a nice (but probably reasonably unstable) balance of the two. 

Mistakes.

Today, most of the people I started university with got their final degree classifications (well done everyone!) and I had a job interview. So the buzzword for the day really has been all about careers and lives and like ... the future and stuff. You know, that massive dark cloud of uncertainty, fear and despair hanging over my entire generation?

It got me thinking about what makes a good career, a good life, and whether there is a formula for success.

Career-wise, whenever successful people and celebrities are interviewed on TV about their careers, they always seem to say that they just fell into it. ‘Lucky bastards’ I used to wail in my head. ‘Don’t be so modest; stop pretending that everything in your life was so unexpected. Give me the key, the EXACT WAY you got your EXACT LIFE.’ These days I tend to think that they were probably telling the truth. Few people do exactly what they wanted to do when they were in school. I also think that it’s a good thing there isn’t a key, because I don’t really want to be Sporty Spice any more. My 9 year old self could have fast-tracked me on to X-Factor by now … ew. 

This last year, things didn’t turn out the way I had planned. All my deliberation and reasoning around my decision to leave New York circled around the idea of thinking about not just what I want now, but what is best in the LONG RUN. Whether or not in 10 years’ time, I would look back and think that I was stupid to leave.

But I’m not sure that this is necessarily the right way to look at things. The more time that passes since I left, the smaller the event seems. As more stuff happens, that decision becomes less and less relevant to my life. I think in general, in the actual ‘long run’, things matter less. Getting over the initial hurdle of rearranging your life is a big deal, but I reckon that individual moments are, as a rule, rather insignificant in our lives. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t scrutinize and think long and hard about big decisions that we make. -Actually, yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. If it’s the best move at the time, worrying about whether it will still be the best move in ten years’ time is silly, because it ten years’ time it will be in the past. I'm so bored of second guessing my 30 year old self. That’s why left New York. And why I got a tattoo.

It’s pretty much a standard assumption that last year I made a ‘mistake’, giving up an exciting and important career opportunity. My decision has been one I’ve never publicly justified, and one I don’t defend a lot even in private. I think I need to, because I don’t regret it and I really don’t want people to think that I do, or to feel sorry for me.

I think mistakes (if you want to call them that. Although I prefer the term 'detours') are great. They make life more interesting, they make you more interesting, and they keep you on your toes. I hope I make many more. Working consistently within the realms of the reasonable, safe and practical can, I suspect, lead to more regret than a few unexpected debts or compromised living situations. I refuse to be submissive to some fictional, world-weary middle aged version of myself. One who everyone seems to be trying to convince me will be disapproving and regretful of all the irresponsible actions I make that stop me getting a respectable career. People have been warning me of her inevitable arrival since I first sat in a GCSE classroom. At what point do I begin to turn into this killjoy future-me? Probably about the same time I start answering to her.

I suppose what I’m saying is, in the wake of this imposing dark cloud, full of unemployment statistics, living wage figures, pay gaps and Ian Duncan Smith, I refuse to go corporate out of fear. 

The Literary Review Just Got Exciting!

Well, it actually has been for the past 20 years, I just didn’t know. 



As a student of English literature, I’m no stranger to the Literary Review. It’s a place I regularly find myself trawling through, looking to impress my tutors with up to date criticism. I hope they might be duped into thinking that my fantastically relevant reference articles are pieces I merely happened across while eagerly flicking through my monthly subscription, rather than the product of a few haphazard taps of my keyboard (I don’t even have to type it all out any more - my igoogle page remembers my frequent and frantic search on the eve of every deadline).

But oh, how I have missed out in only giving this magazine the minutest fraction of my attention! I have been so dismissive and unappreciative. Blinkered by my narrow search criteria, driven solely by my quest for a precise result. And consequentially I have denied myself the world of pleasures available to those aware of all that this esteemed and valuable publication has to offer.

Did you know they do a BAD SEX AWARDS!?!


