Alex Bell - fantasy author

I got a subscription to Elle this Christmas. Yay! It took me a loooong time to come to fashion. When I was seventeen, I wouldn’t have been seen dead with a copy of Elle. If I saw one of my friends reading a ‘woman’s magazine’, I sneered down my nose at it. There was actual lip-curling contempt. I thought my subscription to SFX made me infinitely superior to my friends with their gawking at ridiculously high-priced fashion trinkets and the endless makeup and Gucci adverts inside those glossy pages. I’m a Captain Kirk girl, I would say in my most defiant tone. I must have been insufferable.

My problem (apart from being completely stuck up about it, that is), was that I failed to appreciate what Elle Magazine is really about. I thought it was all about status symbol shoes that none but the fabulously wealthy could ever afford to buy. I thought it was a slap in the face to any self-respecting feminist. So I stuck my tongue out at the magazine and insisted on walking around college with a battered copy of Pride and Prejudice instead, whilst completely missing the point that Elle would love Jane Austen because Elle loves any successful woman. Elle is not just about the catwalk, it is a celebration of being female.

The magazine doesn’t just profile fashion designers, they also interview novelists, comediennes, TV presenters, actresses and journalists too. They write articles about art and literature, film and travel. An edition I read last year even contained an article about becoming a writer.

Certainly a large part of the magazine is about beauty and fashion but Elle are far more interested in the style and life of Grace Kelly than, say, Paris Hilton. And they are independently-minded when it comes to fashion too, as opposed to the slavish followers of fleeting trends I always imagined them to be. One edition I bought last year contained an article titled: ‘Is Fashion Racist, Ageist and Fattist?’ In a different edition, ‘Your Body – What’s the Right Size?’ celebrated the different types of female figure. Far from perpetuating the size zero phenomenon, the magazine challenges it instead (on behalf of real-live, actual food-loving women everywhere).

Most of all, the magazine promotes diversity, variety and personal style. It is a celebration of individuality and of the self. It encourages readers to love books as well as shoes, to have an interest in fashion as well as to nurture career ambitions, to want a solid relationship with a boyfriend/partner, sure, but to not want that and only that. The magazine is a consistent celebration of being a woman in a modern world and of being free to pick and mix different interests, hobbies, likes, dislikes and passions. In this way, Elle is one of the most inclusive and open-minded types of magazine there is because it reaches beyond its own area of expertise (that of fashion and beauty) and is quite happy to dabble in countless other areas. Where else would you get articles about the newest mascara alongside glowing praise for the work of Edgar Allan Poe and the Twilight Series? Or a reference to Gabriel Garcia Marquez in an article that is, essentially, about rom-coms? Or see a one-page spread on how to wear polka dots this season alongside an article that begins with the comment: ‘All girls love Han Solo’? (It’s true, by the way – we do.)

Elle does not sneer at Star Wars the way I once sneered at glossies. They’re quite happy to take a slice out of every pie if they see something they like there. There are no cliques here, no constraining little boxes. You can love Star Wars and you can love lipstick. I love Elle because although it’s fiercely stylish, it’s fiercely intelligent and independent too.

I wrote a blog post a while back about feminism and how TV female role models have changed over the years by comparing Elena from the Vampire Diaries with Sam from Bewitched. I think that drippy, empty-headed, whiny Elena would read (if you can call it reading since there are more photos than words) a sensationalist celebrity gossip magazine like Hello (if she could tear herself away from Stefan long enough to read anything at all, of course). But Sam, with her independence, her class, her intelligence, her sense of humour and her sense of mischief, would most definitely read Elle.

This advert for Agent Provocateur’s new perfume is like a visual representation of everything that’s so good about Elle. It’s very beautiful with its brooding overtones of cool French sophistication and an impossibly chic model but rather than having her kissing some half-naked stud, what do they have instead? They have her playing chess. There is no man in sight in this advert (half naked or otherwise). It’s all about the woman. Bravo, Agent Provocateur. Since discovering pure lotus flower oil in Egypt I rarely wear perfume anymore but this advert ticks every box for me and, if I could succeed in confirming that this company does not test its products on animals, I’d seek out this perfume tomorrow.

