From E, I learnt about the significance of the solstices (which to be fair do not go unobserved in wider society), the equinoxes, and the four inbetweeines: Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lammas. These are all pagan festivals, for sure, and I would not describe myself as pagan, but I loved aligning different kinds of movement to them. It made sense to me. They're important inflection points in the year. Spaces to reflect and make change.
I am grateful to know more about all of them, as a person who has often struggled to maintain a strong connection with her physical self. Imbolc especially is a good day: we're nearly through the darkness! Don't push it, respect its retreat. Stay cosy but start making plans. Tentative forays are what we need at Imbolc. Adventure a few stretches.
But I have come to learn that I also love an equinox. Whatever it is you've been investing in, the year is flipping on its axis, have a little think? It's less of a resolve time and more of a reflection one. I find.
M and I got civilly partnered on the autumn equinox almost two years ago. Not sure anyone else (including him) really got the significance of the choice of date, and to be fair it helped that it was a Saturday and the registrar was available, but it felt good to me. And as equinoxes approach each year - especially the autumn ones, but I do like the fact that there are two of them - I do a bit of the "so, how's this going then?"
The short version is it ain't so different from the way it was going before the legalities and the big party, though there are some lovely long tail reminders of what a great idea it is to push the boat out on the party front once in a lifetime, and I am glad we did it after 25 years together as sooo many people there knew and had spent significant time with us both (and each other), and that made it all the lovelier. I could point to some things I would have done differently, but on balance, all I would say is I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
Last year we returned to the Imperial Hotel to celebrate our first anniversary, not alone but with a much smaller group of people, and it was lovely to remember, to celebrate in a different way, to give Blackpool another chance to entertain us (and it totally did). I had a bit of a thought of, ok, this is what we do now on the autumn equinox, but actually, I am not sure I want to be that predictable to myself.
So this year, I decided to mark the event in a slightly different way. M's birthday was the weekend before the equinox, and we booked a night away at the wonderful Inn at Whitewell, but I know that more than anything he likes to be part of a big convivial meal, so I offered to organise one of those in our Common House on the Saturday night before we went away.
I could easily have pulled a group of 12-15 people together from the folk we socialise with regularly, but actually I knew he wanted something that would be open to anyone here who wanted to come. This is something I knew I would find much harder, because of the potential for feedback. I like to be prepared, and the more variables there are, the more prepared I have found I like to be.
But I've been working on this stuff with my therapist. who will say "why don't you just do [X] then?" and then watch me wave my arms around for ten minutes as I describe all of the things that might happen to me and how they would make me feel. But he's always got a point, and the things that I do instead (impersonate a cat, make sculptures from fish tins, write Nick Cave quotes on the blackboards, let my window box flowers die, avoid community meetings) may seem to me like a clear expression of my discontent, but I'm not sure anyone else reads them that way.
And we have a "your birthday, your rules" position in this house, so I drew on one of J's suggestions, which was to organise something you want to organise, do it the way you want to do it, and invite everyone. My only stipulation was that I needed numbers in advance -- numbers are important for logistics, but signing up is also an important signifier here: I see you and I accept your offer. And also you get to know who's coming.
And that's what I did. I chose something that would be a bit special but that I knew I could cook at scale on my own - and clear up on my own if necessary, though I didn't expect to be doing either, I knew M would help me prep and it's usually a communal clear up if it's been a good night. I decided to make fish soup from a recipe I've been using since my early 20s: if you have good olive oil, good vegetables and herbs, good stock and tinned tomatoes, and good fish, you're onto a winner. It's so good, and super easy.
The fish goes in right at the last minute, so I planned to do most of the cooking in the communal kitchen, which is vegetarian, and then add the fish in batches on a little induction hob around the corner in the Meat And Fish Area. We bought the fish from our mobile fishmonger on the Tuesday, prepped it and froze it for easy use on Saturday with no messing around.
We're very sensitive about certain things here, for some reasons I understand and some I really don't. But I did a lot of thinking about how to deliver it inclusively, including having an offer for any vegans or vegetarians (basically the same soup but with butter beans -- I have done this before, it has gone down well).
Protocol here is you give out info on the menu so people can check their dietaries, there was also going to be local sourdough bread and samphire butter (I was a few glasses of wine in when I decided to include the butter, as that was a true experiment and this was supposed to be entirely known territory). Anyway, I set out the offer and I sent out the invite.
It's actually hard to explain how big a deal this was for our household, as for years I have been extremely cautious about engaging with the community as a whole, qua community. I drew up a set of concentric circles and populated them with the people I feel solidarity, connection and comfort with, moving out through goodwill, neighbourliness, and neutrality to hostility and mistrust (often mutual). And when I felt I wanted to engage at all beyond that inner group, I used an array of opt in WhatsApp groups and an email group I called, Imbolc style, Tentative Forays. If you don't want to hear from me, went my reasoning at the time, I will make sure that you don't.
There's a WhatsApp group that most people are on, but I am not because it makes me feel existentially lonely. I'd like to be able to drop in and out of it but the main admin won't change the setting to make that possible, and so I just miss that stuff.
