Moving and shaking

Well, it's nearly the end of November* and I couldn't let a fifth (nearly sixth) month pass without a blog post... actually, I could, but I didn't want to, as Joella first put nicotine-stained fingers to red-wine-stained keyboard ten years ago this month, and I felt the occasion should be marked.

And it's not that there hasn't been stuff going on, quite the reverse. If I had to sum up the last six months in less than, say, 140 characters, it would be something along the lines of TOO MUCH STUFF ALREADY. NOW LEAVE ME ALONE.

In the early days of the blogosphere, I used to write pithy and/or incoherent and/or cryptic posts even when things were kind of weird. We have Facebook and Twitter for that these days, and in many ways I think they do a better job. But (as I've said before, and I'm not the only one) something that could have stood a paragraph or two, a bit of reflection or expansion, become a little self-contained note about life in the 21st century, can, when condensed to a tweet or a status update, just disappear into the stream that flows past us all, all the time.

So I regret my blogular silence, not least because this exercise has always been as much for my own benefit as anyone else's. These months have not been easy, but they have been significant. I would like to get back to blogging, it's a medium I'm fond of. Writing is still one of the things I like doing best of all. It's early for a New Year's Resolution, but I have a good experience to build on: this year's was to refuse to visit the Daily Mail website, however chain-yanking the link-bait, and I have kept the faith. So in 2013, which I fully expect will not be an easy year either, I resolve to blog at least once a week.

A tweet or two from each week since I last blogged... for the sake of the record: 

June:

• Project Interim Hair Colour is moving into phase 2: goodbye Dirty Blonde, hello Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlights.
  
• Shit is relative, as Freud almost said.
• Pint of Isis Pale Ale in between a Hinksey swim and spaghetti carbonara (v). Happy end to a weekend of heated long distance debate.
• We argue while boarding the 35. M: 'you just wanted to say "hegemony" on the bus, didn't you?'. Me: 'yeah, a bit'.
  

July

• Drinking spicy Turkish turnip juice in East London.     http://t.co/QLnTqQkT
• We had the Cohousing Conversation About Meat. Nobody died.
  
• The horses in the field next to our temporary Lancs home trot over every time we walk down our long drive. Horses are GREAT. I'd forgotten.
• History of the toilet programme on BBC4 right now making this sociologist-plumber very happy.
  
• So that was odd, but mostly in a good way. Like us, I guess. Yay. And an extra yay for the Saudi women. In black, at the back, but here.

August

• Home alone with an End of an Era hangover. Nothing in the house but plums and Parmesan heels. Time for a bath with Georgette Heyer.
  
• If the Spice Girls are the 'originators of girl power' I want a fucking refund. Off to bed.
• Coffee at Restore after pre-Cambodia jabs at East Oxford Health Centre. Hurty arm. Quite a stressy month, all told.
  
• On our way To The North. http://t.co/BXLMLCiM
• Woke up, thought what's that noise, it's like living on a building site. Oh. But VIEW!  http://t.co/bMgZ02tw
  
• Like Guinness in Ireland, Singha only tastes right in Thailand. BKK airport just about counts, specially on 'WTF is the time?' time.
• It appears I am now a "Crazy Goat".  http://t.co/9dMG1H3c
  

September

• I just dropped a litre of Tanqueray in the middle of Abu Dhabi airport. The staff were amazing. The man who got gin on his ankles, less so.
• Oppressed by boxes in multiple different ways. Oppressed by lack of internet in the Glorious Eco Home. But feeling resilient, mostly.
  
• I feel like a pendulum swinging between 'unstoppable force' and 'immovable object'. Both have their merits, but it's not very zen.
• Finding some calm at the end of a hectic not-over-yet week with a Lune-inspired playlist... Rivery http://t.co/FA2mrOIa #Spotify
  
• Discovered today that we live about three miles (maybe four via bike down towpath) from this: http://t.co/L9p2clkw

October

• Going off-grid* for a few days.  *leaving town with only one internet-enabled device
  
• Thanks to my lovely boyfriend for support through one of the hardest weeks of my life. And for eating THREE meals with gherkins in today XX
• #justthewomen - I despair.
• Feeling a little mutinous. And possibly a little carnivorous. Could be ominous. Could be fun.
  
