I don't need another hero, I don't need to know the way home...

(and as those of you from the 80s will already know) ...

All I want is life beyond the Thunderdome.

 Well, it's been a bastard of a year. Can't wait to see the back of it. Started it with a full complement of parents, while knowing that I'd likely be down at least one of them by this point. (I say at least one, because my mum was pretty much a racing certainty - so on the grounds that the average number of legs people have is less than two, there was always the chance I could lose the full set).

The year went with the odds, and so I have joined the ranks of the motherless. And the only good thing I can say about that is that you only have to do it once. At this point, four months in, I can sense my resources regrouping. I can see that at some point, and it probably won't be too long off, one of my friends will tell me that her/his mother is dying.

And I will know what that feels like, and I will know what to say, and I will offer some of the things people offered to me. Being, variously, bodily warmth, hot dinners, large glasses of red, packets of tissues, links to useful reading, handwritten letters, space to vent, walks on beaches, turning up at short notice with low-effort plans, saying 'I know how you feel'.

And *their* mother dying will make *my* loss easier to bear (like I'm sure my loss did, though no one said that out loud, because you don't, do you) because it will be a reminder, though I shouldn't need one really, that this is a normal thing, it happens to everyone, unless their story is even sadder, because they don't have a mother in their life, or because they die first. And what I'm saying here is that if a) you mourn the loss of your mother, and if b) you're 43 and that's the biggest loss, by far, BY FAR, that you've ever had to bear, you can't be doing too badly, in a world that contains, just this year, Syria and the Philippines and South Sudan and the Central African Republic and Dasani the invisible child.

My mum died. It was awful. I don't cry every day anymore, but I still cry every week. She was dealt a shitty hand in her last year (and that's another story) but even given that, she was loved, she wasn't poor, and she got some of the best care that the National Health Service has ever been able to offer. She might even have hit the apogee of what the American Right calls 'socialised health care' - let's just hope that if/when I get my terminal cancer diagnosis in 25 years' time, we've sorted out assisted dying. The last bit was medieval. We should be better at this by now.

But life does go on. The clocks do not stop. And I have gradually worked out that I still have everything my mum gave me, plus all the things I learnt when she was dying and that I've learnt since she died. I'd love to ask her about some of those things, but I just have to live with that.

What she didn't give me was belief in anything above or beyond or outside this life. She was brought up Catholic herself, and brought me and my sister up Catholic too, but once we were teenagers and (certainly in my case) had reviewed the evidence for there being a God and found it lacking, she sacked it all off. Possibly with some relief, but I don't recall ever talking about it. She chose a Catholic funeral director, but (without us knowing) she went in to see him before she died and told him she wanted a cardboard coffin and a non-religious ceremony. He did a fantastic job - at the crematorium he read Dust If You Must. She did a fantastic job too, I am comfortable in my atheist skin, but I do light the odd candle for her here and there, most recently in Norwich Cathedral's Peace Globe.

But I can do that within a secular world view. As I do everything else. And there's something both sharp and sweet about realising that you only pass this way but once. Get On With It. Well, tomorrow. Tonight I'm drinking too much sherry and watching Inspector Morse.

In my world, 2013 was the year of Trish. She was, as JP would say, a ledge. 2014 will be the year of the rest of us. Let's hope we get it right.

joella

Grief is the word

In the month or so after her death, I had some very vivid dreams about my mum. In my favourite, she was in the bath, and she asked me to scrub her back. This was a thing that actually happened a lot -- I don't know anyone who saw their mum naked more often than I saw mine. She never got self-conscious, even in her last year, when her body changed so much, from the vibrant and healthy thing I'd seen a changing-but-the-same version of all my life, to something tiny, punctured, and randomly (or so it seemed a lot of the time) unreliable.

In my dream, she had her old body, the one that worked... with the strong, broad back, the hair in a headband, the freckly white skin that was so smooth but reddened so easily. She always liked a proper back scrub, though, so that's what I did, and then she looked up at me, stood up in the water, and gave me a proper big hug. I woke up feeling that I'd said the proper physical goodbye that I never managed in real life. I used to hug her a lot, but by the time we knew she was dying, she was too frail and too encumbered for anything more than holding of hand and stroking of head. So I thank my subconscious for bringing me that hug.

And generally, I am sleeping better since she died than I did during her last months. There's nothing I can do for her now, and however mind-gapingly awful her illness was, it's over. I feel huge - at times overwhelming - sadness much of the time, but I also know that, at least while she was ill, I did my best. That was something I learnt from Trish herself -- if you've done your best, you have nothing to feel guilty about. You may wish you were a better person or that circumstances had been different, but you can't do much about that and there's no point wasting energy on it.

There are (fairly obviously, I guess) some teenage moments I wish I could revisit, and many years of self-absorption where a bit of "it's not all about you, love" might have helped, but for much of my 30s, and my early 40s, we both worked to find a space where we could do things together that we both enjoyed, and we managed that. I'd (fairly obviously, I guess) have made more effort if I'd known she wouldn't live forever, but shit, she was the strongest person I knew. You just don't believe someone with her resilience will go and fucking die on you. She didn't believe it either. One of the last things she did was order a new bathroom. By the time they came to fit it, she was in the hospice. One of the others was to plant a monkey puzzle tree in the front garden. By the time that's grown up, we'll all be ashes.

Every day, there is a moment where I remember that my mum's dead. Sometimes it's like being hit with a blunt instrument somewhere deep inside, other days it rips my surface, like trying to crawl out of a bramble patch in your pants. Many days, whether raw or deep, it's nothing worse than sadness, which, at this point, feels like an achievement. I shed some tears on a bus, or in the supermarket, or when I catch a certain smell or hear a certain song. But sometimes it just stops me in my tracks, and for a few hours, there's quite literally nothing I can do.

