Premature delivery

Because what works in America will find its way over here - Michael Howard pledges to cut the legal time limit for abortions to 20 weeks.

In an interview to be published tomorrow, the Tory leader says that women are effectively now able to get terminations 'on demand' - the rallying cry of pro-lifers, who argue that legal safeguards designed to prevent abortions for frivolous reasons are being ignored.

Frivolous reasons? Like having nothing else to do on a Saturday afternoon? Or the frivolity of not wanting to be forced to bear unwanted children? 'On demand' is not, as we currently enjoy, having to convince two doctors that your health would be seriously compromised to continue with the pregnancy for even the earliest term abortions; on demand is not having to give a reason for wanting control over your own body.

Howard is, I am sure, imagining scenes of tired but radiant new mothers in a plump white hospital beds wistfully yet with a sense of inner peace and satisfaction handing over their newborns to new, strictly heterosexually married adoptive parents. Instead of a sea of capricious women getting to five months pregnant and deciding that actually she doesn't feel like having a baby right now, what with the skiiing season coming up and all, and in her lunch break popping down to the clinic who will whip out the vacuum cleaner and the pliers before she can say speculum, presumably. I am imagining the cost to the woman, the child and society as a whole of women being compelled to act as an incubator for a child she does not want, and wonder if increased care for the excess of unwanted children already in this country wouldn't have been a better single issue for the Tories to campaign on.

We are all as unclean things

My interminably long and smelly journey on the 253 bus yesterday was improved immeasurably by the discovery of a Chick Tract on my seat, a souvenir from the exorcism-performing evangelical church further along the route. Wrapped in a leaflet asking in big red letters DOES IT COST TO BE A CHRISTIAN? (answer: no, the price has already been paid for your salvation) was, as I later learnt it to be, one of Mr Jack T Chick's most popular pamphlets, the 'world-wide favourite' This Was Your Life!

The story starts with out hero, pipe in mouth and glass of something intoxicating in one hand, watching his shiny sportscar with one eye and a violent gun battle on the television with another. Suddenly he drops dead and his soul whisked away, to his not inconsiderable consternation, to heaven to be judged. Despite his protestations of a good life lived, he is shown to have looked at women and his watch in church, and therefore is ushered into hell by a devil in a ponytail. The tale ends with various scenes of how this unfortunate man could have ensured not only his entrance into heaven but such praise from his colleagues as: "Incidentally Sir, he's not only one of our best workers but also he's a fine Christian!"

Included is a handy guide to all manner of God-displeasing behaviour and the telltale facial expressions that you may use to identify such sinners. I'm especially fond of this apparent attempted revival of expressing displeasure by shaking a fist at the sky, something (along with the word 'fisticuffs') I've been trying to bring back into general usage for a while now, though my 'whoremonger' expression still needs a few more hours in front of the mirror to perfect.

But if that doesn't take your fancy, why not try That Crazy Guy and see how when Suzi got AIDS, she learned that God's demand for sexual purity was for her own good!

I beat polycystic ovarian syndrome and dropped four dress sizes

Redmaiden was right; I am indeed in Marie Claire. Page forty, sandwiched between items on table lamps made from cuddly toys, a limped Australian actress and a Nottingham agency that rents stand-in mothers for 'career women' sits little purple box illustrated with a silhouette of a woman in a panama hat with two llamas (no, really) bearing the headline 'Give Us A Blog'. Not entirely sure what's that's supposed to be a derivative of, but let's push on.

They're young, female and shooting from the hip. Check out these five online diaries.

www.greenfairy.com
When this eternal student is not upsetting 'Republican soccer moms' she's making you giggle at her guilt about throwing away teddy bears.

Nice. So. Hello, Marie Claire readers. Did you enjoy 'MURDER IN SUBURBIA: The husband, the lover and the pregnant wife'? Maybe 'SANDRA BULLOCK: Is Hollywood's girl-next-door ready to say I Do?' was more to your taste. I couldn't blame you if so. Either way, I'm sure that from now on you won't dare to leave the house without having followed the '8 rules of summer fashion' (knee-length skirts and pedicuring 'religiously' - you were gagging to know, I know). Perhaps you're despondant after scoring all As (pretty and feminine) on the quiz to tell you what lingerie mood you're in today when you thought you'd be all Ds (sensual and sophisticated) and you've now got a terrible thirst for a designer, bright orange cotton cushion cover at £149 to cheer yourself up.

I haven't bought a woman's magazine in over a decade. I am filled with a lumpy, gelatinous kind of self-loathing that ego won out over taste and decency and I broke that ten year reign of sanity. I am going to go out into the garden now and hold it at arms length while it burns, and then I'm going to flush my retinas with bleach. Marie Claire, and any others of your ilk, please don't come back here. I wouldn't want to have to do you, too.

Update: Thanks to Anne for sending me this.

I'm frightened of Belgian chocolates / I'm frightened of pot pourri

Horribly disappointing results of 'research' published in the Sun today on what people would do if they woke up in the body of the opposite sex. I appreciate that reported in the Sun as they are - and comissioned to 'celebrate' the release of White Chicks on DVD - these numbers may not be the most empirically significant social statistics ever published but all the same, I remain sobbingly disenchanted by the respondants breathtaking lack of imagination in the face of a hypothesis positively throbbing with engorged potential.

