Christina Patterson: A disturbing trip into Hicksville, Europe...
Published: 20 April 2007
Armies have never been known for their enlightened approach to race relations. (Not surprising, perhaps, when the chief requirement of your job is to blast the balls off whoever your government has currently decided is your "enemy".) Even so, it was a bit of a shock to hear of a German army instructor's favourite training tactic. "You are in the Bronx," said the instructor to a soldier in a clip from a training video. "A black van is stopping in front of you. Three African-Americans are getting out and they are insulting your mother ... act."
Christina Patterson: Who said life was fair? Get used to it
Published: 13 April 2007
Nature can be extremely cruel. On the one hand, it (or pesticides, or negativity) can give you cancer. On the other hand, it (or some crazed hysteric that's somehow seeped into your psyche) can give you an urge to propagate so profound that you're prepared to spend years parading your pain in front of panels of judges. And when this fails, to break down and weep - uncontrollably, unphotogenically - on national telly.
Christina Patterson: You can die for Britain, but you can't live here
Published: 06 April 2007
In the second century AD, Britain had a black governor. He was called Quintus Lollius Urbicus and he was one of a number of African soldiers in the Roman army. In the nearly two millennia since, soldiers from Africa have continued to serve in the British Army, first as part of the great British Empire and now as part of what we must call (dropping the "British" which seemed so central to the whole enterprise) "the Commonwealth".
Christina Patterson: Poverty, crime and the power of forgiveness
Published: 30 March 2007
One of the saddest images of recent weeks was surely the mugshot of Bradley Tucker, the 18-year-old from east London who was convicted on Tuesday of murder. The face in the photograph is sprinkled with spots and the upper lip is dusted with down. The eyes suggest fear and defiance. This is a boy in trouble, and trapped.
Christina Patterson: Thank goodness for Gordon's work ethic
Published: 23 March 2007
"Work is love made visible," said Kahil Gibran, the Lebanese poet turned new-age patron saint. Well, perhaps. Some people, like nuns "offering up" their floor-scrubbing to the Lord, are able to imbue their daily labours with profound spiritual significance. And some people bounce to work with a smile on their face and a twinkle in their eye. Taking Freud's dictum about love and work as their guide, they rejoice in combining both.
Christina Patterson: Save us from this ersatz masculinity
Published: 16 March 2007
The pursuit of the spiritual is not, it's fair to say, top of the list of concerns of the average British male. Apart, that is, from those of our Muslim brethren whose big, bushy beards are a symbol of their desire to assert their credentials as rugged warriors of the Crescent. Beam-me-up-Muhammad merchants aside, however, the British male's interest in the transcendental is about on a par with his enthusiasm for Mulberry handbags.
Christina Patterson: Dream on: we are just a nation of useless voyeurs
Published: 02 March 2007
Last weekend, I had some friends for dinner. As always, loving food, but hating cooking, I decided to keep it simple: soup, fish baked in foil and some fresh berries. As always, it all went wrong. The onions did their usual trick of instant metamorphosis from golden chunks to charred embers. I had to dash out for more and start again - but I had to anyway because half the ingredients had, apparently, done a runner.
Christina Patterson: To hell with these phoney 'life skills'
Published: 23 February 2007
Life's a pitch and then you die. That, at least, is the view of design guru, Stephen Bayley and, as was evident from Michael Cockerell's film on him this week, of our own dear Prime Minister. Actually, it appears to be the view of almost everyone now. Where Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell were once deemed demons of the dark arts of spin, they might now be classed as amateurs. David Cameron, the Bullingdon bad boy whose heart now bleeds for the inner cities, and whose chief professional achievement outside politics was selling crap telly, is 13 points ahead in the polls. Life's a pitch indeed.
Christina Patterson: A lesson in how to add insult to injury
Published: 16 February 2007
Excellent news for the young men and women who have had limbs blown off in Iraq. There they were, worrying about how they were going to find new ways to serve their country when they could hardly make it to the corner shop, when genius struck.
Christina Patterson: Modern life: aren't you just sick of it?
Published: 09 February 2007
Sometimes salvation arrives from the most unlikely quarters. Yes, even from the French. "It is possible to have a passionate conversation about a book that one has not read," declares Pierre Bayard, a professor of literature in Paris. "The discourse on books that have not been read places us at the heart of a creative process which leads us to their origin."
Christina Patterson: Trust me, I'm an alternative therapist
Published: 02 February 2007
"Write a list" wrote Stephen Russell, aka the "Barefoot Doctor", in one of his last columns in The Observer, "of all the ways you've fallen short. Then, wrapping your arms lovingly around yourself... say warmly, 'Well done you!' for every point listed."
Christina Patterson: Do we want to know what the future holds?
Published: 26 January 2007
Last week the medical director of a hospital told me that it was "essential to see the situation with the stars". I didn't ask him about the moon, but I think that went without saying. And in this, it seems, the doctor would have been right. According to new research, and a review of 50 previous studies, the moon can affect your hormones, your behaviour, and the size of your lunch.
Christina Patterson: Diet books? They're just for reading
Published: 05 January 2007
The wrong kind of weather, and indeed management, may be the chief cause of delays on our own super-pricey trains, but in New York explanations for late-running trains are a little less prosaic. According to the city's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the main culprits, after engineering problems, are "fainting dieters". Only in the land of the free and the faddy could an urgent desire to squeeze into your size-0 jeans bring public transport grinding to a halt. The supersized, wedged into seats increasingly designed for baby whales, must be furious.
Christina Patterson: No sex, please - I am tired and it's Christmas
Published: 22 December 2006
Last week an editor asked a single friend of mine when she last had sex. My friend paused to do some mental maths and then replied. "Oh dear," said the editor. "So many people lead lives of quiet desperation!"
