One Man And The C-Word

A colleague at work recently lent me a book to read - four or five of us have a little book club thing going. Having discovered we all like pretty similar reading material we regularly swap books between us.

Chatting with this colleague, a very pretty twenty-something, a few days later she said she was slightly surprised that it was her mother who had given her this particular book, The Slap written by Christos Tsiolkas, containing as it did really strong language and sexual themes. In fact the word that women so hate, the c-word, appeared twice in the first paragraph and many times thereafter.

Everyone who knows me will confirm that I do not shy away from using swear words at all and have no feelings one way or the other about their use. I am, however, really conscious that women do not like that word so refrain from using it in their company unless it really is needed to make a point.

I'm no prude - far from it - but do like to think I am respectful towards women.

It took me longer than usual to read The Slap, not because of its content but more because, to me anyway, it is one of those books that you need to be in the right frame of mind to read. If I wanted something light to read in those last ten minutes before sleep came and got me then this book wouldn't be the one I'd reach for.

I was having a shower recently - not a significant event in its own right, you understand - and as I let the hot water play on the top part of my spine and neck, a moment when a lot of my thoughts seem to crystalise, I suddenly realised a truth about this book I was now close to finishing and to the liberal sprinkling of that c-word throughout it.

In The Slap the word is used in just about every context it can be. It is used as a derogatory term of contempt for people, as a description of women who are sexually attractive and desirable and, of course, for the "lady part".

There is no general consensus about the origin of the word other than it probably came from Germanic or Old Norse use. Between the 11th and 15th centuries it became common in English with variations of spelling. One thing is certain, however. It always referred to womens' genitalia. Using it as a term of abuse started within the last 150 years or so.

I have twice been to see the Vagina Monologues. Glutton for punishment, me. The play based on Eve Ensler's Vagina Interviews is an entertainment and, for men at least, an education. It is both very funny and very poignant. At one point during the evening the women in the audience, who outnumber the men by over twenty to one, are full encouraged to reclaim that word that men have commandeered as a vulgar abuse by screaming it out loud. Sitting amongst several hundred women shouting out the word "cunt" as loudly as they can is, for a man, an amusing yet humbling moment, no doubt about that.

But that shower moment led me to thinking that maybe Eve Ensler has got it all wrong.

The word itself is very short, harsh and definitely has a Germanic sound to it. Audibly it is a horrible word. Two brief and hard consonants either side of a nondescript "un" sound. It is a word that sounds like it belongs to despicable people. It really deserves to be used as a term of abuse. I fully endorse its use for that purpose and use it to that effect often, although mostly aimed at myself.

But - oh - do I ever hate the word being used to describe the lady part. Hate it with a vengeance. A lady's sex is neither harsh or vulgar, quite the contrary. It deserves a name, other than the anatomical ones which, let's face it, are only to be uttered in doctors' surgeries and the like, and a name that sounds every bit as soft, warm and feminine as the part in question. There are plenty of alternatives out there and I have two or three that I use which, to me, fit the bill nicely.

I am not a fan of the word pussy - somehow it seems to demean women in my eyes - and fanny can be a perilous word when talking to Americans who think an inch or two further back than we do! I do, however, delight in minge - always a truly jocular and playful word, only to be said with laughing eyes. But none of these are what is needed as a word acceptable to both men and women that describes the part and what it represents.

It is not for me, however, to suggest a word or words that could and should replace the dreaded c-word. That's for you to decide.

I really do think, though, that it is time for women in general, and Eve Ensler in particular, to maybe embrace the idea of adopting the c-word as a term of abuse, at the same time ridding ourselves of it as a slang term for the vagina. Don't try to reclaim it. try to replace it. Your part deserves something far better.

All I know is that in my world cunts will always be nasty people and will never, ever be women who are sexually desirable, or the parts therein.

Memory full!

This ageing thing, it's worrying, isn't it? We've all walked upstairs and then realised we can't remember why we went up there. We've all spent hours looking for car keys. We've all had those conversations which start with something like, "You'll never guess who I bumped into the other day, it was - oh - what's his name?"

Yesterday I reached new heights. Or depths.


Just before I left home to start a lengthy train journey I switched my i-pod on, decided against it playing randomly from all tracks, so put it on to random play and then selected Rock. I was on the first train for just under an hour then had ten minutes to change at Birmingham on to the next, longer part of the trip. All went smoothly and I was travelling along in quiet contentment, listening to my music and reading my book, in fact the whole thing seemed to go remarkably quickly.

