I'm on the newly refurbished Northern Line platform at Tottenham Court Road. I use the word refurbished with a pinch of salt. The walls are barely plastered and the whole place looks distinctly unfinished. It's either some form of shabby-industrial-chic statement, or the money/ time ran out and this was the best they could do!
Another day spent in the bowels of BBC Television Centre. I haven't seen anything like enough daylight. I've also eaten rather too much canteen food, so feel bloated and tired.
Matt's show was brilliant tonight. The guests were Louis Walsh, Jermaine Greer and Clive Anderson, and the humour bubbled up really nicely without anyone trying too hard. All the guests came across as genuinely nice people, so I was a little disappointed to be slightly snubbed by Professor Greer afterwards.
She'd announced to the audience that she lived on Junction 9 of the M11, which is just north of Thaxted, so afterwards I sidled over, announced that I'd been doing autocue, and mentioned that my parents lived in Thaxted. "Oh" she said, imagining, I'm sure, that I'd crawled out from a slimy pit and was going to request her autograph. Her tone was so dismissive that I instantly felt ashamed and started to burble. "Is that close to you?" I asked. She looked over my shoulder, "Thaxted is south" she said, "at junction 8." "Yes" I said, "but it can't be that far away. Which village are you in?" There was a stunned silence, like I'd just asked for her age, followed by her bra size. I felt even sillier and burbled on... "you must live near Saffron Walden, or Duxford, or something like that?" "Something like that" she said, and nodded and moved on to the man behind me, painting a glorious smile across her face because he was a somebody, and to her, I was a nobody. Quite why she didn't have enough charm to say, "isn't Thaxted beautiful" or ask if I'd grown up in the area, I've no idea.
I hope one day that someone will make her feel as silly as she made me feel.
December 1st, 1661 was a Sunday, and Pepys entertained an old university friend whilst Elizabeth went to church. They ate Braun and "rare" gherkins, drank a great deal of wine and gossiped about politics. Pepys referred to the bad treatment of the "poor cavillers" during the interregnum. Turn coat!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Germaine Greer shouldn't be asked to appear on chat shows. She's horrendously transphobic - in a very serious and damaging way. She actually went out of her way to hunt down trans women and publically 'out' them. I find it shocking and deeply repugnant. Read this small note on the matter:
ReplyDelete"Introductory note by Lynn Conway:
Germaine Greer is notorious among trans women as one of the feminist vigilantes who went on an anti-transsexual rampage in the 1980's and 1990's. Along with feminist academic Janice Raymond, author of the notorious book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, Greer went on a witch-hunt to find and 'out' stealthy postop women.
Raymond and Greer (and their ideological followers) especially targeted trans women who had successfully obtained good employment. They went after these women without remorse, in efforts to publicly defame them, cost them their livelihoods, and force them into social marginalization (which Raymond and Greer apparently thought they deserved).
Physicist Rachel Padman of Cambridge University became one of Greer's special targets in 1996 (Greer ruthlessly outed and attacked Rachel in the UK tabloids). Fortunately, Rachel was really well-liked at Cambridge, and was able to survive Greer's wrath.
Although most stealthy women in academe and the professions escaped such exposure, fear of being exposed by the Raymond-Greer witch-hunt kept many successful trans women in deep stealth during the 1980's and 1990's. As a result, the stories of many successful transitions in those decades never became public.
However, at the turn of the 21st Century ever larger numbers of trans women finally began finding each other via the internet each year and began collectively freeing themselves of the fear, shame, embarrassment and guilt that so many transphobes such as Greer had heaped on them in the past. As a result, our successes are rapidly becoming much more visible now.
Nevertheless, Germaine Greer continues to viciously defame trans women even now"