Up Front by Emma Hart

Capitulation has a sound. It's the slap of my forehead dropping into my hands as I realise that my expectations for the New Zealand cricket team still weren't low enough. It's a clattery wooden sound and the tone of weary resignation in Bryan Waddell's voice.

I feel terrible saying it. Who wants to kick this team when they're down? For a start your leg would get really tired. Sometimes, though, there just comes a point where you have to say, cricket is not a faith-based initiative. The first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem, and the Black Caps' problem is that they suck. It is possible that I take their repeated serial failures a bit personally. They're 'we' and 'us' in our house in a way that the All Blacks, for instance, aren't.

I can't remember when I first fell in love with cricket. It certainly wasn't at primary school, where girls weren't allowed to play. Well, except in Standard Two, where Mr Foster's idea of a class treat was to take us all out for a game of cricket to see how long he could bat while screaming abuse at anybody who did anything wrong. No, I don't think it was that.

I guess I first became aware of cricket's power on trips to Australia as a kid. Those summers, the cricket was on in the lounge of every house, commentators' voices providing a gentle counterpoint to the constant drone of ceiling fans and racism. It was the Chappell-Hadlee era when I started to become aware of players' names and roles. For some reason the player I chose from that stellar line-up as a personal hero was Ewan Chatfield – and not for his demonstration of why you don't bowl bouncers to tail-enders.

Cricket suits our tendency to root for the under-dog as a nation. We love our nuggety tail-enders battling for survival just as much as we love watching Chris Cairns hit sixes out of Scottish stadiums and into rivers.

While we're on the subject, I suppose we shouldn't under-estimate the influence of the Cairns Boy on my love of cricket. When I was at uni, my best friend and I set out to then-Lancaster Park to watch New Zealand play Pakistan. Stopping briefly at her house on the way, we discovered that neither Cairns nor Imran Khan were playing, so we didn’t bother going. Also we wouldn’t be needing those binoculars.

My partner found the Cairns thing hilarious. We'd be sitting at Hagley Oval watching Canterbury play while the kids roamed free, and he'd be running a monologue something like this:

Have you noticed how tight his trousers are? I thought it was just the wind pushing them back, but now he's fielding on the other side and they're still doing that. Nobody else's trousers are that tight. Hey, he's looking right at you. He's staring. He's probably thinking, "there’s that chick I saw in McDonalds the other day".

When Chris Cairns put out his autobiography, my partner managed to get hold of one of those life-sized cardboard cut-outs of him as a Christmas present for me. He thought it would be really funny if I woke up and it was standing next to the bed. Unfortunately for him, I woke up to find him pushing it into position. All I could see without my glasses in the darkened room was a man-sized thing silently gliding towards me. It was a good couple of minutes before I could stop screaming. I don’t wake up well. My kids grew up with Cardboard Chris, which was why when we ran into him and his family in McDonalds, my daughter yelled, "Look! It’s Cricket-Man!"

Even without him and Stephen Fleming though, cricket is still a Beautiful Game. I know that's supposed to be soccer, but for me a well-timed straight drive or an athletic diving catch is a thing of pure joy. And without being one of those people who can quote you stats until your head explodes, I love the rich history and humour associated with the game.

Even New Zealand cricket has had some wonderful moments. Winning at Lord's. Lou Vincent making a century on debut against Australia. (We still didn’t win.) White-washing Australia in a couple of huge run-fest one-dayers last year. And yet we front up in Brisbane to play an Australian team that's just been bashed about by India, and did I think we could match them? Nah. We just struggled against Bangladesh – the only results Google yields for 'Black Caps shock loss'.

So we lost the first test, not just a bit, but really thoroughly. At least we've fixed that problem where our tail-enders were making half our runs. And now we'll go to Adelaide and lose all over again, but in prettier surroundings. I'll be out of town for the first three days of the Second Test, and I'm more than half expecting it to all be over by the time I get home. But will I get my hopes up every time we take a couple of quick wickets or make twenty runs without losing a wicket? Of course I will. What would life be without the occasional triumph of hope over experience?

You know what it's like. You get back to the internet after a break, and the first thing you do is find out what the sex blogs are doing, right? Right?

While I was gone, Australia made me a political party.

I'll admit at this point I was torn. The Australian Sex Party. There are so many jokes so deeply inherent in just the name that it's almost too easy. So just this once, I’m going to see what it's like going with my nobler instincts, and taking this seriously.

