On womb linings and associated detritus

At the end of last month, the Guardian seemed to have its own endometriosis week. I wasn't quite sure where the 'news hook' for this came from, and initially I wondered why it was making headlines in a week when surely we should have been talking about socialism. But then my endometrial tissue has taken up far more of my evenings over the last 30 years, so I figured I'd ride the wave while it lasts. 

I quite possibly have endometriosis. I certainly have, or used to have, the level of period pain that would indicate it. For years, I would hide away for hours every month, writhing, sobbing, furious and terrified, waiting for the codeine to bite me, the whisky to dull me, and my sanity to return. Few people ever got to see that, and the ones who did often didn't quite believe it. For each of my university exam terms, I went on the Pill, despite the side effects (weight gain, spots, tits like grapefruit) so I wouldn't be bleeding during the wrong week. Later, it affected my choice of job, the hours I could work, and the length of commute I could contemplate. I can tell if you are experiencing the kind of pain I used to experience. It turns you grey, you can't think straight, and you would genuinely lose a tooth, or a toe, or a family member of medium significance, if it would only just go away. 

The first time I "did something about it" I was 30, and it was because for a year I had a job with private health cover. I felt that the cover meant they could demand more of me, so I should demand more too. I had a vaginal ultrasound and then an investigative laparoscopy in a v swanky hospital in Oxford. I ordered a smoked trout salad which they brought me at 3 am. I remember the genuinely lovely gynaecologist who told me that my uterus was retroverted (no big deal except when it is) and there were a few 'possible endometrial spots' but he couldn't be sure without more invasive investigation and he didn't think it was necessary unless I did. Which I didn't, as I'd handed in my notice because I'd got my job at NGO X and my private health cover was about to cease. 

But it was useful information, and I looked after myself a bit better after that: watch how much you drink when you're premenstrual, watch how you plan your holidays, never make any major life decisions when you're within a week of bleeding (when you're actually bleeding, major life decisions are the least of it, so no worries). If you have to go home, go home. 

Which saw me through, mostly, until I hit my 40s, when shit totally went pear shaped. One of the few good things about my dreadful awful periods was that they were pretty reliable, timing-wise, and they were never that heavy (though of course that could be because the bleeding was happening in other places). I could tell the instant they started, often before anything had appeared. I wasn't one of those people who randomly bled through their clothes. Until I was. They used to come, nearly kill me, then go. Then they started coming, going, then coming back for more. They were slower and darker and heavier and bleaker and, while not so acute, generally just a whole lot worse. 

This coincided with the beginning of our Great Move North, so I would regularly (but not predictably) find myself sobbing in train toilets, improvising san pro from wodges of cheap-as-possible paper towel. There was one long, dark bike ride in the rain, back to a slightly damp room in a house with no warmth, that I will never forget. I took to carrying supplies - pads and drugs and my little microwaveable heat bag, a long-ago present from a long-ago boyfriend - up and down the country, just in case. It wasn't life threatening, but it was unutterably miserable. I can't remember what sent me to my GP, the changes were incremental but something must have tipped me over. She was marvellous - she was always marvellous - but she said that she wasn't the practice expert on 40+ hormones, and I should speak to Doctor Claire. 

Doctor Claire rang me a couple of days later. I was sitting on a bench at Radley station, waiting for a train. Can you talk? she said. Sure, I said. M was sitting next to me. Later, he told me (and he only heard half the conversation), wow, I had no idea. And he had been living with me for over 10 years. Doctor Claire recommended a Mirena coil, but I wasn't keen on that. I have heard about how they get those things in, I said, and let's just say I'm not going there without sedation. I haven't had children, remember. Well, fair enough, she said. We can do that (the sedation, not the children), but maybe we should check out your tolerance to the hormones first. Try this mini-pill for three months. If you have any problems you can stop, and if it helps then we can either knock you out and stick a Mirena up you (I paraphrase), or give you an implant. 

The next week, I went to pick up my prescription. The advice I'd had from Doctor Claire was that this particular pill had a transformative effect in around a third of cases, made naff all difference for another third, and for the final third, would only make things worse. You do not want to read the list of possible side effects. I thought myself a person who did not want to take hormones, having felt the combined Pill's side effects a huge price to pay for admittedly manageable periods. I knew myself to be unlucky in blood. I was not expecting to be in the magical third. But hats off to Doctor Claire, who at that point I had not actually met. By the time I did meet her, I had taken to singing 'Wo-oh, it's only Cerazette but I like it, like it, yes I do'. 

