Goodwill to all mankind (that includes shopworkers)

So, in the immortal words of Noddy Holder, here it is. Three and a half weeks to go until the big day. In shops and stores across the world, consumers are suffering varying levels of festive stress. In need of an outlet for this building pressure, they seize on the best virtual punchbag known to retail: the poor soul behind the counter.

This underpaid minion has not been wearing tinsel and reindeer antlers since the middle of October of their own volition. It is a Management Directive. They are not smiling at you because they are delighted at your custom. It is a rictus forced upon them on pain of unemployment. If at times this becomes a little tiring and they look a little surly, do not blame them, for their feet ache, the remorseless lighting and the relentlessly looped Christmas music have given them a splitting headache, and the general public at large, endured en masse, day in, day out, rot the soul.

You're at work. You're doing your job as best you can. Somebody comes up to you expecting to be treated with respect, nay, honour. They are The Customer. You smile, offer a polite greeting. The customer blanks you completely to bawl into their mobile phone. You scan their items and wait for payment. The customer continues to ignore you. A queue builds. Eventually the customer shoves a card at you, still talking, not making eye contact. Some time later, they deign to enter their PIN code into the machine. You finish the transaction and present their card, goods and receipt with a smile now a little frayed around the edges. They snatch the lot and leave without a backward glance, still yakking. If you're lucky, the next customer will give you a word or a look of sympathy. If you're unlucky, they'll be on the phone.

If you've never worked on the wrong side of a service point, you cannot imagine the rudeness, the venom that is spat at someone in no position to defend themselves. Ninety-five per cent of the time, it's not their fault but still they have to apologise for the perceived mistakes of others.

Today (not in my workplace) I heard a customer spend at least twenty minutes haranguing a man behind a counter for something that was a) not his fault, b) inconvenient but not insurmountable and c) temporary. All this in tones of real nastiness. It's a tone I hear a lot, sometimes directed at me, sometimes at other people.

When you're out and about, in shops, in public service offices, hanging on the phone to call centres, listen to yourself. Not just to what you say, but how you say it.

So you're having a bad day. So nothing's going right. We're sorry for your troubles. We're doing all we can.

Swear inside your head, not at us. Better still, take a deep breath and try to appreciate that we want to help if you'll let us, but if you carry on treating us like dirt we'll decide you're not worth the bother.

This may amaze you, but people in customer service have feelings too.

And she's hooked to the silver screen

It's taken me a while, but I've finally realised what the problem is. This is a Technicolor (TM) world. My soul is monochrome. Inside this scruffy exterior, buried beneath layers of ill-fitting denim, beats the heart of a wannabe silver screen siren. No wonder modern life leaves me so dissatisfied. In the first place, no-one wears hats properly any more. I certainly don't as I any hat tends to make me look like Noddy Holder crossed with Wally from the Where's Wally books (or Waldo if you're in the USA). Yet fifty, sixty years ago everyone wore hats by instinct alone and looked fabulous. The same goes for tailoring. The women were hoisted into place with discreet scaffolding of one kind or another. The men wore made-to-measure as a matter of course. Now I know I'm generalising wildly and yes, I know not everyone could afford to look like that. But that era had class. No-one flashed their drawers at the paparazzi. They'd be ashamed at the mere idea. Yet these days tartiness is de rigeur and I can't remember the time I saw a well-dressed man in the street. By now you're rolling your eyes and wondering what's set the mad tweedy women off on her soap box again. It's quite simple. Blame whoever did yesterday's daytime telly schedule and decided to put on a 1947 thriller, Odd Man Out, directed by Carol Reed and starring (deep breath to ward off swooning) James Mason. He was playing a wounded killer on the run rather than leaning suavely against a mantelpiece but it still set me thinking. My train of thought, a short one, admittedly, ran something like this: I'd forgotten how lovely James Mason's voice was. Oh, I haven't seen The Prisoner of Zenda for ages. Oh! Stewart Granger! Stewart Granger and James Mason in the same film! At this point I had to go and lie down, fanning myself with the Radio Times. You just don't get men like that these days. You don't get stars like that, all velvet-voiced and masterful. I mean, compare the brooding presence of Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights with Tom Thingy in the recent TV serial. It's a bad example for me because I didn't watch the latter on the wholly-justifiable grounds that I can't bear the book and just want to bash Cathy and Heathcliffe's heads together for being so irritating, but you can't fault Olivier. I'm on safer ground with Hitchcock's Rebecca; I've seen that several times and he was an excellent Maxim be Winter. Going back to James Mason, I've seen several old films in which he's never less than compellingly watchable even if the rest of the film's complete tosh. I know these men were actors, and gifted ones, and I know that sixty years ago there were probably women carping that screen heroes just weren't the same since the talkies came in, but I do think that modern men just don't compare. So while my inner self cries out to wear a fabulous frock with a nipped-in waist and my hair longs to do that twisted under thing beloved of the Foyle's War stylist, perhaps with a little pillbox hat perched aloft at a sassy angle, I have to say no and put my plimsolled foot down firmly. There is no point going to all that effort when men wear South Park t-shirts and talk like refugees from soap operas. As a species, we have no longer have any class. How frightfully, frightfully grim.

