Heat and the male gaze

I dropped a note idly onto Facebook the other night. I say night, it was around 3 am, not long after I woke up on the sofa (classy, Jo, classy), tangled in my giant culottes and oversized top, and crawled upstairs to a not much cooler bedroom but one where I could starfish in my pants on my linen mix sheets and think about summers past. The note was about being told, when I was younger and it was this kind of hot, to put more clothes on. I wrote it because I often think 'I should say more about X', where X is a thing I'm thinking about, and then I forget. I even forget when I write the notes in a notes app, because when I do that, I use personal shorthand, like I'll know what I mean, but when I see it again, I generally don't. But if I say it on Facebook, it has to make sense to people, so it will make sense to me. Was my logic. Around 3 am. But actually, the sense it made to others was very different. It started an interesting conversation about the limits of being able to wear what you want, the consequences of wearing what you want, the things that affect what you want to wear. And it was a good conversation, but not the one I had been thinking about. 

Because the times I had been thinking about were the ones where the clothes they wanted me to put on were the ones *underneath* the ones I was already wearing. 

Even at my youngest and most exploitable, I never wore revealing clothing. This was partly because I have skin the colour of a milk bottle, and can *feel* it burning, even with sunblock on, and we didn't have sunblock when I was at my youngest and most exploitable. So I'm used to covering up. It was also partly because I was convinced, like many young women, that my body was deeply unattractive, not least because of the milk bottleness (these were the Miami Vice years and your tan was verrrry important). But it also became apparent to me that having a deeply unattractive body (I conceded in a diary from the time that my arms were "ok") the colour of a milk bottle did not seem to stop a certain level of attention being directed at me. I had a brutalist haircut and a totally flat chest till I was about 14, and was regularly taken for a boy, so it didn't start as soon as it might have, but start it did, as it in-evi-tab-ly does. So it was also partly to minimise that attention. 

I also identified as a feminist pretty early, became familiar with (if confused by) some of the core texts of the second wave, and was in some essential way drawn to the baggy t-shirt, leggings and DMs look. So all in all, you rarely saw my fleshy edges. 

But it was *a* look, of course, and often topped with wild, wild eyes. I'd say they were smoky but they were far less subtle than that. And my hair was enormous. I modelled myself on Robert Smith, learnt how to backcomb with an afro comb, and got through more cans of firm hold Silvikrin than the ozone layer could, it turns out, really deal with. I wore second hand men's clothes (grandad shirts from Oxfam, my dad's old suit jackets), mixed with a touch of goth and a bit of Miss Selfridge, hundreds of bangles and tons of make up. Look at me don't you dare look at me, this look said. 

I think, now, that when you're 15 or whatever, anything you wear is revealing, because you are open season for the next two decades and you're finding that out the hard way. But then, I was handling it, I thought. 

But here are three stories, the ones I was replaying the other night in the heat. 

1. I'm at school. 

My school was recently demolished. I wasn't sad. There exists some kind of vestigial presence, in the form of a) a merger with another school with a fancier building a little way down the coast, and b) the form of a Memories of Jo's School Facebook group, which I follow with some fascination. There really are people who hold those days as the best of their lives, who still have their blazers and their ties, who salvaged memorabilia up to and including the *curtains from the stage in the big hall which they made into curtains for their actual house*. I say people. I mean men. 

My school was not designed for girls. I'd personally argue it wasn't really designed for children, but I can be sure as eggs is eggs on the former statement because it had been going for the better part of a century*  before it let any of us in. And when we got there, I had the strong feeling it was under sufferance. There weren't very many of us, and they often bunched us together in lessons, especially science ones, as if we might warp some kind of laws of physics / biology / chemistry if we moved around too much. I was a proto blogger even then, and some of the things they said to us (collectively, en masse, as girls) would be genuinely fucking reportable these days. 

What they really wanted, I think (apart from our Oxbridge potential, mwa ha ha), was a sort of no mess no fuss arrangement. Girls can be such a civilising influence on the main story, no? And useful in plays. So, while there were almost no female teachers (they were an even smaller proportion of the teaching staff than we were of the school population, which is batshit if you think about it for any length of time at all), there was a Head of Girls. There was no Head of Boys, because boys were the norm. No, just Girls. For the right amount of fine wine (any) I will tell you about the Sanitary Towel Experience. But we're not here for that today, we're here for the summertime. 

