mippy

I saw the Michael Jackson acquittal come in live on News 24. It was a drunken evening, me and a friend trying to slough off post-interview nerves with red wine in the World Service bar at Bush House. Gradually a few people round about became aware of something happening over on the huge TV screen, and as the doves were released one by one I sat on the leatherette sofa circling the dregs of my drink in the bottom of my glass while an Iranian journalist clutched my arm and said 'But he must be guilty! He must be!'

The sick jokes were floating round my office within ten minutes of me getting in. 'So you're not a fan, then?' 'Oh god no. I think he's a paedo.' 'He *was* acquitted - thats an unsubstantiated claim, I think you'll find.' 'Yeah, but he's guilty in my court [taps head]. I mean, he paid someone off...' I imagined the school playgrounds of the nation - kids not born during his last big album, too young to know that his last single was one of the great underrated singles of the past few years and only aware of him as a strange, tragic figure - resounding to the sounds of the same gags told with all the adult understanding of Timothy Gedge. Sky News reports "Now that Michael Jackson has died, what will happen to his 50 night run at the O2 is unclear." For the first time I remember, nobody bothers to look outside of our boardroom doors at the news ticker; there's one story and we've heard it already.

There was one person I thought of immediately when I woke up in the middle of the night and switched over the radio. An eccentric that was known to all where I grew up as Michael Jackson Man. I'd see him round town dressed in a homemade Dangerous-era outfit, like a chat-show guest impersonator that was never off duty. He would hang around the counter of Our Price asking them to play his idol's music in-store, and I heard rumours that if you asked him he would moonwalk for you. I never believed it until I spent the summer after my A-levels working as a cleaner: as I looked up from the bin I was emptying out of the window to the traffic island on Barbara Castle Way, a figure waited as though to cross the road, but as the lights changed, he moved to the other side and grabbed his crotch and went for it. When the lights changed, the next queue got a performance. He stayed there for three or four cycles of the lights; when I next looked up, he had finished for the day and gone home.

I've been reading this on the BBC website, which is interesting as it comes at the same time as the Abercrombie and Fitch discrimination case - one which has made the UK media aware of their somewhat stringent 'looks policy' that specifies not only shop floor dress but hair style, make-up and fingernail length. (FYI they have only one store in the UK.)

I remember my dad telling me that if I ever got pierced, tattooed or dyed my hair a 'daft colour' then I'd never get a job. (He also told me that when I graduated I could become a secretary and 'if you work really really hard, work your way up to being a PA.' Product of his era.) Whether this was a reflection of his own workplaces or how things have changed, I don't know, but this seems very much not the case now. I've worked in casual offices since 2005, and many people here have tattoos - some visible on arms and wrists - I know people in other offices with several piercings, and while my hair isn't punk red it's been a pretty bold colour for a long time. (I'd love to do it pillarbox red again, but what stops me is the mess it generates - I do have the odd external meeting but I don't think it would make an enormous amount of difference. When I met the company lawyer from a large energy company I deal with, he was wearing a grey sweatshirt, albeit with designer specs.)

If I worked in a more corporate environment, or one which meant I dealt with the public more often, then of course I would alter my dress to fit. Today I am wearing a vest top patterned with Peanuts characters and have been known to wear vintage frocks to work (including with a blue wig for our karaoke night) but when I have had meetings I made sure I was in a dress and boots, as this is what makes me feel a bit smarter and more presentable. However, reading about the Abercrombie case reminded me how dressing for your work environment is all very well, but I would be extremely reluctant to take a job where the compromises I had to make within my role extended to compromising my choices outside of my work life.

 I hated school uniform more than any other aspect of school - it was ill-fitting, horrible fabric, impractical, the socks gave me blisters and never came up high enough because of my big feet, and I didn't see why wearing hair bobbles in approved colours or not wearing a small lapel badge made me any better at learning things than doing so did - surely a dress code would be a more intelligent solution? Last year I went to a temp agency who told me that I would be expected to wear a suit to my filin''n'typin' assignments - fair enough, though I wasn't sure how I could procure a suit that fitted on £8 per hour. Then I was told that I would be expected to wear heels. Not smart shoes. Heels. As said, I have big feet, and getting heels in a size 9 is hard enough, and harder to wear them with tender feet that spent six weeks in a cast earlier that year. I was at a point where I would have been happy to wear a banana suit to tide me over while jobhunting - occasionally feeding and housing yourself needs to take precedent over woolly-minded principles - but it was another bang on the nail marked 'This Isn't What You Want Or Need'.

