Leaving Oxford in 100 blog posts: 6. 28 Beaumont Street

When I first moved to Oxford, I registered at the Kennington Health Centre, which was fine. There was the one deeply embarrassing experience when I went for a smear test and I still had my diaphragm in, and then had to count on my fingers how many hours it was since I'd had sex to see if it was safe to take it out, but that was hardly their fault. But when my Significant Ex and I moved to Cowley Road, we switched to one of the practices based at the East Oxford Health Centre. And that wasn't so great.

I never had a problem with the GP I usually went to see, though I never warmed to her. She was always a bit rushed, a bit distracted, not the sort of person who has the time or the inclination to pick up on the things you're not saying -- but I was young, I was reasonably healthy, and it didn't matter that much. But there was another GP at the same practice, the one my Significant Ex went to see about his mystery abdominal pain, who was an arrogant arse. 'It's an ulcer,' he was told, and sent away with a giant bottle of Gaviscon which made no difference whatsoever. The pains came more frequently, bent him over double and took the light out of his eyes. You don't want to see anyone in that kind of pain, and you certainly don't want a GP who says 'well, you clearly think you know better than me, so what do *you* think it is?'.

In the end, his mum took him to A&E, and they diagnosed acute gall bladder inflammation. Which is rare in young men, but HAD, in fact, been picked up by his previous GP, at the Kennington Health Centre, who unfortunately sent the referral letter to number 127 Our Road instead of number 227 Our Road just before we moved, and the people at number 127 hadn't sent it back. So he missed the appointment, then he moved GPs, and the new one did not deign to investigate that closely. Three months later he had his gall bladder removed -- they would have taken it out there and then, but it was so inflamed by that point it would probably have exploded.

I wrote a letter of complaint, but I was young, and I was reasonably healthy, and I never sent it. I wish I had. But both of us left that practice as fast as we could. We joined 28 Beaumont Street, on the recommendation of a friend, who said 'I think you'd like Dr F'.

I did like Dr F, and I still do. In fact I reckon moving to 28 Beaumont Street is one of the healthiest decisions I've ever made in my life. Dr F is the doctor I see most often. She has a certain brusqueness, but mixed in with that is a great deal of experience, especially in women's health issues, and a great deal of humanity. She's a qualified homeopath as well as a GP -- I had a homeopathic consultation with her once about 10 years ago, after a laparoscopy revealed there was nothing specifically wrong with my patently sub-optimal urino-genital system, so there was nothing specific that Western medicine could offer apart from 'keep taking the codeine, love' or putting me back on the Pill. She prescribed sepia. I can't say it fixed me (and I do basically think that homeopathy is bunk) but it did get me thinking about my menstrual cycle and its effect on me in a much more holistic way, which in turn meant things did get better.

Over the last 15 years or so she's also referred me to a knee clinic for an MRI scan on my dodgy knee (not much to be done), a podiatrist for my dodgy feet (the main cause of the dodgy knee - they made me some orthotics which I usually remember to wear when walking any distance), a breast clinic for ultrasound and a lump biopsy (turned out to be benign), a dermatology clinic for a strange mole on my foot (they took it off but that turned out to be benign as well), an endoscopy clinic for my digestive issues (congenitally sluggish, but no intervention deemed necessary), an eye clinic for a scar on my eyeball that was picked up by the optician (turns out I have a scar on my eyeball), and most recently for a pelvic ultrasound to have another look at that sub-optimal female area (still a bit shit but nothing really bad going on, so back to a review of 'other options'). Plus the odd course of antibiotics to deal with UTIs, sinus infections and the like.

This all makes me sound like a raving hypochondriac, but we're talking about a decade and a half here. The main point is that I think if over that time there'd been anything really wrong with me, a) I'd have gone to talk to her about it, and b) she'd have listened, and got a second opinion and/or more information if she deemed it necessary. I know that's what GPs are *supposed* to do, but that's not to say it always happens*. There are some skills you've either got or you haven't, and she has. I think she rocks. She's a Girton woman, I think that might be part of it.

Many of her colleagues are very fine too. The nurses can take a smear test almost as fast as you can say 'Ow!', and have blood out of you before you've even noticed. During my latest review of other options, Dr F gave me a very clear explanation of the reasons why 40-something hormone levels can wreak havoc on a person's life, and suggested I talk to Dr M, who knows a lot about progestogen management. Dr M rang me while I was waiting for a train at Radley, and we had a detailed conversation about coils and implants and progestogen-only pills which prompted M, sitting on the bench next to me, to seek more knowledge of such things himself. I don't think he'd realised there was so much to it, just that for mysterious reasons I was spending more time than usual in a sobbing heap.

Cerazette is what she recommended for starters -- ten weeks in and I've been hardly sobbing at all.

But extra-special mention must go to Dr S, who I went to see in the Dark Days in the New Building, when I was (basically) in a total state. I came down with a sore throat and tried to make an appointment with Dr F. She wasn't available, so I opted for Dr S instead. He called me in and I started telling him about my sore throat and how I thought it was tonsilitis, and I probably needed some antibiotics. Hmm, he said, and how are things at home? Well, all right, I said, bit stressful (these were dark days for M as well, all his children had fallen out with him and he was very upset). And how are things at work, he said. And I found myself telling him all about it.

Jo, he said, you don't need antibiotics, you need sleep. And he wrote me a prescription for Temazepam and signed me off for a week, which, looking back, is one of the single best things anyone's ever done for me. A month later I went back and said 'these Temazepam are BRILLIANT, can I have some more?' and he said well, they are rather addictive, so you can have one more lot, but that's it. That was over five years ago and I still have a few of them left. I use them for very special occasions when I need to wake up into a benign world.

And that, I think, is what I love about 28 Beaumont Street. They hear the things you aren't telling them. I'm not a great one for league tables, but I did check out their score in the NHS Quality And Outcomes Framework. Generally on a par or just above the average results for the PCT, and generally a little above the England average, which, knowing Oxford as I do, is just about what I'd expect. But their Patient Experience results are 99.7% -- 14% above the PCT average, and 27% above the England average. Which is basically about can you see the doctor you want when you want to, and do you get enough time with them. If you can say yes to these things, you're doing something right.

I can see that once we've moved, travelling over 200 miles to see my GP isn't going to be feasible, and they probably wouldn't let me stay on the books even if I wanted to. But on the grounds that you're nowhere without your health, I will miss that practice more than I care to acknowledge.

joella

*I once had to get the morning after pill on a Saturday, and the GP I went to see took my blood pressure and wrote the prescription on his doorstep. The GP I had in Cambridge tried to put every female student who went to see her on the Pill (presumably so her Saturday mornings would be uninterrupted).

Leaving Oxford in 100 blog posts: 5. Woodside

It was September 1994, and my Significant Ex and I had been back from travelling for over a year. Since the previous November I had been working in Andover, living with my parents, who had accidentally moved there a few years earlier, and spending a chunk of every Friday night and a chunk of every Sunday afternoon driving myself to Oxford and back by 2cv to see him (and to not be in Andover). It was workable, but it was not sustainable. He was working in Newbury, so in theory we could have moved there and I could have commuted, but a) why would you live in Newbury, or indeed anywhere near it, unless you're the kind of person who has a horsebox and a Range Rover, and b) I hated my job. So I started buying the Oxford Times every weekend, and taking it back to Andover to scour the jobs pages.

I applied for anything that looked even remotely like a job I could do, but I didn't get very far. These were the Major years, and it was still all looking a bit grim. But then I saw a job for a Production Editor at a small publishing company based just outside Oxford. I didn't know what a Production Editor did, but I applied anyway (when I was drunk, but that's another story) and duly found myself arriving at Woodside to be interviewed. By P, who read my CV, said 'well you seem bright enough, let's see what you can do', and gave me an article to copyedit on screen. I was very nervous, and dimly aware of movement behind me. I later found out he was making 'she might be the one' gesticulations at C, who was working at the next desk and trying to make him stop.

I was the one. Although it turned out C wanted to be the Production Editor, so I got his job, which was Reporter. It was a bit easier to understand what a Reporter did, so I didn't mind. What I was Reporting on, though, was in the main totally baffling, being the European information industry, which in those days was still largely dial-up leased line databases which were searched with their own command line languages. There was Telnet (but only in the morning, before America got out of bed). There were obscure data protocols called things like Z39.50. There were CD-ROMs, but most computers didn't have a CD-ROM drive to read them. There was email, but it was mostly Compuserve, where you didn't have a name, you had a number (mine was 100632.151). It came down the phone line. If you had a modem/phone line splitter, you were pretty cool. If that was what you thought cool was.

