Katie the Duchess of Cambridge is up in arms with media houses that published naked photos of her whilst she was sun bathing on holiday in France with her husband William. Their lawyers are said to be pursuing the matter through French courts with the aim of preventing further use of the images and to seek damages. To them their right to privacy has been infringed since these pictures were taken using a long lens by someone in the street near where the royal couple was staying. Back at home, Locardia the PM’s ‘estranged’ wife is a big sucker for encouraging journalists into her private life. Today the Herald’s front page carries a picture of her and her lawyer discussing the way forward. Yes – her lawyer’s office – I wonder how a journalist had access to that meeting! She has always struck me as a media attention seeker. She surely knows how to get journalists inside her camp and get them well equipped with details.

I recently stumbled on a report online about sterilization of HIV positive women. I was baffled to learn that three women in Namibia had been sterilized without their consent. I have to admit that I haven’t heard of any such cases in Zimbabwe. All I see are means of educating HIV positive couples on ways of having healthier and possibly HIV negative children. Thus there is more talk of the mother to child transmission programmes and no talk of sterilization. The three women took the state hospitals to court for sterilizing them, making them barren on the basis that they are HIV positive. Now these women cry that they are going to be outcasts in their societies because of their barren nature. In African societies a woman is defined by being able to bear children. They say they have lost out on this ‘womanly definition’ against their own will.

“Do you fall in love often?”

Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.
Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

We often find ourselves telling a person to take a chill pill and take things easy. Well, a wife suspected of cheating prescribed a painkiller to her husband who had claimed he was hurt when he learnt his wife was cheating. The wife, Swaziland’s Minister of Culture, Sports and Youth Affairs, exact words were: “If my husband is hurting, he must buy Panado and drink it with lots and lots of water to relieve the pain.” Read full story here.

Found via Andrew Sullivan. Beautiful or what.

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography — to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.

- Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient