The hate crime that is a fish finger sandwich

It’s hard being a blogger in an intentional community. Hundreds of fascinating things happen, half of them inspiring, half of them infuriating, and you think about what a good blog post most of them would make. But is it ok to write about them?

I watched 20,000 Days on Earth last week, where Nick Cave talked about cannibalising his relationship with his wife for his songwriting. Presumably, she’s all right about that, and hey, she gets to be married to Nick Cave. I write about M sometimes, and generally assume that he doesn’t mind. I write about events long ago or far away, and generally assume that the distance is sufficient for it to be safe. And I’ve written about people who will never know, and I generally assume that they wouldn’t care.

But the space in the middle is a bit grey. If it’s something lovely, or about someone lovely, I tend to go ahead, though I might not use real names. If it’s something highly personal about me, but featuring other people, I tend to do the same. In the next circle out, I might change any identifying details, or be generally more oblique. If I have something I want to say, I try and find a way to say it, but I walk a delicate line. I had to retrospectively sanitise a few posts about NGO X once they introduced a blogging policy, but the policy itself was quite helpful. There’s a social media policy as well now, which says you can say that you work for NGO X, but you should include the statement “all views expressed are personal”.

And I’ve not written much about my (still fairly new) neighbours, because it’s hard to know where the boundary is between what’s my story and what’s someone else’s, so intertwined are they. And we all live in a yellow submarine, so the whole anonymity thing gets a bit challenging, and I don’t want to piss anyone off unduly.

But I figure once you’ve been accused of a hate crime, all bets are off.

So here we go. It's quite long. All views expressed are personal.

Over in Ecoville, we have a Communal Meals Policy. It was written in 2006, and it states that we wish to provide “a vegetarian and vegan friendly environment, whilst recognising that many members may also wish to eat meat from time to time”. The person who wrote it was vegan. She never actually moved into Ecoville, but I have heard various interpretations of this policy from people who were around at the time, ranging from “Y never wanted a vegan-only environment, that’s not the kind of community she wanted to live in”, to “if you didn’t want to live in a vegan community, you should have started your own”, via “the first three meals every week will be vegan”.

The person asserting this last, henceforth to be known as Z (for ZOMG!), told me this first on a visit to another cohousing project, a long time before we, or indeed anyone, moved into Ecoville, but several months after we’d parted with a large sum of money and put our house on the market.

It was news to me, and was the first thing that started my (then Ocado pescatarian, currently locavore omnivore, if you're asking) alarm bells ringing, because I Am Not Vegan*. Z was convinced this had been agreed at some point, and I'm not saying it hadn't, but unfortunately no one had seen fit to put it in the meals policy, the decision log, or the minutes of any meeting for which minutes exist. So it can’t reasonably be said to be something we’d “signed up for”... indeed, if it had been called Veganville, we’d never have got on the bus.

As we got closer to move-in date, M and I joined the team looking at how our meals would actually work, which process quickly revealed itself to be Extremely Hard Work. By the time what has become known as the August Agreement was finally hammered out, the Meals Team had to have their meetings mediated by the Process Team. (Not a joke, not even a little one).

And I think it’s a terrible agreement. I didn’t agree with substantial chunks of it at the time, though didn’t get to register that on the day except by proxy, as it was passed at one of the very few General Meetings I wasn’t able to attend. Its worst bit is the Plate Apartheid... if, in the limited set of circumstances when it is not verboten, one chooses to consume something non-vegetarian in the Common House, one must carry it in on a separate plate, use separate cutlery and serving utensils, and carry it all home again dirty afterwards. If you think this is overkill for a sausage roll, imagine how annoying it is when you drop your fork and have to go home to get another one because you can’t use one that’s already there and you can’t wash the one you already have.

