That was the year that was

I spent an hour waiting to see the doctor this morning, probably contracting a fair few new infections from the festering antechamber in the process. But he was delightfully sympathetic ("Oh dear! Poor you! Bad luck!") and wrote me a prescription for highly specific antibiotics, which I carted off to Boots just as fast as my ragged urethra would allow. God bless the NHS, I thought, as I climbed gingerly onto the bus home. It's wonky, but it's saved my life on a couple of occasions and my quality of life on countless others. If your urino-genital system is, shall we say, sub-prime, you could live in a lot worse places.

I am, however, consigned to the sofa for the duration of New Year's Eve, wrapped in a blanket and watching the fire. So I have an unusually timely opportunity to reflect.

In photos:

January: Elephant riding, Kerala. February: Snowdrops, Christ Church Meadows. March: Luminox, Broad Street.
April: Pebbles and sea, Westward Ho! May: Baby Tungsten, our garden. June: Cow parsley, Thrupp.
July: M on the jetty, Lytham. August: Road sign, Cowley Road. September: Wire waiting for Charlie, Chatsworth.
October: No Entry, Harcourt Arboretum. November: At home. December: Recovering from shopping, St Michael's St.

Happenings of note:

For the first time in years (ten? fifteen?) I have taken only one flight this year, though it was a long one: coming home from India, where we spent last Christmas. We holidayed in the UK, and work didn't take me away. And I have no complaints about either of these things, though I already know neither will pertain in 2008.

A side effect of this is that I am eligible to give blood for the first time in about the same number of years (they don't want you if you've been anywhere malarial, or had a tattoo, or had your wisdom teeth out, or any number of other things I seem to have spent my 20s and 30s doing). I have put my name down, as I am rhesus negative and there's never enough of us to go around.

I emerged from the Dark Days. I have already written about this so will not dwell on it further here.

Rediscoveries: frugality, thanks to part-time working; long-lost or nearly-lost people, thanks to Facebook and the internet more generally; music, thanks to last.fm, 6Music and iTunes; vegetables, thanks (however reluctantly) to Abel & Cole; hanging out with ex-housemate S, thanks to baby Tungsten and aforementioned part-time working.

First time discoveries: walking in the Peak District, working (however sporadically and unconventionally) in the manual trades, power tools, Woman's Hour, friends from the internet.

Must not forget life's great continuities: old and new friends, front crawl (not enough of that, mind), OX4, FY8, too much booze, inner fury, good food, Evening Primrose Oil, a lovely boyfriend, a roof over my head, a town where they know what I'm like and don't mind.

To paraphrase my favourite toast, may the worst years of our lives be like this one.

joella

Shake your UTI

Marvellous. I have a urinary tract infection. That will serve me right for enjoying myself.

When I was a child, I had a gazillion of these. Nobody knows why. I had my own little box of soft toilet paper that I kept in my tray at primary school, thus saving me from the shiny stuff that was printed 'Lancashire County Council. Now wash your hands please'. That was a bonus. Less of a bonus were various operations, months and months of antibiotics, and a steady stream of doctors poking around 'down there', but I'm sure it all contributed to my enduring fascination with water generally and toilets in particular.

I haven't had a UTI for years, though. I know exactly what to do to avoid one (look it up on NHS Direct if you need to know, but if you need to know you probably already do know) and I am usually pretty good at it. I blame the inflaming sambuca. Still, a New Year's Eve based on cranberry juice and no sudden movements won't do me any harm.

joella

So there it was, merry Christmas

At the age of 37, I have of course realised that I'll never drive through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in my hair. But there are consolations. I've also finally, *finally*, realised that the secret to the perfect Christmas Day lies in escaping expectations, and striking the right balance between sociability and misanthropy. You do not have to leave the country. You barely have to leave the house. Thanks are due to Jeremy for some sound and timely advice on this.

It goes a little something like this:

1. Wake up in the bed of a teenage girl.
(She wasn't there, but I like to think some of her cool rubbed off)

2. Put last night's clothes back on, eat Plumbing S's maple syrup crepes while little T freaks everyone, including herself, out with Real Scorpion Toffee.

3. Come home and open presents. Top gifts this year included a radio-cum-iPod-dock for the kitchen, so I can now boil an egg to the Ace of Spades if I want to, and, following weeks of big fat hints, the complete Morse on DVD. I don't understand you, said M, you don't like box sets and you don't believe in owning DVDs, so why on earth would you want this? I can't really explain.

