I have always felt somewhat underwhelmed by the polite, Protestant nature of the British democratic process; I'd like to see this country attempting to do the kind of election hysteria perfected by small African states after thirty years of dictatorship. I want queues forming from the early hours (though if they could be significantly dwindling by the time I got there that would be handy), kept in line by the military (or the Territorial Army or at a push, Boy Scouts) with huge threatening guns (or water pistols if it was warm) and there's lots of excitement and shouting rude slogans about certain candidates' hairstyles before the police rush in to calm everyone down with tea and a plate of digestives with no more bodily injury than a few small paper cuts from excessive placard making.

At the very least, I'd like the ballot papers to come with a space next to the candidates' names where you could leave thumping endorsements or scathing dismissals along with your vote. I think a lot more people would be willing to engage with politics if they were allowed to write a giant ARSE next to the BNP's listing and it might just provide me with an answer to the question I've been pondering for the last few weeks: just who is it that's backing Boris? While I appreciate - with no small dismay - that not everyone is like me and my liberal hippy Commie agitator friends, whoever it is can't live in London, surely?

As I was leaving the hall, I noticed that the Sunday School had cut a giant HALLELUJAH out of shiny paper and stuck it up over the crucifix on the far wall. The Jesus on the cross was unusually Caucasian even for the Catholic church with a plump, white face and messy blond hair.

ARSE.

Roles and Society

Holly from Menstrual Poetry comments on a survey by The Telegraph that states (with admirably restrained glee) that many men believe society is now run by women and men are merely 'waxed and coiffed metrosexuals' who have to abide by female rules and long for a good only fashioned 'return to manliness'.

The World is Now Dominated by Women, Where Have I Been?

"It seems as if once women set their footprints in the wet concrete of history and start making own choices without having to consult a man before doing so, the men start to get all uppity."

Fannie offers a step by step guide to the kind of worriedly becoiffed men in The Telegraph who are fretting about the influx of women into the pubic sphere, by taking a lesson from Iraq on keeping women in their place.

A "Concerned" Man Tutorial

"Where in the world could one look for inspiration, for a guide on how to keep women in their place? Where could we possibly look for a shining model on how to integrate fundamentalist religion with government while using the correct gender-conservative ideals declaring that each gender has a proscribed place in society?"

Cara at The Curvature tries hard to keep a straight face at the pundits insistence that the wife of The New York governor caught cavorting with ladies of the night is somehow to blame for the apparent easy downward motion of his trouser fly.

Another exciting round of Men Can?t Be Held Responsible for Their Actions, Let's Blame The Wife!

"In the end, there’s nothing that you can’t turn around and blame on a woman. This time, we’ve got: Well, she didn’t have enough sex with him! In other instances, it will be: Come on, what’d she expect if she was going to burn the roast — and then talk back?!"

Sexual violence

Julie and Maia from The Hand Mirror present a duo of complimentary posts on anti-binge drinking ads from New Zealand that reinforce the responsibility of women to prevent rape by not enjoying themselves too much.

It's the victim blaming; it's not how you victim blame and Actually, She Wasn't Asking For It At All

"Anyone who believes the rape myth that women are responsible for rape if they have been drinking can do real harm to women who have been raped. This advertisement is one more reinforcement of a myth that is already way too prevelant."

Another pair of linked posts from Holly at Menstrual Poetry, this time on the commercial sex industry, offering some statistics on prostitution and thoughts on the reasons why men use sex workers.

The Truth About Prostitution and The Psychology Behind Men and Prostitutes.

"It is said that while politicians, in particular, are used to wielding power and keeping people under him in check, no one is working for this man without getting something in return–and that is where the appeal of prostitutes comes in."

Rape survivors Marcella at Abyss2Hope and Amanda at Pandagon present two differing views on the 'I Was Raped' t-shirt designed by Jennifer Baumgardner, a shirt designed to let rape victims “own the experience,” an "help chip away the cone of silence that surrounds a crime with humiliation at its core."

I Was Raped T-Shirt Not A Statement Of Victimhood

"Smart and rational rape survivors are supposed to carefully guard their secret unless they are being brave by cooperating with law enforcement. If you don't shut up about rape or don't only reveal what happened to you in hushed tones then you are suspect. The dangerousness of coming out as someone who has been raped is what should have all of us concerned and dedicated to eliminating this danger."

You know who needs to take ownership for rapes? Rapists.

"Pressure to “own” a rape probably doesn’t do rape victims a bit of good, because that puts it back into the dominant narrative about rape, which is that it’s a woman’s fault if it happens to her."

