There are some ladies out there who must have ditched Google long ago, unless they’re using webmail or something. Why on earth would they ever use Google? They know everything!

Preserve me from the little lectures on everything under the sun, everything from banking to art history to cats via – groan – their definition of an alcoholic; and that awful perky correcting tone their voices take on when replying to you – even when asking you questions about your own life!

Preserve me, particularly, from lectures given by near-strangers on how I can improve my life.

For diplomatic reasons I will draw a veil over some of the people I’ve got in mind, but last night’s PITA really took the biscuit.

This is a person, let’s say, with personal issues, which she splats on anyone who will listen. I’d met her once before, and she’d tried to put one over on me, but I thought maybe this was a one-off. The moment I ran into her again with another friend, she started up about all her (not inconsiderable) problems, and – fool! – I made sympathetic suggestions.

Cut to two hours later when the three of us had walked out of a terrible play and gone to a café for some tea. Almost the moment we sat down she started telling me that, with my smart university credentials, I really ought to be tutoring children, and that I should definitely be charging at least eighty pounds an hour. After hammering me with this for a few minutes, she then said, ‘I’ll write the introductory letter for you if you like.’ Dumbfounded, I said, ‘And what makes you qualified to do that?’ ‘Because I think you’re going to undersell yourself.’

There was a small pause. ‘Oh, I do it too!’

Clearly, something is going on here. A writer thing. This woman has been a copywriter for many years, and, according to her, won awards for her work in her home country, and is, according to her, the only game in town. Softened by her tales of depression woe, I could not bring myself to ask her the simple question why, with this earth-shattering CV, she still hasn’t got a job.

I’m not sure where this comes from. Late-onset insecurity, just plain ole arrogance? No idea. But it’s boring. As they say, a closed mouth gathers no feet.

Our conversation sent me down memory lane to the 80s and 90s, when being female in a technology, camera, phone, or record shop gave me 0.01 percent of an idea of what it must have been like being black and deciding to go into a whites-only restaurant just after segregation laws had been lifted. Technically I was allowed through the door, but that was as far as it went.

Tottenham Court Road was the worst, a frenzy of being totally ignored, stared at but ignored, or talked down to like a child, all with the added thrill of wondering which of my secondary sexual characteristics the bloke, or blokes, was going to look at next. It got to the point that I just wouldn’t go there under any circumstances. Up until 1994 I’d been using hand-me-down Amstrads from my dad, but then I decided to get my first computer. Guess what? I got a Mac, because they were generally available from small sellers where there was some chance of reasonable treatment. (I remember they were in PC World, but I didn’t like the atmosphere in there.) For what it’s worth, I’ve been using Macs ever since. QED?

Then there were the mobile phone shops. About 10-12 years ago I decided to look into getting a phone, but my experience of going into Carphone Warehouse and the like was utterly repellent, chiefly because trying to get advice over the counter involved negotiating some sense out of the three or four (or five or six) overexcitable teenage boys who worked behind the counter. Ditto the ignoring, the talking down and the trying to hustle me, with a soupcon of examining my SSCs. (see above). Ditto no phone bought. Luckily some friends gave me one.

And that brings me to camera shops. In the early 90s I was in the first phase of my photography. I was planning a big trip to India with my Ricoh SLR, another hand-me-down from my dad, as it happened. I decided to go to Jessops, partly because it was the only camera warehouse of its kind at the time, I think, and partly because I had been to Chris Jessop’s 18th birthday party, ten years before. Don’t knock Leicestershire networking. I was looking for a telephoto lens. Young, and admittedly knowing very little, I ventured into the store in the West End. I came upon a bearded man who looked utterly disgusted to be serving me. He cut me off short, waved one unsuitable lens at me and then another, while talking over me as if I was a total fool, and then just walked off. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, or something like it, ‘You’re being very rude and I’m going to complain about you.’ Now, that was a good start. But it all fell apart when I asked him to give me the number of the ‘complaints department.’ This was 1993 and customer services were still in nappies. He scrawled a number on a torn scrap of notepad and thrust it at me. I went immediately to a phone box to call, and of course the number was invented, non-existent. I was younger then. I know I should have been more assertive and had it out with him there and then, but what if I had had to mention f-stops or depth of field during my complaint? My self-confidence sapped, I exited the shop and went up the road to Fox Talbot, who gave me what I needed, second hand, and were very nice. I didn’t set foot in Jessops for another ten years at least.

