I don't want to ride my bicycle (and other stories)

A couple of months ago on ye olde Facebook I said that I was thinking of entering full disclosure Angry Autumn / Furious Fall (aka #aaff2020) and just saying it as I feel it. There was a bit of a 'yes we should all do this' response, but you know what, we didn't. 

I am still not sure I can really do this - as my old dad likes to say, you can't unring a bell - but I've been moving towards it as part of my wider second wave (now Lockdown 2) survival strategy. 

It's based around tiers, because, hell, what isn't right now. A long time ago, my friends A&K came up with a three-level categorisation scheme for people. You are a) a twat, b) not a twat, or c) a high quality person. Try it, it's surprisingly effective. But also a bit, you know, crude. So for the current situation, I have repurposed it. 

• Tier 1 people: the ones you need around you right now. The ones who nourish your soul, who give you what you need, who hold you up. The ones you would be drinking negronis and eating Dishoom black dal with tonight if you could. 
• Tier 2 people: most of the people. The ones who are muddling through and doing their best like the rest of us. The ones you are happy to help out at a basic human decency level, and who are happy to help you out. The world would be fine with just these people in it, but you would probably feel a bit lonely and misunderstood. 
• Tier 3 people: the ones you really, really don't need in your life. The users, abusers, narcissists and manipulators who *no one* should have in their life, but also the ones who are somehow toxic to you personally. Which might not entirely be on them, but either way engaging with them is an act of self-harm. 

The first thing I did was fillet my Facebook friends list. I am lucky to have a bunch of Tier 1 Facebook friends, we all know it's an evil platform but it does bring me much joy. I also have a bazillion Tier 2 Facebook friends, some of whom I don't really know or seldom interact with, and I'm cool with that. The random likes and the posts that get a different kind of conversation happening are also part of the joy. Tier 3 though. The ones who get shitty or shirty, or I self-censor in case they do, they are gone. The White Lives Matter ex, he's gone. How did I ever think I'd make a difference there? I never could when I was 17, why assume everyone grows up to be a better person? The overt transphobe, bye. The partner of the guy who blocked me for reasons I never understood but which really upset me, gone (I always really liked her, but life is less confusing this way). A couple of people whose posts I'd unfollowed but somehow felt I might offend if I unfriended them, gone, why would they even notice? So if you get here, I'm assuming you want, at some level, to be here. I haven't stuck it in your feed. I think that's less, you know, provocative. And more freeing. What took me so long? 

The second thing I did was apply this schema more directly to my neighbours. I do this thing at night, when I can't get to sleep, where I run through an exercise in my head and align it with my breathing. It needs to be just complicated enough to take up the mind-whirring space but not enough to stop me drifting off. Going through the 13 times table can do it, for example, or the Hebrew alphabet, or the periodic table. But do all of these things often enough and they become too familiar and stop working. So I started using my street. There are 41 households and about 70 people in total, so it's a good sized dataset. Breathe in, person at #n. Pause. Breathe out, person at #n+1 . Pause. And so on. For quite a while, just populating all the houses in order was the perfect level of abstraction. But then I got too good at it, and I had to switch it up. So I'd add things like, all of the people who have *ever* lived in this house. What year the current occupants moved in. (I have a head for this kind of thing). It sent me to sleep, for a while.*  

But eventually that also wasn't enough. So I tiered them. One of these people has (indirectly and cack-handedly but still) accused me of fascism. A few of them don't quite ignore me in the street, but make the sort of acknowledgement that is only upsetting when you see them greet someone who they actually want to see. One of them seems to have ruled me out as a cool kid (and honestly, the bar is quite low, so this stings). There are the old wounds, too. We eat our young, around here. Anyway, that's Tier 3. 

This strategy is sweet in two different ways. It still helps me sleep, as neighbours occasionally shift between tiers, always worth checking (especially interesting with couples in different tiers). But also... it was so useful to enumerate the Tier 3 neighbours. There really aren't very many of them, there *really* aren't. There are more in Tier 1, but I would never have thought that till I did this. But I have done it, and if I apply my sleep science to them, I find when I am awake I can just not pay them attention. 

It's honestly quite a shift. As Leymah Gwobee said: "Anger is like water - the shape it takes comes from the container you put it in. Let it flow". So as I pass up and down the street, breathing, I let it flow out of the houses, into the Sustainable Urban Drainage System, into the river and out to sea. We live, and sometimes, we learn. I'm honestly feeling better for it. 

