A magician with numbers - EOI Aragón inglés B1 resuelto

Daniel Tammet has an extraordinary gift for mathematics. 

He can also speak 10 languages as well as his own invented language, "Mänti". 

Daniel’s mathematical abilities are so extraordinary that it took a long time for them to be recognised. He struggled at school. He got a B at Maths GCSE. He wasn't diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome until three years ago, at 25. Sooner would have been better "both for me and my parents".

 “As a child I didn't speak very much. I used to put my fingers in my ears to feel the silence. It was hard for me to find my voice because I was, for so long, absorbed in my own world," says Daniel "I had to teach myself to look in somebody's eyes," he explains. "Before that, I used to look at their mouth, because it was the part of their face that was moving."

Daniel's condition brings him great riches: his visualisation of numbers means he can perform extraordinary mathematical achievements. Daniel's world is a rich and strange one, where every number up to 10,000 has colour, texture and emotional resonance. More remarkable still, he has described it all in Born on a Blue Day, his memoir of his life with a rare form of Asperger's; consciousness-raising is part of his motivation for writing his book. "My condition is invisible otherwise."

Scientists at California's Center for Brain Studies were amazed when, two years ago, they discovered his facility for discerning prime numbers. They had assumed he must have been trained to do it. But to him, it is more like an instinctive process.

"The scientists and researchers come to me so I can help them design the parameters of their experiments," he says. It is important to Daniel that he uses his gifts responsibly, perhaps for science, perhaps for teaching: he is already devising a new system of visualisation to help with language learning and dyslexia.

Daniel was lonely. Forming relationships was difficult. "I was desperate for a friend and I used to lie in bed at night thinking about what it would be like. My younger brothers and sisters had friends and I used to watch them playing to try to work out what they did and how friendship worked. Then, I would have traded everything for normality”.

Falling in love with Neil has changed everything. They have been together for six years. Now his emotional life is more like everyone else's. "Neil is very patient with me, and the routines I need to have to help with my anxieties," says Daniel. "I don't know what I'd do without him."

Generally, Daniel feels he is progressing all the time towards "outgrowing" his autism." He is getting steadily better at social interaction. "Every experience I have I add to my mental library and hopefully life should then get easier." I've learned that being different isn't necessarily a bad thing." In this, he seems to sum up the progress we all hope for.

Chaque femme est un roman - EOI francés B2

«Roman en liberté» et «livre foutraque1» de l'aveu même de son auteur, Chaque femme est un roman constitue le dernier volet d'une trilogie familiale entamée avec Le Zubial et poursuivie avec Le roman des Jardin. Après avoir dévoilé au grand jour les secrets d'une famille excentrique, Alexandre Jardin se concentre sur les «adorables perturbatrices» qui l'ont aidé à se construire et à penser autrement, «loin des glissières de sécurité». Jardin, pour qui les femmes sont des «tremplins vers le fabuleux», convoque un bouquet de créatures et de séducteurs. Voici notamment une blonde voisine qui fait l'amour «comme on sort de la route» alors qu'il essaye de réviser sagement pour son baccalauréat; une mère qui brûle sa bibliothèque; un ministre de la Ve République qui a fait le gigolo; ou cette Milou qui croit au pouvoir des mots. Le savoureux portrait de l'éditrice Françoise Verny vaut le détour. De l'Alexandre Jardin pur jus!

Je m'appelle Alexandre et je suis écrivain.

Longtemps je me suis cru l'héritier d'une famille givrée2, portée par l'écume du siècle et engagée dans des tournois sentimentaux qui me dépassaient - alors que je suis né de mes rencontres avec d'étourdissantes perturbatrices. Ce sont les femmes, en effet, qui m'ont appris à penser autrement, loin des glissières de sécurité. Les hommes, en revanche, ne sont pas mon genre. [...] L'improbable roman de mes apprentissages se confond avec celui de mes rapports avec des filles toquées de3 liberté. Toutes ont dynamité mes opinions ou fait craquer la tunique de mes réflexes trop sérieux.

