donna at the end off the day his gf fooked his ed up she the one to bleam if sge hadent off tould him that she woz seein a police man then none ov this would off soo bleam her n now his mam has lost him for good n his kids dont hav a daddy eny mre all dwn to that bitch if u ask me r.i.p raoul xxxx

Doubtless there are some agents provocateurs in there, but the essential impression of these groups is sub-literate vileness.

That’s weird. I can smell smoke. Are my earrings on fire?

Hold on, isn’t it politically incorrect to criticise someone who expresses themselves so badly, because their poor education can’t possibly be their fault, but society’s?

Damn it’s getting hot in here.

But then isn’t it really patronising to imply that just because someone has a poor education, they are incapable of basic moral decency?

Yoww, my eyes are really stinging now.

But should a person’s actions be viewed through the filter of their perceived educational background anyway? After all, isn’t a highly educated person just as capable of having awful views, even to the point of committing terrible atrocities?

Really could do with a fire bucket over here.

But Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, Amin and Hitler were not particularly well educated academically.

Shit, man. That charred thing that just fell on the floor looks a lot like my ear.

But that wasn’t their fault either!

OK. I’ll put you out of your misery now. One of the best things I’ve seen on the Daily Mash is the following:GUARDIAN READERS’ HEADS EXPLODE IN WOOTTON BASSETT DILEMMA. It made me howl with laughter. And here we are again.

As a rule, it’s always safer to blame society – but not too much! Or you’ll be accused of coming over ‘all Daily Mail.’ Have some focaccia.

And then you run into a girlfriend, and you rant at each other for a while, trying to dampen the panic. And then you might have The Conversation. If your friends are all incredibly sorted financially, or terribly disapproving, or you want to hide your situation, you may have The Conversation alone. (You may also had had this conversation with yourself after an abysmal one night stand, or while some grim liaison zombies itself to a close, and you stagger out of there, thinking, ‘I should be getting paid for this.’ Ah, there’s a clue.)

Yes, it’s the Prostitution Conversation. (Or sex work, if you will.) ‘How can I make money quickly?’ you think, desperate, and the thought goes round and round, and you remember all the bad sex you’ve had in your life, (for free!). You’ll discuss it for ages, and talk about people you know who’ve done it, and, if you’re of a middle-class liberal persuasion, guilt-trip yourselves for the awful privilege of being able to make the choice in the first place.

But still, your bank account is at five to midnight on the doomsday clock. And it’s extremely unfashionable to admit poverty nowadays. Newspapers, for the last decade, have been full of stories about how ‘we’ are all rich now. Even now, post-recession, the best most journos can manage is growing your own veg, recycling socks, or not getting your morning coffee from Starbucks any more. Few of the chatterati would dare admit anything tougher than that. But you would think newspapers paid in gold from the way some hacks bang on about their shopping lives, whether buying clothes, holidays, houses, or private health insurance. In fact, all sorts of people are really struggling right now. And some may well decide that the only solution is to sell sex. What money’s that short, considerations like health, personal safety, and the secret getting out to all and sundry, temporarily fall away.

However, talk usually remains just talk. Many are called, but few are chosen. When I was in my late 20s I knew a 19-year-old girl who’d been doing it for a while. ‘It’s the shopping you get addicted to,’ she said. She went on to marry a client, have kids, and did very well for herself. She was always telling me, ‘You could do it. You might not be in the top rank but you’d be fine.’ Around the same time, a lesbian friend went for an ‘audition-with-benefits’. She didn’t pursue it in the end, but the offer of the guy’s number was always there. Aged 29, I so nearly went through with it. But I didn’t. Others did. See, of course, Belle De Jour.

Lots of women also consider becoming dominatrixes, especially because you don’t have to have sex with the client. In fact many dommes dislike being called prostitutes for that very reason. But this is something that takes a certain skill. The pros make it look easy when it’s not. You might have the ‘You could do it, you’d be great,’ conversation with various girlfriends, but you are unlikely to make the grade, and it’s hard work. But many will consider it, as the bills flood in and the cheques bounce, and the fees go up.