And therein lies the one niggle that I have with Elle – I would love to see more of a focus on ethical beauty and fashion. Although green issues do make the occasional appearance, it would be nice to see much more of that along with some discussion of the animal rights issues in the cosmetics industry as well. Realistically, this is unlikely to happen any time soon since so much of the fashion world is corrupted with gross mistreatment of animals but, still, I can’t help thinking that if Elle can challenge size zero then surely they can challenge animal-tested make-up too. It’s an evil that need not exist, and should be eradicated, but only will be when consumers, and publications like Elle, protest long and loudly enough.

In the meantime I am very much enjoying writing for EcoChic Magazine (check it out here: http://www.ecochicmagazine.co.uk/). Where else would I get to write about international human rights and organic chocolate body butters? Sweet perfection.

There was a discussion on Twitter a while back, instigated by James Long of Speculative Horizons fame, about what makes a good author blog. The reason I eventually decided to set up a website and a blog was, primarily, in order to promote my books and myself as a writer. It seemed sensible to have an online presence of some kind. If I have a publication date or a writing event coming up then I try to blog about it in advance (although I haven’t always been as good at this as I should, particularly regarding the events). But events and publication days don’t come around all that often. What do you blog about in the meantime?

My theory is that there are two styles of blogging: there’s the author page style, and the facebook style. The author page style is the kind of blog that deals only with issues of writing, reading and being published. It talks about word counts, and the current state of the work in progress, and upcoming public events, and various publications of the author’s novel in other languages and other formats. There may be serious discussions of serious writerly topics such as gender in SF, or the maps debate, or whatever, but the blog is, fundamentally, an extension of the author’s page on their publisher’s website – it tells you about their books but it doesn’t tell you too much about them.

Then there’s the facebook style of blogging and, for better or worse, it is the one I tend to embrace. This is the kind of blog that’s like a sort of extension of the writer’s personal facebook page. If you enjoyed reading a book then it naturally follows you might have some curiosity about the person who wrote it. This style of blog says more about the author than about their books. It is a less private style of blogging although it does, of course, involve information and announcements about books and writing as well.

I wouldn’t say one style is better than the other but I am curious as to what people generally prefer when it comes to author’s blogs, and what it is that they look for in them. Perhaps the style choice comes down to what you ultimately want to get out of your blog. Do you want to inform? Do you want to make people think? Do you want to make them laugh? Do you just want as many followers as possible no matter what the quality (or lack thereof) of their contribution to the topic being discussed?

I’m a pretty irregular blogger and perhaps I don’t post as often as I ought to. Part of the reason for that is time. Plus, I’m easily distracted. But, mostly, it’s because I don’t want to blog just for the sake of blogging. I therefore only write a post if I have something I genuinely want to say or to talk about. In fact, one of the main factors that finally pushed me into setting up a website in the first place was that, at the time, for some reason that I no longer remember, I felt a really pressing desire to blog about Slowpoke Rodriguez. I remember being on holiday in Athens with my family and looking at these amazing ruins and all I could think about was how much I wanted to have a website with a blog post about Slowpoke Rodriguez on it. It’s odd, I know, but there you are. That’s life. That’s my life, anyway. Ironically, though, to this day, the Slowpoke post remains one of the most popular on my blog.

My personal preference is to approach my website in a pretty informal manner. It is, however, difficult for me to try to guess what exactly the average visitor would like to see from my blog, or from any other author’s blog, for that matter, simply because I can’t look at this in an unbiased way. I can’t help but be incredibly biased because I am a writer myself. So when I think about what I like to see on another author’s blog, I’m still thinking in terms of a writer rather than a reader.

