Sadie Hasler

33: Asteroids & Bikes

Posted on June 25, 2013 by Sadie Hasler

Age is a funny thing isn’t it. Our lives divvied up into manageable sections – how long we’ve lived, how long – deduced hopefully from averages – we might expect to live yet. The maths of our being human. Numbers. Things we made up to make more sense of the world. How did we first come to count things – did some lovely fool in a cave fall in love with the stars and try to count them, and in quantifying them, own them?

I turned 33 last week, and somewhere amid all the internal din, the silent fuss of getting older, the cell-rooted panic specific to women in their thirties that their Fallopian tubes might clamp shut before they get around to thinking about whether they want to use their lady bits as a hotel for foetuses, somewhere in the middle of all that, (and present-opening and beer and more food than is medically advised), I realised: BEING IN YOUR THIRTIES FRICKIN ROCKS.

Obviously it has its setbacks. There’s a bit of prep that goes into a birthday in your thirties. You have to dye your hair the day before for a start (there’s nothing so tragic as people noticing your grey hairs as you blow out your candles). You have to consider everyone else’s lives in your celebrating; where is best to go for kids, what can everyone afford, who knows and likes whom, what happens if it rains, what happens if an asteroid in the park wipes out the scotch eggs, how much should you drink if you want to write that press release/spring-clean/still be alive the next day. It’s not simply a case of getting a bit older – there’s admin to fun in your thirties.

But there’s also a delicious freedom. You know what you want; you set about with all your gathered skills to pragmatically achieve it; you put up with less bull-turd from twazzocks. YOU ARE MIGHTY. (And you’re still pretty. Honest. Prettier, even. Defo. Promise.)

I did a few things that made me feel ‘pretty darn rad’. I sacked off a casting for a part in something because I simply thought “No. I don’t want you and I shall not waste my time.” (definite progress from my 20s), I cut my own hair (a friend taught me the highly addictive ponytail technique and I have subsequently lost seven inches), and I got a new bike. My mummy got me one. It’s purple and awesome.

Now, I haven’t had a bike since Helen Fulton borrowed mine in 1994 to go round to Leanne’s to have an argument and it got ‘stolen’ (Don’t ask. It’s still very raw.) so this wasn’t simply a case of replacing tired mechanics for new. This was serious stuff. This was childhood revisited. This was rebirth, with wheels. This was…clumsy, and not very pretty.

There is a blissful solitude in whizzing (okay – wobbling) along the pavement on a new bike, at any age. For a portion of those self-propelled moments you will always be the kid you were, set off down the road for the first time without the stabilisers on. You are alone in a scary beautiful world. Perhaps that is one of the first and truest existential moments we have. To feel it again after years of not having a bike is very strange.

But I stayed upright. I did. I might have flashed my knickers and I might have looked a bit of a nob but for a few moments down the road I was all ages all at once, and I felt happy with where I’d been, where I was, and how I’d got there. My thirties. My lessons, my strength, my gathered love; my years cast up like stars above me.

And then I went to the pub.

The Comfort of Strangers

Posted on June 17, 2013 by Sadie Hasler

So. I was going to write about silicon spatulas, or how Helen Mirren rocks, or how I am addicted to my new poster-making app; I wanted something light to counter-balance my rather serious column last week.

But I can’t write about those things. Something is tugging my brain away from all those things. It won’t settle on them. Those are not my real thoughts, so I shan’t write them.

For those of you who didn’t read last week’s column, it was about Stephen Fry, and my Dad, and bi-polar, and suicide, and how I reconcile myself to my own low moments. It was a breezy one, I’ll confess. Look it up if you fancy a hoot.

I wrote it, certainly not as a throwaway piece, naturally, but as a small high-five of solidarity with Stephen, and a snapshot of my thoughts that morning circa my column deadline; wended that way by the news. I had absolutely no idea that it would be spread so widely by its readers on Twitter and Facebook, retweeted and shared by so many, that people would actively look me up and write to me, at such great length, so candidly, so beautifully.

Having spent the last week reading and responding to so many messages it’s easy to be tempted to think that I am suddenly more ‘well known’; that my writing career is perhaps building. But none of it is to do with who I am, how I wrote the piece, which personal things I chose to touch briefly upon, or even if it was any good. It’s because I wrote it at all.

