Life gets better with a tutu on your head

A tutu improves most things in life, in fact!

Flow x

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Don't worry, be happy... and the grand-daddy of beatboxing should know!

You won't be surprised to hear that Bobby McFerrin's 1980s hit single Don't worry, be happy is already in my collection of Bouncy Happy Tunes. Few songs are as cheering and chilled as this one!

But I'd never listened to any of his other music, until last night when I casually clicked on the Bobby McFerrin YouTube playlist. And what a revelation. I'm not a music critic, and the only words I can find are inadequate cliches like "Wow" and "Oh. My. God", so I won't even try. If you don't already know this music, just click on some of the links and listen.




Even if you do know some of McFerrin's music, you may not have made a connection between it and beatboxing - one of the most amazing music forms - a sort of awe-inspiring acapella hip-hop. Back in 2008 I enthused here about ReepsOne, a young beatboxer who left me joyfully stunned when I listened to him making his mouth-music in my friend's sitting room. ReepsOne won the UK Beatboxing championship the next year, but of course there was no such competition back in the '80s. Yet listen to Bobby McFerrin's version of Blackbird above, and you'll see he's obviously the funky grand-daddy of beatboxing!

How can people possibly make such unbelievable, beautiful sounds with only their voices?!

Flow x

Peace police, don't hurt the kids

It's going to be harder than usual to be positive tonight. I'm recovering from flu', which means I've had a lousy week... But worse, the news of the student 'riots' in London tonight is upsetting.

It plunges me straight back into memories of the Poll Tax demo in 1990, when tens of thousands of people marched to protest against the huge new charges we were all being expected to pay.

I was there. I was with my friend Carolyn and her baby in a pushchair, so when things started to turn from joyful to nasty, we left, and went to wait for our friends in a cafe. We were all due to catch a coach back to our north-of-England university town.

It took a long time for our friends to arrive. In fact some of them didn't make the coach. But over the next few hours, most of us gathered and shared experiences. I was young. I was naive. My friends saw some shocking things, and hearing about what they'd seen shook my middle-class complacency badly.

Almost everyone described how they'd felt to be 'kettled': trapped in Trafalgar Square and not allowed to get out, then squashed into a smaller and smaller space as the police squeezed in. It was scary, basically, and definitely dangerous.

Then, worse, one friend sat in a section of the crowd that was staging a peaceful sit-down protest ... and couldn't get up in time when mounted police charged ... and the woman next to him had her shoulder crushed ... and he held her until the ambulance arrived.

Two other friends saw a police van drive into a 'kettled' crowd at speed ... hook a woman on its bumper ... and drag her several hundred yards down the road while people yelled at them to stop.

As I say, what I heard was shocking. But even more shocking was the news coverage. We got home and turned on our TV, to see the events we'd witnessed described as 'riots', with no mention at all of the police's own role in the violence. I was young. I was naive. My belief that the police or the media 'served the people' was dead.

These were the days before the internet, remember, so there was no YouTube. The 'other side of the story' only came out months later, in a couple of little pamphlets printed by small anarchist publishers. It never hit the mainstream media at all.

But the world is different now.

Tonight's violence is shocking, and the BBC - disappointingly - has repeated the mistake it made in 1990 and presented a simplistic, anti-protester view: the students were angry about higher fees so they rioted.

But as first-hand accounts of the student protest begin to hit YouTube, it's already clear that 'riot' isn't the whole story: the police and the BBC may be slow to realise this, but the streets today were full of mobile phones with cameras...

It looks like the demo started with a nice enough atmosphere ... Then the police started using horses ... And they used fences to push people back ... Then it got dark and it all got a bit scarier ... And this vid shows what happened a couple of weeks ago, which maybe explains why – and how – things got nasty tonight.

You can see why I'm struggling to find a positive side to all this.

But here's it is...

All those people posting their own little snippets of video care about the way today's demo is represented. These people know the 'mainstream' view paints only half the picture, and they've taken the time to add their own little daub of paint to the 'other side'.