The Australian Sex Party will be launching at the Melbourne Sexpo (oh, this 'serious' thing isn't going to be easy) on November 20th and will attempt to gather the mandatory 500 members to become a registered political party. 'And a pony' could well be their least dodgy inducement. (Alright, I failed. I have no nobler instincts. Happy now? Because if not, I may know a political party that could help.)

They're already behaving just like a lot of other political parties, in that they've got a press release out, but there's no policy on their website. (As an aside, by the look of that website they desperately need at least one communications advisor, so if anyone knows an out of work bureaucrat looking to move to Australia, I can see an opening.)

Still, if there aren't any details, there are mission statements:

The Australian Sex Party is a political response to the sexual needs of Australia in the 21st century. It is an attempt to restore the balance between sexual privacy and sexual publicity that has been severely distorted by morals campaigners and prudish politicians.

Its platforms include a national sex education curriculum, reducing censorship, abolishing the Federal Government's proposed internet filter and supporting gay marriage.

Struggling through the urge to snigger in that first sentence, those sound like some platforms I could wear. Party Convener Fiona Patten, chief executive of the Eros Association, points to the proposed Aussie Clean Feed as a major stimulus behind the formation of the party. They also want a consistent national sex education curriculum like those in place in Britain and France, and a repeal of the ban on Australian foreign aid going to abortion services.

Single issue party? Sure. But they started it. If I were Australian (that is, if the Kiwi half of me were also Australian) and a party gave me full gay marriage, decent sex education from kindergarten, liberal censorship laws, and got rid of that stupid, stupid filter, I'd even forego the pony.

Speaking of the stupid stupid filter, things are developing. The Green Party has been giving Communications Minister Steve Conroy a hard time in the House, and now the ISPs are getting all testy:

Michael Malone, managing director iiNet, said he would sign up to be involved in the "ridiculous" trials, which are scheduled to commence by December 24 this year.

Malone's main purpose was to provide the Government with "hard numbers" demonstrating "how stupid it is" - specifically that the filtering system would not work, would be patently simple to bypass, would not filter peer-to-peer traffic and would significantly degrade network speeds.

"Every time a kid manages to get through this filter, we'll be publicising it and every time it blocks legitimate content, we'll be publicising it."

As more details emerge closer to the trials starting, things become even more alarming. Turns out there are two blacklists, and you can only opt out of one of them. Electronic Frontiers Australia also looks at the content of the much-touted ACMA blacklist – or at least what they can deduce, given the list is secret. Best guess is that about half the sites on the list contain nothing but legal material.

It's enough to make people want to form a political party. I do hope our new Minister for Laying Fibre Up My Driveway will be watching Senator Conroy's special Christmas train-smash closely.

This year I've discovered a sure-fire way to distract myself from less than ideal election results. Well, alright, another one; one that doesn’t involve imbibing flammable liquids. We're moving house.

This is something we haven't done for a while, and while I wasn't looking, our home apparently turned into the Pacific Trash Vortex. Debris has washed up in the quiet cupboards and wardrobes. Sorting it out has been like going on an archaeological dig – except way more interesting, because it's all about me.

The finds have caused much reminiscing. Our children's artwork from kindy. A receipt for a computer from 1998. (Remember when we thought ten gig was unimaginably huge?) One of those old pink Echo Records bags. The photograph of me my partner used to carry with him when we had to be apart. My medical records from my pregnancies. All binned.

Travel light. I can't sleep in a room where I don't have a clear path to the door. You have to throw things out. I learned this valuable lesson from my family, who haven't. Cleaning out my aunt's house was like some weird form of backwards purgatory: my virtuous mother and cousin spent days in there, and I got let off lightly by dint of being heavily pregnant to a man who wasn't my husband. The drawer entirely full of rubber bands was just the tip of the iceberg. It was the bag full of worn-out bras under the bed that finally sent me screaming from the house.

There were, of course, treasured family heirlooms in there. China that had been nursed in my great-grandmother's lap halfway round the world was decorating the shelves in a room no-one was allowed to use. Nothing was lost: most of my aunt's things made their way to my cousin's house, which I estimate being about two years away from complete gravitational collapse. Should a small black hole ever form in Ikamatua, you'll know what’s happened.

Getting rid of all the crap is just a side-effect of moving. The main motivation is a desire to get noise control off the speed-dial and prevent my being incarcerated for a particularly brutal murder involving a meat tenderiser and a large bottle of Louisiana Hot Sauce. We’re not sure what the new neighbourhood is like, because we've yet to see another human being on our frequent trips to the house. "It’s quiet," my daughter said. "Too quiet." It's possible our new neighbours are all ninjas, which would, quite frankly, be unbelievably ace.