The Feminist 101 blog comprehensively debunks the views of a BNP London Assembly candidate Nick Eriksen who said earlier this month that "Rape is simply sex. Women enjoy sex, so rape cannot be such a terrible physical ordeal.To suggest that rape, when conducted without violence, is a serious crime is like suggesting that forcefeeding a woman chocolate cake is a heinous offence. A woman would be more inconvenienced by having her handbag snatched."

If women like sex just as much as men do, then why is rape so bad?

"I suggest that anyone tempted to make such objections really think a bit harder about the difference between doing something when you choose to do it, and enjoying doing it when it is your choice, versus being forced to do it at someone else’s choice with no care for your safety or dignity, and that someone being gratified at you being powerless to stop them."

Sex and Reproductive Choice

Mary from Womenstake is shocked to the core - as all of us Decent, Right-Thinking citizens are - by a recent news article that young people are Doing It and what is more, Catching Things.

Young People Are Having Sex! (And this is "News"?)

The recent “news” that STDs are running rampant among young women is already old to those working in public health. What other outcome could we expect when the federal government is funding abstinence only education, which deprives students of the basic information needed to make sex (which they are apparently having) safer?"

Author of Hoyden About Town, Lauredhel presents a well reserached analysis of free choice in birthing care and infant death from unnecessary caesarean intervention.

Death twice as likely by caesarean??

"Truly free choices are almost impossible within a societal and medical patriarchy in which birthing is considered a stupendously dangerous, messy, primitive, terrifying process which must be timed and controlled and scrutineered and interfered with in the normal course of things."

Greta poses the question: Why don’t they make a birth control pill for men?

Sex, Lies, and Contraception: The Male Pill

Because this isn't simply a question of sexist men dumping the responsibility for birth control onto women. It's a question of whether women would be willing to place the responsibility for birth control into the hands of men.

The F-Word rounds up the press reaction to my personal favourite story of the year so far, Thomas Beattie, the pregnant transman. I've tried to avoid reading any tabloid coverage of this due to a desire to keep my head unexploded until at least May this year, but Jess has suffered the rage so I didn't have to.

How the press reported on a pregnant man

"The concept that Beatie doesn’t feel like being pregnant threatens his identity as a man seems to be difficult to understand for those who are still not entirely comfortable even with those who break down gender roles, such as a female boss, a stay at home dad, etc, let alone challenge the concept of gender as a simple binary divided by an impenetrable wall."

Twisty Faster - gentleman farmer and spinster aunt - from I Blame The Patriarchy gives further thought to the 14 year old girl in the US who was threatened with the head-meets-wall lunacy of murder charges for miscarrying on an aeroplane.

The continuing exploits of the fetus-lovers

"Why is this even in the news? Because even though it was just a miscarriage, it involves scandalous dirty female sex behavior in the shape of teen pregnancy and a trash can, that’s why. Homicide cops, faugh. Why not just institute the Houston P.D. Criminal Uterus Unit and be done with it?"

Eye-wateringly sanctimonious articles about enthusiastic devotees of abstinence movements are not new, but Jessica from Feministing neatly sums up why public promotion of the lifestyle choice hurts the chaste as well as the sluts.

Why glorifying virginity is bad for women

"Perpetuating the virgin/whore stuff hurts all women, not just the "whores." Until women's morality is divorced from their bodies and sexuality, we'll continue to be defined by what's in between our legs - instead of in our hearts."

Bitch PhD writes a extremely familiar story of social and self-imposed embarrassment over menstruation and learning to let it go.

Coming out of the menstruation closet

"Fourteen years after I started bleeding every month, I feel like I've mostly gotten the hang of it. But the other day, I realized the extent to which having "gotten the hang of it" is only true within the limited context of our culture of concealment. Getting the hang of it means learning how to conceal it as best as possible, so no one ever knows you've got it."

Body Image

Two posts about the fraught relationships women have with their body hair, the first from The Jaded Hippy and the second from Anji at Shut Up Sit Down.

Body Hair

"Women have body hair. We choose to manipulate it or get rid of it. But pure and simple, WE HAVE IT. And I have always been of the opinion that we should be able to simply HAVE it, and should not feel obligated to do anything about that."

The Politics of Body Hair

"Put down the damned razor and love your body the way it is naturally, not the way you've been taught it ought to be. By refusing to participate personally, but becoming one more woman who challenges the status quo by loving her body hair, you become one more soldier in the army fighting towards making women's bodily self-esteem and equality a reality."

