Some notes on riding the Greyhound

It’s possibly a combination of socioeconomic factors, and the arrant distance involved, that causes some eccentricity on the long-distance Greyhound buses. America is big. Really really big. Trying to quantify it with comparison to the UK is fruitless; the culture relating to distance is so starkly dissimilar as to make any correlation hopelessly skewed. Driving from London to a far-flung location like Cornwall – just over 200 miles away – is considered a huge undertaking in Britain. 200 miles is the sort of distance that – as Bill Bryson once pointed out – most Americans will happily drive to get a taco. Even in major cities Americans will willingly drive for an hour just to get between bars.

So when Greyhound say long distance, they mean long distance. The journey from New York City to San Francisco takes around 72 hours. There are prison sentences shorter than that. Major cities are often a thousand miles apart, and the slightly annular nature of American population distribution means that routes are often torturously circuitous.

Plus, well, it’s mostly poor people that ride the bus. Many American states have little in the way of automotive legislature relating to a car’s physical state, and the ones that do are normally less rigorous than the UK. There’s nothing really comparable to an MOT, and so you occasionally see some absolute clunkers driving around. As long as a car looks OK from the outside it’s unlikely to be pulled over. The sheer scale of the American landscape –even if you live in a town of smallish population you are unlikely to live within walking or cycling distance of everything you need – means that car ownership is almost ubiquitous. You have to be pretty damn poor to ride the bus.

Every American I met who was travelling domestically was doing so by car. In Austin, TX I ran into a guy named Joey from NY whose beaten-to-shit Nissan (affectionately referred to by anyone who climbed inside as ‘Ol’ Blue’) had assumed the status of a spirit vehicle, so often was it miraculously resurrected. It looked like an idiot’s crayon drawing of a car; the sort of vehicle you’d take in to part exchange and come away clutching a Magic Tree air freshener, feeling like you got a good deal.

So riding the Greyhound involves traveling with a cross-section of the lower economic brackets of American society. For a very long time. The natural instinct to ignore everyone around you begins to sputter out after 19 hours without human contact. Add the fact that Americans are generally less reserved than British people and your outcome is that if you travel on the bus long enough, something notable will happen. It’s not that the Greyhound is intrinsically weird, it’s more that you have to spend such a long time on it that something weird is statistically likely to occur.

The drivers themselves are not immune. There is a required speech they must make at the start of each leg, for the benefit of new passengers. It details where the bus is going and what time they are expected to arrive (often to muffled comments and cries of derision), and runs through the Greyhound ‘in-flight’ policies. These mostly consist of things that are prohibited, a list which roughly runs as follows:

• No guns
• No drinking
• No drugs
• No smoking
• No smoking out of the window
• No smoking in the bathroom
• No disabling the smoke alarm in the bathroom and trying to smoke unnoticed in there, seriously guys

Drivers have to repeat the same spiel at every stop, and so begin to add their own spin and vocabulary. A wizened old black guy who sounded remarkably like Droopy listed what sorts of cellular and electronic music devices he did and didn’t have a problem with us listening to. Some of them put on accents, which you would only notice if you ride the whole journey with them.

If you are caught breaking the rules you are dropped at the side of the road in the custody of a state trooper. A vivacious and amply proportioned driver on the last leg of Roanoke, VA to Atlanta, GA would enunciate this warning and then supplement it with: “And I’ma whoop yo’ ass, too,” an offhand threat that drew occasional cheers. She drove at least ten miles below the speed limit the whole way there, “For the sake of the chillun.”

A stern and slabby old geezer behind the wheel in Alabama encouraged people to remain in sight of the bus at all times during rest stops. “If you have to go inside, you look at us out the window,” he advised. “You got 20 minutes, so you can smoke 20 cigarettes. No need to go nowhere.”