Ma mère, la première, réprima mon inclination pour la tranquillité en faisant la guerre à mon fond d'idées stables. Saute toujours dans le vide, jamais dans ce plein, me répétait-elle souvent. Dans son esprit, cela signifiait torpiller l'idée même du repos. Chaque jour, je devais larguer les amarres, effondrer mes certitudes et, surtout, envisager l'inconcevable. Il ne fallait consentir à rien de fixe et à rien qui manquât de hauteur. Avide de tempéraments de son calibre, je me suis ensuite efforcé de dénicher des filles inclassables et souvent dénuées de ballast4 moral. Ces faux départs passionnels, à l'ouverture de ma vie, ne furent pas les moins formateurs. Le goût des femmes différentes, chez moi, a suppléé une fréquentation de l'université (où je n'ai fait qu'un saut tant je craignais d'y expier mon ignorance). Aujourd'hui encore, je continue à vivre des intérêts de ce pactole de liaisons et d'amitiés avec de robustes luronnes. C'est en faisant à leurs côtés l'expérience de l'inimaginable ou de l'impossible tenté que j'ai appris à apprendre et surtout à désapprendre.

- Des réservoirs sur les bateaux permettant de changer l’immersion ou l’équilibre.

Ce livre foutraque est le recueil de leurs préceptes, ou plutôt l'histoire électrique des interrogations qu'elles n'ont cessé d'allumer en moi. Parfois, il me semble que les femmes sont des tremplins vers le fabuleux. [...] Depuis mon plus jeune âge, je sais que chaque femme est un roman. Voici en quelque sorte mes études littéraires, blondes et brunes.

Ce volume, crucial à mes yeux, a failli ne pas voir le jour! [...] Pourquoi passe-t-on tant de temps à éluder ce qui nous est essentiel? Mi-avril 2007, je prends une décision difficile: je brûle l'ouvrage - fabriqué, chargé de brillances et finalement raté - sur lequel je m'échinais depuis plus d'un an. Quel soulagement! Façon sans doute de me sentir à nouveau fils de ma mère. [...] Je flambe donc ce manuscrit mort-né avec l'espoir que cette taille fera remonter en moi une sève franche. Au fond, j'ai moins été déçu par ce roman glacé que par l'homme déloyal que j'étais devenu en l'écrivant. Je m'y dérobais derrière des mots.

Illico, je préviens ma mère de mon autodafé. Fidèle à son logiciel d'aventurière brevetée, elle me rétorque:

- Bravo mon chéri! Je n'en attendais pas moins de toi. On devrait toujours flamber ses livres... Je recommande cette ascèse.

- Pourquoi?

- Pour ne pas vieillir avant l'heure. C'est pour cela que je n'ai jamais publié les miens...

- Tu as écrit des romans... toi aussi?

- Pour les brûler, cinq ou six. Tu vois, il arrive que nous soyons de la même famille... Curieuse lignée de brûleurs de livres...

Texte adapté. © Alexandre Jardin, Chaque femme est un roman.

(Encadré : © www.lire.fr) (696 mots)

The story of newspapers - EOI Madrid inglés A2

Read about the ancestors of our newspapers

The oldest British national newspaper is about one hundred and eighty-five years old, but news-sheets of various kinds have been known in different parts of the world for many centuries. The Romans sent news in the form of letters to their distant soldiers. There was no paper, as we know it, in those days. Few people could read. The messages were hand-written on a material made from the skin of a sheep, and read aloud to the soldiers.

In 60 B.C., Emperor Julius Caesar started a daily bulletin in the Forum at Rome. The Forum was the meeting place of the Senators who governed the city. The bulletin was fixed at a convenient point where the senators could read the news on their way to and from their discussions.