• THREE MONTHS since we placed a BT landline order and they still won't give us a date. Well, they've given us many dates, but no landline.

November

• "Because of you, I doubted my own sanity." Go Carrie! Stick it to the man. #homeland
  
• Our old table in its new home: fish pie & champagne in the Common House with some of our lovely cohousing neighbours http://t.co/xwlsBAIF
• Day 87 in the house with no landline. Putting finishing touches to my 1700-word letter of complaint to BT.
  
• Hot Ribena and hot Vimto at the Crook O'Lune http://t.co/eCbqK1f7
• After 11 years cohabiting, we are merging our book collections. Our Bodies Ourselves now lives next to Mathematical Puzzlements.
  

What all that means is...

1. On 19 August we left our Interim Bungalow for the long journey north. It was good to us, was the Interim Bungalow, and I very much enjoyed living next door to ex-housemate S, her Young Man, Tungsten and Particle for the best part of a year, but if I had my time again I'd do it differently. We'd have stayed there for a few months, through the winter, and then made a clean break and rented a house in Lancaster till the Passivhaus was ready. That way I'd have done the shift to remote working, got to know a new city, said the big goodbyes to Oxford, all while the days were lengthening and while the shops were in walking distance. Instead we did a halfway thing, and sublet a couple of rooms off another cohousing couple who had rented a big house (so big it was immediately nicknamed the Massivhaus) near the site as their own interim base. The idea was we'd live there some of the time and in the Interim Bungalow some of the time. But that didn't work out... it was never a space we felt at home in, and it was never a space we even felt that warm in. It was a long way from town, up a hill, right next to the M6. A good setting for a novel, but not a good start to our life in Lancaster. We liked the horses in the field next door. We liked the view over the hills as we walked to the bus stop. We liked the wild garlic and the bluebells in the spring. But really, when we were there, we always wanted to be in Oxford, where we could eat what we wanted and watch TV in our pants if we wanted. These things happen, and it seemed like a good idea at the time, but ... it made the leaving harder. 

2. When we arrived, we were the first people to move in. On the upside, it was a celebratory weekend -- both before we left, when we had a lovely Isis-and-curry night on the Friday, and a big Flowing Well meal on the Saturday with the ex-housemate S massive plus C, who drove a van down from Lancaster to pick us and our stuff up -- and when we arrived, when there were loads of people waiting to welcome us and help us unload the van. We hadn't been in our house, or any of the houses, before we took possession of the keys, and the whole thing was both surreal and overwhelming. I think only four properties were released that week, and we were the only ones who were moving any distance, so everyone else moved in gradually, while we got the big bang. And it was pretty weird. A brand new house has no coat hooks, no towel rails, no lampshades, no clues as to how you should occupy its space. This one also had an awful lot of new things to get our heads round -- MVHR, district heating, an induction hob, a water-efficient bathroom -- plus a whole bunch of stuff that simply wasn't finished or in place yet... no communal indoor or outdoor space, no laundry room, no car pool, no phones or internet, a postcode so new that for delivery purposes, we just didn't exist. Where do we do our washing? How do I do my job? Where's the post box? How do I go shopping? What the hell am I doing here? 

3. Less than a week later, I flew to Cambodia for NGO X's annual Global IT Summit. As a non-IT person, I felt it was a significant invitation and not one I should turn down -- indeed it was one of the best such events I've ever attended, it has given my work new energy and was a great place to forge and renew the relationships without which my job is almost impossible. And there were good reasons for it being in Cambodia -- it's the first NGO X 'model office', where staff of multiple affiliates share resources and services and deliver a shared programme [oversimplification, but that's a whole other post], and part of the remit of the summit was to evaluate the approach taken. Professionally, it was a great trip. Personally, it was tough, I was pretty wiped out emotionally by the move, and also trying to come to terms with the fact that my good friend W, who I met in my first year at Cambridge, was dying of cancer. There's nothing you can do, but that's almost the worst part. One night we were all on our way to a traditional dance production put on by an NGO which cares for orphans... I know, I know, we really do this stuff. I was feeling a little disconnected and was looking out the window of the minibus, and I saw a guy lying in the road, head caved in, blood everywhere, just been killed by a motorbike. I was a long, long way from home and I didn't even know what home was. I had a bad night with too much minibar Scotch, called M and sobbed for 20 minutes at £X per minute (couldn't Skype, plenty of internet in Phnom Penh, but none in Lancashire), woke up next morning with puffy eyes and an 'oh shit' feeling. There was a bright side... NGO X is stuffed full of people who turn out to be way more than colleagues, if you find yourself in a situation where that's what you need, and I had some properly bolstering conversations over the next 24 hours. I am still feeling the warmth. 

