I believe black is white…discuss.

UPDATED

Hostilities between herebemonsters and hendrixcat have ceased. It is now safe to go back into the comments box.

I’ve spent this week thinking and planning and backwards engineering. I’ve reviewed where I am and where I’d like to be. I’ve SWOT’ted and self-appraised, soul-searched and wish-listed. I’ve considered every option open to me and a few that aren’t. On the grounds that the company I work for makes an enormous profit flogging the phrase in PowerPoint presentations, I even took some blue-sky thinking out of the box and ran it up the flagpole to see what ducks stuck. (It didn’t work for me but I think I had the wrong sort of blackberry – mine just sat there, defrosted and stained the tablecloth dark purple). I’ve introspected, retrospected and consulted my inner child (she still wants a pony – and a penguin)

In short, I’ve navel gazed until my eyes crossed and I got a crick in my neck (must do’s - phone electroshock back lady, buy new belly ring) and I have made the following New Years Resolution.

My New Years Resolution for 2007 is that I am not going to make any resolutions.
Not one. I’m going to wing it. The whole damn year.

It’s exactly the same resolution I made at quarter to seven last Sunday evening.

However, since then I’ve been told that resolving not to make any resolutions is shortsighted of me (or words to that effect – I was so crushed by the tone in which it was delivered that I paid little heed to the exact phrase). What I should be doing is listing all the things I was grateful for in 2006 and stating all the things that I intend to achieve in 2007, break it all down into realistic targets, cross the t’s, dot the i’s and then get on with it.

Because I value the person who gave that opinion, I’ve thought about what they said all week. I’ve thought about it to the extent that all the joy and exhilaration I felt about having a bright new year spread out in front of me went as flat as a bottle of pop with the top left off. Instead of doing all the things I was all fired up about doing, I’ve spent the week stomping round the house, muttering to myself, sitting up half the night crying and then sleeping too late in the morning. I’ve crashed down crockery and snapped at F until I wouldn’t be at all surprised if top of his list of resolutions was a desire to get the hell away from me.

I can’t blame someone for their point of view. I’m not blaming them for how their point of view made me feel. That I had that reaction is no-ones fault but my own. Mine for paying more attention to someone else’s point of view than I paid to my own gut instinct about what felt right, even if I couldn’t justify why it felt right. It’s my fault for not realising that the person who made that remark obviously has such a low opinion of me that they automatically assume that my not making any resolutions means that I’m going to sit around with my finger up my ass and do bugger all for the next twelve months. I’ve never done bugger all in my life before - why should I suddenly start now. It’s my fault for caring that they might think that anyway. Above all, it’s my fault for feeling that I need to justify to anyone any decision I chose to make about my life. I don’t.

And the price I’ve paid to learn this lesson is one week of my life. I’ll never get it back.

Therefore, after much careful thought and not a bit of crockery smashing, I’d like to clearly and for the record state the following.
My New Years Resolution for 2007 is that I’m not going to make any resolutions. I’m going to wing it. The whole damn year.

I now intend to get on with the rest of it.

I’m not good with phones. Never have been. Which is why there are currently 31 messages on the ansaphone (it’s not that I’m popular, it’s just that there’s a machine somewhere that’s convinced that our number is the number of a fax machine that its madly in love with and so it rings it constantly - either that or ET is getting seriously pissed off) I phone my mum on a Sunday night and one night through the week as well – just to check in, and my Nan phones me twice a week. I would be happy to call her, but if I do that then we spend the next hour going through the “put your phone down and I’ll phone you back to save your bill” “no Nan I can afford to call you” conversation that all grandma’s have when their grandchildren call them, because even when you’re grown up and have a job and a house and all that stuff and your grandparent’s existing on the insult that the government call a state pension, they’re still convinced that the only income you have coming in is your pocket money.

Actually that’s not true; the most righteous MC Grandma S of the WI posse doesn’t go through the whole “hang up and I’ll call you back” routine, she just hangs up when she thinks that the call has gone on long enough. This can be (and often is) midsentence. She keeps mentioning something about her hearing aid cutting out but we’re convinced that she’s worried that the fuzz have put a tap on the line.