I never read self-help books just like I never weigh myself. But you don't get to be 43 without absorbing some common wisdom about grief, if only by emotional osmosis. I know about the stages-that-aren't-really-stages. I know it's different-for-everyone. I know that losing a parent is massively significant, whether you got on with them or you didn't. That constant, that given, whether a presence or an absence, a source of pleasure or pain, now gone. If you're an adult, it knocks you forward into another phase of your life, closer to the centre of your family web if you have children of your own, more aware of your genetic cul-de-sac if you don't. I think I was prepared for that, to some extent, given that I had some notice. And my mother was one of the good guys. Our differences were non-toxic, our disagreements benign. I thought I had nothing really to fear but the sadness. I thought that I was probably at the lucky end of the people-whose-mothers-are-dying spectrum, however shitty a spectrum it may be. And that may indeed be so. But there are two facets of this beast called grief that I wasn't expecting.

One of them began to crystallise at her funeral, when my dad spoke about their life together and said, of its last phase, after they moved back to Lytham in 1997, "she really loved her life here". And she did. She really did. She was part of the fabric of that small town for more than half her life, she loved the house she lived in and the people she knew, and she loved her job and her family and my dad and the comfort that came from the rewards of their long years of careful sifting and saving. My mother was the very model of economy, but she loved to be generous, including to herself. Such balance I will always envy, and it will take me a long time to reconcile myself to the fundamental unfairness that a woman who overcame so many obstacles, and displayed such tenacity and grit, never got to spend that much time in the (figurative - remembering the white skin and the freckles) sun, and spent a year dying horribly before she was even 70. There are millions of people who can't see the point of life, and millions more who build their lives and their livelihoods on the exploitation of others. Why do some of them get to live out their old age when my mum, who wanted to be alive and spent her life (working and otherwise) looking after other people, doesn't? Huh? Where's the justice in that?

(I do know that there ain't no justice, before anyone sends me a book about it).

The other facet is harder to articulate, because it's the one I *really* didn't expect. I knew I was going to lose my mum. What I didn't fully appreciate was that she was the family's UN-Security-Council-cum-ACAS. Not that we're a family at war. More that I suddenly realise there was someone gently representing everyone's interests to everyone else, and negotiating settlements without anyone else involved (or at least me) really knowing there were issues to be settled. I just lost my best defender and I never even knew I needed defending. I have a bunch of relationships to renegotiate now, not with my dad, fortunately, as that has always been relatively unmediated, but from there on out, I'm like a wheel without a centre. There are times I think 'why didn't you *say* anything?' ... but then I think, hey, that was the secret of her success. Why would I expect her to change the habits of a lifetime on her deathbed? She took a bunch of our secrets and lies with her, and she absolutely had that right.

I fucking miss her though.

joella

Love, food and pants

My mum's bike. We took it to the funeral. 

This is what I said towards the end of my mum's funeral. I also read Dorothy Parker's Fulfillment at the beginning. I held it together pretty well, if I say so myself.

When I was little, I thought all towns were like Blackpool. I thought everyone had seaside and rollercoasters. I also thought everyone had a mum like mine. There was always love, there was always food, there were always pants. She was always there. It wasn’t really till I grew up that I realised how lucky I was, and how remarkable *she* was.

The love, food and pants were unconditional, but she did have a way of letting you know when you were pushing your luck. In my late 20s, I was on the verge of splitting up with the boyfriend I’d been with since Cambridge. I was worried my parents wouldn’t approve of this decision, and I was pretty confused about it myself. I came to Lytham for the weekend to get some space, and I was watching Trish hang out some washing when she said ‘so are you going to tell me what’s going on or not?’ Several hours later, she said hmm, do you know what I think? I said no, what do you think? She said ‘I think you should stop arsing him around and call Pickfords’.

Her advice, as ever, was sound, and eventually I did. Some time later, about 15 years ago now, I introduced her to Miles for the first time. Afterwards she said to me ‘oh, darling, those teeth.’ But then he turned up on the doorstep that Christmas with a giant jar of cashew nuts, and she began to see the point of him. It made me very happy that they got on so well, and he also now goes to the hygienist regularly.

Practical woman that she was, Trish most often came to stay with me when there was work to be done. When we moved to our house in Oxford she came to help clean the flat Sara and I were moving out of. I went to pick her up from the train station and she alighted carrying a Hoover and a bucket. I protested that as a fully grown woman I *had* a Hoover and a bucket, but the look she gave me made it clear that in the world of Hoovers and buckets, I knew nothing. When, ten years later, she came to help me paint the bedroom of that house in Oxford before we put it on the market, she brought her own overalls and brushes, and I didn’t say a word.

Over the years she taught me a lot of practical things -- how to unblock a toilet, how to prune a rose bush, how to split logs with an axe -- and bought me a lot of practical things as well: a dishwasher, a tumble dryer, a shed, a bicycle, another dishwasher. She was a big fan of dishwashers. When she bought me the first one, she said ‘if you’re going to live with a man, dear, you’re going to need one of these.’

One of the things I admired most about her was that she didn’t pretend to be a fan of things she wasn’t a fan of ... shall we visit an art gallery / cocktail bar / sushi restaurant? I’d say. No thank you, darling, she’d reply ... but there were things we both enjoyed, and things we all enjoyed as a family, and I have so many happy memories of time I spent with her. My first biryanis at the Bengal in Preston when I was little. Picking field mushrooms in Ireland when I was a bit bigger. Going for coffee together like grown ups do when I was a teenager. Smoking cigarettes together not very long after that. Being the only two people swimming before breakfast on holiday in Turkey. Walking a few miles of the South West Coast Path just a few years ago. We enjoyed that a lot, and we talked about doing more walking together in the Lakes once I’d moved north.

