Fair warning: this interview of Eddie Izzard in the Guardian is prompting in me some thoughts which will definitely be considered transphobic by modern society. Of course, it doesn’t take much these days.

So, Eddie now identifies as a woman but still wants to be in ‘boy mode’ when he feels like it, including playing male characters in films.

It’s a bit convenient, considering that’s not exactly how it works for us ‘cis’ people – no way would Eddie Redmayne be cast as a trans woman in The Danish Girl if it was being made today, let alone get an Oscar nomination for it!

But, at the end of the day, whatever. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

What is more annnoying is this bit:

Would she like boobs? “Yeah! I’ve had boob envy since my teens. Just when teenage girls of my age were going ‘I want boobs’, I was thinking yeah me too. But I couldn’t say it. They talk about penis envy, and I believe some women suffer penis envy. I cannot for the life of me get my head around this. But yes, I’ve always had breasts envy.”

So you had breast envy, did you? Did you have period envy, too ? You can’t get one without the other, after all. How about constant objectification and sexualisation by society envy? Or being put down and belittled by men when you’re cleverer than them envy? Or unwanted pregnancy and abortion envy? Or street harassment and sexual assault envy? Or being murdered for daring to walk down the street envy?

Did any of these things which are also part and parcel of the female condition ever cross your mind as a teenager, or even later? Of course not, it’s so much more fun to pick and choose the best bits without having to put up with the more unpleasant aspects. A Barbie girl in a Barbie world, basically.

Now, I am sure coming out and living as a trans woman cannot be a bed of roses, but the hostility you can experience is totally different from what biological women have to put with from childhood.

Izzard shows me how people used to laugh in her face. She moves her face forward so she is virtually headbutting the screen. “People would stand this close, and say: ‘What the fuck is that? What the fuck is that?’ They turn you into an it.” Did it scare her? “No, it infuriated me. I want to fight everyone that says things like that.”

The above would obviously never happen to someone who was born a woman. This is an expression of fear and incomprehension: “You’re a bloke! You should look and act like a bloke! What’s wrong with you?”

Whereas women traditionally get :”You’re a second class citizen and dont you forget it! Men get to define what you should look like, how you must act in public, how your sexuality will be expressed!” etc, etc, etc.

Having said that, transgender people often have a strange idea of what looking and acting like a woman means, which really doesn’t help matters.

What the hell is this outfit? What woman dresses like that, unless she’s just off to work at the nearest truck stop? If trans women genuinely are a woman in a man’s body as we keep being told, why do they get femininity so wrong?

The interesting thing is, if a biological woman and a trans woman went out walking every night in a rough neighbourhood in this kind of outfit, they might both eventually end up in hospital. The biological woman would have been raped and the trans woman would have been savagely beaten up. That’s the difference.

I’m not even going to mention Grayson Perry and his ‘female alter ego’ Claire.

Oops, too late.

Going back to Eddie:

“People don’t expect a trans woman to be able to run 130 marathons for charity and it changes their sense of what a trans woman is. I can see in their eyes they go: well, fair play.”

Now this here is what we in the profession call “shoehorning”. Dear Eddie, people do not expect anyone to run 130 marathons for charity. Anyone. Let alone a celebrity. That’s all there is to it.

Also, you ran those marathons looking like a man so people saw a man. It’s still impressive.

So, this was going so well and then…

“I’d like to get to the place where we don’t have to have this fight because I’m trying to deal with rightwing fascists and what they say.”

Oh dear. Rightwing fascists, no less. And you want to be taken seriously as a would-be Labour politician? SMH, as the cool kids say on the internets.

For the Guardian and its readers, everything is political. Even walking for pleasure.

A reader describes her evening walks through Edinburgh and of course feels the need to shoehorn some leftie rhetoric into her prose:

The families, joggers and dog walkers in Braidburn Valley Park help me shake off the stress and insincerity of my corporate job.

Virtue signalling alert! What the hell is this woe-is-me bullshit? If her ‘insincere corporate job’ (that she presumably wasn’t forced into at gunpoint) clashes so hard with her ethics, what’s stopping her from resigning and applying for a less well-paid job at a non-profit organisation? Hmmm? Would the filthy lucre be too much to give up, by any chance?

