Seeing a pattern yet?

This year sees the eightieth anniversary of women being granted the right to vote on equal terms with men: a right won after almost a century of lobbying and direct action.

Eighty years. That’s within living memory. And after such a long struggle, why are we so eager to joke about a right that was bought so dearly?

To put things into perspective, New Zealand was the first self-governing country to grant women the right to vote: all women over the age of 21 were enfranchised there in 1893. In Britain, however, things were different. Until the mid-nineteenth century, even male enfranchisement was limited; it wasn’t until the 1867 Reform Act and the 1886 Suffrage Reform Act that the majority of men could vote. And despite philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham’s advocacy of universal suffrage as far back as 1818, it didn’t look like things were going to change.

In 1894 - a year after New Zealand granted full female enfranchisement - the British government made a concession. Women were permitted to vote in local elections - but would continue to be denied the right to vote on a national level. They would, the argument went, be too easily influenced - either by their male relatives or by the looks of the candidates (that old chestnut again) to be trusted with a wider-reaching responsibility. Only men could grasp the full importance of government.

The women of the day had other ideas.

Frustrated by the continued lack of response to lobbying, and seeing the 1894 Local Government Act as a brush-off, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) began to take more direct action. In 1905, they began a campaign of civil disobedience: protests, destruction of public property- even (good lord, no!) spitting at policemen. Banner-waving women chaining themselves to railings outside Downing Street became an everyday sight and thanks to the Daily Mail, the term “suffragette” soon became common parlance. Previously unheard-of numbers of ‘respectable’ women of all classes were arrested and imprisoned - and in July 1909, Marion Wallace Dunlop went on hunger strike, instituting what was to become a major WSPU tactic. Terrified that she might become the first ‘martyr’ to the cause, the decision was made to release her.

Two months later, force-feeding of imprisoned suffragettes began. In a practice that can barely be described as brutal, a woman would be tied to a chair, her mouth held open by a steel gag and a long rubber tube forced down her throat. Liquid food would be poured down and then the tube roughly removed in a practice many likened to rape. Resistance was often met with more force: it was not unusual for those who struggled to have their teeth knocked out.

On their release, imprisoned suffragettes were awarded medals by WSPU - but much of the population believed the stories of force-feeding and beatings to be mere propaganda in an increasingly dirty and bitter campaign. It took the actions of Lady Constance Lytton in 1910 to change things: she was arrested for protesting - but released immediately when the authorities found out who she was. Believing there to be a strong prejudice against those less-fortunately connected, she disguised herself as a working-class suffragette and was duly arrested. This time, she was subjected to no less than 8 rounds of force-feeding: an experience which is thought to have shortened her life considerably.

One of the most dramatic protests carried out by a suffragette was that of Emily Davison, who threw herself under the King’s horse at the 1913 Epsom derby. She died four days later as a direct result of her injuries - but it is unknown whether she had intended to simply disrupt the race.

With the outbreak of the First World War, all WSPU activity ceased, with all suffragettes being released from prison. Other women’s rights groups continued to lobby peacefully for female enfranchisement but most suffragettes diverted their energy to the war effort, led by Emmeline Pankhurst who had called on the Trade Unions to allow women into traditionally male industries.

Emmeline Pankhurst addresses a crowd

It was their work on the home front which gave them the final ammunition they needed in the battle for the vote: a contemporary poster highlighted all the things that a woman could be: teacher, doctor, factory worker… and still not be entitled to vote.

The world after the war was a different one - and finally, in 1918, the Representation of the People Act granted the vote to all women of property over 30. While not universal suffrage, it was a significant step forward - and ten years later, women were granted the right to vote on equal terms with men.

That’s not to say, of course, that all men were enfranchised before the 1918 Act - until this point, (male) domestic servants and soldiers were also denied the right to vote, and it was as a result of both sexes’ contribution to the war that reforms were finally made. Never, however, was there a movement like that of the suffragettes amongst the men. Not only did it redefine the role of women in political life, it changed the way they were viewed by society in general: the use of force to subdue and arrest female protestors shocked the wider British public into taking note of the cause.

Eighty years. It’s really not that long, when you think about it. Chances are that many of us have living relatives who were born before that. And still there are countries in the world where women’s suffrage is denied or conditioned - countries where men’s suffrage is denied or conditioned. How can we in all good conscience afford to be apathetic about our right to vote - particularly the women of our society, knowing how hard-won that right is?

And next time a candidate with an Eton hairdo, or stacked heels, or a winning smile happens to win an election - however unlikely the odds may seem - don’t blame us. It’s not necessarily that we’ve voted for the prettiest one, or the most charming, or the one who clearly knows how to moisturise: it’s just that we’re equally as capable of making the odd iffy political decision as you are.

Even the most politically astute observer of Europe’s fractured geography would probably concede that there are several countries of such little global significance that their disappearance from the map would only be discovered by neighbours a few weeks later, like the old people who die in council flats and end up being eaten by their cats. By rights, Ukraine shouldn’t be one of them. Larger than France and with a population more than four times greater than Greece (in number, if not culinary ability), the birthplace of Slavic civilisation remains something of a sleeping giant on the world stage. One suspects that if an over-excited Norwegian football commentator were to celebrate a surprise win over them they’d struggle to come up with much more than ‘Vitali Klichko, Milla Jovovich, uh…..the other Klichko…..your boys took one hell of a beating’. In the popular imagination, the land of Gogol, Bulgakov and Malevich is primarily known for being very cold and very far away.

The ‘Orange Revolution’ may have briefly punctured the public consciousness a few years ago but other, less picturesque, political crises have gone largely unreported and the eyes of the international media have turned elsewhere – towards Serbia’s continuing matroshka act or the newly resurgent Russia. April, however, saw a greater focus on Ukraine than any time since the upheaval of 2003 with journalists decamping to Kyiv to cover the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl catastrophe, the formal government declaration that the famine inflicted on the country in the 1930s amounted to genocide and the news that Ukraine and Georgia have been snubbed by NATO on the question of potential future membership. The state tourist board must be thrilled. May, on the other hand, has seen the country descend from tragedy into all-out farce.