For example, I have recently discovered Dennis Lehane’s crime novels and I have been completely blown away, both by his incredible prose, and the twists and turns of his intricate plots. I looked at his blog hoping to find some discussion of how he writes, or how much plotting he does on a novel before he starts it, or what research he does beforehand etc. But I’m thinking as a writer, and I would assume that the average reader, with no aspirations to write themselves, probably doesn’t have all that much interest in the grim minutiae of the writing process. I could be wrong in this, but I would assume that what might be immensely interesting to me from a professional point of view isn’t going to be so fascinating to the average person who just wants to read the book and then move on. I mean, you can enjoy watching a film, but that doesn’t mean you want to watch a two hour documentary on the making of it.

In addition, there’s also the fact that I don’t normally want to blog about writing because writing is my job. I have been thinking about this stuff all day (and all night, sometimes) and it can get to the point where you just don’t want to think, or talk, about it anymore. I’m usually, therefore, more inclined to blog about some film I just watched, or some weird thing I found, or something my Great Dane did, or something I found funny because my sense of humour is weird that way. It’s not all fluff, though; I have written about politics and animal rights as well – occasionally I’ll have a crack at discussing something serious, at the risk of provoking irate comments on the comments page.

These are the so-called ‘danger’ areas where online spats and arguments are wont to break out and make mountains out of mole hills. Personally, I am pretty thick skinned about these things – like a rhinoceros, really – and I enjoy debate and disagreement and being challenged and made to think about things differently, so a visitor to my blog is unlikely to offend me very easily, but if I write about something more serious than my Great Dane wearing a party hat and eating a birthday cake (for example, if I write about vegetarianism or my political opinions) then I run the risk of offending someone which could then put them off buying my books. Clearly, I do not want this, but, at the same time, I’d like to occasionally use my blog to discuss a topic that is important to me, and that I feel passionately about, without getting too caught up on the possibility that someone, somewhere, might feel offended by my post.

In the main, though, it’s difficult for me to be serious about things (too many years spent studying Law will do that to a person). But I always tend to feel slightly guilty about posts that have nothing to do with writing. My perception – rightly or wrongly – has always been that it’s not what’s expected of an author’s blog. Even though these are the posts I want to write, I sometimes feel like I ought to write about writing instead, even though I don’t particularly want to most of the time.

There’s also the question of who reads writer’s blogs. If you’re just a casual reader who read a book and quite enjoyed it then perhaps you might look at the author’s website once and glance at the most recent blog post but I would think those people probably aren’t going to be regular readers who come back and check the website frequently. People following the blog of a sci-fi or fantasy author are, I think, more likely to be active members of the sci-fi community themselves: reviewers, bloggers, other writers, editors. And they, perhaps, will want something different from the average Joe who bought your novel on a whim in Waterstones because they liked the look of the cover.

Since I don’t know what it is that the average visitor wants from my blog, my philosophy tends to be to please myself and write about whatever the hell I like. If that makes me look like a frivolous sort of personality with an unhealthy preoccupation with shoes, or an unseemly fascination with skeletons, or a totally disproportionate sense of pride in the extreme gorgeousness of my dog, well, then so be it. So be it. This is my blog and the beauty of the thing is that I can write whatever I want on it. I can even delete comments if I want to (not that I have ever have had to do this as of yet – one benefit of not being a super-star is that the quality of the readership and comments on my blog remains extremely high. It’s only when you get crazy popular that the weirdo’s start coming out and harassing you on your own website).

When I first started my blog (with nothing but a blank page and a dream about bringing Slowpoke Rodriguez to the masses) I don’t think I intended for it to be quite so . . . well . . . so bonkers all the time. Or to have quite so many photos of Great Danes and weird things on it. But it has evolved like that over the two and a half years that I have had it, and it’s unlikely to change now. Not unless I undergo a serious personality change at some point in the near future (or rethink my decision to drop out of law school, in which case, clearly, all the fun will have to go). For the foreseeable future, though, I fully intend to stick with my own facebook style of bloggery.