Between Phoenix and LA the aisle seat next to me was filled by a rotund guy in a heinously bright shirt that made his sombre, Eeyore-esque voice seem like a wind-up. Raymond had the diabeetus (a term that I had heard college kids say in jest but never heard spoken in truth until then), and carried himself with the resigned, slightly absent gravitas of the long sober drug addict.

Raymond had what I choose to believe was a powerful grasp of scripture. My knowledge of the Bible is essentially naught, and so for all I know the words could have come from fortune cookies, but he said them with sufficient weight and distance that they seemed universally applicable, which I suspect is the point of most scripture anyway. He dissected my life over an eight hour period and told me that either I would be saved or I wouldn’t, a remark which seemed remarkably fatalist for an evangelical, until he told me that his problem was that he knew he was already saved, and so he needed to turn me to the path of righteousness for his own peace of mind (which I thought was pretty generous of him). He was bemused to find I was in the US to mostly look at windfarms.

By the time we arrived in LA I was refereeing a three-way argument between Raymond, his son and his daughter-in-law, a position I considered overloaded with responsibility seeing as Raymond's reason for coming to LA was to reconnect with his partially estranged son. I didn't want to be the guy who clumsily blew out the flame on his rekindling relationship. I must have done OK: he gave me a packet of Ritz crackers (“I’m not supposed to eat them anyway, they could kill me”) which proved useful in dealing with the psychic fallout of a 30 hour bus ride.

Across the whole trip I spent more than a week on the Greyhound. That’s a lot longer than some other experiences that I consider life-changing or defining. I’ve been in relationships that were shorter than that. It ought to mean something, but I'm not sure if it does yet.

Alternate viewing

Cracked.com has ruined a lot of things I like. It’s mostly my fault: no-one is making me look at funny lists of Star Wars bloopers, but once I’ve had them shown to me I can’t un-see them. I’m now that guy, the one who points out editing gaffes or continuity errors in films, just to spread the misery around. You know, that one person who comments on the submarine scene in Raiders even though ‘no gives a crap, oh my God will you shut up about cinematic mistakes, we’re trying to watch a film, why do we even invite you over.’

Occasionally, though, Cracked drops something good in my lap. A recent article suggested a reading of The Catcher in the Rye in which the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after the death of his younger brother. It’s an interesting theory; Caulfield does demonstrate some of the symptoms of PTSD (mood swings, fluctuating sexual drive, feelings of alienation etc), and equally fascinating is the fact that J.D. Salinger suffered from combat stress reaction or ‘battle fatigue,’ which is thought by many psychologists to be a precursor to PTSD. *clenches fist* Suddenly it all falls into place!

Now when I read The Catcher in the Rye I have difficulty discarding this theory, even though it came from an admittedly left-field source. It indelibly informs my understanding of the book. I can ignore it if I choose, but it’s added a new and interesting dimension to the novel (one I wish I’d heard about when I was at uni. Man, would I have looked smart).

There’s a fan theory about Ferris Beuller’s Day Off in which Ferris is merely a figment of Cameron’s imagination: his psyche’s attempt to break Cameron out of his funk and go and enjoy life a little bit. As a reading it lacks some depth (the fact that Cameron sees plenty of people interacting with Ferris elevates him from charming mental projection to full blown dissociative personality), but like all the best alternate readings once you’ve set out the ground rules you can twist the actual narrative to fit, if you want.

You can apply an alternate reading to whatever you want, even if it’s something you hate. Who’s to stop you? The Thought Police? (I’m hoping that’s not a thing yet.)

I’m not a huge fan of Jedward, but there’s a reading of Jedward that I quite like. My brother claims to have come up with it but I’m pretty sure it was Russell Howard. Anyway, my preferred decoding of Jedward states that one of them (it can be John or Edward, I don’t think anyone remembers which is which anymore), really, REALLY hates being a part of Jedward. That with each camp wave and power kick a little part of him flutters and dies. He stares at himself in the mirror, starkly lit by the sodium lamps of another Butlins dressing room, and wishes himself anywhere else. He wanted to be a surgeon, a captain of enterprise, a hostage negotiator. He dreams of filling their back page column in Heat with his informed feminist rhetoric... but instead has to fill in little coloured bubbles about what their favourite fizzy drink is, or what they dream about at night (Column answer: riding with their fans on unicorns. Real answer: holding Louis Walsh’s head under the water until the bubbles finally stop).