4. Receive guests while still feeling sparkly-yet-manky. Drink posh wine.

5. Decide not to eat dinner till *after* sunset walk in Shotover.

6. Go for sunset walk in Shotover with the kind of friends who think to bring mince pies and sloe gin.

7. Have a big nap.

8. Eat cheese fondue and a big salad.

9. Watch a good film (well, we watched Love Actually, which I don't think counts, but the intention was good).

10. Dance away the clearing up, helped along by little sambucas in new little sambuca glasses. Go to bed.

It was great. We rose on Boxing Day ready to cook up a Claudia Roden storm. Our 'Open House' from 2-6 degenerated into fire, music and mayhem till midnight. All the major world religions were represented, and it seems everything now smells of woodsmoke and fish.

joella

Life changing stuff in the Three Goats Heads

In the Three Goats Heads
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

You know you're pretty much on top of things, in the immediate 'festive' sense at least, when the only things left on your shopping list on the Saturday before Christmas are firewood, meths, horseradish root, coffee beans, and something for yourself, love.

We scored the firewood at the garden centre, as the sawmill is already closed for the duration. We couldn't decide between hardwood, softwood and not wood (some kind of ashless, smokeless reconstituted log-style composite) so we got a bag of each. We scored the meths at Silvesters on Magdalen Rd -- one of those family hardware businesses that defies the 21st century in the best possible way. They sell pretty much everything that a 1970s home could possibly need. Cleat hooks: check. Fridge bulbs: check. Winter pansies: check. And best, and rarest, of all, they give advice. So thus it was I emerged blinking into the wintry sunlight bearing the last axe they had in stock in one hand and a bottle of meths in the other. If my mother could have seen me, how proud she would have been.

After a quick break for vegetable samosas and the Guardian, it was time to brave the city centre. We had a nice pint with some programmers in the Kings Arms and then ventured into the Covered Market for the final food items. We are now catered up for the 25th (cheese fondue, hence meths, in case anyone was seriously worried), 26th (party going on, Jewish food and secular drink, come round if you want) and 27th (stepchildren), barring a few last minute things that can be sourced from the kind of shops that don't close for Christmas. M had a couple of presents still to buy, so we headed for a big fat bookshop.

Where, following tradition, we each bought ourselves a Christmas present. I bought myself the new 30th anniversary edition of The Women's Room. I didn't know it was out, and I was looking for my original (well, 1986) copy just yesterday, following a Solstice Dinner conversation with housemate C where we agreed that we would swap radical feminist fiction in the New Year. I couldn't believe she hadn't read The Women's Room. I mean, most people haven't, I just couldn't believe *she* hadn't.

My copy is kind of embarrassing, it falls open at particularly strident passages and about half of it is underlined. But worse, it seems I don't even know where it is, so I bought another one.

And it was the right decision: I haven't started the novel proper yet, but we repaired from the bookshop to the Three Goats Heads where I read the 2006 introduction by the author. She says:

"When I was asked, in 1977, what I would wish for the Women's Room, I wished for a world in which no one comprehended it because men and women had found a way to live together in felicity. Unfortunately, despite many easements on female life in the west, the world's ethos has moved in the opposite direction, towards more hostility between the sexes."

Can't say unfairer than that. And I also thought I should pay for a copy, seeing as I stole my first one from a second hand book fair my dad took me to. I'd run out of money and I saw this book that said on the cover 'this novel will change your life'. I could use a bit of that, I thought, so I nicked it. And it did.

M's Christmas present to himself, incidentally, was also a reissue -- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with Mervyn Peake's illustrations: "meticulously reproduced, for the first time, as they were meant to be seen... the first edition to do justice to two great English eccentrics."

I'm not sure I agree that the past didn't go anywhere.

joella

End of the working year

I am surprisingly fond of the view from the bike sheds of the New Building (right). Soggy waste ground (one day to be a Newer Building, no doubt) leads to the Ring Road, with the twin high rises of Blackbird Leys in the distance.

I can stand there for ages, watching the cars zoom across the flyover on their modern missions in the modern world. I am always glad I'm not in them: that, for now, I don't have to travel any further.

If you look left, you can see the Cowley Gas Tower and the Mini factory. I never mind industrial architecture in the winter. Even in the summer it looks better than the Business Park you see when you turn around. The sky is big, too, and I love it. I miss the big sky of my childhood by the sea.

But I'm not paid to look at the view. So after a while I gird my loins, crack my knuckles, and stride up to the plexiglass barriers. They part at the lightest touch of my proximity card, and I'm in.

And without a doubt, it's been a better place to be this year than last. I have a job that I really wanted, that is real and practical and useful, and I seem to be allowed to get on and do it. I have many lovely friends and colleagues and a slow-growing feeling that actually, I might be in more or less the right place at more or less the right time. I survived my Dark Days.

One of the outcomes, of course, was that I broke away from full time office work. I needed some time to lick my wounds, and there was something else I wanted to do. My plumbing year is a whole different post, but my sense is that, one day, I will see that that cloud did indeed have a silver lining. NGO X is restored as the best place I have ever worked, and very happy I am about it, as I like to think I'm pretty useful to have around.

joella

It says here...

