Pivoting to Asda (and beyond)

I'm starting this post at a bus stop in Summertown, Oxford. NGO X was HQ'd here many years ago, and when I started working there, fulfilling two ambitions simultaneously (1. working for NGO X and 2. getting a job that had been advertised in print in the Guardian), my world tilted on its axis a little. 

It was after the genocide in Rwanda but before the Asian tsunami. Before (just before) 9/11. Phones were still bricks, there were hardly any blogs. And I used to get my lunch almost every day from a Lebanese deli called LB's. Sometimes falafel. Sometimes a vegetarian lunch box. But my absolute favourite was a wrap with ijja ("little clouds"- a kind of fluffy omelette made with cauliflower and parsley), shredded cabbage and tahini sauce. I loved it so much. 

Today, for my lunch, I sat outside LB's and had a coffee and an ijja wrap. It tasted just as I remembered and I loved it just as much. As Chrissie Hynde once said, some things change, some stay the same. 

****

After I wrote that opener, in a notebook, in pencil, I bought four Punjabi samosas from a young woman at a stall (Summertown has a street market on Sundays these days) and got on the bus. I was heading to Kennington for an Easter gathering with M's offspring and their families. Before I got there, at the next bus stop in fact, I ate one of the samosas. After I got there, I ate one of the others. Man alive, I love samosas. *That* love affair started in Cambridge, at a bakery called Nadia's on Trinity St, where I bought my lunch most days. It was either a warm, fat vegetable samosa, or a poppy seed roll with houmous and salad, to which I would add most of a packet of prawn cocktail crisps. Both excellent nourishment for my deep thoughts about the human condition. 

I've been buying samosas for over 30 years now. Ijja wraps, over 20. I hope I will be buying them both for decades to come, given that I'm unlikely to develop the skills to make either. But it's literally only in the last couple of months that I've started noticing how much they cost. And these are not fancy food items. You're paying for some basic vegetarian ingredients, the fuel to cook them, someone's time, and a bit on top. But suddenly, it's "how much? for a samosa?". 

I am not claiming poverty, not remotely. I am still, for now, someone who puts tins *into* the food bank collection box (sardines, usually, obvs). We live on a part time income (mine) plus a very part time income supplemented by the state pension (M), which isn't a huge amount, but still more than a lot of people, and we have secure housing and an extremely energy efficient house (one of my neighbours recently said to me, in a reversal of the trope, something along the lines of "if you hate it so much here, why don't you go and live somewhere else?" to which I said well, I don't hate my *house*, and that's where I actually *live*). Until recently, there was a bit of money left in our joint account at the end of the average month, which I salted away to pay for holidays. I did a weekly Abel & Cole order, the occasional Ocado, Co-op top ups and still managed to support various charities as well as buy foodbank tins, keep up a respectable (if low-end) wine habit, and feed a voracious half-wild cat. I honestly thought I'd cracked it. 

So this -- the cost of living crisis, as we seem to be calling it -- is a proper shock to the system. A perfect storm. All of the things hitting at once, so hard and so fast that even those of us with multiple buffers are reeling. 

You could, at this juncture, point out that I live in an intentional community, and don't we explicitly share resources? Doesn't that save money as well as increase the sustainability of your lifestyle? Well, yeah, in theory, kinda, potentially, in a way. But only if you are willing (or even able) to accept certain constraints. "Cutting edge" was one of the phrases that attracted me to Ecoville over 11 years ago. Oooh, I like the sound of that, I thought, because I am always thinking. And lots of things *did* feel pretty 'out there' initially. The ideas were good, their implementations not quite there maybe, but we evolve, right? We continuously improve. We iterate. We adapt. 

But actually, my experience has been more that we stick with things that were close to cutting edge in 2011. And now we live in 2022. It's not the same world, but we largely act like it is. There are mutterings, there are conversations, there are tentative forays, but (in my view) we are stuck on two fronts. Firstly, all systems have inertia. It's harder to change things than to do the same thing, until there is a tipping point, and many of the Ecoville incumbents are pretty comfortable, and not for tipping.