The cast of Made in Chelsea are not, as the show would have us believe, rich, under-educated sociopaths, who cannot either be interesting on their own, or act interesting even when prompted. Instead they are a collective of penniless orphans, given one last chance to act their way out of the workhouse, playing the parts of rich, under-educated sociopaths who cannot either be interesting on their own or act interesting even when prompted, and giving the performance of their goddamn lives.

Remember how the first series of Big Brother was pitched as a genuine psychological experiment, with scientific talking heads and everything? People immediately realised that they were happy to simply watch other people do stuff (which is, when you think about, all you basically do in your daily life anyway), and after a few seasons people were mostly watching it for Russell Brand pulling down his trousers and pants, but to begin with Big Brother was legitimate viewing. And you can do the same to almost any TV show, with a little creative thinking.

The Bachelorette is part of a super-soldier breeding programme. Tool Academy is beamed into space as a counterpoint to ‘the best of humanity’ plaque that went out with the Voyager probe, so that if aliens ever find us we don’t look too stuck up. The men in Playing it Straight are all homosexual. So is the female lead. It’s all a big gay practical joke. The kids that get booted off the island in Shipwrecked are in fact killed and eaten by the remaining cast as supplies dwindle.

The only flaw in my genius scheme to single-handedly save television is that you could just go and watch something else, something not crap, and save yourself a lot of time and effort. But I don’t watch Made in Chelsea because I like it, I watch Made in Chelsea because my flatmates like it, and I was here on the sofa first and it’s cold in my bedroom. They get irritated, and rightly so, when I pick holes in their entertainment. They know it's crap. They don’t care. I could easily go read a book. Since I can’t be bothered to get up, the least I can do is find a way to enjoy what I’m watching.

I’m not suggesting you put up with inferior entertainment forever. I’m always suggesting that you go read a book. But media is yours to enjoy, and yours to exploit and mutate. Go nuts.

Writer's... um...

Every writer writes about writer’s block at some point. In fact, I’m fairly sure I’ve started several blog posts in this manner (possibly with that same opening sentence, I do love alliteration), only to put them aside either until ‘proper’ inspiration struck, or because I felt the idea seemed trite or overdone. As I’ve said, every writer mentions it at some point (even if it’s only to say they don’t ever suffer from it, the smug paranormal-romance writing bastards).

I suppose I’m persisting with it now because I don’t really have writer’s block at the moment. For the time being, work on the novel has slowed, and I’m starting to enter the next phase: finding someone who likes it enough to represent me. It’s a frankly petrifying move, as every rejection (not many so far, but mounting) feels like a simple and solid reason to abandon the project that has consumed eighteen months of my life, taken me out of a settled existence surrounded by friends; into a place I hardly know and where no one knows me, and left me an embarrassing stretch behind other recent graduates in trying to find employment.

So the novel suffers not from writer’s block but rather writer’s paralysis. Until I find some feedback, any sort of feedback, I know not what to do with it. It can become this or it can become that, dependent on the whim and will of an agent or a publisher or the public or my friends and family. I’m confident in my writing. It’s my only talent and I have worked hard at it. If I might be allowed to bluster a moment: it’s better than Verbal Slapstick. These blog posts take roughly an hour or less, and are edited perhaps once before I upload them (this may explain why they are littered with typographical errors).

My book is in part a labour of love, and inverted, a test of skill. If someone tells me how to make it better, I am positive I can do so. I just don’t know how (which is sort of the kicker, no matter how you look at it).

