Category: Life

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Getting a passport in Australia

See Lindsey Kuper on a expedited US passport, here we have another “life in Australia” comparison piece.

Step 1: obtain passport form. If you are an adult renewing an existing adult passport that has been expired for less than 24 months, you can do this online. Otherwise, obtain form from nearest post office.

Step 2: track down someone — usually just another passport holder — to be your photo referee (ie, to agree that it is you in the picture). Gather relevant documentation, that is, proof of identity and of citizenship. If you were born in Australia on or after 20 August 1986, see below.

Step 3: ring up local post office for passport interview, usually granted within the week. If you need it sooner, call several post offices in turn or go to the Passport Office (in a capital city).

Step 4: attend post office. Have them take your photo, these days, because if they don’t approve it, they can take it again. Have interview, which in fact largely consists of having your documentation and photo checked for validity.

Step 5: pay fee ($233), extra $103 for priority.

Priority passports are printed to be mailed within 2 business days, other applications within 10. They arrive registered post (ie, signature required). If you require one within 2 days, it seems you need to attend a Passport Office in person and hope they can help.

Given that I understand it takes weeks and weeks to get a USA passport if not expedited, 10 days is not too bad.

Born in Australia on or after 20 August 1986? Tricky! This is when Australia stopped granting citizenship by right of birth alone. So you need proof of citizenship, which can include:

  • evidence that you were born in Australia and that one of your parents was either a citizen or permanent resident at the time of your birth
  • evidence that you were born in Australia and that you were still a resident of Australia on your 10th birthday (school records and so on)
  • evidence that you were born in Australia and were not eligible for any other citizenship
  • see also

This diversion has been known to be lengthy. 🙁 It’s also just about impossible to get one as a minor if your guardians don’t agree to you travelling.

Have a small child with you?

Good luck with that, because the photo standards require straight on face shot with open eyes and neutral facial expression. Try getting your pre- or semi-verbal child to do that.

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PhD status

Mount Everest as seen from the Tibetan plateau
Mount Everest by Joe Hastings

A quick note that appearances do suggest that I am in the final weeks of my PhD, with submission in late May. I am reluctant to say this because I’ve been wrong before, but this time my supervisor agrees. So.

I probably will be pretty absent for several weeks. And if I am not, I may be very tired.

Also an explanation of how this works in Australia, because it’s quite different to North America. Mostly writing this so that people don’t start addressing me as ‘Doctor’ in June.

Short version: this work is me preparing my thesis for initial examination, and this is hopefully the hardest bit. But I won’t graduate for at least six months.

First, I finalise my thesis document (we don’t call it a dissertation). I submit this to the university where it is examined by three external examiners: ideally at least one from an Australian university. At this point my work on it is in deep freeze.

Unlike in North America in general, these examiners are anonymous to me (chosen by my supervisor) and were not involved in my PhD studies prior to this point. This means in theory that they might not like it: in practice I am told that around 99% of students who submit at all eventually graduate.

Examination in theory takes six weeks, it could take as long as six months (since appointing a whole new examiner might be slower than waiting for a late one). They submit reports which my supervisor reads and makes recommendations on (most commonly I agree, Mary should indeed fix all these things, followed by I almost entirely agree, Mary should indeed fix all but a few of these things). This is fed into the higher degree research committee (who usually agree with the supervisor, but they might come up with a different answer if the examiners’ recommendations varied a lot) and then there’s a huge range of possible decisions that come out of the HDR committee:

  1. pass as is
  2. make minor amendations to the Library copy and pass
  3. minor revisions to be checked by supervisor (for which I’d be allocated a month) and then pass
  4. major revisions to be checked by supervisor (for which I’d be allocated two months) and then pass
  5. revise and resubmit to examiners a second time
  6. only award a Masters degree (possibly in combination with revisions): recall that in the Australian system I don’t already have a Masters degree
  7. fail

The most likely decision by far in my research group is minor or major revisions: I’ve never heard of anyone avoiding them. Some people in fact prefer major just because you get a bit more time to revise. (In other faculties, it isn’t unheard of to pass without revision.) No one wants to be re-examined: this usually means re-enrolling and re-doing experimental work and similar.

Unless re-examination is needed, after any required revisions it is pure administrivia: the HDR committee must pass it, and then the university Senate. I submit a bound copy of my thesis to the university library and (far more importantly now) put it on my website and submit to the university’s digital collection.