The writer Glenda Richards wrote memorably about her date with a pimp when she was a struggling actor. Other women wrote to her and said that they too had stepped over the line. It may be that women are not as fragile as we are supposed to be. Certainly, in my experience, teenage and college sex, and the politics around it, was at times a demeaning and brutalising experience. I sometimes wonder if payment would have been adequate compensation, but it might have helped me get a deposit on a house in later years. It’s nice to get something back for your trouble, no?

And here is the bit of the conversation where, depending on the parties involved, it all splits, and you go through the red channel or the green channel and the two do not intersect. I am not going to rehearse all the arguments right now, as we’d be here all night. But fundamentally, (and there is certainly some fundamentalism here), in one corner there are the anti-sex work feminists who will say that every single woman who works in the adult industry is there by coercion, and that all women who sell sex are either drug addicts or being forced by pimps. I have been at dinner parties of intelligent educated women who will swear blind that this is true.

And then in the other corner there is the uncomfortable (for some) fact that some women work in the adult industry because they have chosen to do so. It insults them to imply that they are victims and need to be ‘saved’. But the two sides simply will not meet. I don’t really understand why it’s so hard to take in the idea that a) there are women in the adult industry who are being abused, and this needs to be stopped, but b) some women work in the adult industry because they want to, and accept that they are both true at the same time. The media doesn’t help, by either glamorising or demonising in equal measure.

Now I’ve got this far, I’ve realised I’ve got a huge amount to say about all this, and it just won’t go in one post. Plus I’d like to namecheck the bloggers, activists, and artists who are working to raise awareness of the issues here.

I am not saying anyone should sell sex. But the thought goes through many women’s minds, whether anyone likes it or not. Stepping over the line and actually doing it, of course, (more’s the point, more than once), is another thing.

It was also partly sparked by my discovery of the glasswing butterfly at Kew Gardens.

The whole thing turned into a bit of a science lesson, which I hope is at least a reasonable percentage accurate.

I was very sad to hear of the death of Sebastian Horsley last week. I knew him only slightly, having met him a couple of years ago, but I went to the launch of Tim Fountain‘s lively and very entertaining stage production of his memoir, Dandy In The Underworld at the Soho Theatre last week, and so saw him only the day before he died. The party was so crowded that I hadn’t even got round to saying hello, when suddenly the place – the gorgeous Quintessentially Soho – seemed to empty and he and all the lovely people were gone. I had been admiring his blue velvet suit, which I preferred to the red one he wore later, and I very much regret saving my hello for last. Perhaps it was shyness.

Anyway, *wavy lines; dissolving xylophone*.

Two years ago I was on the judging committee for the Erotic Awards, a wonderfully chaotic annual giving of giant golden penis trophies to a truly diverse range of erotic/adult acts; everything from websites, strippers and sex workers, to artists, writers and campaigners. The accompanying annual ball has been described by bestselling erotic author Suzanne Portnoy as ‘The Glastonbury of Sex,’ and the doughty folk who support and run it as ‘The good people in a gloriously mucky business’ by artist Grayson Perry.

As I remember, we all, or at least the vast majority of us, loved Dandy In The Underworld, and felt it had to win something, so we gave him publication of the year. [Incidentally, writer of the year went to the wondrous James Lear for his Mensa-level gay erotica, which itself pipped another excellent book, Daddy's Girl, by Stella Black, to the post. 2008 was an exceptionally good year for books. Bafflingly, though, the 2008 winners seem to be missing from their website.] I loved Sebastian’s book, despite it needing an editor for the excess of – cough, at times borrowed – aphorisms. That didn’t matter – it had a really compulsive energy to it.

Cut to the launch of the awards exhibition, where finalists’ work was shown for the week or two up to the ball. I found a gallery in Redchurch Street in Hoxton, which seemed ok and a decent enough space. These gatherings were always fun, with a stripper or two and a few fetish types all dressed up. Someone read from a spanking memoir, Dances with Werewolves, while the author, Nikki Flynn, was spanked. Then it was Sebastian’s turn. He turned up, as I remember, in the red suit, with the giant hat almost touching the ceiling, and read from his book. There was quite a crowd squashed in there. With a flourish, he began to read.

