In a conversation at the office Christmas party (no, this was a fairly sober one), I was talking about playing in local squash leagues and my companion, a quite sporting woman, expressed astonishment that men and women played on equal terms. I pointed out that, as in most sports, it is your skill and ability to play intelligently that matters far more than the highest degree of strength or fitness.

And it is great. As a 38-year-old woman I just love beating the arrogant young males who on arrival at the court look at you and wonder why they bothered to arrange the game – they obviously won’t get a workout.

In fact there’s really no reason for most sports, maybe all sports, to be segregated.

I’ve played football (soccer), rugby (well once, and I was outclassed, but that was because of lack of experience), and still play cricket with men, in addition to the squash. I’m slow, but moderately clever and quite strong, and that reflects my childhood experiences, development and training level, not my gender.

And maybe, slowly we’re heading in the direction of unisex sport, with the signing of the first woman to play professional league football, in Mexico.

From The Guardian:
A Mexican professional football club has made history by signing a woman. The move has already caused an uproar, but the player is undeterred.

“I’m not frightened of anything,” Maribel Dominguez told reporters at a packed press conference called by the second division club Celaya.

“I want to thank all those who believe in me and ask those who don’t to give me the chance to try. Maybe I will fail, but at least I will have tried.”

Player and club insist there is nothing in the rules prohibiting women from playing in the professional men’s leagues. They are waiting for Fifa to endorse the move …”

The fastest woman in the world may never beat the fastest man over 100m, because the top end of the male bell curve is usually above the female for the required characteristics, but the best marathoner in time could well be a woman, and think of how women’s sport would leap ahead with all of the new opportunities and the new drive to get better, faster.

I nipped up to the British Museum this morning for a talk on Ephesus (one of my favourite places in the world), but it was cancelled, so I opted for an exploration of late antiquity and Byzantium. (And found they’ve substantially remodelled these galleries – check them out if you haven’t been there a while.)

The first theme that emerged was the practicality of the ancients. There are a large number of “gold-based cups”, with pictures in gold leaf samdwiched between two layers of glass on the flat bottom. When one partner died, this served as their burial marker. (Many have been found in the catacombs of Rome.) Nothing like being prepared.

You can see an example here. Most are Christian, but this one shows a pagan adopting Christian iconography, but saying “in the name of Hercules” instead of “in the name of Jesus”. There’s also one in which Cupid offers a blessing.

All you could want to know about Roman glass techniques can be found here.

There are also a large number of gold wedding rings. They show Christ and the bride and groom on the bezel, and are all engraved with the the word “harmony” (in Greek of course). If you take injunctions to behave in a certain way as indications people are acting the opposite, that gives you some idea of the marriages of late antiquity.

But they are also an octagonal shape, which makes them childbirth amulets – that double-purpose investment again.

Finally I did get to Ephesus, in the form of a moulded glass cameo, a tourist trinket of its day, showing the “Seven Sleepers of Ephesus”. They were Christians said to have taken refuge in a walled-up cave in AD250 during a persecution, who emerged more than a century later, just when a controversy was raging about the reality or otherwise of the resurrection of the physical body. Having put the “heretics” to flight, they then conveniently disappeared again for good.

This translation from a medieval Anglo-Norman source gives a less cynical view on it.

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beale, originally uploaded by natalieben.

Popped into the National Portrait Gallery today for half an hour to commune with the Stuarts, and was rewarded with the discovery that they’ve hung this self-portrait by Mary Beale, the first professional female painter in England.

I’ve only previously seen it in reproduction. The first surprise was its size – this is a huge, impressive canvas (an impression magnified by the heavy gilt frame).

The drapery of her dress and shawl is impressively detailed – it is thick, stiff and shiny. Would you call it a taffeta? If so a little research suggests it would then have been made of silk and very expensive.

The painting is subtly lit from the right of the frame (as you look at it), and a shadow thrown on the wall to the left.

This was painted, it is thought, as a showpiece for her work, just before she set up her professional studio, which was managed by her husband – you could almost call him one of the first house husbands. The companion painting of him is in Bury St Edmunds.