4. And thank whoever for that, because it turns out I never needed it more. Flew back into Manchester, accidentally smashing two litres of gin in two continents en route, and arrived home to find still no landline, still no internet, still no washing machine, but lots of jetlag. We had our first Oxford visitor the morning I came home, wild-swimming H, a fellow native Lancastrian, on her way back from visiting her parents. That was the sanest moment of my week... the next day I naively / optimistically climbed the hill to the Massivhaus with my laptop (to use the broadband) and a suitcase full of laundry (to use the washing machine) to find ourselves ... I don't really know how to put this diplomatically, not very welcome. Kind of fair enough, as we were no longer paying rent, though we had paid half-occupancy rent for nine months of one-fifth occupancy, so I had anticipated a bit of leeway. It was made very clear that our room full of boxes was also no longer welcome, despite explicit previous assurances to the contrary. There is obviously a parallel narrative here, but hey, that's for someone else to blog about. Let's just say that from my perspective it was the last thing I needed. We made alternative arrangements as soon as we could -- we rented some temporary office space in town, and eventually started shelling out stupid money for mobile broadband, which does just good enough a job to allow you to function, while being just flaky enough to keep you on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Don't believe the EE hype, people. You have to reboot at least three times a day, and they block Skype while lying about it. 1998 ADSL never looked so good. 

5. So there we are, struggling to 'work from home', with BT acting like a new build development three miles from Lancaster is equivalent to establishing a new nation state on a Pacific coral reef when it comes to giving us landlines and broadband. It's still going on, over three months later, but I do now get regular phone calls from Alison in the High Level Complaints team. You take your pleasures where you can. Especially when your mother, who has been as fit as a butcher's dog and as strong as an ox for your ENTIRE LIFE, apart from that time she had to go to hospital after your sister was born, and that other time they took her toenail off, and that other other time when she was in hospital for a week having a hysterectomy and we ate out of tins and off paper bags to save on washing up, but that was like 1979 and she hasn't been ill since then, especially when she tells you that she's not feeling well but she doesn't want to worry you because you've got enough on your plate. Which you have, but then you get the call on your mobile, which starts 'isn't your landline working yet?' and no, no it's not, but it does ring and ring and ring, and that's what she did first, losing some minutes of breath that she doesn't have, because what she's ringing to tell you is that she can't breathe and the ambulance is on its way. 

6. So then my most excellent and indefatigable mother, who was surely going to outlive us all, and was planning to do my wallpapering and walk some Lake District hills with me, among other things, is in hospital for three weeks, and leaves (after experiencing some brutality but also much humanity) with a diagnosis of terminal adenocarcinoma. Having googled 'pleural effusion' (which is what sent her into hospital) I knew that was a strong possibility, but when you're waiting for that kind of diagnosis, you live in a Schroedinger place -- until they say that's what it is, it isn't anything. She was in hospital in Blackpool -- maybe 45 minutes by car, but we don't have one, and we didn't have access to one... so we we went by bus, or by train to Lytham and then with my dad in his car. I spent a lot of time at the parental home during those weeks -- it seemed important to keep up standards, and to make sure everyone was eating properly. Not saying we managed it, they were dark weeks. And in the middle of them, in fact while were were on the bus from Blackpool back to Lancaster, we got a call to say that (despite re-negotiated agreements around boxes and having already taken half of them away) we needed to come and get the rest of them, like, now. In a couple of years, when all is calm, I might get over that request being made at that time, parallel narrative, yadda yadda, but I don't have a lot of spare empathy right now, so fuck it. We complied -- well, technically, M complied, with the strength of the furious, while I moved boxes round to make space for more boxes, while swigging whisky and crying. And it meant we could draw a line under something. 

