Dedicated follower of ...

The year: 1978. Or thereabouts.

The cast: me and Miss Scunthorpe (that was her name, she was no beauty queen).

The political context: Seven and eight year olds are doing string painting* in small town Lancashire. This was pre-Thatcher: milk was free, paint and paper were plentiful. We seven and eight year olds didn't know we were born.

The personal context: I wasn't a big fan of string painting. All string paintings look the same. How is this a valid form of self-expression?

What happened: I did my string painting, being essentially a rule-follower. We'd been told that our string paintings would be put up on the wall for parents' evening. I wondered how on earth my parents would know which string painting was mine, without having to read all the names. I couldn't imagine them being interested in anyone else's string painting or even, really, mine. They really are pretty boring. So to help them out, and ease the tedium a bit, I put three orange splodges on the bottom of mine with a paintbrush.

Miss Scunthorpe came round to look at our string paintings. When she got to mine, she stopped. She glared (and she had a right old glare on her). "Joella," she said, "I hate children who have to be different."

My string painting didn't make it onto the wall. But while, with hindsight, I can see that this wasn't a very kind thing to say to a child, and I can also see that if you only like children who want to be like everybody else perhaps you shouldn't be a primary school teacher, at the time I wasn't particularly crushed.

Thing is, I knew Miss Scunthorpe was right. I am a born, or possibly bred, non-conformist. Even as an eight year old I could see I didn't have much choice about that, so if she didn't like it it was her issue.

I don't want to over-simplify it -- there have been times when I've desperately wanted to have the right aspirations, the right clothes, the right life. It can be lonely being a bit of a freak.

But I've taken a lot more, a *lot* more, pleasure in not having these things, and not wanting them.

At this juncture my imaginary reader points out that I have a monogamous long-term relationship with a member of the opposite sex; a nurse and a lawyer who still love each other for parents; a big mortgage; a good degree; a shit pension; a proper job. I read the Guardian, I get a veg box delivered, I'm going on holiday for 2 weeks in the summer, and I've just bought the new Elbow album. Exactly how non-conformist, he says (my imaginary reader is a man) is *that*?

Yeah, and he's right on the nail. It really annoys me when I find out that I'm excruciatingly normal. On-trend, even. That annoys me especially. I thought I'd discovered wasabi peas, then I read about them in the frigging Observer. Sambuca? Everyone's drinking it.

So it was difficult for me to say yes to round-the-corner S when he asked me if I'd be interested in sharing an allotment with him. Yes! I want to grow my own sweetcorn! I have the time and the inclination, why didn't I think of this years ago when they couldn't give allotments away? Now you have to wait longer for an allotment than for a hip replacement, and there's a column about it every week in the frigging Observer. (I did say yes though, in fact I said yes please and thank you for asking. So watch this space for predictable middle class allotment-related ramblings).

So I am left musing on the nature of fashion. Clearly some things move into fashion for good reasons -- eg Fairtrade, biodegradable sanpro, er, allotments -- whereas others are just keeping fashion and by extension marketing people busy -- eg enormous handbags, cholesterol-reducing yoghurt-style drinks, wallpaper with patterns bigger than a baby's head.

I can't work out where the line is between what's fashionable and what's zeitgeist and what's idiosyncratically cool. I don't care about fashion and I don't want to, I think being up with the zeitgeist is probably sensible as it generally moves in the right direction, I do want to be idiosyncratically cool but I know this is vain.

*sigh*

Still, I guess there are worse dilemmas.

joella

*I genuinely do not know whether string painting is generation- or culture-specific. But if you're wondering, it basically works like this: you have an A3 sheet of paper which you fold in half, then open out again. You have pots of poster paint in three or four colours, into which you dip foot-long lengths of string. You arrange your lengths of string around half your A3 sheet of paper, leaving the bits that weren't dipped in the paint trailing across the edge, then you fold the empty half of the paper over the stringy half and pull the string out. Open the paper out and you have the sort of painting that to my seven or eight year old mind, would impress no one worth impressing.

Axing lyrical

It had been a decade since I'd last wielded an axe. I feared I may have lost my touch.

When last it happened, I was (as Mr B put it) the mad woman living at the bottom of the garden. Someone else's garden. It was not a peaceful time, but I learnt many things -- how to tune a video (a redundant skill now, but one which has proved extensible), how to sleep in an empty house, how to wire a plug and change a lightbulb, how not to sleep with taxi drivers, how to live off Spar lager and Bombay Mix, how to find out who your friends are, how to run round empty hillsides at night, how to Save as Draft when you are pissed and send it in the morning (I learnt that one the hard way).