He read about sex with amputees. Sex with senior citizens. Sex with ethnic minorities. I think he covered just about every group save children and animals, and even then, from memory, I can’t be sure. But, guess what? The only people in that whole crowded sweaty room who were laughing were me, and Tuppy Owens, the organiser. Otherwise, you could have heard a pin drop. The room was silent as the grave, save for the air con and the drinkers outside.

Not surprised? Hold on a minute. His reading may have been wildly un-PC, but the crowd consisted of people who attend sexual freedom meetings and assert their right to do all sorts of unusual things to each other, using all sorts of implements, and sometimes in public. Despite this alleged subversiveness, not one of them could see the humour, or the irony, in what Sebastian was saying. There was a tiny bit of huffing at a couple of the fruitiest points, but neither did any of these iconoclasts actually take him to task or even dare to boo him.

He had them fair and square. I suddenly felt deeply embarrassed. What on earth were these people claiming to be, that their edifice could be cracked so easily? ‘Call yourselves swingers?!’ I wanted to shout. I winced inwardly. I exchanged a handful of emails with Sebastian, (in which, on sad re-reading, I found myself becoming increasingly arch, for some reason), and I ran into him again at the ball. He seemed extremely nice and kind, and despite his merry use of industrial swearwords, of which I approve, very non-judgemental.

Sebastian had the last laugh that night, but now he has left many bereft. I only wish I’d got to know him better.

One thing I didn’t go into was modern day, secular, forms of excommunication. This might involve not being photographed when you expected to be, or written about. On a smaller and more domestic scale, I can remember, if I’m honest, having transgressed group politics on more than one occasion, and found myself untexted, unemailed, and un-christmas-carded. But that was a long time ago, pre-social media. And the fallouts were over staggeringly petty things to do with who’d slept with who. Nowadays, someone would have had to have done something pretty awful to be mass-unfriended or unfollowed on Twitter and Facebook. Phew.

I could have called this post ‘The Politics Of Pain’, to dress it up, so as to appease intellectuals, fetishists, and amateur semioticians, but sod that, it’s Friday. I am who I am.

A visiting Martian might think that SATC2 is a form of school test, or an unpleasant syndrome acquired from living too near a sewage plant. Earthlings know it is a newly released spin-off movie from a very 80s-looking American series that I hardly ever watched, unless by accident. This fact, and the ascendance of Theresa May in our new government, has shoved shoes firmly back onto the agenda. During the cheap credit boom years of the noughties, a high purchase level of footwear on the part of a woman was a prime indicator of social arrival. Once upon a time, Imelda Marcos was seen as a Marie Antoinette, someone to be mocked for her addiction to shoe ownership, but gradually the shopping classes have raised her status to heroine.

I have never been an Imelda. My relationship with shoes is a little more love/hate. Up until a few years ago, my summer shoe ritual involved the following:

1) Buy fashionable summer sandals.
2) After two hours, feet hurt.
3) After four hours, feet blistered.
4) After a whole day, feet bleeding.
5) Alternate with other similar pairs, and continue all summer.

Now, of course, this progression did not come entirely as a surprise, so I always carried about half a packet’s worth of plasters about my person. In pockets, handbags, and the darker parts of my wallet. If you walked anywhere with me, you’d suddenly realise that I hadn’t replied to your last comment, and you’d turn, and there I’d be, bent over, ripping a twisted, bloodstained piece of pink fabric off my foot, and replacing it with another.

After a few weeks of this, my feet were marked all over. Someone said they looked as if they’d been burned. After a hot bath the scars would glow red, like stigmata, and they lasted well into winter.

Similarly, with heels. Once upon a time I used to go to the pub, already pissed, in really high shoes, and stagger home later, with a Walkman (as we called them then) on at full volume. Why I never got mugged is a mystery. And why I didn’t faint from the pain is another.

The trouble with shoes, and other fashiony things, for the last 15 years or so, is that everything went petite. Teeny little pointy feet, kitten heels, little micro tops, tiddly little bits of micro-jewellery consisting of two bugle beads and a seed pearl, all strung on an invisible bit of wire, all kind of ethnic-meets-70s. I missed all the 80s clunky stuff. It was big and you could see it across a room. Shoes were generous. Then they became mean.

