Norman Maclean - A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

All photos copyright Claire Shropshall

Kenneth Grahame – The Wind in the Willows

All photos copyright Claire Shropshall

Dr Seuss – The Cat in the Hat

All photos copyright Claire Shropshall

Diamonte-shaped sunburn, lambrini in the park, scantily clad ladies tanning on roundabouts – it can only mean one thing. Spring hath sprung in London Town.

The ice sheet of winter has finally cracked, dousing us in sunshine and dressing our trees in glorious, lustrous greenery that smells better than a Lenor advert. We didn’t think it would ever happen but the long months of wearing tights under jeans (unlucky, boys) and spooning hot water bottles are finally over.

Luckily our fair capital has some of the best outdoor swimming facilities around, to keep us refreshed during the hot, steamy summer that’s obviously round the corner. With lido facilities sprinkled north, east, south and west, as well as places like Hamstead Heath swimming ponds for the weed lovers among us, there’s always somewhere to cool off.

But as always with any urban activity, as well as finding watery sanctuary, you’ll also come across a veritable cornucopia of weird behaviour. Let’s take a look at some of the worst offenders when it comes to bad swimming etiquette:

1. The Windmill – they say as long as you try your best, there’s no such thing as failure, and if that’s true then our first contender deserves a Nobel prize for effort, despite cruising at around 0.3 miles per hour. With wildly oscillating limbs and enough back-splash to rival a drowning aardvark, approaching these dangerous waters risks taking a flailing elbow to the jugular. Overtake at your peril.
2. The Boaster – there’s very little actual swimming involved with this one, the end of the lane simply provides the opportune space to park up and talk loudly about the second house in Brooklyn. Occasionally it looks like the boaster might be thinking about swimming, but this soon passes.
3. The Unit – two non-conformists that laugh in the face of conventional meeting spaces for friends – like cafes, parks, living rooms or generally anywhere that’s not wet and ripe with opportunity to get in other people’s way. They’ve come for a catch up, not to swim seriously, so will either be taking up the entire lane, or be sort of floating one behind the either with craned necks.
4. The Hipster – easily recognisable because they’re dry as a bone. Don’t expect them to actually get into the pool, they’ll just be sitting on a chair, posing and wearing oversized sunglasses even if it’s raining. I’m looking at you, London Fields Lido.
5. The Fashionista – there’s always one fashion forward swimmer. Take the dude I spotted recently in neon pink speedos. It takes balls to wear those, and we could certainly see his.
6. The Pace Wrecker – this one idles in the shallows, waits until you’re almost at the end of the lane and about to execute a Phelps-esque turn at the wall, then launches themself into action like a floundering walrus, forcing you to stop and wait for some distance to form between you, ruining your stride and  impending Olympic record.
7. The Moorhen – for some unknown reason, maybe due to being an otter in a previous life, this one will intermittently dive under water, only to pop up in really inconvenient places, like under the lane rope, or next to your crotch.
8. Tumble Turn OCD – this swimmer will obsessively tumble turn at the end of every length, even if there are 11 people crowded into the shallow end waiting to commence workout and executing said turn involves kicking a pregnant woman in the nostril. I can only assume that if our rotating friend misses a turn, somewhere in Turkmenistan, a badger will die.
9. The Foot Fetish – there’s always someone that insists on paddling so close behind you that they touch your feet with each stroke but for some unfathomable reason will not overtake. Simply looming as a creepy toe-stroking presence in your wake, this pool companion is hard to shake.
10. The Competitor – the only thing worse than someone who won’t overtake is someone who won’t let you overtake. Especially when the effort of staying ahead is about to give them a stroke. Maybe only making ninth place in the year seven school swimarathon still burns like a Glasgow bikini wax, but whatever their neurosis, our angry friend needs to relax and give way.

So the next time you’re merrily splashing around in the pool, take a long hard look at yourself and your swimming etiquette. Do your lane companions look like they’re about to do a murder, and you’re about to become a bloodied heap of lycra and goggles in the nearby bushes, Poirot style? If so it might just be time to get out and have a cold shower.