I’ll then head towards Hermitage Drive – where I might resent the obvious wealth if I weren’t so chilled out.

“Resent the obvious wealth”? Yeah, how dare these people be richer than she is! The sheer nerve!

Can I just point out that she walks through that area by choice, because it’s pretty. And why is it pretty? Because the locals have the means to make it that way and keep it that way. If she doesn’t want to be surrounded by the trappings of wealth, may I recommend walking through the nearest council estate instead? Urban decay galore! Nothing to be envious of!

Then we have this other reader:

I am very fortunate that I can walk and do not require a wheelchair; however, my disabilities cause me severe pain if I walk long distances. There are millions like me who fall into the zone between able-bodied and wheelchair confined. When I hear the term “pedestrian friendly”, my first thought is “disability unfriendly”.

This person lives in the USA, where pretty much everything is car-friendly by design and pedestrian-friendly features are few and far between. The average American never needs to walk anywhere. And that’s still not good enough! She still feels discriminated against!

It is rather disingenuous to say “I do not require a wheelchair” if she can only walk short distances without excruciating pain. If she refuses to use a wheelchair when she needs one, what exactly is the city supposed to do to accommodate her? Provide conveyor belts? Or maybe she could just ignore the pedestrian-friendly areas, get in her car and drive wherever she wants!

There is a new outdoor mall near me with a pedestrian-friendly town centre design. It is a sprawling, lively place, but I can’t shop there.

Look, it’s very sad that she can’t walk very well or very far, but it’s nobody else’s fault. That mall wasn’t built to spite her personally, it was build to give pedestrians a bit of a break from the all-pervasive car culture. Not everything can be or should be inclusive (controversial statement).

Walking needs to be encouraged in a way that does not forget about the needs of the disabled.

Like how? Genuine question. What are these needs? How are pedestrian-friendly areas supposed to welcome someone who can only walk short distances but won’t use a car or a wheelchair?

The Guardian is like the Terminator, it absolutely will not stop.

Here’s yet another immigrant’s tale of woe for your entertainment.

Five years previously, when I had entered the UK on a Writers, Artists and Composers visa I thought the road to settlement, and then citizenship, was flat and paved. As long as I could maintain myself financially, continued to work as a writer, and didn’t break any laws, I’d be eligible for ILR in five years, and citizenship a year later. And then there would be a citizenship ceremony to end it all, which seemed a pleasant enough idea.

So far so good, although I did raise an eyebrow at “which seemed a pleasant enough idea.” A rather curious choice of words to talk about acquiring citizenship, isn’t it? It almost sounds as if she isn’t really taking the concept seriously.

Fancy that.

But I wasn’t prepared for the mutable nature of immigration laws, and their ability to make migrants feel perpetually insecure, particularly as the rhetoric around migration mounted.

Weren’t you? Don’t you read the Guardian then?

“I didn’t think that would affect someone like you,” a large number of Brits said to me over the years, with the implacable British belief that if you’re middle class you exist under a separate set of laws. They weren’t entirely wrong – the more privileged you are in terms of income and education the more likely it is you’ll be able to clear all hurdles. It’s only the rich around whose convenience immigration laws are tailored.

And you’re what, shocked and disappointed? Of course a rich, educated immigrant will always be preferable to a poor, illiterate one! You need the skills, tools and social graces that money and education can give you in order to function in a First World country or else you’re wasting everybody’s time, including your own.

Seriously, show me one country in the world which is run as a charity and only takes in waifs and strays. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Soon after my arrival, I had heard of an overhaul of migration laws which would bring in a new “points based” immigration system; but the migration lawyer I spoke to said there was no way that the Writers, Artists and Composers visa could be brought within that system, since there was no way to actually measure “cultural value”. Speaking in a manner that suggested deep insider knowledge, the lawyer said that the migration route I had entered on would remain unchanged. I had enough faith in his polished assurance that I paid little attention when the new points based system was announced.

I’m afraid that lawyer had zero clue about it (how could they?) and therefore told you exactly what you needed to hear – and you believed them because you wanted to. You can’t exactly blame the government for this.