Secondly, there are some things that are held sacred, inviolable, although we are not supposed to be a cult and indeed they are not written down anywhere. You might not even know about them till you innocently ask a question some time in year 3. These are qualities of the system that are somewhat mystical, which I do not understand and which no one has ever been able to explain to me. Despite being almost the first full time resident of this community based in the county of my birth, I remain a stranger in a strange land. 

What this means for me in practice is that I can't really do my food shopping in our little store, because a) a lot of it is not stuff I want to eat/use, b) I have been firmly informed that this will not be changing, and c) the combination of these things means I experience extreme dissonance, almost physically, when I think about it for too long. So, in short, I mostly don't. And mostly don't buy stuff there. (I make exceptions -- eg local eggs and salad leaves -- because with those things, the equation in my head works). 

I've had enough feedback to know how annoying this logic is for a lot of people. And of course, if I had no choice, I would be grateful for the convenient food supplies. But I resent having my options constrained in ways that do not make sense to me. 

By way of comparison, one of my colleagues, M, was furloughed during the first lockdown in early 2020, and spent his days volunteering for an organisation distributing government food parcels to households who had to shield because they contained people who were clinically extremely vulnerable, and in time, to households that just could not access or afford food. He did this for weeks -- sat in the back of a black cab with bags of food and delivered them to homes in one of the most deprived boroughs of London. Often, he was the only person they'd seen for days. There was one household he visited which had children in it, and it was the same little boy who opened the door. One day he looked in the bag and said 'can we have white bread next time?'. Thing is, the government knows best, and the government says only brown bread can go in emergency food parcels. Those of us who can go out, we get to choose our bread. 

So broadly, overwhelmingly, I shop elsewhere. And because of my fact-spongy sort of brain, I hold a lot of information which helps me decide where and how to do that. I'm nowhere near at Jack Monroe's level on this, but then my motivations are different. She's a national treasure, I'm just a stubborn foodie geek. 

Enter Asda, as Metallica didn't quite say. I'd only previously Asda'd with my late aunt, when I was little and went to stay with her. She had two boys who were even littler than me. I loved going to Asda with her to do the Big Shop. One of her boys would be in the trolley and the other wandering around getting lost and I would be holding the 1980s Sinclair calculator and adding everything up. It was basically sums, to me, and I loved sums. We didn't do a Big Shop in my family, because my mum went out shopping every day on her bike (occasionally I went out in her place if it was the school holidays and she'd been on a night shift), and my dad went out in the car with me on Saturdays. I know the same sums were happening, but not in such an obvious way. I definitely knew that you never, ever bought anything that wasn't on the list (my dad: it just says salami, do you reckon we can get away with Hungarian?). We didn't go to Asda, or any kind of superstore, because there wasn't one locally, but (because I knew basically nothing) I envied the people who did. 

When I started going out with my Significant Ex, his mum asked us to "go to Sainsbury's" because there was "nothing in". This was categorically not true, there was a whole walk in pantry full of stuff that I quite rapidly took on the job of organising, because that's the kind of job I like. But we went, of course. There was no list. What are we getting? I said. What do you want to get? he replied. This was literally my first experience of shopping like this -- I would say I hadn't been very "on it" as a student, but I only ever bought the same things: bread, eggs, Cup a Soup, cheese, mayonnaise, tuna, Encona, sweetcorn, pasta, tinned tomatoes, Batchelor's Savoury Rice, Super Noodles, gherkins. You can do a lot with that stuff, believe, but this was like walking through the doors of perception. Wholegrain mustard!! Anchovy paste!! Fresh basil!! Parmesan in a lump!! Artichoke hearts!! Avocados!! Lemon juice from a lemon!! 

And very fast, sooo fast, I got used to that. I have a sense of frugality for many things: if I can't afford it, I don't buy it. If I really want it, I save up for it. I have had an overdraft, but I have never had a credit card. But a) I acknowledge the psychological as well as generational privilege this represents, and b) I've never really, in my adult life, had to apply that to my food shop. In my 20s, it was Tesco on foot / Sainsbury by car plus local shops on Cowley Road (for the samosas, the kosher pickles, the instant ramen and the Polish bread), my 30s much the same plus Abel & Cole veg boxes and the occasional Ocado delivery. My 40s were entirely different, as I tried, but ultimately largely failed, to reinvent myself as a locavore. I came close, but we fucked it, lads. 

