Blown on the steel breeze

We recently marked the autumn equinox, one of my favourite days. While I've always noticed the seasons, I never paid direct attention to these things until I spent several years practising seasonal vinyasa yoga with a teacher who enabled me to connect with parts of myself I'd never even been aware of. Sort of like that Heineken advert, but real. 

From E, I learnt about the significance of the solstices (which to be fair do not go unobserved in wider society), the equinoxes, and the four inbetweeines: Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lammas. These are all pagan festivals, for sure, and I would not describe myself as pagan, but I loved aligning different kinds of movement to them. It made sense to me. They're important inflection points in the year. Spaces to reflect and make change. 

I am grateful to know more about all of them, as a person who has often struggled to maintain a strong connection with her physical self. Imbolc especially is a good day: we're nearly through the darkness! Don't push it, respect its retreat. Stay cosy but start making plans. Tentative forays are what we need at Imbolc. Adventure a few stretches. 

But I have come to learn that I also love an equinox. Whatever it is you've been investing in, the year is flipping on its axis, have a little think? It's less of a resolve time and more of a reflection one. I find. 

M and I got civilly partnered on the autumn equinox almost two years ago. Not sure anyone else (including him) really got the significance of the choice of date, and to be fair it helped that it was a Saturday and the registrar was available, but it felt good to me. And as equinoxes approach each year - especially the autumn ones, but I do like the fact that there are two of them - I do a bit of the "so, how's this going then?" 

The short version is it ain't so different from the way it was going before the legalities and the big party, though there are some lovely long tail reminders of what a great idea it is to push the boat out on the party front once in a lifetime, and I am glad we did it after 25 years together as sooo many people there knew and had spent significant time with us both (and each other), and that made it all the lovelier. I could point to some things I would have done differently, but on balance, all I would say is I'd do it again in a heartbeat. 

Last year we returned to the Imperial Hotel to celebrate our first anniversary, not alone but with a much smaller group of people, and it was lovely to remember, to celebrate in a different way, to give Blackpool another chance to entertain us (and it totally did). I had a bit of a thought of, ok, this is what we do now on the autumn equinox, but actually, I am not sure I want to be that predictable to myself.

So this year, I decided to mark the event in a slightly different way. M's birthday was the weekend before the equinox, and we booked a night away at the wonderful Inn at Whitewell, but I know that more than anything he likes to be part of a big convivial meal, so I offered to organise one of those in our Common House on the Saturday night before we went away. 

I could easily have pulled a group of 12-15 people together from the folk we socialise with regularly, but actually I knew he wanted something that would be open to anyone here who wanted to come. This is something I knew I would find much harder, because of the potential for feedback. I like to be prepared, and the more variables there are, the more prepared I have found I like to be. 

But I've been working on this stuff with my therapist. who will say "why don't you just do [X] then?" and then watch me wave my arms around for ten minutes as I describe all of the things that might happen to me and how they would make me feel. But he's always got a point, and the things that I do instead (impersonate a cat, make sculptures from fish tins, write Nick Cave quotes on the blackboards, let my window box flowers die, avoid community meetings) may seem to me like a clear expression of my discontent, but I'm not sure anyone else reads them that way. 

And we have a "your birthday, your rules" position in this house, so I drew on one of J's suggestions, which was to organise something you want to organise, do it the way you want to do it, and invite everyone. My only stipulation was that I needed numbers in advance -- numbers are important for logistics, but signing up is also an important signifier here: I see you and I accept your offer. And also you get to know who's coming. 

And that's what I did. I chose something that would be a bit special but that I knew I could cook at scale on my own - and clear up on my own if necessary, though I didn't expect to be doing either, I knew M would help me prep and it's usually a communal clear up if it's been a good night. I decided to make fish soup from a recipe I've been using since my early 20s: if you have good olive oil, good vegetables and herbs, good stock and tinned tomatoes, and good fish, you're onto a winner. It's so good, and super easy.

The fish goes in right at the last minute, so I planned to do most of the cooking in the communal kitchen, which is vegetarian, and then add the fish in batches on a little induction hob around the corner in the Meat And Fish Area. We bought the fish from our mobile fishmonger on the Tuesday, prepped it and froze it for easy use on Saturday with no messing around. 

