Maria

The thing about an ICANN meeting is they’re mostly men, and most of them are lovely, especially the older, very techie ones. I do the policy circuit and the 16 hour days, and I mostly skip the big industry parties. (Actually, I’m not usually invited. Probably because I’m such a blue stocking.) So I don’t usually interact with the trade show marketing types, the back end salesmen and the domainer guys.

But once, I think it was in Dakar but they all blur into one, I’d had a couple of drinks and ran into a friend I call in my heart of hearts the ‘king of the registrars’, the hard scrabble companies that sell domain names and figure out how to game any system they can get to let them in. Whatever hotel this was, it had managed to create some mystique about having a club on the top floor that didn’t advertise itself. It was the place to be. My friend convinced me and a female colleague to go up for a nightcap.

Now my colleague was six feet tall, blonde and the kind of gorgeous that makes even straight women pause to enjoy an extra look. In fact, when my boss first introduced her as his incredibly capable new assistant, we all went ‘uh-huh, sure.’ (He took it on the chin and sure enough she turned out to be the smartest on the team and pretty much indifferent to being ritually dismissed for her beauty.) So she and I catwalked out of the elevator on whatever secret floor this club was on and right into a long glitzy bar we walked the length of, got seen to be seen, and went and sat down on a magically free sofa. It was just that kind of night.

Various youngish guys we didn’t know sat down to talk, offer us drinks and wander off. I was on water by now. Holding court beside us was the alpha guy I liked to call the king. A bit like ‘the king of the travellers’, in that you don’t get it by being born – you have to fight smarter and tougher than anyone else, and a bit of charisma doesn’t hurt either. Guys would ply their differing wares to him, then us, or vice versa. One glommed on to me, probably because I was older and plainer than my colleague. The conversation started off harmlessly enough, the usual ‘what do you do’ and ‘where are you from’. He was keen to show he was also a big time domainer or domain name seller or something, and he’d keep nodding in the direction of the king.

Then things got a little strange. He would ask me a question and I’d answer it, and he’d say something rude about my answer. I wish I could remember the actual things he said. They weren’t outrageous, just mildly obnoxious. I’d nod and wait for him to say or ask something else, and then say ‘right’ or ‘is that so?’ But he was quite insistent about me giving substantive answers that he would then say rude things about in a weirdly affectless way. I remember wondering if he was Aspergers or something, which is not unknown in the technical community, though this guy seemed far more interested in money than code. I swatting that idea away. The rudeness had an edge. It was intentional.

So I said to him ‘wow, that was really quite rude, did you mean to say it?’ And he said something like ‘come on, you liked it. You know I’m in charge’. Or something equally asinine.

And then the penny dropped.

I was being chatted up by a real live Pick Up Artist!

I burst out laughing and said ‘oh my god, I don’t believe it. You’re doing that thing, aren’t you?’
‘What thing?’ he asked.
‘You know, the thing where you try and make a woman feel bad enough about herself that she’ll suck your cock.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself’, he said.

Then my little lizard brain stirred deep down in the folds of the amygdala and said to me ‘you know what will work best here, don’t you?’. And I thought to myself, this doesn’t make me a good feminist, but it will be nasty good fun.

I turned to the king and said, over the guy’s head, ‘you’ll never believe what this guy just tried on. He negged me. Have you heard of that? The whole PUA thing?’

‘What, him?’ the king said, laughing, to us both. ‘Little jerk. Is he even old enough?’

And the little jerk slunk away, defeated.

Oh how we laughed.
Patriarchy. You’ve gotta love it.

The Union Jack came down in Camp Bastion today, marking the end of the UK’s combat role in Afghanistan and its misconceived campaign in Helmand Province; the campaign with no strategy, less chance of success and a gossamer-thin plan. It has come to a dignified end with a choir of establishment generals (is there any other kind?) and politicians serenely harmonising the nation’s oldest hymns; ‘mistakes were made’, and ‘perhaps we might have done it differently’.

Nineteen billion pounds. Twenty thousand Afghan civilians. Four hundred and fifty three UK soldiers. More Afghan National Army killed last summer than UK troops throughout the whole war. More poppy seed than ever growing in Helmand, but lots more children in school, too.

