Sarah Standing

Wednesday

11 Nov 2009
Sarah Standing

The ‘bovver birds’ are back

Sarah Standing’s daughter was attacked by a girl gang — but it wasn’t an isolated incident. Female thugs, of the sort who ran riot in the 1970s, are roaming the streets againIt was a beautiful balmy evening when my youngest daughter finished school last summer. The A-level results had just arrived, and she was happily ambling home from supper with two girlfriends. They were in no rush. They’re 18 and were about to spread their wings, leave London for the first time and head off towards various universities. They were finally ‘grown up’ — with parental curfew lifted, able to judge risks for themselves. And walking along the King’s Road in Chelsea, they had little reason to anticipate what was about to befall them.

Saturday

19 Sep 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 19 September 2009

Flying out of JFK on 11 September was a sombre experience. As I checked out of my hotel the concierge dropped his daily niceties as a mark of respect, and instead gently urged me to ‘have a thoughtful day’. The handful of star-spangled banners that lined Madison Avenue flapped at half-mast and the skies opened as if in dark protest, chucking down apocalyptic rain and causing the traffic to crawl. As someone who suffers from an unfounded yet pathological fear of flying I decided there was only one way to step up to the plate and board my American Airlines flight to Los Angeles: vodka.As soon as I’d gone through airport security I downed a shot of Pravda I’d slipped into my handbag. Pravda is patently an expensive brand of booze.

Saturday

12 Sep 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 12 September 2009

Having made an ambitious campaign pledge and staked his domestic credibility on the promise to radically reform and restructure the health insurance industry, Barack Obama has been forced to endure a sticky summer of sliding poll ratings and sustained Republican attacks. One gets the impression that even die-hard Democrats are slightly ‘over’ their initial enthusiasm for an overhaul, and it’s starting to look as though it may take a lot more than a spoonful of sugar to help this particular medicine go down. There’s a pervading and impatient urgency awaiting Mr President’s next move. Even Facebook devotees tried to jump on the political bandwagon; urging quasi-acquaintances to join forces and virally reiterate a simplistic and watered-down message.

Saturday

5 Sep 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 5 September 2009

Louis Armstrong singing the Gershwins’ ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off’ only touched the tip of the iceberg. Potato — potahto, tomato — tomahto; for two countries ostensibly sharing the same language, England and America have deeper cultural disparities than merely amusing colloquialisms, and never is this discrepancy more apparent than in the naming of pharmacies. We say chemist, they say drugstore.In the States, the ‘cult of celebrity’ poses a far greater toxic phenomenon than it does in this country. We tolerate fame while Americans positively revere it. To them it is a religion. And mega-fame, just like worshipping the gods, requires a giant leap of faith and an unassailable devotion by those that choose to bask in its reflected glory.

Saturday

29 Aug 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 29 August 2009

A new twist on an old favourite. Question: How many ministers/blondes/psychiatrists (feel free to fill in the social stereotype of your choice) does it take to change an old-fashioned 100-watt light bulb? Answer: None.From 1 September the joke will have become redundant due to the fact there won’t be any traditional light bulbs left to change.The European Union has banned the sale of incandescent bulbs in order to slash energy bills and cut carbon dioxide emissions. This is an act which will force us all to become eco-warriors or, if we don’t comply, law-breakers. Under the European Directive, from next week manufacturers in Europe are legally not allowed to sell the banned bulbs to retailers. Eight months ago, when leading shops implemented a voluntary ban, it triggered an unexpected frenzy of manic hoarding.

Monday

24 Aug 2009
Sarah Standing

Breast is barred

Truth is indeed often stranger than fiction. It appears Big Brother is not just watching our every move but has also infiltrated our bodies. Speaking to a cranial surgeon over the weekend, I was fascinated to discover that most of our replaced, repaired or “surgically-enhanced” body parts are now bar-coded and given serial numbers - just like supermarket goods or a improbable plot devised by Ira Levin. Jasmine Fiore - the former Playboy model allegedly murdered by her boyfriend Ryan Alexander Jenkins - was recently identified by her breast implants. Her teeth had been forcibly removed, yet this did not deter detectives from their investigation. For those who strongly object to the government holding DNA records, the writing is on the wall: there is no escape.