I think at that point I am finally a graduand and can use the title ‘Dr’ in academia and so on. Actual graduation would take place in either September/October or April/May, so in the pathological case it could be a while between finalising the thesis and actually graduating.

I do not do an oral defence (a three hour or so session where my examiners ask me questions in person).

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Product review: GoGet carsharing

We’ve been non-car owners again for a few weeks and members of GoGet car sharing for a month or so. These are my initial impressions.

This is against a background of our car being primarily used for occasional errands, and weekend excursions either locally (to the beach etc) or to regional cities. We also used to use our car for our son’s daily childcare run, but since we moved, his new childcare is in walking distance. I wouldn’t recommend GoGet to anyone who has a daily errand, this review is largely comparing it to having an occasional-use personal car.

Good things compared to car ownership:

  1. most areas where there is a car at all, there’s more than one. An out-of-action car does not mean “no car use at all until car repaired”
  2. they take care of on-road costs and insurance. Of course, this is bundled into subscriber fees, but it both flattens them over the year and works out cheaper for our usage. I think in theory they aim for a car for every 10 subscribers or so? We’re on the Frequent member plan, so I guess you could say our on-road costs are $360 a year.
  3. they take care of repairs. Again, bundled in, but flattened and so on.
  4. they take care of having a free parking spot by paying the council for guaranteed spots.
  5. (maybe arguably good) they turn the fleet over far more often than most people I know replace their cars.

Good things compared to car rental:

  1. the cars are just sitting there, in our case quite close by. You just get online, book, and walk up and take one. You only sign away your life in triplicate once. You don’t have to budget in a trip to the car rental place, a wait in a queue, a briefing on the terms and conditions and an inspection of the car.
  2. the insurance is reasonable rather than the typical car rental deal with a $3500+ excess unless you pay them 1/2 the rental cost again. With GoGet, if you can wear a $1500 excess it’s built in to the base pricing, or you can pay about $18 per day to bring it down to $300.
  3. you have to return the car with at least 1/4 of a tank of fuel, which is a lot easier to achieve than the full tank rental companies require.
  4. both the possibility of hourly bookings and the hour saving in pickup time make them way more useful for errands and so on.
  5. close to instantaneous bookings, subject to availability, whereas rental companies often struggle with sub-24-hours-notice requests

Bad things:

  1. Bookings start and finish on the hour. In pathological cases (say you need a car from 1245 to 1315) you pay for two or three hours of use in order to use the car for an hour or so.
  2. They’re for-profit, presumably this could be done cheaper not-for-profit. This is a bad thing-asterisk though: as I know very well, NFPs don’t magically appear out of thin air. Someone would still have to set up an entire car sharing company except with only a salary to motivate them.
  3. GoGet’s big thing is “we pay for fuel”. And they do pay in the sense of providing fuel cards, but they also have a 39c per kilometre usage charge for bookings that aren’t a day long booking. 40c per kilometre adds up fast!
    In theory the day booking rate (24 hours and 150km free for $68) kicks in as soon as your per-hour spend exceeds the day rate, for most cross-metro trips you’re probably going to nearly hit that.
  4. (potentially) GoGet does not accept any member who has a major traffic offence in the last 10 years of driving, and all applications for membership are at the discretion of their insurer. This contributes to the cheaper insurance compared to car rental, but it obviously disadvantages people who do have a traffic record or a history of at-fault accidents.
  5. not an enormous amount of choice wrt make and model, less than many larger rental centres. Really your choice boils down to little-medium-big in whichever make and model are nearby. (For us little == Toyota Yaris, medium == Hyundai i30s and i30 wagons, and big == Hyundai iMax.)
  6. some contention for them. Our experience is that with weekends, we really need to plan our trip the day before to have a good chance of a single car in Glebe being free over the entire block of time we need, and it’s probably worse in suburbs with less cars (Glebe has at least 10, and Pyrmont and Ultimo another 15 or so). Long weekends are worse because people take them away, and the iMaxes get booked really early most weekends.
  7. lack of flexibility with end time. That is, if we want to go somewhere and book a car accordingly but then someone invites us to dinner or whatever, we may not be able to stay because the car needs to be back. We haven’t had to try for last-minute use extensions yet, so we don’t know how often we will find that the car has 3 hours free just after our booking.
  8. if something goes wrong with your booking, they give you a $25 credit on your account, which unless the error is very minor is really not enough. To be fair, they do shift the booking to another car if they can, but on weekends this would be hard, see 6.
  9. fitting children’s car seats is a pain in the neck.
  10. their setup has an annoying feature whereby if it is the very first time that you in particular have used a given car in the fleet, the booking needs to take place about 15 minutes before your slot, so that the car can download your access data. Less important once you’ve used the car nearest to you for the first time.