Was it worth it? Well if you’ve figured out a workable and not-obscene calculus of human pain and worthwhile profit, let the rest of us know.

I knew one of the four hundred and fifty three, but only superficially. He was deputed one autumn evening to squire me around the officers’ mess when E was already gone. He made sure I had drinks and was warm enough, saw me into the dining room, flirted chastely back and manfully ignored the younger women. It was like something out of Thackeray. Beautiful manners on the eve of battle.

The other senior wife and I went to his funeral, along with the welfare officer, representing the battalion. The men wouldn’t be home for months. As an Irish woman, I had never expected to be dressed in black, walking slowly through a seated congregation to a reserved pew at the front, next to a coffin with a Union Jack on. The gloves and belt were the hardest to look at. No one cried. Not obviously, anyway.

Later, driving through the gold-tinged dusk of a Wiltshire summer evening, I rounded the corner of B-road to see the flag again, flying in someone’s garden. I had to pull over.

That’s not my flag and never will be. It’s just something someone I slightly knew died for.

When I was sixteen and seventeen I did my 5th Year of secondary school twice. Amidst grinds, tears and two to three hours of Honours Maths homework each night, I just could not make it past Christmas and still understand what was going on. (The obvious and practical response; take Ordinary Level Maths instead and accept that a career in Medicine was out, just didn’t seem to present itself.) For two years I hungrily repeated the exercises in the small part of the curriculum I understood, and threw myself with increasing desperation and diminishing returns at the rest. The last chapter I remember mastering was called something like ‘Sequences, Series and the Binomial Theorem’.

Happily, understanding – at least a little – the concept of geometric progressions has turned out to be one of the most useful and widely applicable bits of Maths I could have picked up. It crops up everywhere; understanding the spread and gravity of DDOS attacks, why mouse infestations need to be hit early, why skimming stones on water is so hard, and how a young woman settling for less money than a man at the beginning of her career may still be paying for it when she’s middle-aged.

The definition of a geometric series or progression is ‘whenever a term of a sequence is a constant multiple of the preceding term’. When that multiple is greater than one, the numbers will get very big, very fast. If, for example, the multiple is two, you’ve got ‘exponential growth’, a mathematical term of art that’s often used inaccurately elsewhere to describe rapid but not geometric increases. Real exponential growth tends to sound pretty grim when the term is correctly applied in epidemiology.

At dinner the other night, I learnt that the rate of increase of cases of Ebola in certain African countries has been modeled as a geometric progression for weeks, if not months.* Since at least August, the number of new Ebola infections has started to double every month. Common sense dictates that the more people infected, the more people who will be infected. Mathematics predicts chillingly just how bad it will be. The battle to stop the spread of this disease reaching the threshold where it is now running like wildfire has already been lost. [click to continue…]

Feminism, social activism, eye-catching stunt made eye-catching because it’s not a stunt.

About a dozen single mothers kicked out of their hostel in east London have occupied a ‘show-flat’ in the former Olympics estate that Newham Council is trying to flog while it has 24,000 households on its waiting list.
Instead of doing what they were told and being socially cleansed 200 miles away from family, friends, children’s schools and job prospects, these incredible women subverted one of London’s great middle class pleasures, the architectural Open House (I put my hand up, I go on it every year to gawk at other people’s houses), and occupied one of hundreds of empty, new-build flats. They set the place up as a community centre and are campaigning for the council to house the actual people it’s responsible for, showing they are real, articulate people with needs and rights, not a worthless blob of social problems.

Increasingly, I just can’t justify the amount of volunteer time I spend on Internet rights. Yes, we are handing over control of every aspect of our lives to insidiously corrupt and obviously ineffective states, and that is a terrible, terrible thing. But I live in a city of dirty billionaires and hungry children. This made me cry. Something has got to give.

@FocusE15 #occupiedE15

What’s the IGF?*

The world’s ninth Internet Governance Forum (IGF), organised by the UN, is happening this week in Istanbul. The IGF is a free and open gathering of people from all over the world who have come to talk about how the internet is run. Last year’s IGF was in Bali. The year before was Azerbaijan. Turkey’s jailing of bloggers and recent attempt to ban Twitter are actually part of an established tradition of IGF host countries showing a certain carefree whimsy about human rights and the internet.