But most of all, and largely from necessity, I learnt how to chop wood. I was staying in a cottage with a wood burning stove, and it was freezing. I found out where to buy wood from, (the previously-blogged and still glorious Bagley Wood Sawmill) and pitched up there to load up Cherry the 2cv with the necessaries. 'It'll need chopping up,' said the woodsman, possibly recognising that I didn't know a combustible item from a hole in the ground. 'Yes, of course, thanks very much!' I said, and drove off at not-very-great speed.

Next I had to source something with which to chop. My landlady at the time was generous beyond the call of duty in many ways, and offered to purchase it for the property, so cost was not an issue. I didn't really know what I was doing (generally as well as specifically) and I ended up buying an industrial-quality splitting axe from a local tool hire centre.

This was possibly my first 'it's all about having the right tools' experience. The damn thing weighed a ton though, and initially I didn't have a clue what to do with it. I swung it dangerously around a few times, missed things, burst into tears and called my mum. One of the things I didn't know about her until then was that she knows what to do with an axe. She talked me through it over the phone, and I pulled myself together and went outside for another go.

I can still remember the feeling when the first log split. It took a while to properly get the hang of it, but I persevered, and over a few weeks I gradually worked out how to use the weight of the axe (that was a beautiful axe), lift and slide, keep knees soft, jump backwards to avoid crushed toes. I chopped in my US Army surplus combats and my fingerless gloves. I played loud Ani DiFranco out of the window as I was doing it. I chopped at night, when I'd been drinking and I shouldn't have been anywhere near sharp objects. I felt like Sarah Connor.

This was an-inbetween phase of my life though, and about three months later I said goodbye to the cottage, and the axe, and moved into the House On The Island, where another in-between phase of my life was to begin.

I have never had cause to chop wood since... this house has an open fire, but we rarely used it until this winter, and even then mostly used smokeless fuel (as this is a built up area, the Clean Air Act applies). But a) fuel prices have shot up and anyway we know we're running out of the stuff, b) the living room is the coldest room in the house, and c) smokeless fuel is both ineffectual and joyless. In the meantime, several people told me that it is ok to burn seasoned wood. I have tried to check the veracity of this, but like many regulatory type things it is almost impossible to get a straight answer to a straight question, so fuck it.

We bought a new axe before Christmas. It's not on a par with the last one, being a standard multipurpose axe, with a bit more of the felling than the splitting about it, but I liked the way it felt in my hands. I've only just made it back to the sawmill, having relied until recently on garden centre pre-chopped wood and reconstituted wood-style combustible material. We've also had nothing to chop *on*, but thanks to the recent storms and a chainsaw, Plumbing S was happy to part with a big slice of tree-trunk.

So finally, I had the axe, the wood, the chopping block, the freezing weather, the 10% hike in gas prices. And the final ingredient: the bad mood.

I was a little nervous. Would I remember what to do? Am I too old and feeble? Might I chop my toe off?

These days, I have safety boots, so I was able to mitigate the risk of the last, and I lined up my log, lined up my axe and let it fall.

The first log split on the third attempt, the rest mostly on the second, which, with a lighter axe, is pretty good going. I was delighted to find that my body remembered what to do, and, if anything, I am stronger than I was ten years ago, certainly more in control. As the third or fourth log smacked down and split cleanly down the middle, I laughed from the sheer pleasure of hitting things with other things for good reasons. We should all do more of this.

joella

Happy Easter! Or something.

Can I say something difficult on my blog? I ask myself. Yes, I tell myself. Like the man on The Road always says to his son when he wants to do something that might bring him a sliver of relief in a hopeless world, of course you can. Of course you can.

(An aside: the only criticism I have of The Road is that it would have been better if the man had had a daughter, as then there would have been less chance of personal pronoun confusion. I guess this is a novel that would work better in Finnish, where, I gather, they have a case for everything. Though I can't imagine the Finns letting the world get to that state.)

So. I didn't get up this morning. I lay in bed all morning: it was chilly, I had a good book to finish (not The Road, I finished that on Thursday, another good book), and I never get up in the morning if I don't have to.

I got up early this afternoon, planning to make coffee plus cheese-and-mushroom-and-tomato on toast. Mmm. I padded downstairs in pyjamas and a big jumper, thinking that I might never want to get up, but life's not so bad really.

Then I found that the dishwasher has broken again. That's the third time in six months (though it's something different this time: this time it hasn't drained -- the pump's packed up probably -- leaving 2-3 inches of cold, greasy water in the bottom). Housemate C had missed this when she emptied and re-filled it.