A dear friend and successful author has what I believe to be the most sensible and generally successful solution for writer’s block: write around it. It doesn’t matter what you turn to, even if it’s something away from your primary project. Just getting words on paper or on screen can be enough to start the creative juices flowing (a metaphor I am unable to source, and somewhat weirded out by).

More than that, writer’s block can be just that: and obstacle to be skirted, flanked, outmanoeuvred. Some things are difficult to write about. Some things are boring to write about. Some things are challenging to write about in a way that makes sense, or is compelling, or isn’t a little cringe-worthy. Every writer has things that they personally struggle with. I don’t write sex scenes because I can’t (please don’t make any inferences here). It’s just too hard (that’s what she said). So if I feel I have to have a sex scene (and sometimes you just do) I have to find a way to write around it without looking like I’m writing around it. It’s a time-consuming and messy process (much like sex).

Another quite well-known writer of my recent acquaintance told me a good story about his own experience leapfrogging writer’s block. Finding himself completely stymied while trying to write a scene set in a sea-side cafe during winter, and finding it more a problem of atmosphere rather than description, he decided to take himself to a similar cafe and grab some photographs. Jumping on the train to some depressing sea resort he wandered around until he found a cafe comparable to the one in his imaginings, had a cup of tea and snapped some photos. He got them developed on the way home and pinned them up around his writing desk. And did not look at them once. Although he had not been paying special attention to the cafe his was in (his idea was to get the photos and be home as soon as possible, before the urge to write at all disappeared) something about the place had apparently seeped in – the look or the smell or the sad tiredness of it all – and swilled around in his head so that he returned to his desk fully equipped to carry on. Writer’s block can be defeated by ‘physical’ means: action can be taken.

You can read your way around it. This sounds like an intellectual way of saying ‘steal things from other writers’ and it sort of is, but there’s nothing malicious behind it (or at least there shouldn’t be). Stephen King said that if you don’t read then you lack the tools to write and I think that goes beyond an aphorism into straight-up profundity. Words are your tools and your building material at the same time, your clay and your wood and your chisel and saw and pencil and granite and and dynamite. The more examples, combinations, permutations you are exposed to, the more ideas you have to draw on. And I don’t mean simply by facsimile. There’s an arborescence to writing: every new word you learn, or new context you experience, increases the number of viable word-links you can make. And because of the profligate manner in which words can be joined (especially English words, the slags) the number of links increases immensely with each piece of inducted knowledge. You are constrained only by the rules of grammar (which can be bent) and those of style (which can be broken).

Finally, you just have to keep going. I have no internet connection right now, so I cannot say with authority which writer described writing as ‘staring at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds’ (or something along those lines), but that is often what it feels like. Writing when it isn’t coming easy can be tortuously hard. It’s less fun than almost everything else there is to do in your house, up to and including de-scaling the kettle. But if you go away and leave it when it’s hard, chances are it will still be hard when you return (that’s what she said. I’m so sorry). It might be better to creep, creep your way across the screen, checking your word count (wisely removed from the hotkeys and appearing at the bottom of the screen on Word 2007) every few seconds, writing and deleting, writing and deleting, a frustrating arduous slog up a literary hill until... until the difficult part is over, or what you’ve written leads naturally to something else, or while you’re thinking of a way to tell this bit, you figure out how to tell that bit, or (and this happens more than one might like, but is necessary), you realise that you’re fighting a pointless battle, and you may as well chuck this whole section and start again a bit further back but with a better idea.

Writer’s block is a problem with creativity. Ergo, in order to beat it, all one has to do is create. Quality can follow on. So I don't know what to do with the book. Better start thinking about the next one.







It occurs that perhaps I should have saved writing this post for a time when I actually have writer’s block. Oops. Bit of a plus for my flatmates though: that kettle’s going to be sparkling at some point.

