Jiggery pokery: introducing the series

We're far enough out from the depths of the pandemic that Facebook memories have started popping up. It's all kinds of weird. One of the things that's coming up for me is how, in the depths of a terrifying time, there was -- for some of us, not all of us, I know -- a new kind of space, an opportunity to assess and reflect and maybe, as we used to say before we had the soul drained out of us by the latest round of Entitled Toryism, build back better. 

Some things have changed forever for the worse: so many lives lost or long-term affected, so much damage to the NHS, so much sacrifice unrecognised or unappreciated. A few things for the better (from where I'm sitting anyway): hybrid and remote working releases opens up whole vistas of flexibility, I sense a new acceptance of personal/family life alongside working life, you can get Roti King by post. 

But in many arenas, while there was a once in a lifecycle opportunity to reconfigure, to divest of what is not serving us and invest in what is or might be, it was wasted. We went from "we're tired, it's hard, we haven't got energy to address this" straight to "we want it back like it used to be, only a bit shitter, because everything's a bit shitter now" without passing Go or collecting $200. 

This is very much how it feels for me here in Ecoville. Before the world went mad, we had our entrenched problems as a community. In decreasing importance (to me, I am not speaking for anyone else) these were*: 

• conflict avoidance and its effect on community wellbeing
• communal meals and their primacy in our agreements
• rules around what can be stored and/or cooked in communal spaces, including outside (actually, with cooking, anywhere outside)
• whose behaviour is challenged and whose is tolerated and why
• spending money on non-essential things that some people want a lot but other people don't want at all 
• who can and can't have a car or priority access to a car
• the role of pets in people's lives

There was a part of me - because I am a deep thinker and, while not overly optimistic about humanity in general still of the view that people don't generally want to make the lives of others worse when they know those people and are part of some kind of shared endeavour so are directly faced with the consequences of their actions and choices (in a way that say people buying clothes from Primark or scoring cocaine on a weekend or flying to the Maldives or ordering fois gras arguably are not) that thought we could, you know, do some work on this.

(Yes I know that sentence was too long, but that's how convoluted it gets around here).

Anyway, as my Significant Ex used to say to me when I'd been especially idealistic and/or naive, which has never been that infrequent in Jo World, it's amazing how wrong one person can be. 

We, as in M and I, will have been here for ELEVEN YEARS come August. ELEVEN. We were early birds, because the house we got was one of the first ones to get finished, so there's a general sense that 2023 is the 10 year marker. Good number, 10. Healthy time to do a lil evaluation, maybe? 

Honestly, I'd love to get into that collective soup. I think it would do us so much good - both us right now and us as an entity that has a past and will endure into the future. And there are so many ways we could do it! But we won't. We're too stuck. There's all kinds of hostility, toxicity, unchallenged legacy power dynamics and ensuing enmity... there's almost an argument to be made that we've fucked it, but actually, loads of us are still here, and while moving house is a shag, people still do it all the time, so there must be a reason for that? 

I like to understand my own reasons, at least. I bear examination. So I'm going to take those sticky issues and dig in. If you love my Ecoville reflections, you're in the right place. If you don't, I invite you to switch off your television set phone and go out and do something less boring instead, WHY DON'T YOU?

If you're sticking around, welcome! 

We started out with some pretty fixed ideas, which were turned into some pretty rigid policies before we even really got started. This was, in my view, a massive mistake. But. For me, these are sunk social and emotional costs. They shouldn't influence our forward direction. We should label them and let them go. 

We don't though. To beeeee continued. 

joella

*I didn't mention parenting, because I'm not a parent, but by the end of lockdown I'd certainly added 'use of the only decent sized flat bit of lawn on the whole site, a chunk of which happens to be directly outside my house'.