Several months later, near the time when I had to renew my writer’s visa, I went to the UKBA website and discovered my visa category had simply been abolished. I would either have to find some other category for which I was eligible, or leave the country.

I’m flabbergasted. The random lawyer was wrong after all! Say it ain’t so!

Even in all my huge relief, I registered a sense of disappointment at having been transferred from Writers, Artists and Composers to the category Tier 1 (General).

Yes, now you’re just an ordinary member of the public like the rest of us, instead of being an Artiste™. It must burn. It’s almost not worth applying for that pleb visa… oh wait.

Wanna bet this person is a fierce critic of ‘elitism’ the rest of the time?

I never really felt safe after that. Every announcement of proposed changes to migration laws made my heart stutter, every politician’s announcement about slashing migration numbers felt like a threat.

Look, at the end of the day, you have no god-given right to live in London for the rest of your life just because you want to. Half the flipping planet wants to!

You’re not exactly stuffed to the gills with skills the UK desperately needs either. Writers are two a penny. Retrain as a orthopaedic surgeon and we’ll talk.

And so, five years down the line, I was able to apply for ILR – though first I had to take the Life in the UK test, which continues to be mistakenly referred to as a Citizenship Test. At this juncture I received a tremendous outpouring of sympathy from my British friends. “It’s ridiculous,” they said. “Why should you have to learn about the kings and queens of England in order to stay?”

She keeps quoting these mysterious “British friends” who sound too stupid to be allowed. Are they even real?

In fact, the test teaches you little about kings and queens and is full of information about employment rights, schooling, the history of gender equality laws and other rather useful things (though the Tories want to add the kings-and-queens stuff, which will render it absurd.)

No more absurd than the history of gender equality laws. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present.

This kind of knowledge will also allow you not to make a twat of yourself when playing Trivial Pursuit with locals (not your imaginary British friends though, they don’t sound the type).

I had thought dual citizenship would feel like a gain, not a loss. Instead, as I took my seat in the chamber I found myself reflecting on what it means to be from a country in which acquiring a second passport is regarded across the board as reason for celebration. Weeks later, I was trying to explain this to British-Libyan writer, Hisham Matar, who knew exactly what I meant. “In that moment you are betrayed and betrayer both,” he said. “You’re betraying your country by seeking another passport, and you’re betrayed by your country which makes you want to seek another passport”

So many insecurities and chips on both shoulders. Oh dear.

And she’s only got two countries to deal with. How does she think Jason Bourne feels?

What dissipated the feeling of melancholy was a glance toward one end of the council chamber. There was a picture of the Queen in her tiara, set against a large union jack. I might have laughed out loud. It seemed so American: the smiling portrait, all those flags. And then someone pressed “play” on a CD player and classical music filled the room. I want to say it was The Ride of the Valkyries but this seems so over the top that it must be a novelist’s imagination rather than memory. Mustn’t it? All I know is I kept looking across the room at my sister and giggling.

Well, I called it, didn’t I? Getting British citzenship is just a big joke to her, all that matters is that she gets to stay in London.

we all sang – or moved our lips meaninglessly in time to – the national anthem

Oh FFS. Just tear up her certificate and send her back to Pakistan. What a waste of space.

However high my levels of anxiety might have felt along the way, I always knew I had the luxury of another home to return to, as well as a livelihood which wasn’t contingent on being in one place rather than another.

How interesting. What was all that guff about feeling ‘unsafe’ then? Check your privilege, you silly moo!

We had all been given envelopes for our certificates, and when I opened mine out popped Theresa May. Or at least a letter of welcome from her, with her photograph at the top of the page. Just a few weeks earlier, May had sent her “Go Home” vans across the UK, so this hardly inspired a feeling of belonging.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION.

LEGAL IMMIGRATION.

TWO DIFFERENT THINGS.

is it even necessary to add that the irony here that the resources of the state, as embodied by institutions such as the NHS, would probably collapse without migrants?

But you’re not one of them, are you?

Also: hooray! The legendary “the NHS relies on immigrants” trope makes an appearance! We have a full house!