And what I find surprising is that none of their friends, in the clergy or the Royal Society, seem to have found it odd that she was effectively supporting him financially.

But she’d be pleased to be hung in such august company today – Room 6 — with Boyle, Harvey and other scientific luminaries.

She has other works in the National Portrait Gallery.

She is also supposed to have painted a portrait of Aphra Behn. If anyone knows anything about that I’d love to hear it.

An informative interview with Michael Scheuer, who served in the CIA for 22 years, until this year. He was the Chief of the bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999.

“I think al-Qaeda is probably in good shape. One of the problems facing the U.S. intelligence community is that it continues to regard al-Qaeda as a terrorist group rather than an insurgent organization and we have never really constructed an order of battle for the organization. We only know of the leadership. And when U.S. politicians say that we have destroyed two thirds or three quarters of the leadership, what they are really alluding to is al-Qaeda’s casualties based on the information available in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. There are a lot of people who we just don’t know about and moreover al-Qaeda has demonstrated a remarkable capability to replenish its losses.”

“I don’t think Afghanistan and Pakistan are denied areas to al-Qaeda. There are very few U.S. troops in Afghanistan and the warlords control many of the areas. The tribal areas in Pakistan, save for South Waziristan, are not controlled by the Pakistani government. You can make the assumption that Afghanistan and Pakistan are denied areas but really the only thing you can be sure of is that they are not where U.S. forces or Pakistani forces are. I mean al-Qaeda and the Taliban can operate with relative ease in the tribal areas of both countries. And because a lot of national reconnaissance systems have been focused on Iraq, we don’t have that many resources to track these people from space.”

“This is perhaps my wishful thinking, but I think if we made some tangible changes to our relationship with Israel, started a serious discussion on securing alternative energy resources and refused to gratuitously support Putin’s actions in Chechnya, that would give America an opening. Maybe then people would actually start listening to what we are saying. The problem is we don’t even have an audience in that part of the world right now.”

“We appear to be in a temporary phase where the current Administration looks at the world as it wants it to be and not as it is. Likewise, the Administration seems to be making it clear that it is not interested in analysis from its intelligence community if that analysis doesn’t mesh with or support the Administration’s views, policies, and perceptions. As a result, open-source publications have become by default the conveyor to the public of information and analysis on what is really happening in the world. America’s citizens certainly need this information. I also believe that many professional intelligence officers will welcome such publications because they themselves are unable to present the world as it is to senior government officials.”

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

“A ban on smoking on Sydney’s popular Bondi, Bronte and Tamarama beaches came into effect today and may be extended. Waverley Council Mayor Peter Moscatt said under the ban, one of the first in Australia, smoking on the sand will be prohibited but other nearby areas may follow.”

Having just about lost my voice and suffering from creaky-feeling lungs, the effects of the smoke level at the office party last night, I can only croak: “Yippee.”

I’ve been saying for years that governments would finally ban all public smoking only when I was just too old to enjoy it, but maybe I’ll get a few years of clean-air pubs and restaurants – the Blair government being timidly headed in that direction.

Then if they’d just ban smoking on pavements (footpaths), so that when cycling peacefully along the road you don’t suddenly cop a lungful …

Today I met Mitbahiah, a 6th-century BC Jewish woman living in southern Egypt. She lived in a remarkably egalitarian world: “a woman could readily divorce her husband, with or without his consent. From other documents, we know that a woman could exercise this right by “standing up in congregation and merely declaring ‘I divorce my husband’.”

Mitbahiah, who seems to have been a shrewd investor, also had a full economic life; lending money to her father that was eventually partially repaid by the transfer of a house. She also did rather well out of her three marriages, the middle of which was outside her community, to an Egyptian official. She got to keep all of the wealth she had taken into the union, and half of his when she left, after less than 12 months.

From Al-Ahram Weekly, via The Head Heeb, a fascinating occasional blog by a scholar studying Jewish history.