The Plate Apartheid rules are, in my personal view, insane in the membrane. They mean that visiting friends and family, who we sometimes take in there to eat as we no longer have a large dining table at home (having donated it to the Common House because one of the things about cohousing is you don't need to have a big table in your house, or indeed a big house, because when you have guests, you can use the communal ones), think we live with a bunch of freaks and weirdos. They mean that you end up walking down the street with sharp knives sticking out at dangerous angles because you’re also trying to carry eight plates and eight sets of cutlery. They mean you are called over by one of your neighbours and asked to explain to his six year old son why he has to eat his pie off a different kind of plate, and you can’t give a reason that a six year old can understand, because there isn’t one. They mean that you have to gesticulate wildly at people who are about to pick up the wrong kind of plate, or stop them taking your wrong kind of plate away to put it in the dishwasher. And they mean that any shared eating experience that is conducted in this way, and they are few and far between because of all the other rules, starts with a good 20 minutes of talking about how insane in the membrane it all is. In no way do they promote peace, love and understanding, and quite often people break them, even when they’re trying hard not to, like when you turn on the light even though you know there’s a power cut.

So how's this all working out for us? Well, meals have happened, and do happen, and while I think they tend towards being brown, bland or bizarre (and sometimes all three), some of the people think they're great and some of the other people think they're fine... although they are not happening nearly as often as the seven times a week they are supposed to. In practice, it's averaged around four, because hardly anyone signs up to cook as often as they have in theory agreed to. Not much else happens in the Common House on other evenings, because there in theory *should* be a meal, so at any moment there *could* be a meal, so it's pretty difficult to organise anything else. So many nights, it sits dark and empty, and on some of those nights small groups sit in atomised small living spaces eating spare ribs off their laps and bitching about the August Agreement. Meanwhile, those who thought the AA was a great thing sit around bitching about the lazy arses who aren't pulling their weight / are shirking / are taking the piss / etc.

Why have we carried on like this? Well, another of the agreements that pre-dated our arrival on the scene, catalysed, so far as I know, by earlier challenges to the food policy, was that all policies and associated agreements would stay in force until six months after the last household had moved in. I can see the sense in that, you can't be going around moving goalposts while you're also trying to build and sell houses, but in practice the whole moving in phase lasted over a year, so the last person's six months was the first person's getting on 20.

But eventually, the requisite number of months had passed and the Meals could be Reviewed. We agreed that the Meals Review Team should be elected rather than made up of volunteers, and we were all invited to nominate people. I didn't nominate myself, because I had such a shitty experience the first time around. Let some other fool do loads of work and then get shouted at, I thought. I'm not stupid.

But then I got more nominations than anyone else. Which did genuinely surprise me, as I have largely been avoiding communal meals (which I have described elsewhere as food I don't want to eat, at a time I don't want to eat, in an environment I don't want to eat in), and I haven't made any secret of how much I dislike the Food Rules. I thought people would choose calm, kind, gentle souls to do this job. But I talked to a few people, and I thought no, there was definitely a reason people nominated me, so I stood, making my position as clear as I could in the process. And four people were duly elected, including me.

That was in February. Since then we've met nearly every Monday morning. We've had 1-1 conversations with every single person who lives here, we've recorded what they've said about what's working and not working for them and what they'd like to see done differently, we've sorted those (thousands of) comments into themes, we've held 'listening circles' to hear people's views on inclusion, integrity, and the purpose of meals, we've provided regular progress updates to our monthly General Meetings, the last of which, in July, said we would be bringing proposals to the September meeting. Which. We. Did... in the form of a draft new agreement, accompanying guidelines, and an evidence document explaining our findings and workings.

We followed the agreed process in submitting the agenda item, and we turned up on the day to present it. We knew that there would be some vegan resistance to some of the things we were proposing, and that there would doubtless be more work needed on these areas - around bringing meat and fish in from home (we weren't proposing that it should be cooked or even offered as part of communal meals), keeping it warm, and the whole Plates Situation - but we put them in because lots of people felt excluded by the current set of rules, and we wanted to propose softer boundaries and explore where these might be acceptable.

And then thirteen people -- most of the current Meals Team, most of the vegans, and a few of what I have come to think of as the Old Guard -- refused to agree the meeting agenda. They did not want this proposal presented, because they didn't like what was in it. No one's ever blocked a meeting item before, as far as I know. Nobody knew what to do. So we spent half an hour of a four hour meeting talking about whether we should be allowed to go ahead or not.