Rachel from Women's Health News reviews Locker Room Diaries, a book that purports to be a wake-up call for women to stop obsessing over body image but the text reveals something different.

Locker Room Diaries - An Initial, and Unpleasant, Review

"I don’t think I can bear the obsessive weighing and measuring of women’s bodies in what, one would assume from the title, would be a work precisely about refusing to let numbers rule women’s lives."

Inspired by this post, Samara at the F-Word wonders why, from scratchy lace arse-floss to crippling stilettos, women are still considered increasingly sexually attractive the more uncomfortable they are.

More on shoes.

"I wonder if vulnerability = sexiness. Would I have been even more “sexy” if I’d been wearing shoes so uncomfortable I’d been struggling to walk? Is a woman who can’t fight back the best kind?"

A woman after my own (eminently sensible) heart, Nine from Rage Against the Man-chine is mystified by commercials in which women appear to gain some kind of curious sexual pleasure from cake, marvelling at the misogyny that leads food to be thought of as a forbidden pleasure.

I don't give a shit about chocolate at all.

It’s perfectly acceptable for these women to behave lustfully with regard to food, which is odd considering the fact that they aren’t permitted to do so when it comes to actual sex. I suppose it really isn’t much of a shock; women aren’t allowed to express sexual desire without being labeled sluts, so it has to go somewhere. Best direct it toward something that doesn’t threaten men’s control over the realm of sexuality. Something like cake."

Feminism

From Jessica Hoffman at Alternet, the compelling and necessary On Prisons, Borders, Safety, and Privilege: An Open Letter to White Feminists.

"If feminism is about social change, it is about recognizing that safety in this society is a fantasy afforded only by assimilation to power, and the cost of that fake safety is the safety of those who cannot, or will not, access it. If feminism is about social change, it is about radically challenging prisons and borders of all kinds."

Helen offers a very personal take on the transfeminism debate at F-Word.

What is transfeminism?

"Perhaps, then, trans women do have insights to offer in the debate as to why our issues have a place in feminism: if nothing else, we must surely agree that gender variance, and how we express it, should be a right common to all if we are serious about ending discrimination."

Zuzu writing at Feministe uses the example of mass media misogyny towards Hilary Clinton to explain how using sexist language to dismiss and denigrate a woman you disagree with damages all women.

Why calling out misogyny matters

"I’m calling this shit out because this shit hurts women. Women like me. Women like many of you. Women like your daughters, your sisters, your mothers, your friends, your spouses, your SOs. If it’s okay to dehumanize a US Senator and presidential candidate as “that thing” or dismiss her as “that bitch” .... then we now have an environment in which it’s okay to dehumanize, demean and diminish ordinary women because they’re women."

Lina argues at Uncool on why there cannot be a single definition of feminism and by extension, why there are many ways to be 'feminist'.

On Patriarchy, or Why there cannot be a universal definition of feminism

I don't want to get all postmodern on your asses again, but the day of the metanarrative is (or ought to be) over. It's far better to engage with the language, the key words, and figure it out for yourself. In short, do not be told what feminism is (or patriarchy for that matter!).

Finally and with pleasingly neat contrast, there are also many ways to be unfeminist. Katie gives us a tongue in cheek yet annoyingly accurate top 10 list of all the ways some women manage to make life difficult for the rest of us.

Dollymix's guide to giving the sisterhood a bad name.

"5. Develop an irrational hatred for a woman you've seen in Heat magazine (but never met or spoken to), and make a point of saying "I *HATE* that stupid bitch/cow" whenever you see a picture or article about her, as though she has personally wronged you in some way."

And finally finally, April 18th is Blog for Equal Pay Day. More details here.

No more tearing of hair, no rending asunder of clothing, no praying to gods both major and minor for the damn thing to arrive immediately and deliver you from days spent discussing silicone versus plastic teats on a brownfield estate in Amersham. Or in my case, being forced to watch Loose Women from a TV on the ceiling with my toes pointing skyward as a doctor sets about my business end with a the upholstery attachment from a Dyson. No. You can trip frivolously about town with a sunny disposition and a tinkling laugh (though possibly not in light coloured clothes), safe in the knowledge that whatever else Auntie Flo might be doing, she will assuredly turn up sooner or later.