All of us should care enough to ask whether the police are behaving acceptably - or even sensibly - here. My own answer is 'no': I can't for the life of me see how it can be OK to trap people into a confined space, let alone charge horses into a crowd of children.

But if you need more persuasion, the two linked videos here and here show why the right to demonstrate is so important. Bless this guy Radfax, as he goes on and on and on saying "peace police" and "don't hurt the kids".

When we were kids, and we came home complaining about the way the police had behaved, our parents didn't believe us. Now many of us are parents, and we know it's true: too often the police behave badly at demos.

It's time for the grown-ups stand up and say so.



Flow x

Jitterbugging Angels

Here's a little bit of wisdom for you boys and girls, on this fickle Sunday morning:

"Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have known all along it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek".

These are words from that go-going gaga guru Tom Robbins, not me. (And before anyone takes offense at my choice of adjective, look up gaga and see how I chose it 'cos it's apposite as well as alliterative!) It's one of his many insights that I wish I could claim were mine.

And now I must return to my grouting...

Airplanes and red shoes

Let's start with a riddle: What do aeroplanes, sugarlumps and red dancing shoes have in common?

No, sorry, you can't have the answer yet.

This blog is all about aeroplanes, and some worries I have...

Now don't get me wrong, I love flying. Rollercoasters and football matches do nothing for me: when I'm looking for excitement, the buzz is best when that juddering aircraft leaves the tarmac, and I'm flying off to somewhere new and exciting. And as for the feeling I get when I'm up in the sky looking down on the clouds. Well, if you ask me, it's quite obviously magic, and it's marvellous!

But a friend sent me this video, and it has made me think that maybe we're doing just a little bit too much flying. Have a quick look at it before you read on (if you haven't already) so you'll know what I'm talking about...

Now, at one level, I think the video is rather beautiful. It reminds me of other things, like ripples and magnetic field patterns and the dances that bees do to find their way home. But these are aeroplanes, not bees.

Do you know how many flights there are, globally, each day or each year? Go on, have a guess...

The most reliable source I could find on t'interweb said there were 77 million flights in 2008, and numbers are rising. 77 million each year?! That's about 211,000 flights each day! And there were 4.874 billion passengers... Which, frankly, is such a BIG number that my poor brain can't even process it.

Now, I could go off on all sorts of interesting diversions about global economics ('cos this many passengers equals one hell of big pile of dollars, dunnit?!) and international development inequalities ('cos look at how the flight-paths predominantly zoom in and out of the US and Europe) ... But the big question this video has raised for me is about saturation.

Saturation, I hear you say. What, if you please, is saturation? Or rather (given that my readers are educated people) what on earth has saturation got to do with air traffic?!

Let me explain myself...

Saturation is what you get when you try to add too much of something to something else. So, you can add sugarlumps to tea, and go on adding them for a long time, making your tea sweeter and sweeter... But there comes a point where your tea can't absorb anything else; and if you go on trying to add sugar, it won't dissolve, and you'll get a lumpy mess. You see, the tea has reached its 'sugar saturation point', and it just can't take any more.

There are lots of other examples where a little bit of something is fine, but too much is not. The odd whisky (or wine or beer or whatever your tipple) is great, but too much alcohol becomes a problem. And a little bit of food down the plughole is OK when you are washing up, but half a plateful will block your pipes!

I suppose I'm worried that we might just have reached our 'aeroplane saturation point'. At least, I'd like to know what or where this point is. Perhaps 55 million planes a year was OK, but 77 million isn't. Or perhaps 78 million is OK, but 79 million will be too many. Do you get my drift? It would be useful to know, wouldn't it, just how many aeroplanes the planet can cope with.

Now, at the risk of getting all earnest here, maybe we should be asking the same question about everything we do, at a personal and global level. Basically, the question is, how much is enough?

Do you know The Red Shoes fairytale? I may tell you more about it another time, but for now, all you need to know is that the central character loved her red shoes so much that she wore them too often, and went dancing in them when she shouldn't have, and then couldn't stop dancing until someone cut off her feet with an axe.

