Hey Sexy Reader

And so 2012 draws to a close and I'd like to thank you for your interest and support. It's been a defining year for me; one in which I left broadcasting and embarked on my poetry journey. I also got a dog.

Happy New Year and here's hoping we continue to live our dreams and dance to our own beat in 2013. You never know, the way we see it, however extreme, simple, or downright inane, might just be the interpretation or style that takes off....

Oh nuts!

For a woman still in my thirties it's been lot to come to terms with now that my childbearing days are over. I already have two darling little terrors and although the mere thought of adding a new baby into the equation triggered palpitations, it still felt nice to have the option. I could have if I wanted to...

However my husband, Peter, had other ideas. He had always made it clear that two children, an heir and a spare, was plenty. This conviction was only reinforced by the hard and never ending grind of parenting. I mean, God love 'em, but THREE would surely have tipped us over the edge?

In the end, the decision was made for us; this being the age of austerity. With deeper cuts and Britain's elongated recovery from financial crisis, we have certainly been feeling the pinch. In truth, since "becoming" a poet, it's felt more like an enormous chinese burn. Not the most lucrative of career choices it has to be said.

The average cost of raising a child in the UK from birth to their 21st birthday is now 218,000 quid. Bearing in mind we have two, we are about 400,000 quid short. And when a minister announced that University tution fees were to rise to up to nine grand per year, it was game over. My husband's bollocks had to go.....

"The Snip" by Ruth E Dixon & Peter Dixon

Fo' Shizzle

Hey there! How's your day been? I'm a little excited coz I've just released my first "rap". It's all because I've got ginger hair and people, right. People, yer, well they keep mistaking me for this lass called Rebekah Brooks. You know that bird who used to be married to a Mitchell; who seemed to be in charge of the entire British tabloid press and is bosom buddies with Rupert Murdoch?

 "Oh ha ha ha ha" I would say "no, really, you are very very funny; yes I do look just like her". It hurt a little though (only a smidgen) coz I'm a journalist too but I never did nothin bad bro and when I left my job I didn't get a seven million pounds pay off. I got a recipe for soup (delish).

Then I thought to myself  "Ruth E Dixon, I is having a cunning plan. Why don't you buy into your image issit and make sweet poetry". And then I got the idea to take it one stage further and write a rap. And then my lush gangsta (Annabel) who hangs in my hood just around the corner filmed it.

Me and Annabel thought we'd try to get the rap to "go viral" today; on the day Lord Leveson published his report into the culture and ethics of the press. But I've only got 80 followers on Twitter and Annabel's been in meetings and she's been eating cheese; and I fell asleep watching Leveson on the telly, and now I need to help my son with his homework.

Ah well. Consider yourself the exclusive audience. Keep it real bro.

Not Far Enough - The Rebekah Brooks Rap - Leveson Remix

Thank you to my buddy and wondrous filmmaker Annabel McCourt:- http://annabelmccourt.com/

Camping

Do you like music? It's a broad question I know, a bit like, do you like language or do you like countries? The vast majority of us will appreciate an aspect of it and regularly listen to a form of it be it live or recorded. Others will learn to play an instrument, or use their voice, or fiddle about with decks and beat boxes or dustbin lids. And then there are those who are born with music deep within their veins; who live and breathe it and through music find their means of expression.

You're getting an education today reader.

I really like music, I enjoy listening to it and I also tinkle the ivories every now and again. When I was a youngster I got my grade two piano and since then me and Chopsticks have never looked back. I even write the odd tune, Camping & Vaginas being my most popular to date.

The thing is, and please don't tell anyone, but in my head I'm hearing Mozart and Chopin. Alas, when it comes out, my compositions amount to little more than Knees Up Mother Brown and variations thereof. That's NOT what I meant to say fingers. Camping & Vaginas for example was supposed to be Ruth E Dixon's Prelude Number 3 "Sunshine Summers" in C major. It's fair to say that, as it turned out, the two do not blend. The one I'm currently writing has a working title of Rainbows Sonata in E Minor. Unfortunately the emerging combination of the "Have A Banana" musical notation and the lyric "He's having me Shirley's salamied" renders the original thinking meaningless. There's no getting away from it, I am a cockney poet not an Austrian piano genius. I'm not even Elton flippin John.

