Sexual healing

If the name of the column is anything to go by, this is what Pamela Stephenson Connolly claims to be offering to the sexually perturbed and confused. And I think we can all agree that if you find yourself writing into the Guardian to get advice about your sex life, the confusion factor is pretty fucking high. Here's an example:

"My boyfriend is an outgoing type, always the life of the party. Even when we're alone he wants to joke around. I love him, and sex with him is satisfying when we finish what we start. However, when we're making love he is easily distracted. It could be the sound of someone moving around in the next flat, or noise outside, but pretty soon he loses his erection. Is this normal? How can I keep his mind on the job?"

It may be prejudice on my part but her response struck me as being so Californian:

"It is "normal" - for someone whose brain is wired in such a way that paying attention to one thing at a time is challenging. Your boyfriend may have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), meaning that he has difficulty filtering out sounds and other stimuli that are competing for his attention.

Don't take it personally.

You should suggest he be evaluated and treated for ADHD, while remembering that he is probably a bright and creative person, who could do with your help in staying on-task."

Dunno about healing but this advice is certainly soothing. If Mr and Mrs Connolly had opted for Glasgow instead of LA, I like to think her advice might go something like this:

"Unless bits of it actually fall on me, the fucking ceiling collapsing wouldn't distract me from 'staying on-task', ok? Given this is, as far as I can gather, the way of all flesh, you really should accept that yer boyfriend just ain't that interested. I suggest you get him tested for Shagging Someone Else Syndrome (SSES).

Do take it personally."

Out on the wiley, windy moors...

We'd roll and fall in green.
You had a temper like my jealousy:
Too hot, too greedy.
How could you leave me,
When I needed to possess you?
I hated you. I loved you, too.

Bad dreams in the night.
They told me I was going to lose the fight,
Leave behind my wuthering, wuthering
Wuthering Heights.

Heathcliff, it's me--Cathy.
Come home. I'm so cold!
Let me in-a-your window.

Heathcliff, it's me--Cathy.
Come home. I'm so cold!
Let me in-a-your window.

Ooh, it gets dark! It gets lonely,
On the other side from you.
I pine a lot. I find the lot
Falls through without you.
I'm coming back, love.
Cruel Heathcliff, my one dream,
My only master.



Honestly!

Via

Raintown blues

I have to say that I've been enormously impressed with the attention that the forthcoming by-election in Glasgow East has been getting.

The constituents of Glasgow East are much like the rest of us except they have had rather more disadvantages to put up with. I could elaborate but I wouldn't want this to obfuscate what I consider the most obvious, glaring difference: they have less money.

This, it goes without saying, is a much too economistic and mundane explanation for the Tories who prefer a more Victorian narrative:

"David Cameron acknowledged his debt to Iain Duncan Smith as he stood in a church in the East End of Glasgow to deliver his address on personal morality. Mr Duncan Smith, in turn, credits the deprivation he found on the estates of Gallowgate for inspiring his 'modern, compassionate Conservatism'."

"Modern, compassionate Conservatism", it would seem, is Samuel Smiles with more smiles. I think we're supposed to find it heart-warming that Glasgow inspired this little 'crusade':

"Of course, circumstances — where you are born, your neighbourhood, your school and the choices your parents make — have a huge impact. But social problems are often the consequence of the choices people make."

So obviously the east end of Glasgow is so fucked up because there is a larger proportion of the population there who have a greater marginal propensity to make bad life-style decisions than elsewhere.

Hitherto, I had been prepared to attribute a greater weight to social circumstances in forming character - but if we take Cameron at his word, I feel we can do no other than to draw the following conclusion: it is not by accident of birth and upbringing that David Cameron is a complete wank - it has been a conscious choice on his part.

My own view is that this has been both a foolish choice, and an aesthetically disastrous one - but my point is that what I now understand to have been a lifestyle choice on his part to be a complete wank does not appear to have resulted in him living in poverty in the east end of Glasgow.

Drifted off from the point, which was this: the single most significant thing about this by-election is that anyone's paying attention at all. I love these pundits pontificating about whether a 'seismic change' is taking place in British electoral politics. "Not yet", so many of them say earnestly, with authority. No-one is on hand to point out that the "seismic shift" has already happened. There are indicators aplenty but here's just two that people really should pay more attention to:

1) Labour has lost control of Scotland. Pundits, politicians, and the tuned into the funky vibe bloggers seem not, on the whole, to have understood the significance of this.

2) It is not a question of whether Labour can hold Glasgow East - it is the fact that the outcome is seriously considered as uncertain that is the significant thing. I suspect that Labour will hold this seat but that there's the prospect of a real contest means that there is no such thing as a safe Labour seat anywhere in Britain.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls...

On schools and cops

Ed Balls strikes me as the sort of person my son's mother dismisses under the label "macho dick-head":

"Schools judged to be either "coasting" on their good results, or doing too little to reverse poor performance, will face the threat of direct intervention from central government."

One day - although I suspect no time soon - the penny's going to drop and people are going to realise that central government intervention is the problem rather than the solution.

"Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, outlined new powers yesterday to enable his department to force local authorities to issue both successful and failing schools with a formal warning notice, giving them 15 days to make improvements or be taken over."

That's 15 days people. What does he imagine any school can do about anything in 15 days - even under the threat of being invaded? There's more lunacy:

"In a separate move, Mr Balls said that schools would be made to collect and publish records of children's lifestyles, through a new set of "wellbeing indicators", likely to include healthy eating, participation in sport and attendance."

You'd find it sinister if you didn't understand that Mr Balls is the spokesman for a fading regime that can't even control its own ministers - never mind its own party - never mind education in this country.

___________


This is completely unrelated but did you know that Glasgow police force was the oldest in Britain? I didn't - and neither did the Met when they claimed to be "the oldest police service in the world".

Glasgow and the Gaza strip

We're used to politicians being blamed, or taking credit for, things that are beyond their control but Angus Robertson has taken this pointless ritual to new levels of absurdity:

"A furious row has broken out over claims that the Scottish Nationalists compared an impoverished area of Glasgow hosting a crucial by-election to the Gaza Strip.

Labour lambasted Angus Robertson, the SNP leader at Westminster, for arguing that life expectancy in Glasgow East is lower than in the war torn territory in the Middle East.

He suggested the legacy of decades of Labour rule is that men in the constituency live on average four years less than those in the in the Palestinian territory, which in March was subjected to air strikes."

Govan - a quaint fishing village on the Clyde - has been won twice by the SNP. As a consequence, life-expectancy is ten years higher than the national average, infant mortality is a fraction of that for Glasgow as a whole, and the wombs of Govan women are significantly more fertile than in the rest of the country.

Via: Will