The Head of Girls would call you in, if you were a Girl, for any of an unspecified number of Girl related infractions. These were almost exclusively to do with what you looked like (or occasionally, smelled like). One summer term the temperature reached the level when we were allowed to dispense with our green blazers, or, if we were in the Sixth Form, as I was by this point, our grey suit jackets. Fairly soon, I was called in. 

HoG: Do you have any idea what you look like? 

Me [I'm fifteen, I have more idea what I look like than at any point in my life before or since] : How do you mean? 

HoG: We can all see that you're not wearing a bra. 

Me: Um, ok? 

HoG: I want to see you in a bra tomorrow. 

Me: But... I don't need a bra? And it's hot? 

(I didn't need a bra. I didn't really have any bras at this point. But I did start wearing a bra. Even though it was hot). 

Some days later, I am called in again. 

HoG: What are you wearing under that shirt? 

Me: A... bra? 

HoG: It's black. We can all see it. 

Me: But... I thought the problem was that you could see that I wasn't wearing one? 

Now. I knew to a little tiny extent what I was doing here. I knew that no mess no fuss (white) girls wear nice white bras under their nice white shirts and I knew I was fucking with the HoG a bit. But I also profoundly believed that the person most upset by my lack of bra and/or visible bra was the HoG herself. I really did not *need* to wear a bra** at that point in my life. If the tiny breasts of late developers bother you, please, just don't look at them. If you want to look at them, that's on you. It's not the job of young women to police themselves. I have written about this before. 

2. I'm at work. 

I have left school, and am working in a restaurant kitchen over the summer. My job is the worst one in the building, I'm on wash up. I am very happy to have this job, as it enabled me to leave my previous job, in a bread shop which was run by sex pests. Nobody in the restaurant kitchen appears to be a sex pest, and this is progress. So I'm pretty cheerful, on the whole, as I load plates in and out of a red hot dishwasher and scrub pans in the sink. They bring me beers and fries. It's quite convivial. We all get a share of the tips. I'm gradually getting to do bits of other things - this is the place where I first see a whole cauliflower, learn how to peel garlic, and work out that I am a proper vegetarian. (This last part doesn't last, but I had to wash enough bloody chopping boards and scale enough sardines to see me through for a while). 

We all have some kind of uniform, and mine is a white overall with a long white apron. The chefs have whites, and the waiting staff are in white shirts, bow ties and the same long white apron. The aprons are also the tablecloths, from a laundry perspective it's pretty efficient. 

But it's really, really fucking hot in the wash up (which is a portacabin) that summer, and I basically stop wearing anything under my overall. (I mean, I wear pants, and usually leggings, but sometimes shorts). You can see where this is going. 

I must make it clear, I still had naff all by way of breasts. If you only met me during the last 30 years that may sound hard to believe, but honestly, they arrived fully formed the second I went on the Pill (and never went away). Before that, I used to own a badge that said 'Small Breasted Women Have Big Hearts'. (Might still be true, who knows). 

Anyway, there I am, in the sweaty Portacabin, washing up all of the things, swigging on a newly fashionable Becks, and in comes the boss. He's one of those shouty chefs, but he's not a bad man. I can sniff out the bad men by now, for I am seventeen and have met enough of them. 

Jo, he says. I need to say something. 

Sure! I say. Hot, isn't it? 

People are noticing... he says, that you're, well, not wearing anything under your overall. 

Philip! I say. I am wearing pants and leggings. 

That's not... what I mean, he says, but I know, and he knows I know. 

Who is bothered? I say. It's not like the customers see me. I'm just here, out the back, in the hottest place, doing pretty much the hottest job. 

He doesn't have an answer for me, and to his eternal credit, he leaves it be. 

Later that summer, maybe even that same week, there was a shift where it was so hot I was putting ice down the back of my neck and running my head under the tap. And then the weather broke and there was a thunderstorm and a massive downpour. I banged the dishwasher on, walked out the back door, and by the bins I pulled my overall open to the waist (it had poppers), threw my arms up to the sky and stayed there till I was rain-soaked and cold. Then I reassembled myself and went back in to get on with it. 