This drug CHANGED MY LIFE. Since I started taking it, over three years ago now, I have not had a period. Not a one. Not even a little bit of one. Not a twinge. No PMS. No pain. This is like being a child. Or a woman without a womb. Or a woman who's had the menopause. Or maybe a man. Someone who feels the same, every day of the month. Who doesn't get taken out of circulation three or four days at a time, and who can trust her own judgement from week to week. I don't shout at people. I don't sob. I don't think 'tonight, I will walk down the middle of the road and see if I get hit by a bus, and if I do get hit by a bus, I will see if it hurts more than this'. 

Full disclosure: I rarely got through my PMS and period pain without accessing other mind-altering substances, mainly alcohol and prescription painkillers, and usually both. If I'd been all about the flower remedies and the homeopathy, I might have handled it differently, but there is still no way on this sweet earth that I would have actively enjoyed riding that crimson, latterly sepia, wave. I made many efforts to accentuate the positives of the emotional rollercoaster (to be fair, I have done some excellent ranting, some of which can be accessed via the anger and hormones tags below), and gained meaningful awareness that one's mental state can be affected by things produced by one's body as well as things one has consumed. But with hindsight that was all set against a feeling that the alternative was weight gain, spots, and tits like grapefruit. And the slightly lobotomised dullness that came with all of that. I thought that this pain was part of the female experience. It was part of the miracle of life. It should, as far as possible, when it's not making you want to cut out your own uterus with a carving knife, be embraced. We're feminists, remember? This is WOMANHOOD. Not long after we met, M bought me a patchouli-scented second-hand copy of The Wise Wound. He meant well, but after much reflection I concluded that the hidden energies of my own moon cycle can basically do one.  

For realz. As one of the lucky third of Cerazetters, what I feel now is only the absence of bad things*. I have to struggle to remember them. I only remembered during the writing of this post what it was that first took me to the GP. I'd had three dreadful periods on the trot and I was beginning to think that I could only wear black pants and trousers and should have some kind of ceremonial bonfire for all the others. I was also getting through so many of those little packs of tissues (mostly for the crying, but also for the emergency san pro improvisation) that I'd started buying the shoebox-sized multi-packs. So I went to the doctor, the excellent doctor, and she said 'how can I help today Jo?' and I said 'I'd like a hysterectomy please, can I get one on the NHS or if not how much does it cost?'. 

So she did her excellent job, and Doctor Claire prescribed the Cerazette, and three months later I went to see her. She said, how are you getting on with it then? I said 'I think this may be the best thing that has ever happened to me in the whole of my life'. She said, well let's not mess with it then. 

And three-plus years later, here I am. I've kept all the empty blister packs as souvenirs (yes, really). Every six months I ask for a new prescription at my new GPs, and they book me in for a check up. My blood pressure is always a bit high the first time they take it, and I explain that it's because I'm worried that it will be too high and they won't give me a new prescription. How are you getting on with it? they say. It's the best thing that ever happened to me in the whole of my life, I say. And they write me a new prescription, and my blood pressure drops. 

joella

*I do sometimes think I may be a little harder than I used to be. But then stopping bleeding is not the only thing that's happened to me in the last three years. 

Me and JC

So, Jeremy Corbyn. I've never been a member of the Labour party, although I've always voted Labour in general elections. And this one was no exception, though they basically had to drag the vote out of me. I wanted to vote Green, because their policies were closest to my heart, but several thoughtful people counselled me otherwise, as this was a marginal Con-Lab seat that Labour could have won. And in the end I went to listen to the candidates, and I liked the Labour candidate the best. I'm sorry she lost and I'm glad I voted for her. I'm sorry Labour lost and I think it's a tragedy for the country. I liked Red Ed, the man and his politics, but I can totally see why many people couldn't see him as prime minister, and it was a pretty wet campaign overall. That stone. That sandwich. That mug. That van. And the whole messaging on the economy. It was there for the losing, with hindsight, and it was lost. And Ed had to go. 

My interest in Corbyn was first piqued by Cat Smith, new Labour MP for Lancaster & Fleetwood (I like to think of her as my MP, as my actual MP says nothing to me about my life), who nominated him straight away, boom. And it's just grown from there really. Ten years ago I spent three years working for NGO X's UK Poverty Programme and I learnt a huge amount about poverty and inequality in the UK. It's appalling, and over the last five years it's only got worse, and over the next five, well no prizes for guessing who austerity will bite the hardest. And since I moved back to the north west from the bright shiny Oxford bubble, with its artisanal sourdough, its Mini-driving students, its insane house prices and its, again with hindsight, extraordinary complacency, I've seen a lot more of that biting happening around me. 

And you know, #poorlivesmatter. Of course you know, you're my friends, you're not dicks. But it's easy to forget, when you're not living it and neither is anyone you know*. I'm ashamed of what this government is doing to people who were barely able to cope *before* this ideology-driven onslaught. There are plenty of economists arguing that there's nothing necessary, or inevitable, about austerity. It's a political choice, and we need to be putting forward better choices, ones that people who can see past the end of their own noses (and that's fucking loads of us, right) can, and will, vote for. 