Fortunately, I did. Because from all of that, came the internet, which (if you don't count the pr0n) is still about the coolest thing ever. And because I got to work at Woodside and Report on it (and on some other things -- I was Managing Editor of Library Manager magazine for a while, and not a lot of people can say that), I got to watch the world wide web emerge from its geeky chrysalis, spread its wings and change the world. And write about it. It was ace.

At some point during this period though, I split up with my Significant Ex. For related reasons, there came a point where I had to leave Woodside. But, as Lloyd Cole once said about Charlotte Street, it was never my intention to stay so long.

Many of the people I met there, though, are still part of my life. We had a Woodside Editorial Dream Team ("for a time, in the mid-90s, almost nobody in Europe knew as much about this shit as we did, probably") reunion last Christmas, with attendance from Oxford, Abingdon, Nantwich, London and Arizona. C and I used to argue like cat and dog (including about which of us got to be the dog), but these days I am properly genuinely fond of him. M developed the software for Index to Theses, currently (tho' not for much longer) run by P, and C is also involved, doing something involving abstracts that I have never fully understood. When P turned 60 a couple of years ago, he invited us all to a Works Outing in London, which involved sewers and speedboats and sherry and was altogether excellent. I have made many good friends at NGO X, but the IWR* years, and the people associated with them, will always have a special place in my heart.

And in my last months in Oxford, I have by chance come back to live near Woodside. By slightly less chance, M still does little bits of work for various of the spin off businesses that grew up when the mothership imploded, as it was always going to once it was bought by Big Publisha. One of them ended up back at Woodside, as it was always going to, what took it so long? But then we heard that the building had been sold, and was (is) shortly going to be demolished, to make way for five "luxury homes". Because we need more of them.

But you can't fight progress, and M and I duly made a short (but brutal, as it was by bike, and anyone who ever cycled to Woodside will remember that hill) pilgrimage to see J and L during their last week in the building, and to say goodbye to the place. I hadn't been there for years. Maybe not since I left in 1999. When we arrived, the first person we saw was Dave Bond, the handyman-cum-caretaker who once cut through the ISDN line to London and nearly stopped us going to press, resurrected from retirement to clear musty rooms of their history. We sat in the office that Big Publisha Clive once extended so it would accommodate his ego, and caught up on the old days with two people who were old hands when I was but a Bright Young Thing. It was like a timewarp, but in a good way (apart from the dead flies), because the vast majority of my memories of the place are happy ones.

The doorstep I used to smoke on with J the receptionist. The tannoy through which she would announce "Sandwich lady's here, everyone! Sandwich lady!" and we would pile out the door to buy brie and cranberry on multigrain out of a Boars Hill yummy mummy's BMW boot.

The unheated swimming pool we would jump into every sunny lunchtime from May to September, still the best lunchbreaks I have ever had. The cherry tree Dave the Rave and I would lie under after jumping into the pool, nursing our vodka hangovers.

The server room occupied by a series of unpleasant men, with the honourable exceptions of Yasser, a Palestinian asylum seeker who was IT guy when I arrived and who presided over a collection of PCs that nobody ever bothered screwing back together, so often did they need to be taken apart, and Michael -- Irish, mostly stoned, and willing to supply you with dope, so he was, as part of his unreliable service.

The garden room, where important meetings (and job interviews) were held, now full of dead flies. The editorial office, where Library Manager guest editor J V W, from the featureless interior of the US of A, fell asleep face down on her keyboard one afternoon, causing C and me to email each other in silent hysterics, wondering what we should do if she'd actually died. The small archive room known as the library where we used to record our phone interviews, which Marketing wanted to expand into, sparking a 'Today the library, tomorrow Poland!' guerrilla poster campaign.

The residents block, home to random self-employed people (including, for a while, the newly separated M, who slept in his office on a camp bed), transient lost souls, and an alcoholic postman called John who would boil lumps of meat in an aluminium pan for hours and hours and hours, until the whole ground floor stank of cheap dead pig.

Which was a slight improvement on the smell of dead rodent, which we had to deal with one winter when something died under the floorboards of the editorial office, and we spent several weeks typing in fingerless gloves, on account of the cold, and burning joss sticks, on account of the stench.

And yet, and yet, it was my first proper job, and without it I would not be the woman I am today. Whatever kind of woman that is. Oh, and it's where I met M. If you hadn't worked that out already.

joella

*I link to the website reluctantly. It's not even half the publication it used to be, and that's not just because I don't write for it anymore.

The hidden stories of Bletchley Park

Photo: bletchley park decoding goodness by insert_user_name, on Flickr. Shared under Creative Commons: click photo for more info.

Taking a little break from writing long posts about leaving Oxford to write a short one about Bletchley Park. If you haven't seen Codebreakers: Bletchley Park's Lost Heroes then (at time of writing) you still have six days to watch it, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

A few years ago, there was a special Cambridge alumni day at Bletchley Park which included a talk from Turing's biographer, someone who explained how the Bombe actually worked, a social historian who talked about life there, a demonstration of the Bombe in action, a look at the Colossus, and some other things I forget. I thought I'd take M as a birthday present, him being a mathematician and all. When I first tried to book it was completely sold out, but I put my name on the reserve list and when someone cancelled at the last minute we were offered their places.

It was generally a pretty weird day, as the majority of my fellow alumni present were of the elderly imperious entitled variety (I am very uncomfortable belonging to a club that has people like that as members), and their wives. I did not enjoy the smalltalk. But the big talk blew my mind.

I came away thinking why isn't visiting this place part of the National Curriculum? Why is it falling down? Why don't kids study Turing like they study Hitler?

What I didn't properly realise till I saw the Codebreakers documentary though was that the reason Bletchley was left to moulder away for so long -- and still struggles with funding -- is that so much of what went on there was so super top secret (and carried on being used in the Cold War) that even today we don't know the whole story. We did know about Turing -- and the government recently acknowledged that the fact that a grateful free world saw fit to persecute him to death after the war for his homosexuality is a source of national shame -- but there are others whose work was never recognised, who went on to live in postwar obscurity.

This documentary is an important part of beginning to recognise their incredible contribution, and the fact that a large part of what won the war was maths. It's all fascinating stuff, but what brought a lump to my throat was a bit near the end where someone explained why there was no German equivalent of Bletchley Park.

Firstly, the Allies weren't so reliant on codes, because there was more trust and less fear in the command structure, so messages could be carried and transmitted in different ways. And secondly, a lot of the best codebreakers were Jews or gays or wildly eccentric misfits. The Nazis were busy exterminating those minds, not valuing them. So it was recognition of the value of (or at least tolerance of) diversity that won the war too. We need to remember that.

joella

Leaving Oxford in 100 blog posts: 4. The train station

The first time I came to this fine city, it was by train. I was in the Lower Sixth at school, and had been identified, together with a bunch of others, as Potential Oxbridge Material. A minibus was commandeered to take us on a trip to Oxford to check it out.

Only I missed it. I can’t remember why, some fairly significant departure time mix up, I presume. I do remember my dad driving me to the station, and buying me a ticket. I was only 15, so it was a half, and trains were cheaper then anyway. So I travelled on my own, and arrived at the station with a suitcase (not on wheels, this was the 1980s) and instructions to ask for Queen's College, which is where we were staying. I can report that it’s a long walk to Queen's College with a 1980s suitcase.

I liked Oxford a lot, and duly applied to Jesus College to study law. I got an interview (which I went to by train) but I didn’t get in – I was still only 16 at this point, which probably showed, and I didn’t really want to be a lawyer, which probably showed too.

But that wasn’t the end of going to Oxford by train – my friend R had a friend who was in his first year at Magdalen, and he invited us to a party. Looking back, I am amazed that we travelled for three and a half hours to go to a party in the Waynflete Building, but that’s being (possibly, by this point) 17 for you. All three of us slept in his single bed, and lay around feeling peculiar the next day until it occurred to us to look up the time of the last train back to Preston, which turned out to be 20 minutes later. So we grabbed our stuff, and we ran. I can report that it’s a long run from the Waynflete Building to the train station. The train was in when we reached the station and we made it with about five seconds to spare.