Easy to miss, I guess, when it's not your dishwasher (and I am not having a go at housemate C here). But I don't miss these things. And I feel it's my responsibility to sort them out. I should not be overwhelmed by a packed up dishwasher. We have a sink, we have hot water. Nothing is fundamentally threatened.

But it was, somehow, overwhelming. I hauled everything out of the dishwasher, and washed it all up badly. M shouted down that he was trying to have a shower (the shower only works when there is no other water running -- another entirely surmountable obstacle but one which gets to me far more than it should). I shouted back. By the time he came down to make breakfast (and it was totally my turn, and it was way past breakfast time), I was sitting in my red bucket chair, my arms curled round my knees, fat tears rolling down my cheeks.

I don't understand, I said, why the world can't work better. And it upsets me so much that it doesn't. How do you know what to buy? How do you know who to trust?

I'm sorry, said M. I can't do much about it, but do you want to go out for lunch?

I did. We did. We went to Shiraz -- a known quantity in a scary world. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Much later, I rang my mum. We had a long chat about, among other things, dishwashers, weddings, madness, the weather, and the power of novels. Oh, and my dad's earache. She poked him awake to talk to me. I tried a variant of his own joke on him (How many ears does Mr Spock have? Three: his left ear, his right ear and his final frontier) but quickly retreated. And before long I was back on the dishwasher-as-life metaphor.

Looks like you bought the wrong dishwasher, he said.

Dad, I said, it's a Bosch!

Well, said my Jewish, avowedly apolitical, always-knowingly-understated father, I'm not sure you want to trust the Germans, dear.

The older I get, the more I get the point of literature.

joella

Bonjour tristesse

There has never been a more inappropriate item of clothing than a high-vis cycle vest at a Diamanda Galas gig. I tucked it into my bike helmet and tucked my bike helmet under my seat, but still it glowed, like a radioactive ingot in a post-apocalyptic world.

What I should have been wearing, of course, was black. All over, from the inside out. That's what most everyone else was wearing, including the lady herself. I'd call her something like the High Priestess of Goth, but I don't think that would begin to cover it.

She sings of love, of despair, of death, of bleakness, of grief, of injustice. She does this in three languages and over three octaves. When singing isn't enough, she screams. I went with A, who has been waiting to see her live for 21 years, and his friend J, who said afterwards 'I can see why they made us drink out of plastic. She'd have shattered every glass in the place'.

I spent most of the set grinning like an idiot. Halfway through, A said 'is this *really* what it's like inside your head?'. Yeah, I said. Sometimes.

Her new album is called Guilty Guilty Guilty. Let's just say that as a lapsed Catholic, on Maundy Thursday, I could relate to that.

Right, I'm off for a shriek.

joella

Three colours purple

Three colours purple
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

Four, if you count the necklace. I was totally on brand this International Women's Day.

NGO X has a regular online 'Have Your Say' space, where we get to discuss pertinent issues with colleagues round the globe. Where appropriate, senior managers respond in a live lunchtime session which, increasingly, links out to the rest of the world via videoconference. It's a great idea, though one tends to find that the hottest topics are more to do with the number of car parking spaces or why our pensions are disappearing into a hole in the ground than anything weighty about, say, gender equality.

This time round, the big debate is around whether or not we should introduce a dress code. The question was asked, I believe, by someone from overseas who had visited head office and genuinely didn't understand why every second person they met looked like they'd been dragged through a hedge backwards. Perhaps, he or she suggested, it would be simpler if we all wore some kind of uniform.

It isn't the first time it's come up -- in the past someone has commented that they find it disconcerting and unprofessional that people wander the office barefoot in the summer, someone else was not comfortable with the amount of female flesh on display.

All of these conversations are fascinating -- some responses are flippant, some are indignant, yet others try and explore why it is that one person's smart is another person's overdressed, or why bare feet in one place may not mean the same thing as bare feet in another.

Personally, I think a uniform is a terrible idea. One of my very favourite things about NGO X is its explicit lack of a dress code: you wear what you want to wear, and you take into account the effect on others when you are making that decision. Wander round the New Building and you will encounter every form of dress imaginable. There are headscarves and suits and T-shirts and flip flops and dreadlocks and shawls and DMs and cleavage and jumpers and brogues and kaftans and I love all of it. I see why people find it confusing, but once you get into it, it's brilliant.