IGFs are a bit like weddings or London glass box house extensions. They’re all basically the same, but the tiny, barely discernible differences between them consume vast amounts of energy and generate heartache for everyone involved.

What’s the same about this IGF?

For participants, IGF Istanbul is much the same as all the IGFs that came before. It has the usual long, hot queues for a registration badge, extravagant security measures and slavish worship of alleged VIPs, the near-riots by participants not about the free flow of information but the free flow of coffee; the endless, paint by numbers speeches by a dozen or so communications ministers, a venue network that barely functions, and a gala reception with no alcohol.

These first world problems are actually a plus. They bring the 3,000 participants together, providing just enough shared moaning to break the ice between the different tribes of government, technical community, business and civil society.

What’s different?

Nothing overt, but the ground is shifting. This is the second IGF since the Snowden revelations shattered global confidence in the US’s leadership of the internet, and the first IGF since Brazil initiated a global dialogue about who should be in control. There is also the ongoing saga of how ICANN can prove itself worthy of being cut loose by the US government before the Obama administration finishes. But no world-changing announcements are expected at this IGF.

As ever, countries including Russia that want to control the internet would prefer to have the discussion about it in a forum that governments dominate: the International Telecommunications Union. But those countries still come to IGF and take part, albeit grumpily. They see efforts to stop them getting their hands on the internet’s controlling levers as stemming from the west’s desire to keep it for itself, with freedoms and human rights simply a smokescreen. All the work-shopping and hand-shaking at IGF won’t mask the ugliness of the internet’s basic geopolitics, especially in a city straddling Europe and Asia, and looking up the Bosphorus to Ukraine, Crimea and Russia’s (other) Black Sea resorts.
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UK CT readers, please read this Open Rights Group myth-buster on the surveillance legislation the three main parties have stitched up behind closed doors, and plan to vote through as an emergency tomorrow. Is your MP planning to vote for it? If they are, ask them if they will support a (to be tabled this afternoon) amendment that will bring the sunset clause down to 6 months – surely enough time to fix the ’emergency’.

(More analysis from Paul Bernal here.)

(Email your MP here.)

What is DRIP?
The Data Retention Investigatory Powers Bill (DRIP) will require internet and phone companies to keep their customers’ communications data for up to a year. It is being rushed through parliament this week: MPs will vote on Tuesday and the Lords will vote on Thursday.

DRIP will replace the Data Retention (EC Directive) Regulations 2009. The legal basis of these regulations has been uncertain since the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) after the CJEU found the EU Data Retention Directive 2006/24/EC to be invalid.
Legal wranglings aside, the ruling was very clear. Keeping everyone’s data in case they commit a crime seriously interferes with our right to privacy and our right to a private family life.

Additionally clauses 3-5 extend UK surveillance law – RIPA – to US and foreign companies. These measures are controversial, not related and there is no evidence that there is any reason for any rush.

Below are five arguments that the Government is using to justify its passing – and the real reason why it shouldn’t.

“This is an emergency”
The CJEU ruling was delivered on 8 April, 2014. The government has had three months to address the court’s findings. We believe that it is the threat of legal action by Open Rights Group and other organisations that has prompted this ‘emergency’ legislation – not the threat of terrorism or criminal activity. The government should not mislead us about the urgency of this legislation. Given its significance and the threat to our civil liberties, It should not be rushed through without proper parliamentary scrutiny.

Background: After the CJEU ruling, Open Rights Group and other organisations contacted the Home Office to ask them if they would be asking internet service providers to stop retaining data. In May, the Home Office responded by saying that ISPs should continue to retain data. Last month, over 1,500 ORG supporters wrote to their ISPs asking them to stop keeping their data. They responded by saying that they were acting under the instructions of the Home Office.