There was a brief hiatus, but then I went off to Cambridge (turned out I was Oxbridge Material after all) and met my Significant Ex. Whose mother lived (and indeed still lives) in Oxford. There followed a series of Significant Reunions at Oxford station after long periods of apartness. Until my parents accidentally moved to Andover, these were generally me coming down from the north. In those days you could smoke on trains, and I did, but I had a self-imposed ‘no smoking after Banbury’ rule, so as to be more kissable on arrival. There was also a memorable arrival from the south the summer after I graduated, when ex-schoolmate-pre-housemate S and I caught the train to Oxford from Paddington after three days (THREE DAYS) on the Magic Bus from Athens to London Victoria. We had ankles like tree trunks and mild psychosis, and we were sweaty, smelly, hungover and ravenous. It must have been a delightful sight.

The station receded into the background for several years after that though... we went away travelling, and when we came back I got a job in Andover. It's technically possible to get a train from Andover to Oxford, but it takes twice as long as driving, even when what you're driving is a 2cv. So I never did, and then I moved to Oxford, and entered the road trip years of my mid-to-late 20s.

The station came back into focus again towards the end of my relationship with my Significant Ex. The night of the 1997 general election I was dancing at a Billy Bragg gig after-party in Harlesden until they threw us out about 3 am. After that we walked to Paddington, fuelled by vodka and adrenaline (and, I must admit, some speed, but these were the optimistic 90s and I was still young...). The first train to Oxford was around 5.30... I was the only one of the four of us with a ticket that could be used before 9.30, but the train manager was in as celebratory mood as we were so he let us all on. We arrived in Oxford at the dawn of a new era, and I should have gone home, but I didn't want to. So M and I dozed in the sun on the grassy bank outside the station until the pubs opened, and then we went for a beer in the Turf Tavern. I came down with a crash about 12 hours later, but it was a magical morning.

That grassy bank isn't there anymore, it was concreted over in the name of progress about ten years ago. But the train station itself gradually faded back into my life. My parents moved back to Lancashire in the late 90s, and for a good while there was a train that ran from Reading to Blackpool, so I got on it a stop after it started and got off it a stop before it finished. Perfect. That doesn't happen anymore, you have to change in Birmingham and deal with the Scottish Train, but it's still generally better than driving, so long as you can afford it and nobody turns themself into a fatality on the line the day you want to travel.

I also spent three years working for NGO X's UK poverty programme, which had a major presence in Manchester, Cardiff and Glasgow, and a minor one, in the form of a single colleague, who lived somewhere near Pitlochry. All of the major stuff happened by train and Travelodge, the minor via sleeper and spare room. Early on I extended a Cardiff trip to Swansea to visit the Finnfans, who I hadn't really seen much of since Cambridge. I am very happy indeed that I renewed their collective acquaintance, and it all started at Oxford station.

And then there was Lancaster. The first time we went there, we drove, but most of our subsequent trips have been via train... most of the Lancaster Cohousing meetings are held in the Friends Meeting House, which is right next to the station, and it feels like the right way to arrive.

I like Lancaster station better than I like Oxford station, it has a Victorian solidness to it that resonates with me, while the Oxford building is somewhat flimsy, despite its Great Western Railway roots (I am a big Isambard Kingdom Brunel fan). But Oxford station has been the centre of so many journeys of my adult life, arrivals and departures both. It will always have a place in my heart.

joella

Leaving Oxford in 100 blog posts: 3. House move real time evaluation and learning points

What went well?

1. We sold the house. Ultimately, mission accomplished.

2. We sold the house to People A Bit Like Us. This is advisable, because (after the sale is agreed, at any rate) it means you can talk to them directly rather than do everything via estate agents, thus avoiding things becoming unnecessarily formal and oppositional. I'm not sure how you engineer this, except by leaving your art on the walls and your books on the bookshelves. This will put off quite a lot of people who are Not Much Like You. We felt our buyers were people we could trust, so much so that we gave them keys and let them knock a wall down before the sale was completed. Don't tell my dad, he'll have kittens.

3. We chose estate agents we could talk to. This was an unscientific process, led by me and based on gut instinct and gut prejudice (and not on cost). They're never going to be your mates, but you need not to hate them.

4. We chose a solicitor we could talk to, and our estate agents could talk to. This was based on a personal recommendation from a friend who is also a solicitor. Not the cheapest in town, but this is not an area where you want to focus on saving £100. Trust me. Even my dad liked her, and he's very hard to impress.

5. We gave quite a lot of stuff away to family and friends, and we gave even more stuff to Oxfam. We were reasonably organised about this and I look forward to learning how much our stuff sold for, thanks to the Tag Your Bag scheme.

6. Our timing was fortuitous and our friendships strong: the bungalow previously occupied by ex-housemate S, her Young Man, Tungsten and Particle was in a limbo state, and they cleaned the carpet, got the painters in and agreed to let us live in it in exchange for very modest rent, a bit of babysitting and some random gardening. Up north, fellow co-housers D and P offered us a part-time sublet of Halton Mansions, so we go from one-home city dwellers to two-home villagers at a stroke. Amazing. But maybe also karma - back in OX4, there were many people who lodged with us for a few weeks, a few months, a year because they needed a place for a while. We always felt good about being able to do that, but it's as important to be able to accept kindness as to offer it, and sometimes harder. However you look at it though, we feel pretty lucky.

7. We used a professional removals company. Those guys can shift stuff. I have moved myself, I have moved with man-with-van, and this was in a whole different league. This is the way to move house, people. We did our own packing, but if I could have afforded it I might have got them to do that part as well.

8. When it came to it, we were ready. I don't mean prepared, we weren't prepared (see What didn't go well). But in our waters, we were ready. It was time -- though I didn't realise that until afterwards.

What didn't go well?

1. I went to the Co-op last thing the night before the move to get cash to tip the removal men. The cash machine wasn't working so I bought a bottle of wine so I could get cash back. Then we drank the bottle of wine.

2. Partly as a consequence, the day of the move itself was 12 hours of hell. This was also because we were in no sense prepared: we'd been packing for weeks, but there was still stuff lying around in every single room in the house. The more we frantically threw things in boxes, the more stuff there still seemed to be lying on the floor.

3. Virgin Media cut our land line off a week early. Then they said they hadn't, but you know what, they had. Here's the short (and slightly redacted) version, written to the @virginmedia team when we finally got some joined up attention via Twitter -- surely the best thing EVER to happen to customer service.

The account is actually in the name of my partner M____. We are due to move house next week and had booked for all our Virgin services and our landline number to be transferred to our new address. This was originally booked for Monday 26 Sep then changed it to Friday 30 Sep when our move date changed. Our landline stopped working on Friday 23 Sep. Over several hours I spoke to several people in several teams who all told me something different. I eventually spoke to someone in the move team who said it would be reinstated by 7pm (this was about 4pm), and that she had done this by cancelling the move, but would rebook it. The phone was not working by 7pm and has never worked since. Another person told me it would require a technician visit and this was not possible for a week. By cancelling our move date we lost the ability to transfer our landline number as this requires five working days, we need the broadband working before then as my partner works from home, and we were told that it was not possible to have two visits, one to install the broadband and one to install the phone, even if we paid extra. We were not advised of this at the time our move was cancelled. We have rebooked our move, but we now have to tell everyone we know that we have a new phone number, having previously told them we would be keeping the same one. All the phonecalls I have made about this have been on my mobile, so I have had to pay a premium to call the 08457 number. Your teams have generally called me back when I've asked but I've often been in a queue for many minutes before this is possible. Additionally, there are dozens of essential calls I have had to make as these are the last few days before we move, to insurance companies, solicitors, utility companies etc. These have been a mixture of 0800 and 08457 numbers, which would have been free or local rate on my landline, but I have had to make on my mobile instead, thus incurring significant extra cost. This is why we are so unhappy with the service we have had from Virgin Media over the last week. Thank you for the opportunity to explain it and I look forward to your response.

A genuine real person called Billy sorted out most of this, and it turned out we *could* get our landline number transferred, but unfortunately we didn't have an unpacked handset at the time so we couldn't check that we could, you know, call people. And it turns out we can't. So that one's still going on *sigh*.

4. The removal men were due to arrive at 7.30 am. At 8.30 am the manager called and said 'we can't get our van anywhere near your house'. There was a long pause. I said 'well, I don't really know what to say'. In the end, they parked the big van where they were, and someone else arrived in a small van. There was a degree of relay shuttling of boxes. It was a bit like getting a chicken and a fox across a river. Let's just say a) I'm glad it wasn't my problem, b) I wonder why they sent the big van, given that they did come and look at the house, and they do do this for a living, and c) East Oxford student parking is not something I will miss. Not even a little bit.