I imagined that I probably didn't look that different as I'd been soaked with sweat for hours (in a way that is coming back to me now in the menopause, weirdly) and I was bang-crashing away when I heard a little knock at the same back door. It was a boy maybe a year or two younger than me, absolutely scarlet faced, who'd been sent from the restaurant we shared our yard with to ask if they could borrow some garlic. I did suddenly realise that he must have seen me howling bare chested at the rain. I was really nice to him. 

3. I'm in hospital. 

Well, now I'm 22 years old. And I do have pretty decent sized breasts, I think I'm a C or D cup by this point. I'm travelling with my Significant Ex, and in Thailand we have a 'couples massage' where I take my (M&S basic, unpadded) bra off and the lady masseuses hold it up to the light and pass it around in incredulous, hilarious wonder. I have arrived, on the top half, and I dress accordingly. 

Somewhere in between Thailand and Malaysia, I contract something which may or may not be typhoid (I have had my jabs, so tests are inconclusive though my symptoms are consistent). I am actually pretty fucking ill, and after a long week of mad fever, weakness and dehydration, I end up in a teaching hospital in Kota Baharu. 

I have nothing but respect for the people who got me there (my SE himself, of course, but also the couple who ran the guest house we were staying in when I fell ill, and who cared for both of us and got me medical attention on an increasing level of intensity, including, ultimately, driving me to hospital. I sent them Christmas cards for over a decade). 

Anyway, here I am, on IV fluids and antibiotics, in a hospital ward I arrived in barely coherent. The ward is open to the air - by design - the walls are slatted, and I am starting to feel better. They have given me a hospital sarong outfit and I have worked out how to take myself to the squat toilets - the drip stand is fixed to the bed, so I have to hold the bag up with one hand and the sarong with the other (and if I get them the wrong way round and hold my bag up with my drip hand the blood comes out into the tube and I slide, faint down the wall till someone rescues me or I sort it out myself, anyway I generally manage it, and hang the drip bag on the hook in the bathroom stall and use both hands to hoik up my sarong to have a piss and then do it all again in reverse. 

It may or may not have been typhoid, as I say. One of the other things they thought it may have been is dengue fever - you get this from mosquitoes, and we'd spent a very bitey night on the floor of a train from Surat Thani. One of the symptoms of dengue fever is a rash on the chest. A steady stream of male doctors appeared at my bedside, asking to check for this. Honestly, I'd say, your colleague just looked, there's no rash. I think I'll just take a look, they'd say. Just to be sure. Fine, I'd say. I mean, it was company. 

But actually, this one isn't about my spotless breasts. On day, I don't know, three? I was in there for about a week I think, my Significant Ex turns up at visiting hour, bearing V8 juice and Marmite (I still love him for this) and I don't know... sanity? I'm definitely on the mend by this point and can see that on one level he's doing a lot of the heavy lifting, not least trying to stop my mum getting on a plane to Malaysia. We're both pretty sure that I'm not going to die, and we're kind of back in the game as a team. 

He is sitting next to my bed, and the husband of the woman opposite is sitting next to hers. She takes time every day, before visiting hour, to check her face and put a headscarf on. The husband calls my SE over. Words are exchanged. 

He comes back to me, pulling a face that says 'you're not going to like this'. 

What did he say? I ask. 

What he said was: tell your wife she is exposing herself. 

Dude. I'm in actual hospital. I'm on a drip. It's a women's ward. It's open to the actual air. I'm wearing the actual clothes they give women to wear in here. You have an issue because you can see my pants? Honestly, just don't fucking look. 

These little stories, over and over. These are just three. These are just mine. And it literally doesn't matter what you wear, so you might as well wear what you want. 

In the original conversation, someone asked me about the female gaze. I've been thinking, but I haven't got a lot to say about it really, at least not mine. Summer brings out the sort of man who likes to hang out in a beer garden with his top off. We see a lot of male flesh at this time of year. I generally mutter dear god, put some fucking clothes on, but I guess the same logic applies: if it bothers me, and often it does***, I take my gaze, and I avert it. 

joella

* I managed to top this by attending a Cambridge college that had been going for over four centuries before admitting women, and all I can say is it can be fun being a trailblazer, but you better not bleed anywhere.   

** These days I am pleased to see there are things called bralettes. I'm way past the market for them, but when I would have been, all we really had was A cup versions of the overengineered things most of our mums wore - mine would elaborately remove hers from under her top as soon as she sat down after tea (a useful skill, which I also have). There is progress. It does exist. 

