Hypatia Avenue

“And motives like stowaways

Are found too late.” – W H Auden

So… after another fabulous monthly reunion with my pals of the YWP,I returned home to find the festering – oh, sorry, festivetree festooned with the overenthusiastic sparkly Christmas efforts of Flatmate A and B. Which was nice. And over a glass of totally unnecessary Amaretto which just about kept us tiddly girls topped up in terms of alcohol, I managed to keep up a pretty fucking deep and not particularly drunken conversation with Flatmate A.

In our surprisingly lucid discussion we covered:

The redundancy of the terms "winning" and "losing" in modern warfare.

How the age of irony, cynicism and intense self-reflection avoided its inevitable slide into hedonism then anarchy then self-annihilation with the occurrence of September 11.

How September 11 simultaneously helped us avoid a backlash against irony which would logically (but probably not practically) have seen us all becoming over-earnest and sentimental.

Whether or not the backlash against irony and self-reflection would in fact have been sentimentalism.

The quarter-life crisis being the new gap year.

Turning 30 being the new coming of age - and whether or not anything you do before 30 can be remembered as anything other than precociousness and mere media hype.

How feminism has failed if women don't fight on the frontline - and just how deeply ingrained are the double standards of post-feminism in the age of global terror and imminent hostile military action.

Whether it is wiser to give all you can in love and suffer for it, than to give what you think you can manage and always wonder if there is more to it.

The internet and new communications as a new global support system - and the unforeseeable consequences of treating it as such.

Whether or not we should have another or go to bed.

Yah, it was one of those nights.