In the medium term, this is likely to be a sufficiently good replacement for our occasional-use car.

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Nannies and flexibility

Liam Hogan tweeted:

Further on rebates for nannies: if they’re a response to family-unfriendly working hours, flexible childcare is solving the wrong problem.

Here’s some systemic problems with childcare as it currently stands that one might hire a nanny as a possible solution to:

availability (strong form) For under 2s in Sydney, you simply might not get a childcare place accessible to you, by your scheduled return to work. Full-stop.

availability (weaker form) You have 2 or 3 children under 5, not uncommon. If you do get childcare places for them all, they (a) start to approach the price of a nanny and (b) are often not at the same daycare centre. So you can add 2 to 3 drop-offs to your commute run, 2 to 3 infection sources to your health problems, and when your children do all end up at the same daycare centre, you can enjoy four to six weeks of emotionally resettling them with the new centre. Or hire a nanny.

commuting in general Family unfriendly work hours are common. Family unfriendly commute hours are even more common: either a really tight schedule where you hope for no breakdowns/signals failures, or just total impossibility of getting to the centre in time. (Or you can have your kids in care near your work, and have them commute with you. Fun for the whole family. Plus you cannot use the centre when you are sick, which is one of the times when you really want to.)

illness I had four bouts of gastro and eight respiratory infections in the four months after my son began daycare. A nanny is an expensive way to avoid this, but that night I considered calling the police because we couldn’t lift him up to feed him? Maybe that’s worth $200 a day to people who can pay to avoid it.

throughout the day contact a privilege of (partial) telecommuters and (partially) at-home business people, and in theory daycare centres allow drop-ins if children are well-settled there and can handle two separations in a day (so, probably not in the first several months of care). For these people, a nanny may be one way of allowing the parent and child to have throughout-the-day contact without the parent needing to be first contact point for the child’s needs.

Now, I fully agree that funding nannies is less good ultimately than, say, free and freely available childcare, predictable work hours, widespread onsite/neighbourhood childcare with liberal allowance for parent drop-in, redesigning work and cities so that 1+ hour commutes aren’t the usual case, or… I don’t even know what you do about the illnesses, because I once saw my 9 month old licking another baby’s face and getting a good licking back. But there’s a raft of reasons why nannies are attractive. We may turn to one after our next child on cost alone. So that’s the context of nannies, for me.

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So yeah, that happened (Wikimania 2012, Washington DC)

On Friday, I was announced as the keynote speaker for Wikimania in Washington DC in July.

Ada Initiative:

We’re proud to announce that Ada Initiative co-founder Mary Gardiner has been chosen to give the opening keynote at Wikimania 2012! Wikimania is the world’s top conference for Wikipedia and related Wikimedia projects, held this year from July 12 – 15 in Washington, D.C. “Mary has been a strong advocate for open source and has worked extensively to elevate the role of women and increase their participation in open source and open culture,” says James Hare, Wikimania 2012 coordinator.

I basked in my glory for all of about two hours before coming down with some horrible illness my toddler picked up at daycare. Talk about crashing to earth.

Anyway, so, I am Wikimania’s keynote! My plan, loosely, is this:

  1. arrive DC on July 8 or 9
  2. AdaCamp DC on July 10 and 11
  3. Wikimania on July 12–14
  4. (possibly/probably) San Francsico on July 15 onwards, probably departing on the 18th or 19th (due to the dateline, add 2 days for my Sydney arrival)

Since I am unlikely to bring my son, I’m trying to limit my time away and am unlikely to add another city. If I do, it will probably be Montreal (where my sister-in-law lives).

If we know each other and you want to get in touch about meeting up in the States, email me at the usual places. If you’re a journalist wanting to talk to me, email me via the Ada Initiative press@adainitiative.org.

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Sunday spam: watered-down gruel

Mmm, yum.

I’ve been thinking more intensely about schooling my son since, well, he was born and also since I began reading Rivka’s homeschooling blog (she began homeschooling her then five-year-old year old daughter in June 2010, when my own son was about four months old).

I probably, frankly, wouldn’t know the first thing about homeschooling otherwise, but as it is, I can bring you several links. The first couple are a defence of homeschooling from a self-identified liberal point of view, in the US sense of progressive. In fact, all of this is about the US school system.

Does homeschooling violate liberal values?