Image Credit – http://www.hazellcottrell.com

I remember The Sun newspaper littering the worn coffee tables of my school common room. The boys in the year above comparing page 3 models to various girls they’d seen naked. Katie from Dorset, 34DD, out on display like strawberry millions in the local sweet shop window. She was an aspiring photographer, apparently.

I remember listening to my male friends’ open commentary on which model had the best breasts out of those adorning lad’s mag covers in our local newsagents. The first time I camped out at Reading Festival and the boys decorated the tents with a paper-chain of lesbian porn mags. Feeling ashamed and stuffing my bra with cotton wool to match these buxom ladies, and ending up with lumpy boobs.

I grew up aware of female objectification, surrounded by it in fact. At school we were active participants in our own subordination – rolling our skirts up until they were a mere puffy grey bulge connecting hip and upper thigh, cooing over the ‘fit list’ that circulated round our year 8 class, trying to hide barely repressed pride the first time a white van man honked his horn at us. Such was the way of the world and we accepted our female bodies as vessels for lust, vying for male attention and adoration, competing with each other via lipstick and push-up bra weaponry to live up to the images of femininity peddled by the media that enveloped us.

It was only when I lived and worked in Honduras briefly aged 21 and suffered daily cat-calls, hisses and spitting from local men in the street, that something truly and irrevocably sank in. Being treated differently for occupying a female body wasn’t just frustrating and irritating. It was frightening. My grasp of Spanish was lacking, but even I soon knew my way around Latino slang for ‘whore’, ‘slut’ and ‘cheap’.

Whether I knew how it affected me at the time or not, I grew up surrounded by tits and arse. These days I’m grown up enough to know that my bra size isn’t the sum of my worth, but I know as a self conscious adolescent this conveyor belt of female objectification made me feel inadequate. And it was everywhere. The man on the bus flipping through topless photos of Paris Hilton, bikini-clad women on the front page of the Mail in the corner shop, raunchy magazines carelessly strewn in the gutter.

Which is why David Cameron’s latest assertion that it’s the ‘parent’s responsibility’ to protect their children from inappropriate images in the media is so ridiculous. ‘Turn the page,’ he said. ‘There are some things you don’t want your children to see and you should make sure they don’t see them.’ The only way a parent could truly shield their child from the kind of sexism and objectification our society promotes, would be to blind and deafen them.

So I’m supporting the No More Page 3 campaign, and I’ve signed the petition asking editor Dominic Mohan to take the bare boobs out of The Sun newspaper. If you too have a problem with insidious displays of female availability in the media, then you should sign the petition here.

My young mind was yet to start really asking questions when I didn’t see being surrounded by wholesale female nudity as anything but the norm. I just don’t want my children growing up thinking that seeing naked ladies in the family newspaper is ordinary.

A mythical fantasy land bewitched with leaping goblins, singing flowers and knights errant?

Or…a sleepy corner of Bristol. Also “the finest place in England,” according to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.

All images copyright Claire Shropshall

I recently had the misfortune of catching Salt on the TV. When it became obvious that Angelina Jolie’s CIA-agent-on-the-run wasn’t the most believable character – in part due to gravity defying lorry hopping stunts, but largely because halfway in she somehow dyes her peroxide blonde tresses black without turning them purple first – I turned to alternative entertainment. Twitter.

“Nothing feminine about Angelina Jolie! Far too thin!” screeched @JazzyFizzle4man. “As if Angelina Jolie can take on these guys. She is a twig. I’m calling BS,” chortled @lauramcglone. Just as I was starting to despair over AJ’s boneability, @Taff_Hollywood hit my newsfeed with: “Regardless of what anyone says, I would still do Angelina Jolie.” PHEW.

With a female lead voted sexiest woman alive more times than OK! Magazine has printed photos of Kerry Katona’s arse, sadly it’s not shocking the film’s plot was sidelined for debate on her waistline. What was dire, however, was how readily viewers aired their disgust at her lean figure. Jolie was looking a little on the gaunt side, for sure, but after training two hours a day three or four times a week for the role, she was never going to be popping out of her pencil skirt. It’s not the first time the actress has been lambasted for her size, but I have to wonder if she was tipping the other end of the scales would we be so quick to tell her that she was overweight.

Because there’s something we seem to forget when we talk about the female form. Pointing out excess weight is cruel and unnecessary, yes? So is skinny shaming.

