Meriblog: Meri Williams' Weblog

Why equal marriage matters to me

(cross-posted from the wonderful Medium because it’s important to have your own copies too, however great a community is: original)

I was a child without a future.

Don’t get me wrong, I had all the advantages. I was bright, got excellent grades. I’d been born white in Apartheid South Africa, experiencing incredible (undeserved) privilege. I was likely to get a full scholarship for university. I had a stable home life.

But I was facing the endless drudgery of working and going home to an empty life stretched out ahead of me. Painfully alone, forever.

I didn’t want that.

I remember contemplating suicide for the first time before I even hit my teens. How different I was became increasingly apparent from about the age of ten. The girls in my class started to get giggly around the boys, to dumb themselves down (in SA at that time, girls weren’t meant to be smart and smart girls definitely weren’t attractive).

I was bemused. I mean, boys were alright. Some of my best friends were boys. But this sudden attraction my classmates were feeling? I never felt it, never comprehended it.

And with puberty came planning. Futures, weddings, girls scribbling their names with their crush’s surname appended. Idle, childish daydreams, but central to conversations all around me.

I couldn’t imagine anything worse. Marrying a man I didn’t love? Enduring sex I didn’t want and could never enjoy? I decided very young that I would rather die.

And so my planning became razor blades, hoarding pills, finding secret hideaways where I wouldn’t be discovered until it was too late.

Dark years. Hard to write about, even decades later.

So how am I here today?

Xena.

Yes, that’s right: Xena, Warrior Princess.

In the relatively early days of the Internet, I discovered Xena messageboards. They gave me a lot of things: terminology for the things I felt, an explanation for why I found the show so compelling despite its ridiculously low production values and hilarious accent combinations (all medieval Greeks spoke with Kiwi accents, doncha know?), tentative new friendships. Exposure to a bunch of people in other countries, some just as backward as my own, some more progressive.

Interestingly though, the vast majority of us were in places where it wasn’t good to be gay: America, Africa, Australia.

The most important thing they gave me though was a friendship with a woman twice my age. She lived in Austin, Texas, with her partner of more than a decade. They were happy together, had a house, a business and a pair of adorable dogs.

I honestly had no clue this was an option.

Hearing about their life together was like being released from a tiny iron cell, coaxed outside and invited to look at a view that stretched out beautifully for miles.

I wouldn’t have made it out of my teens without knowing that view existed. I’d have been a statistic, part of the horribly high LGBTQ teen suicide rate.

In Apartheid South Africa, there were no visible, happy gay folks. We weren’t equal in the eyes of the law or society. I couldn’t daydream about marrying my dream girl, draw hearts round the names of my crushes. Marriage wasn’t an option for people like me. Happiness wasn’t an option for people like me. And it really felt like living wasn’t much of an option for people like me.

So if you’re bemused about the fight for marriage equality, wondering why it matters? It’s not just about giving folks equal rights and responsibilities. Not just about protecting our children and our families. Not just about legal and societal recognition and equality.

It’s about giving kids a future to believe in, too.

I have a lovely, trusty little laser printer which has served me well over the years – a Samsung ML-1510. I was a little disappointed to see that there weren’t modern drivers for Mac OS X for it, until I discovered SpliX. Lovely set of CUPS drivers, restoring my ML-1510 to full usefulness in a matter of moments

Sharing in case anyone else has a need for a Mac OS X driver for the Samsung ML-1510, or indeed a number of other Samsung printers — there’s a full list on the project page.

Over the past few years we bought a flat and then a house. Some recent conversations IRL and on Twitter reminded me that I never wrote up the tools that we used when househunting. A number of these sites were useful when doing so — please do let me know in the comments if there are others worth including in the lists.

First Things First: Financials

• Use a mortgage calculator to check what you can borrow and what your repayments will be. Remember to factor in utility bills, council tax, etc into your affordability calculations.
• Calculate what stamp duty you’ll need to pay and investigate what your conveyancing etc costs are likely to be. Searches, fees, etc, all add up! If it’s your first time buying, then check out MoneySavingExpert’s very comprehensive guide.

Understanding the Area

• The excellent UpMyStreet used to be my go-to for understanding an area, since it included ACORN data (type of people living in a postcode), crime, affluence, education level, etc. Sadly they were acquired and their functionality doesn’t seem to have been included in the new owners’ own site.
• However, the MousePrice Area Guide feature gives a fair amount of information and I particularly like their heatmaps.
• Check My Area is another decent resource, giving affluence ratings etc.
• If you want lots (and lots!) of detail, then the Office for National Statistics’ Neighbourhood Statistics page is for you. I find the Neighbourhood Summary the most useful, but if you really want to crunch some numbers, they’re all here.
• If schooling is important to you, then find Ofsted inspection reports to judge whether those in the area are right for your kids.
• For detailed crime stats, Police.uk plots them on a map and lets you filter by category. Really helpful to judge the relative seriousness of the crimes in the area — for instance, in student areas there might be a lot of “unsociable behaviour” but this might be OK if the violent crime / burglary rates are much lower.
• Lastly, Walkscore is an excellent little site that helps you understand how easily you can get what you need within walking distance in a particular postcode A much more advanced version of the “nearest pint of milk” test!
• UPDATE: Good point from Chris in the comments: broadband availability matters too! The maps on Think Broadband are useful and if you want to see the sort of packages and speeds available, then the USwitch broadband checker is a decent start.

Searching for Specific Properties

• Zoopla is one of the better sites, with good map features including the ability to plot a very specific area that you want to live in.
• Mouseprice again is useful and has a REALLY useful (if a little glitchy, certainly in Mac Chrome) heatmap search option — useful for seeing in colour which areas are likely ex-Council or similar if you’re looking at an area you don’t know so well yourself.
• PropertySnake lets you search for properties that have been discounted and also shows how long they’ve been on the market for. Sometimes indicates a buyer who’s holding out for a price they won’t get, but sometimes shows those properties that are a good investment if you’re willing to put the work in to modernise them etc.