5. Boxes. Back in, like, February, I bought some boxes on eBay. We filled those up. Then my colleague L moved house and brought us round a car full of boxes. We filled those up too. *Then* we started to panic, because we clearly needed loads more boxes. You can get them free from your removal company, once you have booked your removal. But we hadn't, because our solicitor said we shouldn't commit to a moving date until we'd exchanged contracts. This was wise advice as things were indeed delayed. But it meant that we had to pay £150 deposit for the boxes from our preferred removal company, on the understanding that this would be deducted from the final invoice. The very same day they delivered them we did exchange, rang up to book our move and they were fully booked for the whole week. So we had to use a different company, who were already £150 more expensive. So that added £300 to the whole experience. What joy.

6. Cleaning. Oh my god the cleaning. D, our buyer, came round at lunchtime the day we moved to get some keys. He said 'you will be cleaning everything, won't you?'. I said 'well... you *are* about to knock a wall down'. But he is new to the home improvements game, and he seemed to think that wouldn't impinge on the rest of the house, and -- reasonably enough -- he wanted to move into a house with a clean kitchen and clean bathrooms. So I cleaned them. For about four hours I moved through the house at top speed, dealing with dust and limescale and grease with an increasingly toxic range of chemicals. It seemed like the right thing to do, even though a) it nearly killed me and b) there'll be about an inch of brick dust on everything by now, and he will be weeping gently and wondering why he unpacked his crockery. But it wasn't for me to tell him.

7. While I was moving rapidly along the Ecover > Cillit Bang spectrum, M was shuttling backwards and forwards in a Comonwheels car, which he'd originally, and with characteristic optimism, booked until 3pm. Halfway through the afternoon we extended it until 6pm, but it became clear that we needed at least another hour. Unfortunately, by this point the people on the phone had gone home for the day, and we didn't have good enough internet on my phone to renew online. It's ok, said M, we can do it from the on-board computer in the car. So we filled the car with the final load, solemnly said our goodbyes to the house, locked the door for the last time and prepared to set off. At which point we discovered that we couldn't extend the booking. So we had to unload it all, open the house again, and unceremonially pile it all back in. Then M cycled over to the Interim Bungalow. My bike had gone in the van, so I had to get a cab. I sat in the back and had a little cry. But only a little one.

What will I do differently next time?

1. Clear!

Why was M baking bread two days before we moved? Why were we still using every single room till the very last minute? We should have decommissioned the kitchen, all but one toilet and all but one bedroom at least three days before we moved. There should have been nothing but boxes in these rooms and they should already have been cleaned. We were in denial. Maybe that's inevitable, but it would have been so much easier if we'd mentally extracted ourselves well before the removal vans arrived.

2. Trust my instincts more.

D was very anxious, as least as anxious as me, to do everything properly. He's clearly a person you can trust. But the system isn't designed to let you trust people, basically because until you have exchanged contracts either side can walk away at any time. And people do. But he wouldn't have. So we could have, for example, and said 'look, if we can't move on X day because your funding isn't in place, will you pay the removals penalty?' He was the one wanting us out quickly, and he was upset that we couldn't move the day after we exchanged, which is the date we'd originally agreed. But if we'd been able to book the removal date knowing we wouldn't be out of pocket if we had to reschedule, we would have done. It just made everyone's life a bit harder than it needed to, given that we were all in fact decent human beings. If you are one, and you meet another one, you can usually tell.

3. Start earlier.

As in months earlier. We knew we were going to move as soon as we put the house on the market. In fact we knew we were going to move the best part of a year before that. We boxed up the easy stuff -- the books, the records, the CDs -- thinking we were being organised, but any fule can do that. The hard stuff is the space under the stairs, the boxes in the loft, the shelves in the shed. We should have sorted this carefully and methodically, and got rid of most of it six months ago. Instead, we threw it into boxes which are now looming at us from corners saying 'This is your life, and you haven't got room for it anymore'.

But we have a little hiatus. A winter in the Interim Bungalow (of which more anon) where we will deal with this issue. We will.

And meantime, the main thing is, we're both SO MUCH HAPPIER now we've sold the house. It was no fun, but now it's done. Hooray for us.

joella

Leaving Oxford in 100 blog posts: 2. Foliage

We had the Finnfans from Swansea staying last weekend, for the last time, in all likelihood. 'I want to have a proper look at your garden,' said K one morning, after we'd eaten kedgeree and listened to Hounds of Love.

I went out with her. I was ostensibly checking on the laundry but I realised after a minute or two that I hadn't thought much about leaving it behind, this place that we made ourselves out of clay and stone and compost and circles, with help from books, from our friends, and of course from the plants themselves. I do love it. I will miss it.

I went back in for the camera.

The Cornus sanguinea 'Midwinter Fire. I went to Waterperry with my friend R especially to get these. They are spindlier and more delicate looking than most dogwoods, and it always feels somehow wrong to cut them back hard in the spring. But I generally do, and come winter it lives up to its name. Glorious little things they are. Brighten up the darkest of days.

The golden marjoram. Came in a pot as a present from R&T, who are the kind of people who bring you pots of things when they come for lunch. I planted it out without much hope for it, as the soil is heavy and there's quite a bit of shade. But it survived and then thrived, and every summer we make garden pesto with fistfuls of it. Also a star player in my fish soup.

The water lily. I can take no credit for this. M wanted a pond v badly, and when we were building the patio he went out to the garden centre and came back with a large round bowl, which we sank into the clay and filled up (including a bucket of pondwater from over the road). The water lily took several years to get going, but suddenly there it was, floppy leaves for the frogs to hide under and jewel-like pink flowers emerging in late summer.

The pond grass. No idea what this is called. We bought a basket with three or four different pond plants in it, and this is the only one that made it. It loves our pond, and is gratifyingly tall. Makes the pond look more mysterious, and us look like we know what we're doing.

The Boston ivy. This grows up the shed, and every year till this one I have diligently pulled its tendrils away from the roof to stop it taking over completely. This year I didn't have the heart. The shed is (faded) green, and I bought the Boston ivy for its autumn redness. It needs a bigger shed, ideally, but the basic idea works.

The day lily. I do like a day lily. I fell for them one hot summer when I semi-accidentally went to visit the national collection of them, which is somewhere in Oxfordshire. They're kind of scruffy and very much here today gone tomorrow, but they can put up with anything and come in interesting colours. I used to have some crocosmia next to them, but I accidentally dug them up. They should really be in the sun, and mine aren't, but they do still produce sprigs of orange and purple flowers. I bought them with the garden vouchers M's mum gave me the Christmas she died, and when the flowers come out I always think of her.

The Sorbus 'Joseph Rock'. The summer we moved in, I cleared the back corner of the garden. It was full of buddleia, brambles and what I now know was a rambling rose, which with hindsight I should possibly have cut back and left, as it provided excellent screening of the difficult 'behind the shed' area, but which was totally out of control and extremely thorny. There was definitely a gap to be filled, and when my mum came to stay she suggested a small tree. So we went to Notcutts in the 2cv, chose this orange-berried rowan, rolled the roof back and drove home with it waving above the back seat. I planted, staked and tended it carefully, and it's an autumn beauty, but it's a bit overshadowed by the sycamore behind it, which grows like topsy. I think probably the sycamore should go, as it's basically a giant weed, but have never been able to bring myself to cut down an actual functioning tree.

The Nandina domestica, aka heavenly bamboo. This was my leaving present from my colleagues in the NGO X internet team when I moved over to work on knowledge management for the UK poverty programme in 2003. I had admired it when on a garden centre trip with Plumbing S, and she engineered its purchase. I love it because it's just so interesting -- you never know what it's going to do next. It's been hit quite hard by the last couple of winters so isn't quite itself at the moment, but hopefully will recover to grow random flowers and berries another day.

The Cotoneaster. This little fellow was about a foot tall when I discovered him lurking in the ivy (qv). Initially unpromising, but he turned out to be extraordinarily good value -- a strange, frondy habit, very forgiving of hard pruning, bright red berries, strong evergreen foliage. Mrs Ahmed next door admired him one day and we got chatting. I gave her the label that was still wrapped round his trunk so she could get one of her own (so I forget which kind he is). It was the longest conversation we ever had.

The smoke bush. I first saw one of these in the garden at a party I didn't want to go to. It was indeed a rubbish party but worth it for the bush, which was very large and in full frothy flower at the time. I was fascinated by it. And went out to get one for no better reason than that, but actually it's also been excellent value -- provider of pea sticks in spring, great colour contrast and smokiness in summer and an important part of the multicoloured autumn dying of the light display.