This method of giving information is still used today. Notices and bulletins are pinned to notice boards in offices and factories; schools and colleges run wall newspapers. Typed sheets of news or articles are placed on large notice boards. The entire contents of the board are changed at fixed intervals, in the same way as a new edition of a newspaper is printed daily or weekly.

In the 16th century, the commonest form of news-sheet was a leaflet, consisting of a single sheet printed on one side only. Leaflets were sold in markets and country fairs on the Continent, and English translations appeared in this country. The leaflets were published only when there was news of wars, battles or disasters. No-one had yet thought of publishing a bulletin regularly.

The first English publication to contain domestic news appeared in 1641. It was called Diurnal Occurrences, and it was concerned mainly with the activities of Parliament. This was just before the start of the Civil War, in 1642.

In 1665, the first number of a twice-weekly paper, The Oxford Gazette, was published. A few months later the name was changed to The London Gazette. This paper was the official paper of the Government. It did not contain news, and it did not try to entertain. It circulated among people such as bankers, solicitors and Members of Parliament.

Adapted from© The Story of Newspapers, by W.D. Siddle, Wills & Hepworth Ltd.

EOI País Vasco inglés B2 resuelto - Au Renoir mister Franglais

The British are notoriously bad at learning foreign tongues. But with Franglais anyone could get by on holiday with just a petit peu of effort. If there is one foreign language that English speakers always seem to crack, it's Franglais.

Its rules are simple. Insert as many French words as you know into the sentence, fill in the rest with English, then speak it with absolute conviction. Although it wasn't known as such then, Franglais is found in Shakespeare and has probably been used for as long as the English and French have had to talk to each other.

But Miles Kington did it best. After all, he coined the name for this hybrid tongue. Kington studied languages, and it showed. In a long-running series of columns for Punch he satirised the earnest but doomed efforts of native English speakers to handle French. Like a phrase book, each of his "lessons" covered a particular situation.

Bodged attempts at foreign languages are as important as food poisoning to a good holiday anecdote, but Franglais is a daily reality for millions working in Europe, Africa and Canada.

The Canadian journalist Karl Mamer, author of a website on Franglais, says many Canadians speak "cereal box French", as they only get to practise it by reading the bilingual text on the back of the box in the morning.

When they then travel to French-speaking centres, like Montreal or Quebec City, their few words of French are used as a kind of peace offering to shopkeepers. He says they're thinking: ‘Look, I'm going to try speaking as much French as possible, showing you I'm making a sufficient effort, and then you please switch to your fluent English as soon as I've linguistically self-flagellated myself before you.’

Franglais might be good enough to buy your oignons, but it's different if you want to win votes.

Politicians running for office in an officially bilingual country need to try to master both languages, although some have made it to high office without knowing their coude from their elbow. According to Janyce McGregor, a producer who covers parliament for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, ‘they may be very clever, but their language skills are always going to be a factor.’

It's not just high office either. A Francophone bus passenger in Ottawa complained to the city transport authority last December that drivers must be bilingual, and be sent off for language training if necessary. But as Ms McGregor points out: ‘If people are bilingual, they probably won't apply to be bus drivers.’

In Canada, Franglais helps French and English speakers co-exist, even if it's a shoddy compromise for some. In France it is something quite different. It is a cultural attack. This is not the Franglais of the tourist asking awkwardly for a cup de cafe. What concerns them is the creeping advance of English words, especially American-English, into their language.

The Toubon Law, passed in 1994, was an attempt to restrict them. It makes French compulsory in government publications. Public bodies weed out English words and suggest French ones where they previously did not exist. So it was goodbye "e-mail", hello "courriel", although "le weekend" - for some the dark heart of Franglais - has survived.

London-based French journalist Agnes Poirier says those who suggest new words are often too late. ‘The man in the street will have already adopted English words to describe new trends.’