The downside of this of course is that I have no need to keep any track of even the general kind of time in which this might occur. Which means I no longer know when I'm premenstrual. If I was the kind of woman who raged and snarled, ate black forest gateau with a potato masher and constantly fell off the back of chairs when her period was due, it would be obvious. But I'm like that all the time. The only way I can tell is because my sense of taste, never all that much to begin with, slips quietly but firmly into the twisted bowels of lunacy.

This time, I bought a bag. It is large and it is green. It has one diaphanous maw at the bottom of which you cannot find anything and six tiny pockets that could only be of any use if you're the kind of woman who cannot leave the house without lipstick. It has a collection of woollen pompoms and clattering brass trinkets hanging off it that let friends and colleagues alike know where I am at all times. It is lined with carpet from an episode of George and Mildred. And it is made of moss. I can never go near another goat in my life. Not that I do so on a regular or even incidental basis, but now that I actually can't I find myself disproportionately agitated by this seemingly easily avoided curtailing of narrative possibility.

The time before, I bought a yellow satin prom dress that made me look like a slab of melting butter. And 2,500 ear plugs that I then left on the bus. Despite my almost constant hectoring, the major pharmacutical companies seem curiously reluctant to print DO NOT GO SHOPPING on capsules of Evening Primrose Oil. In league with the retailers, I don't doubt.

Still, better than that time I bought some salad.

I know laydees, I know. Us feminists lead very busy lives putting contraceptives in the water supply, fornicating outside of wedlock with communists and gathering ingredients for spells to turn other people's children into homosexuals. But should you have found the time after hard day destroying the very fabric of decent society to have written about your tireless efforts, I'd like to hear about it.

You can send me submissions through the carnival submission form or at pandemian AT pandemian DOT com until 7th April. There's no theme but the post should have been made since the last carnival, number 56 currently up at Redemption Blues. Ta.

* Strictly speaking that might just be my own general life's goal and not something necessarily endorsed by the carnival organiser.

I realise, in some circles, this is as bad as thinking Oliver Letwin has the right idea or looking speculatively at five year olds. I don't know that anyone who likes Morrissey will ever speak to me again. Nevertheless it is true. I am lazy and find merely asking if someone would like to fuck takes much less time and effort. You can always talk about music afterwards and if it turns out he owns more than one Coldplay album well, at least you got laid. Probably just the once though, eh?

Anyway, I appreciate that there may well be subtle pleasures in the actual creation of the tape itself and the whole process is not necessarily about marching inexorably to a fruity outcome. So I made one. For my own educational edification and absolutely not because everyone else is also doing it. And certainly not in order to attract the how's your father, but if your surname is Oldman, Rickman or Bowie I'm happy to open a dialogue on the matter. It gave me pleasure. Also a punctured toe, from dancing over a drawing pin.

It's not the soundtrack of my life because that is an ear-meltingly eye-gougingly face-punchable piece of linguistic titwank if there was ever one and besides which it's inaccurate; my life sounds like Ian Paisley doing the vocals for Aphex Twin and despite tireless efforts I couldn't find any of that on Limewire. But here. 12 songs that fill me up with the sherbet from seventy-two Dib Dabs and then shakes me until I froth. If you feel like taking your knickers off by the end that can only be a bonus.

And not before time; the usual suspects have, it must be said, been growing a little stale over the centuries. Which one of us looks upon the prospect of blasphemy, wrath, bearing false witness, greed or shoplifting from Primark with any real relish these days? Even the biggies - adultery, abortion, contraception, sodomy - seem to be no more an offence against God as merely against the Daily Mail.

Published in the Vatican's official newspaper L'Osservatore Romano the list of mortal sins were revealed at the end of a week long refresher course for priests on the sacrament of confession.

Putting aside the delightful image of the priests behind handed a memo slip from the Sins Forgiveness Committee as they shuffle tiredly out of the door after a five day conference on the importance of thinking outside the (confessional) box, the new sins are drug abuse, genetic manipulation, morally dubious experimentation, environmental pollution, causing social injustice or poverty and accumulating excessive wealth. The latter comes with a special dispensation for the Vatican, presumably.

I have to say however, I feel a little disappointed with their choice. At first glance it appears promising; out of the six or so new sins I have only committed three - morally dubious experimentation being the cheapest and most enjoyable by far - which on the face of it leaves plenty as yet unexplored, especially exciting as I had already gone through all the seven deadlies by the time I was 11. But the others seem to be annoyingly unachievable even by the most dedicated of heretics. If I squint very hard I can imagine someday the possibility of indiscreet wealth, but I fear the chance to meddle with anyone's DNA will lie forever out of my sticky grasp. Tacit approval of such may well turn out to be enough, but it just doesn't give the same kind of inner satisfaction as say, actually coveting your neighbour's ox in person does.