“This is not an extension of powers, it’s restoring the status quo”
The Prime Minister said, “we are not introducing new powers or capabilities” but in fact DRIP does not just deal with Regulations that were made illegal by the CJEU ruling. Clauses 3 to 5 of the Bill make amendments to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). DRIP extends the government’s surveillance powers in two ways:

It extends the territorial scope of RIPA – this means that the government can issue interception warrants for communciations data to companies outside of the UK.
It extends the definition of “telecommunications service” within RIPA. The effect of this is unclear, but it appears possible the new definition could include services such as Gmail.

“It’s the only way we can catch criminals”
We agree that the targeted retention of communications data can help the police to tackle serious crimes, such as terrorism and child abuse. However, the CJEU ruling outlined a low threshold for deciding to retain data. For example, if a serious crime if committed, data could be retained for a particular geographical region to support a criminal investigation. This means that the police could still retain data for specific investigations, rather than the blanket surveillance of all citizens.

The CJEU ruling was clear that blanket data retention interfered with our right to privacy and our right to a private family life. Other European countries, including Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Romania and Sweden, have rejected it. These countries continue to tackle serious crime without undermining their citizens’ civil liberties through blanket data retention.

“There is a sunset clause”
The Bill will expire on 31 December 2016. The government claims that this will ‘strengthen oversight and transparency’ but that is two and a half years away. Given that the Bill is to be rushed through parliament in a week, we believe that this date is too late to allow for proper parliamentary scrutiny. If legislation is to be rushed through without debate, an earlier expiry date of 31 December 2014 would allow for scrutiny in six months.

“The Bill includes concessions that take into account the CJEU ruling”
DRIP ignores the main part of the CJEU ruling – that blanket data retention severely interferes with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data. The government has claimed that other aspects of the Bill will strengthen oversight and transparency. For example, they claim it will restrict the number of public bodies that can request communications data. Yet this concession does not appear in DRIP or the secondary legislation that will implement it.

E and I are acquiring a hairy baby this weekend. We can’t agree on a name. He is against human names, except for when he isn’t. I tend towards cute ones that will be embarrassing to call out in a south London park. We’re not allowed to get pretentious ones after writers and such. Suggestions?

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I spent last week in a posh beach hut somewhere very hot, sleeping off the latest ICANN meeting and reading a stack of books. But mostly just sleeping.

ICANN meetings are inhuman. The nice ‘back to school’ bit, exchanging cheery hellos in the hallways with people you’ve not seen for months, is over in the first eighteen hours. From then it’s an unmerciful eight or nine day slog through jetlag, air conditioning, bad tempers, disinformation, misinformation and information overload. Forget about having time for meals, exercise or sufficient sleep; I ration my fluid intake because there literally isn’t enough time to go to the loo. (This is bad; I nearly always get what I now call my Tuesday Migraine.) I did not get outside in daylight from the afternoon I took the Piccadilly Line to Heathrow to a ten-minute walk to an external meeting, seven days later. That’s not at all unusual. The meetings are scheduled and conducted as if the people taking part don’t occupy human bodies. The topic of ICANN volunteer burnout is an evergreen, especially people who aren’t paid lobbyists of one sort or another. As a friend wrote to me this morning:

“The result (of fewer volunteers doing an increasing amount of policy work) is that the organization retreats from its roots as a bottom-up, multistakeholder policy body to a staff-driven stakeholder interest-based policy organization. If that transition takes place, then the fundamental position of ICANN in the Internet’s management ecosystem may change significantly.”

But that’s not what I want to talk about.
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Here in Singapore at the ICANN Public Forum, we’re at the end of a brutally busy week talking about how to run the Internet naming and numbering systems. It’s an event comprised almost entirely of ritual, and to understand what’s going on you need to be able to translate some of the long-loved incantations. Here are a few:

When someone says: I’m going to simplify things.
They mean: Be confused. Be very, very confused.

When someone says: I’m going to back up here.
They mean: I’m going to make up some history, now.

When someone says:I’m going to name the elephant in the room.
They mean: My next observation will be startlingly banal.

When someone says: Speaking on my own behalf. As the VP of Blah for Blah Blah Corporation, ….
They mean: I don’t want you to think about who’s paying me to be here, but you better listen because we have a lot of money, customers and power / votes, ministries and battleships.

When someone says: We need to show leadership.
They mean: I should be in charge.