Having said all that, a 'wear purple' message went out before International Women's Day this year, and a surprising number of people did, including some whom I might have put on a 'least likely to have anything purple' list, if anyone had asked me to make one.

Purple covers almost a whole spectrum in its own right, so we clashed with each other almost as much as we usually do, but it was a clashing that gave me a warm feeling inside all day. There were those who stuck to their monochrome, but hey, that tells you something useful too.

(I know IWD was nearly a fortnight ago, but I've only just got round to getting the Macbook and my phone to talk to each other.)

joella

Best laid plans

The plan was a civilised wander round Kew Gardens. I have never been there, and everyone was up for it. We sat round R&J's convivial dinner table on Saturday night and decided we would go unless it was 'absolutely pissing down'. On Sunday morning, it was of course absolutely pissing down.

So what to do with six small children (three of theirs, one of E's, visiting with her from Paris, and two belonging to their friends C&M)?

And so it was that we squidged into the back of a people carrier and then squidged into borrowed swimming gear (R&J are considerably svelter than we are -- let's just say that if it hadn't been for a maternity two-piece then I'd have been sitting it out) and then found ourselves flailing around with large numbers of shrieking children in a shallow pool of warm multicultural middle class wee at the local leisure centre. And all this before we'd normally have been out of bed. Hang on a minute, said M at one point, how did we get here?

When we got back we had an enormous Syrian lunch, then I rather impressed myself by managing to take a nap in a room full of under fives watching Winnie the Pooh on DVD. I was feeling a bit tired with all the excitement, and my bed of sofa cushions was still on the floor from the night before, so...

On awakening, I was cross-examined by J, who is three and a half and likes making rules.

'Are you a mummy?' she said. No, I said.

'Are you a nanny?' No, not one of those either, I said.

(pause)

'Are you a *boy*?' No, definitely not, I said.

'What *are* you then?'

A good question. I thought on it for a while, and then said 'I'm a Jo'.

There are days when that's not much fun, but this was definitely not one of them.

joella

I'd rather Mac

A few weeks ago, M decided it was time to upgrade his hardware (stop laughing at the back). He's had his laptop since 2002, and the desktop is even older than that, though has had various bits replaced, including the motherboard, so who knows how old it is really. Given that he works from home, spending half his time developing software on his laptop and the other half recording and mixing music on the desktop (which strictly speaking belongs to the household, but which has been in his room ever since I got my laptop two years ago) I think it was about time. Everything's creaking, sometimes literally. He had a good year last year, and the boiler man said there's a few years in the old Vaillant yet, so there was scope. I think the balance was tipped when he won a copy of Windows Vista in some geeky competition or other and realised there was nothing in the house that could handle it.

But I do not know what it was that first prompted him to think Mac. To my knowledge, he's never had one before. I think it may have been GarageBand, combined with Boot Camp, combined with the sheer undeniable beauty of the new iMacs. My sense of Macs is that they've always done what they do very well, but there was so much you couldn't do on them. With Leopard, all that seems to be ebbing away.

Anyway, he booked himself an appointment at the Apple Store on Regent Street last Friday, and called me at work to ask him if I'd be able to pick him up from the station, as he had something that wouldn't fit on his bike.

I got there in time to see him coming through the special wide ticket barrier lugging a big white box and a little white box. The big white box was his 24 inch iMac. The little white box was a present for me.

Which means I am now the proud (but if I'm honest still rather embarrassed) owner of a shiny new MacBook. I pride myself on being a thrifty and low maintenance kind of girl, so I didn't know what to do with myself for a while, but I hope I have now accepted this alien life form gracefully and gratefully: my laptop came from the thrifty and low maintenance end of the scale and using it has rarely been a pleasure and often been a chore.

But this thing, this is one of the loveliest things I have ever had my hands on. Things happen in strange and sometimes disconcerting ways, but they are efficient and beautifully designed ones. It's like going on holiday to Finland. Thank you, lovely boyfriend.

joella

The public wants what the public gets

My friend L had a spare ticket to see Our Friends in the North. I'd had a hard day's radiator-bashing and jumped at the chance. At the very least, I thought, there'll be interval drinks (I *love* interval drinks) and good people-watching. I don't go to the theatre very often.

It's a very, very long play. I was slightly worried by the end of the first half, and remembered the time I went to the theatre with my Significant Ex and his mum and tried to leave in the interval because I thought it was the end.

But the second half was amazing. A depressing message, though: if you try to make the world a better place for everyone, you will be compromised and eventually corrupted, and you will despise what you have become. If you keep your head down and take care of your own, you will find yourself kowtowing to those with more power than you and shitting on those with less, and you will despise what you have become. And if you opt out and follow the winds, you will end up serving the corrupt agendas of others, and despise what you have become.