And then we come to record shops, those festering armpits of dorkdom. There were many years when I simply wouldn’t set foot in one. Whether Record & Tape in Notting Hill Gate, or that jazz place in Covent Garden, when I once had the audacity to ask for something by Robert Johnson, my abiding memory is stale rudeness and a clumsy but very sincere culture of exclusion. And that’s just the people who work there. What is it that comes over men when they go into a shop that just happens to sell records? I have actually been pushed out of the way because some anorak has decided that he just has to flip the exact rack that I’m standing at. I went into the hip-hop Record & Tape and was astonished to be standing next to a very tall, very large, young guy who insisted on resting his hands, at the ends of very long arms, on either end of an entire display rack of CDS. His arm span must have been at least six feet, but since he had only one set of eyes, he seemed to be scanning every artist’s name individually. I was standing so close that I was almost touching him, and yet he was totally oblivious to me. Well, I suspect he wasn’t, actually. HIs girlfriend was standing behind him and was getting pretty annoyed. I hope she dumped him pronto.

Those were (mostly) the old days. I have since then spent money in Jessops – although by the admission of one of their assistants, I suspect after a drunken Christmas lunch, they are the ‘worst discounters in London’ and I buy all my photographic stuff on the internet now, as with my phones. I have been to Record & Tape and have at times been treated with politeness and professionalism.

However the upshot of all my stories about is that all those businesses lost my money and my trust. It was truly as if my cash was worth less than a man’s. Baffling, and really, really stupid. Of course, feminism is fraught with false peaks – now we just have to get past the pink laptops.

A few weeks ago, an acquaintance was getting very misty-eyed about Martin and Rachel Ridall, who declared that they had forgiven the woman, Hannah Saaf, who killed their 11-year-old son Sam in a hit and run accident last year.

‘Aww, isn’t that amazing,’ said the acquaintance, ‘I wish everyone could just forgive each other and put all their differences behind them.’ She was a bit miffed when I pointed out that forgiveness is not always an ideal position, and I half expected her to wheel out that Mandela quote that goes ‘Blah blah is like drinking poison and thinking it will kill your enemy,’ in this case, inserting ‘Not forgiving someone’ in place of the ‘blah blah’. I’ve seen several different versions of these words on the web and have no idea which the real one is, but this makes no difference at all to the forgiveness fascists. They think themselves terribly clever for quoting it, and feel very smug.

These are the kind of people who blithely invite sworn enemies to the same party, stand well back from the fireworks, and then say, ‘I just want everybody to get along.’ These are the kind of people who, when you are foolish enough to mention your problematic relationship with someone, will lecture you about having compassion for them. In fact, I once had the misfortune to share a tube journey home with one particular new-age ninny, who was very keen to tell me that my feelings about a close relative of mine were somehow misguided, and that if I could somehow take a video camera and make a film about the relative’s own childhood, somehow I would be able to understand them and it would all make it better.

These are also the kind of people who talk about cancer sufferers being ‘fighters’, and insist that positive thinking will cure all ills.

What is so irritating about these people, and ultimately so toxic, is that they are implying that these situations involve choices, and that you are somehow lacking if you don’t make the ‘correct’ one. There is something profoundly coercive about being told that your feelings are somehow wrong; that you somehow haven’t ‘got it’. Blaming the victim is the ultimate goal here – forgiveness fascism is part of a very cheap, sentimental black-and-white universe which really doesn’t exist.

What the FFs refuse to acknowledge is that feelings cannot be bought and sold like a pair of shoes. Forgiveness isn’t something you can work at. It’s like falling in love. It comes from deep inside and you can’t tell it when to appear. It’s not like a tap you can turn on and off.

Before Christmas I read Alice Miller’s The Body Never Lies – The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting. Her thesis, in brief, is that cruelty to a child by a parent will manifest as physical illness later on in life, if not acknowledged. She asserts that a lot of the pain people go through as adults is caused by the lingering effects of the fourth commandment, ‘Honour thy father and mother,’ and the obligation to accept whatever they did, simply because they were your parents. This rang a lot of bells with me. I know many people who have never been able to forgive a parent for their actions. They may deperately want to be free of the past, but forgiveness is never that easy, and feelings can’t be glibly written off or bullied away. Constantly being told how you ought to feel or behave does nothing to help.