*** I'm fine with actual naturism. It's the performative tatts out look that I struggle with. But your body, your choice. 

Just another sister on lockdown

Bread (not pictured) and roses, bread and roses

Just before this year's Significant Birthday, I did a little series of This Much I Know style musings on Facebook. I enjoyed it: the taking stock, the reflecting on things from the perspective of middle age. I like to think I don't feel that different to the way I did 30 years ago, when Young Joella was at her most glorious, but I must. I absolutely have to be a fully-fledged adult by now. I belong to the generation that's in charge here, terrifying as it sounds. 

But whatever any of us thought we knew has taken some punishment in the last 150 days, hey. And there's been no shortage of white middle class takes. Is there ever? But you know the drill: if you don't want mine, you really don't have to read it. Back buttons are available.

Schrodinger's Dad 
This was the big one. The big fella. Sometime in late April, it's a little blurry now, my actually quite beloved dad, my grumpy, stubborn, 20th century, pre-Israel Israeli, principled, heartbroken, sometimes inappropriate, reluctantly-but-in-the-face-of-incontrovertible-evidence evolving dad, was blue-lighted to hospital for the second time in a month. The first time, it was with a recurrence of the thing that keeps coming for him that no one has yet been able to identify. The second time, it was with the Covid-19 that he picked up the first time. I won't lie, I thought he was a goner, that it had finally come to, as he would say, Goodnight Vienna.

I know I am so far from the only person who went through this, and I know that the NHS were doing their absolute valiant best, unlike some people we could mention, but it was terrifying and awful. There were days and nights, long days and longer nights, where I just didn't know whether he was coming, going, or already gone. I couldn't go and see him, he wasn't well enough to call, there was a mega spendy phone number that went to his bedside, but they kept moving him around, so the number kept changing, and when it rang out I didn't know if he wasn't picking up, or someone else's dad wasn't picking up, or it was just ringing into the void. The ward asked for one person to call each day, morning and evening, so they weren't overwhelmed, and one day it was me and I rang in the morning and the person who answered said 'he's asleep'. 'How is he, do you think?' 'Well, he refused his breakfast'.

Two things I now know that I didn't know then: first, he'd lost his sense of smell, so food wasn't that interesting to him, but more importantly, he's vegetarian, and they kept bringing him meat. In those circumstances, refusing breakfast seems reasonable, but at the time, I thought, that's it, he's checking out. The one thing we could do was send messages online, and every morning I typed a little message into a web form, trying to say what I needed to say, and hoped that somehow it would get to him.

He survived, though is yet to fully recover, and I have since been to visit a few times. But there was some point in the 10 days or so he was out of reach where M observed that he was effectively shut in a box with a deadly virus, and until someone opened it we had no idea whether he was alive or dead. I grew that little shell around me that I remember from my mum's terminal illness. Not very much could reach me, but what could absolutely tore me apart.

He's back at Caffe Nero now, and sporting quite the beard. A couple of weeks ago, I was in his kitchen frying up some garlic for pasta puttanesca and he said 'wow, that smells great!'. I looked at him and grinned, and he said 'my god, I can smell!' He dodged the bullet that's now hit the larger part of a million people. May his luck continue to hold.

Reassessing the familiar 
I knew about the obvious key workers. My mum was a nurse. My dad worked in local government. My best friend is from a family of teachers. I have spent most of my own working life in the third sector, but many of the same values hold. It's not about you, it's about everyone. Nobody is ok till everybody is ok. Human rights apply to all humans. Pay your taxes. Vaccinate your children. Vote for progressive government. Check your privilege. Don't be evil.

But I did not fully recognise how reliant we are on the delivery drivers, the corner shops, the butchers, the bakers and the people who keep the lights on. Andy the fish man comes here on a Tuesday. He disappeared for three weeks because Fleetwood fish market closed for physical distancing adjustments. When he came back I nearly cried with happiness. In the deepest lockdown, the appearance of his van was one of the major events of the week. You can't outsource eating. We have to remember that. I can't even go there on the care worker front, I'm still too angry and sad. PAY ALL THESE PEOPLE PROPERLY. THIS IS THE REAL WORK. (Also: monkfish curry is the best).