The European and American narrative of the Orange Revolution suggested that plucky pro-Western liberals committed to freedom, mom and apple babka had conquered the vestigial remains of the Red Menace by rising up and snatching back a stolen election. While there remains something rather fishy about the process that saw Russian-backed Viktor Yanukovich succeed initially, little of the rest of the tale is true. The enthusiasm of the young Ukrainians who took to the streets of Kyiv to demand their democratic rights can’t be faulted but the politicians they put their faith in have proven themselves to be as shameless and shambolic as their rivals.

This week saw Viktor Yushchenko, ‘talisman of the revolution’, physically prevented from reaching the podium in parliament from which he intended to deliver his annual presidential address. The politicians standing in his way were not representatives of the Russian-speaking Party Of The Regions but members of Blok Yulya Timoshenko – his partners in government and subordinates of the woman he made Prime Minister. Rumours abound that Yushchenko is planning to abandon his ailing Nasha Ukraina party and form an alliance that would see him lead POR instead. It’s a bit like Gordon Brown deciding he fancies being the leader of the Conservatives, or it would be if the Conservatives had rigged the last election to keep Labour out and been accused by all and sundry of poisoning him. Rather than asking ‘what went wrong?’, we might take the time to reflect upon whether anything really went right in the first place.

Ukrainian politics has never been as black and white, or blue and orange, as the West would like to imagine. The division between Ukrainian-speaking nationalists in the country’s Western regions and those more sympathetic to Russia in the East and South is real enough but the rest is largely fictional. The two Viktors may have been presented in the press as polar opposites but, in reality, they both served fairly happily as Prime Minister to autocratic former President Leonid Kuchma in the 1990s. The suggestion that the Orange factions want to join the European Union while the Blue side is allied to Russia may dominate the rhetoric but the truth is that neither can afford to move away from their powerful neighbour to the East and neither would want the scrutiny that setting the country on the path to EU membership would bring about. Loyalty in the country’s ‘democratic’ system is about three things - money, power and how much of the latter the former can buy you. Believe what they put down on their tax returns and neither leader earns more than their miniscule parliamentary salary each year. Believe what everyone else is saying and you’ll see two men making out like bandits by hawking their influence to anyone with enough Hyrvnia to pay for it. The primary distinction between them is that Yanukovich is backed by ethnic Russian industrialists and Yushchenko has generally been backed by ethnic Ukrainian oligarchs.

In recent parliamentary elections, the share of the vote given to the President’s party has absolutely tanked while Yanukovich’s group has remained moderately stable – easily the largest single party in Ukraine but incapable of winning enough support from those in the Western half of the country to regain power. The stage would appear to be set for a new force to come in to demolish the corrupt, discredited and incompetent two-party stranglehold. As ever in post-Soviet politics, you have to be careful what you wish for, you might just get it. The electoral collapse of Nasha has been prompted not simply by years of economic misfeasance but by the rise of a slick, dynamic nationalist counterweight capable of siphoning off the bulk of their core support. Led by the charismatic and, it must be said, surprisingly foxy Yulya Timoshenko, there’s little question that BYT is now the senior partner in the governing coalition. The only drawbacks are the fact that she’s ballsed-up everything she’s touched whenever she has been given a taste of power, particularly in her first spell as PM, and the small matter of the $10bn in natural resources she’s accused of stealing from Russia in her days as a ‘gas princess’. Yes, ten billion dollars which, even at today’s exchange rate, buys an awful lot of glossy propaganda.

Timoshenko’s appeal isn’t based solely on slick marketing videos and the rather jolly t-shirts of her in various action-heroine poses that are sold on market stalls across the Western regions, she delivers a fine line in Russian-baiting rhetoric that goes down a storm in ethnic Ukrainian strongholds like Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk. With her trademark peasant braids, she’s one-part Joan of Arc to two parts Cruella de Vil. Enmity pointed in the direction of Moscow isn’t particularly surprising when you bear the aforementioned famine in mind but it’s unlikely to do much to heal a rift that could conceivably split the country down the middle. There are signs that easily-led, but enormously influential, international think tanks like the Project Syndicate group are already lining up to support her bid for the presidency in 2010.

As abhorrent an idea as a Yushchenko / POR alliance might be, it does represent a short-term way out of factional ethnic politics. It’s difficult to see the country making genuine progress with any of the current options on the table, however. As the behemoth on its Eastern border goes from strength to strength and neighbours to the West like Poland, Hungary and Romania boom, Ukraine continues to stumble from one crisis to another, stagnating economically and socially. It’s as cruel a betrayal of the political idealism and hunger for change that saw tens of thousands gather in Independence Square five years ago as could be imagined. Sadly, there doesn’t appear to be any serious prospect of the situation improving until a genuinely democratic grass-roots politics takes hold in the country. With such unimaginable resources behind the swindlers currently vying for office, don’t hold your breath.

The charity mugger (or chugger) was a highly prevalent creature that prowled the streets of London at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Their odious crime? Bringing cold calling to the streets of London. Using underhand tactics such as fit young ladies actually bounding up to speak to you in the middle of the street, the gullible and the foolish were swiftly fleeced of their Big Issue money as they felt compelled to give to a charity they didn’t much care about anyway, simply for being made to feel special. Enjoying nothing more than jumping out unexpectedly on weary city types at lunch-time and bemused tourists looking for Trafalgar Square, these brazen harlots fleeced the guilt-ridden masses, via character assassination, into contributing to the charity they happened to represent. It didn’t matter if you already sponsored one or more other charities; their beady (yet beautiful) little eyes judged you as toilet scum if their charity wasn’t included on your already burgeoning list of direct debits.