That’s the problem with us students. We’re only after one thing. Once we have our references we just toss the magazine aside, not taking the time to discover all its other beautiful aspects. Philistines.

It saddens me when I think about all the years of my life I’ve spent, unaware of the amazing invention that is The Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award. I feel similar to how I imagine the second dude to leave Plato’s cave felt. After continuing to resolutely face the cave wall, calling the first guy who climbed out a wally, telling him to stop talking nonsense, only using him to bring back that outside-chicken he got that somehow tasted so much better than shadow-chicken, I’ve finally seen the light. And I now know that I was the real wally. I’m newly enlightened, and embarrassed that I wasted so much time in the dark eating ghost meat.

Every year the Review holds a lush ceremony in London, where one deserving author (if they are brave enough to attend) is presented with a statuette of a naked woman splayed out across the pages of a book, and the title of ‘author of the worst description of a sex scene in a novel’. The award excludes erotic and pornographic fiction (so not a whiff of Christian Grey anywhere near this year’s shortlist). What they are looking for is ‘bad sex in good books’ (so again, Christian Grey nowhere in sight). The magazine’s website explains that the award is designed to draw attention to ‘crude, badly written, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description’, a common crime in contemporary novels, according this entertaining and informative video.

The Review are seeking in their own way to improve the standard of modern fictional sexy encounters by highlighting authors’ awkward metaphors and evasive similes; hopefully discouraging such badly written inclusions in future. The founder of the award, former editor of the Literary Review Auberon Waugh, started it due to his belief that publishers encouraged the inclusion of sexual content to boost novels’ sales.

On a serious note, this is an awesome cause: eliminating poor obligatory sexual content, and working towards making sure modern novels retain a beautiful literary standard. I don’t want sex scenes to become shoddy laboured requisites in every novel, be they crime, historical, or that Alan Bennett one about books and the Queen. I don’t want to become desensitised to the danger and excitement of a good sex scene by recurring dodgy content. I really like that there’s a (sort of) quality control working to stop rubbish sex scenes being brushed over by editors and publishers, due, I can only assume, to some sort of universal sub-conscious recognition that sex is always crude, and therefore can be crudely described, even in a really good book. Sex can’t just be prudishly accepted by authors and critics as resident in the land of awkward, embarrassed euphemism and unhelpful metaphor, not requiring the same powerful, expressive language one would use for describing deep seated emotion or a picturesque landscape.

On a less serious note, it’s also REALLY REALLY FUNNY. My favourite example is from 2010 winner, Rowan Somerville’s The Shape of Her:

'Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her' 

Is it just me who found that more reminiscent of Silence of the Lambs than of anything remotely sexual?

This award is without a doubt my best discovery of 2012. It’s light-hearted, entertaining, and is simultaneously allowing us to laugh out loud at awkward and far-fetched descriptions of sex, while keeping sacred our ability to have a little naughty giggle at the good stuff too.

Here’s some extracts from this year’s shortlist (hee hee hee!) I don’t know about you girls, but no part of my body is a bakewell pudding, or a light-sensitive manual camera. And jockeys don’t (to my knowledge) go inside saddles (pelvic or otherwise). And my Lady Jane is definitely nothing like a chrysanthemum (though I will admit my plant knowledge is pretty shaky, and I had to do a quick google image search just to check). Enjoy! 

The Quiddity of Will Self, Sam Mills

'Down, down, on to the eschatological bed. Pages chafed me; my blood wept onto them. My cheek nestled against the scratch of paper. My cock was barely a ghost, but I did not suffer panic' 

Noughties, Ben Masters

'We got up from the chair and she led me to her elfin grot, getting amongst the pillows and cool sheets. We trawled each other's bodies for every inch of history'

Back to Blood, Tom Wolfe

'Now his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle, riding, riding, riding, and she was eagerly swallowing it swallowing it swallowing it with the saddle's own lips and maw — all this without a word' 

Rare Earth, Paul Mason

'He began thrusting wildly in the general direction of her chrysanthemum, but missing — his paunchy frame shuddering with the effort of remaining rigid and upside down'