When someone says: There needs to be a bottom-up process.
They mean: Nobody asked me about this.

When someone says: I want to talk about process.
They mean: Hold up. I need to consult my boss.

When someone says: I realise I’m what’s standing between you and lunch / dinner / drinks
They mean: I know you won’t like what I’m going to say. Please don’t throw anything.

When someone says: We are fixing the plane while it’s in flight.
They mean: I don’t understand what’s going on, but I know I don’t like it.

When someone says: The perfect is the enemy of the good.
They mean: Ignore everyone else’s ideas and just use mine.

When someone says: Any other comments on this?
They mean: Will everyone please, for the love of all that is holy, STFU?

A journalist friend just emailed me some questions about Friday’s announcement by the US Dept. of Commerce NTIA that it will work towards internationalising the oversight of some of what ICANN does. The IANA function has long been a source of international grumbling, particularly amongst middle income countries that don’t feel they have any influence over a service the global Internet depends on. Some of this grumbling is purely opportunistic, especially in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations, but the bulk of it is of long standing. Ahead of an international meeting convened by Brazil next month to work on principles for Internet governance, the NTIA has made its play to get back in control of the process and the story. It’s asked ICANN to bring people together to come up with a transition plan to internationalise IANA.

If this hadn’t been a weekend when Russia annexed a province of a neighbouring country, the premise of the TV series ‘Lost’ became a serious contender for explaining current events in, or perhaps far away from, the Indian Ocean, and my husband’s best man made headlines saying he is ashamed of toeing the Ministry of Defence’s line that UK military kit in Afghanistan was a-ok, I expect the news that the United States is to renounce its exclusive hold on part of the Internet would have been front page news.

But it hasn’t been all that much in the news, and I am too jammed to blog anything comprehensive about the topic, so here are some hastily typed responses to the questions I was asked:
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I have endless important topics I need to, should and must blog about, not least the fact that I was in Crimea some time back and am currently glued to the radio, thinking very hard about it and not sure quite what to say. But anyway, I hope this post may end up being useful to somebody, somewhere, sometime.

Right now, I’m doing a lot of what consultants term ‘desk research’. That is, I read a lot of stuff on the Internet, must of it about technical topics. Every now and then, some person or organisation I admire collects a lot of information into a report they are really proud of – and which looks incredibly useful to me – and I think ‘that is so good I’m going go ahead and read the whole thing.’ And that’s when the nuisance begins.

Look, I am old. Or what to my parents’ generation was called middle-aged, anyway. (When I was a teenager, women my current age wore scarves to protect their weekly set.) When I am very interested in something I’m reading on the Internet, I print it out and scribble, underline and write things on it. That’s what we old-timers do. Actually, I think that’s what most people still do when they want to ‘engage with a text’, and it’s why despite being a crazy-early adopter of Kindle type devices, I haven’t used one in over five years. (But I am grateful to e-readers for finally liberating me from the fear that scribbling on books and bending down their corners is desecration. It may also be my own mortality that causes me to mark things I am reading, as a none too subtle note to myself that it’s the only literary mark I am likely to make. Also, it helps me to remember later on that I’ve read something and even what I thought of it.)

Anyway, back to the PDFs of the useful and improving reports on matters technical or technocratic (it’s all the same in my world, that of Internet policy). The problem is, the people who produce these reports – and I am not naming names, because that would be ungrateful and the reports really are great, just unreadable – are so thrilled or relieved to finally get them out the door, they whip up something that looks great on the screen and just publish it to the Internet where saps like me download it and print it out at our own expense. Now I am happy and delighted to print this stuff at my own expense. It’s the ability of organisations to externalise this cost that makes it possible for many more people to get their stuff. But the wonderfully unbounded nature of online dissemination also stops those people from thinking about the reality and cost to their readers of actually printing and reading their work.

Probably back in the olden days when the world wide web was new, people would whip up something that looked great in print, put it online without doing anything else, be underwhelmed by the response and then sit through hours of expensive, off-site design seminars being told that is a totally wrong way to go about online publishing and the reason we can’t have nice things. Now the problem is kind of silly, really. People design documents that look great on a screen, publicise and publish it online, and send out to the home and office printers of the world an offering whose form is so irritating it detracts from the content.