Making an Offer

• Before you get too excited about that massive bargain you just spotted, use Homecheck to see whether the discounted price is due to flooding, industrial contamination or similar. Postcode searches are free, but if you want to get very specific property level advice I think you need to pay. Remember you’ll have to get this sort of search done during conveyancing anyway, so use this as an indicator but don’t shell out loads on searches.
• Check that there aren’t any planning permissions already granted that will impact the property you have your eye on by finding your local Planning Authority on Planning Portal.
• Check what council tax you will pay by first finding out the Council Tax Band and then checking the local council site for the actual tax band costs.
• OurProperty is good for finding what the specific property previously sold for. Though of course you can’t tell from this data what improvements have been made or additional lending taken out against the property, it’s a decent starting point to understanding the context of the seller.

To celebrate the launches of Department for Communities and Local Government and the Department for Transport we decided to make a terraced house (to represent DCLG) and a bus (for DFT).

Frankly I was really worried about this one as it involved a lot more detail work than I’d ever had to do before. I was hugely grateful to Ali (and her much steadier hands!) for help doing the doors and windows and basically all of the finer work on it.

The approach was pretty similar to my previous cakes — I hauled out the trusty vanilla buttermilk cake again and made four rectangular cakes (in roasting pans once more) and then cut them appropriately:

I used a glass to cut out half circles for the wheels of the bus and then iced over the entire thing, using plenty of buttercream to hold it all together:

After covering both cakes in fondant and then using more fondant cut into shapes to decorate, they slowly took shape. Ali completed them with some fine writing icing touches, from the windows to the numbers on the doors.

And though sadly I was on a train home to Newcastle when the cake was cut, it seems our departmental colleagues did enjoy them

For the public release of GOV.UK, I was asked to make the celebratory cake for the team. With all the folks at GDS and a number of visitors on the celebration day, we needed cake for 250-300 people. Definitely the largest I had ever undertaken!

So first I made 6 large roasting pans worth of my favourite vanilla buttermilk cake — including one which I made gluten free by substituting in Dove’s gluten free plain flour (which for the record is absolutely brilliant!).

Then covered them with a thick layer of buttercream icing:

Once it was all smoothed out…

We covered it in a layer of black fondant icing (which you should DEFINITELY buy ready-made rather than trying to colour it yourself — trust me…):

Ali and Ben both kindly helped out rolling out the white fondant and cutting the letters (in the correct font, of course!):

Culminating in the final product — which looked pretty good alongside the existing 100 days, 50 days and GOV.UK road signs:

And just one final shot so you can see the scale:

My friend and colleague Neil asked me to make his son’s 5th birthday cake, in the shape of his favourite lego piece. The boy has excellent taste — his favourite piece is a lego computer. I thought I’d document how I went about it in case it’s of use to anyone else

First of all I made a vanilla buttermilk cake in a large roasting tin so it was about 38cm long, 24 cm wide and 6cm deep and a bunch of vanilla buttercream icing.

Then I took the photo of the lego computer piece and measured it to make sure I got the proportions of the slope etc right. I multiplied out the ratios and matched it to the available cake:

I cut the oblong cake into a 2/3rd and 1/3rd piece and placed one on top of the other. I then carved a triangle out from the bottom to make the correct slope. With the remaining couple of pieces I made the lego studs (apparently that’s the correct term for the bumps on top of lego) for the top.

Next I covered this in a thin layer of buttercream icing — not worrying too much if any crumbs got into the icing. The key thing was to get a smooth layer, both for the fondant to stick to and to even out the total shape. Important to get this right as the fondant is very unforgiving — any bumps will show through!

Next I rolled out a couple of packets of white fondant icing and draped it across the entire shape, using a polisher to get sharp edges. I also used the back of a sharp knife to trace around the base of the bumps to make them stand out right.

And then finished it off with coloured fondant to create the screen and buttons

So, I’ve been living in central London Monday to Friday for the past 6 months. It’s been an interesting experience — particularly since I was REALLY not much of a London fan before now and it was one of the things I was most nervous about when I took the new job.

It’s been a real delight getting to know the London I’d never seen before. Previously I’d only ever visited for the day, or the weekend, or sometimes (on one particularly awful trip from Bath to Hull — yes, Hull!) just passing through.

I Love…

• Walking around. It really is a different city on foot!
• Sheer variety of food — having three different Vietnamese places to choose from ON MY WALK home is ace.
• Hearing half a dozen languages being spoken — just on my walk to work in the morning
• Being able to pop along to loads more tech/geek events

Still Not So Sure About…

• People not liking it when you smile at them. Seriously people, it’s OK to smile! Stop looking at me like I’ve escaped my strait jacket ;-P
• The Tube.
• The smell. Do you eventually get used to it, or is that why so many more people smoke?

Some Favourites So Far

• Hawksmoor — for seriously good steak and a nicely affordable lunchtime/early evening/late evening 3 course meal option
• Fleet River Bakery — good coffee, nice atmosphere (if a little crowded/noisy sometimes) and Most Excellent breakfast butties
• Banh Mi Bay — their grilled chicken & pate Vietnamese baguettes are proving very hard to resist
• Sen Viet — best pho I’ve found in London so far
• The Diner — really tasty hot dogs. And a burger that comes with pulled pork on it. Oh and the pancakes are good. And the ribs. The Diner fries (cajun spiced) are to die for… *Homer Simpson drool noise*

OK, so seems most of what I like about London is the food. Other suggestions?