So here I am in my early 50s, feeling the financial pinch with the rest of the medians. What's a highly numerate girl with catholic tastes but strong views to do? 

If you're in this position too, here are my top tips: 

• Absolutely follow Jack Monroe: her advice is impeccable and her recipes are inspiring. My favourite book of hers is Tin Can Cook: this is absolutely my style of cooking but taken up several notches. I hope one day to interest her in my Tuna Noodle Pickled Vegetable signature dish. 
• If you a) eat meat, b) have a reasonable size freezer c) live in the British rurals and d) can pull a bit of cash together, buy a whole lamb, or (as we did) half a lamb. You get a LOT of meat for your money, and you know exactly where it's come from. 
• Make a list, and take it to Asda. In person, at least the first time, because there are things you will see in the store that you would not notice online. For me, here are some of those things: 
• Fresh squeezed not from concentrate juice -- unbeatable £ for this, like half the price of the nearest NFC alternative and those vitamins guys!! 
• Their quick frozen scratch cooking veg: chopped and ready to use for an amazing price (my favourite is what they call soup base I think but I would call mirepoix - carrot, celery, onion) -- get it on, bang a gong, get it on. 
• Relatedly, dried soup pulses mix -- get your soup base melting away in EVOO, add your stock and your mixed pulses, little splash of red wine, little squirt of tomato puree, you're living a pretty good life. 
• Re: the EVOO: watch for offers, watch like a hawk. Likewise the wine. 
• Invest in stuff like capers, olives, anchovies, which are all cheaper in Asda than many other places. 
• Things you might want to source elsewhere, especially if you have local Asian / Turkish / Polish / Kosher shops
• Cheese -- especially white salad cheese which is so useful (I can find ways to eat it for breakfast, dinner and tea), halloumi etc 
• Pickles and fermented stuff generally: big jars for small money. 
• Mangos, drumsticks, okra, melons -- never are they good in the supermarkets
• Rice, noodles, herbs, spices -- only a fool buys coriander from a supermarket if there's a local Asian grocery. 
• My final Asda-adjacent tip is: PLAN. If I write out the meals we might eat for the next week, even if we don't eat them, exactly, we will source stuff more efficiently and cost-effectively than if I send myself out for something at the last minute. Relatedly, assess your INVENTORY -- what's sitting around waiting for use? Is there a cupboard you have not delved into the back of recently? (There probably is -- I obsessively over-stock certain things, especially those which are haram here in Ecoville, which is not necessarily the best use of my limited storage).
• No, not my final! Make a trip of it! Have a lunch in the cafe, buy some stuff from B&Q or whatever. However you can make it ok, do that. 

I reckon a big old reining in can be done. Enough of us have belt-tightening space, and the government just deposed our spaffer in chief, who felt it was ok, right here right now, for someone else to spend six figures on a very temporary play space for one, max two, of his many offspring. We could regroup, somewhat collectively, having de-spaffed. We could seek a little common cause, some of us, maybe. Find a way to think about a future that would work for (I both love and hate to say it) the many, not just the few. We're already seeing mould, misery, malnutrition and DIY dentistry in this actual country which is supposed still to be actually wealthy. Is this... fine? Are we going to let people freeze to death? We already let people drown in the Channel and burn to death trying to keep warm in tents, so maybe we'll find that's tolerable too. 

It might be a policy decision to keep most of us scrambling to find the means to keep warm (or, hey, cool) *and* put food on the table, if we have a table. I really think it might be. And one of the things I find hardest about it is that it's working, in the sense that it takes a lot of time and energy, that we might otherwise use to think about alternative ways to use the same resources. 

For example. If I ran the country and had an 80 seat majority (big if, I do understand), I would proceed along something like the following lines. 