What’s more important – that a book is well written or that it has an engaging story? I’ve always been firmly on the side of story. If the story isn’t compelling then it surely doesn’t matter how beautifully it’s been written. That’s what I’ve always thought, at least. However, I am now reading a book that’s making me rethink my position. I managed to get my greedy fingers on not one, but two, of the titles for World Book Night, one of which was Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is 348 pages and I am up to page 116, and I am completely and utterly gripped – not by the story, but by the writing. It is one of the most exquisitely written books I have ever come across – and I do consider myself to be pretty well read. There is an effortlessness in every sentence and I feel like this book is showing me just how great the written word can be.

So far this year I have read a lot of just-released books, and have found many of them to be insipid and bland, and now that I am reading Marquez, those other books seem even more insubstantial and unsatisfying – like having a glass of water for dinner as opposed to a three course meal. Time of Cholera is something to really get your teeth into and, right now – just over 100 pages in – I feel like the book is nourishing my reader’s soul. I am not massively engaged with the characters or their story (although I suppose that could still change), but, with this book, it honestly doesn’t matter. I feel almost hungry for Marquez’s words. How refreshing to read a book that is not a fast-driven frenzy of activity from beginning to end. What a welcome change for there to not be some sort of fight scene or car chase on every page. This is a book that allows itself to breathe – and is all the better for it.

Pace is something I am painfully aware of with my own writing. I’m aware of a constant pressure to make sure the action doesn’t slow down, even for a second, in case – God forbid – the reader gets bored, and the reviewers begin baying for your blood etc etc. Surely we have not sunk so low as a society that all we want to see is pretty people running away from explosions? It is a notion that I dislike intensely. Not so much for Lex Trent or other comic fantasies because they’re naturally more fast-paced – but for serious adult books I find it very frustrating that there should be such a single-minded focus on grabbing the reader’s attention by doing the writing equivalent of bashing them over the head with a heavy object. Personally, I generally dislike books that start with action scenes or fights or chases. They bore me. If I don’t know the characters yet then I couldn’t care less what happens to them as they run madly through the house whilst being pursued by a werewolf/man with gun/love-sick sparkly vampire. Still, I am told that this is what most people want in an opening chapter.

In the story versus style debate I would hold up Dan Brown as a brilliant example of the former. I realise it’s dreadfully unfashionable of me to like Dan Brown, and many people (some of whom openly admit to having never even picked up one of his books) seem to almost fall over themselves in their eagerness to proclaim that the man cannot write, or that his writing style is clumsy at best. I do not accept this. I think Dan Brown is a very skilled and intelligent thriller writer, and no aspirations to literary snobbery will make me say otherwise. Dan Brown does not write beautifully but the stories he tells do not require that he should. I enjoyed The Da Vinci Code but I absolutely loved The Lost Symbol. I devoured it because every time I got to the end of a chapter I couldn’t wait to learn what was going to happen next. It gripped me very differently from the way Time of Cholera is gripping me now.

I am in awe of Marquez’s writing – literally, I am in awe of him – but I’m still more likely to take a Dan Brown book on holiday with me, or reread a Dan Brown book, or rush to the cinema to see a film adaptation. I am still more likely to eagerly seek out other work of Brown’s that I have not yet read – not because I think his books are better than Marquez’s but because, for me, story is still more important than style. I read Brown’s books – and others like them – for a different reason. Fundamentally, I read those books to enjoy them as a reader, whereas a book like Love in the Time of Cholera I’m reading mainly as something to aspire to as a writer – a fondly nurtured dream that perhaps if one worked at it solidly for fifty years or more, one might become even half as good.