Do we have a responsibility to work towards equal educational opportunity for all children, and if so, do we violate it by removing our family from the public system? Even liberal homeschoolers don’t really seem to engage with this question much. Partly I think it’s because there’s such a strong libertarian streak in homeschooling communities, even on the left wing. But also, liberal philosophical arguments for homeschooling tend to be based on a critique of schools as rigid and stifling institutions…

Are liberal homeschoolers hypocrites?

… I’m not a homeschooler, and I don’t particularly care whether anyone thinks I’m sufficiently liberal. But I certainly don’t judge anyone who chooses to take their kids out of these schools. There’s no one right answer to how to make this world a more humane place, and the homeschoolers’ answer seems at least as wise as Goldstein’s. If anything, I instinctively distrust the idea that we can create a more liberal and humane society by putting our kids into less liberal and humane environments. By treating kids as instruments for social improvement, that argument mirrors the very same instrumental treatment of children that I object to when it’s practiced by “reformers” who treat kids as soldiers in the battle for global competitiveness.

And that last point about soldiers in the battle for global competitiveness neatly brings me to Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools:

Hundreds of private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion annually to support or transform K–12 education, most of it directed to schools that serve low-income children (only religious organizations receive more money). But three funders—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad (rhymes with road) Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—working in sync, command the field. Whatever nuances differentiate the motivations of the Big Three, their market-based goals for overhauling public education coincide: choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making. And they fund the same vehicles to achieve their goals: charter schools, high-stakes standardized testing for students, merit pay for teachers whose students improve their test scores, firing teachers and closing schools when scores don’t rise adequately, and longitudinal data collection on the performance of every student and teacher…

Every day, dozens of reporters and bloggers cover the Big Three’s reform campaign, but critical in-depth investigations have been scarce (for reasons I’ll explain further on). Meanwhile, evidence is mounting that the reforms are not working…

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Talking about his generation: you too can be a bad futurist

The X or Y posts (Gen X or Y?, On being X-ish) reminded me of something I wrote about my son, who was born in 2010, not long before he was born:

I was looking at one of those “the kids of today” lists and thinking about V. What will the world of the 2010 baby look like? I came up with:

  • September 11 will be something that happened when his parents were young, roughly equivalent to the Vietnam War for me, a bit nearer than the moon landing or Harold Holt drowning
  • in fact by the time he’s a teenager everyone or nearly everyone who walked on the moon will have died
  • he may not ever learn to read a paper map or street directory unless he gets heavily into bushwalking or something
  • by the time he’s grown up, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s really unusual to own many paper books, perhaps as uncommon as people my age who own vinyl (yeah, I do know a few, but…)
  • there will be a few veterans of WWII and people who experienced the Holocaust (other than as little babies) around in his childhood and even teens, but they’ll be like I remember WWI veterans: very elderly

If anyone wants to play: can you come up with things that aren’t true of children born in 2000, say? Things like “your parents have always had mobile phones” are going to be true of children 10 or even 15 years older than V will be. (Of my list, the paper map stuff probably fails that test, so might the WWII stuff.)

I’m a terrible futurist, that already reads badly to me. For example, I didn’t own a GPS device at the time: that’s why I thought that bushwalking would rely on paper maps in 2030. (Since they don’t run out of charge, presumably they’ll be useful as backups for a long time, at least for the type of folks who are wary enough to take backup maps anywhere.)

But the question stands: there’s a lot of difference already between me and someone born in, say, 1995. But what’s the difference between that child’s life, and that of my son born in 2010?

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On being X-ish

Now that I have described how I graduated into Generation X, I have a secret to confess: I’m starting to think that that might not be entirely wrong.

Let’s stick to cohort effects here, since it’s supposed to be a cohort term. And I should add that this is all very trivial stuff, I’m focussing on media, pop culture and technology experiences.

One of the major temptations of identifying as Generation Y had to do with pop culture. My teenage years were just past the wave of slackers and grunge and Seattle. I probably heard Nirvana’s music during Kurt Cobain’s lifetime, but I didn’t know of them as a thing until about a year after he died. I’ve never even seen Reality Bites, but Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder are both 10 years older than I am, and their movies weren’t about my cohort.