Sadly, that was not to be. But she was only very rarely a sentimental person, and again, I have a lot to learn from her here. A couple of years ago, as a thank you for helping me paint that bedroom, I took her to the Sanctuary, the women-only spa in Covent Garden. I thought, this is a meaningful thing to do with one’s mother. I decided to go for a naked swim in the famous Sanctuary pool. When I got in the water, she said ‘well, at least you won't sink with bazookas like those’.

I’m desperately sad that I’ve lost my mum, but I’m glad I did move north - it meant I got to spend a lot of time with her during her last year. And I’m desperately glad that I had the benefit of more than 43 years of her humour, warmth, courage, generosity, and common sense. In my drawer at home is the last pair of pants she ever folded for me. It will be a while before I can bear to wear them.

I owe lots of people messages. I'll get there. In the meantime, thanks for all the love, support, cards, messages and donations. They have all been hugely appreciated, I'm just, you know, a bit behind on my correspondence.

joella

Those beautiful brown eyes have closed for the last time

Trish Lyon
 27 February 1944 - 21 August 2013

I'm so sad.
If you knew my mum (or hey, even if you didn't) and would like to make a donation in her memory you can do it here.

joella

You're allowed

In 2005 a Zambian colleague of mine took me onto a public ward in the main hospital in Kitwe. It was the size of a school assembly hall, and it was full of women dying from AIDS, each lying glassy-eyed and skeletal on a blanket. They were all surrounded by relatives looking down at them, unable to do anything about it. Downstairs, there was a coffin shop. That, said my colleague, as we left, is what poverty looks like. When I close my eyes, I can still see that ward. I think I kept my face straight, but in my head I looked like Munch's Scream.

She was right, that *was* what poverty looks like - nearly all of those women were younger than me, and if they'd been living my life, they wouldn't have got HIV in the first place, and if they had they'd have had access to treatment, support and some of the best healthcare anyone gets anywhere.

But hell, that only takes you so far. My mum's had all those things, and she's still dying. She's now lying in a bed in a hospice looking just like that, while we stand around her smiling brightly with internal Scream faces.

It won't be long now. She read her last book a long time ago. Last week, she did her last crossword and had her last food. A couple of days ago, she watched her last TV programme. She won't get out of bed again.

She's so very, very tired, but she's also still in there, in that tiny body that has taken such punishment over the last year. Yesterday, I was sitting by the bed holding her hand. What *is* that noise, said my dad. I said 'oh, it's me, I was humming'. There was a little noise from the bed, and my mum raised her eyebrow and said 'You're allowed'.

I hadn't even known I was doing it, I think it was just something to fill the void. Later on I did it again and that's when I realised what it was... at a friend's funeral on Saturday (yeah, quite a month for dying) one of the songs they played was a girl's choir singing Fix You. I don't even *like* Coldplay. But like the man says, I am about to lose something I cannot replace.

But this is where we are. This person who has done so much for me, for so many other people, who has helped so many people through what she is now dealing with, is running out of road. There's not much left she can do for us, and there's not much left we can do for her except hold her hand and hum.

So, you know, mum, you can go any time you want. You're allowed.

joella

Foothills of end

My lovely friend W, who died of cancer last year, kept up her Facebook correspondence until she started to, quite literally, lose her mind. It was tremendously sad to see her incisive, unsentimental updates start to falter, and her phrasing and spelling begin to disintegrate. Then for a few days there were just ‘likes’, and then there was nothing at all. The update that sent a little shock through me, and sent me down to the river to have a proper cry, opened with the words 'foothills of end now'.

It’s a killer of a phrase: you haven’t got long, and it’s only going to get harder. Looks like my mum’s just approaching those hills now. We hoped she’d have a few months on the post-chemotherapy plateau, hanging out in her tent there, relaxing with a book or two, maybe adventuring the odd picnic or day trip. That was why she put herself through it.

But that isn’t what’s happening. No. Instead she has to pack up her rucksack again and start climbing, only she’s not as strong as she was before, and the paths are rockier, and there's no map for this country.

joella

Echoes

Moving north was supposed to be all about the new. Living in an intentional community by a river in a brand-new eco-home... could there *be* a better opportunity to reassess, reprioritise and reinvent? And there's been some of that, and there will be some more -- not since I went to university 25 years ago has everything about my day-to-day life been so suddenly so different. It's not all marvellous -- if I could draw, there would be a comic strip in me called Harangued By Vegans*, and there are some people, and some places, in Oxford I MISS SO MUCH -- but when I sit back a little and survey my new territory, I think we properly lucked in. If you're going to try and live more sustainably, more mindfully, more (dammit) communally, you'd be hard pushed to find a more, for the most part, resourceful, kind, interesting and diverse group of people to try it with. When it came to the go/no go conversation back in whenever it was, of the two of us, I was the less convinced. But even I thought, hey, if I walk away from an opportunity to be part of something *this* properly groundbreaking, I'm not the woman I thought I was.

But the woman I thought I was had a mother who was all seeing, all knowing and was going to live pretty much forever. She was going to be one of those women who take up marathon running or karate in their 70s and appear to be made mostly of sinew and gold. When I saw the now infamous Twitter post of the son of the woman who confronted the guys who killed the soldier in Woolwich I burst into tears. Because *my mum used to be a motherfucking badass too*. (Except without the swearing, she hates swearing).