We're very sensitive about certain things here, for some reasons I understand and some I really don't. But I did a lot of thinking about how to deliver it inclusively, including having an offer for any vegans or vegetarians (basically the same soup but with butter beans -- I have done this before, it has gone down well). 

Protocol here is you give out info on the menu so people can check their dietaries, there was also going to be local sourdough bread and samphire butter (I was a few glasses of wine in when I decided to include the butter, as that was a true experiment and this was supposed to be entirely known territory). Anyway, I set out the offer and I sent out the invite. 

It's actually hard to explain how big a deal this was for our household, as for years I have been extremely cautious about engaging with the community as a whole, qua community. I drew up a set of concentric circles and populated them with the people I feel solidarity, connection and comfort with, moving out through goodwill, neighbourliness, and neutrality to hostility and mistrust (often mutual). And when I felt I wanted to engage at all beyond that inner group, I used an array of opt in WhatsApp groups and an email group I called, Imbolc style, Tentative Forays. If you don't want to hear from me, went my reasoning at the time, I will make sure that you don't. 

There's a WhatsApp group that most people are on, but I am not because it makes me feel existentially lonely. I'd like to be able to drop in and out of it but the main admin won't change the setting to make that possible, and so I just miss that stuff. 

But this is all complicated to manage and not very sustainable. New people arrive and I never meet them, unless I go round and knock on their door and say "hi, you won't meet me so I thought I'd come and introduce myself, I don't have any beef with you, so do you want to be on my email list?" I paraphrase but it's a strange way to try and get to know people, and of course it immediately puts them in an awkward position. 

So, you know, invite everyone, let's see what happens. Be Best, as Melania would say. 

Stuff happened. I aim to keep the focus here on me, this being my blog, unless a line is crossed. I wrote about getting accused of a hate crime, for example, and I stand by it, but I try not to write about other individuals. This time wasn't nearly so drastic but there was a Challenge, which became an Issue, which led to some Emotional Conversations, and ultimately a Meeting. The crux of it was could you just not? and I decided that I couldn't just not, so while most people who accepted the invitation had no idea about all of this, and indeed neither did most of the people who didn't, by the time the day rolled around I'd been several times through the wringer that living here can be. 

And I didn't know if it would be ok. If I would be ok. The morning of the party there was a General Meeting and I facilitated an hour long session on travel. I have been trying VERY VERY HARD to bring my A game (or at least my B+ game) back into the collective mix, based on the assurances of others that we're all a bit more chilled out these days, more tolerant of each other, more willing to see that there's more than one way to "do community". So I've started going to GMs again, including offering to minute and run the occasional session. There is a limited pool of people able / willing to do these things, and my Marxist tendencies mean I think that if you can, you should. And at that point, I could, so I did. 

I was scheduled to go to the gym in the afternoon, but that, I couldn't do. Instead I slept for a few hours, then at 4pm I said right, let's do this, and I went down to the Common House to get started on the cooking. By about 5.30 soup for 20 was well underway, samphire had been mixed into butter, fresh sourdough had been delivered, and it was maybe time to open the wine. 

Let's put some music on and do the tables, I said to M. There is usually a row of three tables all lined up together to make one big one. I don't like it, to me it makes the place feel like a school dining hall. My current preferred layout is to turn each of them through 45 degrees, to break up the lines and create more intimacy. There are other tables in there too, including our old dining table from Oxford, and I like to make them all look different but equally welcoming. 

There's a pretty good sound system in the Common House these days. I connected to the Bluetooth and opened Spotify on my phone. The first thing I saw was the preview of Wish You Were Here 50. And I thought, that will do if I put it on loud enough. 

So I did, and we moved the tables, and turned down the lights, and opened the wine, and set up the space, and around 7 the guests arrived. One neighbour lit a fire, another sliced the bread, another brought berries and cream, another one brought a cake. Two of the younger ones who love to help carried the soup round the corner, stirred in the fish, and helped me serve it up in batches. There'll be way too much, I thought, but every last bit of it was eaten, and several people asked for the recipe. 