Mostly, my dislike of using the phone is confined to actually calling people. I’m never sure of whether or not I’m intruding on them. I mean I often don’t want to be disturbed and so I try to extent the same courtesy to others and therefore I don’t phone just to have a chat. (Obviously parents are different because they’ll just tell you to go away if they’re busy, and if they’re our parents then they may not even be that polite)

I don’t have that much problem with people calling me. I never deliberately let the ansaphone cut in. But as result of the length of time it takes me to pick up the damn thing, I’ve now got a totally undeserved reputation (and not for the first time) as someone who doesn’t answer the phone. It’s not that if you call, I’ll ignore you. I won’t (well not unless you’re from the bank). I’ll do a mad dash from the kitchen or the computer room, grabbing my fags on the way and I’ll bang my shin on the corner of the coffee table in my haste to get to the phone before the ansaphone cuts in and I’ll fail because the ansaphones set to two rings before it picks up and starts the “I’m afraid no ones in to take your call please leave a message…” routine that it does in a voice which is dead ringer for the queen. But that’s the reason I always sound so pissed off when I answer the phone. It’s not that I don’t want to talk to you. It’s just that what I really want to do is hop round the living room clutching my calf while screaming “fuck fuck fuck ouch ouch ouch” (I used to scream “fuckit fuckit fuckit ouch ouch ouch” but our living room wall backs onto our neighbours bedroom and I started to get funny looks when I passed her on the stairs…)

To a certain extent F is the same. He doesn’t ignore the phone but he does screen all the calls that come in. This is partly because of all the weird and wonderful people that used to call him when he lived in Lala land – some of them apparently so lala that they forgot that they had called him and left long messages wondering why whenever he called them he was out and partly this is because of the people in London who wanted to kill us (one of the reasons why we escaped to here in the first place) and partly because if he’s musicking then nothing and nobody can disturb him. So we’re quite well suited.

But we differ in one crucial aspect. F, is a major mobile phone junkie. I am not. I hate the bloody things. I wish they had never been invented. Texting is fine (it’s only ever herebe and occasionally Jboy who texts me so I feel free to ignore them with faint regard) but I’d rather carry a hand grenade in my bag than a mobile phone.

For a start there’s the heart attack you have when the thing rings – By the time you’ve loudly cursed the fact that someone is disturbing the peace with their bloody phone you’ve realised that it’s your phone that’s disturbing the peace, although you usually forget to bring it with you much less switch it on. And, not only does it not stop ringing but with each peal the volume increases until everybody is staring at you and wondering firstly; why you don’t answer your phone and secondly, why you have the first 4 bars of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung as your ringtone (the reason being it was the only song that you could think of on the night that someone offered to programme a personal ringtone for you and now it’s too late to have something cooler as they’re too busy to reprogramme it)

So you venture into the very depths of the abyss, otherwise known as the bottom of your handbag to find the thing. And, as you scuttle round in the murk – unearthing enough pink toilet tissue paper to dress a dairy queen, (and it’s only ever pink toilet tissue even if you’ve never in life bought anything other than Andrex white) bus tickets from a town you’ve never been to, sweet wrappers of boiled sweets that you can’t remember buying much less eating, a needle that will embed itself up to the eye underneath your fingernails, a hairbrush that is more hairs than brush and a mascara wand you wish could magic you from this embarrassing dimension - you find the damn thing just as it stops its tolling. So you relax and cast it back into the depths from whence it came.

Where it promptly starts up again. This time it’s something called voicemail which seems to think that it’s of the utmost importance that you heed the call that you never wanted to listen to in the first place. And voicemail is as persistent as a Jehovahs Witness.

I mention these things because in order to understand what happens next you need to understand that when it comes to mobile phones I am a Luddite. In fact, when it comes to mobile phones I think the Luddites had the right idea (they just implemented it on the wrong technology – there is nothing wrong with 40 denier black opaque’s) As you may gather I’m a bit of an anti-mobile person. But, I now work from home. And because I work from home, and because I persistently refused to give out my home phone number (which I think is eminently reasonable) to the people who have a perfect right to call me whenever they so desire – all x thousand of them - the powers that be within the company gifted me with a mobile phone so that I would be contactable should anyone feel the urge to try to win a multimillion pound deal on the strength of a gradient fill.