It's true that, like a really good French waiter, Franglais always seem to be hovering nearby with a suggestion. Need a three-word headline to sum up the man who has cost Societe Generale billions? Le Rogue Trader, as the Independent - Kington's own paper - described him last week.

So e-mails still swamp courriels on French web pages. And despite the Toubon Law, Ms Poirier says the internet has led to an invasion of English words, which are picked up by newspapers because they seem fashionable, and then find their way into speech.

But why does it matter? Ms Poirier's book, Touche, a French Woman's Take on the English, has plenty of examples of the English language adopting French words and phrases, even if some of them, like "double entendre", are not actually said in France. It's a kind of Franglais, but it has never seemed to bother anyone.

Other mixed languages like Spanglish and Denglisch (German and English) also exist without causing nearly so much anguish. The French see it differently because English is taking over the world and French isn't. English doesn't need defending, but French, once the European language of freedom and culture, does. And English is not just 600,000 eccentrically spelt words in a very large book, it is, to some, a symbol of Anglo-American cultural imperialism, the language of junk food. You might think we were talking about the last two speakers of a native American dialect, rather than French, which is used by more than 350 million people. But to some, a future of Franglais n'est pas un future at all.

Adapted from BBC.co.uk

Instant recall - EOI Navarra inglés B2 resuelto

I was idly flicking through blogs when I stumbled upon a website. It was a collection of polaroid photographs and gradually I began to realize that there was one for every day between March 1979 and October 1997. There was no way of telling who they belonged to, no commentary or captions, just the photos, arranged month by month like contact sheets. There was a sense, too, that I was not supposed to be there, browsing through these snaps of friends and family, of baseball games and picnics, but they were funny. There were pictures of things that did not exist any more as well as car parks and swimming-pools.

Slowly it became apparent whose collection it was – friends would come and go but one man regularly popped up over the 18 years documented, doing ordinary stuff like eating dinner or unusual things in faraway countries. In one picture he is proudly holding a skinned goat, in another he is on stilts. A lot of the time he looks serious while doing ridiculous things. During the 80s there are lots of pictures of him playing music with an avant-garde street performance outfit called Janus Circus. There are pictures of TV screens – ball games, Frank Zappa’s death, president Carter, Reagan and Clinton.

Then, in 1997, events take a dark turn. There are pictures of the photographer in hospital, then with a long scar across his head. He is gravely ill. For a short while his health appears to improve and he returns home. In October there is a picture of a ring, then two days later a wedding ceremony. But just a few weeks after that he is back in hospital with some friends from the early photos. On October 25 the series ends. The photographer has died.

Of course I was not alone in discovering this remarkable site. Since the end of May it has been passed from blog to blog across America. “The first I knew about it was when all my other websites started to closing down under the strain,” says New Yorker Hugh Crawford, who was responsible for putting his friend’s pictures on line after his death. “Initially it was not meant to be looked at by anyone. A group of us were putting on an exhibition of the photos and the site was a place where we could look at the pictures while we talked on the phone.”

The photographer’s name was Jamie Livingston. He was a film maker and editor who worked on public information films, adverts and promo videos for MTV. Taking a single photo every day began by accident when he was 22 and studying film with Crawford at Bart College, in upstate New York. “He’d been doing it for about a month before he realised he’d been taking a photo about one picture a day, and then he made the commitment to keep doing that,” says Crawford. “That’s what he was like. There are some people who have flashes of brilliance and do things in a huge rush or creative burst but he was more of a steady, keep-at-it kind of guy and he did amazing stuff. Part of the appeal of the site is that Jamie was not this amazing-looking guy. He led an incredible life, but there’s an every man quality to the photographs.”