Just as I approaching my destination I heard another track start and realised I had already heard it. Obviously the i-pod had played through all the available rock tracks and as I was close to journey's end I thought I may as well turn the music off. As I did I glanced at the i-pod's display screen and there it told me which track was being repeated. And it also told me that it was track 4 of 5.

Track 4 of 5?!!?

I had just spent three whole hours listening to the same five tracks playing over and over again and not even come close to realising. If each track is four to five minutes I must have heard each one about ten times! How can you not notice you heard the same thing less than half an hour ago? And an hour ago?

More importantly - as I don't actually consider myself to be an old man yet - just how bad is my memory going to become as the years do past?

Now - where did I put my i-pod . . . ?

Why sculpture?

When I discovered that near Myrtle Beach in South Carolina there is a park with over 500 sculptures in it my plans were immediately altered to include a visit there. Something about sculpture fascinates me enormously.

I know Modern Art is not to every one's taste; it's good that we all like different things, of course. My real interest in it started in my twenties when I became more and more aware of Andy Warhol's work. There is, as far as I can tell, no middle ground with his art, you either like it or you don't, simple as that. From him I then started to admire the work of Roy Lichtenstein, Polish born Tamara de Lempicka and, having thought his work was trite and childish, went to see an exhibition of Jackson Pollock's work and saw a depth and meaning to it which was not obvious from previous photographs seen of his stuff.

I can see that another man looking at the same paintings would still see them as meaningless or worthless and, I guess, equally another person might see something altogether more deep and meaningful than I did. That is the beauty and fascination of art in any form, paintings, music, literature, etc.

Running parallel to my love of mainly American Modern artists has been an increasingly profound love of sculpture. I can remember seeing an exhibition of the work of Englishman Henry Moore in London, probably in my mid to late twenties and being awestruck way beyond my expectations. Part of that was undoubtedly due to the sheer scale of the work, Moore's sculptures tended to be very large and grand. Massive bronzes which, despite their size and material managed to convey a lot of sensuality and occasionally sexuality. So many of the abstract pieces seemed to be one very small step away from representing the female form whilst the rest invariably were indeed of the female body in one guise or another.

As the years have passed and I've visited so many galleries I have refined my time more and more. I know what doesn't please me and walk straight past with nary a sideways glance and use my time seeking out the works which intrigue me most. Sixties Pop Art will always draw my attention, art "installations" will be viewed and judged on individual merit - I once watched a still life video deliberately placed opposite a traditional still life oil painting. I looked at the oil painting for about thirty seconds and then stood transfixed watching the video play through four consecutive times. Watching a bowl of fruit start to rot, become covered with mildew which then spread from the bowl across the table, miraculously vanished back into the bowl and disappear forever had a beauty the painting couldn't match.

Equally there is an ever-present exhibit at the Tate Modern gallery in London which is nothing but a blank canvas - and by blank I mean there is no paint upon it whatsoever - in a frame with just one slash through it from a sharp knife. To me it is simply a piss-take. Everyone of us could stretch a canvas across a frame, slash it with a knife and call it art. I wanted to take a knife of my own and make it two slashes so that I had created "art" - I hate it that much. But I have to assume the "artist" - I can't bring myself to remove the quotation marks - would be so pleased to have invoked that response in me.

So why then the fascination with sculpture? For me it is summed up to perfection with the piece in the photograph at the top. It is called "Job - man of wood" and was created by a Jamaican artist who was brought to England by The Prince's Trust when discovered by Prince Charles in Jamaica. He was Lancelot Bryan who sadly died last summer after a long battle with cancer. If not for his art he deserves to be remembered for the work he did in his adopted community taking art, sculpture and self expression to the children of Bradford in Yorkshire. He had a passion for giving children an inner belief and the chance to discover their potential.

Discovering potential was really the whole raison d'etre of Lancelot Bryan. He worked exclusively with the wood known as lignum vitae, a very hard wood which was particularly difficult to carve. He had an ability to stand and look at a large block of the wood and just "see" what was in there. It is a rare talent or gift indeed and one that many artists would have envied him. He summed it up himself in one simple sentence, "Whatever you want is in the wood, all you have to do is take away what you don't want and release it". Oh - well if it's that easy maybe we should all do it!