But this is all complicated to manage and not very sustainable. New people arrive and I never meet them, unless I go round and knock on their door and say "hi, you won't meet me so I thought I'd come and introduce myself, I don't have any beef with you, so do you want to be on my email list?" I paraphrase but it's a strange way to try and get to know people, and of course it immediately puts them in an awkward position.
So, you know, invite everyone, let's see what happens. Be Best, as Melania would say.
Stuff happened. I aim to keep the focus here on me, this being my blog, unless a line is crossed. I wrote about getting accused of a hate crime, for example, and I stand by it, but I try not to write about other individuals. This time wasn't nearly so drastic but there was a Challenge, which became an Issue, which led to some Emotional Conversations, and ultimately a Meeting. The crux of it was could you just not? and I decided that I couldn't just not, so while most people who accepted the invitation had no idea about all of this, and indeed neither did most of the people who didn't, by the time the day rolled around I'd been several times through the wringer that living here can be.
And I didn't know if it would be ok. If I would be ok. The morning of the party there was a General Meeting and I facilitated an hour long session on travel. I have been trying VERY VERY HARD to bring my A game (or at least my B+ game) back into the collective mix, based on the assurances of others that we're all a bit more chilled out these days, more tolerant of each other, more willing to see that there's more than one way to "do community". So I've started going to GMs again, including offering to minute and run the occasional session. There is a limited pool of people able / willing to do these things, and my Marxist tendencies mean I think that if you can, you should. And at that point, I could, so I did.
I was scheduled to go to the gym in the afternoon, but that, I couldn't do. Instead I slept for a few hours, then at 4pm I said right, let's do this, and I went down to the Common House to get started on the cooking. By about 5.30 soup for 20 was well underway, samphire had been mixed into butter, fresh sourdough had been delivered, and it was maybe time to open the wine.
Let's put some music on and do the tables, I said to M. There is usually a row of three tables all lined up together to make one big one. I don't like it, to me it makes the place feel like a school dining hall. My current preferred layout is to turn each of them through 45 degrees, to break up the lines and create more intimacy. There are other tables in there too, including our old dining table from Oxford, and I like to make them all look different but equally welcoming.
There's a pretty good sound system in the Common House these days. I connected to the Bluetooth and opened Spotify on my phone. The first thing I saw was the preview of Wish You Were Here 50. And I thought, that will do if I put it on loud enough.
So I did, and we moved the tables, and turned down the lights, and opened the wine, and set up the space, and around 7 the guests arrived. One neighbour lit a fire, another sliced the bread, another brought berries and cream, another one brought a cake. Two of the younger ones who love to help carried the soup round the corner, stirred in the fish, and helped me serve it up in batches. There'll be way too much, I thought, but every last bit of it was eaten, and several people asked for the recipe.
The whole evening felt wholesome and good and warm. There was that lovely buzz of conversation that you get when the ambience lands right. I was very happy. A neighbour loaded the MAFA dishwasher with all of the soup bowls and the pans we'd used at the end, then around 9.45, people started drifting off. Right, said T, let's turn the music up and get the clear up done. And four of us cleared the tables, ran everything else through the main dishwasher, cleaned the kitchen, swept and mopped the floor, bang, done. One of the lovely things about a shared space is lots of people know how it works, and it doesn't belong to any of us, it belongs to all of us.
You made an amazing thing happen, said M the next day. And I did, though not on my own.
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| Sometimes I take an indirect approach |
Instead, my implicit not explicit breach of a rule made for reasons lost to time, in an era where many such rules lie in the dust of the governance drift we cannot find the energy to attend to, has occasioned an Edict. There will be no more fish soup without due process. And we all know the death of creativity is the due process in the hall.
I have worked on all of this for coming up 18 months now. I've moved myself back into good faith engagement, encouraged by a lot of the good faith I see around me. I've put time into things I know I can do, not least this very evening -- our bin collections are changing, we need to work out how many more bins we need as a community, because we don't have individual household bins. I'm in a good place to be part of that team, as I can a) do maths, b) was part of the original thinking about how many bins we needed 13 years ago, and c) live right next to the bin store so I can see what it copes with and what it doesn't cope with. Oh, and d) I care.
It's the caring that comes and goes. I worked really hard to get it back. Many people were lovely to me, and appreciated the work that I was able to contribute to travel, to bins, to file management, to food and celebration and joy. I have skills -- some of which I already possessed (planning, estimation, user experience, numeracy, critical thinking, sensemaking in ambiguity, attention to detail), some of which I have developed while living here (menu planning for large numbers with varying needs, ambience curation, expediting, facilitation of diverse groups, adapting approaches for low tech users). They're not all of the skills a community like ours needs, very far from it, but they've all been useful at times, and I am aware at least some of them are in short supply.
I also do more of what I have learnt to call "inner work" than I've ever done. And I always did a fair bit. I'm currently supremely fucked off that none of that seems to have paid any lasting dividends, but maybe I shouldn't be surprised. Haters gonna hate. Gotta shake shake shake it off.
So. No more working on community spirit for a while. Tis a season for joys closer to home and far, far away.
joella
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