There are a lot of visual jokes, funny shots and fluted self-portraits, but the plan was to take one picture and keep it no matter how it turned out. Once they found themselves walking with a circus of elephants through the heart of New York, late at night. Crawford turned to his friend and suggested this could be the picture of the day. “He was like, “No, I took a picture of my lunch, it’s already been taken,” laughs Crawford. […]

Only one mystery remains about Livingston’s life: “There’s one woman who appears a lot (in the earlier photographs) who seems to have been a girlfriend but no one knows who she is,” says Crawford, much of whose own life story is told within the pictures as well.

The more famous the pictures become, the more likely it is that one day he’ll find out.

© The Guardian 13.08.08

Drunk, and dangerous, at the keyboard - EOI Madrid inglés B2 resuelto

ANYONE who has spent more than a few minutes over the last couple of weeks trolling tech blogs or cocktail lounges has probably heard about Mail Goggles, a new feature on Google’s Gmail program that is intended to help stamp out a scourge that few knew existed: late-night drunken e-mailing.

The experimental program requires any user who enables the function to perform five simple math problems in 60 seconds before sending e-mails between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on weekends. That time frame apparently corresponds to the gap between cocktail No. 1 and cocktail No. 4, when tapping out an e-mail message to an ex or a co-worker can seem like the equivalent of bungee jumping without a cord.

Mail Goggles is not the first case of a technology developed to keep people from endangering themselves or others with the machinery of daily life after they have had a few. For years, judges have ordered drunken-driving offenders to install computerized breath-analyzers linked to their car’s ignition system to prevent them from starting their vehicles when intoxicated.

But as the first sobriety checkpoint on what used to be called the information superhighway, the Mail Goggles program also raises a larger question: In an age when so much of our routine communication is accomplished with our fingertips, are we becoming so tethered to our keyboards that we really need the technological equivalent of trigger locks on firearms? In interviews with people who confessed to imbibing and typing at the same time, the answer seems to be yes.

Kate Allen Stukenberg, a magazine editor in Houston, said that “the thing that is disappointing about Mail Goggles is that it’s only on Gmail,” because many people need cellphone protection, given the widespread practice of drunk text-messaging.

The Mail Goggles program itself was born of embarrassment. A Gmail engineer named Jon Perlow wrote the program after sending his share of regrettable late-night missives, including a plea to rekindle a relationship with an old girlfriend, he wrote on the company’s Gmail blog. “We’ve all been

there before, unfortunately,” said Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. So-called drunk dialing may be as old as the telephone itself, but now, he said, the edge of the abyss is much closer in an era when so many people carry personal digital assistants containing hundreds of contact numbers — including clients, work adversaries and bosses — everywhere, including bars and parties.

And e-mail messages can be particularly potent because they constitute what social scientists call “asynchronous” communication, meaning that exchanges between people do not happen in real time, unlike face-to-face or telephone conversations. People can respond to work-related messages hours after they leave the office — a risky proposition if they happen to log on after stumbling home from happy hour.

The delay in response time means that people have lots of time to shape a response to achieve maximum impact, he said. “If you have eight hours of bar time to think of all the bad things you can come up with, this becomes uniquely damaging,” Dr Bailenson said.

Text-based communication and alcohol are a potent mix in part because people already tend to be more candid online than they are in person, even before they loosen their inhibitions with a drink, said Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. “Research suggests that for some people, the use of computers or other gadgets creates some emotional distancing from the person they are addressing,” Mr Rainie said in an e-mail message. The distance, in other words, makes them feel safe — flirting becomes more flirtatious; insults become more insulting.

The latter was the case with one 23-year-old record producer in Manhattan who recalled a drunken text-message mishap on a recent trip to Syracuse University. The producer, who declined to be identified, said he had picked up an undergraduate woman while intoxicated and had accompanied her back to her apartment. But sitting in her kitchen at 4 a.m., he said, he started to have second thoughts. So while she was in the room, he tapped out a message to a friend’s iPhone: “Eww Saratoga, what am I thinking? I can def. do better than this ... can you drive my car and get me out of here?” Seconds later, her telephone buzzed. He had accidentally sent the message to her, not his friend, the producer said. Months later, after a few more romantic misadventures with her, “We had a long talk and I apologized,” he said. “I now write songs about getting my life together.”