In Praise of ... Billy Bragg.

Happy 50th, first hero.

joella

The wind goes right through you, it's no place for the old

I've come to the realisation that while I will never like Christmas, I can bear it in the following circumstances:

1. I either don't go anywhere or I go a long, long way away.
2. If the former, a project management approach is adopted. I cannot muddle along tinsel-headed having a gay old time.
3. I do not enter a city centre on a Saturday or watch any commercial TV station at any time for the two months previous.
4. I get horribly drunk on mulled wine early enough in the season to hate myself for several days afterwards and adopt a more balanced approach to subsequent festivities.
5. The house looks as much like Blackpool Illuminations as environmental conscience can allow.
6. Nobody makes me play charades. In fact nobody makes me do anything.
7. At a time of my choosing, I get to eat a whole tin of Roka Cheese Crispies to myself while watching Morse in a misanthropic funk.

Beyond this, terms are negotiable.

joella

The ghost of Christmas Dos past

Ex-housemate S came round today with baby Tungsten. She needed to get out of the house because her Young Man was so hungover after his work Christmas Do that he couldn't stand the company of other human beings. There was free-flowing (and indeed free) champagne, apparently. Always a bad idea.

We don't have free Christmas parties at NGO X. And fair enough -- that's not what little old ladies knit all those blankets to fund. But once the Babycham's not on the house, you do have to ask yourself if you really want to go there. Increasingly, I find the answer is no.

But I have not always worked for NGO X. My first Christmas do was in the function room of the Queens pub in Lytham, which is where I was working at the time. It was on a Sunday, which was one of my nights, so I was behind the bar downstairs, but from time to time someone would come down and cover for me for a bit and I would go up and get myself a vodka and lime. It was busy, and we were running short of glasses... I was drying a 'ladies half' (surely they don't still have those?) which was still steaming from the glass washer when the base of it twisted off and into the base of my thumb. There was a lot of blood. I ran it under the tap and the water ran red. There was a big flap of skin flap flap flapping. I went a bit funny. Maureen the landlady appeared, gave me a beer towel full of ice to grip, made me swallow a double brandy and sent someone off to make me a cup of sweet tea. Once I'd drunk that, she said right, you're off duty, and I wandered upstairs with a woozy head and a big wodge of paper towel held on with a bandage. At some point in the evening there was a Lambada competition. No one from Lancashire can dance the Lambada, it's a known fact, but there were a couple of Australians working in the pub at the time and one of them asked me to dance. He wedged his thigh in between mine and moved us around the floor in great flamboyant style. I was out of my tree and just smiled a lot (and indeed it's strange I can remember it, but I can) and as a result we won by a country mile. The prize was a bottle of Pomagne, which we proceeded to drink. I don't remember getting home, but I do remember waking up the next morning not sure which was worse, the bruise on my pubis, the pain in my head or the dull, deep ache from my still-bleeding thumb, which, it was perfectly obvious by then, I should have had stitched. I still have the scar.

About eight years later I was working in the House on the Hill. Three hundred and sixty four days of the year the Management wouldn't have cared if you lived or died, so busy were they extending the brand, extending their egos and indeed extending their offices. But they did push the boat out, in a banal sort of way, for the Christmas party. They would send taxis for anyone who didn't want to drive, and we would all have dinner in a hotel, drink too much and dance until the taxis arrived again to take us home. One year we went to one of the Four Pillars Hotels. There was turkey with all the trimmings for the carnivores, and what was described as 'oriental vegetables in puff pastry' for the rest of us. With all the same trimmings. What arrived was actually a heap of stir-fried carrots, cabbage etc in, or in the Lizard's case, merely near, an empty vol au vent case. 'Well,' she said, 'it was nice of them to give us a bin for our Brussels sprouts', and proceeded to pile hers neatly into it. We had to move rooms for the disco, which was shared with other Christmas Dos. That year, if memory serves, it was Thames Valley Police and Oxfordshire Mental Health Trust. We thought we could party. We had nothing on them. At the end of the night there was a big circle on the dance floor, holding each other up and kicking legs in the air in sort-of-time to New York, New York. I ended up dancing in the middle of this circle, and got kicked soundly in the legs many times as a result. I then had a bit of a fight with one of my colleagues while waiting for the taxi, and we fell over into the rockery. I was black and blue all over the next day.

The year after that they splashed out on the Randolph. Nigel the sales manager ended up coming home with me and M. I think we thought he had some coke on him, he usually did, and we'd got to that point in the evening where we thought coke would be a great idea (I now know of course that the point in the evening when you think coke would be a great idea is exactly the point in the evening when it's the worst idea possible, but I guess you can only find that out the hard way). He didn't have any coke on him, at least none he was prepared to share, but he did try to get off with me while M was in the bathroom. There was something very apposite about the bleakness of this.