In order to up my game, I've enrolled the help of Peter (my husband) to aid me with my music making. I have to say, I'm really pleased with his honky tonk. The kids are enjoying it too because the rhythmn appears to prompt the need, several times, to jump off the sofa and walk around the living room with bandy legs. Not quite the Royal Albert Hall experience I had hoped for, but "a happening" nonetheless. The one thing I have had to ban though is Peter naturally falling into playing Radiohead's song Codex after our practice (apparently it's in the same key as my tune). Hearing the two back-to-back, well....salt, wounds, rubbing into etc etc.

The truth is though that I am in awe of, and hugely grateful to, that rare breed who feed your soul with their gift of music. I've just finished reading a biography of the Cellist Jacqueline du Pre. I can only sit back and let her beautiful language soak me up. 

Jacqueline Du Pre - Elgar Concerto

A link to my Camping and Vaginas song off the back of Jacqueline Du Pre would require so much self harm and salt that an agonising death would be imminent (and, reader, I still have too much music "to give"). So for those who are interested, might I suggest you go to my website:-

Not Even Elton Flippin John

                                                   Doin' the Lambeth Walk. Oi!

Show us what you've got

I've been thinking a lot recently about "offending people". Not necessarily with the intention of doing so but more with intrigue that sometimes it can be the byproduct of my work; my best work. I've been trying to figure out how and why and whether it's a problem that some people can take offence.I kind of think not because those I admire most tend to have a capacity to offend. But I needed some more reassurance.

So I googled it and I realised, hell no, it's not a problem at all. If anything, it's my duty.


Cheers internet.

Virtual Museum of Offensive Art  -  A virtual museum where you will find art works that have caused social turmoil in the past, present and possibly in the future. 

Do We Have The Right To Offend? - Peter Tatchell, Human Rights Campaigner argues that many of our most important social freedoms and advances have been brought about by people who caused great offence in their time such as Galileo and Charles Darwin.

It's Your Democratic Duty To Be Offensive  - Germaine Greer argues that freedom of speech cannot be maintained in a society where nobody ever says anything subversive or inflammatory. Agitated though we might feel by some of the things people say, we have got to go on defending their right to say them.

In conclusion to my own mini cruise of self discovery:- When I perform my poem "A Weather Girl's Got To Have Tits" please read between the lines. To be fair, most of you do. I campaign for equal rights for female broadcasters. Gender, age and the way we look should not matter. BUT, and as a completely separate issue, aesthetics and/or aesthetic beauty is truth (see "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats).

The truth is boobs have been, are and always will be absolutely lovely jubbly.

Tim Minchin's Confessions

Current Buns  - A website for up and coming female broadcast journalists.

Dogging

Well this is weird, I don't have anything to say this week. But this is my allocated "blog writing" time and it seems a shame to toss it off? I could listen to Desert Island Discs or watch Jeremy Kyle. Or, Jenny Eclair has just tweeted that the Kardashians are "live" with Lorraine. How fascinatingly dull. Somehow writing nothing, or simply searching for something to say, seems much much more productive.

So, here we are.

How do you write yours and where do you draw your inspiration?

Ummmm....I've just been in the shed to look for a bike lock. I found it but I couldn't find a key to fit. Then I washed down my panniers. Not many people can say they've done that today; or ever.

I saw the brilliant Fascinating Aida at Hull New Theatre this week. OMG, where have I been for the past thirty years? In the shed?

Oh and I drove to Milton Keynes, spent the night in a bedroom on a roundabout and found the perfect dog to buy.

I guess in future I could use this time to walk the dog...or, instead of blogging....

Dogging

I Quit This

OK, so I admit I really enjoyed the way radio presenter Danny Baker told his bosses where to stick their abacus beads after his show on BBC London was axed. "This is the best show I'll ever do, but that is apparently not the point", he said "it's about kowtowing to the reams of middle management". The fact that these swathes of management failed to actually inform Danny that his show was for the chop (he was told by his agent) makes you wonder what they actually get up to for all that time in all those meeting rooms. Hilarious to hear a clip of Danny's boss on Radio 4 programme PM saying words to the effect of "well this is the way it's always been done with Danny" i.e. NEVER actually speak to him.

Two points here reader; firstly, when I worked in local radio I avoided meetings like the plague. In my experience they were a complete waste of time and got in the way of my job; making radio. Secondly, the irony that managers of a broadcasting corporation seem to lack the ability to communicate with their staff.

When I finally faced the "semi-chop" (I couldn't present the show on my own anymore, a man needed to come in and help me), it was done with such a farcical display of colourful graphs purporting to illustrate "where I'd gone wrong" with my listeners, that it was hard to take seriously. But semi-chopped I was. I only wish when I did finally quit I had had the balls to leave in style like this DJ from Alabama...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoqJx5zQb6w