Then we have the so-called "gender wars", which are touted in some circles as sexy, but are about as sexy as the goings on in Abu Ghraib were sexy. The same principle applies here and is necessitated by the belief systems of the sexists. The belief that to demand one's freedom is really just a cryptic demand for power OVER you, necessitates the severity of the reaction. The sexists have set their terms: The price for the removal of their boot from my neck must necessarily be my boot on their neck. Nothing else will convince them to stop abusing their power other than the exertion of a countervailing force. Their belief system -- which leaves no room for the intervention of reason -- necessitates the severity of this response.

And so, forward with the de-nazification of culture!

And let those who nurture a belief that women are only out to steal their masculinity be reminded that if your intrinsic properties can be taken from you, and appropriated by another, then they were insubstantial.

The Brits are peculiar to me in their strange psychological insularity, and I shall make no attempts to understand them. I do like -- and understand -- the self-acknowledged working class Brits, actually. I could joke with the bus drivers and found them to be largely pleasant characters. Their extraversion and tough mindedness amused me. I had the following conversation with one of them:

"My bus ticket it booked for 11 am, but is it okay if I catch this [earlier] bus anyway, if you can check and confirm this ticket?"

Bus driver says: "The number on the ticket doesn't mean anything to me. If you can show me some photo-ID, you can catch this bus."

I said: "So long as my photo-ID looks like me, I can catch this bus?"

Driver: "Yes, if your photo-ID looks like yourself, you can catch it."

[I show him my University photo-ID.]

Driver [Scrutinising it]: "This photo-ID doesn't look like you. It's older than you."

***

On the other hand, the culturally static and inert nature of most of what passes for British "culture" gives me pause for thought.

I am particularly inclined to rethink the value of the school of British psychoanalysis, in particular in terms of whether it pertains largely to the British character structure (in its more common and passive forms) rather than to the human character as such.

I'm thinking about Donald Meltzer and his idea (which now appears in starker relief to me, than before embarking on this trip) that somehow eros (in its mastubatory forms) puts a premature end to epistemological enquiry. This, it seems, could be the case in an incredibly culturally inert societal context. Yet it is counter-intuitive that it would be the case in any other societal context. Rather than being a mind-coagulating, inwards-moving and psychologically narrowing force, eros seems to me to be an expanding and expansive force -- if anything, quite the opposite to how I now see Meltzer as portraying it.

It is the opposite force to that of eros -- the death instinct, and that depicted by Freud as "Thanatos" -- that, for me, has the quality of inertia (or at most a centripetal energy,) according to my cultural experience in Australia. Nietzsche seems to agree with me that it is energy or positive life-force that causes us to separate (as if it were a centrifugal force), whereas "ressentiment" (or a barely contained hostility to others, along with the need for an assured proximity to others in order to take out one's vexations on them) causes us to bind together.

I'm back in it, and it feels dead right to be back in the Southern Hemisphere again. What got to me (initially quite starkly, but perhaps less so, and nonetheless, irksomely right to the final hallowed minutes when the plane passed out of British territory) was the British taste for complete neutrality in fashion, eating and personal style. I yearned for something flagrantly Southern Italian for more times than I could have imagined. Is there anything wrong with expecting a little bit of pizzazz?

When I snapped back into my normal mental state of casual non-conformity, I found the gap between my hope and expectations and the actual state and condition of British processes of cultural thought was even greater than it had seemed to me to have been earlier.

The stark neutrality in taste (the failure to even try to have any particular quality of one's own that isn't general and applicable to any situation) reduced me to my own level of pragmatic utilitarianism. I would take from the situation what I needed, make no effort to get drunk as it would only end in failure, and efficiently process myself out of the country via customs. This was to be the climax of the trip.

I had one item of clothing that remained, for my last morning's stay, and it was woollen, billowing at the bust and sleeves, and cinched around the knees. It has the glorious status of not having encountered my sweat through wear at even one point on the trip. I wore it down to breakfast, with my eyes still puffy and enlarged from the glass of champagne I had made my acquaintance with, the night before.