The whole evening felt wholesome and good and warm. There was that lovely buzz of conversation that you get when the ambience lands right. I was very happy. A neighbour loaded the MAFA dishwasher with all of the soup bowls and the pans we'd used at the end, then around 9.45, people started drifting off. Right, said T, let's turn the music up and get the clear up done. And four of us cleared the tables, ran everything else through the main dishwasher, cleaned the kitchen, swept and mopped the floor, bang, done. One of the lovely things about a shared space is lots of people know how it works, and it doesn't belong to any of us, it belongs to all of us. 

You made an amazing thing happen, said M the next day. And I did, though not on my own. 

Sometimes I take an indirect approach

Not the end of the story though. It'd be a #livelaughlove Facebook post if it was. No. 

Instead, my implicit not explicit breach of a rule made for reasons lost to time, in an era where many such rules lie in the dust of the governance drift we cannot find the energy to attend to, has occasioned an Edict. There will be no more fish soup without due process. And we all know the death of creativity is the due process in the hall. 

I have worked on all of this for coming up 18 months now. I've moved myself back into good faith engagement, encouraged by a lot of the good faith I see around me. I've put time into things I know I can do, not least this very evening -- our bin collections are changing, we need to work out how many more bins we need as a community, because we don't have individual household bins. I'm in a good place to be part of that team, as I can a) do maths, b) was part of the original thinking about how many bins we needed 13 years ago, and c) live right next to the bin store so I can see what it copes with and what it doesn't cope with. Oh, and d) I care. 

It's the caring that comes and goes. I worked really hard to get it back. Many people were lovely to me, and appreciated the work that I was able to contribute to travel, to bins, to file management, to food and celebration and joy. I have skills -- some of which I already possessed (planning, estimation, user experience, numeracy, critical thinking, sensemaking in ambiguity, attention to detail), some of which I have developed while living here (menu planning for large numbers with varying needs, ambience curation, expediting, facilitation of diverse groups, adapting approaches for low tech users). They're not all of the skills a community like ours needs, very far from it, but they've all been useful at times, and I am aware at least some of them are in short supply. 

I also do more of what I have learnt to call "inner work" than I've ever done. And I always did a fair bit. I'm currently supremely fucked off that none of that seems to have paid any lasting dividends, but maybe I shouldn't be surprised. Haters gonna hate. Gotta shake shake shake it off. 

So. No more working on community spirit for a while. Tis a season for joys closer to home and far, far away. 

No. Shit. Till Imbolc.

(earliest, bitches)

joella 

O, from this time forth, my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!

sometimes I feel very seen

We went to see Hamlet Hail to the Thief last weekend, and it was thrilling. I've never really been one for Shakespeare -- I can see there are stories in there that embody the "nothing new under the sun" message, and I can also see how valuable it is to have those stories, but, mostly, yawn. Too many words, too much leaping around, too much declaiming. I've seen a few of the more famous plays, live and on film, and I studied a few more at school, but they just don't reach me. And it's not that I'm unreachable, is my logic, so it's not on me. If I ever got to go on Desert Island Discs, I'd ask for the complete works of Ursula Le Guin instead. 

But HHttT (as no one called it) was immense. I have seen the full Hamlet twice, so I know how many of the lines are part of the culture, and this seemed to concentrate around the highlights and make them make sense. With additional bonuses of a) incredible physical energy (there was quite a lot of dance) and b) a killer soundtrack (there is little Radiohead I don't love). I laughed out loud several times, and had to look through my fingers several more, and this is rare for me at plays. To be fair I don't go to that many -- the first one I went to that wasn't a school or university performance I tried to leave at the interval because I thought it was finished, so I guess I'm just not much of a thesp. 

I've been thinking about what reached me, and why, and what other recent things have reached me, and why, in the light of my current exploration of the snakes and the ladders. Some of the other recent things include a Richard Dawson gig which I only bought a ticket for on the night, a visit to Levens Hall, a bowl of Bun Bo La Lot at Salvation in Noodles in Finsbury Park, a Lego Serious Play workshop for some of my colleagues that I made happen (and got to attend), a wine-soaked conversation punctuated with birdsong on someone else's riverfront terrace, and a walk with my beloved across the Lots in Silverdale as the sun was setting over Morecambe Bay.

I live, and have generally lived, a life suffused with things that reach me. I want to be reached, and I want to be part of things that reach other people. I think that's important, when I talk about the snakes and the ladders. It really fucking matters to me, the reaching. And I mean reach (and this will come up again later, kids) with good intent. That can mean challenging. That should sometimes mean challenging. Of me, as I am reached, and of others, if I reach them. Or it can mean joy. Or comfort. But if it makes you think, that doesn't make it bad. In my view. If it makes you a little uncomfortable, ditto. 