The angelica and the lysimachia firecracker. The lysimachia was a donation of surplus from plumbing S, probably around the same time as the sumac tree (qv). It's taken slightly too firm a hold on the bed it's in, but I let it get away with it because I absolutely love the colour of it. Who knew there was a colour in between purple and green? And I don't normally like yellow flowers but somehow these work. And it fits in well with the angelica, which is normally established before the lysimachia gets going for the year. I did originally plant the angelica about five years ago, a tiny 9cm pot from Waterperry which grew into a seven foot monster that first year, before falling over in spectacular fashion. I planted a rheum palmatum the same year -- it didn't make it through the winter, but that summer it looked like some kind of prehistoric jungle out there. Anyway, the angelica has always been welcome. Its leaves are incredible. Such notchiness!

The sumac tree. Oh the sumac tree. About seven years ago plumbing S brought round a bare root sucker that one of her neighbours had given her because she knew I loved sumac trees, and now it is big enough for children to climb. It's a voracious grower, and has already suckered its way all the way over to next door but one, but it provides shade in the summer, a beautiful fractal skeleton in the winter, and its glorious autumn foliage is the single best thing about November.

The camellia. Was originally here and is a total joy in the springtime. Its flowers are bright pink and its leaves are glossiest green. They say you aren't supposed to plant camellias facing east, because the flowers get frost-scorched, and that does happen a bit, but there are hundreds of them so it doesn't detract from its glory. I barely prune it and never feed it, yet it seems to be the happiest bush in the land. Truly a blessing. Every home should have one.

The first of the dogwoods and the sambucus nigra. Bright red dogwoods are a bit municipal, but I can't get enough of them. There was originally a large boring bush right outside the back door. I never found out what it was, and after a few years we dug it up, liberating the camellia (qv), which it had been squashing. While it was growing into the gap, I planted a dogwood, and a few years later, a black elderflower. The latter wasn't such a good choice, as it's too vigorous for the space, but they look beautiful together, and frame the view from the conservatory all year round. There's also an old, old honeysuckle. I killed one of these by accident but the other survived. The flowers are glorious, obviously, but I like the berries too.

The ivy. Has possibly been here forever. When we moved in, the first thing we did was strim the thigh-high lawn (which back then covered most of the garden), and the second was pull out yards and yards of ivy. There were dense layers of it tangled through everything, but I gradually revealed a brick path and brick-edged flower beds, which had once been well cared for. It took days, the ivy-thinning, but I didn't get rid of it all. It still clothes some otherwise nasty breezeblock walls, and winds its way round washing line poles and terracotta pots.

There will be another garden. I know this. But this was my first one.

joella

Leaving Oxford in 100 blog posts: 1. Curtains

We may have sold our house. I say 'may' because we have accepted a low offer from our potential buyers, and they are doing a full structural survey. Who knows what further wranglings may result, even if I believe (as I do) that the faults of the house are as visible as its glories.

But we're far enough down the track to have instructed a solicitor. She was recommended by a friend who is also a solicitor. You may never be able to get an electrician if you're middle class, but you can source good conveyancing within minutes. And now we have forms to fill in, many many forms.

One of them is about fixtures and fittings. What is included in the sale? We get to tick and cross boxes (including putting prices on things we are prepare to leave but only if they are prepared to pay for them), and then if the buyers disagree (or want to haggle over a price) we negotiate via our instructed third parties. This seems potentially confrontational to me, and I'm not in the mood. And who'd take *light fittings* with them anyway?

So basically, my first thought was that I'd just tick everything. But then I got to the curtains.

We only have three pairs of curtains. Two of them I could happily never see again. But the ones in the living room are different. We bought them at Seasons Furnishings in Delhi in January 2003, a shop recommended by Plumbing S which was the devil to get to, not because it's hard to find, but because it's hard to find a rickshaw driver who will take you to a curtain shop that isn't owned by his cousin.

When we got there, M realised he'd forgotten to bring the window dimensions. So we used their phone to call the UK, woke up then-housemate S at 7 am, and made her get up and measure the window. She was really pleased about that.

It took us about 30 seconds to agree on the fabric, a deep red raw silk that we both loved on sight, and the deal was done. On the way back to our hotel we stopped in a market to buy shawls and eat momos from a street seller. It was chilly, we were happy, and the curtains were delivered to us two days later as promised, just before we were due to leave for the airport to fly home.

The red curtains have not been an unqualified success. They came with the cheapest, flimsiest possible curtain hooks, which we a) had to insert ourselves, and we did a bad job and b) have never got round to replacing. They fall out regularly and the curtains droop off the rail. They aren't very warm in the winter. And most pertinently, raw silk is a terrible choice of fabric for south-facing windows. The edges of both curtains have faded and shredded. We swap them round every couple of years (while still not replacing the hooks) to try and mitigate the worst of it, but they are basically now shabby chic, without that much of the chic.

But I love those curtains. And they're coming with us.

joella

NB The photo above was taken in 2004. That coffee table is no more (M put his foot through it one New Year's Eve), but the curtains look much the same on a sunny Sunday morning.

Heatwave memory shard

The river Nile. A felucca trip because that’s what you do in Aswan, or wherever we were, when you’re about 22. A captive market for the captain, also about 22. We met some people in a restaurant who also needed people to travel with, we tried to bargain with him. Two litres of water each a day, he said. Three, I said.

It was blazingly hot, Nubia in August. An insane time of year to spend four days on a tiny boat. Another felucca more or less kept pace with us, full of party backpackers having screaming fun, leaping off the boat in their shorts and bikinis when they got too hot, splashing each other. We were the sun-and-disease-aware kind of backpackers. We lay on deck under shade screens and sweated, for fear of bilharzia. There was no toilet on board, so we had to make a request to the captain to moor up every time anyone needed to go. Not now, he would say, until eventually he found a place he was prepared to stop, where we would scramble ashore and run across land as hot as fire to find a spiny bush big enough to shelter behind.

I hated it. I hated the flimsy plank and the morose, jet-black captain in his dirty off-white vest who had packed us in like sardines. But he probably hated us too, it must be more fun to sail a boat full of people enjoying themselves than people (one of us, at least) engaged in a constant balancing act between fear of thirst and fear of an overfull bladder.

There was dope on the boat, part of some sailing down the great rivers of the world fantasy we’d had. But that only made it all worse -- the heat, the thirst, the heat, the pressing need to urinate, the scary, scalding, dark yellow urine that resulted. So I stopped that after the first day, and just read my book, kept my movement and my fluid intake to a minimum, and willed the time to pass so I could escape from this circle of hell and return to civilisation.

But there were two things that lifted that felucca trip out of the ‘one of the top five worst decisions I have ever made’ category.

The first was a stop on the afternoon of day one, where the captain, whose English was sketchy at best, moored up the boat in what looked like the middle of scorched, heat-hazed nowhere and bid us all disembark and follow him. We shortly arrived at a walled compound in a small settlement, which turned out to be his family home. We met his mother, who seemed supremely old but was probably about 40. She was clad head-to-toe in shiny black, which I guess would age anyone. I remember it so clearly because I couldn’t understand how she could actually walk around in that heat covered in that much man-made fabric. I was disintegrating into a stinking, steaming heap in my clean cotton T-shirt and shorts. And then he told us that she had never been out of the village, had never been as far as Aswan (or wherever we had been a couple of hours earlier) or encountered electric light (or, say, an electric fan, or a refrigerator).

So he was quite the big man, bringing these exotic creatures for her to look at every week or so. I can now see there may be a more benign interpretation of the situation, but only if I cast him in the role of Enlightenment gentleman, and it's a bit of a stretch. She was the first woman I ever met whose life was so constrained. I remember her.

And the other thing I remember was the lentil soup. We were on a shoestring-budget, bring-your-own-sleeping-bag trip, but the food was sublime: better, I’d wager, than anything served to the tourists on the air-conditioned mega-cruisers whose wash rocked me in my overheated misery. It was cooked by the (all male) crew on a kerosene stove from dry ingredients, spices and cool-box (but clearly local) vegetables. And the first thing they served, lentil soup with flat bread, was one of the finest things I have ever tasted. I have still never tasted anything close, but I’m still looking. I now think there must have been cardamom, cinnamon and allspice involved, but there was also something lemony, and something fresh and green.

I wouldn’t get on that boat, or anything like it, again for all the tea in China. But when the mercury rises above standard north-European operating temperature, my amygdala does a little flip-flop and I wonder what became of the captain’s mother, and envy whoever is getting to eat that soup tonight.

joella

Oh, what a mess we made

Well, you couldn't call it a slow news month. Amy Winehouse has crashed and burnt. The press is not free. Europe is broken. There's a famine in parts of Somalia, where Islamist extremists are restricting aid agencies' access while people starve. Not all extremists are Islamists, of course, there are white ones too: in America they are about to piss on all the chips in the west, and in Norway they shoot children.