Yesterday I went over and told our one decent set of old neighbours we were moving. They’re lovely people, in a home-schooling, Purpose Driven Life, American missionary sort of way. (We did briefly experiment with the concept of a porpoise-driven life, where you do whatever the dolphins tell you, but something seemed a bit fishy.) I didn't go tell them earlier because I wanted the dust to settle from that awful U.S. election result. They're charming, really, but the cultural differences can be a minefield. Where I come from, for instance, it's considered rude to repeatedly suggest to someone's daughter that it would be really neat if their mommy had a bunch more babies. My youngest child is eleven: take a freaking hint. Mind you, I swear like a New Zealander, so it goes both ways.

I'd forgotten how stressful moving can be. My partner and daughter have both come down with colds, my auto-immune disorders are going crazy, and my son is undergoing severe Lego: Indiana Jones withdrawal. Our ginga cat is stressed as hell and showing it by leaving the carcasses of his little feathered and furred friends scattered across the lawn with their entrails displayed serial-killer-style. He knows I don’t wear shoes.

I will miss my garden. I'm trying to regard seven years of English Cottage slavery as a gift to the next tenants. It was probably time for an intervention there too, though: I may have more aquilegias than Danielle has pairs of shoes.

What I'll really miss, though, are my cyber-homes, as I go through what could be several actual days without internet access. This will include the day on which Friends in England would otherwise be sending me the QI Children in Need Special. On the other hand, by the time we move in, National should have finished running fibre up the driveway.

Anyway, for the next week or so, I'm offering free therapy. If the election result seemed like the worst thing that could happen, come see me. I've got some walls you can scrub.

One of my favourite English assignments at high school was a review of a really terrible biography of Lenin. Instead of chucking that book and reviewing a good one, I gave in to the sheer glee of slamming the fish repeatedly against the inside of the barrel.

The memory of that seminal moment of Schadenfreude came back to me last week, about ten pages into James Robert Parish's Katharine Hepburn: the untold story, a book that came with its own sound-track: sub-vocalised muttering, punctuated by occasional bursts of swearing.

I fell in love with Katharine Hepburn nearly twenty ears ago: what stroppy mannish not-conventionally-attractive brunette teenage girl wouldn’t? And Parish promised me that he was going to reveal Hepburn’s deadly secret: that like the teenage girl who'd loved her, Kate was a closeted bisexual.

Parish’s book, it turned out, was just a pastiche of confident assertions and rumour-mongering that should come with a 'citation needed' tag plastered across the cover. I could have enjoyed even that, if it hadn't been full of prose like this:

He was impressed by this free-spoken, appealing young woman with impressively broad shoulders. On her part, Kit was immediately attracted by this muscular, blue-eyed doctor with his striking bright red flock of hair.

Parish even quotes Hepburn at the start of Chapter One, and I found myself rather wishing he’d listened to her and saved us both three hundred pages:

I had many women friends who were very close to me and if you had that, then people thought your were a lesbian. It didn’t affect me at all, because it wasn't true… It's nobody's business. Nowadays, I'm forced to be interested in a lot of people's sex lives, which I find exhausting.”

And it is, isn't it? Nobody's business? Isn't outing people tasteless and destructive, regardless of whether it's true or not?

I wonder, if Hepburn had been Out voluntarily, what difference that would have made to me. Do the gains from having positive role models place some kind of obligation on high-profile GLBT people? Oh no, a liberal dilemma: time for pinot gris and self-obsessed whining.

I washed the taste of the Hepburn bio out of my brain with John Barrowman's autobiography, aptly titled Anything Goes. It was like reading sunlight. Barrowman describes himself as having been 'mostly known for my work in musical theatre'. Course you were, darling. And a man who can use a sentence like

my first serious gay relationship was with a Spanish flamenco dancer from Cordoba called Paco Perez-Arevelo

clearly isn't a man with too many issues, right? It's a long way from the closet to snogging your boyfriend on stage at London Pride and selling your Civil Partnership photos to OK! magazine. Anyway, we've seen inside his closet and it's full of Barbie dolls.

I have to admit that one of the reasons I like Coming Out so much is that I have the world's least functional gaydar. I've failed to notice the sexual orientation of some of my closest friends. Even the people I occasionally chat to at the school gate are better at spotting queers than I am. They must be, because how else would you manage to tell your children not to look at 'those people'? (I don’t blame them for not spotting me. Bisexuals are the ninjas of the Gay Agenda: you’re not supposed to be able to see us.)