In fairness, she's handling her terminal illness absolutely like a motherfucking badass, at least whenever she's had the choice. The times when she doesn't are the hardest for all of us, possibly her included, though these last months I've learnt many things about the boundaries of agency. Things which I'm sure she already knew, being a nurse (and a M-F-B-A), but which for the rest of us, have been a bit WHAT THE FUCK. I've spent a lot of time sad, and a lot of time crying, but you can only spend so much time mired in anticipatory grief, especially when the person in question, on a good day, is adjusting her wig (have I got everything? phone? keys? purse? hair?) and requesting that you get your arse in gear so we can get to the curry house the moment it opens**.

Which brings me to the point. This time of planned beginnings is also a time of unplanned endings. And on the journey between the two, from Lancaster to Lytham, I change trains in Preston, the town (now city) where I was born. Preston Station is part of the landscape of my formative years... any significant journey to anywhere that wasn't in a car went via Preston. The bar in Preston Station was where I had some of my first solo drinking experiences -- hey, anyone can be in transit, I can sit here with my pint of lager, my pack of Embassy Regal and my novel, waiting for a train...

And I find myself in the same bar (less seedy these days, more's the pity), waiting for the same train, the hourly Colne > Blackpool South, that punctuated my life all those years ago. If the sun is past the yard arm, I order a glass of red wine and a mini tube of salt and vinegar Pringles. Every time this happens, a line from Michelle Shocked's Memories of East Texas plays in my head... "looking back on the road I'd come, thinking I had not come that far..." But then, I alway think (the repetition is one of the echoes) I have gone far, I've just come back. I never thought I would, but I did. And, I alway think, is that a good thing or a bad thing? 

Unless I (and, frankly, science) buck the trend set by all my grandparents, and now my mother, I'm definitely in the second half of my life. There are a squillion cliches about this, none of which I wish to quote, but suffice it to say that I only just realised it. Longevity-wise, I've peaked. To that extent, in no way is forty the new thirty. Forty is halfway to fucking eighty. I don't come from a tribe that sees eighty. So, y'know, get ready to crumble.

ON THE OTHER HAND who the hell wants to be eighty? I'm not sure I do. So maybe this is all kind of timely. You've gathered enough input, love. You've had enough stimuli. Work out what it is you want to do with it all. Stop consuming***, start producing.

These are my thoughts at the moment. I expected to be carving out new territory, but instead I often find myself in strange familiar places, wading through layers of memories. Not so long ago, I was almost never allowed to cook a meal in my mother's kitchen, that was her job. These days, I cook nearly every visit. One of my regular dishes is spaghetti bolognaise. I make it with Quorn mince, as everyone bar me is now pretty much veggie (as I was until I was Harangued By Vegans), but as I put it in the pan to brown, I remember being sent to Clarkes butchers as a child for three quarters of a pound of minced beef. I remember queuing up, thinking 'I can't see over the counter, will they see me?' (they always did, but that never stopped me worrying that they wouldn't) and John, the big butcher with blood under his nails, putting his hand in a bag and using that to grab the mince. He was nearly always spot on.

When I chop the garlic, I remember working in Pleasant Street restaurant just down the road, where I learnt to smash garlic cloves with the flat blade of a knife, to get the skin off more easily. I also remember having to do that with six bulbs of garlic every Saturday morning, to make the garlic butter for the house vegetables for the week, how sticky my fingers got with garlic juice, and how my mum taught me how to get the smell out with Vanish, which she used on the collars of my dad's shirts. With the peppers, I remember the dreadful experimental dishes of the 70s. There was something called March Pork, featuring pork and red peppers, which my mum made once, and which I point blank refused to eat. I did the same with Hungarian Goulash. Still can't do much that involves peppers and rice. But I also remember, many years later, reading a book recommended to me by my friend V, about a British Pakistani family, where one of the characters watches a friend chopping a pepper and throwing away the stalk and seeds, and is reminded of her mother, who makes a special dish from these unwanted parts, like vegetable offal. I've always wanted to taste that dish.

The mushroom thing has been there for a while... about 20 years ago I was chopping mushrooms for a lasagne with my friend N, and she was throwing all the stalks away. I asked her why, and she said that when *she* was growing up, her parents used to eat the mushroom caps and give the stalks to the kids, and she was never going to eat a mushroom stalk again. I immediately started throwing stalks away in solidarity. A few years ago I saw her chopping mushrooms again, and she wasn't doing it anymore. Oh, I'm over that now, she said. I wasn't. To this day I always chuck one or two stalks in the compost bucket, just because I can.

Every meal I make there, and increasingly elsewhere, is like that. Something as simple as cooking dinner suddenly seems to be suffused with the cooking of every dinner ever. I am meeting myself coming back. I don't know if I like it, but there doesn't seem to be much choice in the matter. Is this growing up?

I am hoping it's not followed by an overwhelming desire to pass on mushroom-chopping traditions to the next generation, because I've left that a bit late. I am the end of the line. All that will be left of me is blog posts, rag rugs, sloe gin, playlists and pickles. And I don't mind about that. At least, not yet.

Pink Floyd are finally on Spotify! Here are some more echoes.

joella

*Not all the vegans. Just one or two of them. But there's no haranguing like it. 
** My dad has his own role in all this, and one which merits at least as many words. But for now he has taken on the role of parent-who-will-live-more-or-less-forever. Now I think about it, *both* my parents are M-F-B-As. 
*** I say this as someone who's been a taxpayer for 20 years. I'm not talking about financials.      