The first thing I did on returning home was download and fill out a passport application form. Wanting to stay was my primary reason for acquiring citizenship, but the added benefit of a passport that allowed me to travel without the visa nightmares that come attached to a Pakistani passport was also a strong motivating factor.

This says it all. What a worthy addition to the UK this person is. Not.

I filled out the form, took it to the post office, and handed it across the counter to a bearded man with the name tag Khaled.

Khaled, huh? Just like back home!

“First passport?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Khaled looked gravely at me.

“Welcome,” he said, and everything uncomplicated and moving I had wanted to feel in that citizenship ceremony, I felt then.

Oh, now you feel like you belong in the UK. Because Khaled said so. Right.

Chinatown is in trouble because the horrible Home Office is arresting all the illegal immigrants working in restaurants

WTF Guardian? Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t human trafficking A Bad Thing? Don’t you campaign against it on a regular basis?

Or is it only OK when it means Londoners are not deprived of their beloved Chinese food on a Saturday night? Never mind the exploited, overworked, underpaid, illegal Chinese sods in the kitchen, huh? Nothing else matters so long as we get to enjoy our duck shredded in a pancake, soaking in the hoisin of your lies!

This Guardian article on the history of the sandwich industry in the UK is very interesting, but I couldn’t help rolling my eyes at the journalist happily peddling the unexamined official narrative on Brexit making everyone bankrupt in the foreseeable future, from factory owners to the NHS (Britain Relies On Immigrants™).

In the main production hall, which had a red floor and a thrumming air supply – keeping the temperature a steady 10C – a couple of hundred workers lined seven conveyor belts. Chahar took me to the middle of the room, where around a dozen women were making one of Adelie’s newest lines, a chicken tikka and onion bhaji sandwich, which is popular among students. The belt was going at about 33 sandwiches a minute, so the woman at each stage – arranging the 40g of chicken, dolloping and spreading out the bhaji paste, sprinkling on 3g of coriander – got less than two seconds before they went past.

Standing at a conveyor belt in 10 degrees Celsius, repeatedly putting stuff on a new slice of bread every 1½ seconds. In other words, living the dream.

Over the years, Chahar has tried to get unemployed British people to join his sandwich lines. “They come here. They do half day. They never come back,” he told me. (Adelie has also made similar, largely unsuccessful attempts with ex-convicts.) The work is too cold, and too repetitive. Pay at the Wembley factory starts at £7.50 an hour. As a result, most sandwich factories have relied on immigrant labour for at least a decade

Well, my good man, I’m not sure how to put it to you but if the only people who are prepared to do a particular job are poor immigrants desperate for money… maybe, just maybe, there is something wrong with the job.

In order to make things perfectly clear, this a worker’s typical day:

Sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich
sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich – 30 mn lunch break –
sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich
sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich sandwich – go home.

All day. Every day. Standing still in the cold. For £7.50 an hour.

Can anybody tell me what’s wrong with this picture? Anybody? Anybody at all?

For Chahar, who dreams of introducing the sandwich to Algeria, it is a baffling situation. “The British people needs to get into this job. It is the sandwich,” he said. “They should be proud.”

The man is delusional. How is doing a mind-numbing job for peanuts something to be proud of? Of course the Brits never come back! Why on earth would they agree to work in Third World conditions in their own country? I don’t see the journalist resigning from the Guardian on the spot and demanding a hairnet and a pair of white wellies!

“Brexit has fucked everything up,” one chief executive, whose firm relies heavily on eastern European labour, told me. “On the day after the vote, on that Friday, people are walking up to me and saying, ‘Do I go home now?’ These are the people who dug us out of a hole when the indigenous population failed.”

Yeah but no. The indigenous population didn’t fail, it’s just not interested in being exploited and undercut by Eastern Europeans. This has nothing to do with laziness, just common sense.

Try paying a living wage, Mr Chief Executive, and watch the Brits come back in their droves. And by living wage, I mean a salary which allows people to have a decent lifestyle in the UK, not just sleep on a mattress in a house shared with 20 other guys, eat tinned food and send all your money back to Hungary.

It’s so simple, and yet it just never occurs to them. Huh.