And now, as a post script to this post, for anyone who hasn’t heard about this yet, my good pal, and blogger extraordinaire, Amanda Rutter, along with several other very fine people, have organised and set up an auction in aid of the Red Cross Japanese Tsunami Appeal. I’d like to encourage you to head on over to http://genreforjapan.wordpress.com/ where you can bid on all manner of exciting things, including rare signed books, critiques from authors and the chance to have your name in an author’s upcoming book. There is some super exciting stuff up for grabs – and, as a genre fan, some of the lots have left my fingers itching to reach for my credit card. As an example, if you’d like to be a baddie who dies horribly, but has some great powers (and who wouldn’t?!), in my friend Suzanne McLeod’s upcoming Spellcrackers novel then go here http://genreforjapan.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/item-27-appearance-in-the-next-suzanne-mcleod-novel/ and place your bid. I’d bid on this myself if I hadn’t just donated to Japan Earthquake Animal Rescue and Support. Sadly, animals tend to get overlooked in natural disasters of this type but they are just as much in need of aid as their human counterparts. If I and my whole family were killed in an earthquake and my spoilt, pampered pets were left to fend for themselves I would hope to God that there would be someone there to help them. If you’d like to donate to their ongoing efforts on behalf of animals in Japan then you can do so here: http://japanearthquakeanimalrelief.chipin.com/japan-earthquake-animal-rescue-and-support/

Or: Elena versus Sam.

I love I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched but there’s always a slight jarring element for me – particularly in Bewitched – with the way both female leads try so hard to please the male lead. Their lives revolve around making their men happy. The suggestion is that, as Darrin’s wife, it’s Sam’s duty to obey him and so if he doesn’t want her to use magic then she simply accepts this without question, and tries to live like a human for him, meaning that she’s cleaning floors on her hands and knees and pushing a hoover around by hand rather than simply snapping her fingers (or twitching her nose, as the case may be) and doing it all by magic. It’s a ludicrous premise and one that would surely make the hackles rise on any modern housewife. I don’t think such a show could be made today. In these post-Buffy years, people want strong heroines of the kick-ass variety rather than the housewife variety. Heroines have moved on and are now expected to be stronger, sexier and sassier than ever before.

Or, at least, that’s what I’ve always thought. But then I watched an episode of The Vampire Diaries soon after an episode of Bewitched and thought yikes, there’s no way that Elena is a better role model for women than Sam. I watch and enjoy Vampire Diaries but, Christ, Elena is one hell of a wet blanket. She doesn’t seem to really know what she wants, and she doesn’t appear to have any kind of life or personality beyond Stephen. If she has any career ambitions or plans for her future then the audience are left entirely unaware of them. There’s also a disturbing trend in YA heroines nowadays to drop friends, family and, indeed, their entire lives, in order to be with their boyfriends. It’s a single-minded devotion and obsession far beyond anything Sam or Jeannie ever displayed.

Plus, heroines of the likes of Elena and Bella are ordinary human girls constantly needing to be rescued by their powerful vampire boyfriends. In the 60s American sitcoms it was the other way around. Sam and Jeannie are both far more powerful than their men, and if anyone’s going to be doing any rescuing, it’s going to be the women. Sam and Jeannie both know what they want and go after it, whereas Bella and Elena spend most of their time dithering about trying to make up their minds and complaining about how ill used they are. Sam is strong and capable – cross her and you’ll be sorry for it. Darrin probably lost count of the number of times she turned him into an animal or an inanimate object of some kind. But cross Elena and what’s she going to do? Pout at you to death?

Of course, it should be acknowledged that these are two very different shows – one is a sitcom and one is a drama – so it’s not comparing like with like, but it’s still an interesting contrast between heroines considering the difference in decades, and how far women are supposed to have moved on since the 60s. Also, the Vampire Diaries is aimed predominantly at teenagers so maybe that partially explains the fact that Elena is a whiny teenager whereas Sam is a strong grown-up woman. The emphasis is on her being a smart and powerful witch who also happens to be classy and sexy, whereas with Bella and Elena the emphasis is very firmly on the fact that they’re pretty. Well, good for them, but what else have they really got going for them? They never seem to have any fun. They don’t study for exams. They don’t make plans for their future. They just moon over their boyfriends. Yuck, yuck, yuck! It makes me cringe.