7. But it left a bad taste, and so did the food wars, which coincidentally -- or maybe not -- largely consisted of us (representing omnivorous diversity) arguing with one of them (representing hardline veganism) about our competing interpretations of the Food Policy. Those are hours of my life I'll never get back. In the end, the whole group hammered out a starting position, which in parts still felt way too extreme for me (if you want to eat a fish finger in the Common House on one of the days it is permitted, you have to cook it elsewhere [fair enough] but also bring your own plate and knife and fork to eat it with and take them home afterwards to wash up [completely mental]), but does at least allow for the existence of cheese and wine. In theory anyway -- in practice the initial food ordering seemed to take a look at everything in a hardline vegan kitchen and buy 25kg of it. We will not run out of pearl barley or soya milk for decades. There are some people who are ignoring all this and getting on with producing delightful food from stuff they've bought at Sainsbury's, but somehow, because I was so bruised by the process, I can't. But I'm not so sure I like communal meals anyway. They make me feel a bit panicky and weird. Safer to stay home and eat exactly what I want, at least at the moment. Which might include liver and pork pies: I've realised I am SO NOT A VEGAN that I'm probably a meat eater, though I haven't actually done a very good job of eating meat yet.  

So yeah, it's been a "journey". Writing about it all in one go I'm amazed that I haven't fallen over. A couple of weeks ago I did spend the whole weekend in bed reading novels and ignoring the doorbell, but I have days like that at the best of times. It's also safe to say I am not sticking within the government's alcohol guidance at the moment, but when did I ever? 

And I am still struggling to keep firing on all cylinders, but it's gradually getting easier. The house is delightful, a space I loved immediately. It's been home since the day we set foot in it, despite the boxes and the fact that it was in the middle of a building site. There are about 20 homes occupied now, and we have a car club, a laundry room, guest rooms and a common house with a wood burner. And of course neighbours, many of whom I like a great deal and some of whom I already think of as my friends. The site is muddy but beautiful... we regularly walk through the woods to the Crook O'Lune and have a hot Vimto at Woodies. The cycle track over the river takes us to Caton in 15 minutes, where we can shop at the Co-op or have dinner at the Ship, or to Lancaster in 25 minutes, where I am gradually discovering new places and getting less lost. We are four miles from the sea, and have spent time exploring the delights of Hest Bank and Morecambe. Further afield, but not much, are Arnside & Silverdale, and we've also been to Ambleside, Bowness and Windermere, thanks to the splendid 555 bus. This is a beautiful part of the world, and I am glad we moved here. I just wish it hadn't been so hard. I feel like we're plants that have been uprooted and lost nearly all their topsoil in the process. Luckily our roots are tangled up together, I think without M, I would probably have just given up for a while and let everything go dark. He's been a brick. Or is it a rock. Something of both. 

My mum's still got cancer though. Not a hell of a lot I can do about that. She is having chemotherapy in the New Year but it's not about curing it, that's not going to happen**. I hope to find some midwinter space to retreat and regroup, because next year I am going to need to be a big brave girl. Watch this space. 

joella

* now December, but I wrote most of this in November, so I'm giving it a November date. Because I can. 

** I don't want to write a cancer blog. At least not yet. But her initial diagnosis was Cancer of Unknown Primary, which has a pretty bleak prognosis. 

Leaving Oxford in 100 blog posts: 7. The river

Every city should have a river. Being a bit fancy pants, Oxford has two, the Thames (aka the Isis) and the Cherwell. Plus a canal.

All that water get can very confusing, especially in places like Osney Island and Mesopotamia, and it can sometimes get a bit floody as well, but without the river(s), we wouldn't have the river magic. And we have a lot of that.