Breast is barred

Saturday

22 Aug 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 22 August 2009

The Borat-ish ‘burkini’ edict that’s currently causing ripples of concern in a handful of council-run leisure centres is undoubtedly going to provide a lot of challenging design opportunities for fashionistas. Officials are attempting to bar both Muslim and non-Muslim swimmers from entering pools in normal swimming attire during certain sessions unless they comply with strict ‘modest’ Islamic dress codes. Modest dress code dictates that women be covered from neck to ankle (with headscarf) and men from navel to knee. ‘What Not To Wear’ on the beach seems to have unwittingly overtaken global warming as the contentious topic of conversation this summer. Across the Channel, France is also in sartorial turmoil. The country that fought hard to champion topless sunbathing in the late Sixties as a symbol of feminist rights (and has subsequently prided itself on being the world’s capital of seaside semi-nudity) is suddenly facing a bit of a bikini backlash.

Saturday

15 Aug 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 15 August 2009

Oh dear. Nearly 80 years ago Dorothy Parker wrote a bleak poem entitled ‘Resume’. Back then she must have thought she’d been fairly comprehensive in covering all possible self-inflicted exit routes. Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.Times have changed — as indeed has the toxic cocktail of doom. Were Ms Parker alive today and living in England she might have felt the need to add a few revisions that attempted to embrace the withering wheels of misfortune that now precipitates not just our demise, but threatens to blight our very existence.Conkers pain you: Pools are damp; Sunbeds stain you And organics cause cramp.

Saturday

8 Aug 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 8 August 2009

‘Last chance for Krakow. Krakow only. Sir, I am not interested in Belfast. When I DECIDE to be interested in Belfast I will inform you. Until then wait your turn and rejoin the queue. Step aside Madam, if you will.’ Robert pointed to a woman with two small children. ‘You’re not listening. I am aware of the fact everyone here wants to board. I understand your concerns, but I am currently processing Krakow. Krakow ONLY. Now, step back behind the barrier and wait patiently.’ Poor guy. He must have known he was asking the impossible. Robert was Ryanair’s Messenger of Doom — a role I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Looking down at his clipboard and wiping the sweat from his brow he barked out another destination I’d never heard of.

Saturday

1 Aug 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 1 August 2009

How nice all our daily lives used to be before millions of David Brent wannabes saw fit to take the mother of all executive decisions and irrevocably tip the scales of justice away from our grasp. Hard to remember, but there was a time when authoritarians were still occasionally allowed to make ‘exceptions’ to the rules. Those halcyon days of reasonable behaviour have long gone. We are seldom — if ever — given the chance to even explain our wrongdoings any more. No rule-enforcing flunkey has the time, inclination, facility, courage or authority to veer off-piste and listen to (let alone act on) gut instinct. To do so is, literally, more than his job is worth. Sad, but true.It used to be that every once in a while a parking attendant spontaneously ‘let one off’ a ticket.

Wednesday

22 Jul 2009
Sarah Standing

The swine flu panic will turn into a national sickie

First, the good news. And we all need good news. According to the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, the UK is no longer at a ‘critical’ level of threat from a terrorist attack. We’ve been downgraded to a ‘substantial’ level of alert against al-Qa’eda or other extremist groups. So we’ve gone from a ‘touch-and-go’, worst-case scenario to a merely ‘significant’ one. However, the bad news is that ‘the Fear’ has been replaced by the Big Bogey Man himself — Mr Piggy.Swine flu allegedly now poses a cataclysmic and ‘far greater’ immediate threat to our country’s heath and safety than anything else, and so far the government has spent over £100 million stockpiling Tamiflu. At the time of writing, 30 Brits have died as a direct result of the outbreak since 14 June (according to the Department of Health, there are 12,000 deaths per annum from ‘normal’ seasonal flu in this country).

