Still, she had a heatwave in Cape Town to look forward to on her return! Or did she? A text from Mr Timberland intimated that she'd missed that, too. It was all most frustrating. Was she doomed to live out her days in a mild climate? Perhaps next time she should leave the umbrella at home - that way she might finally get to meet some snow, rather than just fantasizing about the stuff while defrosting her freezer.
The Cow sadly stuffed her brolly into her bag and tugged on the zip. Despite her best attempts, she had still not succeeded in tracking down the eluive UK winter, and her stay was about to expire. Like the unicorn, it was looking like a decidedly mythical beast, and she couldn't help wondering if the reports she'd read of deadly storms shortly before her arrival had been a rather feeble PR attempt to keep the myth alive.
Still, she had a heatwave in Cape Town to look forward to on her return! Or did she? A text from Mr Timberland intimated that she'd missed that, too. It was all most frustrating. Was she doomed to live out her days in a mild climate? Perhaps next time she should leave the umbrella at home - that way she might finally get to meet some snow, rather than just fantasizing about the stuff while defrosting her freezer.
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The Cape Town the Cow had left behind had been confused. Midsummer rain and a return to the Dark Ages had left many ambivalent about living in the best city in the world, and while the Cow did not share their Afropessimism, she suspected that Fate was preparing her for the northern midwinter she was about to face.
The searing sun scorched her eyeballs as she boarded the flight, before retiring to bequeath the stage to a comet more spectacular than Halley's. The lights faded as the plane soared off over the sea, towards winter. Arriving an hour early, the plane was eventually permitted to land, whereupon it taxied around for more than half an hour in search of parking - rather like a suburban housewife outside a mall. Thirteen degrees, and the sun hadn't even risen. This was winter? Catching her breath before her connecting flight, the Cow squinted out of the window of Gate 8, up into the jet-streak London sky, in search of the fearsome storms she'd heard about days earlier. The scoured blueness stared back. Like a knight in creaky armour outside a dragon's cave, the Cow waited nervously for the arrival of the dreaded UK winter. George Bush had a lot to answer for. She glanced down at the umbrella in her hand. Perhaps it would have been of greater use to Gramsci, left behind in Cape Town... Carnivorous Cow couldn't understand all the fuss about Big Brother. It led on five of the six tabloids she saw displayed in the local shop, indicating that someone, somewhere, actually cared. Though no one she spoked to claimed to be that Someone. Someone else, then.
But more than the specific incident, she couldn't understand the phenomenon. That people could sit and stare at a group of people they didn't know, didn't particularly care about either way, doing nothing at all, seemed a peculiar way to spend time. Particularly when there were so many other ways of doing the same thing without appearing quite so idiotic. Airports, for example, provided excellent opportunities for such observation. Armed with The Guardian and Costa's hot chocolate, one could sit and watch for hours - as many did, waiting for connecting flights, or conference buses. And airports, just like Big Brother, offered many opportunities to observe racism. "Ah," countered Bronstein, "but your airport observations are not the same as my airport observations! The random incidents of daily life you observe will feature different people, different spaces and times from the random incidents I observe! And while there may be common themes, framed by a guiding hypothesis, analytic work is required to position those sensibly into an argument of commenality. Big Brother doesn't require any such hard work. Switch on to Channel 4 and chances are you're watching the same people doing more of the same thing that your colleague was watching a few hours ago. You need only mention a name, and your colleagues will summon all of their remembered observations, and your common framework is established!" "Instant ethnography," snorted the Cow derisively. "Just add watcher." Bronstein chuckled. "Perhaps," he shrugged, "but I'd love to know whoever thought of naming such things 'reality tv'. If that's reality, they're clearly on the wrong drugs..." The Cow phlumphed down with a thud in her chair and sighed loudly. "Twice in one week!" she wailed.