People are desperate to feel like there are people who are in a similar situation to them, that people understand. Bi-polar, suicide, darkness, loss. People who need to send their thoughts elsewhere, fire them out of their own lives like lit matches, hoping they will catch on something or be extinguished forever. People want to talk. People need to talk. Some people need to talk right now, because they are in the midst of a low that is scaring them, from which they can see no way out. They wrote to me, a total stranger.

I began to have the tiniest tiniest glimpse of what Stephen Fry, with his incomparably massive profile, must be recipient of, all the time. No wonder he feels duty bound to speak out. You begin to feel a bond with these people. You want to make it better. It has made me resolve to finish the book I’ve almost finished and to look into self-publishing because I think it deals with stuff some people clearly want to read; even (to my greatest fear), if I find in the bearpit of publishing that I am not a ‘proper writer’. It might only be a small thing, my words, but now I know that what people most respond to is not craft, but honesty. That is where they get their comfort.

Yesterday was Father’s Day. It was also my birthday. It’s normally a strange few days, the day of Dads always circling around my ‘yay!’ day like a sad crow. He is not here anymore. I don’t get excited about my birthday anymore, sometimes because 33 is starting to feel a bit grown up for my liking, sometimes because of the sad irony of the tandem events, but mostly because I just miss the old bugger.

But this week I feel like I have new friends, friends whom I have never met nor am likely to meet – but they’re all out there, being strong, some of them not knowing that that makes them more amazing than they know, and so the pint I would normally raise to Dad was raised to them.

For Sadie’s uncut columns go to http://www.sadiehasler.wordpress.com

Bi-Polar Lives: My Dad & Stephen Fry

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Sadie Hasler

Last week, in a podcast with lovely comedian Richard Herring, Stephen Fry felt comfortable enough to speak with further candour about his ‘bi-polar life’. Confessing that he had only last year attempted suicide, he went a little further than he has previously done, giving us another intimate instalment of his condition – a duty he takes seriously as the president of charity Mind. It was shocking to hear of such an act, but perhaps more so of such recency; you always naively hope, despite his frankness about his lows, that he has conquered the demons since his famous breakdown of 1995, which saw him walking out of a West-End play to sail for Belgium, (as good a place for dark thoughts as any).

It is something I remember vaguely from the news while I was staying at my Dad’s bungalow in North Wales. I naturally thought it was sad, but it didn’t touch me then as much as it touches me now.

My Dad had bi-polar. At least that was the label that was given to him and which best-fit, which is a scientific salve to me now in the constant puzzle-solving that comes from losing someone you love to suicide. The cold hard facts become a kindness alongside the searing cruelty of too many questions.

When I was 23 my Dad hanged himself, a method he turned to after superficial attempts with pills and razor blades failed. He was found in a doorway with headphones on. Cat Stevens in the CD player. I trawl those lyrics even now, a decade on, for a satisfying goodbye note. Coincidentally, the last place he travelled to was Belgium, a couple of months before. He went on a recuperative day trip with a coach-load of people he had been with in a local mental hospital; a charity event in which I am surprised but glad his lofty pride allowed him to participate. What did he think as he walked around Bruges? Did he know? Was he saying goodbye to the world?

Dad had always struggled with dark thoughts. He was found by his mother with his head in a gas oven aged 13. He considered (and threatened, and perhaps attempted) it many times after that. He experienced the ‘massive highs and miserable lows’ that Stephen has described. He had the characteristic extravagance that is common to manic depressives, resulting in a lifelong dance with crippling and often criminally fraudulent debt. He was a plotter, a calculator, a control freak. At times in his life he was alcoholic, manipulative, violent, and to some pretty damn evil. He was also charming, vibrant, cheeky, eloquent, highly intelligent, witty, and would give you the shirt off his back. He once anonymously paid off my best friend’s overdraft, he once sat with a very troubled man for hours talking him out of going and indiscriminately shooting people. He was adored, dreaded, loved, feared, tolerated, yearned for, and immeasurably grieved for. His funeral book bore thanks from people for the countless kind things he had done, and for being the reason one old friend was still on this earth himself. He was celebrated for his joyfulness. The service was moved, to our surprise, from the small chapel to the big chapel because so many people turned up to pay their respects. He was all things. I was always – even later, in the more difficult times – so proud of him being my Dad, or Papa as he liked to be called, the twee bugger. It still rankles my gut that he never gave medication a chance. I think he was afraid of losing control; of his sharp mind being blunted; of his pursuers catching up with him; of, dare I say, prison.