Brazzaville Beach

Not Brazzaville Beach

It's getting on two years since we had a holiday, and *that* was a snatched week on the Kent coast (above), where we took our laptops and spent a goodly portion of each day looking for cafes with wifi so we could keep up with our lives.

We did do some good walking, and drank some good beer in some good pubs, had a sandwich in Sandwich, and I re-read The Crimson Petal and the White... so it was a break, but mainly of the relative-calm-before-the-enormous-storm kind. It was the week we put our house on the market, and nothing has been the same since.

We used to be quite good at holidays, but they take time, planning and cash. All of the above disappeared into the vortex of our decision to join Lancaster Cohousing... a weekend of meetings every month, with train fares and finding places to stay, selling a house, moving to the Interim Bungalow, project commitments, trying to spend more time up north and less time down south, failing, trying to manage two lives ... it's not very sustainable, and it's completely exhausting.

When I look back I wonder if we should have made the break sooner, but then we had our own place in Oxford, and good friends all around, and we knew how everything worked. We didn't have much fun in our temporary northern accommodation, and anyway you don't leave Oxford lightly, not if you've loved it longtime. But then I also wonder if we should have taken it more gradually, moved in slowly, instead of basically camping in a house full of boxes with no internet, no washing machine, no transport, in the middle of a building site with a postcode that didn't really exist. In the end, we felt that would have just prolonged all the above agonies. We were absolutely in accord that we should just get on with it, so we did. But shit, it was hard. We were very tired.

And we still are. There hasn't been any respite... if anything the reverse. I've had more work travel this year than ever before -- I'm not proud of this, carbon footprint-wise, and it's probably a one-off, but in the last 12 months I've hauled my arse to Boston, New York (same trip, and I did get the train between them...), the Netherlands, Cambodia, the Netherlands again, and Tanzania. I also go to Oxford every six weeks or so to catch up with people in the NGO X mothership, and to Lytham every week - to spend time with my mum while I still can, and to give my dad, who is too sensible to drink alone, a reason to open a decent bottle of red and take a little time out from the main event. 

We live in a peaceful, calm, warm, comfortable house which I do not regret for a moment moving to, which has felt like home since the moment we stepped through the door, and which has a view of the mighty River Lune which I could look at forever. I knew the first time I stood on the footpath near what became my house that this was the place I wanted to live for the next part of my life. But unlike the house, many aspects of living here are not yet peaceful, calm, warm or comfortable, and some may never be. If I had what I have come to think of as my usual resources, which have seen me through life pretty well so far, I think I'd be relishing some of the challenges that living in an intentional community can bring. I know how to represent myself, and I know it's not all about me. 

But I don't have my usual resources, they have disappeared into a swirling vortex of lost certainties. I'm pretty sure I still know who I am, but quite a lot else is All New Here. My head is so full it might burst. And it's a long, long time since I had one of those weeks where you can't remember what day it is and all you have to think about is which book to read next and whether it's too early for lunch. 

Enter Brazzaville Beach, which M borrowed from the library. It lay on the top of the book heap in the bedroom for the couple of months it took him to get around to reading it, and I have become a little fixated with it. Not the novel, but the place. And not even really the place, as the place in the book is a fictional beach which is nowhere near the real Brazzaville. The real Brazzaville does have a part of it called Brazzaville Beach, but that's not really a beach. 

But none of that is really the point. The point is that Brazzaville Beach is a place that's as far away as it's possible to get. They do things differently there. It will be hot, and the food will be strange. There will be mosquitoes and poor sanitation. You will keep your wallet, which will be full of brightly coloured notes with elephants on them, which you need thousands of to buy a beer, zipped into your trousers-with-many-pockets. You will feel like the whitest person in the world, and you will seek out breezy seafront places to drink that beer, which will come in large, slightly wonky brown bottles. The sun will drop out of the sky like a stone at six in the evening, leaving a jet black sky covered in unfamiliar stars. You will sleep with the noise of calls to prayer and barking dogs competing with the air conditioning, which will go off with the electricity several times a night. 

It will all be a bit scary at first, but you will gradually work out how to read situations, and make friends with taxi drivers and waiters, who will find out what you like to eat and where you want to go, and tell you about their families. If you stay long enough, you'll rent a house and start buying food at the market and sending your washing to the laundry. But you'll never belong there. You'll always be insulated from how life really is, and there will be a space around you that will stay empty, that you can use to think about which book to read next and whether it's too early for lunch. And the rest of the world just gets further and further away. 

That is the space I want, and the more different everything else is, the easier it is to find. I have no actual great desire to go to the Republic of the Congo, but I have a feeling that a week in Devon just wouldn't cut it right now. There's no imminent likelihood even of that, to be honest, so we battle on, relying on the odd yoga class and the odd bottle of single malt to provide their different forms of respite. I haven't read the book myself yet -- novels remain a form of escape, as they always have, but somehow I want to keep this one till I really am on Brazzaville Beach, wherever that turns out to be. 

joella

Half a century of nursing

It's pretty hard watching your mum die. I ain't gonna lie. But when I try and project myself into the future, to when she's gone, I can see I will be glad to have had some notice of my imminent motherlessness. I have had some amazing messages of support, especially from people who have been here. One of them said 'take what you can from [this time]. There are good moments'.

I already agree. When I was younger, till probably about 10 years ago in fact, I thought I had precious little in common with my mum. I loved her very much, and we got on fine, but we never hung out in that spa-break chicklit sort of way. I took her to the Sanctuary once, by way of a thank you for a lot of decorating she helped me do, and the look she gave the woman who approached with complimentary macaroons and pink Prosecco would have felled a tree. I tried a naked swim in the famous Sanctuary pool, based on an assumption that she would be unfazed. She was unfazed. In fact she said 'well at least you won't sink with bazookas like those'.