40′s skinny shaming

I’ve never been a big girl, but it’s not through choice. I’m certainly not extremely thin, but in my experience people tend to assume that a slighter frame comes only from a diet of mung beans and compulsive spin classes. I find this insulting because I love food. I love food so much that if I’m not fed every two hours I lose the ability to form sentences. I refuse to go to restaurants on first dates because I know the excitement of impending culinary magic will distract me from the guy I’m there with. “I love you more than cheese” is a platitude which carries immeasurable weight coming from me, because, seriously…CHEESE.  The implication that I’d curtail this love affair for vanity irritates me more than you’ll ever know.

Glorifying being skinny and fetishising thinness is never OK. I can’t even begin to describe how much work the fashion industry and media-at-large have to do before they stop peddling unrealistic body images. But not everyone under size 10 becomes an automatic role-model for thinspiration. It is possible to consume your body mass in mince pies now and again, and still naturally err on the slender side, and there’s a real tendency to underestimate how hurtful being called skinny is when you’re demonstrably lacking in so-called ‘feminine’ curves.

With this in mind, I’ve compiled a list of incidents occurring at various points in my life; that you should never mirror if you want to avoid being a dick to someone that’s smaller than you. DO NOT:

• Utter the words “Oh but you obviously don’t eat anyway” – assuming that solids don’t generally pass my lips, even though my hair has yet to fall out and I still have gums, is annoying.
• Physically prod the stomach area, accompanied by exclamations of “there’s nothing there!” Get off. Immediately. Would you do the same if you noticed I was packing an extra roll round my midriff? Didn’t think so.
• Allude to inherent weakness or being scared to touch me in case I ‘snap’. Careful bitch, I could stab you with my collar bone.
• Act like my size is so repellent it’s offensive to be seen next to me. “I’m not standing next to you in a bikini, you’ll make me look fat”, etc. How do you think I feel knowing that your curves make me look like a pre-pubescent boy? It works both ways, but evidently I’m 100 times more polite.
• Use the words skinny, bony, stick insect or beanpole. No. Just no. STOP IT. I’m not ‘about to slip through a drain’, either.
• Assume that a lack of blubber makes for a Siberian winter. “You must be so cold, there’s no fat on you!” LISTEN TO YOURSELF. Unless you’re comparing me to a polar bear, this is ridiculous.

So let’s all simmer down and make room for the petite amongst us (they only need a little bit of room) without pursing our lips or murmuring cruelly about ‘real women’. It ain’t good form – and in this world of oft-celebrated diversity, we can afford to remove that last barrier of acceptable prejudice.

Images

Salt – http://www.empireonline.com
Advert – http://www.about-face.org

Over recent years, high profile deaths are something we’re acutely aware of. Thanks to the frantic online treadmill that is the dissemination of information in modern times, obituaries aren’t just something you read in the back of a Sunday supplement anymore. We know when someone vaguely famous has passed on, because they get their own hashtag. And if I’ve never heard of them, I’m notified of yet another talent woefully unrecognised in his or her time.

On Wednesday I noticed Twitter was a-babble with tributes to one Jason Molina, an American singer/songwriter who had died aged just 39, from organ failure owing to alcohol consumption. I wondered who was this master of alt country, who seemed to have moved so many with his music? Why hadn’t I heard of him before? So I delved into the back catalogue. Two bands, fifteen studio albums and three solo releases.  He hadn’t even reached his fortieth birthday.

Molina’s songs are sublime. Best known for his work fronting the bands Songs:Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co, he was prolific in his transmission of nostalgia and the blues. Listening to his whiskey soaked laments on heartbreak and tragedy reminds anyone they’re not alone in their sadness. There’s something incredibly unifying about the way he makes melancholy beautiful. So many of the comments littering YouTube and the various online obituaries reference how a particular song had helped someone through a difficult time, and I can see why. Hailed as a cornerstone of record label Secretly Canadian – recently propelled to the forefront of public consciousness for housing Indie sensation Bon Iver – it’s obvious that a gifted storyteller has departed far too soon.

And if you don’t believe me, have a listen.