You're wanting to know where my bicycle fits into this, aren't you? Well, it's another of my pandemic learnings. With great introspection can come great enlightenment. 

I like to think that I don't do things just because I'm supposed to, but clearly that is not the case. I am supposed to cycle everywhere, and I'm supposed to like it. I'm surrounded by people who cycle out in all weathers, hauling all kinds of loads in all kinds of ways. Many of them have more than one bicycle. There is a lot of lycra, and a lot of those big bright waterproof panniers. And they just keep doing it. It's amazing. 

And I did decide to come and live here, and since I did I have done really quite a lot of cycling. But earlier this year the council dug up the off-road bike path into town in order to build up the flood defences by the river. It will be reinstated at some point, but for now, cycling into town, while still relatively traffic-free, is much more of a palaver. And suddenly... I stopped. 

All of a sudden I have realised that I hate cycling, and I have always hated cycling. I have actually only had three bikes in my adult life. There was one at Cambridge, a crappy second hand thing that I only ever used in my first year, to cycle to ballroom dancing lessons, until I realised I did not need to learn how to ballroom dance, and I stopped. Everything else I needed to do, I could walk to, and I did. I have no idea what happened to that bike. 

I lived in Oxford for four years without a bike, but I got one not long after I got together with M, because he couldn't believe I didn't have one. It came from a Cycle King sale and was probably quite a good bike, it had a lot of gears. I rode it to work sometimes. I rode it to the station sometimes. I rode it to the pub sometimes. I never, ever understood why people would choose to 'go for a bike ride' but I was talked into it once or twice. We cycled round a reservoir in the Peak District once. And we cycled out to some kind of country park when we were in the Forest of Bowland one January. It snowed on the way back, and I actually cried with misery. I was allowed to spend the afternoon drinking golden mild by a peat fire after that.

NGO X used to run the cycle to work scheme, and after I'd had my bike around 10 years I saw a demo one that I thought might actually be a bike I could love. It was Dutch style, with hub gears, and it was solid as a rock. My mum (who loved riding her bike) got it for me for my 40th birthday. It was certainly very comfortable, and pretty much maintenance free (which was handy, as I know nothing of cycle maintenance), and there was a stretch of the Oxford ring road where I could get up a good speed on the way home from the office to the Interim Bungalow. I could just about say that I was fond of that bike, but I couldn't say that I loved it. 

I thought for years, this issue is with me. I am not fit enough. I don't have the right legs. I don't have the right kit. I don't have the right bike. If I had the right fitness / legs / kit / bike, I would love cycling. I just need to try harder. 

No. I fucking hate cycling. It is shit. It is, I have realised, like camping. If you don't love it at its most basic, you can spend all the money you like (and it will be A LOT) but you will never, ever love it. I hate dealing with traffic. I hate faffing with helmets and lights and locks and waterproofs and panniers. I hate hills, I hate punctures, I hate getting pins and needles in my vulva. I hate all of it. So why would I spend what would be easily into the four figures on upgrading my infrastructure? That's a lot of bus fare, and I will still hate it. 

I gave the second bike to a project that refurbishes them for refugees. I saw it locked up at the train station about six months later and was happy it was helping someone get around. I still have the third bike. I will probably start riding it again when the cycle track re-opens, though I have also now fully got into shopping by car, mixed with Abel & Cole and the occasional M&S via Ocado. 

I also currently have two baths a day, have developed a Kiehl's habit, spend a lot of time vaporising essential oils and am washing my clothes at 60. More habits I may readdress when This Is Over, but if we've learnt anything over the last eight months it's that life can come at you fast. Take your pleasures where you can. 

joella

*This is such an obscure reference I think only my Significant Ex is likely to get it, so on the offchance he's reading and wondered if it was a nod to Gary & Melissa, yes. 

I hope the Tories love their children too

I wrote this before Lockdown Two but I forgot to post it. Still holds. 

If you know me at all, you'll know I'm a foodie. I have always been a foodie. My tastes have, it must be said, changed somewhat over the decades, but the basic principle is the same: good food makes life immeasurably better, bad food makes it significantly worse, and insufficient food is one of the worst things that can happen to a person, and something we as a society, a species, should constantly strive to ensure does not happen to anyone. 