But it’s not just a mobile phone. I could just about cope with that. It has Bluetooth. I have no idea what Bluetooth is, much less how to work it but apparently it has something to do with the box that came with the phone, a box which I’ve never opened but which bears a picture of something that looks like a really painful contraceptive. It has something called push to talk which seemed to be fairly explanatory even to me, but when I did - push to talk- the thing not only refused to talk but made all sorts of squeaking noises and then refused to talk anymore. In fact, the only 2 useful functions that it seems to have are an alarm clock that refuses to stop even when you switch it off and the facility for herebe to text me to check that I’m still alive (every so often he gets a bit worried) even though I’m never sure – because it doesn’t tell me – that I’m actually replying to his messages. Actually I’m not even sure how he got my number because I don’t know what it is, so how could he?

So there it is. A mobile phone; with all singing, all dancing technology and someone who has a dislike of phones in general and mobile phones in particular. You just know that something hilarious is going to happen next. Stick around.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a big project. Well, that’s what they call it. I call it a right royal pain in the ass. It hasn’t stopped me overworking to match the deadlines and get everything looking perfect, but that’s partly my own professional pride and partly the knowledge that if it looked crappy then the too tight deadline wouldn’t be the thing that was blamed.

So now I’m tired. Chain smokingly, bleary eyed feels like you’re coming down off of speed sort of tired. And I’m eating loads of carbs to compensate (which are not good for me because, at the risk of sounding like a hypochondriac, I’m also very sensitive to carbs – esp bread, pies and pasta - which are the things I crave when I get tired but which are also the things that give me violent mood swings if I od on them – and od’ing on them is a slice of bread a day for three days running and do not under any circumstances eat a plate of pasta unless you want to take out an army with your bare hands) to combat the tiredness because it’s a family thing that we all have wonky blood sugar levels and if we get tired and then we don’t eat like we’re about to go out and single-handedly lay down a hundred miles of railroad track – then we get really (and I mean psychotically) bad tempered and snappy. So I’m under slept and I’m eating all the wrong stuff and I’m in a fierce mood. But even then that’s ok, because there’s nothing like the adrenaline rush from a fierce bad mood to help you get things done. Except when you’ve spent the past week eating all the wrong stuff and you have PMS and you’re under slept. On those days, when I’m already tired and hormonal and on the verge of a hypo, I don’t do deadlines. Well I do deadlines, but I don’t do people repeatedly phoning and breaking my concentration while I’m working, very well. And though I’m never ever anything other than professional when someone calls, and though I’m never ever anything than nice and calm and helpful when I speak to someone on the phone, I have the classic forgetfulness of a low-blood-sugared-premenstrual-underslept-mind-of an- otherwise occupied woman.

Which means that when, after the umpteenth call asking if something will be ready for a deadline that is five minutes away I will, when the call is finished, slam the bloody thing down and scream “you are a fucking twat” at the top of my voice in order to let off some of the tension that has been building up. And, being a low-blood-sugared-premenstrual-underslept-woman with an otherwise occupied mind and only having a hazy idea of how to operate my mobile phone. I will have forgotten to press the button that hangs up the damn thing.

…and not in a good hey hey open another bottle sort of way. There I was - half way through writing a nice long funny (well it made me laugh) post all about musicians and Gibsons and magicians who worked miracles when I heard something. Not a noise outside, not a creaking floorboard, not the drip, drip drip of a phantom tap. Nothing that you could ascribe to imagination, neurosis or too much cheese. Nothing, furthermore, that I could blame on meeting several relations this weekend which usually heralds any urge I may have to attempt to conduct brain surgery with the aid of piece of 2×4 liberally sprinkled with rusty nails. Oh no. Nothing so simple as that. Instead, I’m completely pissed off in a in a cold, calculating, it-may-take-me-until-the-day-I-die (and-beyond)-to- make-you-pay-for-that-but-the-lime-is-a-patient-tree-and-I’m-quite-happy-to-wait-for-that-day sort of anger. Normal (or as normal as you’re ever going to get with me) blogging will resume later.

Stand well back - I’m about to make an announcement. It’s not much of an announcement and will mean absolutely nothing to you if past experience’s are anything to go by but it means a lot to me.