Adapted from © New York Times, 2008.

The Jane Austen Centre - EOI País Vasco inglés A2

Welcome to Jane Austen Centre. The focus of this exhibition is Jane Austen’s five years living and socialising in Bath – the places she lived in and visited. We hope you enjoy your visit.

The Jane Austen Centre in Bath at No. 40 Gay Street is a house very similar to No. 25, where Jane Austen lived for a few months following her father’s death. These Georgian town houses in Gay Street were built between 1735 and 1760.

The houses are alike in design, although this house had a large extension added, during the 20th century, which covers the whole of the garden. It is in this space that the permanent exhibition is placed.

Within the exhibition are displayed a number of hand-made reproduction period costumes, which have been created using authentic fabrics, in colours contemporary with the period.

Refresh yourself during and after your visit at our Tea Rooms and enjoy a pot of real leaf tea, some home-made cakes or a delicious light snack.

The Centre Giftshop is a treasure of Jane Austen – related gifts, some specially designed for, exclusive to, the Centre. There is a range of writing paper, pens, post cards and high-quality reproduction cards. We have a comprehensive stock of books about Jane Austen, her life, her family and times.

Ministers who justify state snooping might now learn that the biters can be bit - EOI Navarra inglés C1 resuelto

Every journalist knows that breaking the law is inexcusable - except, of course, where there is an excuse. As a general rule, what I write, however obtained, is in the public interest. What you write is money-grubbing prurience. Now what was that juicy story you told me the other day?

The News of the World scandal is in danger of submerging the body politic in a wave of hypocrisy. The paper did what some newspapers have long done, which is scrape the dustbin of gossip in whic lurks the fame of all public figures. Aided by electronic surveillance, journalists use private detectives, hackers, oddballs and dodgy policemen to dig the dirt on behalf of their readers and shareholders. They usually pay money, even if this is not allowed.

Sometimes, as with the Daily Telegraph on MPs' expenses, we are served copper-bottomed sensation. Although the scoop was allegedly based on payments for theft, the world cheered the "public interest". Other times, as with the (Princess) Dianagate tapes, salacious material is uncovered with no shred of public interest but which no amount of self-restraint could keep from the public eye. In the case of the News of the World, the ease with which mobile phones can be eavesdropped on supplied a mountain of celebrity gossip.

Human Rights law may offer "a right to respect for private and family life, home and conversation", but this is merely a pious hope. When a cloud of secret range-finders can hover over the mobile phones of the stars, policing is near impossible. Hackers can squat in caravans or attics, equipped from any backstreet store. The News of the World gained access to thousands of phone messages. These could as easily have been posted on the web.

Although the police have decided to take no further action, the case raises intriguing but tangential issues. It is implausible for the former News of the World editor, Andy Coulson, to plead that he did not know what was going on. No editor would be left in the dark about the costly source of such scoops. Even a remark that "I would rather not know" admits responsibility.

When a member of the paper's staff, Clive Goodman, went to jail in 2007 for a hacking offence, a parliamentary committee was told that he was a “rotten apple” and an isolated case. We now learn that Coulson’s staff had access to thousands of mobile phone records, all illegally obtained and currently in the hands of the police.

The paper then lavishly paid off some of its victims on condition of confidentiality, while the police (and Crown Prosecution Service) agreed to turn a blind eye. They neither pursued other offences by News of the World reporters nor informed those whose private lives they knew to have been compromised. The police appeared to collude in a massive breach of privacy.

The much-vaunted framework of parliamentary oversight and media self-regulation was also left looking idiotic. We have been told for 18 years that the presence of working editors on the voluntary Press Complaints Commission brings a weight of expertise and judgement to its decisions. This is selfserving rubbish, trotted out by successive PCC chairmen who enjoy cavorting with the barons of media power.