Luckily, Londoner’s are generally built with a guilt free chip and the more their pleasant lunchtime stroll through the smog-filled wilderness was ruined by jobless, inconsiderate graduates doing a bit of volunteering and pushing for the hard-sell, the more abject apathy set in. People don’t want to be pressured into giving to charity, as it’s the antithesis of what giving to charity is all about - giving voluntarily! As Londoners caught on to the charities’ little ‘game’, the highly annoying chugger that blocked ones path to Charing Cross Station of an evening became the lesser spotted chugger, until one day it was simply no more. London, victorious yet again!

But as one evil passes, London Town is already battening down the hatches and bracing itself as another has already claimed the berth vacated by chuggers, with the potential to be even more bloody annoying. There seem to be more of them, on nearly every street corner in central London, and they seem riddled with stupidity. That’s right, just the thing needed to wind up the average Londoner battling their way through the public transport system on the way home of a Tuesday evening; some numpty offering them a free newspaper…

It’s difficult to comprehend that some chunder-muppet thought this would be a good idea. For years, the practice of a free newspaper had worked on the morning commute simply because the individual was provided with a choice. The Metro wasn’t fired at your being like a dagger spearing for your heart; it just sat there, happy and unconcerned, waiting to be plucked from its comfy threshold by someone who fancied a quick glance at the morning news. If one didn’t fancy a read, despite it not hitting your pocket or the fact the ink doesn’t rub off on your hands, well, you were entitled to ignore it, no questions asked.

This benefit has all but been removed on the evening commute back home. Now you have no choice. Instead of leaving the free evening newspaper (the London Paper or the London Lite - both equally rubbish) stacked in a pile at the station, for one to pursue if they show wish, it is now thrust in an individuals direction by some jobsworth who’s main role in life is to interfere with other peoples personal little bubbles. Displaying a form of twitchy physical tourettes, which sees the deliverer’s arm spring into immediate and constant action whenever pedestrians pass by, there is no escape as the paper is impaled in your chest, killing the remainder of what’s left of your soul! You can have your hands in your pockets or put on a death stare that can only mean you wish to slay the London Lite wielder with mind bullets; in fact you can do anything to show your complete disinterest in accepting what’s on offer, yet that sodding arm will always reach out, imposing it’s will where it’s not bloody wanted. Sure, some may only see this is as a slight nuisance, but when there’s a complete disregard for personal choice and one is still attacked after doing everything they possibly can to avoid contact with such dead-eyed vultures, well, it’s a bit much.

But, it gets worse. Ignore taking the paper forced into your hand and the merchants mate is only 100 yards down the road to rectify the mistake, starting the whole charade again. Nnnnnnnaaaarrrgggghhhh! And if you’re really unfortunate, you can become an unknowing participant in the free paper war that has sprung up on the darkened corners of the city, as two rival dickheads drooling at the mouth repeating ‘London Lite’ or ‘London Paper’ vie for your attention, prodding and poking with their uninteresting wears. It makes you want to scream “I don’t care what celebrity has been snapped falling out of a lucrative club without there knickers on today, or ever… now piss off!” And worse of all, unlike chuggers, I haven’t seen a fit young beauty amongst them yet!

Big Issue sellers have never been so forceful. Indeed, the bloke at Embankment station who recites with great sardonic verve “Big Issue - wonderful magazine” should by all rights be given a medal for his services to putting a smile on the face of commuters. Likewise, you don’t see Evening Standard enforcers chasing one and all down the Strand swinging the Standard at any appendage that happens to be within reach - there’s just the incomprehensible warble of ‘final’. So, why do those handing out London’s most rubbish paper(s) feel the need to launch in to such a desperate act of handing them out? Has ‘no’ come to mean ‘yes’ in the customer service guidance for these paper merchants, as they look to meet unforgiving targets from their harsh taskmasters? Or is it part of the governments scheme to reduce the overall employment figure by giving people pointless jobs, where people aren’t actually necessary? And seeing as it’s quite a wretched job, why aren’t these people looking to be employed as a sandwich artist (oh, how I loathe thee foul words) at the Subway around the corner, instead of being part of an unfulfilling role that simply annoys the hell out of everyone? Unless these are the type of people that just like to annoy people for chuckles.

If it’s the latter, then these free paper numpties are going to be a more difficult blight to remove from our fair capital than the average chugger! We’re going to need more than mere apathy to get us out of this one. So, put your hands in your pockets, fire mind bullets at these villains, take an alternative route to the tube to avoid going near such dangers, or shoulder barge the swines out of the way if two of them are fighting over your soul - but what ever you do don’t take their sodding papers. Make a point of walking over to the stack they have hidden round the corner, pick one up from there (if you really must) and then laugh heartily in the face of the enemy at your victory. If we all do this, then gradually the companies that spawn these papers will see the error of their employment ways, the status quo will be returned, choice will rear its head again (like the Metro in the morning) and a rainbow will reflect beautifully in the crystal clear waters of the Thames. Bliss!

And for you muppets out there, please take the following into consideration - if I’m out for a run, dressed up in my running kit, wearing my running shoes, sweating because it looks like I’m running, and going at more than walking speed because, guess what, I am running, do I really need you to thrust a paper in my direction? Does it look like I’m remotely interested in reading it whilst I am running? The next one of you clueless goofs that does that is going to get punched in the face…

“Seed, bark, flower, fruit, They’re never going to grow without their roots.

Branch, stem, shoot – They need roots.”

(Show of Hands, Roots.)

There’s a school of thought that says it doesn’t matter where you come from, what matters is where you’re going. Maybe that’s the right viewpoint: in an age where the friends we choose are often more important than the family we don’t, and when increasing numbers of us live hundreds – if not thousands – of miles away from our parents and relatives, what does our history matter?

Since the mid-nineties there’s been a definite shift away from family towards friends as the most important group in our lives, and now more than ever, it looks like our families are less of a factor in our daily lives than they used to be. Paradoxically, our interest in our family histories and genealogy is increasing – and has been for about the same length of time. What used to be a fairly niche concern now has enough pull to inspire several seasons of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?, a show in which assorted celebrities investigate their family histories. It’s popular enough to have inspired a live event, held over the Mayday weekend at London’s Olympia.