• Baseline it. How good, on the whole, would you say your life is, British person? Big old survey. Hopes, dreams, mental health, all of it. Representative selection, with some more in-depth focus groups maybe. Get some indicators together. BIG COHORT. 
• Everyone who owns more than one house, or indeed any property that isn't occupied for at least nine months of the year and could be a permanent residence, has to choose one. The other/s get Compulsorily Purchased by my government. At market rate, but non-negotiable. 
• We use those properties to house everyone currently in temporary accommodation - refugees and asylum seekers, care leavers, families in B&Bs. The family size homes go to families, the bigger and smaller ones go to single people or groups from similar backgrounds. 
• There is a quid pro quo here: in order to access this (now social) housing we ask them to sign up for three years to participate in a Grand Plan. This involves all adults doing some mix of the following: 
• Training (provided) as an eco-refitter of existing housing stock. Practising on the housing they are currently occupying then moving on to a government programme to reach all homes
• Training as a care worker, specialising in personal care for people coming out of hospital
• Agricultural labour 
• For those with caring responsibilities, setting up kitchens in community centres / church halls and either working in the creche or cooking evening meals for the local community to come and eat or take away. Childcare and food hygiene training will be available too. 
• Some benefits that I could imagine accruing from this:
• Sort out the housing crisis 
• Repopulate holiday home desert communities with economically productive families
• Make a dent in the energy crisis 
• Fill gaps in the labour market with a guaranteed supply of skilled workers
• Sort out the social care crisis and the hospital bed blocking crisis
• Address the nutritional gap for people who can't afford or don't have the facilities to cook decent food at home, and redirect surpluses and gluts in a direction where they can be used. 
• Everyone gets paid the living wage, and everyone pays rent out of that. After the three years, people can decide to sign on for longer or move on (if they are refugees / asylum seekers, they get indefinite leave to remain as a thank you for their contribution). 
• After the first three years we re-run the baseline - do we feel like we're a better country? Are we happier? Do we like ourselves and our lives a little better? 
• I'm going to take a punt on yes, and run again on that ticket. Going to expand the scheme. Anyone who wants a three year go at socialism is welcome. 

This isn't the only option, of course. And it's not perfect (I just thought of it all on my own, with my own set of privileges and prejudices and resentments. I personally like the clarity of a deal: if you do X then you get Y, but YMMV). My bigger point is that we should all be thinking bigger. It's the thinking smaller, the pulling the ladder up, the building the walls, than pains me the most. These are not the times for that.  

joella

Never give in to the fuckery

Content note: abortion. Not mine. But still. 

Second content note: I'm not outing anyone in this post. I've changed pretty much any detail that could possibly identify anyone except me, my Significant Ex, and guy X. Should guy X happen upon it (deeply, *deeply* unlikely), well, it's never too late to say sorry. 

The world: Hey, how you doing?

Me: Fine! Actually, not fine? Actually, more like commando crawling through an assault course made up of austerity, Brexit, Trump, Johnson, climate emergency, Covid, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Roe? With a few extras that don't make global headlines because geopolitics, and a few extras that are local and personal. But thanks for asking. How *you* doing?

Did I mention that my inner voice is a screaming woman?

In a big conversation I had with my beloved recently I realised that he thought she was screaming in anger (I've only recently realised we don't all have a screaming woman inner voice - this would have been useful intel before now but I do at least now know).

No, I said, she's screaming into the void.

All the time? he said. No, I said. Just sometimes, but quite often at the moment. Would it help you to know when it's happening?

Um, I guess, he said. Worth a try. (This is excellent boyfriend behaviour, by the way. Exemplary, even. Big ups to my beloved.)

So, I was sitting at the table, writing to do lists, after weeding the broad beans at the allotment. We're talking about dinner plans but I'm a bit distracted.

Oh! I said. She's screaming. Shall I tell you why?

The attack on abortion rights in the US is genuinely terrifying. I am not in the US and I am almost certainly done with the egg and sperm business but still, it makes my blood run cold. It's medieval logic in the 21st century. Not so different from the actually certifiably evil Taliban, if you look at it straight on. Women - no, let me clarify, people with the ability to get pregnant, however we define ourselves - are fully realised humans or we're not, is the binary, and I know which side I'm on.

And I always have. In the 80s, in Blackpool, there was a never ending flow of boys and men trying to have sex with me. With any or all of us, I wasn't that special. Never. Ending. Mostly I didn't, sometimes I did, quite often there was some kind of tussle involved, almost like a dance.