The case for non-statutory regulation of the press remains strong, but depends heavily on that regulation being scrupulous and outspoken, as it largely was under the old Press Council with its vigorous chairmen. The present Press Complaints Commission claims to work its magic "behind the scenes". It works no magic. It is dead.

None of this impinges on the central issue of the News of the World case, that chaos now surrounds the confidentiality of electronic data in Britain. That law-breaking now depends wholly on the “robustness” of an excuse is hopeless. Most people accepted that the Telegraph was justified in using stolen information to reveal details of MPs’ expenses. But the argument was tested neither in the courts nor before the PCC. It was granted by acclamation.

© Simon Jenkins “The Guardian”, 10th July 2009

It's all about me - EOI País Vasco inglés C1 resuelto

It used to be that only oppressed minorities had the right to lay claim to victim status, but not any more: it seems that anyone and everyone can be a victim now. Forget the Oppression Olympics, the pointless debate over which identity group suffers the most discrimination; these days, as Frank Furedi noted in The Culture of Fear: "We are all expected to compete, like guests on a television programme, to prove that we are the most put-upon and pathetic people in the house, the most deserving of counselling and compensation."

It was Margaret Thatcher who inadvertently provided the catalyst for all this navel-gazing and selfobsession when she infamously pronounced that there is "no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first." Since then it's all been about "me me me"; not even 11 years of a Labour government have managed to halt our increasing narcissism or inject any sense of collectivism back into the national psyche.

Bookshop shelves groan with the weight of self-help manuals, designed to pander to and heal just about every psychic and emotional stress known to humankind, while misery lit (or misery porn as it's more accurately known) is fast outselling any other genre.

As writers scribe in unflinching detail their stories of brutalised childhoods, and of their survivals against all the odds, we lap up these tales of woe and clamour for more. Narratives that were meant to inspire and empower us with their messages of triumph over adversity serve instead as fodder for our most voyeuristic tendencies; it's starting to feel like there's an incredibly tasteless competition on to find the poor sod who has had the most miserable childhood in the history of the world, ever.

But as Libby Brooks observed recently in her excellent piece on the debate about rape: "Creating a hierarchy of victimhood helps no one." I couldn't agree more.

Even those with all the advantages aren't exempt from all this wallowing and internal reflection.

Born with a silver spoon in your mouth and sent to all the best schools? Don't worry, there's a support group out there for you somewhere. Think you've always been happy and never wanted for anything? Well think again. No one gets through life unscathed: you're probably in denial and need a good dose of therapy to find out whatever it is you're repressing.

What's really lacking in all of this introspection is any sense of the bigger picture. These personal histories stand alone, testament to the individualism that has permeated every aspect of 21stcentury life. Rather than examining and critiquing our social conditions, we're encouraged instead to look inwards, to heal ourselves and rid ourselves of any demons we may have picked up along the way. As a consequence of this we're failing to make those vital connections between our personal experiences and how our lives have been shaped by forces beyond our individual control.

But "the personal is political" was not just some trite feminist slogan dreamed up to help bored housewives make sense of their lot. As Carol Hanisch said in her essay of the same name: "personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution." Isn't it about time we started to embrace that kind of thinking again?

The discriminations and prejudices I've encountered in my life are not because I'm me, Cath Elliott: they're a direct result of the gender and social class I was born into. Counselling, self-help books or holistic therapies might make me better able to deal with what life has thrown or has yet to throw at me, but it won't do anything to change the external conditions that impact negatively on me and mine.

So, the choice is ours. We can either continue to wallow in our victimhood, fighting to outdo each other with our tales of oppression and woe, and attempting to heal our lives in splendid isolation, or we can learn once again to recognise our shared experiences and start to fight together for change. We're only victims if we choose to be so. Personally I reject the label: I'd advise everyone else to do the same.

Adapted from The Guardian