As the lights came up, they played Things Can Only Get Better, and I shed a little tear for New Labour.

I've been wall to wall Jam ever since.




joella

Stormy Monday

Most of the time I love sleeping in a loft conversion -- the warm air drifts up in the winter and you get all the light that's going, and in the summer you can open the skylight at one end and doors at the other and it's like being in a huge breezy tent. On a clear night, at the right time of month, I sleep bathed in moonlight. But when there's a gale blowing, the extractor fan clatters and the rain pounds next to your head. You don't sleep so well, and all your dreams are stormy.

The plumbing's picking up a bit, and I have a job on this morning. Not a scary there-on-your-own-out-of-your-depth one, but a difficult one. One so difficult that J the plumber is doing it himself, and I get to help. These are my favourite kinds. I make the coffee and say 'why is that doing that?' and 'where is that water coming from?', safe in the knowledge that he is in control of the situation. Or at least giving a good impression of it.

But even with these jobs, I don't sleep so well either, possibly because I have to get up a clear 90 minutes earlier than I do on an NGO X day. *This* morning however, the effing storm has made J the plumber 90 minutes late, something to do with needing to chop a fallen tree up. So I am double sleep-deprived, and still here, with a full extra hour to get nervous.

I expect I'll stop getting nervous one day. That's what normally happens.

And I think I will paint my bedroom storm colour.

joella

Friendlier with two

By the way, said M this morning, I paid your library fine.

Who said chivalry was dead?

joella

Not waving but drowning

I made a flying visit Up North this week -- I thought my mum might like to see me on Mothers Day, and I was right. It was lovely, and while I was up there I dropped in on Mick the Builder.

Mick the Builder is an old friend, and in a never-did-much-about-it-and-never-will sort of way, an old flame. At the moment he's in a bad way: he met an arty native American woman on the internet (I believe they StumbledUpon each other, rather than doing an online dating thing, but the end result was the same), she moved to Lancashire, lived with him for a year and then fucked off with his best mate. His proper, since primary school, carried his dad's coffin with him best mate. I think it is no exaggeration to say that the bottom has fallen out of his world.

He's signed off building at the moment, and I woke him up by leaning heavily on his doorbell at midday. He has the Prozac shakes so bad that the tea was only just staying in the cup. We'd arranged over IM to go swimming. The shakes explained why his typing's got so bad.

I don't think I'm going to make it swimming, he said.

I left it five minutes, then said, sorry, but you're coming with me. Get your trunks. No arguments.

Like hundreds of other children, we both learnt to swim at Lytham Baths in the 1970s. The clanking of the turnstile, the Junior Swim tickets, the chilly tiles, my dad coaxing me onto (and then off) the diving boards, turning somersaults, hot chocolate afterwards and a go on the Space Invaders machine. I can remember it like it was yesterday, but it's gone now -- they turned it into offices in the brave new 1980s.

St Annes Baths was built around the same time they knocked Lytham Baths down. We went there on the bus. I'd been there once, but Mick hadn't been swimming for the intervening 20 years. We got changed and met in the pool. It was clear and clean with a glimpse of the big Lancashire sky out of the high windows.

This, he said five minutes later, is ace. This was a brilliant idea. I did 20 lengths, he did 2, but you have to start somewhere, and watching him float around peacefully made me very happy.

Is that you done? he asked when I came up for air after number 20, and I suddenly realised that he was the only man left in the pool and I was the only woman under 60, possibly 70. We were surrounded by blue rinses and verruca socks. We legged it, and back in the changing room I heard the opening strains of 'Car Wash'. We'd narrowly missed the Aquarobics.

By the time we got to the pub, Mick had decided he was going to go twice a week. It was, he said, the most positive thing he'd done in months. I believed him. I offered him some Frankincense Nourishing Cream, but he gave me a 'don't push your luck' look.

The day after, they decided to close the baths to save money.

Imagine. In a seaside town, in a country where nobody gets enough exercise, the Conservative Borough Council decide to close one of only two public swimming pools in the borough -- a facility that has an appeal stretching from children to heartbroken builders to little old ladies.

Here in Oxford we have five public swimming pools, six in the summer. Most of them are free to anyone under 17 and subsidised for people on low incomes. There are no elected Conservative councillors here*.

Be careful what you vote for.

joella

*There are two Conservative councillors, but they were both elected as Lib Dems.