In a way, I think they were gentler times, it wasn't a porn-saturated environment and no one really knew what they were doing. We shared tips on how to avoid what I'd now call PIV sex, but at the time was just called sex. How to deflect and distract and deal with the situation a different way. A lot of us were pretty good at it by the time we left Blackpool. 

And ngl, those skills came in handy when I got to university (I was stumped when someone *didn't* want to have sex with me, but that's another story).The main reason I didn't want to have sex with men who wanted to have sex with me, at that time, quite honestly (I have evolved since), was because I didn't want to get pregnant. I worked extremely hard at not getting pregnant. By this point I'd already borrowed money from my parents to lend to a friend who needed an abortion, and I knew of several other people who'd been in the same position.

Anyway, my first term at university, there was a night, there was a guy, let's call him X. He was pretty flirty, I was playing along. He came back to my room, got a bit pushy, I dealt with the situation. It was fine. He went to sleep, I sat smoking out the window for a bit, then woke him up and told him to go back to his room. (I could almost literally see his room from my room, I wasn't asking him to get a cab or anything). He said he wanted to stay, and I said I didn't want him there when the cleaner arrived. He asked me if I was embarrassed. I said not really, I just had a good relationship with the cleaner. (NB she later tried to set me up with her son, but that's also another story).

He left, and we never really spoke again, though when he was drunk he occasionally told me that he admired my breasts. I started seeing someone, who some months later was fundraising for a charity thing he was doing. He asked guy X to sponsor him. I will, he said, but only if you admit it. Admit what? said the man who went on to become my Significant Ex, (these were the glorious early days, but even at his worst he was never remotely as jaded and shitty as guy X was at 20).

Admit you're going out with Joella, he said. Well, said my Significant Ex, sure, I admit it. I laughed when I heard that story, but I was also very glad I hadn't had sex with him. Because I don't think he'd have been any kinder about me if I had. 

But that's not why my inner voice was screaming. She was screaming because maybe five years later, in another city, I was visiting someone I knew who was taking care of a friend of hers who'd just had an abortion.

It had been a fairly short relationship. He hadn't been particularly kind. He gave her money (he had money, I don't imagine it was a stretch) when he found out she was pregnant, but otherwise didn't want anything to do with it. She was one of those gilded posh girls who I at one level envied because they knew how to ski and how to eat fish with bones in and didn't bite their nails and were oh so thin, but at another level I knew they envied me because I was sturdy and stroppy and seemed to manage to have boyfriends who liked me (it took me a while, but I'd more or less got there by 20). 

I did not hate myself, I looked after myself in not all ways but several important ones, and I knew how lucky I was. By this stage I'd supported quite a few more people through abortions, financially, emotionally, practically. I knew some of the right things to say. We had a bit of a chat and long story short it turned out it was guy X who got her pregnant. 

And *I'm* the one you need to admit to going out with?

That's why she was screaming, I said to M.

joella

She's got a new smell

Such times. Such times! 

My body is going through it at the moment. I was on the mini pill for about ten years, which knocked my periods on the head, thank the lord, for they were agonising, messy and disruptive, and made me sad and crazy. But with not having them, I always wondered how I'd know when I was menopausing. Well. Turns out you just know. Everything slides around in your head all of the time, and you could power a small village if they could only bottle your heat and your fury. Also, the sweating. Ye gods. Could water a small village too (or at least their marsh samphire crop, that could cope with the salt, right?). 

I should be eating cooling foods and drinking green tea. I should be wearing natural fibres and going for calming walks in nature. I know. I should not be downing Rioja and listening to true crime podcasts and generally stomping around. I haven't been entirely neglectful on the self care front, I have linen pyjamas and a lavender pillow spray and I swim in a cool pool where the water hits my red hot armpits and I think YES. I have started getting my top lip waxed. I have bought this book. I read *everything* that appears in a private Facebook group I was invited to a couple of year ago which is called Hot Ladies (Oxbridge level menopause discourse, I love it). 

Having read the book and absorbed the experiences of the Hot Ladies, I made an appointment with my GP for the discussion of my options. After the discussion of my options, about eight months ago I switcherooed from Cerazette, saviour of my 40s, to something called Premique, which I hope will do the same for my 50s. It's a lot better. A LOT better. But still fairly early days. Watch this space (or, you know, don't). 