The whole thing was a deliberate and orchestrated attempt to derail things, and the fall out has been enormous. Nasty little emails have circulated with accusations about "some people's intentions", and anonymous pass-agg things have been stuck up on noticeboards in the night. We're now in the process of reviewing the process of the Meals Review. It's like living in a cross between Heathers and Brazil, with a bit of Life of Brian thrown in for good measure.

And it's exhausting. The best thing for me, personally, would be no communal meals at all, and a space we can use to do what we want in. Want to eat some brown pasta with some lentils (seriously, what is it about brown pasta?) Be my guest. But me, over here, I’m having a pint and an organic pork pie. But I wouldn't get close to proposing that, because I am an adult and I know I have to live with other people. And equally, if everyone else thought that meals were just awesomely excellent for them, I’d have backed off and worked out what to do next for myself, rather than proposing changes to a functioning system. But that’s not what happened.

This was a fair proposal, in that it took into consideration the views of the whole community, not just those who have the loudest voices or those who have been here the longest. I have no doubt that it would need to be modified before it could be agreed, but to say that it can’t be heard is... illuminating. There’s a reason we haven’t been able to debate this before now, and it’s because there are people who are scared of having the dominant orthodoxies challenged, in case they don't remain dominant. We don't want to talk about this, and we were here first, so *you* can't talk about it. It’s not been a fun couple of weeks.

We would never have deliberately moved to a hotbed of vegan zealotry**, trust me... though I do wonder if we should have asked, at our first communal meal, which was pretty awful, food-wise, if this is what people had in mind. We just assumed it was because everyone was tired after a full day of meetings and they couldn’t find the butter or the cheese, or, for that matter, the salt, the lemon juice, the Tabasco or the salad dressing. It's possible that if we had asked, and they'd said yes, we are happy to eat like this all the time, we wouldn't be here. This is no place for an Ocado pescatarian.

But we are here. And 'here' is a place where M says hello to Z in the street, in the interests of neighbourly living (he is a gentler soul than I, I am still burning with fury at being silenced after having done a job I was elected to do, which involved a fuckload of work), and was subjected to a rant about the obscenity of us proposing something that Z once nearly did himself***, that was in line with a definition of ‘vegan friendly’ that he put forward himself****, and how our proposal generally amounts to a “white collar hate crime”.

That’s a serious accusation. And, seriously, Z and his separatist mung bean manifesto can fuck right off. I give slightly less of a shit about how he feels than I did before I spent two years getting treated like a menstruating Bangladeshi peasant woman for wanting anchovies on my pizza, it’s true, but I’m still not the one around here doing the hating.

joella

*I have had some awesome vegan meals, truly, but they have been awesome because they’ve been awesome, not because they’ve been vegan. Most vegan meals are at the ‘this might be ok if it had some cheese on it’ end of things, in my experience. And you don't persuade people of the merits of veganism by making them cook food they don't want to eat, or eat food they wouldn't want to cook. 

** Not all the vegans are zealots. One of them is on the review team, and I now actively want to cook him dinner. 

*** One Friday night there was no meal arranged and another neighbour, let's call her X, suggested a chippy run. Our local fish and chip shop also does veggie burgers, which are vegan, so everyone had an option that was better than 'just chips', and Z went along with X to pick it up. They brought it back to the Common House, where Z suggested putting it all in the oven to keep warm... until (pescatarian) X pointed out that this is verboten under the August Agreement. Yet proposed use of the hob and oven for the keeping warm of non-vegetarian food is one of the things that is now 'obscene'. 

**** This comes from the 'Fellowship for Intentional Community' -- there are levels 0 (we kill vegans) to 10 (a vegan world) and v7 ("All dishes, including desserts, if not vegan, have sumptuous vegan equivalents; everything is well-labeled, and non-vegans don't consider it a hassle or burden to provide vegan food") is the level that was proposed by the vegans who live here. We thought that was fair and achievable, apart from the bit that describes how people should feel. You can't tell people that they won't find meeting your needs a pain in the arse, especially if you accuse them of hate crimes while they're attempting to find an inclusive way of doing just that.