Saturday

18 Jul 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 18 July 2009

All right, so perhaps I was a mite distracted. I was busy stirring a beetroot risotto, the television was on in the background, I had the telephone tucked under my chin and was also trying to figure out the solution to 11 down in the crossword (‘desire returns to writer covering S&M, spellbound’ in ten letters), but all these vaguely mitigating circumstances don’t really excuse my outburst.‘Goodbye. Thank you. September 24th at 10.30’. I said. And then just before I hung up and added more stock to the pot I inexplicably blurted out the codicil ‘love you’. Just like that. It wouldn’t have mattered had I been arranging a clandestine assignation with a lover, but I was actually just securing an appointment for a mammogram at the London Clinic.

Saturday

11 Jul 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 11 July 2009

I’ve been reprimanded three times this week for ‘inappropriate behaviour’ — issued with a trio of verbal ‘warnings’.I’ve been reprimanded three times this week for ‘inappropriate behaviour’ — issued with a trio of verbal ‘warnings’. None were handed out by law-enforcers — all came from members of the public. Random do-gooders. Total strangers have found the time, energy and self-importance to publicly tick me off for micro-misdemeanours. It’s a trend. Social vigilantes are the new police.The first time I got told off I was parking outside my house. As I reversed, I was suddenly aware that I had an audience. A middle-aged couple were silently observing me. They weren’t threatening, they weren’t waiting to mug me — they were just standing on the pavement watching.

Saturday

4 Jul 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 4 July 2009

When I was young, being given ‘options’ was a treat.When I was young, being given ‘options’ was a treat. It felt empowering — as though I were in complete control of my destiny. ‘Do you want to play Monopoly or Careers?’ ‘You have a choice — a Zoom or a Fab, what will it be?’‘If you have a bath now and get ready for bed you can stay up and watch either Top of the Pops or The Persuaders — you decide.’ In those halcyon, carefree, pre-health and safety days both choices were always presented as being agonisingly fabulous, and much of the thrill derived from the deliberation itself.Now that I’m an adult I’ve done a complete volte-face on options. I loathe them. They no longer represent freedom of choice — instead they’re just decisions loaded with potentially irrevocable consequences.

Saturday

27 Jun 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 27 June 2009

Logging on to a university homepage I noticed that the first thing it flags up — breaking news — is that they’re installing a £56,000 digital satellite TV system which will ‘transform’ the way students access multilingual news and information from around the world. Apparently the purchase of Exterity IPTV represents the Language Centre’s biggest-ever investment in technology for learning and teaching since it was established in 1994 and is ‘available to staff and students registered with the self-access area, who use it to improve their foreign language skills’. Personally I would have used the word ‘within’ as opposed to ‘registered with’ but hey, what do I know? I finished my formal education at 18 and opted out of becoming a Mistress of the Universe.

Saturday

20 Jun 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 20 June 2009

I have the fear. The fear wakes me up at 3 a.m. and for a split second I forget what it is exactly that I’m frightened of. And then I remember. I am a mother and one of my children is off travelling and is on the other side of the world.In the still of the night I prioritise The List. I practise the breathing techniques Betty Parsons taught me when I was first pregnant 24 years ago. The ineffectual huffs and puffs that were supposed to transcend pain. The List catalogues ‘worst case scenarios’ and I systematically shuffle my top five in order of anxiety. I have become the peri-menopausal, female Charles Highway of irrational angst. While The Rachel Papers were concerned with getting the girl, my list deals with how to let her go.

Saturday

6 Jun 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 6 June 2009

It’s always the smallest thing that tips one over the edge.It’s always the smallest thing that tips one over the edge. This week I cracked. I sat on the pavement outside King Edward VII’s hospital and shamelessly sobbed. My husband was ill with septicaemia, and I was desperate to get to him. I was panicked, worried sick and keen to get up to his room to make sure he was all right after an interminable night spent apart. I’d found a parking space — this particular grid of private medical care in the heart of London offers perhaps the last bastion of dependably available parking spaces — and hurriedly began the endless process of pay-parking by telephone. I’d found my glasses, found the sign, texted my four-digit location code, confirmed my car’s registration, entered the number of minutes I wished to park, and was waiting for confirmation.