But recently, when she's been well enough, we've done a lot of talking, and I've learnt a few things about her that I never knew. My mum started nursing when she was 18, and would have marked 50 years as a state-registered nurse if she hadn't had to give up work when she became ill in September. It's a side of her I have experienced at home - when she looked after me when I was ill as a child and young adult, or more recently when I've rung her up to ask how to treat something afflicting me or M - but I've never known much about her working life. I guess I never asked. Oh, the arrogance of youth.

What a time to have nursed through. At her mother's insistence, she applied to and got a place at St Thomas's teaching hospital, v prestigious, but she would have had to wait a year before she could take it up, and she decided she couldn't be bothered. So she went out and bought the Nursing Times and wrote off to various hospitals running training courses. They all offered her a place and she chose St Nicholas's Hospital in Plumstead because it had a brand new nurses home with central heating.

She said that Plumstead in 1962 "smelt like burnt carrots". The course itself, and the nurses home, had near-military levels of discipline, but she'd grown up with a tyrannical father, and been to 11 schools as they moved around after the war (he was in the RAF) and she wasn't bothered. She liked the central heating, and the hot running water. And she liked the nursing - she has quite bad dyslexia, so she found the exams terrifying, but she was great at the practicals. Her fellow students were from all over the Commonwealth - the hospital took Rhodes Scholars, so she trained with women from Ceylon, Malaya, Burma, Canada and South Africa. It must have been amazing. I'd seen some photos from her student days, but somehow never wondered how such a diverse range of young women came to be hanging out together in the early 60s. There was also a nurse from Orkney, who nobody could understand because her accent was so thick. She got pregnant, and had to leave. The ward sisters sounded terrifying, but as my mum says, they'd lived through the war, they weren't young anymore, and "life had given them a box of broken biscuits".

They were not easy times. She remembers girls coming in with septicemia from illegal backstreet abortions. When termination became legal, she remembers sobbing 14 year olds being brought in by their mothers, who didn't stay to hold their hands. And she remembers, when it was still a criminal offence to kill yourself, the police coming into the hospital to try and arrest people recovering from failed suicide attempts.

But the NHS was still young and hopeful, and she saw some amazing things as well. In the very early days of microsurgery, she looked after one of the first people to have a corneal graft. She was at his bedside holding his hand when they took off the bandages and asked him what he could see. He looked at my mum and said 'the most beautiful pair of brown eyes you could imagine'. She had a little cry when she told me about that, and I had a little cry with her.

Since then she's worked in all kinds of places - in A&E, where she was put off alcohol for life, in obs & gynae, on geriatric wards, in a hospice, as a school nurse, in a baby clinic, on surgical wards. She knows how to look after people. Now it should be our turn to look after her, but she still does a lot of it herself, except when things are really bad. She has a blue bucket by the bed. I recognise that bucket, I said. Oh yes, she said, we've all been sick in that bucket.

So this International Women's Day, I celebrate my lovely mum, and thank her for showing me what it means to engage with the world on your own terms.

joella

Adventures in omnivory

So the resolution to write a blog post at least once a week has gone a bit wobbly already. Maybe that was too much to expect, though there are posts forming in my head all the time, the way they used to, so possibly it's about finding new ways to catch them as they are forming, before they slip away. As for Sober January... well, I have a bit of a hangover this morning [that was 31 Jan], so go figure. But I think there have been 25 sober days this month, so I shall put that in my pipe and smoke it. 

The meat eating on the other hand is going swimmingly. Here is all the meat I have eaten: 

1. The chicken livers. I ordered these in the restaurant of the Imperial Hotel in Blackpool with M, Plumbing S and small T. It was overall such a surreal experience that I almost forgot about it. The livers were good -- we had them on melba toast. I remember them from working in a fancy restaurant in Lytham when I was a teenager. I was already a vegetarian, but I diidn't mind dealing with the chicken livers.
   
2. Lambs liver the first. It came in a packet from Abel and Cole. It originally came from a lamb on a farm in Gloucestershire. How cheap is lamb's liver?? Amazingly cheap. M coated it in flour and mustard powder and fried it, and we had it with mashed potato and savoy cabbage. And a nice Chianti (this was in Drunk December). I liked it, but I did think it was a bit dry. And I did spend a lot of time thinking 'hmm, this is an animal, how do I feel about that?'. 
3. The free range pork pie. This came from Booths. I forget where the pig came from but it did say. It was not at all cheap, but I wanted to be sure I was buying pork of good provenance. It was absolutely a hundred percent amazing. I had my half with Branston pickle. I could eat a free range pork pie every day, but I suspect this is not a good idea. 
4. The slice of salami. This was in the fridge ... M had bought it from Booths. Originally from Italy. Salami is something I used to love as a child, and I had high hopes, but it was a bit disappointing. Also I didn't know anything about the pig, so I felt bad. 
5. Lambs liver the second. This came from the local butcher. I suspect this is where we should buy meat, but I am a bit shy of asking him about where it comes from in case he thinks I am a middle class hippie. But for now I'm assuming it's local -- it was the sheep on the hills round here that got me thinking about meat in the first place. That and the vegans. M cooked liver the second in the same way as liver the first, but with my leftover reduced onion soup as gravy. It was superb. I also came away with a leaflet titled 'It's all about offal'. 
6. The lamb rogan josh. I read the all about offal leaflet and decided that oxtail would be a good thing to try (I have fond memories of oxtail soup from a bed & breakfast we stayed at in Whitley Bay in 1979). We went back to the butcher's to get one but he didn't have any in. So we looked at what was there and bought some lamb pieces, which M made into a rogan josh from a Madhur Jaffrey recipe. It was fabulous -- I'd never eaten lamb curry in my life and it's the business, tasty, spicy, all the good things. Though I'd say it was a bit too much meat for me... I enjoyed the leftovers the next day just as much if not more, mixed in with fried rice and vegetables.
   