So perhaps you don’t have to be some sort of kung-fu Buffy action hero to be a true heroine. Perhaps there is something to be said for the quiet strength, keen intelligence and no nonsense attitude of the housewife heroine who knows exactly what she wants and works hard to get it. Certainly that type of heroine has surely got to be infinitely preferable to a whining teenage girl who only gets by on her looks and whose main hobby – indeed, sole purpose in life – seems to be that of ‘being saved’ and/or ‘being ravished’.

Here’s a photo of my poor cat Mitsi after watching the Mary Bale video:

She hid under that blanket for hours, quaking with fear, even after I explained to her that Mary didn’t know where we lived. Moose even tried to talk her out but it was no good – she wasn’t to be moved:

As for Siamese Suki and fluffy pal, Chloe, they just looked understandably annoyed by the footage:

Ace and Cindy, the other two members of the Bell cat gang, were unavailable for comment.

This Mary Bale thing puzzles me for two different reasons. For starters – like most other sane people in the world – I don’t understand why Mary Bale took it upon herself, entirely unprovoked, to throw a friendly moggy into a bin. The simple explanation is that she’s a mean old bat, and a little bit bonkers (and bears more than a passing resemblance to the Bigoted Woman of election notoriety . . .) But that’s not the only thing that puzzles me about this whole affair. Indeed, what puzzles me the most is the general public’s reaction to it.

As an animal rights activist and ardent cat lover, I understand why I dislike Mary Bale but, as for the rest of society, I’m not entirely sure. I would like to think it’s because, when an act of cruelty towards animals is brought to peoples’ attention in this way, they, quite rightly, condemn it. And yet it seems incongruous for anyone who eats meat, or who buys Fairy Liquid or Head and Shoulders or Pringles or any other product manufactured by an animal testing company such as Proctor and Gamble, to claim to be outraged by Mary Bale’s act – and I strongly suspect that the vast majority of people who joined the Facebook hate groups fall into both those categories.

I read an article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/28/cat-litter-pets-protected-and-persecuted) yesterday by Guardian journalist, Michele Hanson, commenting on the Mary Bale/wheelie bin incident, in which she states, quite correctly, that we are a confused nation when it comes to animal rights. We claim to be a nation of animal lovers but, sadly, many people seem wholly incapable of putting their money where their mouths are. Naomi Campbell, for example, was quite happy to pose naked for a Peta anti-fur advert – presumably because she got to take her clothes off and look all sexy and sultry and stuff – but then, fifteen years later she’s photographed pouting alluringly in a fur coat (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1210423/Naomi-Campbell-models-sable-coat-15-years-Peta-anti-fur-advert.html). Many, many people only identify themselves as animal rights activists, or animal lovers, when it is fashionable – or easy – to do so. When it simply involves condemning another person, for example, and not inconveniencing their own lives in any way by giving up something they love or changing the way they behave.

There seems to be a disturbing tendency amongst the British public (and probably any other country’s public) to cherry-pick which causes to be excessively outraged about, and which to merely shrug shoulders over and say: ‘It’s only an animal.’ I do not expect other people to feel the way I do about animal rights issues but, for God’s sake, can’t there at least be a little bit more consistency and a little less hypocrisy?

For example, I read an article a while back about a man who killed his neighbour’s little border terrier, Wurzel, after it got into his garden (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1209475/Company-boss-battered-neighbours-barking-pet-dog-death-hoe.html). The dog was hit over the head with a shovel. The RSPCA chose not to prosecute because, they said, Wurzel did not experience “undue pain” (a requisite for prosecution under the Animal Welfare Act 2006). Let’s be clear about this – Wurzel did not die instantly. He was tossed over the wall back into his own garden, where his owner later found him lying on the porch shaking and covered in blood. He had to be put down later that same day. If that’s not “undue pain” then what is? Since the RSPCA declined to press charges, the dog’s owner was forced to spend her own money bringing a private action for the only charge available to her – that of criminal damage to private property (since, legally, that’s all a pet is – property). She lost. Animals are woefully under-protected by the law, and charities like the RSPCA can only do so much when they are continually fighting an uphill battle with limited funds.