And that's where Mr Corbyn has come in. Everything he's said on austerity, I've been 'why hasn't the Labour party been saying this all along?'. How on earth did the shadow Cabinet come not to vote against the Welfare Bill? What sort of bullshit opposition is abstention? Jesus. 

So there's that. And then the renationalisation of the railways, which is such an eye-wateringly obvious thing to do I would put it on the Jo Stone. And the buses. The way we run the buses in this country, outside London, is FUBAR. Come ON. It's 2015. We can do better. 

And then there's housing. You don't have to be a Marxist to know that the glorious free market will never, ever, deliver decent affordable housing to people in low paid jobs. Never has, anywhere on earth, never will. And when I stop to think about it, which is often (this being one of the things that *did* affect a lot of people in Oxford, and affects Morecambe in a totally different way) it makes me HOPPING SPITTING MAD that all that lovely housing benefit, which is public money raised by taxing the securely employed and housed, goes, in many cases, to exploitative dickwads who couldn't give less of a shit about the quality of the housing they are providing to the insecurely employed and housed. Market forces can do one here. Get in the fucking sea. 

So Jeremy C is a tick tick tick for me on those things. Other things, I'd say I'm broadly in agreement on the big picture, though clearly more work is needed on a lot of the foreign policy stuff. 

But that brings me to the man himself. I love the collaborative process he used to put together his Northern Future manifesto. I love the way he 'doesn't do personal' (something I totally fail at myself). I love the way he's a Marxist and he uses the royal We. He's not in it for the personal glory, and there seems to be a remarkable consensus, even among people who hate his politics, that has him as a decent guy who is doing this because he's the best person to do it right now, and hell, someone's got to. 

And yet there's been an immense 'anyone but Jeremy' Labour establishment backlash, culminating this week with the whole 'we want to be a party of government not a party of protest' thing.

Well, here's the other thing, If he wasn't standing, I wouldn't be voting. I have never in my whole little life seen anyone galvanise the young and disaffected like this. All those people who didn't vote. All those people who thought mainstream politics had nothing to offer them. All those people who couldn't make time for getting their vote out because they were too busy being ill / disabled / working three jobs on poverty wages and what was the point anyway? I love to vote, I've said so many times, but I get to participate. I get to matter. I am one fucking lucky individual and if there's a credible politician out there who speaks for and will act for the people who don't have my privilege, then that person gets my vote. 

And I don't appreciate the patronising tone of the party grandees and many of the mainstream media commentators with this 'oh you naive things, this man could never win in 2020' line. Really? And the other candidates could? All three of them are basically the same age as me, we have similar-ish lower middle-class public sector backgrounds, we all went to Oxbridge in the era when you could leave university with no debt at all if you drank cider and didn't buy too many books. I should identify with at least one of them. But I don't. They seem to have had a collective charisma bypass, though if you twisted my arm really hard and said I had to go to the pub with one of them, it would be Yvette. Obvs. And if *I* can't warm to them, people I could have read Marxism Today, drunk Newcastle Brown and danced to Free Nelson Mandela with, what hope is there for the rest of the Great British Public? Jeremy doesn't even go to the pub, and he's 20 years older than me, and I still think he's the best woman for the job. 

So Im voting for the politics of hope. I really can't see what else to do. YMMV, and I may eat my hat, but then again, it could be the Best Thing Ever. 

joella

* Speaking for myself here, not making assumptions about anyone reading this. I know people in precarious situations, but nobody without some support from friends and family.

Creating new micro-rituals

A month or so ago we went to visit the FinnFans. They used to live in Swansea, but now they live in Norwich. We used to live in Oxford, but now we live in Ecoville. K and I talked about this a lot, in fact we've been talking about it for years, as we both knew we were moving for a couple of years before it actually happened, this massive disruption on the event horizon that you can't stop and you can't really prepare for, you just know it's coming, and then it does.

And then you're somewhere else. You've left the town where they know what you're like and don't mind, where you know where to buy the right size bin liners (Boswells), or Dr Hauschka Melissa Day Cream (also Boswells), where to get a Thai curry with a pint of real ale (The Old Tom), and which bus to catch where. You emerge, blinking, onto strange streets, and you think 'what do I do here? what am I like here?'

Moving to Ecoville had its own special challenges in the early days of course, including living on a building site, not having a postcode, not having a car or a washing machine or a phone line or internet access, but any big move is going to have some of those. And then there was the shock and awe of the Food Wars and the Parking Skirmishes and the tedious-yet-terrifying prospect of spending the next x years arguing with the vigilante defenders of the two legs better stuff. But I've covered that*. Oh yeah, and my mum died.