How many of us have the feeling, the inner vision, the depth to "see" a finished piece of art inside a block of anything, wood, metal, clay? And of the precious few who have that innate gift how many have the skills to actually bring it to reality? Bryan spent six full weeks just polishing the face above to get the smooth finish he wanted. The dreadlocks are carved in exquisitely tiny detail. When you see it you want to touch it - need to touch it, have to touch it - and fortunately it is on display in the Wolverhampton Art Gallery in a room created for the blind and those of limited vision. It is an area where everybody is actively encouraged to touch the exhibits and feel the shapes and textures.

I think, in a nutshell, I love sculpture so much because of envy. Deep within me is a desire to have that ability to create shapes and, more importantly, create shapes which only exist in my mind and in my imagination. But I am realistic enough to know that I possess neither the imagination nor the skills. Just the envy of those who have both. And Lancelot Bryan was a fine example of that. I'll think of him often as I walk through the park in South Carolina.

It's only words

The more contact I have with Americans and the more I plan this trip the more I realise I am going to have language difficulties and for that reason I have found myself an English/American dictionary. The potential pitfalls are just too great to take the risk of travelling to the States (I've been told they only call it America in a formal sense!) unarmed with the correct words and phrases as you will see.

Through the wonderful media of films and television there are plenty of words that we can translate automatically, thus a tap becomes a faucet, pavement is a sidewalk, a nappy is a diaper and, more recently, we have all learned that our A&E is their ER. But I have discovered that my previous job before becoming a train driver - sorry, train engineer - would be heard as Laurie Driver and therefore presumably a man's name. There is not one lorry in the USofA just thousands of trucks, including semis, eighteen wheelers or, to us Brits, artics.

Two paragraphs in and we're already starting to drift apart in a linguisitc sense. Food is a perilous subject to get into and I am starting to feel I would do well to buy food from a supermarket (grocery store) just because I can pick it up without calling it by the wrong name. I mean, our jam is jelly to the Americans. I could live with that if it wasn't for our jelly becoming their jell-o. Say what! An iced lolly is a popsicle - how cute - spring onions become scallions, mange touts are snow peas, chips, as we all know are fries to Americans but, and I cannot believe I am saying this, they have absolutely no equivalent of chip butties. The world's best ever comfort food and they have no knowledge it exists. If I wasn't so selfish I'd spend the whole of my fortnight out there setting up a stall in as many towns as possible and handing out "fries" between two slices of white bread possibly with tomato ketchup (I've seen that written as catsup - can that be right??). Any Britons living in the States really ought to start converting the locals - I'm afraid to use the word "natives" here - to chip butties as a matter of some priority, really they should.

The English can't afford to be smug about the language differences, a lot of the American equivalents sound more logical than the words we use. Fish sticks make a lot more sense than fish fingers, ante natal sounds all wrong compared to pre-natal (and yet they use antebellum to mean before the Civil War), I can understand them preferring dead end to cul-de-sac and, bless them, they ignore our word bungalow and replace it with stunningly self-explanatory single storey house.

Of the words I've listed so far most, if not all, would be met by a deep frown, possibly a "Huh?", but no harm would be done. But for some reason words that begin with the letter f provide a potential minefield out there. Smokers, I implore you, do not use the word fag in reference to your habit, nor fag end! In some places you will be liable to some very strange propositions, in others you might well be run out of town. And Americans do not have fairy cakes or fairy lights. In fact the word fairy might well be best removed from your vocabulary completely for the duration of your visit. One more f word which can be fraught is fanny which is a couple of inches further rearward in America than the part referred to in the UK, hence our bum bag is their fanny pack. I dread to think what you'd end up with if you asked for a fanny pack in a British store . . .

One thing has to be said for the American language, though. They manage to come up with some excellent words which are sadly missing from our version of English. What we call potholing or caving they call spelunking. How great is that? That sounds ten times more fun to do. In my dictionary Swede - and I have no idea whether that is the vegetable or a Scandinavian person - is a ratabaga. A hair slide is, it seems, a barette - how did they arrive at that?

They don't have the monopoly on strange words by any means, try explaining to an American why we call it a "dustcart"!

Lastly our balaclava is their ski mask. It kinda begs the question do they think the Battle of Balaclava was a downhill slalom?

I think my approach will be to keep schtum, nods as good as a wink to a blind horse, mum's the word, say no more, know what I mean!

Where to start?

With my trip to the Southern states of America getting ever closer I am wondering whether having a blog will give me a better chance of saving my pictures - and maybe publishing them online for friends to see - and also keep some sort of diary of how my journey goes.

So this is where the blog starts - let's see where it takes me.