Saturday

30 May 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 30 May 2009

When I was younger (old habits obviously die hard and you have to forgive me for not automatically writing ‘when I was young’ — it’s just going to take a bit more practice), I used to find a particular greeting card amusing. It was a cartoon of a demented-looking career woman. She had one hand clutching her briefcase and the other was held up to her mouth in exaggerated dismay. The caption read: ‘Oh my God, I forgot to have children.’ It made me feel quietly smug as I’d remembered to have my three children by the time I was 30 and it was the career I’d opted to shove on to the back burner. I thought I had nothing much to fear at turning 50. It was just another number. However, logging onto Facebook on the morning of my birthday quickly swiped the misplaced self-congratulatory smirk off my face.

Saturday

23 May 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 23 May 2009

I am not one of those who believe that God made the highways solely in order for motorists to inherit the earth. But any milk of human kindness flowing through my veins curdles when I am driving on the Embankment during the early morning rush hour. I have to make the big sacrifice of not listening to Nick Ferrari’s breakfast show, since it requires total concentration and nerves of steel to avoid the hordes of cyclists coming at me from all angles.Top-gear city cyclists are a law unto themselves. They’re a hardcore bunch — the very antithesis of a benevolent Boris or those daffy Mrs Tiggy-Winkle handwoven folk who choose to cycle only when the sun is shining and they’ve bought something pretty to put in their baskets.

Saturday

16 May 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 16 May 2009

Ideally I only ever want to come across the word ‘system’ when it’s used by an astronaut and sandwiched between ‘all’ and ‘go’.Ideally I only ever want to come across the word ‘system’ when it’s used by an astronaut and sandwiched between ‘all’ and ‘go’. ‘All systems go!’ has a chirpy, optimistic feel. Eliminate ‘all’ and ‘go’ however and you’re left with no hope. I know I never want to hear ‘the system’ uttered by anyone sitting in front of a company computer or in a position of authority. ‘I’m afraid the system won’t allow me to,’ is nothing short of a polite brush-off. A convenient, modern-day euphemism for ‘I can’t be arsed to help any more — sod off.’Blaming the system is an attempt to use the get-out-of-jail-free card.

Saturday

9 May 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 9 May 2009

Unlike the swine flu hysteria currently gripping the globe, the affluenza pandemic of the Nineties and early Noughties (first identified by the clinical psychologist Oliver James) was a virulent, socially transmitted disease most of us subliminally hankered to catch. ‘Unlike the swine flu hysteria currently gripping the globe, the affluenza pandemic of the Nineties and early Noughties (first identified by the clinical psychologist Oliver James) was a virulent, socially transmitted disease most of us subliminally hankered to catch. ‘Bring it on’, was the nation’s great battle cry as we loaded the guns of avarice with alacrity; conveniently forgetting that the bullets of greed have a nasty habit of ricocheting back into society.

Saturday

25 Apr 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 25 April 2009

Twenty years ago I remember driving down Pacific Coast Highway in California with two of my children strapped into their car seats behind me. They were having a humdinger of a row. They were arguing because India had picked her nose and had proudly managed to produce a bogey the size of an ant. While busy admiring her handiwork, her younger brother Archie had snatched the highly prized treasure from her finger and was attempting to eat it. They were fighting so much I eventually had to swerve onto the hard shoulder, clamber into the back seat and sternly lecture them both on the delicate etiquette of nose-picking.‘Whoever picks it, gets to eat it. Understand?’ I admonished sternly. ‘No stealing one another’s bogies.

Saturday

18 Apr 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 18 April 2009

It’s at trying times like these that my latent inner-bimbo gene struggles to reassert itself.It’s at trying times like these that my latent inner-bimbo gene struggles to reassert itself. Sod equal rights, sod women’s lib and to hell with emancipation. When my car mysteriously vanished outside Waitrose last Friday night I was immediately engulfed by a pathetically primal desire to play the role of helpless victim. I’d parked in good faith — albeit in a bay that had not one, but two large suspension notices; I’d carefully read both signs and deduced that the middle spaces were up for grabs. I’d overfed the meter, displayed my ticket and yet when I staggered out of the supermarket, fingers garrotted and white with the volume of heavy bags I was carrying, my car had totally disappeared.