I’ve seen several commentators over the last few days suggesting that people get more worked up about cruelty to animals than cruelty to people. This is utter nonsense. As Wurzel’s case so aptly proves - people don’t get more outraged about cruelty to animals than cruelty to people - they get more outraged over cruelty they can actually see. Wurzel’s case infuriated me when I read about it and, although it was covered in the news, it certainly was not highlighted the way that Lola’s case has been. The explanation, I suspect, is that Mary Bale was caught on tape, whereas Neville Hill’s monstrous act of hitting a little dog on the head with a shovel was not. If his cowardly attack upon the dog had been filmed then I have to assume people would be even more incensed over this than they were over Lola. Surely that’s the only sensible explanation, isn’t it? I mean, surely everyone agrees that killing a dog with a spade is worse than putting a cat in a bin? So it would seem that, sadly, people are only able to feel outrage over the injustices they can actually see. I don’t understand this. Obviously, as a writer of fantasy fiction, imagination is supposed to be my forte and all that, but I wouldn’t have thought it beyond the realms of possibility for ordinary people to imagine a scenario such as the one reported with Wurzel.

So to all those people getting their knickers in a twist over Mary Bale, rushing to join online hate groups and so on, I would remind them that there are many, many injustices to animals that we do not see but that exist nonetheless. If you eat meat, if you buy Fairy Liquid (or any other product that has been used to torture rabbits), or barn eggs from caged hens, then you actively perpetuate those injustices. There is no softer way of putting it. Perhaps such people might reflect for a moment on the wise words of Albert Schweitzer: ‘Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.’ And let’s cease indulging in this fiction that Mary Bale is significantly worse than the average British citizen out there. She isn’t really. The difference is that she got caught.

Having said that, I would be much more shocked to see a CCTV video of an acquaintance of mine throwing a cat in a bin than I would to see a video of them eating a burger. Since I believe that eating meat is ethically worse than what Mary Bale did (because slaughtering an animal – whether you do it yourself, or pay someone else to do it for you – is worse than putting an animal in a bin), I’m not really sure why this should be. It’s a strange cultural by-product, I suppose, of the society we live in. Eating meat is considered socially acceptable – binning random moggies is not. And it seems that I can’t help but be affected by this social norm, even when I don’t want to be. I suppose, in addition, even though Lola was not seriously hurt, Mary Bale’s act was deliberately and maliciously cruel, whereas most meat eaters and Fairy Liquid users – I hope – are not. People know animals have to be slaughtered in order to end up a slab of meat on their plate, but they try not to think about it. Or perhaps they are incapable of properly imagining it.

Sir Paul McCartney said that ‘if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.” I hope this is true. I dearly hope that it is. Because it if isn’t, it means that people don’t ignore the many injustices to animals that are so prevalent in our world because of the fact that they fool themselves into thinking they don’t exist, it means they ignore the injustices because they simply don’t care. And I would like to hope that deep, deep down, people are better than that.

In conclusion, then, logically I don’t think Mary Bale is any worse than the average meat-eating Briton but, emotionally, I can’t help but condemn her more than I condemn them. Nevertheless, there is a moral inconsistency here, and one that should be recognised in amidst all the hysterical outrage and excessive condemnation.

On that note, here’s one last snap of Suki, my tiny Siamese:

She knows I live to serve her. And if anyone ever attempted to grab Suki by the scruff of her neck and throw her into a bin, I’m afraid that I would lose my rag rather spectacularly. She may be wonky, she may be bent, she may be ever so very neurotic, but that cat is the absolute apple of my eye and I won’t pretend to be anything less than completely and utterly besotted with her, and her big blue eyes, and her teeny, tiny feet.