K's also had seismic stuff to deal with above and beyond moving city. But we've all been where we are for a while now, and what I'm left thinking about is how hard it is, how long it takes, to feel that a new place is home. Not a new house, especially, I bonded with our new house almost immediately, but a new place.

On a sunny weekend afternoon in Oxford, we would probably go to the allotment for a bit. A while later, someone would go and get some beers, or we'd retire to the Rusty Bicycle. On a cloudy Monday morning between May & September, I'd almost certainly cycle to Hinksey Pool. Afterwards, there would be coffee and one of those little Portuguese custard cakes at the cafe round the corner on Abingdon Rd. I might meet ex-housemate S in town, in the cafe at Modern Art Oxford, or latterly at Zappi's on St Michael's St, and we'd mooch around semi-aimlessly with whichever of her children was of the appropriate age for mooching with. These things didn't feel like rituals at the time, and indeed they were fairly fluid, in that they came and went and changed (no longer does a Friday night inevitably end with after-hours messiness in the Kari King - there are no after hours any more, there is no more Kari King, and anyway I am too old), but they were how we engaged with the city.

And a lot of our friends would be doing those things too, so you'd bump into people, or make an easy arrangement to meet up, maybe. It was a 'this is how we live here' thing. When we moved, we didn't have them anymore, and we were lost.

But slowly, we're making new ones. I call them micro-rituals. Some of them overlap with Project Anywhere But Here, but micro-rituals are more about grounding than escape.

One of the first, and maybe still the best, is walking to Woodies. Woodies is a breezeblock hut in the car park at the Crook O'Lune, where you can get a bacon roll and a hot Vimto, Friday to Sunday, ten till three. Initially it seemed a strange place to fête, as I didn't eat bacon (though they will do you a beanburger) and hadn't had hot Vimto for many years, and, frankly, it's a hut in a car park which is hardly ever open. But I have come to love it. The bacon rolls are excellent, though I do still go for a beanburger from time to time, hot Vimto is the business, especially in the winter, and it's round the corner from one of the most glorious views in Lancashire, if not The World. You get there by walking down the river, through meadow and woodland, then across a field full of sheep. It's a sad day indeed when I can't be tempted to walk to Woodies.

A much less charming walk, but with a much more charming destination, is a trip to the Red Door. The Red Door is a cafe and gallery that opened almost exactly a year ago in what had for a long time been a derelict pub. The Red Door has changed our lives. Its opening hours are slightly more generous than Woodies', and although it doesn't have the view, what it does have is an Aga and a proper coffee machine, from which flow flat whites and fine, fine food. We love to lunch at the Red Door. There's a dog, a woodburner, interesting things to read, good music, great people. And in summer, a courtyard garden out the back with a little brook running past. Let's just say, when the going gets tough, the tough go to the Red Door for some quiche like their Significant Ex's mum used to make**.

And there's the allotment, of course. The allotment is a source of pleasure, exercise, glut-based creativity (rhubarb and lentil curry, anyone?) and easily accessible escape. It takes work, both physical and mental, and taking it on was a commitment I was not sure I was ready to make, but actually it's been a sanity saver. Five minutes walk away is a different world, where there's always stuff to do, and you always feel better for having done a bit of it. We go up there together, and spend an hour or two working on different things. We may barely say a word, but we come away happier.

Sometimes we go for a pint on the way home from the allotment, as our local pub is at the bottom of the steps in the far corner of the site. I'd like to say that going to our local pub is one of our micro-rituals, but it's never quite made it. I'm grateful to *have* a local pub, don't get me wrong, and we went through a phase of having our dinner there every couple of weeks, but it was just a phase. The vegetarian main course option is lasagne with garlic bread and chips, or as my vegetarian friend M puts it, carb with carb and carb. As I say, please don't close, local pub o'mine (and to be fair I am sure I give it more business than most of my neighbours), but I await your discovery of the pea shoot, the avocado, and the playlist that stretches past 80s greatest hits.

On the other hand, the local shops have revealed their micro-ritual charms, albeit slowly. Central to them (charm-wise, not geography-wise) is the butcher, who we know as Pete the Meat. Pete the Meat sells good meat (fell-bred beef and lamb, free range pork and chicken) but also vegetables, salad, bread rolls, pies, potted shrimps, and other local delights. If only he sold wine. The newsagents has good ice cream. The fish and chip shop has good fish and chips. The general store is very much at the Happy Shopper end of things, which is something of a disappointment (terrible wine), but it does exist. Likewise the pharmacy, the very part time Post Office and the ultra part time library. We are at the edge of viable walkable provisioning, but once you have the opening hours memorised, if you don't work on Mondays you can get a fair bit of it done.