In 2003, aged 57, he ‘finally went and did it’. Those were the words poor Mum had to use to tell us; the words of no surprise. In October it will be ten years. I cannot begin to describe in one column the various landscapes of my mind in those ten years.

I met Stephen once, in the make-up room at ITV while I was watching a dear friend get ready for a QI record. He was charm personified, said hello like I was a favourite niece though he had no idea who I was, and I watched him being powdered quietly from the corner. Here was the nation’s darling, but for me he was so much more. He was all the things I loved about my father, still walking around, alive. The gentle poshness, the brilliant articulacy, the bright and beautiful mind, the dapper jackets and coloured socks peeking out. The aura that life, perversely, is wonderful.

Seeing Stephen Fry didn’t anger me that Dad had not had a similar fortitude to stick around – I’ve never felt that anger – instead it brought him alive again; shook out the good things from the tight bundle I carry around. It momentarily lightened bi-polar – the ever-present elephant (black dog, tiger, mammoth) in the room. He was still here. Hello Stephen Fry. I wanted to hold him. (But I’m ruddy glad I didn’t. He would have thought me very odd, and no one wants Stephen Fry to shake his head in disappointment at them, do they?)

Bi-polar. It’s such a strange beast to understand. I won’t fathom it here. So mysterious a thing is it that my Mum, Dad’s best friend for many years, isn’t even sure that he had bi-polar rather than some other sort of personality disorder. There is scant ‘knowing’ with it. Certainly not for those who don’t have it.

And it is a constant question running alongside my own moods too. Only yesterday I had the shadow flit through in a moment of sadness; I could end it right now. Could. What a word. What a burden.

I don’t think I am bi-polar, at all. I would not insult its true sufferers by supposing my highs and lows are anywhere near theirs in scope. But having had suicide in your life ushers in the possibility of it, while at the same time taking it away. You fantasise about it, but you (think you) know you will never do it. As Stephen said, you picture the faces of those who love you. That prevents you. I think my lows, my hopelessness, have mainly been born out of a very long grief, but when it’s all suicide-tinged it’s sometimes hard to tell. I feel plagued by unknowable genetics, yet I sometimes conversely crave similarity to the man I lost because even his bad traits are better than none. I keep him alive however I can.

Stephen Fry helps.

Like many people I so admire him for his honesty, but am also more grateful for it than I can express. I borrow from him the sense I cannot always find; the lessons that my pain – at times renewed afresh – sometimes makes me forget. I love him, and thank him, and hug him in my mind for all the bleak moments that might yet come to him. And smile, with a smile that holds more than anyone will ever know, at his socks. His lovely, colourful, hopeful socks.

The Humping Below

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Sadie Hasler

There’s only so long you can go listening to your neighbours humping without feeling a bit…awkward. It starts off well enough – delighted disbelief, a twinge of delicious guilt, a light smattering of applause perhaps – but then you become aware that you’re like a dirty ghost, an invisible advisor on the eiderdown; willing him to stop that fruitless thing he’s doing with his nose and mentally moving the remote control so it doesn’t disappear like last time. You shouldn’t get involved. People don’t like it. Especially if you’ve had to saw a hole in the floor to gee them on. The dust gets everywhere. (Everywhere.)

A mere week ago I naively thought the new couple downstairs might become friends, that we were only one cheery meeting in the porch away from being pals. A couple of chatettes away from exchanging spare keys and confessional tales over some ice-cold beers. That was as I heard them shooping boxes whimsically around the laminate floor. Their newness, the implied optimism of their arrival was charming. “Where shall we put the cutlery? In a drawer in the kitchen? Good idea, babe.” Cute. I pictured newlyweds with flushed cheeks. I wondered if I should bake them welcome cookies and tell them I’ve got their backs if they ever need an emergency Enid Blyton or a decade-old bag of odd socks.