Saturday

4 Apr 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 4 April 2009

I live in fear of that peculiar sharp intake of breath I seem to hear whenever I ask service men actually to service anything I own that doesn’t work.I live in fear of that peculiar sharp intake of breath I seem to hear whenever I ask service men actually to service anything I own that doesn’t work. It’s not a promising sound. Dishwashers that stop washing dishes, internet servers that fail to serve, waste disposals that spew sewage wrist-deep back up into the sink, cars that make curious grinding noises — all these are problems I want dealt with speedily and with total confidence. I also want the person in charge of mending them to have a far superior knowledge of the buggered piece of machinery than I do. That is their job; their specialist field.

Saturday

28 Mar 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 28 March 2009

Last week I was invited to join Radio 2 to discuss the European parliament’s most recent time-, energy- and money-wasting wheezeLast week I was invited to join Radio 2 to discuss the European parliament’s most recent time-, energy- and money-wasting wheeze: a pamphlet asking staff to refrain from using titles such as Miss or Mrs. Apparently these titles are considered archaic and a hangover from the past, as they ‘indicate’ a woman’s relationship to a man. According to Strasbourg, Ms is the politically correct prefix all us women should adopt; for despite being impossible to pronounce without sounding as though one is impersonating an angry mosquito, using Ms doesn’t — God forbid — denote a woman’s marital status.

Saturday

21 Mar 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 21 March 2009

Last Saturday I was sent a stiff, glossy brochure informing me of imminent changes in my local podiatry services. NHS Westminster plans to invest £540,000 in this pressing ‘service redesign’ and being a taxpayer and local resident they wanted my views. I had a questionnaire to fill out and return. Alongside the requisite ‘Are you male or female?’ boxes to tick, I was asked the following: Do you have a physical or mental health condition that has lasted at least 12 months or is likely to last at least 12 months? Yes or no? Although I quite fail to comprehend the correlation between having some rubber-gloved nurse gouge out a verruca and a potential bipolar episode, I paused only momentarily before taking an optimistic standpoint and ticking ‘no’.

Saturday

14 Mar 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 14 March 2009

‘Mum, have you ever been cock-blocked?’ asked my 19-year-old daughter on a recent visit home from university.‘Mum, have you ever been cock-blocked?’ asked my 19-year-old daughter on a recent visit home from university. ‘Because it’s driving me crazy and I just don’t know how to deal with it. I thought you might have some good tips.’I instinctively felt that this was probably one of those defining mother and daughter bonding moments that required a confident yes or no answer. ‘No, I haven’t,’ I replied. ‘Or if I have, I think I probably didn’t enjoy it that much and have forgotten all about it.’ Tilly was looking at me with a mixture of both envy and disbelief.‘So you’re telling me that even before you met Dad, no one has ever tried to pull that move on you? Whoa Mama.

Saturday

7 Mar 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 7 March 2009

Munchausen on its own is a psychological disorder in which a person makes him or herself appear ill in order to get attention or nurturing. Munchausen by proxy is when a person fabricates or induces illness in a person under their care. These individuals tend to be highly secretive and use multiple false identities. Now a similar disease has come to my attention: Political Correctness By Proxy (PCBP).PCBP occurs when complete strangers take umbrage and act on behalf of people they think ought to be offended. They assume hurt feelings and hijack them — taking unnecessary offence just because it’s there for the taking. I cite Golligate as a recent example of PCBP. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga could easily — and with due justification — have retaliated against Carol Thatcher’s casually uttered racist Green Room comment himself.

Saturday

28 Feb 2009
Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 28 February 2009

A family-sized bag of Minstrels. A tube of sour-cream-flavoured Pringles. A drum of popcorn. Cookie-dough-flavoured Häagen-Dazs ice-cream. A litre of Diet Coke. For one brief moment I actually thought Ocado had extended their home delivery service to include Chelsea cinemas. I had to move my handbag off the floor just to make room for the supermarket sweep of junk food a couple beside me brought to consume while ostensibly watching He’s Just Not That Into You. By the time the trailer ended and the film began I found myself unable to concentrate and was furiously overidentifying with the sentiments contained in the title. Believe me, I just wasn’t that into either of them. I felt as though I’d been forced to gatecrash a bulimics’ picnic.

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