For whom the Belle tolls

So blogging lady of the night Belle de Jour has outed herself... as a former PhD student. Like many others, I read the media coverage in appalled amazement. How the hell did she find the time? Did she submit her thesis by the deadline? What about the rewrites? Was the quality of her work affected by her other job? And what about the effect of that work on her research project? This is where I have to hold up my hand and declare an interest. I spent four years of my life - and this is not something I'm proud of - as, yes, a PhD student. Even now, the memories fill me with shame. The long hours hunched over a computer, tapping away. The even longer hours trying to look busy while waiting for a simulation to finish running. The clammy, sweaty realisation that I had used the wrong variables and was going to have to start all over again. And the gut-churning day when the computer displayed a black screen with the dispassionate message: "Cannot detect hard drive. Please insert hard drive and press any key to continue" and I hadn't backed up any of the last two years' work. And perhaps worst of all, the self-loathing and bitterness that came from the realisation, about eighteen months in, that I did not want to do this for the rest of my life. The spurious glamour had faded and the fun had gone. But there was no way out. Dependent on the research grant for my survival, I was forced to spend the next two and a half years chained to a battered desk in an overlit, underventilated communal office, putting my soul through all sorts of twisted contortions as I tried to make the person I'd become measure up to the person I could have been had I been able to find the strength to walk away. Today I am rehabillitated, a hard-working, upstanding pillar of the community. But there is always the fear that, one day, my past will catch up with me. Despite the censure heaped upon PhD students, we fulfil a need in society. Someone has to drudge through the dead ends of human endeavour, drawing erroneous conclusions from incomplete data. Without us, there would be no Nobel prizewinners, no medical breakthroughs, no market for black t-shirts emblazoned with the logos of obscure Scandinavian hard rock bands. We live through the agony of peer review of papers cobbled together because our supervisor thinks it's time we published something, anything, through the pity of friends with five figure salaries, and with the almost overpowering temptations of eBay and Facebook. Every day we are forced to face up to our own intellectual inadequacies. We fell into this way of life, seduced by images in the media. We remain there, trapped by the desperate need for cold, hard cash to pay the heating bill. Please don't judge us.

I've got a little list...

When I'm not writing clunky blog entries or procrastinating, I read. Since procrastination takes up most of my time, I read far less than I would like too and less than I should. The usual result of this is spectacular multibooking. This week I have been blending Edmund Crispin with Terry Pratchett, which is good for the vocabulary if nothing else. I haven't dared add any battlefield archaeology to the mix. One of the less mindboggling side effects of this habit is that I always have a mental list of Books I Really Must Read When I Have Time. Everyone has a list like this. It's driven entirely by guilt and peer pressure. Wolf Hall? Oh yes, but there were about three hundred people on the waiting list at the library last time I checked. All three volumes of Simon Schama's History of Britain? Gathering dust on the bookcase for the past six years or so. A Clockwork Orange? Read an extract in the paper this morning, thought "oh, that looks good, I'll have to reserve that". The complete works of Christopher Marlowe? Got to read them for work but I fear I'll struggle. (I don't buy the Marlowe-was-Shakespeare theory on the entirely unscientific grounds that Dr Faustus bored me and the Shakespeare I've read so far never has.) The Lost Symbol? No, no and thrice no. Even for a giggle. The worst aspect of this condition is that the list gets longer all the time. I'll be wading through a social history of the personal column thinking "I haven't read Jane Eyre in ages". (A sub-condition is the buying of books I've borrowed and enjoyed, the theory being that I liked them so much I'll re-read them later. They gather dust with all the others.) Why do I do it? Life is finite. There is only a fixed number of books I can read. Why must I try to cram in more than I can possibly get through in the allotted time? Denial complicates matters still further. I know I won't read six books during my week off work but I still bring them back from the library anyway. I've read one, which has brought a small glow of achievement. I'd planned to read part of another today but somehow ended up ironing instead and then realised I hadn't finished the paper. The simplest thing would be to admit that I don't have time and send the contents of my overstuffed bookcase to charity shops, relying instead purely on the charms of the local library service, but that would be a betrayal of the avid reader I used to be. There's nothing for it. I am going to have to work through all the books on my list. One at a time...