Here we have a kayaktivist (no, me neither) protesting against globalisation, supertankers and pipeline extensions…

… in his plastic kayak. Yep.

By the way, could there be anything more hipsterish than “a collective of kayaktivists in Vancouver”?

The infamous Nannygate

I personally thought the woman was a maid or an au pair, not even a nanny (I expect nannies to behave more professionally). Apparently this makes me a horrible racist, even though her skin colour had nothing to do with it.

So, to those who assumed that Kim was the nanny, it’s worth thinking about what kind of woman you might have expected Kelly to be married to.

Quite frankly, I did not think about that for one single solitary second. He could be married to Cthulhu for all I care.

Did people assume that the Asian woman in his home was the nanny because she seems to behave in a subservient way? She seems scared, flustered, her posture is low to the ground and she doesn’t make eye contact or speak.

Well, her body language is extremely strange for a wife. Why make such a production of taking the children out of the room, skidding sideways through the door in a state of total panic like a cartoon character, and looking for all the world as if she was about to lose her job and be given a hundred lashes? Why crawl on the floor like some deranged Uriah Heep, even if she was worried about being seen on camera? She would have been twice as quick and much less of a disturbance had she just walked normally into the room, picked up the girl, pushed the baby out and closed the door after her. Instead we got an undignified, attention-grabbing display.

She was also surprisingly and unnecessarily rough with the children, as if she was dragging them out of the way of a speeding train. Look at her pull the little girl by the arm, making her fall over! The whole thing looked ridiculous and out of proportion with the gravity of the incident.

The interesting thing is, more people might have assumed she was the wife had she been white, but then the obligatory online debate would have been “Is she a victim of domestic abuse?” Because what kind of wife is that scared of disturbing her husband? Yes, he was being interviewed on live television but shit happens when you work from home and have small children. It was his own fault for not locking his study door anyway.

Or is it that she can’t possibly be the heroine because Asian women are routinely depicted as secondary figures in the media, if they are visible at all.

Heroine? What is this, a comic? She was not even supposed to be in the room at all!

This article is trying so hard to make people feel bad for having normal human thoughts, it is rather pathetic. Let’s consider the source, shall we?

From the author’s profile page:

Vera Chok is an actor, writer and performance-maker. She investigates sex , shame, race and connection

Ah. We are dealing with a professional.

“Sex, shame, race and connection”. Let me guess… what she does is find – or create – connections between sex, race and shame. It’s so easy when you know how; these people all function in the same way. This is how their thought process goes:

*watches video*
“hahaha that poor nanny”
“wait, why did I think she was the nanny and not the wife?”
“eek! it’s because of her skin colour, isn’t it”
“what is wrong with me? I know I’m not a racist”
“oh dear, I’m mortified… I can’t believe I just fell right into a trap I spend my life trying to avoid”
“well look at that, plenty of other people thought the non-white woman was a nanny as well, and I bet they didn’t even stop to wonder why”
“this obviously means they’re unconsciously racist”
“I have to enlighten them, it will make me feel better about myself into the bargain”

Cue patronising lecture festooned with interesting assumptions about how complete strangers perceive race and why they are wrong.

Regarding her point about the representation of Asian women in fiction, I do remember seeing Asian women – in This Life and Torchwood in particular – who were just part of the gang and did not have any special Asian superpowers or weaknesses. I have only seen one of the shows she refers to – Elementary – but she is so dreadfully wrong about Lucy Liu’s character that I cannot trust anything else she says.

3) Asian woman facilitates hero’s mission by being good at maths, science or computers (episode one of Black Mirror; Lucy Liu in Elementary);

Complete rubbish. Joan Watson (played by Lucy Liu) is not “good at maths, science or computers”. She is a former surgeon, which makes her very knowledgeable about medicine, pathology and anatomy. This often comes in handy in her job as a detective – if anything, she facilitates her own mission. When she or Sherlock need help with science or IT stuff, they turn to one of their expert acquaintances.

Also, Liu is not some second banana who gets wheeled out when the script calls for a bit of skirt, she’s the co-star. Watson started out as Sherlock’s assistant but was soon promoted to equal partner. Sherlock actually makes this point on a regular basis to anyone who questions her presence.