The river has flowed in and out of my life here. When I first used to come here to visit my Significant Ex, we would sometimes sneak out of his mum's house at night, cross the railway line, and walk across a field full of buzzing pylons and down a pitch black towpath to sit on a footbridge over the water.

We would wrap ourselves in a blanket, share a joint and look at the reflections of the trees in the river. On a still night, they looked like giant moths.

Once we moved to East Oxford we were further from the wilderness, but closer to the Isis Tavern, in whose idyllic garden we spent long summer evenings getting wasted and feeling just a little bit gilded. One night the water was still as glass, and Dave the Rave and I had to hold on to each other just to make sure neither of us jumped into the abyss.

There was (and occasionally still is) also punting, of course... and although to my mind the Cherwell's not a patch on the Cam for that, only a churl could fail to enjoy drifting by punt through the University Parks. They know how to do a weeping willow, do the University Parks. I did once have to do a nature poo there, but we'll gloss over that.

When we split up, I moved to West Oxford, living briefly on Osney Island, where our local pub was the Waterman's Arms. They had a sign up over the bar saying 'Man seeks wife with own boat. Please send picture of boat.' I loved it in there, in fact it may merit a post of its own. I loved living so close to the river as well, and stayed close when then-housemate-S and I took tenancy of the Bungalow-On-Top-Of-A-Storage-Building just down the road. When I finally embraced cycling in Oxford, which wasn't till I got my job at NGO X, my first route to work was down the river, then over to the canal, then through the back streets of Jericho.

You need to see the river regularly to have a proper relationship with it, though, and once M, then-housemate-S and I moved back east-side, we didn't hang out there so much... the odd walk through Christchurch Meadows, the odd trip to the Isis Tavern. Occasionally we would cycle back from town that way, but it was a long way round, and in the summer the towpath fairly swarms with slow-moving tourists, making cycling somewhat hazardous. I don't think that really changed until Hinksey Pool appeared in my life, when I worked out that I could cycle there by heading over to Donnington Bridge and then heading down the towpath. I enjoyed that ride so much -- through patchwork backstreets, past allotments, under cherry trees, alongside water -- that I wanted to film it, but it never happened.

It wasn't till last summer, though, that I actually went river-swimming in Oxford -- I'd had an ambition to swim at Tumbling Bay for years, but never done it. But I knew we were leaving, and I wanted to do it before it was too late. So one hot humid afternoon last July we cycled over there. There were people there catching crayfish, there was a guy drinking Stella and dancing by himself, there was an old friend of M's who lives nearby and swims there all the time. But otherwise it was deserted. It was a glorious experience.

And then we moved to the Interim Bungalow, and suddenly there was a lot more river. Once you get your bike over the Killer Bridge, the river is the way to everywhere. I go down it for a bit in the morning, on the way to the ring road cycle path to work, I go in the opposite direction and come off at Donnington Bridge for East Oxford, or by University College boat house for Hinksey Pool, or at Folly Bridge if I'm feeling energetic and have cycled all the way into town. We did it in the depths of winter, gliding over icy puddles and feeling intrepid, through the spring, as the green appeared, and then through the near-floods of April and the heat of late May. When you go to the river several times a week, you notice the flora and fauna changing, you notice the level rising and falling, you notice the smells and the sounds and the million shades of green and brown, and the way the second you cross under the ring road on the way out of the city, the towpath changes and it all gets wilder and more unkempt.

We were sitting at our desks last Sunday afternoon, feeling hot and irritable, when I got a text from wild-swimming H: 'fancy a swim in the river? meet you on the meadow opposite the big house?' It was a bit squidgy on the way in, but then it was cool and dark green and lovely. We swam upstream for a little while, drifted back down, then lay on the bank (where I took the photo at the top) and watched the world go by, slowly, feeling that sense of deep calm that is so elusive at the moment. Water is the best.

I love Bruce Springsteen's River, and Joni Mitchell's. But the song I associate with Oxford's river is the Grateful Dead's Ripple. Like the river itself, it is made of wistfulness.