It’s quite a simple admission. There’s not much to it. It’s simply this. I have a name. I know that most people do and I’m not boasting or anything but when you’ve finished reading this I’d like you to spread the word around - tell everyone you know and maybe my blood pressure will stabilise, I won’t be as fucking furious as I am right now and my chances of being locked in the coalshed until I calm down will diminish.

I was very lucky. Confused as they were about most things to do with bringing up children, (actually confused as they were about most things point) - my parents carefully considered a various selection of names before settling on one that could be repeated in polite society. Lauren was an early contender as was Roxanne (until they realised that had Sting ruined a perfectly good name forever) Rowan was dismissed as being too hippy twee and Moonblossom was dismissed as sounding too much like a cheap hand cream. Maggie-May was a serious contender for the first few days - as it incorporated one of mums favourite songs and also the names of a grandma and a great -aunt but in the end it was decided against ( possibly on the grounds that having inherited my families vanity, I would be tormented enough by the morning sun in my face showing my age without having the fact immortalised by Rod Stewarts gravely tones) .

I could have lived with any of those names. All are sufficiently unusual without being of the obviously made up variety and all have sufficient gravitas to grow old with (with the obvious exception of Moonblossom - although I would have been quite happy with that too once I’d read up on Native American folklore and started wearing a lot of turquoise). Most also have a little bit of street cred so that they wouldn’t date - (except Moonblossom but I could have lived with that as opposed to being called something like.. oh bugger I can’t think of a name without running the risk of offending someone reading this!.) Luckily my parents didn’t have any pretensions to be upper-middle class bohemians so I escaped an attack of the Hannah’s, Belinda’s, Poppy’s or any other name that sounds like it should belong to a rag doll.

Instead they went with tradition. After all if you want to be unconventional then being traditional is much the best way. Knowing that my Latvian grandfather had not seen his mother since he was imprisoned by the Germans at fourteen and knowing that owing to the Cold War he would never see her again they decided to call me after his mother. So I was named for her and luckily she had a pretty name.

Now I will admit that I hard time growing into this name. It’s not funky. It’s not groovy. It’s an elegant name that you can’t really make a diminutive of (well you can but you really need to know Latvian and apart from grandpa and his friend Molotov (now there’s a nickname) there weren’t that many Latvians in a small North East village.) and as a teenager I longed to be an Angie or a Jools or a Roxy or any one of a number of hip and trendy short names that would see me firmly ensconced in the world of cool. But like a Chanel suit or a pair of really well fitting jeans my name is something that I’ve grown into. I can wear it anywhere, I can dress it up or dress it down - it always looks good and it’ll last me a lifetime. It’s not a name that will become threadbare. It can be screamed across a soundcheck, whispered in the heat of passion (it sounds very good said with a husky French accent but then most things do), it sums up effortless efficiency in a business meeting, it’s exotic enough for the arts and formal enough for finance. It also looks good up in lights. With this name I can be villain, martyr, saviour or floozy. It will take any honorific from Empress to Auntie. It will one day be perfect as Granny ****** - conjuring up ebony canes and/or being spoilt rotten. It is perfectly balanced by my surname and rolls off the tongue with drama and passion. It looks really good signed with a flourish. It suits me (or I suit it). It goes great with F’s name and surname too (don’t mock - all women check out what their name would sound like with their guys surname) And, as I get older and realise the importance of family and roots and tradition and heritage it makes me proud to know that my having this name keeps alive a branch of the family that was nearly destroyed by the war, that I am named for a women who suffered in a way no mother should ever suffer, that my having this name means that what my grandfather went through has not been forgot and that maybe it made him happy to know that with my birth the life that was imposed upon him and the life he was forced to leave behind were joined together in a new start.

But there seems to be a problem with my name that people can’t get over. I don’t understand it but there you go. Very few people pronounce it correctly. Now I can understand this should people first see it written down. It is confusing to English speaking people who will automatically anglicise it and pronounce it as it’s spelt. However what I can’t comprehend is the fact that people continue to mispronounce it even after I’ve pointed out the correct pronunciation. I can’t work out whether this is because they are all profoundly deaf and so never heard me, whether it is because their opinion of me is so low that they really couldn’t care what my name is anyway, whether their arrogance is such that they feel it’s OK to depersonalise me by removing my name from me (although if that’s the case why not just give me a number), whether they are so convinced of their own infallibility and intellect that they refuse to comprehend or admit that they may have got something wrong, whether they are attempting to assert their own place in the pecking order by asserting their own superiority (after all slaves and servants were often renamed by their masters) or whether they are just plain rude.