It was only hours later that I thought that I might kill them if they didn’t immediately dismantle their too-immediately mantled surround sound; bang and olufsen their skulls in with my hardest shoe if they didn’t cease their repetitive playing of some moronic computer game (that sounded to me, from my second floor sound-vantage, like zombies racing each other around a bowl of rice crispies.)

Then the next morning they played me The Everly Brothers up through the floor while I had a bath and I thought I might have been a bit rash in visualising their sudden and gruesome deaths; that we might after all through the power of shared musical tastes make some long-lasting bonds.

Then their dog made me drop my eggs with its psychotic snarling from its slit beneath their door as I let myself in after shopping. I dimly remembered some old saying about not being able to make an omelette without first breaking eggs, and – realising it was of little use when the eggs are squelching around a Sainsbury’s bag and not a skillet – abandoned my ‘nevermind’ smile and once more wished them a bit of deathy harm.

Then I heard them talking gently about growing tomatoes through the louvre window while I had a wee and I softened at their humble dreams, at the vulnerability of all humans. I had a five minute Jean de Florette spell of whimsy as they poked around the patio.

Then they banged in some nails while I was trying to write and I hoped their nails would ping back out as they slept and their Jack Vettriano pictures would fall smack on their heads and that the resultant dents in their skulls would spell out words like ‘cock’ and ‘fuckwit forever’.

Then I told myself off for being horrible.

And then they started humping.

Now, as I type, I feel like I’m the ousted member of a dysfunctional 70s three-way – pushed out of the tryst to play the gooseberry in the next room; still tacky from my involvement. I hate the bad flat conversion sound-proofing for making me feel like an aural pervert. I hate the enforced intimacy of neighbours. I hate his morning phlegm-gargling and her loud phone conversations about shit I hate. I hate their door-shutting and ostentatious sneezing. I hate their proximity, their life choices; their proximity to my life choices. I hate their X Box and the fact humans ever evolved the opposable thumbs requisite to play it. I hate the fact that when I stand one day soon on their doorstep, all psyched up to tell them off, that they will probably be perfectly nice and I will probably say nothing.

That I’ll then trudge back upstairs to listen to them bumping around like blindfolded pandas tasked with artlessly saving their species. Like now. Ugh. They sound like the BeeGees playing squash. It’s about as erotic as…the BeeGees playing squash. Which isn’t all that hot when you actually picture it. Especially now that most of the BeeGees are dead.

My initial neighbourly visions of sharing hopes and dreams over beer are dwindling; the likelihood of us ever holidaying in a cottage in Cornwall close to zilch.

They are certainly not about to get any ruddy welcome cookies out of me. What will I eat while earwigging?

Face

Posted on May 31, 2013 by Sadie Hasler

Every now and then, when occasion arises, you sort of have to face the fact that on occasion you have to look…at your face. Not just glance at it in the mirror and casually observe that, yes, you have been wandering around with jam on your cheek, not just check to see if your specs are on your conk because you can’t find them anywhere else, but really take stock of what you’ve got going on in the General Visage Area.

There are times when you want to poke your tongue out at yourself in disgust. When you feel glum and dissatisfied with what you’ve got. And there are times when you don’t mind it. Your face. Like when you pop to the loo after kissing someone you like and you catch the flush of colour in your cheeks. That’s pretty nice. Because it’s evidence of happiness, exhilaration. Sometimes it’s nice to catch yourself smiling; to take stock and realise: “I am…happy.”

It’s not generally the done thing to stare at your own face for too long as it usually means you’re a narcissistic vain twit who needs a ruddy good punch. But it does seem apt that when we find ourselves in front of a mirror it’s usually when we’re alone in the bathroom, during our most private moments. It’s the best time to look at our reflection, reflect, and while performing the perfunctory checks that we dress up lightly as cosmetic ablutions, actually candidly consider not ‘how do I look?’, but ‘how do I feel?’