And that, in a nutshell, is what aeroplanes, sugarlumps and red dancing shoes have in common. When it comes to things we like, we're not good at knowing when enough is enough.

And no, I'm not being puritanical.

You know I have an interest in go-going with the flow, dontcha? Well, so, I'm not saying don't dance; I'm saying we need to know when to stop, if we want to go-go with joy. Dance all night if you like, but make sure you can stop when you want, without needing someone to chop your feet off!

So if any of you know how to work out the global aeroplane saturation point, please let the rest of us know!

Flow x

wild about swimming!

I'm feeling very happy this evening. Mmmmm.

Why? 'Cos I have been swimming here today - and yesterday too - making the most of the fabulous weather we've had this weekend!

'Wild' swimming is one of my top pleasures in life.

There's not much more I can say about this, really, 'cos the joy is all in sensations not words. But I will say this: if you haven't swim in a lake or paddled your toes in a stream recently DO IT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!

Flow x

P.S. If anyone is thinking that it looks a little bit autumnal in this pic, you're right. It's an old one... When I go down here on a summer's day, I'm much too busy swimming to be taking photos!

The electronic locker room

I need to start by saying: I am a woman. If you don’t already know this, it is important that you should, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment.

I know, infuriating, aren’t I? Sorry.

I’m waffling a bit, because I’m afraid this could be the most redundant blog post ever written. You’re here on Blogger, aren’t you, so the chances are you’re on Facebook too, and quite possibly other online places like Twitter and MySpace and YouTube and Flickr and Wordpress. There’s probably not much I can tell you about the online world that you don’t already know.

We like to hang out online these days, don't we, keeping in touch with old friends and making new ones. Social networking, it's called... Though you probably already knew that!

I wonder, though ... Have you ever thought about social networking and gender? About the different ways that men and women use sites like Facebook and Twitter?

I’m sure there’s a Ph.D. in the subject, but don’t worry, I’m not going to pretend to be erudite here. I just want to share a few idle and unscientific thoughts…

I joined Twitter a few weeks ago. (If you’re interested, and you haven’t already found me, you can follow me @gogowiththeflow). And being a thoughtful and reflective sort, I noticed fairly soon that most of my followers are men. It’s not that I don’t have women friends – I do – it’s just that hardly any of them are on Twitter. They’re all hanging out on Facebook.

I was interested in this apparent gender difference, so I started looking for some figures. And it’s

Officially True that Facebook has more women users than men. It’s much harder to be sure about Twitter, because you’re not asked to identify your gender there, so anyone who tries to work it out has to guess from the usernames.

(Would you have guessed I was female from the name @gogowiththeflow? What about @scribblemoose? Or @syzygy or @steeluloid or @irevdrdab?)

Anyway, that’s a diversion… My point is this: It seems to me that Facebook is as full of female chat as my corner coffee shop, while Twitter is a sort of electronic men's locker-room!

There's another difference too: the people who are my Facebook friends are (mostly) my real-life friends and neighbours. But on Twitter, my followers are much more likely to be people I know through work or even total strangers. So while idle chat is going on in both places, it has a different audience: the Tweets I see tend to be updates, information and fairly neutral comments about what's going on, all self-policed to make them 'safe' for any audience; while the Facebook status updates seem much more intimate.

Then a colleague of mine made an interesting observation. He's off to a conference soon, where he'll meet lots of people he's previously 'met' through Twitter, and he'll be able to start conversations with them easily because he knows something about their lives. And it reminded me that men have always been comfortable linking their work lives and their social lives in this way - building relationships in smoke-filled clubs and in five-a-side football teams.

While the women I know usually keep their work lives and their home lives very carefully separate.

Now I've crossed this line, and people who are my collegues and acquaintances but not my friends know something about my personal interests and my weekend pursuits. It's not entirely comfortable to be hanging out in the electronic locker room ... But at least I can't smell any sweat!


Flow x


P.S. I dunno whether this is just a strange peculiarity, true only for my friends and followers, or whether it’s true for you lot too. Let me know what you think!