Christina Patterson: Young, gifted and betrayed by society
Published: 15 December 2006
When my friend Dreda Say Mitchell went to visit a head teacher in a school last year, she was asked if she was looking for the kitchen. Dreda is an award-winning crime writer and also, in a stroke of supreme irony, a consultant in ethnic minority achievement. This may or may not have been an example of the "institutional racism" in schools identified in a new report commissioned by the Government, but it clearly doesn't bode well.
Christina Patterson: Can rap and rhyme beat the knife and the gun?
Published: 08 December 2006
"Poetry" said WH Auden "makes nothing happen". He should have been in Whitechapel earlier this week. On a rainy Tuesday morning, in a packed hall on a council estate, children rapped and rhymed and sang of their disgust for a culture of violence that's blighting their lives.
Christina Patterson: An epidemic medics can't seem to crack
Published: 01 December 2006
Fashions in illnesses come and go. In the age of Hippocrates, it was "melancholy", a condition in which "lean, withered, hollow-eyed" patients were "much troubled with wind and griping in their bellies". In the 17th century, it was "hysteria", an affliction which, according to the "English Hippocrates", Thomas Sydenham, affected nearly all women, and men who "lead sedentary and studious lives".
Christina Patterson: Feathered casanovas from real-life chick-lit
Published: 24 November 2006
If Eve was faithful to Adam, it may have been because there wasn't much choice. That, at least, was the conclusion I reached after spending last week in the Garden of Eden. Well, OK, maybe Seychelles isn't actually the Garden of Eden, but Charles Gordon, the formidably bewhiskered Victorian general who visited the country in 1881, was pretty damn sure that it was. He wrote a treatise on the subject, concluding that the coco de mer tree, which produces huge nuts shaped like J-Lo's bottom and long, dangling protuberances like - well, you can guess - was the Tree of Knowledge. He may well be right.
Christina Patterson: The monster that I met in a youth club
Published: 10 November 2006
Last weekend, Katharine Jefferts Schori celebrated her appointment as the first female bishop of the American Episcopal Church with Native American "smudgers" and barefoot Chinese dancing. In a foretaste, perhaps, of the investiture of our own King Charles III, she was joined by a female rabbi and an imam. An enthusiastic supporter of same-sex blessings, the former oceanographer has reason to be cheerful. She will certainly face some opposition from the massed ranks of the church, but the verdict from the wider world is likely to be good.
Christina Patterson: The poetic tendency to licentiousness
Published: 03 November 2006
If most poets can't quite match the sexual exploits of Byron - dubbed even by his doting lover as "mad, bad and dangerous to know" - an alarming proportion of them have a damn good go. The latest example to crawl out of the literary woodwork is the poet and critic William Empson. In the second volume of his biography, published by that purveyor of celebrity sleaze, Oxford University Press, John Haffenden reveals that the man who anatomised the philosophy of the Metaphysicals and "the complex structure of words" managed rather more than seven types of ambiguity in the sack.
Christina Patterson: Cancer is a disease, not a metaphor
Published: 20 October 2006
Another week, and another feisty blonde fashionista triumphs over tragedy. This week's model is Marisa Acocella Marchetto, a slender New York socialite married to a celebrity chef. When she found a lump in her breast, she decided, apparently, to dress for success. Teetering to her chemo in "Casadei faux-croc platforms" and "Pucci rain boots", she resolved to "kick cancer's butt". Two years on, her graphic novel about her experiences is about to be made into a film. Cate Blanchett will play the "fashion fanatic with a fabulous life" in Cancer Vixen, a film whose main message, according to Marchetto, is "Don't be a victim. Be a vixen."
Christina Patterson: Nothing poetic in our sad world of jargon
Published: 13 October 2006
Last weekend, Gordon Brown made a public confession. He told a packed hall at the Cheltenham literary festival that he likes reading poetry. As political gaffes go, it was up there with Boris Johnson's pronouncements on Liverpool. First, the Chancellor admits that he's more interested in the Arctic circle than the Arctic Monkeys, and now he goes the whole - humiliating - hog. His future is surely in the balance.
Christina Patterson: Macho government is on the warpath
Published: 06 October 2006
It's hard to think of a Western government more parodically testosterone-fuelled than that of George W Bush. Here he is: the taciturn man of the people, strutting around his ranch in cowboy boots and jeans. Here he is again: the conquering hero, kitted out like Barbie's Ken, hailing his new Jerusalem in Iraq. And here's the 43rd President of the United States: suited, booted and quietly informing the world that he will hunt down and "smoke out" America's enemies - that he will launch, in fact, a war that can never end.
Christina Patterson: Angels in leather and the lure of God
Published: 29 September 2006
At a time when Islam is attracting new recruits with promises of guns, bombs and passports to paradise, the Anglicans are targeting potential converts with ice cream. Yes, really. Last Sunday, three churches on the outskirts of York took part in the initiative, spearheaded by the Rev David Casswell, to capture local hearts, minds and stomachs. The weapon was simple - a traditional choc ice - and the aim modest. "We don't mind if people just come for the ice cream," said the Rev Casswell, with characteristic Yorkshire bluntness. "Everyone has to start somewhere."
Christina Patterson: Online dating has blunted Cupid's arrow
Published: 15 September 2006
God doesn't always work in mysterious ways. Sometimes, they're really quite prosaic. The news this week that the Pope's parents met through a lonely hearts ad struck a blow for the view, favoured by certain aristocratic writers, of the Catholic faith as one of ineffable beauty and mystique. Ratzinger Snr's request for "a good Catholic pure girl, who can cook well" seems a grimly literal example of word made flesh.
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