In a way I think NGO X does us all a favour. I'm sure things are less messy when you have to fund your own hangover, though the state of some of my esteemed colleagues the morning after this year's shindig might suggest otherwise. Me, I'm living a bit lower, hanging out for the more select mulled wine and mince pie gatherings. I have no wish to sustain physical injury.

joella

Bah humbuggery

So, said my preternaturally cheerful dentist this morning, all ready for Crimble?

What I wanted to say: look, it's bad enough coming here every ten minutes (I am having stuff done to try and reduce the odds of my inner fury grinding my teeth into stumps by the time I hit the menopause) and having to sit in your shiny waiting room with nothing to read but the Daily Telegraph and back issues of Tatler. I *did* have an NHS dentist, but he was successfully sued for 'causing unnecessary pain', and what I need would never be available on the NHS anyway, and I've resigned myself to that, and I do actually think you are a very good dentist, but that does not mean I am part of your world. From Tatler to Crimble, it leaves me cold. Mine probably leaves you cold too, so let's talk about teeth.

What I actually said: mmmf nggh arr.

joella

Room service

Poor M. First of all he has a giant hangover, and then I take a photo of him eating chicken noodle soup in the bath. But I did, on the whole, tend to him fairly well, especially as I wasn't feeling too shiny myself.

joella

Say it with enormous flowers

Say it with enormous flowers
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

My Friday started in rather wobbly fashion. I still haven't got used to the fact that they don't chuck you out of the pub at 11.30 anymore. But I bought a cheese and onion pasty from the Spar at the petrol station (not a Ginsters, they seem to have upped their game recently and started baking them on the premises) and ate it for breakfast, watching the ring road traffic zoom and absorbing sunshine and humidity before engaging with the controlled atmosphere of the New Building.

The morning passed without incident, and by lunchtime I was ready to face Tesco. The underpass is semi-permanently flooded at one end, and you can only get through by leaping nimbly across the stepping stone bricks that are probably there by accident. I am not that nimble so I always prepare myself by choosing an iPod track you can march to and trying not to break my stride. She who hesitates gets wet feet or a twisted ankle. This time I chose Ant Music. It worked.

Inside the shop, the King Protea stopped me in my tracks. I know they are designed to do this, but still. I rang M. You know how you don't bring me flowers anymore? I said. Well, he said, didn't you say something about it being an exploitative industry and a waste of money? Yes, I said, but can we make an exception?

Exceptions are great. I am much better at them than I used to be. Later I made another one and agreed to watch a film with subtitles. It wasn't very cheery (it seemed to be about an Iranian man who was trying to kill himself) but I had my big flowers to keep me happy.

*beam*

joella

The Drawing Schools of Eton

Many, many years ago (and yes I am a little ashamed of this) a friend and I bet each other a pint that we would be the first to shag an Old Etonian. She won the bet: it took me much longer to get with the man who would later become my Significant Ex. He was not one, as he said himself, to get wanton with his tonsils.

I persuaded another friend to invite him to a cheese fondue party she was having. It turned into more of a scrambled egg party, as the recipe called for 1-2 eggs and she read it as 12. I had never tasted cheese fondue before so I was none the wiser, and anyway, it wasn't the food I was interested in. At one point in the evening he said something I found quite patronising and I said 'I did *go* to school, you know'.

'Really?' he said. 'I never saw you there.' And he was one of the charming ones, some of the others meant it.

I visited Eton with him once, with a school friend of his and his girlfriend. A lot of things made more sense afterwards. Cambridge was a crazy place to go to university, but the people who didn't seem to notice this were the ones who went to school in an even crazier place. It's a parallel universe, it really is. There's a lot to envy, but there's a lot not to. The charming ones know this, of course.

I went back there on Sunday to look at the photos of Ian Macdonald, who spent a year there as photographer in residence. They were amazing. He's a northerner, and from what I can make out specialises in taking hard black and white photos of heavy industry, urban landscapes and working men. To see this aesthetic applied to Eton was pretty remarkable. It's the malest thing I've seen in a long time. Which isn't to say that I don't recommend it.

joella

Too much of a good thing

As M was cooking breakfast this morning, I went to set the table and realised that we have two almost new bottles of HP Sauce. My mild OCD (thanks dad!) means that I find this quite distressing. One of the reasons I do all the shopping is to avoid this kind of thing. To make matters worse, one of them was glass and the other plastic. They don't even match!

Why, I demanded, are there two of these?

Well, he said, as he spatulaed eggs onto toast, I am wife to one of them and mother to the other.

Can't argue with that. But I'm not sure which one to dispense with while he's not looking.

joella