After my meltdown in 2002, and I found myself clawing my way back up from rock bottom, I found, in a charity shop, some posh Italian designer flip-flops. They felt like walking on air. Sadly, they came to grief a couple of years later when a cute Jimi Hendrix lookalike, who had clearly been up all night, stumbled into me in the street and trod on one of them, damaging it irrevocably. But I had seen the light. I had discovered the capacity to walk around on a hot day without pain, or blood seepage. From there I advanced to Birkenstocks, which, in my old life, were akin to scabies. I still wore heels though.

And then, in 2006, I gave up smoking. I took a self-portrait on holiday in a bikini a few months before the momentous day, August 31 2006, when I had my last cigarette. I will draw a veil over what followed, but suffice to say I am now twice the person I was then. (NB: not literally twice.)

Cut to last summer. All my high heels, that I’d worn for years and even danced in, were hurting me more and more, but I couldn’t work out why. I have some high black boots, bought in 2005. Last summer, I put them on to go out to two parties. It was going to be a long day. I went downstairs and out into the street, realised I’d forgotten something, and came back up to my flat, by which time my feet were hurting so much that I felt like killing someone. This, after less than five minutes of wearing. I changed them for flats and went out, and stayed out, pain free, for about eight hours.

Then I had my eureka moment. I was about two stone heavier than when I’d bought them! Each foot was carrying an extra 14 pounds – no wonder they hurt. Gotta love physics. And that, as they say, was that. Stilettos, finito. As I’m already 5’10″, I don’t have to worry too much about looking up at people. And there are a few benefits to weight gain, up to a point.

I feel liberated from what, to me, has become a form of painful drag. [discuss] I already felt excluded from the field, to be honest, looking in the windows of Kurt Geiger and the like over the last few years, with their shelves of truly revolting six-inch-heel gladiator sandals, which I call ‘pig-in-lipstick’ shoes, and which always seem to be on sale for a much-reduced twenty quid after a few months. [I’m looking for a decent picture of these horrors, but of course can’t find one this minute.]

This said, and I am only human, if someone asked me very nicely, drove me everywhere, or paid for all the taxis, got me a book deal, and a lottery win, I could be persuaded for an evening…

But, my question is, have I committed a political act?

I do want to tear my hair out when people blame technology for current problems. It’s not perfect, because nothing is, but the capacity to communicate with others is mostly good, isn’t it? I just don’t buy the idea that virtual communication is somehow ‘not real’.

I first got email and a web connection at home in 1995. Around that time, I did some temping in an office which had its own intranet. When I asked whether the staff used the intranet to send emails to each other, the bemused reply was, ‘Oh, we don’t use email here. We talk to each other.’ As you can imagine, this humanity-drenched attitude did not extend to the office politics in the place.

Humans aren’t actually that good at being around each other too much, so this idea that getting in touch through a machine is somehow distancing or alienating is laughable. Watch what people do as they earn they way up the ladder. If someone is fortunate and fulfilled, the usual pattern is to go from flatshare to living alone, to larger flat, to (if they then gather a family together) house, to bigger house further from other big houses, to country mansion, and if the person is very lucky in their choice of career, to buying an island. It is rare that anyone would choose to live physically closer to lots of others if they have any choice in the matter. And, of course, family life itself can cause huge amounts of aggro, tempered only by the fact that nature is very cunning in getting us to reproduce.

So while I can riff happily about the shortcomings of, for example, Facebook and Twitter, I’m not buying the idea that they cause fundamental harm.

And so with grassroots activism in general, I think. Who could forget Swampy, mid-90s hero of the protest against Newbury Bypass? He became a sort of poster boy for middle class crusty campaigning. The impact of that protest, coupled with the rise of the internet and mobile phones, ensured that this was the last time the general population could write off environmental activists as weirdos and nobodies. However, over the last decade, I have come to despair over the way some of these movements have presented themselves.

Ten years ago, back on May Day 2000, I went to a similar protest in Parliament Square, where it was assured that trees would be planted and the area ‘taken back’. On closer examination, I seem to remember a few twigs stuck in the ground, a lot of people wearing those really naff giant striped Artful Dodger hats in red and green fake fur, and the Winston Churchill statue being given a grass mohican, which I thought was rather striking. I don’t remember a riot, but google tells me there was one. In the ensuring months, rumour had it that some cannabis plants had taken root, but otherwise it was not an impressive day.