Gramsci raised an eyebrow, prompting the Cow to continue. "On Wednesday, when the temperature must have been - oh, at least 37 - I had to go and get a raincoat. Where do you find winter coats in the middle of summer? Well, it turns out the coat shop is no longer just a coat shop, but they did have some coats, and I had to stand there in the sweltering heat trying them on, melting under the eyes of the other customers who were shopping for bikinis and school uniforms!" Gramsci shrugged. International travel tended to have such disadvantages, after all. "And then," continued the Cow, "yesterday! After it became apparent that life was not going to return, I had to go and shop for raincoats of the other kind!" Gramsci looked bemused. "More raincoats? Plus an umbrella?" he asked tentatively. "Condoms!" sighed the Cow. "When teenagers are being left to their own devices, with visiting girlfriends, one needs to ensure that Proper Preparations are in place!" Gramsci reeled. The thought of condom shopping with a teenager boggled the nerve ganglion that sufficed for his mind. "Did you know," asked the Cow, "how wide a selection you can now get, all within a single brand?" Gramsci didn't. He wasn't sure he wanted to, either. "It's as bad as everything else!" the Cow grumped. "Thousands of alternatives for shampoo. Millions of choices of pasta sauce. Gazillions of different kinds of tea!" Gramsci had heard the Cow raging about Consumer Society and The Myth of Choice a few times too many, already. He really didn't want to go there again. "So..." he asked nervously, "did you find something suitable?" The Cow rolled her eyes. "I suppose I should at least be thankful he didn't try them on on the shop to decide!" Nipples and blogs are not the only gendered items around, it seems. While taking her umbrella home (to pack for her trip to frozen climes), the Cow remembered having been told it was a "male" umbrella. Its crime, apparently, was to have a curved handle rather than a straight one.
"Now," she told Gramsci, "if someone had made assumptions about its sexual preference based on that observation, I might have rolled my eyeballs but understood, kind of. But its gender? I really don't get that." Gramsci looked bemused. The Cow continued: "I selected an umbrella with a curved handle simply because it struck me as more functional. You could hook the curved handle over things - the back of a chair, for example; or, if you were carrying it, you could hook that over your forearm while carrying something else in your hand. It just seemed to me far more sensible than the higher-maintenance, straight-handled variety which required single-minded focus and limited possibilities for multi-tasking. *That* was more male, I'd have said..." Gramsci, with eight forearms, couldn't quite see the attraction - but he humoured the Cow. "But functional' is synonymous with 'male', whereas females are, well, decorative," he interjected. "After all, there's a precedent. Male orgasms are essential for the perpetuation of the species, whereas the female version - if Cosmo is right and it does in fact exist - is merely an accessory." The Cow looked stunned. She knew a great many females who'd disagree vehemently, thinking the male orgasm irrelevant at best and downright inconvenient, in fact; whereas the female version was vital. But she knew Gramsci wouldn't be convinced by such opinions. "Oh really?" she sneered. "Interesting then that the same sources claim that male nipples, like female orgasms, are evolutionary accidents, entirely lacking in function and serving merely to attest to a common embryonic form." Gramsci backed off, wisely. Perhaps, like the Nipple Owner, he should relegate the male nipple to the realm of mythology, too... The Nipple Owner refused to reveal his sources, citing some provision in the Geneva Convention code for the humanitarian treatment of prisoners of war, or some such. The Cow wasn't really interested in that - she wanted to know who was reading her blog and finding the details of her private life so fascinating.
Or not-so-private life. 146 hits suggested that up to 146 people had read about, or glanced at, what she'd chosen to reveal, and of these, some were speculating intensely on The Significance Of The Ring. The Cow wished she had some dark secret to hint at: that she was a ringbearer, camped outside Isengard while the forces of Sauron massed in the distance; that it was a genie-summoning device, to put the world to rights; that it was Nimue's ring, to enslave Merlin while she extracted the secrets of his magic... "So what did you say?" asked Gramsci, curiously. The Cow batted her bovine eyelashes fetchingly. "Well, since I'm not the Pope, they won't buy that it's an ecclesiastical ring, but surely they'd be happy to know it was a purity ring?" "Did Father Christmas bring you that?" asked D, pouncing on the ring which twinkled brightly on the Cow's finger. The Cow shifted awkwardly - not just because the ring provided still further evidence of the growing disparity between the views she propounded while thumping tables, whisky glass in hand, and the manner in which she was choosing to exercise agency in her own life.
Rather, she was acutely conscious of the zero sum game in which such developments were located. Her excursion off to the world of sunset walks on beaches and dewy morning kisses was offset by the crumbling dreams of others, and D had been among those. The brighter the Cow's eyes had shone, the more the tears had gathered in D's eyes exposed to the harsh glare of reality with the melting of rose-tinted spectacles. And so the Cow was completely unsurprised when Gramsci showed her an article on News24 about the aftermath of the suicide season providing rich pickings for divorce lawyers. Gramsci supported the Cow's view to a point. "Given that the main reason cited for wanting divorce is infidelity, then yes, one relationship does seem to offset the end of another," he commented matter-of-factly, "but many others simply fell out of love, or got bored. And being forced to spend time with someone you're tired of can be extremely stressful in itself." The Cow reflected. Spending time was one thing, but she imagined that another stressor was spending money. Her heart bled for all those unwilling victims of their partners' shopping expeditions - both those pressured into going along, and those who had to unwrap the spoils of the expeditions and pretend to be pleased with yet another indicator of how badly their partner understood them and what they wanted. It surprised her that *any* couples survived the suicide season, come to think of it. Well... The ring twinkled guiltily on her finger. The Cow was astounded. Having blogged previously about the rush to the divorce lawyers that Father Christmas brought in the UK, she was intrigued to see an entirely different spin put on what appeared to be the same survey, this time by IOL.