This all sounds like it's stretched a little thin, compared with the delights of Oxford. And to be honest, it is. But living here is a fair bit slower, way, way cheaper, and I spend a lot more time outside, or inside looking out, at the trees and the birds and the river. I tell M that I would like to spend a year reading the London Review of Books and making art. That would have been unthinkable five years ago, in that I literally would not have thought it, but now it feels only a small (mostly financial) stretch away. Who knew? And we have friends who live next door, who come round to watch Orange is the New Black with us in their pyjamas. I haven't done communal pyjama-based television since we used to get stoned and watch Morse in a companionable heap at Cambridge. It's wonderful (though I am yet to convince said friends, or indeed M, of the merits of Endeavour, sadly).

So I can't say it's always existentially comfortable, and when I'm down I struggle being so far away from the easy pleasures of urban living, but I am getting something from re-casting those same needs differently. I"m not sure it's better for me yet, but I have some faith that it will turn out that way. If I can only handle the neighbours.

joella

* Well, kind of. I have more to say, but the next Ecoville update will be positive, in the interests of balance.
** My own mum did not have an Aga, and rarely made quiche. Her mum also did not have an Aga, but made a lot of quiche. Unfortunately, it being the 70s, she used to put it straight in the deep freeze, to be defrosted months later into something resembling an egg-based jelly with bits in. Never freeze your quiche, kids.

Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness

It's my birthday today. I was born exactly 25 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, which anniversary is now marked every year as Holocaust Memorial Day. Today we remember the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis, and all the other people that regime set about systematically annihilating because they were gay or Roma or mentally 'defective' or Communist or or or. We also remember those who died in subsequent genocides, in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur. Et al.

HMD was first marked in the UK in 2001. Until then, I had no idea of the date's significance. Initially, I was pretty pissed off that it was on my birthday. But I've been coming round.

This is me and my grandma in 1988, when I spent three months in Israel during my year off. She was born in 1920, and left Germany for Palestine, with her father and siblings, in 1928.

So she survived. My dad got born - during the war, when Auschwitz was still in full swing. Some years later, I got born too.

Today, I missed my mum a bit, had a lovely lunch with M and my dad, had a brief love-in with Otto the dachshund, bought some chicken noodle soup in Booths, and came home to do an hour or so's work. I could have gone to the HMD event in Lancaster, where one of Anish Kapoor's 70 candles for 70 years was being lit. But I went to yoga instead, and did my remembering there.

Check our matching noses. Keep the memory alive.

joella

More words about buildings and food

Happy New Year to all my readers! You're wanting a communal meals update, right? Sorry to disappoint, but let's just say me too. Getting on four months after the Fish Finger Hate Crime Affair, we still don't have a new Meals Agreement. Or a new Meals Policy. Or enough communal meals for some people's liking (though still too many for some other people's liking). And still many dark evenings with a dark Common House, while we sit severally and variously in our dimly-lit eco-homes, thinking several and various dark thoughts.

But hey, hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way. And it's not all bad. There *has* been the review of the process of the review process, which didn't reveal any hate crime (phew), but did say that maybe the remit could have been clearer (yup), maybe the Meals Review Team could have had more process support (yup)... oh, and that just possibly we -- big we, not Meals Review Team we -- should have anticipated that by even raising certain issues, or, in some cases, any issues at all, we were essentially picking a giant scab off a giant flesh wound.

Yeah. That. Let's just say that if I had a fish finger / caper / anchovy / gherkin / jar of mayo / ciabatta roll / little gem lettuce / sprinkling of black pepper for everyone who's said 'it's not really about food, though, is it', I'd have a mighty fine fish finger sandwich.

*takes fish finger sandwich break lasting several weeks*

No, it's not really about food. I've identified four things I think it *is* about, and only one of them -- the extent to which being vegan/vegetarian friendly goes beyond providing high quality food for vegans and vegetarians and into guaranteeing entirely meat- and fish- free communal space (some of it sometimes? all of it sometimes? some of it all times? all of it all times? if I eat a fish finger sandwich in the Common House and I'm the only one in there, does a tree fall in the forest?) -- has anything to do with what any of us actually has for dinner.

The other three (in my personal view, YMMV, definitely not agreed by consensus etc) are...