It is most inconvenient for us completionists. I can't see any way around it. Unless.... you wouldn't happen to know of a filthy-minded scientist who fanices swapping a story about that time he made a sheep with seven legs for my approximately 502 tales of lust (assorted), would you?

Edit: Indexed provides a handy guide to effective sin combining.

You used my card in
Fat Eddie's Phat Rims Shop
in San Diego.

To spare your blushes
and for the sake of your own
criminal career,

Next time you might like
to choose someone with credit
of more than 12p.

Sources: BBC News, GuardianUnlimited, The Metro, TimesOnline, Daily Mail ]]> http://www.pandemian.com/2008/02/guess-who.html http://www.pandemian.com/2008/02/guess-who.html Mon, 11 Feb 2008 10:52:35 +0000 Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. I know you're all as excited as I am.

Lent, as I am sure anyone who went to Sunday School and didn't spend all their time at the back of the church hall playing Transformers and discussing girls' front bottoms with Adam Jessop knows, is not merely the time set aside by God in order to wash up from Pancake Day but also a time when we remember Jesus and Lucifer's lads holiday in the desert and the temptations that occurred therein.¹ The purpose of such time of refection is of course to enable one to ponder one's own indulgences and bad habits and give some of these up in order to make room for new and different sins.

Things I'm giving up for Lent this year:

• Drawing Cavalier moustaches and perturbed facial expressions upon the breasts of women in men's magazines.
• Leaving multiple comments a day on the Daily Mail website signed 'Nigel from Niddrie', all of which include the phrase 'fruity harbinger of woe'.²
• Armwrestling for alcohol
• ...or Jelly Tots
• Sending documents to my boss with filthily acronymed filenames
• Asking people I've just met whether they'd rather die by being smeared in jam and buried in an ant hill or by drowning in Michael Portillo

And you?

¹Kind of like an early Burning Man, I think.
² Seventeen published in January alone.

But such is the unpredictable nature of human experience that occasionally even the most pantingly fervent of lexicographers can find that without warning they are still forced to grope crudely around for the most felicitous word to describe the particularly unusual situation in which they find themselves. It was with this sense of shame burning fiercely somewhere about my colon that in the last few weeks of 2007 I decided to make a list of some of the occasions in which I encountered a scenario or sensation without suitable linguistic expression and coin my own neologisms for the edification of you, lovely reader.

Subselfish
The unshakable feeling that whatever you might be doing, somewhere Will Self is doing it better.

Paxosomnia
The inexplicably enjoyable yet undeniably disgusted feeling you wake up with after having had a dirty dream about someone off Newsnight. See also allsoppicating, the act of clearing up after such a dream.

Upsilonification
The practice of inserting superfluous letters, often Y, into a child's name in a painful attempt to render it unique. Brandilynne. Gyn'nifyrr. Chayenne-Fonduu.

Dispomhatted
A slightly surprising sensation, not unlike that created by having your bobble hat blown off in a breeze that was stiffer than you first thought.

It was quarter to nine on Boxing day morning and I was half asleep against the back window of my parents orange (we like to always know where we've parked it and anyway, the only other choice was green and Simon, you know Simon, Mary from Folkestone's second son, he has a green car and it's horrible) Vauxhall in the car park of a retail park in Kent, waiting for Currys to open so my father could rub himself discreetly against the plasma televisions. I had been silently contemplating all possible shades of meaning behind the Britney Spears perfume that Santa had left under the tree for me not twenty four hours earlier. Would it be worse to think that I had been bad enough to deserve such a thing, or good but considered the kind of person that would wear it?

So intense had been my reverie that my mother interpreted my involuntary yelp at having my thoughts so unexpectedly interrupted as audible umbrage at the thought of growing older, or having been reminded of my advancing age at all. She then set about trying to remedy this with indecent and wholly unrequired haste.

I always think my thirties were the best decade of my life. You're properly grown up and you've left all of that silliness of your twenties behind you. You're all settled down, got a proper job and you know exactly where you're going in life. No surprises, none of this wandering about trying to work new things out. You're old enough to know everything you need to know and you can just stick with what you like.

That's right, said my dad, a man who once, in his twenties, set light to a grand piano and was pushed down the Old Kent Road playing Great Balls of Fire on it. It's a great age to be.