I am, frankly, Spice Girls age: not the pre-teen thrilled girls waving things to be signed, but the teenagers who actually paid for the albums with their own money. (I didn’t, for reference. We were a Garbage family.) Britney Spears was born in the same year as me, and her biggest year career-wise was my first year of university. And obviously, when the term “Generation Y” was coined, the stereotypes of late university/early career certainly fit my friends better than the Generation X tags with managerial aspirations. The return of cool people listening to cheesy pop: Y-ish. So that was where I felt I fell. (In case anyone I knew at high school drops by: I realise I wasn’t cool. But you may have been, and don’t think I didn’t notice you danced to the Spice Girls.)

But then, there’s certainly a few small societal boundaries between me and people who were born in 1986. (I have a sister born in 1986, and thinking about the five years between us is often telling.) Starting at a global level, I was reading Tony Judt’s Postwar recently (recommended, I’ll come back to it here at some point), and I was struck because I remember 1989.

To be fair, that’s more important if one lives in Europe, which I never have, but most of my first detailed memories of newsworthy events have to do with the revolutions of 1989 and the 1990 Gulf War. I remember the USSR, again, from the perspective of a young child who was growing up in Australia, but still. I can read the science fiction people smirk about now, the fiction with the USA and USSR facing off in 2150, and remember, a little bit, what that was actually about. This is, well, frankly, more than a little X-ish.

While we’re talking about defining events, I recall that quite a lot of people talked about the children who won’t remember 9/11. (And by children, I now mean 15 year olds, of course.) Obviously this is more important in the USA, perhaps a little like the European children (by which I mean 25 year olds) who don’t remember 1989 in Europe. I obviously remember 2001, and moreover remember the geopolitical situation in the years before it quite vividly too, and that latter is again, more than a touch X-ish.

Turning to technology, which is fairly defining for me, we’ll start with Douglas Adams:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Leaving aside the age effect where shortly everything cool will be against the natural order of things, it’s noticeable to me that the Web and email and so on fall in the “can probably get a career in it” bracket for me. Well, obviously not truly (the first version of the SMTP specification, which still more or less describes how email works today, was published in 1982), but my late teenage years were exactly the years when suddenly a lot of Australian consumers were on the ‘net. Hotmail was founded when I was 15 and I got an address there the following year. (icekween@, the address has been gone since 1999 and I’ve never used that handle since, partly because even in 98/99 it was always taken. But, actually, for a 16 year old’s user name I still think that was fairly OK considering some of the alternatives.)

In short, it was all happening in prime “get a career in it” time for me, and not coincidentally I am at the tail end of the huge boom in computer science enrolments and graduates that came to a giant sudden stop about two years after I finished. Frankly, X-ish. My youngest sister and her friends didn’t get excited about how they were going to become IT managers and have luxury yachts as a matter of course. (Well, partly age and partly not being jerks, there.) It’s a lot harder to get the “just a natural part of the way the world works” people excited about it.

Diagnosis: tailing X.

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Speaking of being tall

Of course, if you blog about it it will happen again: “I thought they only made them that tall in Texas!” said the woman in the elevator with us this afternoon.

At least she gets points for originality. Texas? Why Texas?

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Your friendly guide to talking to me about being tall

Scene setting: I’m 193cm/6’4″ tall. The average height of an Australian woman is about 163cm, so conveniently you can think of me as being a whole ruler taller, or that the average Australian woman’s head is about my shoulder height. This is a weird enough height that I’ve had all kinds of weird conversations about it. Let me get you past the weird.

Rule 1: consider not talking to a tall person about their height. It’s hard to do well. Think of it like this:
Person 1: “your body has a very very unusual feature! very unusual! very unusual!”
Person 2: “whereas your body does not! very normal! very normal!”

It’s a pretty one way conversation, basically. It’s unlikely (statistically) that they can reciprocate in kind by asking you/informing you about your visible weirdnesses, and if they can, it’s likely you don’t want to hear about your weirdnesses. The conversation in reality goes something like this:

Person 1: you are very very tall!
Person 2: um, indeed.
Person 1: [waits patiently for tall person to work harder to pull their turn out of the magical conversation hat]

Or alternatively, the general rule is start conversations where the person you are talking to has some chance of reciprocation.

Rule 2: especially consider not talking to a tall child or teenager about their height! This is because people generally make free with subjecting children and teenagers to every thought that crosses their mind, usually prescriptively at that. I am probably down to a conversation every few months about my height now. When I was a teenager, I had a conversation with a stranger about my height about once a week. That person who by virtue of youth (*cough* and gender) is extra socially obliged to stand there and look polite while they hear your every thought about human height variations? You’re not the only person taking advantage.