• Equity in current work contribution. At the moment, we're all supposed to do three hours a week on essential cohousing tasks, *and* cook once a month and clean up once a month. Some people clearly do more than three hours a week, and some clearly do less. A lot of people, in fact most people, even more clearly (because we have the numbers) cook and clean up less than once a month. This causes huge resentment. But does it make sense to require the same number of hours of everyone, regardless of how often they are on site / how old or strong or fit and well they are / how many hours a week they have other paid or unpaid work commitments? And should someone who eats a common meal once a fortnight be required to cook and clean as often as someone who eats three meals a week? 
• Equity in historic work (and other) contribution. Some people spent years of time and effort and energy, in some cases to the point of burnout, fighting seriously hefty odds to get the project off the ground. They also took a much greater financial risk, and carried the majority of the project load all the way through the build. Those who came along later paid more, in some cases a lot more, for their houses, and inevitably had less say in the design and build decisions. That's just how it is, as in, it couldn't have been any other way, but it isn't necessarily fair and it's hard to know what we can do about that. 
• Adherence to policy / agreements about how we live here that we may or may not have been directly involved in making. There was an explicit 'policy lock' in force for several years, so as not to deflect energy from the build, but I don't think anyone really knew what would happen at the end of it -- what's non-negotiable? What's totally negotiable? What's somewhere in between? And who decides? Yes, there were policies and agreements written back in 2006 about cars and food and smoking and pets (all available here if you're interested) but back then the plan was that it would be an urban project with around 24 homes. We ended up as 41 homes by a river, on the edge of a village, with lots of wildlife but a shitty bus service. And we're all new here. So what should we change? And do we all have the same ability to influence that? 

... and they’re about fairness and power and justice. The big stuff gets writ small in pizza toppings. We have some big cracks, and what the Meals Review did was remind us that in some cases we'd merely papered over them. That was expedient when we had houses to build (and sell) but now... well here we all are and what the hell are we going to do about it?

Well, it turns out we are going to approach it very, very carefully and very, very slowly. We will have conversations, but they will be very, very tightly managed. There will be meetings, but they will be very, very heavily facilitated. It will take a long time, but, ideally, no one will cry, or leave the room, or accuse another person of a god-damn hate crime.

Part of me is 'holy shit, we really have to do it like this?' but another part of me got accused of a god-damn hate crime for trying to do it in a more ‘given that we know all this, let’s get it all out on the table’ kind of a way. *And* that wasn't the end of the super-helpful 'feedback'. SO I get that we have to do it like this. No, really, I do.

No, *really*, I do. No, really, I *do*.

*checks privilege*

*takes another fish finger sandwich break lasting several weeks*

I might write a book about this one day, having assigned elemental pseudonyms to the key players (every community needs a Boron). But I might not. And really, I do know that here, I should basically Write About Me. So here are my two biggest thoughts from my first four months as a fish finger hate-crimeist.

1. Food is way more complex than I thought. 
We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're a long way past having any kind of 'natural' relationship with food. It's all about choices -- these may be heavily constrained in various ways, but anyone who fancies themselves some shade of green, or anyone who cares about animal welfare, or anyone who cares about their own health in a specific way, or anyone who has body-image issues, or anyone who has a physical or mental health issue which affects, or is affected by, what and how they eat, or anyone who has food allergies or intolerances ... all these variables and more need to be held in balance when deciding what to have for dinner.

These are mostly #firstworldproblems, for sure, but they all play their part in how we relate to food. And the more people you're trying to cook for, the harder it gets to find a way of doing it that works for everyone: if it's just me, and I have the time, money and skills, I can eat exactly what I like. If there are two of us, then I have another set of needs to take into account. Once you get to four, you're into complex territory (ask anyone who cooks for a family), and hell, we're looking at forty, sometimes more. Some needs are harder to cater for than others, some are in conflict with others, some are seen as 'normal', and some, at least here, are seen as... I don't know, 'better'. It's not an easy problem to solve, and logic and proportion can really go to shit sometimes.

Until I got here, unless I was in sub-Saharan Africa I thought I was pretty easy to feed (and being difficult to feed in sub-Saharan Africa is one of the reasons I stopped being vegetarian. I'm still an AVML on the way there though). My mum used to get all the major food groups into me without me complaining much; I have been able to feed myself, and indeed others, quite happily since I was a student (others may not have been overwhelmed by Super Noodles with tuna, tomatoes and Tabasco, but a variant of this is still a staple 10 minute dinner in these parts); and M has been very successfully feeding me for years. In terms of mass catering, I didn't have the best experience of school dinners, but by then I was a vegetarian, so it was cheese salad every day, and always the same cheese. But I managed reasonably well with Hall dining at Cambridge (soup and chips if I couldn't bear the vegetarian option, they weren't so great in the early 90s), and I actively enjoyed the food side of my brief kibbutz experience. Olives! Proper tomatoes! Coleslaw! Vegetarian schnitzel! But I find our communal meals genuinely profoundly disappointing and actually pretty stressful, so clearly there's something else at play.