I guess I could just assume that people are straight until they get a same-sex partner, when they're gay. It's a binary state, right? Except for those girls at uni pretending to be bi to get attention. I hear if you pretend to be bi for long enough you get to marry Brad Pitt.

Okay, I have to admit it, I don’t get the 'slagging off BUGs' thing. Is Gay a limited commodity? Will we run out if too many people try to lay claim to it?

Anyway, it's a different world now from what it was in Hepburn's day, right? If people are pretending to be gay for publicity and the reaction to Clay Aiken’s coming out is 'tell us something we don’t know, Captain Obvious', then declaring your gay-ness is practically an anti-climax. It's not like there’s any real prejudice now – unless you want to get married, or adopt kids, or kiss your partner in public without getting abused.

Let this be the day Proposition 8 dies an ignominious death.

Back to Barrowman for the last word:

I remember a conversation I had with Ian [McKellen] once, in which he suggested that he and I should plan a dinner party and invite all the actors who are gay and afraid to come out. We'd make them stay at the table until they realized that they can be successful and gay at the same time.

Who would be at this dinner party? Sadly, too many.

You’ve all been so terribly negative lately, have you noticed that, my poppets? You’re all with the moaning even when you're asked to be nice, and your debates have turned into who's crapper: Iain Banks or Iain M Banks. You've already pushed Graham over the edge.

Well, this is not going to be the only time I ever get left out of a bitch-fest.

Last year I ran a bitching competition on my blog. That one was about films:

Let's hear it: the worst films you've ever seen. To make the list, you need to have seen the movie in question all the way through. No slagging off stuff you haven't seen, or didn't make it all the way to the end... But I don't wanna see anyone getting all precious and bitchy about their poor little baby favourite film, okay? This is a flaming-only forum.

The only change I'd make to the list in that blog is to replace Forrest Gump with Die Hard 4. Here's a hint: when your movie is two hours long and you can remove an hour without losing a line of dialogue, you're doing something wrong.

That's largely shooting fish in a barrel, though. Movies are low culture, easy to hate. You wanted to spend more time talking about books.

I love books. It's not just good prose. I love the tactile experience of a well-made book. I love pretty covers and strong heavy pages and good type-setting with just the right amount of white space. I love the way books smell and the neat way they line up on my bookshelves. This may be some kind of illness, as I even like it when library books smell of the last reader's stale cigarette smoke.

Ploughing my way through an English degree I've read many of the classics. My shelves are full of Worthy Books, the kind that people always mean to get around to reading but somehow never do. And some of them are bloody awful.

The worst good book I’ve ever had to read is Robinson Crusoe. I believe reading it produced some kind of temporal dilation effect, slowing the passage of time in the same manner experienced by people trapped in a theatre during a Samuel Beckett play. I am older than my biological age because of that book.

I have a high threshold for heavy prose and slow plot. The book we read before Robinson Crusoe was Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, which I'd loved. So it couldn't just be the ponderous prose and the overt preachification that made me want to shove it through a mincer without necessarily letting go first.

No, what happened was that after two hundred pages of smug insufferability, I noticed something: absolutely nothing had happened. I know that seems an odd thing to say, what with the shipwreck and everybody dying and stuff, but that's how it felt. Solid eventless pontificating - now I think about it, the exact reverse of Die Hard 4.

After about a week, Robinson Crusoe achieved a singular honour. It became the first set text I didn't make it to the end of. It also became the second book to be hurled across the room, bouncing off my mantelpiece to the accompaniment of a hearty 'fuck’s sake!'. (The first was Robert Heinlein's Number of the Beast.)

I don’t mean to be too harsh on Defoe. There are plenty of other Worthy Books that suck almost as much as his. Imagine, for instance, that you're watching one of those very pretty Merchant-Ivory films, looking perhaps at long lingering shots of Venice with a slow score drifting along underneath, and you're just starting to think 'alright, nice scenery, but shouldn't something happen soon?'. Now imagine this goes on for three or four days and the scenery is all trees. Welcome to reading Last of the Mohicans.

Every now and then I get ruthless, and a few of the classics find themselves taking the Long Walk from the bookshelves to the garage. Last time it was The Rainbow and The Magus, joint winners of my Dullest Rude Book prize.

I must be mellowing in middle age, because it pains me to be so comprehensively negative about my beloved books. If you want a Worthy Book that's Worth Reading, I recommend Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone. Its featuring a gentle piss-take of Robinson Crusoe is entirely coincidental.