 

 joella

Postcard from a long ago holiday

In the latest of a long series of clearouts I decide I can part with my notebook that used to be a plastic box. It contains many shopping and party invite lists, notes from meetings, plumbing diagrams, things Mick the builder said when he was stoned, and this rather cryptic collection of notes from the lake. Oh, the lake. I want to go back to the lake. K and I have promised ourselves it will happen as soon as our respective lives have settled in their respective new cities.  

Wed 23. Tampere, vodka

Thur 24. Adventure park. Gherkin lunch. Tornado. Rapids & water guns. Harald the Viking

Fri 25: A litre of peas and a litre of cherries. Bus via Lahti with stickers on seats. Meeting A & L in Kuortti. The mission for mayonnaise. Welcomed by the bear. Crackling sauna. Into the lake. 

Sat 26. Sauna lake sauna. Coffee on the swing seat. LOST. S & H arrive! The first big fish. Pertunmaa. Lake night lake watching. 

Sun 27. ALKO is closed. Sauna lake sauna lake. 100 backstroke out. The second big fish. Night sauna. 

Mon 28. Sauna lake sauna lake sauna lake. Fishy omelette. Out to ALKO. Cool recycling machine. Swimming noodles. Fishshot. Lentil soup & halloumi. Cardy. Balcony dancing. Naked swimming. General craziness. 

Tues 29. Red wine head. Much sleep. 100 degree sauna. Giant midget. 

Wed 30. Calm & fresh. Healthy. Boys rowing. Sauna lake sauna lake sauna lake with K. 

Thu 31. Hot on the deck. Bleeding. Schnapps. Jews. 

Fri 1. Poetry bark. Plumbing talk. Meatballs. Ballet. Drinking the house dry. Moondance. 

Sat 2. Consequences. Nature walk. Stories. Egg & gherkin salad. Fizzy grapefruit. 

Sun 3. Puppet museum. Rowing to Pertunmaa. Beer & peas. Sauna lake sauna lake sauna. After dinner walk. Ice cream. 

joella

You don't know what it's like

I am enjoying White Heat more than M, who was the same generation (more or less) as the protagonists, and is therefore jarred by the inconsistencies in a way that I’m not. The scene between Charlotte and Jack after Thatcher was elected, for example, where she was claiming it was a milestone for feminism and he was arguing that the new Prime Minister’s vagina was irrelevant in the wider context of her evil political agenda.

Now, I remember being greatly cheered, as a nine year old girl, by the fact that our new Prime Minister was a woman. It was made a big deal of in my primary school, where we debated what it might mean for us when we grew up, and whether or not she would be called the Prime Mistress. M, on the other hand, already married and a father by 1979, can only remember the despair which flooded the left, with the feminists as gloomed as the men who still expected them to make the tea.

In a similar way, I remember the Falklands conflict very differently to anyone who was an adult at the time. I can remember it, but I was 12. My mum worked nights and I used to go shopping for her in the holidays while she was in bed – I remember holding my shopping list at the Booths meat counter and quizzing the staff over the provenance of the corned beef. They assured me that it was form Uruguay, but I remember not really believing them. I remember sitting on a beanbag in my nightie in front of the TV, watching Brian Hanrahan as he ‘counted them all out and counted them all back’. I remember yomping, and Goose Green, and Gotcha. I remember being absolutely amazed that there were still actual foreign wars where actual soldiers from Britain actually died. (There was Northern Ireland, of course, but nobody understood that).

And then it was over. When it was actually announced on the news I had already gone to bed, but my mum came and woke me up and gave me a Kit Kat. I remember wondering if she’d got them in specially, anticipating the inevitable supremacy of our Paras. I also remember learning that most of the Argentinian soldiers were conscripts, and that some of them were begging for food from the islanders, some of whom fed them. I didn’t understand how a government could send soldiers somewhere without sending plenty of food with them. I was so young.

Thinking about it now, I probably have a worse understanding of that war than someone either older or younger – the former had a sense of context and nuance, the latter have the benefit of hindsight and history teachers. I hadn’t lived through any wars, hot or cold, and the axis of evil hadn’t been invented yet.