I'm not 100% sure what it is. But it has to do with the fact that we live in a world where many, many people, especially many, many women, have a miserable, disordered relationship with food, and one of the things I am proudest of is that I am not one of them. I have been on a diet precisely once in my life, when I was 14, and it was a bleak experience. I got the recipes out of the back pages of a book my mum had bought me about Becoming A Woman. I ate meals without the good bits for a couple of weeks, maybe not even that long, and all I could think about was food. I drank black coffee and smoked out the window to dull the hunger pangs. It was terrible, and I decided that it was worse than Being Fat (which actually I wasn't, but I thought I was, not having a thigh gap). So I vowed that all the effort and energy I would otherwise put into Being Thin I would put into Not Caring About Not Being Thin, and that I would henceforth get on with enjoying my food.

And it worked, and I have, and I do. I don't weigh stuff, I don't count stuff, I don't buy low fat cheese, I don't drink slimline tonic. I've never done a 5:2 or a juice cleanse or tried to live off cabbage soup or milk-free milkshakes or egg-white omelettes. I also don't weigh myself. I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't secretly love to be a thin woman (I'd have to live on another planet to be immune to *that* particular message), but I stand by my adolescent conclusion that a *lot* of things taste better than skinny feels. Food is GREAT. Food is one of the best things in the world, and being able to enjoy its delights with largely intact self esteem (I don't feel good about myself when I eat a whole box of Roka Cheese Crispies in one go, to be fair, but I will happily eat a butter pie) makes me One Of The Luckiest People Alive.

But an important part of that is not excluding things -- or at least not excluding things that I love to eat. Once I get into excluding territory then I start to lose my balance. This meal isn't a great meal. It's just calories. What's the point? I mean, we *need* calories, but I don't need as many as I eat, clearly, so why am I eating this? Should I eat it? I get anxious going off in that direction. That way Issues With Food lie.

The things I love to eat have changed radically over the years. As a child it was sausages in finger rolls with tomato ketchup. I can still remember the texture of the rolls, spread with butter from the fridge, the slightly burnt sausages. And vegetable biryanis with omelette baked onto the rice, I bloody loved those. As a teenager, it was Marks & Spencer cheese ravioli with garlicky tomato sauce. I was gutted when they discontinued it. Also those layered salads with cheese or prawns on top. Glad to see those have survived. My 20s were about making friends with chilli and becoming a serious fan of Tom Yam Goong. But it was also when I learnt to cook for myself and discovered the joy of a nut roast with buttered pasta, and Greek lentil soup. And then I met M, who is a fantastic cook and loves food as much as I do, if not more. Ranchos huevos, carrot fritters, smoked tofu carbonara, all manner of curries and noodles and salads and soups and stews. And that's all *before* I started eating meat and he could devil me some kidneys.

But essentially I am about the umami, the contrast of tastes and textures, the sharpness and the spice. I like my food with salt in and my salads dressed. I am not a fan of the sweet (which has in honesty probably saved me from being the size of a house) or the creamy or the heavy or the bland. Many of the things I now love (kale with chilli and garlic! raita! smoked mackerel! pomegranate seeds! avocado! almonds!) are "healthy", but I do not love them for their "healthiness", I just love them. Likewise, many are vegetarian, even vegan, but many are not.

And there's the how as well as the what. I like to eat my dinner in a calm environment, once I've decompressed from the day, with good lighting, off a nice plate, with a knife and fork that match, and a napkin (paper is fine, I'm never sure about how often to wash cloth ones). We usually have a glass or two of wine, and some of our best conversations. If there are four or six or eight of us, (or three or five or seven) even better. I am not so great if I'm eating alone, but I still set food out on the plate with care, sit at a table, listen to Radio 4, think some thoughts.

So I have realised that I make my food choices based on taste and a very personal perception of 'goodness' (avoiding foie gras and air-freighted asparagus, for example, but maybe not avoiding sashimi or out of season green beans if they're Fairtrade), rather than because it's healthy, or because there are things it doesn't contain. That's how I like to eat. That's how M likes to eat. That's how a lot of people I used to eat with like to eat. I kind of imagined it's how everyone would like to eat, if their circumstances permitted, so *there's* a big fat learning point. Another big fat learning point is that if my relationship with food is to stay healthy and happy and un-disordered, and by extension if *I* am to stay healthy and happy and un-disordered, I think it might be how I *need* to eat.

I just can't do food I don't like at a time I don't want to eat in an environment I don't enjoy eating in. I mean, of course I could if I had to, if I didn't have a choice, but I do have a choice, and because I do, I can't. If I can't have something, I just miss it more and want it more. And *that* way also Issues With Food lie.

That may not be as convincing a reason as some can produce for wanting things a certain way, but it's the best I can do. And at this point I'm not even trying to persuade anyone that how I like to eat is the way to go, just to be left alone to cook and eat in peace. I *did* like the idea of shared meals. I still do. Just not these ones.