So here is my free, in-your-own-time design seminar about what not to do when you hit ‘upload PDF’ to your website. [click to continue…]

This morning, European Commissioner Neelie Kroes released the EU’s long anticipated response to the seismic changes in Internet governance caused by the Snowden revelations. In six hundred words, it throws down the gauntlet at United States over control of the Internet for the third time in fifteen years. This time it just might work.

Last October, the technical bodies that coordinate the Internet released the Montevideo Statement. Implying that trust in the Internet’s American stewardship had been fatally damaged by the Snowden revelations, the I*s (‘i-stars; Internet organisations) called for “the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing” and for the overall improvement of global multi-stakeholder Internet governance.

It was an astonishing development. For the US-born ICANN, ISOC, ARIN and IETF to say the US government’s monopoly of control over the Internet root must end was a break few of us saw coming. It didn’t stop there. Within days, ICANN’s CEO, Fadi Chehade, announced that ICANN and the Brazilian government would organize a meeting in early 2014 to start figuring out how this transfer of control might work.
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It’s only been five weeks since the organisations that manage the Internet’s technical infrastructure dropped the bombshell that they want the oversight of ICANN and IANA to be done by all governments and stakeholders, and not just the US. In a statement made in Montevideo, ICANN, ISOC, the IETF, all the world’s regional Internet registries, the Internet Architecture Board and the World Wide Web Consortium all called out the Snowden revelations as having ‘undermined the trust and confidence’ of users so much that it’s now time to get on and build truly ‘global multi-stakeholder Internet cooperation’.

What does all that mean? Basically, the people who built and run the global Internet no longer trust the US government to be its sole public-interested global steward. Despite a six-month scrum of self-satisfied lobbyists falling over each other to say ‘everyone knew what was going on’ and nothing fundamental has changed since Snowden; everyone only thought they knew what was going on and something fundamental has changed since Snowden.

Whether you think real ethical and legal issues are raised by mass surveillance or that the uproar is just an opportunistic response to one country spying merely too successfully on all the others, it is very clear that the US security services stepped far, far over the line when they took part in IETF technical working groups to purposely undermine the security of the Internet. It’s one thing to play an ‘all’s fair in love and war’ game to exploit networks and business relationships to surveil the population, quite another to knowingly introduce vulnerabilities that your enemies can also exploit. This, and disquiet at how some large US corporations act – forced or willingly – as arms of that state, is the basis of the breach of trust.

You don’t get to invent the Internet, export it around the world as a force for free markets, innovation and human progress, oversee the volunteer organisations that make it work, host the most important companies that deliver and use it, and then say it’s not fair that other countries think you are unfairly exploiting a home advantage. You also don’t get a pass on what Milton Mueller calls out as a strange blindness to the privileged role of your own government when you go around the world proselytising that ‘governments should stay out of running the Internet’.

Before Snowden, Russia’s and China’s paranoia and distrust of Internet freedom as a merely tool of US foreign policy designed to weaken their states could be dismissed as the kind of twisted thinking you expect from authoritarian states that simply can’t imagine not abusing a global common pool resource under their control. That’s how they would behave, so of course they think it’s how we would.

After Snowden, we live in a world where country after country has taken steps to distance itself from the current status quo on who oversees the Internet, and to condemn the US for abusing its role. But neither the US nor its junior partner in electronic surveillance, the UK, has made a concerted public effort to counter the claims of moral equivalence made by our rivals in the battle for Internet control; Russia, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The silence of what are, after all, democratic governments about what legal constraints the UK and US’s spying systems operate within – and how those frameworks can and should be improved – means that rival states are controlling the narrative. Controlling the narrative means getting to decide its ending. Lots of us saw this coming. At a national meeting in September we urged the UK to develop a positive response to its role in global surveillance. Snowden wasn’t even on the agenda. But our governments seemed to slope off to the annual global Internet Governance Forum in Bali with no story to tell about itself, merely the plan to slip a few words in the right ears in the corridors outside public meetings, and to hope for the best.