It’s a curious, but apparently cyclical surge in genealogy’s popularity. It developed into the form we know today in the USA in the 1890s, when hundreds of local historical and genealogical societies popped up. By the 1940s, interest had waned – only to pick up again in the 1960s and 70s, driven by the Civil Rights movement. Again it fell away until the late 1990s, when the rise of the Internet made tracing your ancestry easier than ever before. It’s been growing ever since.

So why, if we’re generally less interested in our families, are we so interested in our family histories? Is it really as simple as hoping we’ll discover that we’re descended from landed gentry, or that we’re 1,998^th in line to the throne? Perhaps we’re looking for a hint of excitement – a long-secret love affair, or an ancestor sent to the gallows. Either way, poking around in the past can uncover all sorts of surprises: not all of them pleasant, as Griff Rhys Jones found out during his appearance on Who Do You Think You Are? Upon close investigation, it turned out that an ancestor who supposedly died following a train crash was actually fatally wounded in a street fight, and that his great-grandmother may have had her children removed from her and sent to Industrial Schools as pauper inmates. Not necessarily the kind of skeletons you’d want to yank out into the light of day.

“It’s not who you are underneath; it’s what you do that defines you”

Whether or not we find what we’re looking for, there’s no doubt that more and more of us are starting the search. Ancestry.co.uk, the UK’s most popular genealogy site, has over 17,000,000 posts on its public forums and a separate discussion board for every region. Queries range from those trying to get tombstone information on a branch of their family to people searching for information on possible ancestors who fought at the Battle of Hastings. There’s also a sizeable section devoted to crime: convict ship prisoner lists, pirate genealogies and someone particularly keen to find out whether he’s related to a Wild West gunslinger, all of which suggest there’s nothing as glamorous as a whiff of scandal – provided it’s not too recent, of course.

And the problem with poking around in the past is that sometimes, you find things closer to home than you expected – as we recently found out in my own family. My paternal grandmother was Serbian, and had always been cagey about her younger life. It wasn’t until shortly before her death two years ago that we discovered she had married to get out of her homeland: she had been vocally anti-Tito, and had been threatened with the gulags. On clearing her house, we found a box of love letters from my grandfather stuffed on a shelf in the garage, and another box containing similar letters to her from a Russian soldier in her study… lovingly tied with ribbon and a lock of hair: together, these discoveries left my father visibly shaken. Suddenly, he was led to question what he knew about his parents’ relationship and his own background – already patchy, he’s now unsure of any of it.

Not that there’s always a drama involved – nor does everyone researching their background expect to find one. I know a particularly cheery American who will gladly tell anyone who’s listening that he’s ‘One sixty-fourth Irish’ – and clearly he’s more than happy with having found that out (although I’ve never done the maths to work out just how far back that is.)

Maybe that’s what it’s all about? As our families split, we’re constantly looking for some way to define ourselves. Class boundaries are more fluid than at any time in history, and most of us can no longer identify ourselves depending on our jobs or the places we live. Perhaps that, combined with the wealth of resources available to us, makes genealogy so appealing? In looking for our roots, do we hope to find something that helps us with where we’re going, something that gives us a position in the world? More to the point, will it?

Can we still claim to be as clearly defined by our backgrounds today as we could a century – or even less than that – ago? Somehow, it doesn’t seem likely.

For the vast majority of us, our histories hold nothing more exciting than a diversion to wheel out at dinner parties, a trinket to convince us we’re ‘special’. In the grand scheme of things, what does it really matter that our great-aunt Mildred married the fifteenth son of an Earl, or that we suddenly find we’re distantly related to the Bamfords? On the other side of the coin, if we’re so keen to avoid the sins of the fathers, why are we so keen to embrace their virtues? What if there’s something back there in the murky corners of our family cupboard that really would have been better left alone….?

Looking back a hundred, two hundred years for our identity seems a pretty hollow way to find it – almost like we don’t trust ourselves to create our own. Fine, you want something to strengthen your identity, to give you some roots – you go for it. But it takes more than roots, doesn’t it, more than a handful of other peoples’birth and death certificates to define you as you are? Surely in our shiny new modern age, the era of the individual and of personal responsibility, we are what we do - not where we came from?

At 21, that can’t be a great sign.

I couldn’t stop work, I needed the money (the Amstel wouldn’t pay for itself) and had no idea what else I would do. I couldn’t move out to solve the other problem, I’d signed a contract. But then, after a while, I realised I couldn’t live in the pub. And so it was that one lunchtime a week later found me on Blackfriars Road at a church for the first time in years, standing ankle-deep in books and maps, wondering whether I would follow it through. Two months later I found myself on a plateau in France’s Massif Central, walking ankle-deep in snow, wondering where I was going.  

There exist in France four medieval pilgrimage routes that benefit from literature and guides, and a staggering number of others which criss-cross the country, originating in England, Norway, Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe. Most of these converge near the Atlantic ocean to cross the Pyrenees on a track at one point used by Napoleon’s armies, running parallel to the northern coast of Spain to the city of Santiago de Compostela, capital of Galicia, where the fabled remains of the apostle St James may or may not be buried. These routes have brought people by foot from all corners of Europe for over a millennium. It was a far cry from wondering whether to get the Tube home before or after the O2 turned out.  

I had quit my job, bought a one-way ticket to Lyon and given myself about a month to walk the 460 miles to the Spanish border. It wasn’t so much about post-University travelling, I didn’t want to go East to learn about spiritualism or psychotropic fungi. It wasn’t really about culture; though the route was steeped in it, admittedly beautiful Romanesque chapels don’t set my pulse racing. It wasn’t about religion, though days of walking through the sublime would, I knew, have enforced any belief or awe I felt for a deity. Instead it seemed that to have left everything I knew behind, and to be standing there in the snow trying to remember that the sun goes east to west and so in the mornings I should be following my shadow, was the natural result of how I had felt a month before, in that office breathing recycled air in the time between cigarette breaks. 