Rather than simply stating the obvious - that people who're bored with each other will, when forced to spend more time together, feel the boredom more acutely and will be inclined to consider divorce - the IOL article revealed some rather more interesting stats. For example, one third of men were bored with their wives and marriages. Only a third? Perhaps the wives of the others were amateur pole dancers, she mused. 36% of men - the factor cited most frequently by men - were starved of sex in their marriages, while 44% of women cited their partner's infidelity as a contributing factor to marriage breakdown. Assuming roughly equal numbers of respondents, it would appear then that a significant number of men were getting enough marital sex, but still topping up elsewhere. Quality, rather than quantity, presumably being the reason, she muttered to Gramsci. "Ah!" noted Gramsci, "some sanity at last! The report notes that 80% of children report their home life being the same, or better, post divorce, with just a quarter wanting their parents back together! That puts paid to the notion of 'staying together for the children's sake' - about time someone thought to ask the children themselves!" With 10% of men citing "too much attention spent on the children", the Cow wondered how that all tied up. Still, if there was tying up, that might explain the 67% who didn't report boredom... The Cow read Dave's blog about social networking with interest. She'd recently managed to access her Facebook profile again, but hadn't been using it aggressively for anything much. And she'd yet to use Thomas's MySpace Editor to transform her virginal MySpace page into anything other than a shell.
Perhaps she'd shifted (gulp!) into the age zone which simply didn't maximise the opportunities such tools presented? The prospect was terrifying! But she had noticed that, second only to Mxit, MySpace seemed to have cornered the market as the teenage online equivalent of the pub, or - among pre-adolescents - the standing-around-like-stoners-outside-McDonalds-at-Cavendish gig. The only adults found there in sufficient numbers were chaperones and paedophiles, she suspected. But then, she wondered, where did the adults go? Well, given the sudden appearance on the reborn Litnet of Dating Buzz, she gathered that they too were getting technosavvy. Though the thought of accidentally picking up a professor of creative writing filled her with fear and trepidation... As well, then, that Gramsci showed her an article on News24 about online bounty hunting. It made her ever so grateful that she had no need to go there! For the record, Carnivprous Cow, alreddy attched, seeks studfamr without kids but lots of monney for fun times during daylifht hours with no baggage. Her picture is below: Carnivorous Cow was intrigued to note that she was not alone in finding the women's changing room at the gym an ordeal. An article on women24 proposed a taxonomy of the inhabitants of the women's changing room, but the Cow was disappointed in that this was, at best, far from comprehensive.
"Amateur ethnography!" she muttered dismissively to Gramsci, as she read it. "Nowhere does she mention the most terrifying experiences of all!" Gramsci looked up in horror. He knew his breakfast was about to be ruined and there was little he could do to stop it. "For a start," the Cow continued, "on arrival you have to fight your way between all the dripping pre-adolescents, who seem intent on bringing as much of the swimming pool back into the changing room with them as possible, and the locker doors that the previous users have not seen fit to close. And then, finding an empty locker, you have to negotiate some space on the bench close by to change - in amongst the towels, wardrobes, and cosmetic displays of the gym bunnies!" Gramsci tucked away the remains of his moth for later. He knew this was just the beginning. "And then, when you return, and want to shower - well, the grannies who devote an entire day to standing under the shower have used up all the hot water, and continue to reduce the water pressure to a mere dribble by having the tap open on max. Should you decide to persist with the cold trickle, you have to dodge the suspicious opaque liquid on the walls and keep reassuring yourself that, being a women's shower, it *must* be conditioner..." Gramsci could feel his anti-peristaltic waves starting. It was not a pleasant sensation. But the Cow continued. "And, once you emerge and start dressing, these women appear in your intimate space and start making admiring comments about your underclothing." She shuddered. "If I wanted to get that close to someone else's cellulite, I'd proposition them!" Gramsci was feeling decidedly unwell. This did not stop the Cow. "And then," she continued in a pained voice, "there are the children. Unleashed. Wondering around, staring very pointedly at the bodies of their victims. Clearly deprived of late night etv movies and internet porn!" She felt too weak to continue. "But the women24 article doesn't mention that at all!" "Perhaps you just go to the wrong gym?" suggested Gramsci. "After all, Kelly seemed to quite enjoy the gym!" But then, the Cow reminded him, Kelly did have a rather weird relationship with cloakrooms.... |
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