Zigazig ah…There is a piece in today’s Conversation that caught my eye. It was headlined, “Tradwives: the women looking for a simpler past but grounded in the neoliberal present”.
This is about a new craze in America in which women get proper stroppy about their right to “put husband first” and to superglue themselves to kitchen sinks and cookers. Just like 1959.
Needless to say, the academics at the Conversation dived straight into an orgy of impenetrable feminist theory about underlying social, cultural, economic and political structures.
For one moment I thought about waking my wife to tell her all about the piece. Then reality kicked in and I abandoned the idea.
Brighton revisited… On my first visit to Brighton in a long while, the city looks very run down.
Or maybe it’s me that’s run down, with old age and a jaded viewpoint on what most of its citizens probably think is a bubbling, lively place.
Through my eyes it just looks depressing.
There was a genteel-looking woman in Hove Tesco’s loading her shopping into a Waitrose bag. Not a plastic bag. It was one of those last-for-life nylon ones that cost about £2.
We stopped for a cup of tea in Wetherspoons George Street. My wife Jane paid with the pound coins she had defaced with indelible ink, reading “I 🖤 EU”.
In the Six Nations rugby England were beating Scotland 3-0 at half time.
In one of the Wetherspoons booths six youngsters (20ish) were messing with their phones and drinking bottles of something called Hooch. They were 4 girls and two boys.
Brighton is no longer a comfortable place for me, which it was when we first came here to live in 1988.
We have both changed, but it is hard to see how much it is me and how much Brighton.
Either way, the visit was saddening. The meal we enjoyed later with old friends was a fantastic reminder of why I loved living in Brighton.
Funny now that one of our friends, who in my mind is still a young, rampant, joyous free spirit now has two hip replacements and is wearing a hearing aid in both ears.
Park life… Haywards Heath station has expanded beyond recognition. It now has one of those massive multi-level steel frame knock-up car parks.
BillyScraps 