I know I’m not the only one to be discovering Jason Molina for the first time this week – and wondering why on earth it took death to lend his music the PR boost that brought it to my attention. This may speak more about the depth of some of our musical knowledge than it does the state of the industry, but when mainstream radio wilfully defiles my ears with One Direction and Taylor Swift, yet let me miss out on Molina’s 20-year career, something’s gone awry.

Going unrecognised by the masses in your time can be a sign of greatness. Just look at Van Gogh, John Keats or Bach. Even F. Scott Fitzgerald was once told by an editor ‘you’d have a decent book if you’d get rid of that Gatsby character’. Usually it means you’re doing something a bit different, you’re experimenting rather than just serving up a direct hit of instant gratification. We have to work harder to appreciate this kind of creation, but it’s always worth it.

So maybe there’s something to be said for being underappreciated. But dead or alive this musician has still left an incredible body of work behind, haunted with the ghosts of past pains and a finely tuned awareness of human fragility – and I’d truly recommend checking it out.

Image - http://blogs.post-gazette.com 

Michael Gove has once again sparked outrage among teachers over the last week, this time singling out schools in East Durham for ‘lacking ambition’. A tad confusing, as he hasn’t even been there.

Claiming that five north-east schools were underperforming dramatically, Gove recently told those at the London launch of a book on GCSE underachievement that he could ‘smell the sense of defeatism’. Apparently East Durham provides the perfect scapegoat for the types of schools he feels are mired in the ‘problem of ambition in certain traditional communities’. Yet local Labour MPs and educationalists insisted they could not remember Mr Gove visiting a single school in East Durham, in almost three years in the job.

Unsurprisingly local teachers and students alike were incensed – one sixteen-year-old so enraged that he has written a letter to Gove, branding his comments as ‘abhorrent’ and ‘out of touch with today’s youth’. Sound familiar?

Rather than tumbling into a pit of depression over our incumbent education secretary’s persistent use of outdated ideas and systems to flog the nation’s youth for poor performance, I got to thinking about ambition, and what it even really means to us anyway…and I learned something. It doesn’t really mean anything.

An ambitious person, as described by the Oxford dictionary, is someone that ‘has or shows a strong desire or determination to succeed.’ But what, I hear you cry, is success? As a 27-year-old lolcat enthusiast who’s been known to eat blue cheese off the floor and hula-hoop to Celine Dion, I’m not about to solve the existential problem of lifelong achievement for you. I will, however, say that success means a myriad of different things to different people, and certainly doesn’t always boil down to GCSE grades.

Modern society has an aggressively entrenched habit of defining success and ambition in purely professional and academic terms. Is it really that simple? Does a hard-working parent who abandons a high-flying executive career to spend more time at home lack ambition? Does someone who forgoes higher education to pursue work that already them happy misunderstand success? Of course they don’t. Their aspirations simply don’t mirror what we’re taught about ‘achieving’ throughout the education system.

Under pressure

I was spoon-fed academic ambition from the age of seven when I took my first SAT test.  Then it was a conveyor belt of essays, exams, assessments and constantly reaching for achievement to secure that dream job and some illusive conception of ‘success’. Success that of course would mean a deliciously happy and contented life.  However after being dumped out the end of the education system into the real world, it didn’t take me long to realise that there wasn’t a job on the planet that could guarantee my wellbeing. Spending time with those I love, my self esteem and stepping back from unnecessary stress have been the real key to happiness for me, and these are all things I’m still learning, nearly a decade on from leaving school.

That’s not to say academia and career planning aren’t important, but when fewer students can afford University fees and graduates are facing abject failure and disillusionment in the form of rocketing youth unemployment, a little less tunnel vision might be helpful. The Bard himself traditionally portrayed ambition as a vice, and who wants to end up like Macbeth? Fine, studying too hard for A-Levels probably won’t result in anyone getting stabbed by a dude called Macduff, but still. Let’s be careful.

When success in terms of a degree and a job falls through, a reality for so many at the moment, young people need to learn how to remember their self worth outside of their ‘achievements’. After all, being crushed by the weight of your own ambition is no way to spend your 20′s – and educators would do well to better prepare their students for these difficult times.

Images

Teacher pointing – http://www.elephantjournal.com
Under pressure – http://www.lifehacker.com