To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower

The day we arrived on the Isle of Man I made a waxing appointment. It's one of my few grooming rituals, maybe the only one (bar moisturising every day) since I stopped dying my roots. Every four weeks, half leg and eyebrows, sorted. But I missed one, and hadn't managed to remake the appointment... I've not been up north long enough to be a regular with anyone yet, and I called a couple of times but didn't get a call back and I just got hairy. It's not the end of the world. But there was a beauty room right there in Peel, and she could fit me in at the end of the day on Monday. Perfect.

There's something about being a beauty therapist, you have to be good at talking to people or it can make a strangely intimate situation pretty awkward. And this one was very good... quite a lot younger than me (they nearly all are these days), a little self-conscious (also not uncommon) but at the same time self-assured - it takes skill and hard work to run that kind of business, and while she hadn't been set up on her own there for that long, she had big plans.

But what I found fascinating was that she was born in Peel and had lived there all her life... although she'd been 'across' (as she put it), I got the sense it hadn't been for very long and she had no great interest in it, or anywhere further afield. Her parents live up the road, and she and her sister have daughters the same age, who go to the same primary school as they did.

If I'd grown up in Peel it would have driven me CRAZY. A small town (village, really, even though it's got a castle and a cathedral, so is technically actually a city) on the other side of a small island from its capital, which itself isn't very big - essentially a place where the main story is a) the best part of 1000 years old or b) about a motorbike race that regularly kills people... I can't imagine the depths of anomie to which my teenage self would have sunk. I was once at a Mick Thomas gig with my friend Pete, and at the opening bars of The Lonely Goth he leant over and shouted 'this song always reminds me of you!' in my ear.

I protested that I was never (really) a Goth - I wore a lot of black, and I had hair like Robert Smith for a while, but there was no PVC in my wardrobe, and I did have other looks. But I know what he meant. I grew up in a small town - bigger than Peel, but with less to say for itself... also on the coast, also (in those days) playing very much second fiddle to Blackpool, where the bright lights were, and Preston, the nearest town of any size. It was intensely suburban. It was intensely provincial. I was intensely bored. There was (of course) nobody who understood me. Well, there were a couple of friends, and we would exchange books on radical feminism and tape albums for each other, but there was no critical mass of interesting, no cultural stimuli that I was drawn towards. I would play my Springsteen, my Leonard Cohen, my Suzanne Vega, and literally ache to get out of this place, to where there were highways, there were ideas, there were tea and oranges that came all the way from China.

And as soon as I could, I did. I went InterRailing with my friend R after my A-levels, and saw the Eiffel Tower and the Berlin Wall and the Anne Frank museum, slept in a train station a couple of times, and learnt that you *can indeed* live off bread, Laughing Cow cheese and cheap red wine. By my early 20s I'd spent three years at Cambridge, getting off my head in various new ways and absorbing as much horizon-expanding input as I could fit into my expanding horizon. Then I went out and saw as many different places as I could fit into a year on a shoestring. It wasn't wildly original, even then, but while there were Lonely Planet guidebooks in the early 90s, there wasn't any internet or any mobile phones, so you were on your own out there, even when there were two of you. And we went to the Pyramids and the Taj Mahal and Masada and the Great Wall of China and Lake Baikal, did a bungee jump in New Zealand, spent Christmas Eve on Had Rin beach, travelled to mountains and lakes and jungles and deserts, nearly died of typhoid (that was just me, but my Significant Ex did get dysentery three times *and then* giardia), recovered, had some meals I remember to this day for their fabulousness (a Yemeni lunch in Israel cooked by my cousin's husband's mother, my first masala dosa in what was then still Bombay, a fish and chilli salad near the Thai-Burmese border) or for their awfulness (instant noodles in Australian hostels, the food desert that was Moscow in 1993, 'vegetarian' options with bits of fur and claw in in China).