I won’t rehearse the debate over whether public demonstrations actually do anything. I went on the gigantic one in 2003 against the war in Iraq – much good it did – and popped into the Countryside Alliance one in, I think, the same year, when I was living in the area, to take photos of people wearing fox suits and waving placards saying things like ‘Hitler was a vegetarian.’ This was a very different lot from the crusty crowd, but they are actually not so far from each other.

Back to Saturday. I’m impressed that so many people have been allowed to camp in Parliament Square at all. I suspect the election had something to do with it. In some countries they would have been carted off in unmarked police vans within hours, never to return.

There was some history pinned up on a noticeboard, about the Diggers of the 17th century, and a plan for self-sustaining communities with allotments. Kate had brought a bag of seed potatoes. I figured a lot of the planting would be symbolic, as of course anything actually put in the ground would be dug up again immediately the protesters had gone, creating a rather self-defeating waste of greenlife.

The moment we arrived, as if by magic, some rather half-hearted drumming started. What is it with bloody drumming at these events? My response to it is pretty pavlovian by now, and involves either a flan or a machete, depending on what mood I’m in. Similarly, you can’t have an event like this with out a posh old lady in a turban dancing around, and sure enough, there was one.

Then someone grabbed a megaphone and announced that the planting would take place at 2pm, at the Democracy Oak, a sapling which was already in the ground and protected by metal caging. A matter of minutes later, a woman grabbed the megaphone and announced that a seminar on how to use your mobile phone for activism would be taking place in the marquee at, er, 2pm. Had no one seen The Life of Brian?

Then, a matter of minutes after that, another lady announced that the moon was in an apposite phase and therefore if any of the women present were menstruating, could they please come and use their blood to help make a banner dedicated to the goddess. If no blood was forthcoming, red cosmetics or henna would be acceptable, and this would be a radical act. She had a red mark on her cheek which looked from where I was standing like a large blemish of some sort. It was only after squinting a little that I realised that this was in fact, of course, a smear of blood. I have no idea who carries henna around with them.

The tree-planting won out and we went over at 2pm. A man with the now ubiquitous well-worn bleached dreads was directing several surprisingly posh-sounding boys to plant the plants in a circle round the oak. I admire the gesture but I truly didn’t see the point of this. Then, as if by magic, the Hare Krishnas arrived.

Kate sensed competing factions already, and started feeling annoyed with it all, and so we walked off to call a friend. By the time I looked back to the oak, a group of at least 20 people were standing in a circle holding hands, while the man with bleached dreads instructed them to make various gestures, say something three times, hug each other and then sit on the ground.

And this is when we clocked out, out of sheer irritation.

And this is when I make the terrible suggestion that movements like this really need some sober, professional ‘straights’ on board, if they are ever going to have any equal dialogue with anyone outside their own group. Get some architects in, some journalists, and, dare I say it, find some money men, to help explain your ideals.

Full-on actions such as Greenham Common and Newbury worked because of the large numbers of people involved, and their persistence. But this is something different, and the signal-to-noise ratio is woeful. Over and over again I’ve seen important messages being drowned out by at times infantile new-ageism and the whole thing needs a massive kick up the arse. I’m sad to say this because I essentially support what they do, but I have no intention of joining the Judean Peoples’ Front anytime soon.

I’ve referred to this before somewhere else, but I once went to a conference put on by Southall Black Sisters, and one of the wisest points was made by one of their older activists, who reminded everyone that, in all her years of experience, the main failing of pressure groups was their lack of understanding of finance. They simply didn’t have the wherewithal to talk numbers with the government, whose backing they desperately needed. If you need something from someone, you need to speak their language in order to get what you want from them.

The Pod Delusion is a fine and entertaining podcast. In the words of James O’Malley, the producer:

‘The Pod Delusion is a podcast about interesting things. From scepticism to lefty liberal things, it’s commentary from a secular, rationalist, ‘Guardianista’, sort of perspective. A bit like From Our Own Correspondent but with more jokes. General Election Note: We make no claims to politicial impartiality or balance… quite the opposite in fact.’

Hopefully I’ll be doing more for them soon.