7. The partridge soup. There was a Meat & Fish Eaters Night in Ecoville -- da-da-DAH! The worms are turning! Unfortunately I was at my parents and couldn't be there, but I knew the plan was roast lamb and fish pie. But when A went to buy the lamb from the market she found out that local lamb isn't in season. What's in season is partridge. So she bought a bunch (I think technically a brace) of them, and roasted them instead. I suppose it's obvious that lamb's not in season, but that does beg the question where does our local butcher get his lamb? I leave that mystery for another day. Anyway, I missed the roast partridge, which I didn't mind so much as I'm still not sure how good I'd be with all the bones and business, but there were carcasses, so there was soup. And it was interesting. I think it could have done with some vegetables in it, but it sure tasted of bird.
   
8. Lambs liver the third. This was in Fashionable East London, Dalston to be precise, the Stone Cave Turkish Restaurant to be exact. We were eating mezze before heading to Cafe Oto to see some experimental music. All good. Now, I clearly know nothing of the provenance of the meat in the Stone Cave, so arguably it has no place in my new Dead Animal Lexicon. But it's Turkish mezze where all this started -- back in the days when I used to get howlingly premenstrual, I would want to go for mezze with someone likely to order the fried liver (M, or plumbing S) and steal a bit off their plate.It was good. It was very, very good. Oh yeah. 
9. The spaghetti carbonara. Well this was interesting. We have a great recipe for smoked tofu carbonara, or carbonararara as it was known in M's previous life. I love smoked tofu carbonararara. But he picked up some pancetta in M&S. From 'assured farms in Italy'. I'm a sucker for brand loyalty, and I looked at their pictures of happy British Plan A pigs on the wall and thought, well, it's probably fine. It was very tasty. I could get a taste for pancetta, I'm pretty sure of that. But I'd probably want to find some that was from closer to home. And if smoked tofu remains easy to come by (which seems likely in Ecoville) I feel it may win the day.
   
10. The spaghetti bolognese. This should have been devilled kidneys, which I ordered from Abel & Cole, but they were out of stock. So we went to the butcher to see if *he* had any, and he only had two. M said this wasn't enough, so we bought some minced beef instead. 'I tell you what I do have, though,' said the butcher, and he went in the back and came back with an oxtail. We were so impressed he'd remembered that we bought that as well. That went in the fridge for another day, and that night we had spag bol. This is something that my mum *did* used to make, back in the day, and I remember being sent to the butcher to buy the mince for it. I like to think I make a pretty good quorn bolognaise, but I have to say the real thing tasted v v g too. Smoother, somehow. More integrated. But it didn't taste that meaty. I didn't think, yay, must always have meat on my spaghetti. But I did think, hmm, wonder what that would taste like in a lasagne.
    
11. Lambs liver the fourth. This was unplanned. We semi-spontaneously booked a car and drove over to Ingleton to see N & D and their girls, who were staying in a camping barn there for the weekend with a bunch of their friends. We'd sort of imagined we would eat with them but we hadn't made any plans, and it turned out they were all (about 20 of them) going to the local pub for dinner. They were happy to add us on but everyone had pre-ordered, and when I looked at the menu the vegetarian options looked pretty stodgy, as is so often the case in your small town pub. But they had liver with madeira and mushroom sauce and mashed potato. You know what, I said, I think I'll have that. Me too, said M. 'Two livers!' we called over to the guy on the phone to the pub. He said 'I like your style'. And I thought, oh no, I like being a meat eater now. It was delicious, as well, but there was way too much of it. I'd have gladly swapped half of it for a heap of kale. I like being a vegetable eater too.
    

The oxtail stew awaits tomorrow. We were going to have it on Sunday but that would have been meat three days in a row, and that's not what this is all about. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't looking forward to it. My dad asked me if being harangued by vegans had turned me into a meat eater out of stubborness, and I raised my eyebrows and said 'Possibly. Would that remind you of anyone?'. Which made him laugh, which isn't the commonest thing in the world at the moment, so I was happy. And if I'm honest, there's some truth in it -- there's nothing I hate more than being told what to think, and parts of the Great Cohousing Food Wars of 2012 came with the kind of sanctimonious overtones that made me want to run screaming to the nearest McDonald's just to make a point.

But I do try not to cut off my nose to spite my face, and it's closer to the truth to say that really what happened is I gave the whole Food Issue a great deal of thought, as a result of above-mentioned Food Wars, and came down in a different place to the one I had been in before. I now appear to be a flexitarian -- which is slightly annoying, as that's bang on trend. I hate being bang on trend. But I do like liver.

joella

Monochrome tendencies

Here I am, a day late already, so much for resolve. But in my defence, I've been ill. The kind of ill you get better from, so I don't need any sympathy, but also the kind of ill that sends you falling into to bed with such lassitude that whole days drift past and you've done nothing more strenuous than turn the pillow over looking for a cool bit. Maybe drink a Lemsip and deign to get in a bath that has been run for you. If it'd been left to you it would have overflowed and you'd have found it hard to care. Meetings are missed, emails are unsent, pyjamas are unchanged out of. I already had a policy of avoiding people who cost me energy, but for the last week or so I've just been avoiding people full stop.

