Short Hair.

Feminism Laurie Penny answers a really, really incorrect column about why women who have short hair are somehow "damaged". Frankly, I don't see it's anyone business how another person looks or wants to (unless there's some kind of work related rule but even then...). The stuff about how she grew her hair long to please her boyfriend makes me embarrassed about my gender:

"I’ve experimented with growing the crop out twice, encouraged both times by men I was dating. It seemed like the thing to do to make myself more pleasing to potential boyfriends, potential bosses, and other people with potential power over my personal happiness. Both times, it looked awful. It took a lot of effort and a surprising amount of money to maintain, and it still looked awful, and I didn’t feel like myself. Growing it past my chin took determination, because every day I’d look in the mirror and want to take the razor to it right then and there."

Laurie Penny interviews Terry Pratchett.

Books In case you missed it, Laurie Penny's stunning interview with Terry Pratchett:

"It is at this point that he breaks into song. I don’t mean this figuratively. I mean that he calmly and decisively starts singing the old English folk tune “The Larks They Sang Melodious”. He has a good voice, a quavering baritone that has lost none of its strength, and he doesn’t give a damn that half of the café has turned to look.

"Pratchett sings two whole verses. The song is full of firelight and longing and nostalgia for warmer, younger days, and if you half-close your eyes you could be sitting around a country fire, listening to some elderly relative tell you stories about love and death that are no less true for being ever so slightly made up. Except that that’s not where we are – we’re in a branch of Starbucks, drinking slightly stale tea, and “The Larks They Sang Melodious” was not written to be sung over piped-in Brazilian jazz."

"remains about armpit height"

Travel Laurie Penny is leaving London. Here she is romancing the underground:

"More than anything, I wanted the tube. Every time we went to London for a visit, I could happily have ridden the underground all day. I wanted to lose myself in the dark and mouse-running scramble of crammed-together humanity and come up again in the light. I liked being one of the sardine people, even in rush hour, even at my height, which was and remains about armpit height on the average commuter. Late at night, the platforms echo with the memory of thousands of city dwellers huddled together for shelter with the bombs of the Blitz overhead. Catching the last Bakerloo line home, you can almost see them, out of the corner of your eye, through the cracks in history: propped against one another, mindlessly tired."

Yes, absolutely. Merseyrail just isn't the same.