Well DUH. (A toast-related semi-epiphany)

The other day I had... well, I suppose that epiphany is too strong a word, considering what it actually involved. I'll just tell the story, but I'd ask you to refrain from judging me until I get to the point.

I was making cheese on toast, and I was toasting the bread in the toaster before putting it under the grill (seriously, what's going on with people that don't do that? I asked for cheese on toast, not cheese on bread). The toast popped up and I saw that, as always, there was a narrow strip at the top of the slice that hadn't properly toasted: a white avenue of imperfection on my road to cheese paradise. I bemoaned this fact to my father, and asked aloud why they don't make toasters deep enough to fit the whole slice of bread in.

My father gave me a look that I have come to recognise from my friends and family. It is a complicated expression, driven by mixed emotions. It contains genuine surprise, a soupçon of mirth, a ripple of pained symnpathy for my enduring idiocy and, perhaps, a tiny element of pride: not really in me, but in the fact that they themselves are responsible for my cheerful existence despite my own obvious shortcomings.

"Why don't you," he said, "just put the bread in sideways?"

I think that I stared a moment in utter incomprehension. I think maybe I even opened my mouth to chastise the old man for saying something so ludicrous. Then the concept had time to percolate, and my mouth fell open again, this time in surprise, in awe.

Why don't I just put the bread in sideways?

I would ask you to hold off judging me for just a moment more and consider the following: I had just had a problem solved that would otherwise have followed me my entire life. Let's face it, I was never going to buy a toaster that was deep enough to fit the whole slice (in retrospect, probably because they don't exist). I was going to have to put up with that niggle till the day I died, and here it was solved. Grateful? I felt tuppin' indebted. It was too late for that particular slice, but I had the rest of my life to get it right.

Fine, go ahead. Why didn't you think of that before. Well, I don't bloody know, do I? I'm not, y'know, an idiot. Well, not completely, anyway. It seems like the sort of thing I ought to have figured out myself, but there I was catching flies in my mouth in my own kitchen (at 24 years old).

So judge me if you like, I probably deserve it. But ask yourself this question: what minor irritations in your life have solutions that you never considered? If this toast thing has shown me anything it's that a problem shared can be a problem solved, for good.

I'm not saying it's going to work on much more than the orientation of your bread products. My insomnia isn't going to have a 2 second solution, for example. But that isn't going to stop me seeking a further help, if I can't figure it out on my own. And I'm not going to keep putting up with minor irritations if I think someone might be able to provide an answer. Hell, if this toast fiasco has taught me anything it's that I have no reason to be proud about such things: I'm clearly not firing on all cylinders when it comes to fixing small miseries.

Better cheese on toast means a better existence generally. It's a damn good start. 

The Goldfish

I talk to myself a lot. Obviously I only do it when I am by myself, as I already attract enough disparaging looks when I venture out in public thanks to my general air of untrustworthyness. I debate with myself in the car on long journeys, I voice lists of task aloud, and I sometimes read out loud in the bath or in bed, because I’m a solipsist and like to hear the sound of my own voice. In all these things I am not alone. But mostly, when I talk to myself, I insult, berate and criticise my own actions and outlook, and with good reason: when I am by myself, I metamorphose into an idiot. Seriously. An utter dim-wit.

Clearly I am no Einstein when I’m in a crowd (at work today I spent thirty seconds trying to open the safe door against its hinges) but when I am alone it becomes ludicrous. It would be unnecessarily long and tedious to list every faintly idiotic thing that I’ve done recently, but I shall give you a few examples so you can see what I’m driving at.

Firstly, I am capable of some truly incredible acts of clumsiness. I occasionally have accidents that require a perfect storm of physical ineptness, lack of forethought and sheer ignorance. I once almost succeeded, no word of a lie, in choking to death on an ice-cream while sat at the back of a rave. My panicked, potential final thoughts, were consumed by the knowledge that the ice-cream would melt before my corpse was discovered, leaving the authorities baffled as to the manner of my demise. I haven’t touched a Calippo since: they are as treacherous as frozen confectionary can get.