I had a horrid moment in the mirror the other day when I thought my hairline might be receding. Then I realised my ponytail was just wonky. Phew. But in the moments between intense follicular panic and huge sighing relief I did it; I performed the almost surgical inventory of my outer being. MAKE A LIST, SADIE; WHAT ELSE DO YOU HATE ABOUT THE MASS OF CONTOURED CELLS WHACKED ON THE FRONT OF YOUR CRANIUM?

There were the eyebrows that are scarily like my father’s if not kept in check. There was my John Travolta chin. STUPID CHIN. There were the concentration burrows in my forehead that make me wonder if Boots do own-brand Botox. There’s the tooth I don’t remember chipping. The mole that’s a bit bigger than it was. The pale blue eyes that always seem like dull puddles without mascara. The ski-slope nose that still pangs with junior school jeers. The little lines gathering in my corners like the pages of a book read more than once. The beginnings of changes that will ring in older ages, the warning bells of a greater dissatisfaction with this silly old face.

But there also were the eyebrows that are like my Dad’s. Hello Dad. The nose like my Mum’s. Hello Mum. There were the genetic gifts, the remembrances of people I’ll never meet. There were the imprints of kisses. There were the bits that the people who love me look at while they’re loving me. That’s pretty nice.

We sort of have to make friends with our faces, don’t we? No matter which one we’ve got. Take our quiet moments and use them to be kind to ourselves; make peace with the future of our faces, of our bodies in general, before it happens and hope to squish our self-consciousness before it assaults us with manifold discontent. Our faces are the foyers, the welcome mats, the armchairs, the open hearths for all the company we keep, for all the love we’re lucky to have. And you should sort of make the effort to respect that a bit.

Even if yours is covered in jam and showing you up in public.

Filthy Heathen

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Sadie Hasler

This morning, as I stood on my doorstep waiting for my dog to piddle out his overnight wee reserves, I yawned and pottered along my path. I did it dressed, against all sartorial advice, in black leggings and a tight black top. Like a chubby 30 something who has decided to give everything up and fulfil her teenage dream of going to study mime in Paris, unable to feel spiritually sated until she can hire herself out to weddings and bar mitzvahs for general ‘climbing a glass-fronted building while eating a banana and looking a bit sad’ larks.

I felt no shame in standing on my doorstep like this, just as I feel no shame when standing there in heinously mismatched clothes as I often do, (when I suppose I must look like a children’s TV presenter having a breakdown), or when standing there in pants and vest, (when I probably look like I’m a washed-out mum of ten screaming kids, barbecuing raccoons on a trailer park in Albuquerque). Is this nonchalance something you earn as you get older; the carefree oblivion you wish you’d had when you were younger, when you had a better body?

There’s something quite nice about standing on your doorstep for longer than it takes to find your keys. You notice more. The tree buds, a cat napping, a proud new fence soaking up its stain. This morning I was treated to the delicate strains of a violin undulating across the road. Must be new neighbours; the old ones used to drink cans of beer at any hour, and shout. I fancied I have more of an affinity with the violinist, when in reality I have drunk beer and shouted way more than I have ever played the lilting opening bars of a Brahms concerto, which is never. But I listened to the violinist like they were an old friend, like we’d been at the same conservatoire in the 80s and got chucked out for smoking pot. Music pinched us together, gave us an imagined history.

I wandered out in my bare feet and stood at the privet hedge, looking up and down the street. The sensible mumsy part of myself thinking “Ugh, you filthy heathen, get back inside, this pavement is probably covered in the dried spatterings of rabies flobber, fox diarrhoea, and Tennants Super Head-Exploder.” The non-sensible part of me just thought it felt nice and natural and warm, and that no one had ever died from dirty soles. (I’ve often worried I am just one Jasmine joss stick away from becoming a total hippy. If you ever see me doing Tai Chi in the street with pigeons on my head, slap me.)

While I wouldn’t want to set up a permanent deckchair in my front garden, ready to pass the time of day with any passerby that didn’t look psychopathic, I do think it’s a shame we’ve lost that ‘chatting over the washing line’ culture that film-makers feel compelled to use in anything set in the 50s. I suppose it depends where you live, but it seems that most people hurry in and out of their houses with their eyes lowered so they don’t have to talk to their neighbours. It’s sad really. There’s something peaceful about wandering out into your lesser-used space in a state of morning disarray, unconscious of image or societal norms, to just watch a snail go by, to watch the world go by, and of course, to watch your dog pee.