The Yips, Nicola Barker

'She smells of almonds, like a plump Bakewell pudding; and he is the spoon, the whipped cream, the helpless dollop of warm custard'

Infrared, Nancy Huston

'This is when I take my picture, from deep inside the loving. The Canon is part of my body. I myself am the ultrasensitive film — capturing invisible reality, capturing heat' 

The Divine Comedy, Craig Raine

'And he came. Like a wubbering springboard. His ejaculate jumped the length of her arm. Eight diminishing gouts. The first too high for her to lick. Right on the shoulder'

The Adventuress: The Irresistible Rise of Miss Cath Fox, Nicholas Coleridge

'In seconds the duke had lowered his trousers and boxers and positioned himself across a leather steamer trunk, emblazoned with the royal arms of Hohenzollern Castle. 'Give me no quarter,' he commanded. 'Lay it on with all your might.' 

So there you go. You may have learnt nothing new about sex, but I personally was not previously familiar with the word ‘wubbering'. The winner will be announced on the 4th of December!

My Summer in Lists

In the interest of providing some background to stuff to come, I thought I would begin by briefly bringing you all up to speed on the last couple of months through the medium of LISTS.

WHERE I HAVE BEEN IN THE LAST FOUR MONTHS

1)      Birmingham, UK

2)      St Albans, UK

3)      East Williamsburg, BROOKLYN

4)      Harlem, MANHATTAN

5)      Bushwick, BROOKLYN

6)      Bed-Stuy, BROOKLYN

7)      Back to Bushwick

(Pheew!)

WHAT I HAVE DONE IN THE LAST FOUR MONTHS

1)      Sat my second year university exams

2)      Passed my second year university exams

3)      Said many a goodbye (tearier and more slurred than I had perhaps hoped for)

4)      Made many and introduction

5)      Been made to leave my first NY apartment by my once Vegas bouncer ex-karate champion landlord

6)      Seen the Manhattan skyline light up the night from many a Brooklyn roof.

7)      Spat water/thrown cans/paper off many a Brooklyn roof

8)      Stuck my head over the edge of many a Brooklyn roof

9)      Run away from a pitbull

10)   Started work at BritishAmerican Business’ snazzy offices on the 20^th floor of a midtown building

11)   Had my laptop, camera, ipod and headphones stolen

12)   Got the subway into town and got sushi at 2am

13)   Found a new apartment which is nice and the landlord seems to be allowing me to stay (touch wood)

14)   Stood on a fire escape and sung Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, the Beatles and Frank Turner loudly into the Brooklyn night, because England keeps my bones. (And we have the best music).

WHAT I HAVE LEARNT IN THE LAST FOUR MONTHS

1)      I have the most fantastic friends in the world.
I mean, I can only really say that with authority over the bits that I’ve travelled. But from ET to GMT, they’re the best.

2)      Despite having a ‘postal service’, American’s don’t understand the noun ‘post’. You can post some mail, but mail some post and they won’t have a clue what you just did.

3)      I will never, ever be ‘street’

4)      Having a padlock on your bag is of no use if you don’t put your valuables in it

5)      Having nothing of value is strangely liberating

6)      I will always need my mummy. 

THINGS I DIDN’T KNOW I WOULD MISS FOUR MONTHS AGO

1)      Cadbury chocolate.
I never bought the stuff, but it was nice seeing it there in the shops. Hersheys looks grim.

2)      Spray deodorant.
It exists, but just doesn’t seem to be a very big thing. There’s not much of it in the shops. Apparently hygiene products in a spray can is weird over here,  but cheese? Perfectly usual.

3)      English misery.
People here are positive, friendly, confident and enthusiastic all the time.
It’s fucking tiring. A bit of cynicism and negativity wouldn’t go amiss, dudes, you're making me uncomfortable.

THINGS I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE ACHIEVED WHEN I LEAVE

1)      Be able to speak Spanish

2)      Be able to play the guitar

3)      Be able to pull off wearing a cap