Reasons to be cheerful

A bloggette today: five reasons to feel good about myself. 1. In spite of everything, I keep writing. While some might say this is not something to be proud of, I like to think it shows perseverence and a determination to improve. 2. Slowly but surely I am getting rid of decades' accumulated junk. Apparently this will feel liberating when it's finished, although at the moment I am just wondering where it all came from, since there seems to be no corresponding space in the cupboards I took it from. 3. By not conforming to modern standards of singlism, I am forging my own identity. No matter that this will end up as tweedy woman in bobble hat knitted from moulted cat fur. At least I am not walking about in a skirt shorter than my coat and no tights, so I am not going to contract pneumonia and be a drain on the National Health Service. 4. Although not stated explicitly on my job description, I seem to be the only person who can fix the fax maxhine at work. Apart from last time, when the most I could do was a post mortem. But I did it nicely. 5. I know all the words to Bowie's Young Americans, even the bit in the middle where he gabbles. It's not much, but it's a start. Oh, and I can write concisely when I want to.

Mirror, mirror

So I came back. Bit of a makeover for the blog, tart the place up a bit, try to encourage myself to come out of my barnacle-encrusted shell (do you get landlocked barnacles?) and just get on and write something. But what? Well, I said to myself I was going to be a writer, then I said to myself I'd better face up to the fact that it ain't gonna happen. And so it's time to face the other unpalatable truths of my life: 1. I am never going to be a beauty. Now I know I've blogged extensively about my bloodyminded embrace of plainness and all its attendant freedoms from unfeasible cosmetics bills and having to look in every mirror I encounter, but I have to admit here and now it didn't come easily. Because if I'm honest I'm like everyone else: I want the world to see how fabulous I am. Now, well-meaning friends and greetings card writers aside, no-one really cares about what's inside. Exterior is all. No-one ever said, "All right, she's got a face like the back of the bus but, my god, you should see her spleen." And that goes for more nebulous distinguishing characteristics. You could be the kindest, most noble creature on God's earth but if you look like a mangled trout no-one will give you a second glance, apart from, perhaps, the odd lairy twelve year old who will take great delight in informing you of your repellant aspect. (Really. It's happened to me at least twice in the street.) And all this leads on to: 2. I am never going to have a relationship of any meaning with anybody. Again, I've blogged bravely about the advantages of the defiantly single life, but when it comes down to it, when I've read too much Jane Austen or watched part four of the BBC's adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, it's a bit disheartening to know that I am never going to experience anything even faintly reminiscent of the grand passions evoked in great works of literature, or by the Mills & Boon oeuvre, come to that. In life, it takes a lot to get past first impressions (see point one) and no man is going to waste time on a borderline depressive teetotal wallflower. Well, one or two men might give it a go, but I know them by sight (and, in one case, by particularly pungent smell) and I take evasive action accordingly. When all's said and done, the fault's entirely mine. I'm misanthropic and would rather stay in sighing over fictional heroes than go out and find my own. Nevertheless, resigned singlism does have its problems, namely: 3. Leonard Cohen is never going to write a song about me. For various reasons, among them my inability to socialise like a sane human being, points one and two above, and, most importantly, the fact that we are never going to meet or have any other form of contact, I am never going to be the muse for a song of startling beauty and lyrical truth, sung by a man whose voice sends shivers down my spine. While realism insists I recognise this, I can't help feeling a twinge of disappointment as I listen to CDs on headphones in the wee small hours of the morning. 4. I am never going to be the wise-cracking all-action sidekick of a 1960s super-cool secret agent. It's 2009. Any remaining 1960s super-cool secret agents will be a) dead, b) too arthritic to swing or c) popping Viagra and trying to pull sceptical nineteen year old popsies with a line about their flying car that can go underwater. And it's that pesky point one again. 5. I never keep a promise, even to myself. I said I wouldn't write any more, but here I am. Next time, I shall blog on five things that make me feel good about myself. That will be a much shorter post. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to listen to Leonard Cohen. Well, a girl can dream.