And I've spent some time trying to imagine circumstances under which a hotel maid would actually want to suck a 60 year old Frenchman off and you know what, I can't. I also can't really imagine that a 60 year old Frenchman could, but you know what they say about power and corruption.

I am friends with Professor Edith Hall, one of the cleverest people around and currently campaigning against the closure of the Department of Classics and Philosophy at Royal Holloway. A post in the campaign's Facebook group (here, if you want to join) highlights a talk she is giving today in Cambridge about the six basic 'rules' of competent decision-making in ancient Greece: deliberate slowly, take into account all historical precedents, don’t intimidate your interlocutors, listen to all viewpoints, verify all information, and think through all consequences.

We ignore these things at our peril, and we should know that by now.

Oh, and no one's bought our house yet.

joella

Blood on the tracks

For years I’ve had my life set up so I don’t have to travel that much – I’ve never had to commute to work (apart from a year of Botley Road > Milton Park via 2cv, which doesn’t really count) and I live within walking / cycling / local bussing distance of pretty much everything I ever want to do. When people tell me how lucky I am, I point out that it was a deliberate choice. I have only ever looked for jobs near where I want to live, thus constraining career options, and I spend a stupendously large proportion of my consequently limited income on housing. In return, I get a lot of sleep.

But at the moment, we spend a long weekend every month in Lancaster, which involves getting there. Usually on a Friday afternoon. There is no pleasant way of doing this, so we find ourselves alternating between several equally stressful options. The quickest involved setting off by car at 5.30 am on Saturday morning, but you really wouldn’t want to do that very often. This time we went for what turned out to be the slowest: the 17.36 train from Oxford on a Friday. We were pushing it to get to the station on time, but we needn’t have bothered: by 17.36 the 16.36 hadn’t materialised, thanks to someone jumping in front of a train (possibly even that one) somewhere near Southampton.

I won’t dwell here on my thoughts on choosing this particular method of offing yourself, but suffice it to say that the “gentleman fatality” did not get much sympathy from many of the thousands of people whose Friday night train journeys he disrupted, nor from the train staff trying to deal with the logistical chaos.

Now, while those staff we came into contact with were doing a great job under the circumstances, and while I accept that it takes time to clear a corpse from a train track, what really pissed me off was the handling of connections. There’s no direct train from Oxford to Preston anymore: we have to change at Birmingham on the way up and Wolverhampton on the way down. We arrived into Birmingham fifty minutes late, on a train that had originated nowhere near Southampton. But our connection had been 40 minutes, so we only actually missed the West Coast mainline train – to Preston and Lancaster, but also all the way to Glasgow – by 10 minutes. There wasn’t another one for TWO HOURS. Half the train was heading north, and many of us had reservations for, or tickets only valid on, that train. Why couldn't they hold it for 15 sodding minutes?

But I guess they have punctuality targets, the gentleman fatality had just bled all over one of them, and someone somewhere decided a punctual train was more important than a train with all its designated passengers. So we ended up on a train to Manchester, and then another to Preston. In the end, it was fine – in fact it was fun – we met Justine, a friendly, interesting and naturally curious person who makes programmes for TV and radio, and she interviewed us on Audioboo about the stuff we hold on to (4 mins - goes with the photo above) and why we decided to join Lancaster Cohousing (10 mins). When I played the first of these to my mum and my sister after we finally arrived in Lytham at 11.30 pm, we all cried with laughter.

So there was no damage done to us, really, but we were some of the lucky ones. Other people were missing time with their families, missing appointments, standing up for hours, dealing with fractious children up too late, getting stressed and miserable – and paying through the nose for the privilege. It’s enough to make you think that trains are too much hassle, and we (big we, not small we) can't afford to be thinking that.

joella

Postscript

While I was writing my post about feeling a bit lost, I was also listening to back to back Gil Scott-Heron, having only just heard about the loss of someone who could fill such a big space. I only saw him live once, but it was one of the best gigs of my life. Merits a post all of its own, and maybe it will get one soon, as part of the upcoming 'leaving town' series...

When I ran out of obvious GSH I turned to Diana Jones, who does lonesome and bleak pretty damn well. But that wasn't quite working for me, so I clicked around the related artists on Spotify and decided to check out Iris DeMent's Infamous Angel. Five songs in, she sang Kate Rusby's Our Town, a song off Sleepless which was what took me to see her play live in 2004, and which, though she didn't play it that night, has stayed with me ever since.

I had a little cry, and dug out the album to hear what I thought was the original, only to find, thanks to the sleeve notes (you never get those on Spotify, do you, huh?) that it was in fact an Iris DeMent original. Respect to her for that, it's amazing.

But having given them both several listens, I have to go with the English interpretation. If your head's at anywhere near where mine's at, this song is a killer.

joella

PS I'm fine though. Don't go fretting.

Southeast 4 or 5, veering northwest 7 to severe gale 9, decreasing 5 or 6 later

I've been in a right two-and-eight for the last month or so. When you examine the situation, maybe it's not that surprising. Our house is up for sale in the most fragile housing market in decades, we don't know how long it will take to sell, how much we will get for it or where we will end up living once it's sold. We're trying to keep it 'half an hour from viewable', which doesn't come naturally. I love this house, but now that I know we're leaving it, I want it to happen soon.

Our new house, when it's ready, will be much smaller, so we're also rationalising our possessions room by room, which we never did when we moved in together. This is sensible, but brings its own pain. M hordes books, records, clothes and CDs, I horde random items - socks, seashells, mugs - which, when I start clearing them out, disturb long, deep seams of memory and bring stories to the surface that I didn't even know I remembered. It's generally kind of a blur, the past, but I can replay certain scenes in my head as if they were a film being projected onto a wall.

Mostly, these scenes are entirely benign, just random things from the last four decades... an evening in a pub here, a walk on a beach there, a long journey, a party, a significant conversation. I'd see it as a bit of healthy mental stocktaking before a big change, but a) I don't seem to have much control over it, and b) it's surprisingly unsettling. M has a memory like a sieve, so this isn't happening to him in the same way, but he's been a bit out of sorts too. Something's going on in there somewhere.

So we decided that we needed to take a little time out. We thought about revisiting Robin Hood's Bay, where we spent a glorious week last May - which, with hindsight, was one of the things that brought the north into focus. But then we thought, well, the north is about to get closer (and we have to haul up there once a month as it is) so we should go south, which is about to get further away.

We settled on Sussex, which is where M spent his childhood, but we ended up in Kent, because that is where we found a cottage by the sea near a pub and a train station at a fortnight's notice.

So we went to Deal, and spent a week beach- and cliff-walking, going north to Sandwich and south to St Margaret's Bay, and hovering around the town iself with its narrow old streets, excellent fish and chips, and splendid concrete pier.

It was unknown, in that I'd never been there before, but the memories still kept appearing. Bleakish seaside - done plenty of that. Long quiet trains that divide in the middle - my approach to travelling changed forever on one of those some time in the mid-90s, when a man started masturbating at me in an otherwise empty carriage. That was in Kent, I remembered, as we progressed slowly south-eastwards.

I spent a lot of time in the bath, re-reading The Crimson Petal and the White, while the world around me discussed the difference between 'rape' and 'proper rape', one of the most powerful men in the world was arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting a hotel housekeeper, a Canadian policeman told high school students that they should avoid dressing like sluts if they didn't want bad things to happen to them, and a female MP argued that girls (just girls) should be taught the benefits of abstinence. I was furious. I've been furious for ever, but my fury seemed to be swirling around closer to the surface than usual, like stirring the bottom of a pond.

It was mitigated though by some interesting fractal beach plants, and some properly good food and drink - they like their local produce, do the Kentish, and so did I. And then there was Margate - vast sandy beach, decrepit amusement arcades, a sense of edge-of-the-world end of days about it. We went there to visit the Turner Contemporary -- which I highly recommend -- on a perfect late spring day. The sun was shining, the sea was sparkling, M even went in for a swim... it all felt slightly unreal. I think maybe that was the northern light that Turner was so fond of, possibly exacerbated (though not in a bad way) by meeting up with E, who I last saw in Blackpool in the summer of 1986.

Seeing him again in Margate in 2011 had a pleasing symmetry, but it was weird. Not as weird as I thought it might be -- in many ways it was entirely not weird, some people drinking some beer and talking about some interesting things* -- but it was like a little trip to a long ago place that, of course, isn't the same anymore.