But I think, without getting too woo about it, that whatever is happening to my body, there's also some soul processing happening. It's not like I've had the worst pandemic, millions have had it way worse. I'm double jabbed and boosted, I can still smell, at some point last September I could nearly do crow pose. None of my immediate loved ones have carked it. But however you look at it, there's no way round the fact that It Has Been A Right Two Years.  

So... #blessed. And yet, somehow, not? Maybe as a consequence of my over-thinking (see blog posts passim) I am really shit at gratitude journals and the like. I tried it for a week and I annoyed the hell out of myself. I need space for dwelling in the bleakness. I don't drink tea, and I don't eat cake. Do not invite me to an appreciative enquiry. There are no live love laugh cushions or cursively fonted self-help books in my house, no sirree bob, though I do have a well-thumbed 30 year old copy of Our Bodies Ourselves. Self awareness is the way to survive the white supremacist heteronormative patriarchy, kids. 

I don't feel, like, great about this. How nice (a word I also do not like, even if it's the biscuit, because I do not like biscuits) it would be to luxuriate in my cosseted existence, while virtue signalling, dispensing generosity on my own terms, and really not paying attention to much beyond that. It's the MO of many people in high income countries, and many high income people in low income countries. But any amount of not-even-over-thinking about the world, in fact the merest glance at Greta's Twitter, will create plenty of space for dwelling in the bleakness, you know? And while I love a negroni and a dancefloor at least as much as the next person, I harbour a deep suspicion of the people who are all about the sunshine. (Except maybe the sunshine causing literally unsurvivable wet bulb temps of 35+ in Pakistan amirite?) 

But you can't live in a ditch unless you intend to die in one, so a girl needs strategies. And scent has always been one of mine. As a teenager, I experimented. There was an Impulse Day and Night double set of body sprays that I leant on for a while. In the sweaty bread shop where I spent my Saturdays for £1.35 an hour I would dip into the kiosk that housed the phone and our coats and bags to refresh myself with Day, and once I was outta there I'd shower and become Night. I once bought a can of Femfresh because I thought, well, I'm fem and I want to be fresh. I was spraying it under my arms till my mum saw it and explained what it was really for and why it was terrible. Just Seventeen had a lot to answer for. I wasn't even 17. (I have never deo'd my foof, for the record, but if you have well, no judgement here).

Then the Body Shop arrived in Blackpool. My first purchase was a perfume called Aquarius - every woman needs a signature fragrance, I was learning from J17, and how could it not be a perfect match for my 16 yo proud Aquarian self? Short answer: because it honked. It honked so much one of my friends' mums asked her to ask me not to wear it again if I came round. I did not comply with the request (it was my signature fragrance!!), but at one level I knew she was right. 

So I adjusted my perspective and lo! (and approx 50% of my lady cohort will be right here with me, the other 50% being Dewberry girls) there was White Musk. This glorious (I loved it till just very very recently for reasons I shall not disclose but let's just say it is still some people's signature scent), era-defining perfume carried me through my late teens and all of my 20s. I sprayed the cologne on the clothing of the boy I wanted to go out with (he went out with me). I wore the oil on my pulse points every day. I used it in the bath and the shower and it was part of me. Ten years later, a friend I hadn't seen since uni walked into the pub with her husband and said 'I told him, she'll be sitting there wearing fingerless gloves, rolling a cigarette, drinking a pint and smelling of White Musk.' 

I love to be a constant in a changing world (as another uni friend beautifully badged me a few years after this), but I have to say that I did eventually outgrow that scent. I will always love it, and you can sprinkle it on my grave, but I needed to move on. 

I didn't find a new scent in my 30s. While having a ridiculous weakness for mainstream male cologne (honestly, if I'm ever in the market and you fancy me and have access to original Kouros, you're halfway there), the same does not apply to the lady scent. There was ol' unisex CKOne and its ilk, but nah. They remind me of ladette culture, and I did not belong there. The closest I got was a huge retro trip, back to eau de cologne from Boots in giant bottles and 4711 - a classic from the 70s that an old lady (I say old, but I was eight) I spent a lot of time with used to drench everything in. Love an eau de cologne. 