The first thing one in three men would do, it seems, is to check out his 'new pair of bouncing breasts'. What he's doing to make them flap up and down wildly at the same time isn't mentioned. Southerners are most keen on this idea, with seventy percent saying they'd love to 'cop a feel'. Now, while I can appreciate that should I find myself in the same predicament I may well feel compelled to thoroughly investigate my new toys I cannot imagine ever having the need to grope myself with a big grin on my face. The biggest merit a bosom has is being on someone else, and jiggling yourself around in front of the mirror does rather lose it's entertainment value after a while. Similarly, I am not sure that the men who said they wanted to be Kylie or Angelina or Jordan have quite grasped the metaphysical distress they're going to be in when they realise they're actually the person they'd most like to fuck. They'd also take the opportunity to go on a girl's night out (don't bother - if you're the kind of girl that goes on a girl's night out then they're just like the boys nights out) and buy (buy, noy use, curiously) a sex toy. Visions of a female body with a male size complex being unable to ask for anything but the King Dong in the loudest voice possible...

Women on the contrary are more likely to spend their day as a man asking for a payrise - a very depressing answer - or 'taking the opportunity to eat as much as they liked without worrying about their weight', apparently not understanding the basic concept that they're only a man for a day. When half questioned said they'd spend the time getting friendly with an ex to find out why they were really dumped, something somewhere is seriously askew. I can come up with better ideas than that, I thought. I would run rampant through the city fuelled by testosterone and pale ale, having manly experiences. Except, well, there aren't that many to have, are there?

1. Fuck. I'd have to. It'll probably disappoint me.
2. Write my name in the snow.
3. Sit with legs tighly closed on public transport and still wear an inner grin of knob size confidence.
4. Throw a punch. A proper, from the shoulder, nose-breaking punch. Except I'd probably end up in a body as incapable of doing this as the one I have now.
5. Er...

I must be missing something. Apart from wilfully forgoing the opportunity to use one of those rubber blow job simulators cunningly disguised as a can of beer. Am I missing something?

Empty vessels

I once developed an unyielding, three-year crush on someone at university because I heard him do the most magnificently accurate impression of Alan Bennett. Sitting two rows in front of him in the lecture hall, I had to stab myself in the thigh with a pencil to stop myself proposing marriage there and then. My self-restraint proved sagacious; he revealed himself to have freakishly hairy knees during the graduation ball. It would never have worked.

That was, however, the last time I was able to say with any specificity just what made someone attractive. On the phone with Best Friend - or worse, with Mother - and asked to wax forth on the captivating qualities of any particular New Squeeze, I find myself utterly unable to differenciate him from ninety-nine per cent of everybody else I know.

Sweet.

Funny.

Clever.

Cute.

Kind.

The description is so inevitably generic that only because he can't fit a breadstick in his mouth sideways would anyone be able to tell him apart from my hamster. This is due to a fairly even split of a persistant inability to find the correct words in the face of anything important, and an irritating bloody-minded obstreperousness in refusing to join the ranks of those who aurally pollute my space with rampant and unrelenting tales of that fabulous thing their latest can do with creme caramel and a handful of clothes pegs. Most people desperately need to, in the woefully overused words of the American vernacular, shut the fuck up. You are not that interesting and silence isn't that scary. Pretend perhaps that you have been born with a limited amount of words at your disposal and once they've been spoken you'll be forced to remain mute for the remainder of your life; how many did you just waste telling everyone you know about how you're sure Creme Eggs aren't as big as they used to be? Make every one count.^*

This is also, it seems, the way to go about 'finding a man'; a concept I'd wholeheartedly endorse were it intended to be advice for both sexes rather than yet more 'tips' for women 'looking for love'. A writer from The Times visits a bar on two consecutive nights and bemoans her findings that the gentlemen show a keener romantic interest on the night in which she is quieter and does not, in her own words, "go for every joke and question that entered our heads".

I am one of those girls who talks a lot. Not entirely without wit and not entirely without charm, but a lot nevertheless. Like many girls, I often think of myself — and my single status — in society’s pat terms: I have a 'big personality' and am therefore 'intimidating'. Many men are scared by this assertiveness or, if not scared, put off by a lack of mystique.

Not meaning to decry the absolute truth that certain men find assertive women unappealingly 'unfeminine' and will go for the quiet one for reasons entirely unrelated to how much she talks, I would still like to suggest that, in the apposite and timely words of the splendid Chris Morris, you cannot attribute the results of your tendancy to hoot your trap off at every opportunity to a generalised male adversity to intimidating women. It may well just be making you irritating. She laments that "Kate, my first accomplice, is a beautiful doe-eyed blonde who fears she is single because she likes pulling funny faces and exaggerating her Welsh accent." Entirely possible. I'm sorry dear, I am sure you're pretty, charming and a expert in string theory but if I found myself on a date with a gurning woman with a deliberate comedy accent I'd be looking for something to sharpen the butter knife on before the starters had arrived. You'll impress more by having the confidence not to try.

Shush. Everyone. Just....shush.

^* You may contact me to discuss / snigger at the spectacle of a blogger attempting to silence other people's meaningless chatter at the usual address.