2. Don't put all your eggs in one basket
This time last year, I didn't have a lot of energy. I was low on spoons. I was still very much  dealing with the trauma and grief of my mum's death, which itself was layered on the disruption and uncertainty of moving up north. I'd left behind old friends and familiar places and decent internet (not to mention proper sushi) for a whole new way of doing things, and then the world suddenly tilted on its axis, never to tilt back. It felt like I'd fallen off something, hadn't landed, and didn't know who I would be when I did. I still don't really know how I didn't break anything, or myself, though there were definitely a few times when I came close.

As the days lengthened, and the distance grew, I did start to feel a little resurgence, and a few more spoons appeared. It was unpredictable, but it felt like it was going in the right direction. I'd pulled right back from a lot of cohousing things (apart from managing the laundry tokens, because that's a job you can do sobbing at 3 am) and I was feeling that I should start re-engaging. This place doesn't run itself. So while I didn't nominate myself for the Meals Review Team, when lots of other people did, I thought, well, it's a dirty job but someone's got to do it, and it looks like it's got my name on it.

From this vantage point, I mostly* wish I hadn't thought that. Because I didn't really have the energy. Or rather, it took all the spare energy I had. We did an extraordinary amount of work over a bunch of lovely summer days when I could have been digging my allotment, or painting the house, or walking in the hills, or sorting out the office, or basically anything that would have been fruitful, in a mental and physical health sort of a way. This was not fruitful. It felt like it might be for a time, as we uncovered stories and sorted statements and looked at possibilities, but if ever there was a poisoned chalice it was this one. I didn't really see it coming, but at the moment it feels like we could have pulled a bunch of ideas out of a hat and saved ourselves the time. That was precious time and precious energy, and I spent it on the wrong thing.

M has made some similar mistakes, we both have a tendency to get over-invested in these things. At work I'm pretty good at picking my battles but it doesn't always play out in other areas. Anyway, we had a good old long old think and talk about it and decided to diversify. We have a new initiative, which is called Project Anywhere But Here.

Project ABH (as it was immediately dubbed by the first neighbour I explained it to) is very simple in concept. If it's not a working day, get up and get out. Anywhere. Do not lie around working on proposals for better ways to do things. Get your coat on and leave the house. The easiest thing to do is go up to the allotment, and the beginning of Project ABH coincided neatly with the onset of Digging Season. A couple of hours up there, in the sunshine with a view over the hills, and equilibrium starts to return. We also have a new local cafe, where there is a large dog to stroke, and flat whites and Aga-cooked lunches can be had. On our first ABH outing we had some of those before walking over the hill to Williamson Park, where we drank beer in the chilly autumn sunshine and visited the butterfly house. Sometimes we only get as far as cycling into town to go to the library and have coffee (not in the library, that coffee is not good), sometimes we go to Carnforth, or the garden centre at Bolton le Sands, or the beach at Hest Bank. But we do get out.

I have big plans for Project ABH in 2015, which involve writing ideas on index cards based on how long they take (and what the weather needs to be like), and then using them to plan ahead a bit. If you have a whole day, you can go and do something in Manchester, for example, and one day, when I wasn't far enough away, I was sorely tempted to get on a bus I saw idling in the city centre which was going to Knott End. They have a ferry there. And that's before you get to the joy of the 555. This is a beautiful part of the world, and we've barely started exploring it. There's joy to be had in that.

We made a healthy start by spending both Christmas and New Year ABH -- but not very far away. We went to Silverdale for Christmas and stayed at Holgates Holiday Park with M's offspring. I've never been great at enjoying Christmas, but it turns out that's because I've never spent it in a static caravan with a sea view, a big hill to walk over, a swimming pool and a real ale pub with a big fire and singalong carols. Everyone enjoyed it! It was great! And for New Year we went with good friends (also good neighbours, a fine combination, as someone may already have noted) to Black Fell Cottage, where there were Picklebacks (exhilarating), tons of cheese, jigsaws, blustery walks, films, Monkey 47 gin (terrifying) and a walk by moonlight to dinner at the splendid Drunken Duck. I still have party bruises. I love those guys.

It was all absolutely marvellous, but it was also good to get home. Which is important. I don't actually want to live anywhere else, I just need to get better at managing my boundaries. And hey, if you've got this far, thanks for sticking with me.

*fixes eyes on horizon, walks forward*

joella

*I say mostly because it wasn't all bad. I enjoyed all the 1-1 conversations I had with people, and learnt a lot about different people's perspectives on cooking and eating, and just about them really. Conversations are good. And I really enjoyed working with the other three people in the team, we were very different people with a shared task and we did some good stuff together.