So I am finding out about it all over again as a grown up with the 30^th anniversary commemorations, and it’s quite a revelation. Over 250 British soldiers killed in 74 days – that’s astonishing. And I cried into the pan as I was cooking dinner yesterday while listening to Fathers and Sons: From the Falklands to Helmand on Radio 4 – the story of two men from very different backgrounds who fought in the Falklands conflict whose sons both followed them into the army and ended up in Afghanistan. It’s worth a listen.

This all makes me think about the newest word in my vocabulary: Umwelt – which arrived on 1 April courtesy of xkcd. The definition is in the image text (what you see when you hover over the image). The joke may still elude you (it did me), but a good explanation can be found on reddit. But it’s a great word. We are each the sum of all our parts, and only the sum of all our parts.

joella

Emerging, blinking, into spring

The Crook O'Lune this Aft O'Noon #whyiammovingbacktolancashire
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

It's been a bit of a long dark winter, to be honest. It's had its upsides -- not least the discovery that this view appears on the cycle path from Halton to Caton -- which, come June, will be the location of my local Co-op. Just when it feels like this is the hardest thing I've ever done, the reasons for doing it reassert themselves big time.

But there have been some downsides too. I had a little meltdown just before Christmas. I was cycling back to the Interim Bungalow in the dark and the cold, having just failed to get a project agreed by the technology board at NGO X, and on the same day having had a really disheartening conversation with someone who I'd been pinning a lot of hopes on for another project, and I burst into tears. The project should have been agreed, but I hadn't put enough time into it. The conversation should have gone better -- I have since learnt that he's a man not known for his listening skills, but I could have prepared better for it. A third project should have got external funding and didn't -- nothing I could have done about that but now we needed a Plan B, and I hadn't given that any thought at all for weeks. And there were other things, that people who work for organisations with blogging policies don't write about on their blogs. Work was looking shit from all directions, basically. I hadn't seen it coming, and I didn't know what to do.

I am generally one of those people who steps into a vacuum, says 'oh all right, I know it's not technically my job, but then it's not technically *anyone's* job, so I'll have a go at sorting that out'. Several of those projects landed on my desk that way. And usually that's fine, but there were too many of them, they were all going wrong, and -- crucially -- I didn't have any expansion space. I have been working part time for five years and it's one of the best decisions I ever made, but before Lancaster Cohousing came along, before I was selling a house and living in two places and grappling with logistics and managing a website and a document collection and coordinating an allotment group and trying to do all this by bike and bus and train... if I needed to do a bit more, then I did. I think all part time managers do -- they check their email, they make themselves available, they spend a couple of hours here and there on their non-working days thinking about things that need thinking about, writing things that need writing, generally aiming to cover the gaps while not losing their precious work-life balance.

But I can't do that at the moment. I felt like it had been raining for about two months then there was a huge mudslide.

And then there was Christmas, which was also kind of dark. What I really wanted to do was sleep, and hang out in my pyjamas watching Inspector Morse. What happened was we had Christmas Day with ex-housemate S, her Quiet Young Man, his parents, Tungsten & Particle, all three of M's offspring, his ex-wife, and her mother. This was not my idea, and I initially resisted it pretty assertively. But it was our last Christmas in Oxford, and in the end I went along with it because both M and ex-housemate S like having a house full of people at Christmas, M really wanted to see his children on the day, and this was the only way it was likely to happen. I didn't think there was a way I could reasonably avoid it without making a statement that I didn't want to make (nobody who likes Christmas ever believes that some of us really would be happier on our own with some sherry and a good book) -- but I was tired, I was stressed, I drank too much and it was generally not my finest hour. Boxing Day was no fun at all.

It was all linked with the wider malaise though, which itself is all linked with bigger, deeper changes, and maybe it was worth going through it -- as several days later my head cleared and a possible way forward emerged. I talked stuff through with my manager right at the end of December, and we made some decisions that weren't that easy (giving stuff up is hard, especially if you are the one who made it happen in the first place) but I think will see me through this transition year, work wise, and then we will reassess.

Not out of the woods yet, but the light is returning and the crocuses are out, so optimism is easier. My new house has a roof and windows, and is no longer an abstract concept. And I've joined Pinterest, to help me start imagining what Lancaster Jo's life will be like.

joella