You’ve just got to remember to wear clothes that’s all.

Destiny. Serendipity. Houmous.

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Sadie Hasler

I first tried houmous in the late 90s. Hey, it was crazy times, everyone was doing it. I also wore tie-dye with conviction and thought about getting a fringe but didn’t. It was the bit of time just before Toploader came along and changed everything. The bit before the constant playing of Dancing In The Moonlight made everyone love everyone, which was the bit before the constant playing of Dancing In The Moonlight made everyone want to kill everyone. You had to cut your emotions from other stuff before Toploader. Like Esther Rantzen, Benetton ads, or real life. It was only natural that I should eventually come to try houmous amid all that madness and change. Destiny. Serendipity. Houmous.

I won’t lie; the event took place in a garden in Ilford, the Morocco of Essex back then. I found myself there visiting a university friend of Kosher Organic Shopper heritage who wanted to introduce me to beetroot juice. Despite the retching and the indignant shrieking of “WHY?” I stuck around long enough to try the beige goo in the pot. The houmous. (Or hummus if you don’t like the letter O. It’s not for everyone.)

And that was that. Houmous was in my life.

I think of houmous now, writing this in lieu of anything other to say, because I woke up this morning with some on a plate by my head. I got in late last night, famished, and went to the fridge. A friend had texted earlier in the evening to say he had made some. It’s a thing now apparently; ‘making houmous’. Like blogging, or guyliner. Having some houmous in his honour seemed like a nice friendly idea. Plus I hadn’t been shopping and it was either that or old mushrooms. So I ate some houmous and fell asleep without cleaning my teeth, which is okay every now and then but not often unless you want to lose your teeth and your diet be restricted to swallowable pastes not dependent on molars, like…houmous.

I awoke, my teeth intact. There was the houmous, unfinished. Beneath it the swollen corpse of a ryvita. Beside that its wailing orphaned crumbs. I stared at the houmous and for the first time actually thought about houmous. My brain wasn’t capable of much more. I’m not a morning person.

I thought of my first time, back on an Ilford lawn of 1999. So soft, so smooth, so beige. I thought of my beetroot juice drinking friend who now lives in Israel, who I miss. Houmous is him. I thought of my other friend who spent his evening making chickpea paste, who tries to make people happy through food. Houmous is him now too. Houmous is lots of other people I’ve known and eaten with, out there. Houmous is Israelis and Palestinians eating the same thing as each other every day and not thinking of that instead of prolonging their hate. Houmous is the bank holiday picnic; everyone out in the park in this year’s sun. Houmous is my dog staring hopefully at me, waiting for some to drip-splat on the floor for licking. Houmous is finishing my play, saying goodbye to being a hermit for a while and going to meet friends I haven’t seen for ages; it’s knowing the houmous is there and coming home to the dependable light of the fridge. Houmous is houmous.

We store our lives in such ordinary things. They become emblems for our time. Every time we do something again it’s a salute to the time before, and all the times, all the people, all link up and meet in your memory.

In short, Houmous is awesome. (And beetroot juice is evil. But that’s another column.)

The Maths of Rape: Deed + Time = Does It Still Count?

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Sadie Hasler

Last week on the oracle that is Twitter I learned from a journo friend that another name had been pulled from the hat of secrets. Another of the nation’s avuncular darlings inconveniently reminded of their past misdemeanours. People erupted over the latest in a long line of disappointing media males, questioned then charged over an allegation dating back to the 60s. I’m ashamed to say I thought “Christ, does that still even count?”

I fired off a casual reply without thinking: “He tickled my midriff while posing for a picture when I was 14.” I instantly got a capitalised ‘WHAAAAT?” from my journo friend and a similarly enlarged exclamation from a female comedian. I was surprised at their incredulity. Then various women I don’t know from Eve either followed me or retweeted me in silent almost eerie sisterhood. Solidarity. Why? I hadn’t meant to ‘say’ anything.