Everything feels a bit like that at the moment. Not that I want to go backwards - the future is full of good things, so far as I can tell, and the present isn't (and, brief interludes aside, has never been) so bad. Has got steadily better and better, I'd argue. So why do I feel so... peculiar?

Onwards. Upwards. It will all be ok.

joella

* including beer, which he makes. If you find yourself in East Kent, look out for it. I drank a lot of it, and can confirm it is good.

The depressing politics of revelation

I'm completely fascinated by the Nigella burkini story, even as I feel a bit guilty about this fascination. On the one hand, what a woman wears to the beach should be her own business. On the other hand, though, clearly it isn't, especially if you have a) at least partly made your career out of your cleavage, and b) you then go and do something extraordinarily non-cleavage compliant.

Part of me quite admires her. Like her, I have the kind of skin that is known as alabaster if it's on a celebrity, or milk-bottle white if it's on the rest of us. When I first grew breasts, my sister used to call me 'Traffic Light' because my nipples were actually pale green*. In the winter you can be pale and interesting, no problem, but it's a difficult colour to be when the sun comes out. Dangerous, most obviously -- but also uncomfortable. I can't just go to the beach. I need shade, and lots of it, or I will burn in moments. And even when I've got my factor 30 on, I worry... will I have missed a bit, will it have worn off? I have burnt the backs of my ears and the tops of my feet. I have burnt my knees *through a parasol*. The sun hates me, and I hate it right back.

But I like the water. I love the water. So I quite like the idea that there things you can wear to go swimming in when the sun would otherwise burn you to a crisp. We can't all be the Girl from Ipanema.

But it's not as simple as that, is it? There's also a 'don't look' thing going on which I find pretty uncomfortable. I can see that covering up can be liberating. The pressure on women to reveal their bodies, and for those bodies to be what IBTP neatly terms 'beauty 2k compliant', is greater than ever, and so is the level of artifice and effort involved in attaining and maintaining that compliance -- while, of course, propagating the myth that you were born this way.

And Nigella plays her part in contributing to this mythology, with her surely 'attended to' face and her cashmere-covered corsetry. She also spends too much time licking stuff suggestively off other stuff on national television for my taste, but that's neither nor there. My point is that I'd bet her beauty bill is higher than the average woman's salary, which is at one level also entirely her business, but at another is part of every woman's problem.

So you can look at her when she's been made up and touched up and is eating cake mix off a spoon in a fantasy kitchen, but not when she's off duty, then she retreats behind a full-length curtain of chlorine-resistant polyester.

And I don't think it's a good thing that the only naked female bodies we see are bronzed and hairless and sculpted into something that never occurs naturally and didn't exist even 30 years ago -- if you look at 70s pin-ups they look almost hilariously normal. Even if you've read your Beauty Myth, it's hard to live in this world... if you haven't then it's hardly surprising if you hate your body. This month alone we have been subjected to adverts from Olay for firmifying creams for women 'who aren't ready for surgery yet' and Dove deodorants that will 'beautify your armpits'. Armpits! And this from the brand that made a massive load of cash out of celebrating 'real women'. For shame.

The best beach trip I can remember was in early September, probably about 10 years ago now, where M and I went to Studland Beach. We ended up on the naturist bit, so we took all our clothes off. It's not the only time I've swum naked, I do that pretty much whenever the opportunity presents itself, but it's the only time I've swum naked in the sea in the daytime. The water was warm from the long days of July and August, but the sun itself had lost its power. I have rarely felt so comfortable in my own skin. It was like nature intended, only with an ice cream van. Everyone around me was that end-of-season-naturist conker colour, while I was still milk-bottle-white, but basically nobody was looking.

And that's the rare thing. I don't think there's a single thing Nigella could have worn to the beach that wouldn't have ended up in the Daily Mail with someone dripping poison over it. Her options are a) don't go to the beach, ever, b) spend her life in the gym, under the knife and not eating, so she can be a proper MILF, or c) wear what she wants and take the flak for it.

When it comes down to it I think Nigella's burkini is probably a version of c), so I say good for her and bring them on. But I also want to live in a world where we can hang out in our birthday suits when we feel like it, whatever we look like, and I don't see that happening anytime soon.

joella

* This was just a phase. They're over it now.

Related post: Summer girls will

More on the great leap northwards

So we made our big decision, and, while we were paddling in the sea off Morecambe on an unseasonably sunny Sunday last October, our new Lancaster Cohousing comrades voted us in.

There was a strong chance that they would – applications are only turned down if you can’t raise your house deposit (which is 30%, so pretty hefty) or if the group feel that you don’t subscribe to the values or vision of the project (for example, if you were looking to buy a house primarily in order to make a profit, or to use as a cannabis factory). The values of the project are pretty much our values writ large, and we’d managed to borrow the deposit pending the sale of our house in Oxford, but still, it was a bit nerve-wracking.

And it turns out that was the easy bit. Maybe it’s a bit like trying for a baby – a momentous decision, a blue line which tells you that you are on your way, but it’s only then that you have to deliver something and bring it up to make a positive contribution to society.

It’s very exciting, no question. There will be 34 or 35 households in the main cohousing project*, and about 29 of us are already signed up. The core group are local Lancaster Greens and community activists who set up the cohousing group in 2006, and they have gradually been joined by other like-minded people, mainly from Lancaster and the north west, but increasingly from further afield. Check us out.

I didn’t know anything about cohousing before we stumbled upon it, but the basic concept is that you have a private home, like any other (though maybe a smaller one than you would have otherwise), but also share communal facilities with your neighbours. So there will be a co-house, which will have a big kitchen, eating area and terrace, and the idea is that we will cook and eat together several times a week. This is friendly, but also economical, as you can buy food in bulk, and time-efficient, as you only have to cook once or twice a month, and the rest of the time you can just turn up and eat. The co-house will also have a room for children to play in, community guest rooms and a laundry, and in attached outbuildings there’ll be lock up storage, bike sheds, and workshops. The main street is pedestrianised, and there will be a car pool on the edge of the site so you can book and use a vehicle when you want to.

All the houses are going to be built to the Passivhaus standard, so they will be super-insulated, and they all more or less face south, looking out over the river. They’ve been designed by Eco Arc, and they’re not that big (which is about managing costs, but also in line with cohousing principles, as it encourages people to use the communal facilities), but they have lots of light, and private terraces and balconies. They will be built using recycled and eco-friendly materials, many of which are locally sourced. Heating and hot water will be provided from a central biomass boiler. There is plenty of wild space and woodland as well as communal gardens and allotments, and there’s direct access onto the footpath down one side of the Lune and the cycle path to Lancaster and beyond on the other.

It all sounds AMAZING, doesn’t it? And it is. What’s even more amazing is that this group of 40-odd adults aims to make all its decisions by consensus. So we meet for a weekend every month to discuss everything from the project budget to composting to how to recruit new members.

And that’s the exhausting bit. The project is so amazing that people have moved personal mountains to be part of it, and continue to move them to stay part of it. Everyone’s reasons for being in the room are different, and different people care about different things for different reasons. One person’s flippant comment may strike at the heart of another person’s values. The membership team don’t want anyone to leave, the non-confronters want everyone to be happy, the build team want something that can be built, and we all need the budget to balance.

For the last month, we have been engaged in an exercise called ‘value engineering’. This is basically a euphemism for ‘cost cutting’, as the project costs had come in at 10% over the project budget. Some people lost things that were really important to them. Everyone lost something that they didn’t want to lose. There was tension. There were some people speaking out and some people keeping quiet. There were conversations that went round and round and round and never seemed to go anywhere. I don’t think anyone particularly enjoyed it.

But we got there. And that in itself was a pretty amazing experience. Consensus is a very powerful thing when it works. As President Bartlett said, decisions get made by the people who show up. And when that’s everyone, we all get something we can live with.

We’ve a shitload to do this year (anyone want to buy our house?), and I’m already beginning to mourn the loss of Oxford, but I’m feeling pretty good about my major life decision.

joella

*There will be a terrace of six more houses just outside the main development. These will be built to the same eco-standards but will be normal private homes, with gardens and car parking.

joella

Significant libraries of my life 1988-1994

Thank you for all the lovely comments on the first installment. This is the second, and covers the years between leaving home for the first time and moving to Oxford. Not all public libraries, but all significant.