Rule 3: I’ve heard the jokes. Useful rule in general for anyone who has what you consider an unusual body, name, accent, hair colour, job, dress, religious belief, ethnic identity, mobility aid, manner of speaking, hobby, and/or other thing.

I have to say, I’m yet to hear what I’d call a good tall joke, but then, I would be biased, wouldn’t I?

Rule 4: I don’t need to know about how unattractive you find it. I won’t belabour this: if you’re the kind of person who tells tall people they are ugly or freaky (in my case, this was almost exclusively done by men to my teenage self, men in late middle age still occasionally do it now), you’re the kind of person who isn’t reading.

Incidentally, the favoured insult for a tall slender woman you’ve just seen on the street and instantly been repelled by is “lanky bitch” or “fucking lanky bitch“. In case it ever comes up in a trivia quiz or something. Who the hell uses the word ‘lanky’?

Rule 5: I don’t want to hear about how jealous you are. This is more complicated and interesting. When I was in my late teens, most of those people stopping me to talk to me about it were middle-aged women* wanting to tell me I was beautiful and special and should stand up straight and be proud and they wished they were me.

It took me ages to work out what was going on, which is that each of these women thought she was the only one and was lighting a torch in the misery of my teen years. Since it happened several times a month, I had no notion that they thought that, and they must have been rather unsettled by my awkward and slightly hostile reaction to their attempt to reach through the fog of human cruelty with a kind thought. Sorry, kind women.

* Um, possibly adult women? I wasn’t good at picking adult’s ages at the time.

Rule 6: unless you are my doctor, I don’t want to discuss my genetic history with you. I’m not sure why everyone wants to know whether my parents are tall (oh what the hell: yes, they are, and if the human race consisted entirely of my father’s relatives, I would be at the tall end of normal, rather than at the “having conversations with strangers and writing blog entries” level). It seems kind of weird to be led through a laundry list of my relatives and asked if they are tall. Are people trying to find out if their own children will/won’t/might be tall?

A special note to doctors on this one: you don’t get out of gaol free! It might help to explain why you’re asking. “There are some diseases and syndromes which have extreme height as a symptom, but if your whole family is tall that’s less likely” is an example of a helpful thing to say. (At my height-for-sex, I suspect you can just about get away with saying “so, Marfan syndrome**, you either have it or have been investigated for it, yeah?”) But since quite a few doctors have done this out of either a desire for chitchat equivalent to the general public or a desire to satisfy some medical curiosity irrelevant to their treatment of me, I don’t like it much from doctors without explanation either. I am all good with doctor chitchat, but not about something where I can’t tell if you think I have a disease or you have a few minutes to shoot the breeze with me.

** Not the only medically interesting cause of tallness, I know.

Rule 7: I will be the judge of whether I can wear heels, thank you. I don’t wear high ones because OUCH and also because there’s absolutely no social advantage to me from being taller, quite the reverse. But I sometimes wear low ones because I like the shoes they are attached to, and every so often a sales assistant refuses to sell them to me. What the hell?

Rule 8: It’s not good news for me that there’s someone taller than you. Actual remark addressed to me on several occasions: “wow, oh my god, you’re taller than me! I feel so good knowing that there’s a woman taller than me out there!” Only about half the time do they go on to realise what that implies from my point of view.

I do see the temptation to start conversations with other tall people about how they are taller than me, but when I do I remember this.

Rule 9: You don’t need to worry about what your kids say. Well, unless it’s “fucking lanky bitch” I guess. But kids specialise in drive-bys: “that lady is very tall!” I don’t mind stating-the-obvious drive-bys, it’s cute.

The champion kid remark to date was while I was pregnant: “Mummy, that lady is very tall and she has a baby in her tummy!” Indeed!

Rule 10: I am all good with reaching stuff on high shelves for you. Maybe this bugs some tall people, certainly people apologise a lot for asking me to do this, but it seems fair enough, really. Why do shelves intended for the general public go so high anyway?

Rule 11: I like to show off. I can touch the ceiling (on tiptoes) in normal height modern rooms. (I use this to change lightbulbs.) I can stand flat-feet on the bottom of a 1.8m depth pool (the usual depth of recreational pools) and it comes up to about my mouth. I almost never get the chance to mention these things to people! Humour me. (OK, you don’t have to, now that you’ve read this.)

Rule 12: If you’ve known me for ages and have secretly always wanted to talk to me about being tall, I usually don’t mind much of this from people I know. I guess the ugly thing would be an exception, but really, it’s strangers bowling up to me and asking about the height of my great-great-grandfather’s sister that comprises 99% of the problem.