It turned out to be one of the most personal and painfully rewarding experiences I’ve ever had. I didn’t go to find myself, Jesus or enlightenment, but to get time and space away from everything that bogged down my mind. It was almost unwittingly over those weeks, walking through snow, wind, rain, hail and (unfortunately since it now looks like I’ve been on holiday) the occasional bit of sun, that I deconstructed facets of my life and personality and came to understand things I wouldn’t have had a hope of knowing if I had stayed put in England. These I won’t be discussing with anyone, partially because I’m terrified of appearing someone who has discovered who they are and now, puffing up their chest and looking pensive, can fix your problems too; and partially because, even if I wanted to, I probably couldn’t find the words.  

There were moments when I looked at myself with the sort of disdainful bafflement some of my friends adopted when I left, wondering whether I wasn’t a slight danger to myself. After a week I sat, soaking, in a forest and would have given anything I owned for five minutes in that same pub, in the same life, or to hear my father monger doom about the woes of old age, or just to have a sip of proper tea in my mother’s kitchen. But, of course, it wouldn’t happen, and so you choose an appropriate cliché and root around in yourself for some strength to carry on. And despite the emotional turbulence there were physical concerns. Tendons which were used to 30-minute jaunts to the station fought back petulantly when asked to walk 30 kilometres through mud, to do the same the day after, and to repeat with no end in sight.  

Youth was only maybe on my side. Evacuation of the French countryside to the big cities means you can walk through villages not seeing a soul, and the relative unpopularity of the French sections of the journey, compared with the Spanish, means you can see no one else walking all day. There were other people, and you find you fall into step with some and spend the night at the same gites d’étapes, little places on the routes where for €8 or €10 you can get a bed for the night. But the vast majority of these were retired French or German people, who walked because they had the time to spare. I only met two other people under 30, and we were there because we felt, unlike the others, that we had had to get away from our lives at home.  

There were days when things went wrong: when I got lost and walked for 10 and a half hours and nearly 30 miles to find myself back on the route but nowhere near where I had wanted to end up; when I climbed 600ft, lost again but convinced I was on the right hill, through one electric and three barbed wire fences to reach the summit only to realise my mistake, climb back down and repeat with the right hill; though I was only once slightly bitten by a dog which didn’t get through the leather on my boot. There were chronic mistakes too: thinking a 1.2kg edition of War and Peace was an acceptable weight concession in a rucksack that weighed 15kg without food or water; or that an old pair of fcuk jeans wouldn’t start to disintegrate on the first day. You can add to all this the cacophony of snoring which kept people awake, and the inclination of these ronfleurs to get up at 6am, turn on the lights and loudly discuss where they would be going that day while I tried desperately to shut off the part of my brain which impulsively translates French, to get just a few minutes of sleep before a breakfast which more often than not comprised bread and prune jam, having the consistency of wet sand and a comparable taste.  

But, for all these there were days whose benefits far outstripped the annoyances. First catching sight of the Pyrenees 550km in, sitting on the grassy banks of the Lot where no one knew and no one could reach me, standing in the trees at the foot of a 900-year-old guard tower in a low patch of land so untouched and untended it could have been centuries earlier in time. But as for the final moment, the official end of my trip, passing under a gate which has stood at the entrance to St-Jean-Pied-de-Port for 600 years, there were no fireworks or whooping, no cheers or celebrations. A quiet beer and a phone-call to my parents, a raft of text messages to friends, and a train timetable were my only concerns. In the same way that I wasn’t happy or sad when I left the sandstone and breccia entrance to the cathedral in Le Puy-en-Velay, I wasn’t happy or sad to stand at the door of a red schist church in Basque country while storm clouds moved over the mountains ahead. 

There were exactly four weeks between those points, to duck out of life, out of media, politics, taxes, careers, fashions, feuds, elations, squabbles, commutes, dents on the car and scratches on my mobile to figure things in their place, myself included. It wasn’t a panacea, I won’t be able to cure my ills, let alone make an attempt with anyone else’s. But if you’ll excuse the saccharine taste of this sentiment, it let me return to find an entirely new and more understandable life and country of beautifully finite complexity. Even better, it hasn’t changed a bit since I left.  

Whether you’re betting the ranch or simply after a decent option in the office sweepstake, take a look at the six golden rules of Eurovision betting.

Rule no. 1: Listen To All The Songs

Betting on a winner when you haven’t seen the full field is madness. While it may be highly unlikely that Andorra is going to come from nowhere to blow away the more fancied opposition, it’s not wholly impossible. Although making your way through forty-three competitors may look like heavy sledding, it’s preferable to sticking your money on Russia and looking on in horror as Finland, a country whose most internationally famous act may well be the Bomfunk MCs, romps home at a canter with Lordi. Trust me.

Rule no.2: Make Sure They Can Sing Live

As most modern pop and rock acts will tell you, Auto-Tune can hide a multitude of sins. Eurovision is a live event and entrants need to be able to perform without pitch correction in front of an audience of six hundred million people, a good proportion of whom will have tuned in to see you make as much of a tit of yourself as Britain’s lamentable honkers Jemini in 2003. Serbia’s 2007 winner, Marija Serifovic, may have looked like a chubby Chinese boy but she had lungs that could blow out a candle at a hundred paces. Similarly, Magdi Rusza of Hungary managed to overcome a pedestrian arrangement and a ridiculously unwieldy title to see Unsubstantial Blues take eighth place on the strength of a convincing Etta James impersonation. The ability to sing doesn’t guarantee coming back with the prize but the inability to sing can prove fatal. There’s little doubt that Serebro’s Song No.1 was the best piece of modern pop on show last year but they proved incapable of holding a tune on the night and finished more than sixty points off the leader.