I came down to encounter one last engagement with a typical English breakfast -- something I now knew on familiar terms as I'd had 16 in one row, during my consecutive days' stay in Oxford.

I was dragging -- sweeping slightly -- however unapparently to me, and I didn't know it. Some pale whisp of a Nosferatu character, a male in only general form, felt fit to tell me. Somehow my sleeve was encountering and sweeping plates. Oh my god, one didn't want to be reminded of an English sensibility, just when one had almost succeeded in eliminating it from one's mind. Just one last act of bland servitude towards my body, I as its slave, feeding it hash and bacon and the ordinary things the English love to eat. Here I was still, in my abject state, feeding my body something that it needed rather than desired, and here was an entity, without humour, reminding me precisely of that which I was intending to forget.

A critique from a male slave to blandness, criticising my form.

I tend to react to all forms of interpellation (look it up; it is a term by Louis Althusser) by taking on something of the form in which I've been interpellated -- only in an ironic and exaggerated sense.

In this case, I would be the ingenue and foreigner who knew not how to control the manner of my movements, nor how to be compliant and discreet.

"Oh goodness!" I replied, matching a lack of humour for an irony that wasn't going to announce itself as such. I stared down at amazement at my drooping black sleeves, and gathered one of them up in deliberate fashion. "I don't think that there can be any solution at all to these sleeves I am wearing!"

His Blandness was not cracking a smile.

I later regretted my lack of commitment in follow-through.

"I should have said... I should have said... " I thought, as I sat down to another meal of repetition, "Oh dear! You DO look pale. Are you feeling quite fine?"

If the quintessential British fear is to create a scene, then those who venture forth to challenge foreigners they do not know could find a true encounter with their inner selves by virtue of gratuitous dramatisation.

In my mind (and spirit) I have aleady left Oxford three days ago. Yet when I wake up, each day, I'm still here.

Each day, I have an experience of getting lost in London. Each day, I catch the Oxford coach back to this destination, and start the whole experience again.

I can't feel anything in London because the air does not catch me in any particular way. It has that luke warm blood temperature quality, as if you were still being incubated in a womb. So much of England feels like this that you want to switch off from it in general. Surely it has no deeper meaning than a mother's womb?

I'm glad all of this will come to an end tomorrow morning. Around late morning I will leave for good. I'll leave this womb and the pacification I have felt in it, and kick my feet around in solid dirt and dust.

Have I been decompressed in this deep-sea chamber? Only time and fate will tell.

I've always preferred intense experiences, and I've always set out to create them when the generally haphazard nature of life was not forthcoming in and of itself. I facilitate a return to Rhodesia.

It's merely a sign of the depths of depravity of the patriarchy -- its complete inner corruption -- that it cannot imagine any critique of it that is not also inherently corrupt. Thus does patriarchal thinking make corruption out to be the commonplace, the normal human condition.

Yet it need not be so.

Imagine a boxing circuit where it was considered quite permissable, quite de rigeuer, for half of the competitors to dope their opponents between the first and second rounds. Here you have an image of the patriarchy.

Why some people continue to confuse patriarchy with masculinity and to insist that what we feminists are attacking is masculinity never fails to perplex me. It seems that some people have trouble knowing the difference between freedom to rort the system and freedom to demonstrate one's strength.

 Let me put it plainly: one is never not free to attempt to overcome difficulties, and if masculinity consists in this, I see no harm and all benefit to be gained in encouraging it. But complaining that an underclass of women are holding you back does not demonstrate the willpower or the courage of any kind of fighter, and breaking news is that women have it harder than you and emit fewer whines.

No -- the freedom to dope the female opponent should not be confused with anything good or worthwhile. Masculinity, I have been told, does things under its own steam, and does not need additional tricks and gadgets to try to make it look good. It knows when it looks good, because it is authentic.

The reason that the patriarchs are never quite sure if they look good and resort to taking out their frustration on women is because they were never really true to themselves to begin with. They want women to give them the reassurance about themselves that they have failed to furnish on their own behalves.