Inequality begins at home. 
If we're going to have more pandemics, and I imagine we probably are, we need homes we can bear to stay at home in. I'm Generation X, and, broadly speaking, we got a fair deal on the housing front. I hadn't properly realised how precarious this situation is for millennials and Gen Z, and how badly and insecurely so many people are housed. Which is to say, I knew housing was fucked, but I didn't know how fucked. I learnt back in the dying days of Thatcherism that this is a problem the 'market' will never, ever solve. You want to house your citizens decently, you have to invest public money in it. May we finally learn this lesson. May we finally vote accordingly.

Regression
Son of a gun, holy cow. Turns out we need to look after ourselves. There were the sourdough waves, the crafting waves, the Zooming all evening after Zooming all day waves, the allotted hour of exercise waves, but all that passed and we were still here, looking at the walls, wondering how to climb them. And like many people, I fell back on familiar comforts.

A lot of this was around food, and I think this was also linked to where it came from. We do have food available here in Ecoville, and the team who source it bust a gut to keep it coming in, but it is very much at the wholefoods end of things, and I found that I did not want it, even more than I usually find that I do not want it. What I wanted was pie. Fish fingers. Spaghetti hoops. Cheese and pickle toasties. Tuna mayo jacket potatoes. Ham, egg and chips. Instant noodles. There wasn't a supermarket delivery slot for love nor money, and I did not want to go into town.

So I developed a whole new opportunistic way of shopping, which was a mixture of watching the Abel & Cole website like a hawk (and huge props to them for bringing us what they could bring us every single week), and buying stuff in the local villages. I can now tell you what the Halton shop at the top has (Philadelphia! Cream! Koka noodles! Limes! Chillies!) vs the Caton Co-op (Prawns! Organic wine! Refried beans! Parmesan! Parsley!) vs the Bolton le Sands Spar (Locally made pies! Barmcakes! Linguine! Salted pistachios!).

As is the way in this house, I do the sourcing and M does the cooking. So I have been appearing through the door with all kinds of things, and he has dutifully been creating glorious dinners from them. Special mention to the miso ramens topped with fish fingers (aka cheat's tempura), the tuna steaks with chips and creative salad (aka whatever we have to shred), the many and varied frittatas and omelettes (thanks to my well-connected neighbour S, we have been well supplied with local eggs throughout), the (British*) corned beef hash - now just referred to as CBH - and the absolute standby sausage and sardine pastas (these are two pastas, not one, we're not monsters). We have eaten like kings, if the kings had been teenagers in the 80s. We're a bit fatter, but I think everyone is at this point, so that's fine. Who's even looking.

Transgression
Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in an old midnight choir, I have tried, in my way, to be eco. I have taken this a lot further than many people, to the extent that I could probably give you a list, but I won't, because then I'd sound smug, or defensive, or both, and that's not where I want to go with this. Where I want to go with this is that we all have our limits, in the places where we have a choice, and a whole myriad of factors affect those limits, as well as those choices.

When it all went tits with the Covid, a lot of those limits and those choices became really exposed, and I had a kind of dual experience of it. On the one hand there was the mainstream realisation that we are interdependent beings. Supply chains fail if even one of their links doesn't work. I had a higher than average awareness of this, partly because I'm quite old and I remember the days before you could think oh, I'd like x, and within minutes x appears in your life, as if by magic. And partly because I've spent a bit of time at the other end of those supply chains, on farms in developing countries, with small producers, with the people who don't get prioritised for anything, basically. We mostly don't know we're born, the water comes out of the taps, the lights stay on, and the shops have stuff in them. The difference between that happening and not happening is extremely finely balanced. The more of us who understand this, and make our choices accordingly, the better, and I have noticed the increasing awareness of this. Might we come out of this... better? (I'm not hugely hopeful, but there have been moments). The deep satisfaction that can come from scoring macaroni in a time of scarcity... I think, for a time there, we all appreciated that we should not take this for granted.

On the other, there was the choices that are supported here in Ecoville. I don't think we've had a good war. It's admittedly pretty challenging when you've deliberately designed a set up that relies on sharing facilities (washing machines, cars, bins, play spaces, stores, communal areas) and suddenly all of them are danger zones. There's been a lot of helping each other out, as you might expect. But as a collective, as a whole, we have not, in many instances, opened our minds to new possibilities, or extended each other generosity. In fact, we managed to weaponise the word 'generosity' a while back, which would be impressive if it weren't so depressing. 