It’s all part of our ugly media-led culture of comparison, which of course can be happily ignored until a forgiveness fascist turns up on your own doorstep. I truly hope the Ridells are sincere – during a time of terrible crisis, we must clutch at anything that stops us going mad – but for most of us it’s not a matter of choice.

This is the second time the time funnel’s got me this week. The night before last I was in a supermarket, searching the shelves of spirits and sticky drinks for something to take to a friend’s house. Each bottle seemed to snatch me back to a day of drinking, 10, 15, 20 and getting on for 30 years ago. That makes me sound very old, but I first tasted alcohol very young and it was probably something sugary. Suddenly I found myself rolled inside snatches of memory, of parties, incidents, moments, even single thoughts I had with my mouth full of sweet stinging liquor.

The last time I saw Spiritualized live was in 1998 at Glastonbury. They were playing in the late afternoon. I’d just had a stupid row with my boyfriend in his band’s tour bus, and a line of something nasty, and I stomped off out into a thick field of mud with a can of beer. Goddamn tour buses with their engines on all weekend! I found a stage nearby and watched Bentley Rhythm Ace, I think it was. Then the sun began to set, and then came Jason and the band. Alone and wired I watched them, and their fuzzy, trippy, blue light show, and the sun went down and the moon came up – I might have invented the moon bit, but it fits anyway – and I can honestly say it was a spiritual experience, and it made my weekend, and probably my summer.

That album sat around in my life for a couple more years, being the soundtrack to many stoned bedtime headphone sessions before passing out. I remember wishing someone was into me enough to write a whole bloody amazing record about me, and feeling very jealous of that bloody keyboard woman.

And tonight it all came back. My friend Kim told me his friend Huw had a spare ticket, which felt like fate. I felt tears coming at the start, even before they’d begun playing, but I hung in there. I’m not enough of a muso to critique the interpretation, except that it was loud and sometimes punctuated by a violent strobe display that went on and on, faster and faster, to the point where half the audience had their hands over their already closed eyes. I thought I would throw up, in truth.

They did an encore, playing one song and ending with Silent Night. I thought they would spin it into a ten-minute cacophony of twisting trumpets and howling violins, but they played it very straight and ended it, gently, there.

I’d forgotten how that music had dragged me up and down and around and told me exactly where I was at the time. Thank you, Jason Pierce.

Tis the season to be sober.

It’s full of insightful political commentary and apercus. (I can’t find the cedilla function so that looks like ‘aperkus’ to me.) I’m almost sad that there isn’t a slew of vitriolic, embittered bile in the comments section, accusing me of being ‘middle class’. Soon come.

Edit on 12th December – not a squeak! Plus, I meant to say that the ‘as I am’ in the first sentence was not put there by me. A small thing, but the tone sounds off. A bit crow-ey, a bit unnecessarily explanatory. Never mind.

After reading Robert McCrum’s piece in the Observer a few weeks ago, Stop The Bean-Counters Ruling The Fiction Roost, you might be forgiven for thinking that we had now witnessed the final nail in the coffin for books as we know them. It’s long been known that sales departments dictate what gets published, but for a publisher to renege on a deal because of sudden sales wimpishness is another order of ugh.

My grasp of economics, I admit, is not always great, but whenever I try to explain the books industry to people who work in media, finance, or the law, or any other industry for that matter, they don’t get it either, so I feel slightly more justified. ‘But that doesn’t make sense at all,‘ they say, and I can only throw up my hands and shrug. I am clearly not alone in trying to make sense of the Morlocks vs Eloii circus that the vexed publisher/author relationship so often, sadly, appears to be.

Here’s a good piece about the money side of things: Why Life’s A Tough Gig For Writers. I also well know that authors, now more than ever, have to get real, and I’ll be getting on to that in another post.

Anyway, this is my fantasy land:

Publishing houses would get rid of both their sales and their publicity departments, outsourcing the work to companies that actually need the business and therefore have to work for it. Imagine the scene: ‘Right, here are the 10 books we’re doing next season, and we’ll pay you lot X to sell them, and we’ll pay you lot X to make sure they get out there.’ Boot firmly returned to other foot, and suddenly, there would be a new mobility of vision – wouldn’t there?

Like I said, just a fantasy. Experts, please explain why this wouldn’t work.

My head being crushed by a cold, I was innocently surfing the Guardian website on Friday when I came across this, an introduction to a review of the noughties. Aside from causing me to hate the word ‘noughties’ even more, it made me swear very loudly and write an angry Facebook update.