I'm not claiming any of this changed the world, apart from messing with the ozone layer more than staying at home would have done, but I couldn't get enough of it. And I didn't stop there, and I still haven't... when I joined NGO X I said I'd stay till I'd been able to see more of Africa than Egypt. Fourteen years later I've got a yellow fever vaccination certificate in my passport, together with stamps from South Africa, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania and Mozambique. Not forgetting Sudan. As if anyone could forget Sudan. And if you said to me tomorrow, hey, fancy a couple of weeks' work in Dakar / Dhaka / Dili I'd still be there like a bear.

And yet. As the Charlene song so beautifully put it, I've been to Nice and the isles of Greece, and I've sipped champagne on a yacht. But does it make any actual difference? Am I a better person than if I'd never left Lytham St Annes?

I think probably yes. I wanted to know what was out there in the world. No doubt having the option to find out was, and still is, a huge privilege, but if I hadn't I think I'd have been miserable. I've never actually *lived* anywhere but England, and I've never wanted to... I've thought about it, but a summer in the isles of Greece put me right off. And yet here I am, living 40 miles from where I grew up, less than 30 miles from where I was born. And yes, I have a fair idea how lucky I am.

I first came across this (I now know famous) TS Eliot quote on the wall of my ex-mother-in-common-law's house in 1989.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Twenty five years later, I can see he had a point.

And yet. I admire you, girl from Peel.

joella

I can stand the rain

I'm having an interesting 2014 and I want to do a better job of writing about it than I have managed so far. I keep saying this, so I am making no promises, not even to myself, but what I do know is that there's not a single blog post I've ever written, apart from the ones that got deleted the morning after the night before, that I regret writing. Not even the one where I admitted to voting for the Respect Party once (it was a long time ago). Or the other one where I said I thought Tony Blair wasn't such a bad guy (also a long time ago). You live, you learn.

This morning, M got up at 7 and went for a run with our neighbour A. On the way back, they jumped in the river. He came home, had a bath, and at 8.45 he went out to an Empathy Circle to practise his new NVC skills. He came back from that, cooked me some cheesy scrambled egg on homemade toast, then cycled off into town to donate his blood platelets. It's fair to say he's thriving in the North, and I couldn't be happier about that, but today, if I didn't love him, I'd hate him for all that joie de vivre.

Because I Have A Cold. And it's a nasty one. I got through a lot of last year on adrenaline and fury, and I think I may now be paying the price for that. I woke up this morning with the kind of sore throat that comes from a night of swollen glands and snoring. I could barely speak. While M was out running, I fell back to sleep and dreamt that all I could do was honk like a goose. The harder I tried, the more I coughed, the more agitated I got, the louder I honked. He came back from his run and brought me a glass of red wine. This is my fate, I realised in my dream, I will lie here drinking wine and honking, while everyone else runs up hills and swims in rivers.

I finally rose around 10. I spent the rest of the day moving very slowly, because I Have A Cold, but moving nonetheless (apart from the Long Nap between 17.30 and 19.30). I tidied up the kitchen, cleaned all the surfaces and did a load of laundry. I listened to the wedding drama on the Archers. I walked up the hill to the part-time Post Office to return the dress I bought in the Toast mini-sale that, if I'm honest, I knew probably wouldn't fit me. I bought some Old English sausages from our local butcher (aka Pete the Meat). They have beef, pork and lamb all in one sausage. I'm may be new to meat eating but that strikes me as the glorious opposite of horse in your lasagne.

So I was hardly qualifying, even on my own terms, as a General Total Failure* But when it started raining, I silently rejoiced. I love the rain. I always have, though I haven't always loved walking to the Post Office in it. But, unless you're homeless or on a camping holiday, the rain gives you a break. Whatever you're doing, if you get it done in the rain you get more points. And if you choose to stay in and read a novel instead, well hey, that's just fine. Rain makes me feel like a natural person. So, let it rain on me. And Kimya.

joella

*My Significant Ex went to Eton, and this was a category used by one of the masters when reading out exam results. It's stayed with me, in an Aim Higher Than GTF sense.