I probably had it coming. I had a cold when my mum first went into hospital back in September, but I only remember it because I hovered in the doorway for fear of passing it onto her... it wasn't a showstopper. But apart from that I've been fine for months, through the Big Move, through the days of no broadband, through the long fading of light into a winter of sombre significance and many train journeys. I used to melt into a puddle of blood and tears every month, but that's been under control for over a year now, thanks to the marvels of artificial progestogen (I think I may be a little tougher and less accommodating than I used to be but hey, WORTH IT). I ain't no hippie but I do think when you have to power through, you power through, and then you have a little break from all the powering, and then you fall over. There's probably science that explains that, right?

Anyway, when it comes, it comes, and I'm well brought up enough to know that you can't fight it, all you can do is ride it out. You can go for a little walk in the woods, watch the snow falling on the river, and shed a few tears for all the sadness in the world. You can catch up on all the Nordic Noir you've been missing. You can rediscover the joy of soup. You can read a bit of Tove Jansson, who writes so beautifully about the introspective moods of midwinter. You can spend a lot of time thinking about trees, and a little bit of time talking to them.

This morning the sun rose and shone into my bedroom, and I sat up in bed and saw the heron sitting on his (her? how can you tell?) favourite rock in the river. It was magical. I can do melancholy with the best of them - in Rupert Thomson's Divided Kingdom I would definitely live in the Green Quarter - but it's good to remember that colour floods back into the world just as surely as it can drain out.

joella

Resolve

I'm always quite relieved to get to Twelfth Night, having been at the humbug end of the Christmas spectrum for the past 20 years or so. Oh, but it's lovely for children, people say. Yeah, but I'm not one and haven't got any, I reply. For me it's just a lot of random expense, long journeys at the most inhospitable time of the year, inane music, even more inane television, more stuff that I don't need, and way too much Organised Fun. I'd rather stay in on my own for the duration with some posh gin and Inspector Morse, honest to god, but a) nobody believes me and b) even if they do I'm not allowed.

This year was different, of course (what do you buy the woman who's busy getting rid of things? I could tell you, but you might cry). Gin and Morse was not an option. But, while it was hard for me to tell, because it's a while since I've spent Christmas at the parental home so all the rituals were slightly unfamiliar, I think it went off pretty well. We had a splendid dinner, cooked by my sister's friend O and his boyfriend, who, it turned out, is a chef - poor guy had already done about 1200 Christmas dinners, but we were all very appreciative of his final eight. Cranberry-topped nut roast FTW. We also did quite a bit of Walking the Dog, and Drinking the Wine, and Watching the Queen. It was all as it should be, except not. What else can you do?

Boxing Day was at my aunt's -- and in many ways even more familiar and even stranger. The lasagne, the egg mayonnaise, the tuna pasta salad, the quiche, the rolled up slices of smoked salmon, the lemon meringue pie... all the food and the people and the animals who should have been there (with the exception of my cousin P, who lives in Hong Kong), the men talking about the latest gadget (G's Raspberry Pi), the women sitting round the kitchen table, various people keen to ask me if I really have started eating meat (of which more later). This is what we've always done, but it was a little bit like watching it through a video camera, or from down a long corridor. It was most peculiar. I expect there's a word for it. I wouldn't have been anywhere else, but at the same time, I can't completely say I was there.

New Year was entirely different, and if anything even odder. There was a revue then a ceilidh planned in the Common House, and I am mildly to severely allergic to both of these things. They're not compulsory, of course, just as I am not contractually obliged to eat Mung Bean Surprise, but it's surprisingly difficult to assert your right to, you know, stay in with posh gin and Inspector Morse.

In the end, I had a lovely evening. E came to drink sherry with me and let me be a bit sad for a while, then two people asked if they could come and watch Morse too, which was perfect gentle company. Several others dropped in and out around midnight, and I was finally tempted down the street once I was assured all remaining fun was distinctly disorganised. It does get a bit fuzzy after that point but I remember skidding down the floor to Praise You, and pogoing to Reward till I nearly-fell-over-but-didn't. I didn't feel very shiny the next day (in fact I didn't get dressed) but there in the background was the little glow of knowing that I'm not on my own with the strangeness (or the sadness). I have comrades, and I'm lucky.

In between the two Big Ones we had a delightful visit from Mr B, who came bearing wine, gifts from Turkey and an electric cigarette, which I had a go on after we'd drunk some of the wine (verdict: enjoyable, but probably best avoided unless the alternative is real cigarettes). He'd texted ahead to say he wanted to eat communal lentils, which was not quite possible, but we improvised and sat round our old table with our new friends and ate Greek lentil soup adapted from the recipe of my Significant Ex's best friend from school's mum. It was a good collision of worlds. I do miss Mr B.

But all in all, various things notwithstanding, I was pretty glad to get shot of 2012. We've still got most of the winter to get through, but I find there's something calming and palate cleansing about the tinsel-free bleakness of early January, at least as long as I don't have to go very far and have a decent stack of library books.

So, to resolutions. I have three this year.

1. Blog at least once a week.
2. Sober January. Well, sober most of January, as we are heading to East London to celebrate my birthday and I don't see that happening without a Negroni or two. I might make the days up in February. It's going ok so far, in the sort of extended hangover feat. scary dreams fashion I remember from previous detoxes.
3. Eat meat at least once a month. That's high quality meat of known and ethical provenance, preferably local. So far (not all this year) I have had lambs liver for dinner twice, once from Abel & Cole, once from our local butcher, and half a free range Lancastrian pork pie. I think this may be like discovering classical music after a lifetime of alt-folk. It's a whole new thing. And deserves further expounding, when I've worked out what the hell it is I think I'm doing.

Onwards.

joella