Make sure that, once you’ve whittled your selections down to five or six, you look for Youtube footage of live vocal performances before parting with your money.

Rule no. 3: Ignore The Bookies

There are two critical things to bear in mind when it comes to reading Eurovision odds. Firstly, patriotic immigrant communities in the UK will back their country regardless of its actual prospects, thus shortening the odds. You won’t get a great price on Ireland, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus or Poland and the fact that they may appear high-up on the list of favourites should not be taken as an indication that they’re red-hot tips. Secondly, the bookmakers know absolutely nothing. Last year’s 2/1 shot, Switzerland, limped home in twentieth place in the semi-final meaning that, for the second consecutive year, the bookies’ favourite was eliminated at the qualifying stage. Trust your own judgement, there’s no point looking to them for suggestions.

Rule no.4: Consider Each-Way Bets

Picking an outright winner is notoriously difficult but there are several countries that are generally good bets for a top four finish. Unless they absolutely balls its up, Russia always has a strong chance of placing, particularly with 2006 runner-up Dima Bilan at the helm. Turkey is another country that’s generally there-or-thereabouts when the final rankings are revealed. Naturally, the odds aren’t great but, if you’re lucky, you might be able to pick up evens on either of them. Each-way betting also means that the 40/1 outsider you have a good feeling about can become a very attractive 10/1 option to land a place on the podium.

Rule no.5: Don’t Place Too Much Weight On Geography

The general consensus in the West is that the splintering of Eastern Europe means the Balkans and Baltics now have a monopoly on potential winners. This is the talk of sore losers and nothing more. Following Serbia’s victory last year, a Swedish newspaper tabulated the results as they would have stood had the countries participating in 1987 been the only ones eligible to vote in 2007 and discovered that they matched the actual standings almost exactly. Neighbours do vote for each other quite frequently, of course, but ‘twas ever thus and tends to even itself out over the course of the night. A winner needs to be able to pick up twelve points from all points of the continent.

Rule no.6: Don’t Put Any Money On The UK

It’s not because of the war in Iraq. It’s not because of our close relationship with the US. It’s not because we can’t dress and are awkward around women. It’s because we constantly enter songs that wouldn’t scrape the top seventy-five in the British charts and react with indignation when the continentals don’t fall to their knees in admiration. The UK’s annual failure to come up with anything even vaguely passable means that betting on a British winner is likely to see precisely the same return as folding a twenty pound note into an origami boat and watching it float merrily down the Thames.

It rather goes without saying that all tips should be taken with a pinch of salt - it’s the unpredictable nature of the contest that makes it so incredibly entertaining. There remains something attractive about placing a wager on Eurovision, however. With all sporting events, luck plays an equal role alongside judgement in the final outcome. The only real variable with Eurovision is the reaction of the audience - essentially, it’s the chance to put yourself in the role of an A&R man for the night, using your critical faculties to predict what will capture the imagination of the continent. Roll on Belgrade ‘08.

I am a bookworm, I am never happier than when I have a book in my hand and I will read anything. I can’t leave the house without a book in my bag; even on a night out with my friends I will shove a small paperback into my handbag. You never know when you might have to wait in line at a club, or to use the toilet in the pub. The thought of being alone with my own mind scares me somewhat. The idea of having to make small-talk terrifies me.

I can read a page of an airport novel in just under 20 seconds; I can recall 90%+ of the information on that page. I read a 200 page novel in an hour. When I go on holiday I have to take a book for every day that I’ll be away and then 2 or three extras in case I get stuck in hospital with a rare flesh rotting disease. I don’t include any books my fellow holiday makers take with them in these calculations. These are bonus books.

None of this is intended to be in any way boastful. All I am trying to demonstrate is that a) I like reading, b) I read quickly, c) I read a lot. I may also have managed to demonstrate that I am d) a slightly mentally unstable and e) a social incompetent.

So, back to Ulysses. As you have probably guessed, I never read it while I was at school. Nor did Elie for that matter, so I never felt too badly about it. I knew that my choice to study English Literature at Uni would bring me face to face with the book soon enough, and therefore I saw no reason to worry about this hole in my literary knowledge.

Second year of University. A course entitled ‘Literature and Text’, the kind of course that I love. On the book list, you guessed it, Ulysses. The term moved by quite quickly and suddenly the Easter holidays were upon us. Now, being kindly folk, our lecturers had set Ulysses as the first text to be studied after the break, giving us all the more time to read it. Despite this I had been carrying my copy of Ulysses around with me since the end of January. I was convinced I would read it well before the holidays and, due in no small part to my delusion, I was suffering some quite serious back pain. Bemoaning aloud the fact I had just one unread text on my booklist, someone suggested that I was suffering from what he termed Ulysses Fear. I quickly scoffed at the idea, I who had read not one but two completely unreadable Alan Hollinghurst novels, being scared of a book that was undoubtedly going to actually be good. The very idea was preposterous.

Yet the summer exams rolled round and I never quite managed to plough my way past page 68 of Ulysses and so I avoided it in the exams. My accusatory friend, meanwhile, scoffed in the corner at my feebly uttered excuses.

I resolved to read Ulysses over the summer, perhaps on the beach in Brighton, perhaps while I worked over the summer in that very school where I had made that thoughtlessly disregarded promise. This time, I was sure that I would succeed.

I don’t know what it is that is stopping me. It can hardly be the length as I have read most of Maeve Binchy, ploughed through a smattering of Elizabeth Elgin in my life and recently embarked on an Anne Rivers-Siddons immersion exercise.

Needless to say my cycle of failure continued when I promised myself that I would take Ulysses with me to Montréal as a piece of light reading for my year abroad. As it turned out I didn’t even have space for a French dictionary, let alone a ridiculously battered yet still unread copy of what I had now decided was a nigh-on unreadable text.