To be honest, officewear - as in, the version of it that most of the working population can afford - looks pretty awful on a lot of people. At least, it does on me - I'm not flattered by dress trousers, and not catered for by suit jackets or shirts - they either perch on the side of my chest or make me look like a cardboard box painted slate grey. What annoyed me more during my temping days, though, was the idea of Dress Down Friday. Let me put my Marxist hat on for a moment (it co-ordinates wonderfully with the orange piping on my vest) and say that this strikes me now as a bizarre panacea to soothe workplace annoyance at enforced polyester outfitting; The Man benevolently offering employees the chance to choose their own outfits for the day in the hope of increasing productivity. The worst temp job I ever had allowed this with a donation to charity - the charity being one which belonged to the company, essentially meaning one paid the company for the priviledge of wearing their own clothing to work or risk appearing a cheapskate. (I'm not against charity, of course, I'm just a little selective about who I give to - I would prefer to donate to groups that don't have as high a profile or a high-street presence, for example, and there are certain causes and agendas that I would prefer not to contribute toward.)

Anyway. This lass looks a bit nineties to me, don't you think? But ultimately, it's her choice, and as a grown-up, let it remain so.

A lot of podcast recommendations have come my way, and so I've been sampling a few...

The Definitive Word - I downloaded as this promised a discussion on the definitive top five sitcoms, which sounded like good meat for a funny discussion. I love Danny Baker's 606 as although it's a football show, it's not actually about football - it's just blokes ringing in with stupid stories tangentially related to the beautiful game and it's brilliant. However, this one sounded like some friends pretending to record a radio show on a C90 tape in someone's bedroom, and not in a good way. It seemed to be imitating the format that has spread through the 6Music schedules of late, that of a presenter getting his friend in to chat together between records, and that always comes across as a wee bit insular to me, and leaves me cold. Gave up on it when they started namechecking 80s celebrities for cheap yuks. Yawn.

The Flophouse - I don't get to see movies as much as I should, but really, for a podcast ripping on bad films all you really need is to have seen the trailer for Bride Wars thirty-seven times as I have done. They had a guest member of the team for this episode so it may be different when I listen again, but it was funny, engaging, clever-silly and the right side of laddish, and crucially for any snark-based media, showed they had a genuine love for their subject matter and treated excoriating the awful as a public service.

You Look Nice Today - Described on Metafilter as "the hardest sell as it's the hardest to describe. Three guys pretending that the very funny things that they are saying are not funny at all, are a very serious matter and a potentially lucrative business venture? I guess that's a start." I wasn't feeling this at all. The sketch format it had seemed more appealing to me than the unstructured bantering of The Definitive Word, but I wasn't getting it. It reminded me oddly of Then We Came To The End, which didn't totally do it for me either. I suppose the title 'A journal of emotional hygiene' had me expecting something very spoofy, along the lines of Neil Mullarkey's L Vaughan Spencer.

Craftlit - This was billed as a podcast for crafters who like books. Just up my alley, no? But while the presenter was very engaging, the books (taken from an external site) were recorded with poor quality audio and I was really looking for complete stories rather than chunks. I preferred The Bill in half-hour format - same principle to my audio stories.

Yet to try:
Answer Me This!
Jordan Jesse Go
Bad at Sports
Cast On (short stories - aimed at knitters, but looks like the kind of thing I can listen to whilst sewing)
le show
Wait Wait...Don't Tell me
Stuff Mom Never Told You
This American Life
WFMU's The Best Show
WNYC's Radio Lab
A Way With Words
Widely Ranging Interests
The 40 Year Old Boy (though am worried it is an Overdose of Whimsy)

What was your favourite ice-cream as a child?

What's your favourite ice-cream now?

Favourite ice-cream based chocolate bar spin-off?

What do you remember enjoying as a child that you'd never eat now?

'To a Fat Lady Seen From the Train'

O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
     Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
When the grass is soft as the breast of doves
    And shivering sweet to the touch?
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
    Missing so much and so much?

    -- Frances Cornford
\
I've been intrigued by this poem ever since I was a child. Then, it held the obvious mystery of who this woman 
was, why indeed she walked through the field in gloves (and this was when I was too young to know that in 
the past, gloves were habitually worn by women rather than just popped on to keep hands warm in the winter - I
read fiction according to my own presumptions and ideas and rearranged it to fit what I knew). 

Now, I wonder about the narrator of the poem. Who is she? Is she black, which mentioning the woman;s whiteness makes me wonder, or 
does she have the unnatural pallor of someone who never walks in the field?
Where is she going on the train? And why does she presume so much - she doesn't know that nobody loves the woman 
seen from the train, nor that her walk through the fields is making her miss out on anything - while the narrator
is shut in the carriage of a train, the fat white woman is outside in the fields and touching the soft grass against
her skin as she walks. 

Perhaps if I knew what was going on, I wouldn't like the poem quite so much.