I have instead sensed something of a hardening. The lines that have hardened are not a great surprise, maybe - I'm going to avoid the gory details, but we've had the Tinned Fish Wars, the Don't Tell Us What To Do Wars, and the Trampoline Wars. I mean, we're all a bit broken. Who can say they're at their best in "these times"? And I do, honestly, try and access my empathy (as I imagine others do too, at least those who've done even the tiniest bit of therapy) but then I boing up against its limits and ping off in the other direction. I guess you could say this is a counterpose, if the pandemic were a yoga class, which it in no way is, but we can try. 

The first sign was the washing up. I hate washing up, and we do have a dishwasher, but three meals a day at home, every day, there's stuff that needs dealing with. We ran out of washing up liquid. What's supposed to happen is you take your bottle down the street and refill it from a giant vat of Ecover. This can take a while, it's pretty viscous, but I have been dutifully doing it. And I thought no. Fuck this. I want proper washing up liquid. And I went out and bought a bottle of Fairy Eucalyptus Anti-Bacterial. Oh, the joy those bubbles brought me. I blew the little ones round the kitchen, and made giant ones with my hands. I poured it into running hot water like a cocktail waiter with a bottle of Galliano. 

I was a bit unstoppable after that. Dettol wipes. Tesco Click and Collect, feat. hash browns. Air freighted roses from Sainsbury's (see above. Fairtrade, of course, I'm not a monster). Giant bars of Cadbury's Dairy Milk. Even (and I do feel bad about this, just not bad enough) a strimmer, a whole strimmer, just for my allotment, because the communal strimmer battery went missing and I could. not. be. arsed. waiting for it to be found. So I bought a strimmer. Off Amazon.

I know these decisions are taking me in the wrong direction. We need to be doing less of this, and I have been doing more. I'm still trying to fathom why, as I'm fairly sure it's a slippery slope between this kind of thing and refusing to wear a mask because yada yada freedom. (I am not refusing to wear a mask, of course. I'm not a monster). I suspect it might be actually quite linked to the regression thing. I try and make principled choices, but actually I don't always find that easy. You have to work at it, all of the time. And when you take a kicking for not being principled *enough* (I'm not expecting medals, just not "feedback"), and then there's a *pandemic*, I think what happens is a little switch flips. I have, these last few months, rediscovered the deeeeep pleasure of driving fast, on my own, windows open, loud music playing. I thought those days were long behind me. Turns out not. Quite tempted to make a roll up at the traffic lights singing along to I Am The Resurrection, go full 90s.

Anger. 
If you're not angry, you're not paying attention. I started a 21 day Deepak Chopra abundance meditation thing that one of my lovely Australian half-aunts was hosting, because I thought it might do me some good. But I dropped out from fury on day... 4? Not now, Deepak, I thought. People are dying fully preventable deaths. I could say more about the anger (I could always say more about the anger) but actually, I read this on the LRB blog a long three months ago now and I can't top it. It's really very good.

And now what? 
I work with futurists, and the futurists are busy as hell. This has been like a fracture in time, a deep but sharp shifting of the tectonic plates. We have none of us any certainty about what comes next, and if we do, we're deluding ourselves. So much possibility has been revealed, as has so much vulnerability. Many of us have had the opportunity to think deeply about what really matters, and some of us have taken it. The bare brick of the structural inequalities in our world has been exposed in a way that I have never experienced before - at least, not in the country I live in. 

We could adapt -- we've had a sense of how fast things can change when the political will is there. But I am not sure that we will. We present as a democracy, and heaven knows it could be worse, but our electoral system is so unfit for its 21st century purpose that we have somehow ended up being led by amoral narcissists advised by monsters, and we might quite possibly be fucked. I watch the signals that my colleagues produce that indicate which trajectory we may be on... zero sum game competition for limited resources? trading privacy for access to goods and services? a radically different, regenerative future? something else? Who will decide? 

It's been an interesting time for those of us who straddle various divides, or, to use the new parlance, inhabit several bubbles. Not sure I'd wish these times on anyone, but they aren't boring. There is possibility, for those who are able (and allowed) to lift their heads up high enough to see it. There is a lot of bleakness for those who aren't or can't. I don't know where to put myself really. But imma stashing some tins of sardines, just in case.

joella

*This isn't a Brexity thing, it's a rainforest thing