As I sit here, 3000 miles from that detestable copy of the novel, taking a class where once again Ulysses has been placed on the reading list, I am determined that this summer will be the summer when I, Hattie Kennedy, will conquer Ulysses. In September I am taking yet another course with it on the reading list and I refuse to let this book conquer me when so many others have tried and failed. Ulysses is the kind of book I should love. I really like intertextuality. I really like pretentious books. I’m currently geeking out over an interactive biography of the Quebecois author and revolutionary Hubert Aquin, it has interviews, and postcards, and pull out letters; it is simply called HA!.

So, I sit here, listening to an album conceived as a biography of a certain Jewish teenager (I told you that I like pretentiousness and intertextuality) and I declare that I, Hattie Kennedy, have Ulysses Fear, but that I will conquer it before September.

All in all, that sounds very sensible and normal and, well, grown up.

And therein lies the problem, and the question I’ve been asking myself recently:

Should I finally grow up and put away childish things?

I’ve always seemed to try to keep one foot in my youth, whether it’s my music, clothes, or even when I manage to sneak a weekend away with the boys, we will always end up in the same rock club in Manchester I frequented when I was 20, and at 1am still carry out the same ridiculous dance moves we did over a decade ago, much to the bemusement of the surrounding emo kids, who must surely think we’re undercover police gone wrong.

Outside of my scruffy, almost childlike attitude to personal appearance, my main problem (despite the sensible bank account) is my grasp on money matters. Case in point being the recent wedding. We received a great deal of monetary/voucher gifts, and while my wife and I sensibly discuss items such as breadmakers, dishwashers, cutlery sets, linens etc., when she leaves the room I’m on the web looking at 40″ HD plasma TVs, and price checking PS3s and Wiis.

If it’s not bad enough that I want to fritter away gift money on such childish things, I’ve got over 2k in my savings from a recent share payout and, in my mind, I’ve already spent it on a very nice looking home cinema system that would leave with me just enough change to buy a can of cheap lager to watch it with.

What makes this sadder is the fact that our flat is ridiculously small. You couldn’t get a 40″ TV in there if you wanted to, unless you removed the sofa and fashioned the box it comes in into some form of E-Z-chair.

All of that aside, I’d say the main thing stopping me from being a fully formed adult is the Internet. Sites like Play.com and CD-Wow make it so easy to buy a load of DVDs without thinking twice about it. It’s only when they’re delivered and I’m getting an earful about not having any space that my brain clicks into gear and I five days belatedly think, “Yeah, best not click on ‘Go To Basket’ right now.”

But those sites aside, the main, main problem is that beast they call eBay. The amount of childish crap on sale on there is a haven for morons like me, and you know it’s all being sold by morons like me who are having their hand forced by their partners. Japanese film posters of Coen brothers movies? Check! Replica tat from Goodfellas? Check! Film cells for God’s sakes, film cells? Double-check, and mate.

Do you know what I saw on there the other day?

A home bar.

Yup, the kind that Delboy or Pat from Eastenders would buy. The kind only owned by TV idiots and the mentally challenged.

All I could think was, “How have I lived this long without this in my house?”

I looked further. There are hundreds of them. Hundreds of bars being sold by hundreds of idiots who bought them without telling their wives.

I’m watching several of them as we speak. You remember how big I said my flat is, right? I’m watching one that’s five metres long. There are no rooms in my flat that could accommodate that, and yet there it is, in my watch list.

The one thing that is constantly in the back of my mind when I’m doing stuff like this is thoughts of my parents. Now obviously it was a different generation, and the majority of couples were getting married and having kids a lot earlier, but the thought is always there: can I remember my parents acting like this at my age? When my dad was 33, I would have been around ten. I wonder if he was doing equally stupid things. That said, in our dining room we did have an American slate pool table (a Christmas present to us apparently) and an old bar in the corner… maybe it’s genetic?

I have to say that the one saving grace of growing up is getting married, though. I can say with my hand on my heart that if I was still single, I’d be sitting in one of the stupidest bachelor pads you’ve ever seen. It would have all the latest mod cons, a bar where the kitchen should be, a TV where the sofa should be, and numerous signed photos of James Gandolfini and Darth Vader where photos of friends and family would be.

I wouldn’t be there to enjoy it though, as I would’ve either starved to death after forgetting to buy food for two weeks, or been overcome from the stench of my clothes and drowned in a pool of my own sick.

Anyway, that’s enough chitter-chatter. I’m bidding on an original Millennium Falcon and it finishes soon.

You can read it here:

• Why You Must Own Your Own Domain Name

As said, it’s brief and not much more than a distraction, but the point it raises is valid. If you don’t currently own your own domain name - and by ‘your own’ I mean literally that, your real name (i.e., www.yourname.com), then do it now. Registering a domain name is easy and inexpensive, but the cost of not doing so could prove to be enormous down the line.

Why? What if you hit it big? What if you invent or do something that becomes a huge deal. Then what? I tell you what will happen - as soon as your name becomes even moderately famous (or infamous, thrill-seekers) somebody will register it. And then you’re pretty much screwed. Buying that domain name back - assuming, that is, the person even wants to sell - could end up costing you a small fortune.

It’s up to you - pay a few pounds now, or potentially a few thousand pounds in X years from now.

Heck, somebody may even have registered it already. Check here to find out:

• Domain Name Checker

While there is a real and genuine financial risk to not owning your own domain (not to mention the possibility for ridicule or embarrassment - what if somebody sets it up as a porn site? Or worse, uses it as a platform for something like racism), there are also some other things you should do that won’t cost you a penny, but again may prove fruitful down the line: register with each and every ‘next big thing’ that hits (or has hit) the Internets.

What do I mean? Pretty much anything that’s popular, or potentially will be down the line. Anything and everything. Certainly the main hubs on world web. Even if you don’t plan to use these services, have never heard of them and don’t think you ever will use them, register your name there, and while you’re at it, your business name too. Again, you never know when your current circumstances will change. If you were to ever go on to a life of fame and wealth, those services will not only be potentially beneficial, but there is a real chance that somebody else will register as you (or your business).