Which brings us, topically, to half term. When I was a kid, half term meant a trip to Lytham Kitchen with my mum. I remember it as just the two of us, but I'm guessing my sister was there too as I'm not sure where else she'd have been. By the relative sizes of things in my mind (Lytham Kitchen is still there, and not that different in most of the important ways - go there) she might have been in a pushchair. Anyway. The point is, it was a big treat, and I had spaghetti bolognaise followed by a Viennese whirl. 

What, I think, marks me out as a foodie is that I can remember this meal in such detail over 40 years on. The spaghetti was fat and soft, and came mixed in with the sauce, which was not particularly meaty but very juicy, so you would suck the strands up and it would splat on your face. It had grated cheese on it, which was in fat shreds, unlike at home, where my mum used the thin side of the grater. I don't think I was allowed to lick the plate, but I would have. The Viennese whirl was a piped shortcake biscuit that was half dipped in chocolate. I would eat the plain side first, and then the chocolate side, very, very slowly. 

It's always good to feed appreciative people, as I have learnt myself, and I hope it was obvious how much I absolutely loved these meals at the time (one hallmark of my early eating years was if it ain't broke, don't fix it, so I had this over and over again, and to be honest if they still served it I would have it tomorrow, only not the biscuit, and maybe with a glass of red). 

In the year my mum was dying, I would visit most weeks and sit by her bed, chatting to her about anything that came into either of our heads, wanting to acknowledge what was happening but without getting into the deep and dark places. She was not a great opener of cans of worms or boxes of Pandora, like many of her generation, and many of us Gen Xers have learnt to walk that line. But one night, the LKSB (Lytham Kitchen Spaghetti Bolognese) came up, somehow. And by this point there was a fair amount of morphine in the mix, and I learnt that the reason it was just me stuffing my face was because there wasn't the money for both of us to do that. 

This honestly never occurred to me at the time. I was max eight years old, so I can forgive myself, but additionally, she never gave much evidence of enjoying any foodstuffs as much as I enjoyed pretty much all of them. With soooo much hindsight, including knowledge of how her terminal cancer ultimately played out, I can see that she likely always had a vulnerable digestive system, and learnt to manage that by not really eating a lot. And we could get into the thin thing, which I will just touch on: I think my mum was a 10 because she smoked like a chimney for decades and also didn't eat much, then she stopped smoking and she hit like a 14, and then she got cancer and she went down to an 8 and then she died. She bought a tiny suit to wear to the funeral of one of her uncles who'd been a bit 'handsy'. It was her last 'fuck you' and I love her for it while also still dealing with the implications of all of that, not that I explicitly know the facts. She embodied them, as women so often do. 

*Anyway*. Half term to me means spaghetti bolognaise and Viennese whirls with your mum, or whatever the 2020 equivalent is, and to learn that life often gets worse rather than better for kids, over that time, makes me want to howl. And the thought that the government would enforce rather than relieve it, well. 

I look at those pictures of Marcus Rashford and his mum and I think, people like them should be making these decisions, not a bunch of boarding school educated posh boys, many of whom were deliberately starved of that kind of love in order to make them better heartless leaders. I live with one of those boarding school educated posh boys, and I think I can safely say they are a lil fucked up by the system, even if they never had to watch their parents choose between heating and eating. How are we still here, in 2020. 

What can you do? Well, we went swimming on Friday, then went into town and had noodles and a beer in our local Thai restaurant - use it or lose it, guys, and their Pad See Ew is *so good* - then went to Sainsbo's and spent our lunch budget on foodbank supplies, which can conveniently be deposited in between the tills and the exit. 

I have done a lot of buying foodbank supplies, and my general MO is to buy food I would want to eat myself, on the grounds that just because you are in need doesn't mean you want ham in a tin. (I will add that I never ever buy brown things for the foodbank, on the grounds that just because you're in need doesn't mean you should have to eat some do-gooders idea of healthy food). But this time I took my eight year old self shopping, and bought everything that she would want. Instant mash. Hotdogs. Tinned ravioli. Curly Wurlies. Sardines in tomato sauce. SuperNoodles. Jelly. Twenty five quids worth of joy, and I put it all in the collection box and then had a little cry on the way home. I'm so sorry. I'm so fucking sorry. 

joella