kestrel

I think I rather like Teresa Heinz Kerry

”My right to speak my mind, to have a voice, to be what some have called ‘opinionated’” — and here Heinz Kerry deployed killer air quotes — “is a right I deeply and profoundly cherish. My only hope is that, one day soon, women — who have all earned the right to their opinions — instead of being labeled opinionated, will be called smart or well-informed, just as men are.”

like brisingamen, we have signed up for an organic veggie box weekly. Ours is coming from Riverford, who had a stall at the Trowbridge festival, and seemed very clued up – all available to order via the web site, and so forth.

they also put the list of veggies coming on the site, and tomorrow’s delivery includes marrow and courgettes, neither of which I am hugely fond of.

I suppose I could stuff the marrow with minced lamb or something, and I guess I’ll sauté the courgettes with garlic, make a sauce with the cherry tomatoes, and serve with pasta.

all sorts of new and (possibly) exciting veggie dishes loom in my immediate future.

well, that was huge fun. perlmonger and I took ourselves off to the Trowbridge Village Pump Festival for the weekend.

we packed the Moose with camping gear, and departed on Thursday afternoon. and then …?

perlmonger has a house in Hell Hull, which has been rented to an old friend of his for some years.

this morning brought us a missive from Humberside Police, which has caused apoplexy chez Jordan. Addressed “Dear Landlord”, here are some salient points:

• we’re trying to collate a list of addresses of all private landlords in Hull
• my enquires have revealed that you may be a landlord of private accommodation – what bloody enquiries?
• I am also requesting the names and dates of birth of both current and future tenants that you may have – fuck right off
• Your personal details would not be entered or checked on any of our Police databases – oh yes. we believe that. we really do
• you may be thinking of the Data Protection Act – you bet we are. Especially with regard to where you got the information that we might be landlords …
• a proportion of criminals use private rented accommodation

– fancy that. Of course, the rest of them might live in council property, or have mortgages, or might just be homeless, you know?

of course, Humberside Police are desperately papering over the cracks right now, after the slight embarrassment over Huntley. But Pete’s known Gav for *years* – that’s why we are pleased to have him in the house. And I’m *damned* if we’ll deliver his details to the police.

this is a disgrace

I was listening to the Moral Maze on the consistently excellent Home Service last night (and aren’t we lucky to have it?). The subject was “designer babies”, a term I find irritating. Almost as irritating as “saviour babies”, which is another one.

I loathe and detest the idea of parents deliberately conceiving a child to in some way “mend” an existing child. I think that having to live with the burden of knowledge that you would not have been born had your sibling not required something from you must be dreadful. And what happens if it doesn’t work? – if the sibling still dies, and your birth has effectively been for nothing.

I don’t like genetic engineering. I don’t like test tube babies and stem cell research and 50-odd year old women giving birth and ovum harvesting and all that stuff. I think we are letting stuff out of Pandora’s box, and I wonder where it will end.

and I think it’s because our society now rejects illness and death. If you have a child with a genetic disease, that’s a tragedy. If you can’t have children and you want them, that’s a tragedy. I don’t mean to minimise or trivialise this, truly I don’t. I can’t begin to imagine how appalling it must be to find yourself in this situation.

but we don’t have a right to children, or to healthy children, and I think that our society is wrong to let people think that they do.

excellent obituary for Paul Foot in this week’s Eye.

especially the cartoon at the end :)

well, women’s emancipation is alive and well in UKIP …

Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom told Guardian Unlimited that maternity policy should be: “If you want to have a baby, you hand in your resignation and free up a job for another young lady.”

story from the Guardian

oh my

this is familiar

perlmonger has already blogged our weekend, which is a bit rich, really.

it was mostly spent working, although that’s not so bad as it sounds. I reckon that in twelve hours over the weekend, I got as much done as I would in four working days – no phone calls or e-mails to disturb me. I’m reskinning one of our big sites, and turning the last bits of it into database-y stuff, so it’s good to be able to get my head down and get on with it without interruptions. It went well.

Sainsburys had raw tiger prawns, so on Saturday night we cooked up a sauce of lemon grass poached in coconut milk, with liquidised fresh coriander, garlic, red chili, some shrimp paste, sugar and fish sauce. Simmer for half an hour, then add the prawns – cook for a few minutes, toss in some fresh basil leaves, and eat with lemon jasmine rice. Fab.

Sunday evening we wandered up to the Ashton Court Music Festival (the web site is absolutely useless) – seemed only fair, as it’s at the end of our village. It was a beautiful evening, and we mooched about buying bits of hippy tat and just watching the people. There was a wonderful variety of food stalls – we ate falafel and hummus in pitta, and later some cajun chips with garlic dip. But we could have chosen from japanese, thai, crepes, various organic vegetarian and vegan options, proper meat sossidges, and more that I cannot now remember, as well as the traditional English Fayre of dodgy burgers and fish ‘n’ chips. I was particularly pleased to find a stall with 16 different types of tea – sadly they had run out of Earl Grey, so I had to slum it with Lapsang (perlmonger had Darjeeling).

a lovely evening – even the portaloos were clean and chemically fragrant, and hardly any queuing. And it’s put me in the mood for our trip to the Trowbridge Village Pump Festival next weekend.

however, like perlmonger, I was both angry and depressed to see the mounds of rubbish strewn all over the site. There were copious dustbins, which were being emptied regularly, but people just seemed to drop their litter where they stood. I simply don’t understand it – do they have no concern about their environment? Would they do this in someone else’s garden? I wonder if it is just another British malaise, or is it a worldwide thing now?

I’m very sorry to learn that Paul Foot has died.

he was a campagining journalist without peer, and will be sorely missed.