It's Always More Complicated

Longtime readers of chez oursin will be aware that partner and I have been together for A Very Long Time, living tally/over the broomstick/in sin/etc, according to whatever views the beholder has on the subject (I like 'free union' myself).

And it now becomes possible for us to be civil partners in the UK (plz to shut up at the back with comments as to, so you have been uncivil so far...)

Which turns out to be somewhat more of a performance than I hoped it would be. I suppose I was sort of envisaging a bureaucratic procedure like renewing one's passport or getting a driving license or whatever, or indeed proving a will, as I did a couple of years back. That you give notice and submit some documentation and then turn up and sign a few forms and then Bob's Your Uncle.

But in fact it is - and being a historian of these sort of things I suppose I should have anticipated - a social act and requires witnesses and ceremony and so on.

In fact it requires ceremony to such a degree that one is obliged to get the ceremonial aspect sorted before actual giving of notice of one's intention to register a civil partnership.

Which has led me to the thought that perhaps the sensible place to do that would be, not just down the road at the local Town Hall, but in that place where most of my immediate family still reside. Except that so far, online searches seem to indicate that they no longer have a register office, ceremonies for the performance of, only one to issue certificates of life events, in the town itself.

I was at first somewhat thrilled to see that there is some kind of register office in the Public Library, in which I spent many happy youthful hours, but it sounds like just a counter.

There are 'Venues' in the area, most of which sound rather fancier than we had in mind.

Sigh.

Interesting and barely reported statistic I came across while reading something in connection with reference/review thinggy I must get out this evening. You know that research that allegedly found that 43% of women had sexual dysfunction (especially if you conflated various distinctly different phenomena) - it also found that over 30% of men were less than thrilled with their sexual lives. This does not appear to be matter for comment, but surely nearly a third is a not insignificant proportion? Enquiring mind would like to know more, and may, when time presses less, dig around to find out more.

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O tempora o mores. Have not seen anyone this year demanding penny for the guy. Okay, as I think I have mentioned in previous years, actual guys seem to have been exiting the equation with cutting straight to the chase of demanding money, but still. Itsa TRADYSHUN!! Might its erosion have something to do with the increasing infiltration into the UK of the Americanised version of Halloween? and the effort and creativity and energy that used to go into the run-up to Guy Fawkes now going into costumes for Trick or Treat??

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Leader in the new Literary Review by Allan Massie on that perennial favourite of the literary pages, literary vs popular fiction, leaving out an extensive middle ground (Brookner or Brown, basically.) Massie invokes the names listed inside a 1930s Collins 2/6 Pocket Novel as examples of writers of high literary pretensions now forgotten along with the unremembered popular writers of the day. It may say more about me than the writers that I have heard of all of them and that I would not consider the following writers on his list fallen into oblivion: Rose Macaulay, Vita Sackville-West, Walter de la Mare (though now possibly better known for poems than prose), Henry (Tarka the Otter) Williamson. That is, over half of a list of 7 writers, so I don't really think he can say 'most are now forgotten', on simple mathematical grounds.

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The prospect of a programme on University Challenge winners (*waves at sollers* - have you seen this week's Time Out?) and the way it is being trailed evokes in me a perennial question: if you took any random group of people is not likely that many of them would be counter, original, spare, strange? That what we have here is dear Ms Evans'lovely metaphor of the mirror and the lamp?

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If God had a blog, would it be called 'Inordinately Fond of Beetles'?

This is downright stomach-turning: Why some men become abusive and violent towards their pregnant partners.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on A bill [currently going through the Nigerian senate] that seeks to stop women dressing indecently shows how warped our notions of culture have become: I particularly like this passage:

Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in "real" African culture, before it was tainted by the west, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed. There are men and women who, while holding their imported cellphones and driving their imported cars, say that women should conform to certain gender roles so as to preserve our "real" culture. The historical truth is that most of these reductive gender ideas came from Victorian England.

But assuming that we agree that there is such a thing as a "pure" culture and that we would like to return to it, then we would go back to pre-colonial west Africa when gender roles were fluid, when there was little gender differentiation in Yorubaland, and when Igbo women could marry women. The culture-preserving senator would be surprised if she were transported back to her home in 1800. Never mind low-cut blouses. The women trading in the markets would be bare-breasted.

Barry Morgan, Archbishop of Wales, sounds like a good egg: he is bewildered as to how, having agreed to ordaining women to both the diaconate and priesthood, the church can logically exclude women from the episcopate.

I am seriously creeped by the whole Nick Clegg and number of partners thing, which has generated at least two commenty type articles in today's Guardian: Between you, me and the bedpost and A very liberal lover. Leads to thinking all sorts of thoughts about whether it's about proof of being a bit of a heterosexual stud without coming over as an out-of-control sex addict who is Not Safe In Taxis; and about what would be an acceptable number, if any, for a female politician to fess up to? and why it should matter, and do I care?