My early 40s took me to Boswells in Oxford, where I discovered Roger & Gallet. This was something of a breakthrough. Gingembre and Cedrat are both warm and lovely, and I wore them for a few years, together with a sandalwood-heavy fragrance whose name I can't remember. I went rather abruptly off them (like many things) when we moved north, my mum died, and everything changed. *Her* signature fragrance was Caleche, and I still have her last bottle of it. I bought it for her in Duty Free on one of my long haul trips for NGO X. I wear it on high days and holidays, and it's lovely, but it's her lovely, not mine. 

And then M bought me a bottle of Jo Malone's Wood Sage & Sea Salt cologne. This was a brave thing to do, or rather, a risky thing -- this stuff isn't cheap. But it was perfect. I absolutely fell in love with it and wore it every day till it ran out, then bought some more. I thought I was there, I thought I had my new signature fragrance. I was very pleased. 

But then came 2018, the year of cancer (M's), redundancy (mine), confusion and anxiety, and everything changed again. I couldn't wear Wood Sage & Sea Salt, it just didn't cut it anymore. I put it away in my washbag, and moved on to something darker and stronger: Black Cedarwood & Juniper. I never really loved it, but it fitted my mood. Towards the end of that bottle, I got an interview for the job I have now -- I travelled to London for both interviews, and for the second one I had to stay over the night before, so I had my washbag. Thus it was I rediscovered Wood Sage & Sea Salt, which I renamed The Smell of A Simpler Time. I was ready to have it back in my life. 

Things were never going to stay simple, though, were they. That job has brought me a lot of joy: deep thinkers who care deeply about the world *and* who deeply love to go to the pub, what is not to enjoy? I haven't had so much brain-stretching fun since the early days of NGO X, back when the world was only partly on fire, and we still thought we could fix it. As I said goodbye to NGO X and the many fine people who were still, at that point, sticking it out (some fine people still are, I should add, but I was not the only casualty of the Thing That Happened), I dropped into the Oxford branch of Jo Malone with my friend S, two large glasses of white deep, and chose the scent for the next part of my life. 

That was Jasmine Sambac and Marigold. I chose it because jasmine is one of my favourite smells. It is the smell of hot, humid nights in faraway places, at the point where the sand meets the sea and everything is the same temperature. The food is spicy, the liquor is hard and slightly weird, the music is Santana. Your feet are bare and the main smell, apart from the jasmine, is mosquito coils. You'll have to go back to your life pretty soon, but for now you're free, and now the sun's gone down, you are unfurling like a fern in the warm mist. It's the Smell of Possibility. 

Jasmine also has a high sillage, and I was feeling like I needed a bit of that about me. I wore Jasmine Sambac and Marigold for most of 2019, and it brought me many hugs. I hope it will always be in my repertoire: it is truly the scent of a woman trying to work out what her game is and how near to the top of it she wants to be.  

So we could have left it there, with the gorgeous Smell of Possibility tempered by the clean Smell of A Simpler Time, but 2020 wasn't going to let us get away with that, was it? Hell, as they say, no. So, please welcome to the group the Perfumes of the Pandemic. 

Grapefruit Cologne

My wonderful friends C and S bought me not one but two Jo Malone scents for my 50th birthday, the celebration of which just squeaked under the lockdown limbo pole. One was Sea Sage and Wood Salt -- did they know?? Or am I that easy to buy scent for?? Either way, yay, I still have a bottle for my washbag and I wear it every day I am not in Ecoville. The other was Grapefruit -- I would never have chosen this but it turns out I love it. It is sharp and clever and understated, only two of which qualities I can lay any claim to, but all of which I admire. I wore it through Lockdown One, and it ended up in my swimming bag when the gym reopened, which is where its last vestiges remain. It is now the Smell of Self Care. When it finally runs out, I fully intend to replace it. 

