Philobiblon

In a company full of young people doing dull office jobs, the staff are all trying to establish their lives, to get ahead, and to get into each other’s pants. It’s a situation as old as the shorthand/typist, but these days, as first-time playwright Jason Charles has grasped, there are potential new twists.

Gay workers are increasingly likely to be “out” at work, and their colleagues are going to have to come to terms to working, and socialising, and even getting changed in the same dressing room, as them.

That’s the situation at the start of Steam, which opened last night at the White Bear Theatre in Kennington. Matt (Oscar Wild), the self-proclaimed office alpha male, who treats his girlfriend Vanessa (Lusia McAnespie) with scant respect, is horrified to find that for a football match against their deadly rivals in the crate-hire business, she’s enlisted a quiet, serious, and gay, member of staff, Luke (a finely judged, subtle performance from Daniel Kanaber). One of Matt’s more repeatable names for him is “fairy-cakes”.

The team grows by one with the arrival of Chris (Glynn Doggett), who’s also straight. He seems young, and vulnerable, and you wonder what he might be dragged into by this dominating character until the numbers are evened up with the final member of the “team”, Billy (Jonathan Gibson), the office junior. He’s as camp and over-the-top as could be imagined, and has a fine line in sexy song-and-dance routines.

There’s time for a few nice one-liners: “I had a promotion but it is not a lobotomy”, says Matt. “I don’t usually associate loving with Ronnie Kray,” says Luke, after walking in on some of Matt’s “rough wooing” of Vanessa. But the play is a bit slow to get started. Will there be an all-in brawl? you wonder.

No. Instead, a curious sport develops – the telling of what Matt identifies as NQEs (Near Queer Experiences). For a homophobe, Matt is curiously keen to talk about gay sex and gay life. And he seems curiously keen to touch, even if it is often a punch, the apparently vulnerable Billy.

But what about the football? Well, there is no game – at least not of that sort, for, it emerges, there’s a lot more to this Friday after-work gathering than that. And there’s a lot more to this apparently prosaic locker-room than meets the eye.
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My 19th-century “blogger” Miss Williams Wynn (who’s been quiet for the past week, sorry) is today showing her credulous side, with the story of the fortune-teller who predicted the end of Louis XVIII. Sounds to me like the fortune-teller knew exactly what was going on.

I don’t really have a Friedan story – I first read The Feminine Mystique in a battered secondhand copy about 1985, but having read the fictional but immensely powerful The Women’s Room a few years early, it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, and seemed already rather moderate and meek.

But she was revolutionary for her time. In The Guardian this morning a group of feminists provide their memories. I won’t point you to the Greer piece; it is one of her less attractive efforts.

The Times’s obit plays it straight, while suggesting that her “moderation” was, at least to some degree, a political front.

If Mystique was before your time, the Guardian has also published an extract.

“I am now to end a Scandalous Life, by a deserved Ignominious Death,” says a priest about to be executed in 1693. …

Yep, that can only mean, it is Carnivalesque time. The latest collection of all things early modern in the blogosphere is now up on Pilgrim/Heretic.

There’s also a three-headed Saturn, a reading machine, a curious cat, and many other attractions; do go and check it out.

The International Planned Parenthood Federation estimates 19 million women worldwide will have an unsafe abortion in 2006; a similar number took this risky step last year – 70,000 died. This accounts for 13 per cent of the 500,000 maternal deaths each year, the federation’s report, Death and Denial: Unsafe Abortion and Poverty, released today, says.

Just meditate on that number of a minute – 70,000 women a year, every year. That’s twenty-six 9/11s, every year. Man-made and man-dictated laws are killing that many women every year. Of course they are poor, almost all in poor countries, hence almost invisible. You might call it a gender war.

And of course the toll goes further, in illnesses, disability and infertility. Take just one example from the federation report:

Sarawati, a 37 year old health care worker from India said: “I wish this method [medical abortion] was available when I was young and had an unwanted pregnancy. I went to a Dai [traditional healer] because I did not want to have surgery done by the male doctor; I had pain and fever for many days. I never could get pregnant after that, and my husband left me.”

But, the so-called pro-lifers will say, the laws are saving “babies”. Well actually what they are acting on are bundles of cells or fetuses, but anyway, they are not “saving” them. For as the federation report says:

Punitive legal measures and restricting access to safe abortion do not reduce the incidence of abortion; they just make it more dangerous. The result is that more women suffer. Not surprisingly, it is the poorest women – women least able to pay for any minimal level of care – who end up paying the highest price.
… Colombia, which prohibits abortion even to save a woman’s life, averages one abortion per woman throughout her reproductive years. In Peru, this rises to an average of two abortions per woman.”

The US government is complicit in many of the deaths worldwide, having forced the closure of clinics and forced others to avoid all mention of safe abortion options. This “global gag” rule, imposed by Bush in 2001, requires any organisation wanting US funds to sign an undertaking not to counsel women on abortion – other than advising against it – or provide abortion services.

Of course the other institution most responsible is the Catholic Church, both through the successive Popes’ attitude to birth control – which makes a good number of these abortions necessary in the first place – and its refusal to coutenance abortion.

There is, however, some good news. Tony Blair has for once managed to detach himself from Bush’s lead and the Guardian reports that the British government is to provide the IPPF with funds to at least partially replace the lost US money and increase the availability of safe abortions.

The Department for International Development will contribute £3m over two years. DFID and the IPPF – whose clinics across the world have suffered badly – hope that others, particularly the Scandinavians, Dutch and Canadians, will be emboldened to put money in too.
“I think the UK is being very brave and very progressive in making this commitment,” said Steven Sinding, director general of the IPPF. “We’re deeply grateful for this gesture not only financially but also politically.”

Can anyone help me interpret the following entry from the Public Record Office catalogue?

Item details: C 1/1172/72
. of London, clothworker, v. the mayor, aldermen, and sheriffs of LONDON, and Roger and John MYNOURS.: Money promised to the said Roger to obtain a wife, whom complainant has obtained without his assistance. Certiorari and subpoena.: LONDON.

Who is the aggrieved and who the defendant? Are Roger and John Mynours in the suit together?

TIA!