Meanwhile, the business lobbyists swarmed everywhere repeating the mantra that ‘everyone knew; nothing has changed’, hoping their claim of knowing and worldliness would make anyone who disagreed feel like an ignorant rube, hoping repetition would drown out incredulity. That was both stupid and wrong.

By September, there was a fundamental breach of trust between the US government and the global technical communities, between the US and UK and pretty much every envious middle-income country on earth. But instead of facing up to the problem, the West and its international business community put their fingers in their ears and pretended everything was the same as before, or, at worst, just a little bump on the yellow brick road.

Let’s look at what happens when parts of a powerful institutions go bad and the whole institution ignores, denies and then attacks the accusers; for example, the Catholic Church. First, the people who accused the Church of systematically protecting abusers were written off as kooks. Remember the response to Sinead O’Connor ripping up the picture of the Pope. (Tinfoil hat brigade, anyone? How smoothly those ‘in the know’ transition from laughing at conspiracy theorists to claiming everyone always knew what only paranoids used to claim. But of course we’ve always been at war with Oceania.)

Then came the denials – refusals to cooperate with investigations, claims of special privilege, attacking the victims and accusers and writing them off as ne’er do wells, misfits, the terminally damaged. All that was predictable enough. But the point where the Church really lost its flock – and I’m thinking here specifically of the moment church attendance in Ireland dropped right off the cliff – was when, even though they seemed to be facing up to the need for due process and redress, they just couldn’t fathom the depth of the breach of trust. There was and still is a complete disconnect between what the Church did wrong and what it thinks it did wrong. Many elements of the Church still feel truly hard done by because they fundamentally do not understand why they lost the trust of the people they served. And now it’s too late. People voted with their feet and they’re never coming back.

What the US did to the Internet isn’t the same as the Catholic hierarchy protecting paedophiles, not even remotely. But what is eerily similar is its utter refusal to face up to the fact it they lost the people, it lost the battle, it may just have lost the war.

Getting proxies to run around international meetings saying nothing had changed – and that everyone who thought it had was either knavishly opportunistic or ridiculously naive – was a stupid mistake, a tactical error rooted in an inability to accept that the strategic environment had fundamentally changed. It was a car crash in slow motion. Someone had to do something. Someone did.

More on that anon.

Of course mine was unplanned. Which goes to show anyone can. Never say never!

Believe me, you don’t want the heartburn, the swollen ankles, the back ache and I swear to God if ___ just brushes my nipples again I’ll murder him.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

I never really wanted them myself.

You know, a friend of mine moved to a warmer country and within weeks. Have you ever thought of doing that?

You know, a friend of mine tried for ten years and then they gave up. And then it just happened like that. And they’ve had two more since.

You know, I have a good feeling that it’ll work out for you. I just know it.

If you could just relax a little, you know? Sometimes that’s all it takes.

Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.

Have you thought of trying fertility treatment?

But you’ll be such brilliant parents. You just have to believe it and it’ll come good.

God I know exactly how you feel. We thought my first one was an ectopic until I had the scan.

God I know exactly how you feel. It took us nearly a year for the first. I was sure there was something wrong.

Have you thought about adoption? They’ll let anyone do it these days. Sorry. You know what I mean.

Well at least you have each other.

You’re so lucky. Lie-ins are a thing of the past for us. I haven’t been to the toilet on my own in three years.

Still, there’s always being a god-parent and uncle or aunt. Lucky kids. And you get to give them back when you’ve had enough.

Have you thought of volunteering?

Think of all the holidays you can take. Just the two of you.

My friend went to some clinic and it worked for her. I’ll get the name of it. I’m sure it will work for you.

You’re always hearing of people it worked out for in the end. I’m sure it’ll be the same for you.

Well you know, what with over-population and everything.

Look at the state of them. Are you still sure you want any?

At least you‘ll never have to go through childbirth.

You know I really believe you’ll get there in the end. You just have to stay positive. I know you can.

And here’s the one response that doesn’t cut down to the bone, whatever the situation or experience of the friend / acquaintance / or heavily pregnant lady at the parking permit office who wouldn’t take no for an answer (yes, just this morning):

“I’m so sorry.”