As it turns out, £4.99 electric carving knives from the Currys sale bin are absolutely no good for slitting your wrists at all.

Later that morning he tried to explain that he thought I was his mate, even though his mate was six foot three, black and not wearing his ex-boyfriend's old Arsenal slippers. We were sat in a sopping greasy spoon eating fried egg sandwiches as he told me that the friend in question had caught his girlfriend poking holes in his condoms with a drawing pin so they'd been drinking since noon, sitting in the park mixing Tesco vodka with tap water until it got dark and they'd had to climb over the razor wire to get out. Neither wanted to go home so they'd wandered the streets looking for entertainment until they'd found it in the form of the Londis in-store announcement system and a security guard unimpressed with their singular version of Come Fly With Me. I sat scraping the dirt from beneath the table's formica layers with a fingernail and watching the smile that crept slowly from one corner of his mouth to the next until the room was so full of it I couldn't breathe.

We didn't fuck, not at first. I sat on the worn carpet and looked round the room while he made tea. There were slippers under his bed, adult sized but furry white with nylon whiskers and long pink ears. He said they'd been there when he moved in the week before, the only thing in the bare room like a warning against being late with the rent from the Disney Mafia. He kept them in case their original owner came back for them and she was beautiful. I clicked my heels and told him mine were the only thing my boyfriend had not taken when he left three months ago. I hope you don't mind, he said, holding up a steaming measuring jug with two straws, but there's no cups.

I stayed a week, then a month. One day he turned from the door and, after a pause, said; we should swap.

My entire knowledge of darts comes from watching Bullseye in 1987 from behind the sofa (see Jim Bowen, fear of) and a game once played during my university freshers week that was abandoned half way through when it became shamefully apparent that I could neither a) make the darts stick anywhere but the wall or b) subtract without pencil and paper. I am therefore surprised to learn that darts appears to have moved on considerably in the last two decades, not least of which because the prize for winning no longer seems to be a brown caravan.

ITV's credits wisely show a shiny titanium dart from the archangel Gabriel's very own Black & Decker Workmate winging its way gracefully through blue flames of celestial plasma and omit all suggestion of the players who are still reassuringly red, round and shiny. Flanked by men in dark suits they enter in a thick swirl of dry ice, pausing only to kiss their uniformly highlighted wives before making their way to the board to the rousing strains of MC Hammer. I decide to lend my support to the player with the least atrocious tattoos. Shiny Man 1 has something in faux Old English script up the inside of this arm which might read quixotic or might read sausages, I can't tell. Shiny Man 2 has POWER in red and yellow flames (or ectoplasm from Ghostbusters the animated series or unset Ice Magic) on the inside of his but eventually I decide that my allegiance must lie with Shiny Man 1, as what I do not know cannot disappoint me. I grab a family bag of Twiglets and sit down to watch.

15.55
Very pleased to discover that the announcement of one hundred and eighty still comes with the obligatory seven second pronunciation of eighty. When the country is 47% smaller thanks to rising sea levels and all of Her Majesty's swans have been eaten by asylum seekers who haven't even heard of Princess Diana, as long as Tony Green is still adding twenty nine extra letters where they are not needed there will be a corner of ludicrousness that is forever Britain.

16.14
The players appear to have come to the end of a round, or a set, or an innings, or whatever it is. The spectators have leapt to their feet and broken into enthusiastic song. The words to this song flash on the giant display that encircles the arena and go like this: DER NER NEH! DER NER NEH! DER NER NER NER NER NER NEH! I look on Wikipedia to see if this is obligatory for either the audience or the game but it does not say.

16.36
Round three is at an end and the game of Shiny Man 1 has collapsed like a flan in a cupboard. I console myself by reading some of the hundreds of messages the audience are waving at the camera.

No Halves! No Shandy!
Happy Birthday Wobbly Arthur!
Stoke! Home of darts!

17.00
I learn that throwing for the bullseye to see who goes first is called a diddle for the middle. This pleases me more than I can decently explain.

17.29
Shiny Man 2 thrice misses the win by one dart. I am hopping about on one foot, shovelling crisps into my mouth without pause. And then, with considerably less ceremony and wholly less 1980s music it is all over and the players receive cheques large enough to keep them and their wives in Argos gold jewellery for at least the next five months.

Darts has not gained another fan. But I am hoping that it this a trend that will eventually lead to the glamourisation of other pub games, preferably starting with nine men's morris and culminating into the spectacular televisation of the first world dwile flonking championships. Without the MC Hammer, obviously.