I am also guilty of some spectacular negligence. Given a kitchen to myself and enough time to wander off distractedly, and I will happily set fire to a pan of water.

Finally I occasionally find myself engaged in acts of monumental hubris. You know how sometimes on Casualty some idiot gets rushed into A&E because they were trying to replace a light bulb in a pitch black bathroom above a bath full of water up a rickety ladder while listening to thrash metal on a personal stereo and having a distracted conversation with someone three rooms away? Yeah, that sort of thing is right up my crippled, scarred-for-life alley.

I am not unintelligent. I used to get answers right in school. I have held down various jobs, some for several years, without ever getting into trouble or being disciplined. So why, when I am by myself, am I such a flippin’ retard?

The answer is my attention span, or rather the manner in which I focus it. I cannot keep my mind focused on a single task for more than about four seconds, unless that task requires my complete attention. Things that require extended concentration (driving, video games, cunnilingus, that sort of thing) are all fine, as long as they last. You cannot get away with letting your mind completely wander during these activities, and so it obligingly stays put. This allows me, incredibly, to split my attention in the manner so readily available to other people, and perhaps even do something else at the same time. This is why I can drive my car and talk to myself at the same time, without constantly heading down one-way streets or into canals when I reach a particularly difficult sentence.

Things that require little attention, things that should be easy: that is where I generally come a cropper. Cooking is, normally, not a difficult task. Unless you are making soufflé or ice swans or something equally complex, cooking is really just a collection of small, simple actions: you do the things in sequence and at the end, food happens. But it is because the actions are normally so small, so simple, that I regularly fuck the whole thing up. It’s easy, and so you have plenty of time for your mind to wander, and mine wanders a pretty long way, coming back with its boots muddy and its cheeks red to find the kitchen on fire and the stomach pretty hacked off.

If I have one simple task to do, I will either get distracted and forget about it, or I will become bored and try to multitask unsuccessfully. When I play video games I get bored at loading screens and try to read, an impossibly task that merely result in my reading the same sentence four hundred times and invariably missing the start of the game. Whenever I try to tidy a room I attempt to accomplish every piece of cleaning simultaneously, which means each task advances infinitesimally slowly and I spend the entire time in a state of high irritation. I regularly come back from the post box with the letter I went there to post. Once I put the slice of toast I’d brought with me in there instead.

I don’t do this, crucially, when there are other people around. This is because I am a) more aware of my actions when there are other people watching me, and b) because when there is someone nearby I am less likely to let my mind wander. God knows what I was thinking about when I started choking on my Calippo, but I sure as shit wasn’t focussed on the task at hand, and that wouldn’t have been the case if there was someone talking to me at the time. I can carry on a conversation with someone else while I’m doing practically anything (cunnilingus is a hard one, I’ll admit).

The solution, then, is to either start paying more attention when I’m on my own, or start pretending that I’m not, if you follow me. They say you should always dance like no-one is watching. I’m going to start thinking like someone is watching, and see if that ends up with fewer burnt stir-frys, fewer home decorating accidents, and fewer ice-cream related near-death experiences. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The Gentle Art of Hypocrisy

With a general election looming, my thoughts turn to those of hypocrisy. This sounds like a neat way to burst into social commentary, but as I’m sure you are aware I am woefully under-qualified to make even such a broad political statement. My own political views are a sloppy amalgam of laissez-faire liberality and socialist tendencies, mixed with a cynical view of humanity I got from reading too much Hemingway. Nope, in predictably solipsistic fashion it is my own hypocrisy I’m going to be talking about.

I have been struggling of late to resolve two different concepts in my mind. They have been dredged up by my own actions (which, as always, have been less than spotless recently) and the fact that I just read through all my old Preacher comics again and found the protagonist struggling with similar issues.