I certainly didn’t think it was sinister back then, and even now, hearing of his rape charge, I’m still not overly suspicious of his ‘harmless goosing’ of me as a 14 year old girl; there were a lot of men starting to show me and my friends attention whether they knew our age or not. It happens.

But in my automatic instinct to reduce this to nothing lies the bigger problem. Women (young girls, people, everyone) don’t even acknowledge stuff to themselves sometimes, let alone share it.

I wrote in last week’s column about my behind being touched in a New York bar recently and my not wanting to make a fuss. My insistence to myself that it was harmless. All the recent accusations against media men have made me think of something else I downplayed – an event I have only a few times dully acknowledged to myself as a sexual assault. It was a long time ago. I think I’ve only ever vaguely told two people.

Do I think that I should be retrospectively handed the term victim? God, no. Would I if pressed reveal his name? No. Would I even, if I knew he was reading these words now, expect him to show signs of recognition or remorse? No.

But do I now, despite all my inner impulses to not make a fuss, believe I was definitely raped? Yes I do.

I was pinned to a passenger seat, my feet by his feet, my arms by his arms, my knees by his knees, my voice said no, all strength to counter the act snuffed and my choice taken away from me. It was quick, he zipped up, and he drove off. I felt numb and thought no more about it. If it’s quick, contained, and it doesn’t make you cry it can’t be rape, right? Rape is a big word.

Afterwards I even thought ‘the sex’ had been his right. We were ‘seeing each other’, we’d ‘had a drink’, I’d probably ‘flirted’. Perhaps even some part of my nascent sexuality thought it was normal.

Because I have not been terribly affected by it I feel guilty for using the word when others have suffered far, far worse. But there should be no degrees of rape. It is, or it isn’t.

I think just one of the many problems women have with reporting rape is that some women struggle to conciliate themselves with the times, in lust or intimacy, they might want the man to be forceful. Maybe that is why we stay quiet.

As a culture we have exploited and sanitised submissiveness and dominance. High street shops sell handcuffs. Music videos and movies and bestselling badly-written books use the language and the imagery of victimisation in sex. Our sex, our liberality, our pursuit of satisfaction strings us up.

We’ve probably made it harder for women to realise (to admit, and to tell) that they’ve been raped, not easier. Even now, I am struggling to decide whether after so much time has passed the act still stands. I share my own experience so that people dubious of all these belated accusations in the press might come to appreciate that it can take a while to say anything to anyone, particularly yourself.

Perhaps women are feeling a solidarity in the air; are being given the courage to come forward, irrespective of the time lapsed. Perhaps we’ll remember this time, now, this horrid muck, as something that made women stronger, and men better.

Terribly New York

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Sadie Hasler

There’s something about travel that cannot help but make even the biggest moron think of all the science involved. How does the plane stay up? Where does all our wee go when we flush; do the birds get wet? Why is this bread so hard? And so on.

There’s also something about being a visitor to new places which lends you an observational eye more inquisitive that usual. It’s like being a foreign speck placed in the Petri dish of a new culture, waiting to see if something will grow.

I felt a similar distance in some of my New York experiences. In the streets and in the theatre I felt like I was home, but in the bars I felt stilted. Though I knew some part of me wanted to ‘be’ a part of it, in the way I always want to live a place as though it is my life, perhaps because I prefer to write about it later from a perspective of inclusion, I did not feel like I belonged there. The speck rejected the Petri dish.

One night in particular I was in a bar full of post-work thirsty natives, and my gorgeous and slightly mad host Charlotte was explaining the travails and glories of their dating system to me. For the first five minutes I was enraptured by tales of liberation. I felt like I’d walked into a pop-up book of Sex & The City (my enduring passion for which I will never understand as I don’t do style, I hate Kim Cattrall, and I think the last ‘episode’ in the form of Sex & The City 2 was an insult to women and all of life everywhere. Go figure, as some yanks would say.)