Registration is quick and simple, and you can get the following list done in less than half an hour.

• Gmail/Google
• Yahoo
• MySpace
• Facebook
• Bebo
• Twitter

Don’t delay. Get it done now. And while you’re at it, don’t forget your domain.

After four days sitting in an incredibly grim waiting room at Southwark Crown Court, followed by another four stultifying days in a stuffy courtroom watching the evidence mount (evidence always mounts) against three teenage yobs - they were guilty all right - sending them down would be a pleasure, even if it was for the pesky, jumped-up nothing charge of affray. The prosecution made heavy weather of it and seemed generally under-prepared, but there was enough key evidence, as far as I was concerned, to make it beyond reasonable doubt. The word amongst the jurors, as we were shuffled out of court for yet another of the frequent breaks so that the legal bods could discuss a point of law, was that the lads were guilty as sin.

And then what happens? One of the defendants changes his plea. Dammit - the one thing that would have made the sorry experience worthwhile, the exercise of power, was denied us. Ah well, at least we still had the other two to send down. But no, we had been compromised and what’s more had heard evidence that referred only to the plea-changer’s case - we wouldn’t get to make any decision. We were sequestered in a little room, lest we contaminate our successors, while a clerk tried to find out if any other London courts wanted 12 disaffected jurors. Nobody did, we were free to go, our time wasted. The five younger members of the jury went off to the pub where we got thoroughly wankered. We were all disappointed; we’d got a shit case and we hadn’t even got to go through our deliberations. We agreed that all three were guilty and discussed exactly when we’d come to our decisions - we were all more-or-less in accord. We agreed that three of the older jurors were bigots, but that everybody, even them, had taken the thing seriously. We were solid.

Still, despite getting pleasantly pissed with some decent people, I went away thinking that I’d had my time wasted, not just because of the turn of events in our case, but because the whole thing could surely get along just as well without 12 poor saps sitting in one corner. The judge seemed a nice chap and he surely knew the law better than any of us and would be more skilled at shifting through the evidence. You’re more likely to get rough justice from a jury than a judge, I thought. I knew there was some great libertarian principle that meant we must uphold the jury system, but I was damned if I could think what it was.

Present a case to 12 independent men and women and ask them for a simple decision: guilty or not guilty (and in Scotland the wonderful cop-out of not proven)?

Each will view the ambiguities of the case differently; each will set a slightly different limit to the burden of proof they require for a ‘guilty’ verdict. Each brings their own special prejudices to bear. To some extent, all are a little bored by the realities of the courtroom and resent this waste of their time. Save for a bit of patronising instruction by the judge, they’ve received no legal training. The likelihood that all twelve will, independently, come to the same verdict is fairly remote. Yet this is what our system demands on the understandable, misguided, basis that if twelve different minds assess the same case and reach the same conclusion the judgement must be sound, or at least more sound than that of a single judge.

Of course, in a group situation, it doesn’t work like this, behaviour and opinions gravitate towards the mean quickly. People consciously or unconsciously fit themselves into the group, imitate the behaviour of its one or two dominant members and attempt to find their own little niches. Add to this the in-built system pressure for a unanimous verdict, which rather undermines the point of having more than one adjudicator, augment with the play-acting of counsel who prey on the better or worse instincts of jurors, and you have a system that seems the worst of possibilities. You get all the fallibilities of a sole judge, but without their expert knowledge and trained intellect.

What worth there is in the jury system certainly does not come from any sense that it is a surer way of getting the right verdict, but from the fact that it is ultimately not the state that controls the process, it is ordinary Joe and Jane Biggins. The great merit of the jury is that it is not a slave to the law, but to its own feelings. Indeed, even in the case I sat on, we could still have delivered a ‘not guilty’ verdict after the judge instructed us to find the plea-changer guilty and there isn’t a damn thing anyone could’ve done to touch us.

If you’ve ever been to the Old Bailey you may have seen the plaque commemorating the jurymen from the 1670 trail of the Quakers William Penn (of Pennsylvania fame) and William Mead, the case which finally established the independence of juries. The jury were instructed by the judge to find Penn and Mead guilty of “unlawful and tumultuous assembly” after a spot of anti-establishment preaching. When the jury refused, they were locked up without food, drink, or “so much as a chamber pot, though desired”. When they still refused, the judge fined them and sent them to prison. Eventually, one of them obtained a writ of habeas corpus and secured their release.

In the nineteenth century it was common for juries to give ‘not guilty’ verdicts to obviously guilty defendants in livestock or petty theft cases, where hanging was the statutory punishment. As conviction rates plummeted, amid much establishment grumbling about insurrection, the law was changed to be more socially acceptable.

More recently Clive Ponting’s non-conviction for breaching the Official Secrets Act over the sinking of the Belgrano led to a revamping of the act. Such independent action by juries, of seemingly minor importance, are just about the greatest check we have against unjust and authoritarian laws and (in the face of a toothless parliament) the governments who make them.

It must, however, be admitted that such cases are rare. Can you really justify taking millions of man hours per month from ordinary men and women, when in 99.9 per cent of cases a judge would be just as sound as a jury? Most European countries get by without them in all but the most serious cases. And the less elevated consequences of this disinterest in the letter of the law are far more common: the bigoted “you can see it in his eyes” attitude that at least a couple of the jury I served on displayed and I’m sure must be present on most juries is one example. Personal dislike or like of the defendant is, simply put, far more likely to sway a jury than a professional judge.

I’d certainly like to see a scaling back in the numbers of jury trials and find the government’s attempts to trim back understandable - they are incredibly expensive, wasteful and jurors do undoubtedly fuck up things where a judge would not. Yet, in my heart of hearts, I couldn’t ever condone removing anyone’s right to it. For one thing, you never know if you might want it yourself. If you were stitched up by the state, who would you rather decide your fate: a jury of your peers or a paid up member of the establishment?