I like to consider myself a feminist. Whether I actually am or not is probably a matter for someone else to decide, but I give it a jolly good try. It comes naturally to my thinking that people should be treated equally, and in situations where contextual evidence suggests otherwise, allowances should be made. We live in a society with the ability to level the playing field of achievement in the majority of cases. We don’t use that ability often enough, but it is there. Therefore, the idea that someone might find their ability to achieve and be fulfilled limited by something as non-specific as their gender strikes me as ludicrous.

But, gentlemen walk on the outside of the pavement. My granddad always used to say that (R.I.P. mate), and I do it without really thinking. When I’m walking with female friends I walk on the outside so if someone gets hit by a bus it’ll be me. I go out of my way to help ladies in distress, even at the times (admittedly few and far between) when I’m not trying to get into their knickers.

Are general ideas of chivalry incompatible with a true understanding of the feminist movement? Am I being misguided and a little patronising? This question gave me pause. I was perturbed to realise that I might be being hypocritical and condescending even when trying to do a good thing for other people (even when I WAS trying to get into their knickers).

It is upsetting to realise how far this double-think extends into your everyday life. I say ‘yours’ meaning, of course, ‘mine;’ I am sure you lot are paragons of clean-living consistency. As far as I am concerned, I seem to be operating under several contradictory operating parameters at pretty much all times. My attitude to meat is one: love burgers, but consider myself an environmentalist. My attitude to narcotics is another: generally disapproving of the effect they have on social units (families etc), and won’t specify my own usage in case my Gran is reading this (since when do you use the internet, Nanny?).

For someone with a pretty high opinion of themselves (admit it, I AM pretty amazing), all this was a severe prod to the old ego-balloon. Can you still be a good person if you say one thing and do another? Are you being ridiculous if you persist in holding beliefs that you know to be contradictory to other beliefs you actually hold? I spent a solid five minutes feeling like a bit of a ballbag, I can tell you.

Luckily I came to a few conclusions that made me feel a bit better. When I sat down and thought about it, I was perhaps jumping the gun in condemning myself (either than, or my ability to rationalise my own failures has increased to monumental proportions, and I’ll never be self-reflective again).

Firstly, well, at least I’m practising, rather than preaching. I consider myself a relatively amiable dude, and I’m definitely not going to push my choices onto anyone else. If I say I think one way and then act another than it may be something I have to work on, but I’m not telling anyone else how to think or act. True hypocrisy occurs when you demand of others what you fail to deliver yourself (there’s a political comment in here too, but I sure as hell can’t find it).

Secondly, and most importantly, things are always more complicated than you imagine. My chivalrous intentions are not limited to the lay-deez. I make an attempt to do nice things for everyone, but the realisation of these attempts takes different forms. If I got out of my car and ran round to hold the door for a male friend, they might look at me strangely. The attempt at chivalry would backfire in awkwardness. If society were a little different, maybe I MIGHT do it. I think, or at least, I hope, that my attempts at chivalry are not made because they are what woman need or deserve but are what they will accept, and I’d like to do as much for everyone as I can. Most men wouldn’t mind me holding a closing door for them, and so I do that for everyone.

So perhaps I can consider myself a feminist and still help people with their shopping, and perhaps I’m still a hypocrite, but I’ve put a fair bit of thought into it. The alternatives? Either live a life of extreme consistency (apparently impossible for me) or ignore it, and risk being caught out and justly judged by others. Neither of these is particularly gratifying to me.

So I’m a hypocrite, as there are surely examples of incongruous thinking that I’ve yet to realise or deal with. But I feel a little better knowing that in areas where my own actions wander out into moral and societal grey areas, I’ve at least had a good think about why I act the way I do. If I come across something too inconsistent to rationalise then I need to do something about it.

In the meantime, I shall continue to walk on the outside of the pavement, I’ll just do it for the dudes I like as well.