We were with Charlotte’s yoga instructor Penny, a dazzling redhead in her 40s who introduced us to ‘some guys’. Somewhere in my story-head I imagined we were being introduced to New York society by a upper east side duchess who was weighing up our odds on the love market. Then a man proceeded to touch up my bum while going through the motions of small-talk, and I didn’t feel liberated or culturally curious. I wanted to punch him. Thinking he was a friend of Charlotte and Penny’s I politely kept shifting my derrière and spoke to someone nicer. I loathe myself now for not saying anything. I don’t know why I cared that it might ’cause a fuss’. (Practice run: “Hey, buddy, that’s my ass. Yours is the one behind you looking like an overfilled baloney sandwich.” How terribly New York of me that would have been. DAMMIT.)

Thus was my preconceived kaleidoscope of glamour shattered. I was not seeing women enjoying their freedom unjudged. I was seeing women who could date the same guy for a year caught in a constant round of small talk without ever getting anywhere, I was seeing women who could date four men at the same time without getting any satisfaction from it. I saw women playing cool, playing undercover detectives in their own cryptic games, playing phone tennis where the result is almost certainly never love-anything. I saw an awful lot of singles playing and it didn’t look a single bit like fun.

I’ve always wondered if I should have stayed single for longer after leaving my marriage, if I have fully explored the freedoms of the modern woman or have truly known independence for long enough, but seeing the dating scene in New York made me realise that freedom can be a sort of prison too, if you’re not exercising it in the right way.

I felt glad to come home to the fuzzy nook of my man. Where there’s no games, just truth.

Stupid Mafia

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Sadie Hasler

“Remember, my dear – people suck.” said Socrates to Aristotle shortly before being dragged to his hemlocky death. Or something. Or not. Whatever.

I’m reminded of the made up quote mid-paddy as I tear around my Las Vegas hotel room at ten to five in the morning, my decadent Nevadan lie-in plopped on from a great height by the savage loudness of a construction site coming to life. It’s barely light outside and my earholes are being pneumatically raped. It would be a vile assault at any time, but before 8am it’s even worse. I have been deprived of my rights as a human. Amnesty International probably do entire conferences on this stuff. I think what’s worse is not the volume but the random rhythm of it. Just when you think it’s ebbing, it redoubles. Just when you think it’s stopped it’s back, making your water ripple like that scene in Jurassic park when the T Rex comes to play. I thought waking up in Vegas would be like having your ear gently tickled by Frank Sinatra while Dean Martin croons in the corner and Sammy Davis Jr brings you coffee and croissants. It’s not. It’s rubbish.

Getting older and wiser (or at least pretending to be wiser) has turned me more cynical than I used to be. I ponder plausible adult theories like whether the mafioso hotel bosses wake you up dead early here so you scurry out like bleary-eyed gambling rats and spend more money so they get richer. STUPID MAFIA. A few years ago I would have assumed that the workers just liked getting their work done extra early so they can go swimming in the afternoon. I would have waved at them encouragingly from my window. Now that I’m terribly mature and clever I just think they’re stupid mafia suck-ups and hope they get slapped by Joe Pesci a lot while Marlon Brando watches and Robert De Niro laughs maniacally.

Vegas is a dump by the way, for any of you who haven’t been. Don’t bother. Save your money for somewhere nice. It’s a vile abhorrence. It smells of smoke, air freshener to cover the smoke, and poo. A pit of all the worst things of humans all lit up by neon like all the worst things of humans are something to be celebrated. They aren’t.

I do the only thing I can think of to try and block out the sounds of the desert being ripped up by a giant whisk. I turn the telly on.

On the news is stuff about money, death, and celebrities. In between the news is adverts about what to do when you have no money, how to get money to pay off the money you don’t have, how to spend the money you don’t have to delay death, and how to look like celebrities. All fired out at such a rate I think I’m going to have a super-sized anxiety attack.

Actual advert (slightly paraphrased): “Hi. I suffer from Fibromyalgia. It’s been pretty tough. But my nerves are so much better since taking ‘Generic American Sounding Drug’. Warning: MAY CAUSE HAND-SWELLING, SPLEEN-WHISTLING, AND CONSTANT SUICIDAL URGES.”

Americans are weird. I hate them a bit right now to be honest. I’m sure once I’ve had some more sleep and they’ve served me some more pancakes I’ll love them again, but for now I huff at them, reader. I huff. (But quietly. I don’t want the mafia to kill me.)