I wonder why it jolted me so much. For me, the current decade didn’t really start until about 2003 at least. And then it got me thinking about 10 years ago. Christ. For me, 1999 was a chaos of wrong turns and butterflies ballroom dancing in Tonga, seemingly for my sole benefit. How can I forget all the media roundups that were thrown at us as 1999 came to a close, ushering in not only the millennium, but what was to be one of the worst years of my life.

And now the tide of decadeist reflection has begun, and isn’t going to stop for another, what, three months. Of course, one way to fend off the sense of doom is for me to write some decade review stuff of my own, I guess.

So what have we got now? Before New Year’s Eve 1999, people overbought in Sainsbury’s due to fear of the Millennium Bug. Now people are spending, or being asked to spend, exponentially more due to global warming, which really has no time limit on it. The chicken korma-dipped, bleached bunny porn star look for women was still a tiny bit ironic 10 years ago, but now it’s ubiquitous and almost obligatory. Now ordinary people have flatscreen TVs mounted on the wall. iPods. Broadband. 1TB+ drives. All driven by porn, as was technology in the previous two decades.

Remind me, what else is there?

The Cut Price Hero is a man or woman who tells you, in proud and slightly hushed tones: ‘Last year, I bought my mother’s council house for her.’

Let’s stop there for a moment. How wonderful, you are meant to think, that this person has pulled themselves up from such humble beginnings to such levels of success that they are able to pay for their maw’s security in the form of an entire property. See: any number of footballers, pop stars, and, I seem to remember, a lawyer of my ex-acquaintance. Cockles warm enough yet?

Look again. They think themselves terribly clever for doing this, as of course their mum’s house would have been available at a great discount, thanks to the Tories’ right-to-buy scheme that squats immovably in the middle of public life like a dropsical Godzilla.

But if these people really were the caring souls they wish to appear, they would have bought their mum a nicer house from a mainstream outlet, meaning she could put her original home back into the council reserves, thus enabling an overcrowded family who has spent years in temporary accommodation to have somewhere decent to live.

But we don’t think like that, do we?

I really should be on Grumpy Old Women.

But what’s everyone really doing? In my travels I’ve come across an awful lot of people involved in startups that seem to serve no more purpose than to flesh out their CV. ‘It’s a social networking website, like Facebook, but exclusive. You have to be invited.’ So you and your friends all invite each other and you, uh, email each other through the site, right? Cool! Why didn’t I think of that!

‘I’m a Twitter developer.’ Okaay. Presumably you do a lot of other developer-type things as well, food and shelter being at a premium these days. Actually, I’ve already dumped Twitter. When someone develops an instant chatroom function where a few people can add a tag and chat in private, I’ll return with a vengeance. Possibly.

And how could I not mention one of my old favourites? ‘Why do you want to write PR and commercial stuff when you’ve done books? You’ve got to do what you love.’ Thanks, lovey. Economics clearly wasn’t one of her strong points, which became even clearer when she advised me: ‘Never lower your rates. It’s better to work for nothing.’ Not many minutes of not very probing chat revealed that she had been doing just that for quite a while.

I don’t mean to be nasty. We’re all flapping about in the duckpond right now, but my readers will remember that this line of questioning pushes my buttons, because I find it so dumb. I’m trying to imagine a similar conversation with, say, an artist, who told me they were getting into graphic or web design. In fact I’m going to ask around visual artists who are turning to commercial work and find out if they encounter this as well.

However, the reality is that art scares people who aren’t involved in it. There is both a fascination and a resentment, rolled up together. People are sometimes even in awe of you, and express wonder that you even need to work at all(!). This of course clouds any other impressions of your potential as an employee. I actually asked a copywriting guru about this recently, and he advised me to hide the fact that I have done a certain creative thing which I will henceforth not mention, even though it’s on my website for all to see.

The issue may be this: If you create stuff, like books and paintings and films, there is a tangible result to what you do. A lot of people’s jobs however, seem to involve a whole load of phone calls, emails, meetings, and presentations, but with no tangible product at the end. Are there some archetypes here?

How did I get to the Art Rant when I was writing about networking? Because, I guess, you can run but you can’t hide. Or something like that.

However, due to the flood of requests to start up again, here I am. Plus, I just had a wonderful holiday in Greece, and it’s autumn, which always makes me feel relieved.

I’m still on Tweet Strike, mind.