Red Roses

At the same celebration, I admired the scent of my friend K multiple times (good sillage) and it was another Jo Malone -- honestly, it's like she knows what she's doing -- this time one of the biggies, Red Roses. Again, I would never have, but it smelt amazing on her, so when my friend E said she had a Jo Malone voucher that she wasn't going to use and did I want anything, that is what I chose. And I cannot lie, it is a perfume with power. I am not sure we met the best of each other, me and Red Roses, because that is what I wore through the end of 2020 and into the lockdown of early 2021. Which was an intense time for me. I had an intense perfume to match, and I drew on its strength, but ultimately it will be remembered (by me, anyway) as the Smell of Righteous Yet Unwise Fury. 

Why unwise, Jo, you ask. Surely not you? Well. I swore at one of my neighbours on a Zoom call that was being recorded. The recording now has a life of its own, and I hear that several people just watch that part of it over and over. (I have not watched it, because I was there. I felt like a dog that had been poked with a stick for like months who finally snapped. I remember the sweet, sweet catharsis, swiftly followed by oh fuck I used a swear word, and we don't like swear words). 

How bad was it? I called one of my neighbours a bitch. She was (in my view, and if you want to lawyer up, I have evidence) being a bitch, and I was tired of letting it slide. But it was a dumb move on my part, as we care A LOT MORE, it turns out, about people calling people a bitch than about people actually behaving like a bitch. (Full disclosure: I think I said "stop being such a fucking bitch about this", which a) isn't actually calling her a bitch, but that's what people heard, and b) also included the f word, which I am not sure the audio picked up, as I said it half under my breath, but M's wince every time it comes up makes me think I probably did F it as well as B it). 

I blame the Red Roses. They made me all heady. To be fair, I should also blame my hormones, as this was when I was running at my hottest, but if you're running hot, Red Roses will make you hotter. It's like the drum beat of every injustice you've ever experienced. Mmmm, Red Roses. But I don't think I'll go there again till I'm out the other side of my 50s. 

Forest 

Moving swiftly on, the same lovely E, possibly advised by my beloved, got me a Discovery Set from Rook Perfumes for my birthday last year. I don't really have a Rook Perfumes level budget so this was a perfect gift. I spent the spring (when I wasn't Red Rosing it in red mist) trying all six scents out, one a night on repeat, and thinking hard about which one, if any, might be for me. In the end, it was Forest or Undergrowth, and I waited for a decent discount code and decided to make my choice at the moment of purchase. 

I went Forest, and I have not regretted it. (I don't think I'd have regretted Undergrowth either, but Forest is more assertive). Forest was my mid-year smell last year. It saw me through getting hauled in for questioning by the community governance team, AC-12 style (I also wore an excellent jacket) for ... I still don't know what, really. Upsetting people with a greater set of privileges than me, who therefore get to present as 'nice', is my best reading, but I know even that interpretation would likely be seen as 'upsetting'. Who's upset by whose upset, we might ask. But we don't. 

I grew up on a street called Forest Drive, and I see Forest as the Smell of Remembering Who You Are. 

English Oak and Hazelnut

So. What are you wearing now, Jo, I hear you ask. (Maybe not you, but my imaginary friends, who love reading this stuff). Aha, I answer, I am very glad you asked. Because I do, as we limp towards the end of the beginning of this phase of humanity's decline, have a new smell. And it's another Jo Malone - this time English Oak and Hazelnut. 

This is what they say about it: "The crunch of green hazelnut with the spice of elemi. The earthy woodiness of vetiver, cooled by emerald moss carpets on a warming base of roasted oak."

Perfumier nonsense, of course. One of my neighbours caught its sillage the other day and said 'goodness, you smell amazing, what on earth is that?' 

Well, I said, it's English Oak and Hazelnut, but I call it the Smell of Getting The Fuck On With It. 

When summer comes to Ecoville, I will lie on the lawn, inhale the scent of the daisies and let it play through me. We keep going, they say, we keep growing. 

joella

I worry for the cats of war

I'm staring at the orphan refugee Cat Who Doesn't Live Here who you could say is thriving (tyrannical, muscular, sizeable*), and immensely loved by rebel factions**, but who lives entirely off instinct and never knew his mother or kitlings. No civilising influences for *him*, and he does pay a price for this. God knows it's no time for a cheap metaphor so I won't. But it's not an easy life. 

joella

*Morbidly obese, if you're the vet weighing him. 

** Obvs me, but absolutely not just me