In between panel 6 and 7, Willie goes to the bathroom, brushes her teeth and washes her face. As evidenced very subtly by the fact that the paint is gone from her brow, as you will see next week in the next page … This is technically not a story where nobody ever goes to the bathroom, but I guess usually very little that would be interesting plot-wise ever happens to people while they are in the bathroom. :o/

* * *

Most of the interior decoration in their flat is based on the house where I spent my first years. I suppose it would make sense, since they moved to this flat and got most of the furniture around the time when my family moved into that house, or a bit earlier, and there would be wallpaper from the 70’s left from the previous tenants.

I don’t have many photos from that house (I have to scan some next time I visit mum!), but I posted a couple many years ago on my old Livejournal. Our kitchen had cabinets with orange-yellow doors and white shelves, and dark green appliances. The kitchen wallpaper was striped brown, beige and white (that typical 70’s “bamboo” kind).

* * *

In my research efforts on Newcastle and Gateshead, I’ve been watching a rather disturbing BBC reality TV show called “Geordie Finishing School for Girls”. Four pampered upper class girls have to survive one week on the equivalent of unemployment benefits, complete tasks related to working class life under the supervision of four working class girls their age, and get to know working class life in general.

I heard about the show because a Geordie YouTube person (whose videos I watch to study the accent) complained about how it made Newcastle look really bad. Now that I’ve seen the show that seems like a bizarre reaction. If I was a “posh” person like her I would rather get upset about how the four upper class girls make their class look bad by being so naive and prejudiced (especialls Steph – I really want to punch her in the face sometimes when she refuses to understand that life is very different if your parents aren’t rich and influential like hers, and that people who are unemployed actually aren’t just “lazy” and overly sensitive about getting rejected hundreds of times when they apply for jobs, or when she is “mildly skeptical” about where poorer people would get the money for toasters and Blackberries) … Oh well.

While the show is of course overly dramatized for the sake of “good TV”, it makes it clear many times that the “rough” neighbourhoods they visit aren’t the norm for all of Newcastle, and that there are plenty of “posh” areas too, like in any other UK city. The working class girls in the show are really lovely people, and the supposedly “rough” areas shown don’t seem terribly bad to me at all. (But maybe that rather says something about my own class identity …?!)

In any case, it’s particularly interesting to watch the show against the backdrop of the riots across the UK these days. Through its own little facet it shows how the society in the UK is extremely divided, and what an enormous gap there is between rich and poor. (As for why that is so, see this note I wrote today.)

:3

One of my favourite painters, Evsey Moiseenko, often provides excellent Russian boot reference, like here in The Soil:

I wish I could have dreams like that. :3

(You might want to refresh your memory by reading that scene from chapter 8 again …)

(In Alcoholics Anonymous, you get contact with a “sponsor”, a sober addict him-/herself, who provides support in the process. Of course, Willie knows a lot about these things, since she has probably been trying to get her dad to quit drinking for many years.)

* * *

So, apparently the “Nazidarwinists” from Eva’s solo comics really exist?

It’s very disturbing how the knee-jerk reaction of not just the media and all too many “terror experts”, but also most people in general, was to assume at first that the bombings in Oslo were the work of Islamist militants. I actually didn’t assume that, because I was thinking of how Norway withdrew its troops from Iraq in 2006, and how the Norwegian ISAF forces are kind of limited and low-profile. So I was actually leaning towards a right-wing nationalist ideology behind the bombings, but maybe that’s just my own knee-jerk reaction … Which turned out to be correct in this case. But the “Muslim terrorism” knee-jerk reaction is a symptom for how commonly accepted anti-Muslim sentiments have become these days.

Here is a good article about the ideological background of Anders Behring Breivik and his likes (google translate to English here). In the last few years, we have seen neofascism rise in Western Europe, and this act of terrorism is the direct result of that. It is acutely necessary to fight fascism now, in order to save human lives.

… Yes, I’m still very upset about this. I don’t want to be one of those “oooh, I was right!!!” leftist bloggers. But in this case, it’s very scary that my leftist knee-jerk reaction was right.

When I was that age, I wish I’d have been smart enough to have a secret aspirin stash. V`(oo)´V