Now I will admit that I am partly to blame for this state of affairs. I have not always been as assiduous as I could have been in insisting on the correct pronunciation of my name. Truth to tell until the past week this name thing was a minor irritation which bugged me but really didn’t make that much difference to my life. If people chose to be ignorant then that was their problem. 90% of the time I would never see them again and of the remaining 10% at some point they would be in the company of someone who did pronounce my name correctly, realise their error and change their pronunciation. The matter would then be closed with the minimum of embarrassment to all concerned. I pride myself (rightly or wrongly) on having good manners, I intensely dislike making people feel uncomfortable by pointing out any faux pas they may have made and so for a long time I laboured under the delusion that, that as long as I wasn’t actually being called something uncomplimentary it didn’t really matter how my name was pronounced. To be honest correcting people had taken on the same weary air as the intro to that David Bowie song about Andy Warhol. So I apologise to those of you who may feel that I am now being unreasonably harsh when you had no prior knowledge that this was something that was upsetting and annoying to me.

But, after spending at least an hour a day on the phone for the last month to the tossers who work at Norwich Union Insurance in a vain attempt to get our car (broken into, passenger door hanging off and steering wheel and ignition -wait for it technical term here - fucked) taken to a garage before someone came back to finish what they started I’m a little ragged round the edges. And, after speaking to possibly the entire workforce of that useless and pathetic company none of whom were able to pronounce my name even after I had said it, spelt it and reminded them of it, I have decided to draw a line in the sand.

So here’s the deal. My name is Helena. It is pronounced Hel-ain-a. Try saying “hell ain’t a” and then miss out the T and you got it. Extra points if you can finish the title of the track and name the band. It is not Helen. It is not Eleanor, Elaine, Hannah or even, God help me Linda ( don’t look so amazed it happens more often than you think) It is definitely, absolutely and emphatically not Helen’a (Other than having waist length hair, pale skin and tiny waist in no way do I resemble a third rate actress in a bad adaptation of an E M Forster novel). It is pronounced Hel-ain-a.

I will forgive those of you with a Geordie accent for pronouncing it “Hel-ee-nah” because that particular pronunciation brings back memories of my childhood and the friends of my great-grandparents who spoke proper Geordie dialect. I will forgive those people who do not speak English as a first language for various softening of the vowels and consonants because they at least attempt a correct pronunciation and I will forgive the wonderful Jordanian boss of my first “proper” job for consistently spelling it “Hellenah” which is quite sexy in an Arabian Nights sort of way (although he always pronounced it correctly).

Whatever you may think of my intellect it is insulting to suggest that I am so stupid that I don’t know how to pronounce my name. My parents have many faults but brainlessness is really not one of them and so it is insulting to them to suggest that they got the pronunciation of their child’s name wrong. My grandfather did not get the pronunciation of his granddaughters name wrong and it is a profound insult to him and what he went through to suggest that you know better than he did how to pronounce his mothers name. My great-grandmother may not have spoken English but I’m pretty sure that she knew how to pronounce her own name.

My name is Helena - it is pronounced Hel-ain-a. It is not pronounced Hel-en, Ell-an-or, E-lay-ne, Han-nah, Lin-da or any other variations thereof. It is definitely absolutely and emphatically not pronounced Helen-a. I apologise for repeating the obvious but it appears that all the silent (and invisible) Z’s, X’s Q’s, the absence of vowels and the surfeit of consonants make it impossible for anybody to say.

Therefore if you ask me what my name is, please do not assume that I have mispronounced it and repeat Helen’a, Elaine, Eleanor, Hannah or Linda. If, when asking me my name over the phone I say Hel-ain-a and there is a silence while you figure out how to spell it and I say H-E-L-E-N-A please do not think that I have mispronounced it and start calling me Helen’a. After I have corrected your pronunciation three times I will give up and although I try very hard not to automatically suppose that anyone who works in a call centre has had their brain removed, my prejudice (intolerant, arrogant and judgmental as it may be) will be reinforced by your inability to master the repetition of a word that a Mynah bird would have no trouble with.