Trinity College Library. During my first week at Cambridge, I sat in here and read the Communist Manifesto. If Radiohead had released Creep in 1988, I am sure the words "what the hell am I doing here, I don't belong here" would have started running through my head. And continued as I read The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism right through to the end of On Suicide. But by the end of the first term, I was getting the hang of the place. It was an excellent library, open till midnight during the week, and you could only borrow books overnight, so you could be fairly sure that if the book was in the card catalogue it would either be on the shelf, or you would be able to spot the person who was reading it and find out when you could get it off them. It had comfortable chairs and a members-only air. You were lucky to be in there and you knew it. And when it all got too much you could sneak out into Nevile's Court for a cigarette, and pace up and down the cloisters, considering your position.

The Wren Library. After a couple of years of viewing this glorious building from the outside, someone told me that we were allowed to go and work in there. You fucking what? I said. But it was true. Maybe only in exam terms when the main library was busy, I can't remember. But in the hot, stressful days before my finals, I would sometimes carry a stack of books across the cool black and white tiled floor to sit near the huge statue of Byron with the sun streaming through the high windows. I would write notes on the social structure of modern Britain and try not to think about that fact that soon I would have to leave this place.

The library of the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences (now the Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies). This was a different kettle of fish altogether. I remember it as an open, modern place (in the 1970s sense of the word modern) that was full of radical wonderfulness. I read the Kinsey Reports in here, and Masters & Johnson, as well as lots of social psychology texts, participant observation studies and books about Thatcherism. But the real discovery was the women's studies section. These weren't set texts -- I decided it would be a bit of a cliche to do the Women in Society paper (I was terrified of being typecast. Still am) -- but I sat in there in my dungarees drinking bad coffee and reading Andrea Dworkin, Kate Millet and Mary Daly. An awareness of something profound and fundamental settled around me in there. It has never quite left.

Cambridge University Library. The mothership. The place where all the books meet, yeah. My first encounter with a library OPAC, for anything published after 19... something. I forget. But it was very exciting. Occasionally I would need something published earlier than whenever that was, and would have to haul one of the giant hard copy catalogues off the shelf. Then you would write your reference number on your slip of paper, and then either wander the open shelves, via creaky lifts and hidden alcoves, or, if it was in a closed stack, pass your slip to one of the reading room assistants and wait. It was all astonishingly serious. And quite time-consuming, but there was nothing like the thrill of finally securing your super-obscure text, then taking it into a dark corner, or bagging a space at one of those long reading room tables. After a while, I worked out that I could borrow *any* kind of book, not just ones for writing essays from, and that I should perhaps make more of having access to every book in the world ever. So this was the place that first furnished me with the poems of Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath and Stevie Smith. Also the place with the tea rooms which, in the late 80s, still had a bit you could smoke in. Reading poems in the smoking room of the UL was about the coolest thing on the planet. I loved it in there.

Cambridge Central Library. I still had a fiction habit to feed. And for three years, this is where I fed it.

Andover Library. My parents accidentally moved to Andover for seven years, and I lived here too in the summer holidays between my second and third years at university. It was kind of bleak: I didn't know anyone, I didn't have any money, it took me a while to get a job, and, to be frank, it's a hard town to love if you didn't grow up there. I was pretty miserable. I spent a lot of time lying in bed reading. I was in a bit of a sci-fi and fantasy phase at that point, because I was mostly hanging out with boys. I remember one day when I couldn't bear to leave the house, until I suddenly thought 'I should go and join the library'. So I got dressed and headed into town, returning with part one of the Illuminatus Trilogy. Can't say it cheered me up much -- I don't go for libertarianism, frankly -- but it did keep me busy. A couple of years later, I lived there again for a year, first while signing on, and then for 10 months working as a research assistant at a management consultancy firm. In retrospect, it was useful experience, but at the time it felt like slow death in bad clothes. The good thing was that my office was in the middle of town, near M&S and its prawn sandwiches, near Our Price and its blank tapes, and near Andover Library and its books. I took every minute of my lunch hour every day, and when it was warm enough, I sat on a bench and I read.

There were days in my early 20s where I can genuinely say that the library is the only thing that kept me sane. That's the library. The free at the point of use library. The each according to their need library. There's a spectre haunting Europe, all right. But there's nothing Communist about it.

joella

Significant libraries of my life 1970-1988

There aren't many things that would get me to the barricades, truth be told. But I make an exception for swimming pools, libraries and woodland. We all need places to roam.

So.

Lytham Library. I think I may have spent half my childhood in here. The children's library used to be upstairs, but the issuing desk was downstairs, so you had the place to yourself. I used to read four books at a time, which was the most you could take out at once (unless you could persuade your sister to lend you her tickets). The tickets were cardboard, with a little slot for the book slip in them. The children's ones were orange, and the adult ones were aqua (it was the 70s, after all). The children's library is where I found the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Arthur Ransome, Willard Price, Eve Garnett, Hugh Lofting, Susan Coolidge, Astrid Lindgren, Tove Jansson, and countless others. I would borrow more or less at random, then if I liked something I would look up its author in the card catalogue to see what else there was (sometimes it didn't tell you on the book cover, and sometimes it did, but the library didn't have them all). I can still remember the little flip flop my stomach did when I looked up the author of The Four Story Mistake (Elizabeth Enright) and found that the other books in the quartet were there, I just had to request them and wait.

I can remember the smell of the place, and the thick gloss paint on the banisters and the windowsills. In the summer holidays, I used to wait on the windowsill of the main steps for my mum to finish her shopping, and start my first book. She would come and get me, I would put my books in my bike basket and we'd cycle home.

It played its part in my adolescence too. Teen books weren't up to much in the early 80s, with rare exceptions, like I Never Loved Your Mind. So I graduated early into the adult library, using my mum's tickets (the librarians would stop me borrowing books they considered unsuitable on my own tickets, but I guess if I had managed to get hold of adult ones, they thought it was someone else's responsibility). There followed the summer of Mills & Boon (TM), but in those days they had no sex in them at all, except the elaborately euphemistic, wave-crashing kind, and that was no use to me, I was looking for detail. So I went shelf-trawling for books that looked like they might have sex in them, which is how I found Harold Robbins. Who gave me eye-watering amounts of detail. When he said Dreams Die First, he wasn't wrong.

But you know, knowledge is power, and soon enough (well, maybe not quite soon enough) I came out of my trash-and-filth phase and into proper books. I didn't have a lot of guidance, and I didn't know what was cool (or what was deemed 'good'), so I just read everything. I picked a letter of the alphabet, and I looked at all the titles till I saw something that sounded interesting. A lot of it was formulaic low-end fiction by numbers, probably, but that's not what I remember, I remember Ordinary People, The Sea The Sea, The Little Drummer Girl, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Grapes of Wrath, Chesapeake, Sons and Lovers, Frost in May, Howards End and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

I hadn't been into Lytham Library for over 20 years, but instead of carting books from Oxford when I was dog-sitting for my parents last September, I borrowed my dad's card and nipped over there to stock up for the week. This is a cliche, I know, but I literally could not believe how small it was. I remember it as a cavernous place, and it's tiny (and so is the windowsill I used to be able to curl up in). I nearly went outside to check they hadn't cut it in half and converted the rest of it into a coffee shop. But even tiny libraries can supply endless reading appetites. We lose them at our peril.

Blackpool Central Library. I never came here for books, because I got those at Lytham Library, which was within easy walking and cycling distance. But when I was a teenager, I came here for records. I would dearly love to have one of those 1980s Blackpool Record Library carrier bags, which were, of course, tangerine coloured. Blackpool Record Library was a place of wonder. Again, I didn't have much guidance (there was no chart music in there, this was all about the old stuff) and I just used to borrow things that looked interesting, take them home on the bus, put them on my big Amstrad turntable and see what happened. It may have been about this time that it became 'my' big Amstrad turntable, now I think about it. It was originally in the living room, and my parents probably realised they would be better off not being subjected to what I was listening to.

There was a lot of early Billy Joel in the Blackpool Record Library, but also lots of 1970s rock, prog and folk, with many fine gatefold sleeves to admire. And a bit of early 80s stuff too... I borrowed some Jam, and some Joe Jackson, but it was mostly things like Loudon Wainwright III, Barclay James Harvest and Cat Stevens. The highlight, though, was my discovery of Leonard Cohen. I can still remember my mum coming into my room to find me lying in the dark, burning joss sticks and listening to Songs of Love and Hate. 'Dear god,', she said, 'do you *have* to?' I did, of course, and am a big Cohen fan to this day.

Blackpool Central Library is currently closed for refurbishment, so there is hope. Its web page reminded me that this fine building has the words "let there be light" engraved over the door. Indeed. And let there be lights that never go out.

joella