Vera Chok seriously distorts the facts to fit her own narrative here. And to think she goes on about unconscious bias!

Also ask yourself what goes through your mind when you see an interracial couple on the street. Do you wonder about their lives together in a way you wouldn’t question a couple of the same skin colour?

Someone is seriously projecting. Does she picture them naked in bed too? Is she 12?

On screen, which interracial couplings are you more likely to see and therefore think of as normal (white man with sexy black/Latino/Asian woman), and what disturbs you (black/Asian man with white woman)?

Several issues here:

1. She is telling people what to think!

2. Actually, black man with white woman is the most common interracial pairing, on screen and in real life. Why does she think it’s less normal than any of the others?

3. As for what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘disturbing’, I’m afraid she’s projecting again. Hasn’t it occurred to her that not all her readers are white with white partners, and are therefore unlikely to be disturbed by their own situation – or that of their friends? What makes her think she’s the font of all race knowledge?

4. I am also offended that the white woman is not described as sexy, just like the others! This is discrimination!

Anyway, speaking of projecting… at least Boulet, the author of the French cartoon below, realised his mistake before he started haranguing the ‘racist white old biddies who probably vote for Marine Le Pen’.

And look at that! The family have now become celebrities, are giving interviews and will hold a press conference!

How ridiculously predictable.

Guardian hack draws short straw and has to write article about non-story. Yawn.

Could this writer care less about the fate of the goldfish? It’s described as a “creature” meanwhile, much is made of the fact that the two fuckwits are “friends” who “face jail” over a “dare”.

Someone can relate to their drunk antics and thinks society is overreacting, methinks.

Now if it was suddenly revealed that Donald Trump had swallowed a live fish when he was young and stupid… oh my. Impeach him, he’s a sadist!

Guardian journalist has psychological meltdown after buying his first house

As is often the case with Guardian articles, I had to read it twice to make extra sure it wasn’t a spoof. Making an important financial decision without engaging your brain is one thing, but why on earth would you then tell the world about it? Is this some sort of deranged humblebrag?

There is something deeply wrong with this man’s thinking process (if I can call it that):

Ten minutes. It took 10 minutes to decide that this house was good enough to make me want to spend the rest of my life in debt to a bank.

Consider the possibility that you should perhaps not be allowed out unsupervised.

It isn’t even my house. It belongs to a bank, and I’m going to spend the next three decades buying it back from them half a per cent at a time.

Did you genuinely not realise this beforehand?

I’m a freelance journalist in the year 2016, so, realistically, I only have four months left before work dries up and I’m replaced by a Facebook Live video of a toddler balancing on a log.

And yet, the “belonging to a bank” bit still did not resonate with you?

If the oven explodes or the fridge goes kaput or sludge starts seeping out of the plugholes, you just call your landlord and someone will come and fix it for free. Now, though, that’s on me.

No way! How is this kind of very important information not made public? We are kept in the dark, it’s outrageous!

And there’s a fishpond, too. An entire fishpond that I didn’t clock during my sole cursory glance about the place, that seems to have been put there specifically to endanger my child. I mean, Jesus Christ. I’m an idiot. That’s the only explanation for this.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Worst of all, buying a house makes me feel like a traitor. It feels as though I’ve let down all my generation-rent friends, as if someone drew a line in the sand and I deliberately chose the side of Kirstie Allsop. I feel as if I have become part of the 1%, and I should ride about inside my boxy, broken-down new home on a pony like the shrieking Fauntleroy I apparently am.

Could you please stop with the self-flagellation? If you’re feeling so guilty, why not donate the house to one of your “generation-rent friends”? I’m sure they, unlike you, will be very happy and sleep soundly at night.

House prices increased much faster than my ability to sensibly save for a deposit. Getting it together was like trying to chase a moving train. But now I have caught up with it, and jumped on board, and discovered that all the other passengers are nitwits. This cannot possibly end well.

No no no, you are in fact the only nitwit here. I assure you the rest of us do know what we’re doing, so kindly do not insult us. If grown-up life is too much for you, I suggest you move into sheltered housing for vulnerable adults. Sell that house and you can easily afford it.