This musing is prompted, or maybe accelerated, by the fact that here in Ecoville there is a new Common House Floor Cleaning Rota and a new six month rota for the regular cleaning jobs, and as usual (since forever) my name is not on the former and as usual (since 2020) my name is not on the latter. I really thought this time round I'd feel like I could sign up for a job like some of the jobs I used to do -- I have never been able to approach the kitchen but I used to change towels, clean windowsills and communal toilets, tidy shelves, look after the washing machines. 

I'm not the only person whose name doesn't appear on those rotas (I can guess at some other people's reasons, but I'm not going to speculate on them here) and this does cause issues. If it was literally just me, the community impact would not be that great, everything would get done, some people would think less of me, I would accept that, in the sense that getting me back on the rota would not really be worth any community effort. Just leave her be, she's a weird one. 

I'd still be sad, because I am reachable, and my conscience combined with my female socialisation means that I feel bad not being on the rota, but not as bad as being on the rota would make me feel.* Lots of people not being on the rota makes me feel a bit worse, because I think it's hard on the people who do their bit, but then maybe they like it that way, I don't know. 

Because we don't talk about it. Not really. 

But I can. As I said in the trailer, I've been working some of this through in the light of my (very late! go patriarchy! thanks menopause!) autism diagnosis. If you are unfamiliar with some of the dimensions of autistic thought and communication, there's a reasonable summary here. I would say my need for clarity is intense, and couples with my strong justice sensitivity  And one of the biggest WTF elements for me these last couple of years has been the slowly then all at once realisation that for a lot of people, clarity and justice are not nearly as important as everyone being nice to the people who expect people to be nice to them** (I can't even work out how you know who those people are, except by counting my bruises when I hit a nerve that was supposed to be clearly marked "do not discuss"). 

One way this manifests is that I experience fudging as oppression. I therefore want to fight it, and if I can't express myself in words out loud, I'll find another way to do it. Honestly, it's a relief to know this. 

Sometimes that's in t-shirts: the photo above was taken by a neighbour (also a friend and confidante) at one of our General Meetings (GMs). For many years I barely missed a GM: I believed they were where we made decisions, and I believed (in the words of President Bartlet) that decisions are made by the people who show up. You have to be in the room, I thought, because that is the way to ensure that your views are represented. So I made a lot of effort to be in the room. Before we moved in, that represented hundreds of pounds of effort a month, as we had to travel here from Oxford. After, it was more emotional effort: some meetings sent me to bed for the rest of the day. 

I don't believe that anymore, not fundamentally. My loss of faith in consensus decision making is a whole separate post, and a whole separate sadness, as for a long time I was like well, fuck, this is how everyone should do stuff. You don't get 52:48 votes changing the course of history if you're working with consensus -- you have to keep going till you find something that everyone can live with. But it really doesn't work if you are conflict averse, and it really doesn't work if you won't examine your power dynamics. 

More on that another time, but basically I got burnt bad when my intent was good, and I don't react well when that happens. It feels in my head like a portcullis slams down. I can still see the place that I used to be able to hang out, but I can't get there anymore, so I have to adapt. Annoyingly, it's a surprise every time. You'd think I'd learn, but I'm an earnest little bean. 

Adapting often takes the form of withdrawal, but I still need to find a way to express myself -- I need the pressure release valve if I am not to explode with the injustice of everything. This is, I think, what my Ecoville blog posts have often been about. And sometimes I can get myself back in the room, which is how I found myself in a General Meeting where we were ostensibly talking about conflict. I have stuff to say about this, I thought. Finally! 

I am pretty sure my T-shirt choice that day was deliberate, but it was not conscious. I have a bunch of T-shirts that are (arguably) provocative. At least two of them have fish on them, and one just has the word UNAPOLOGETIC. I bought this green one at a Cypress Hill gig, and really for the front of it (which says Cypress Hill in the Rizla font) than for the back. It's a cracking song though. 

But anyway, there I was, wearing it, and there was the session about conflict, and there was the list of ways you might approach it and we were invited to decide which we identified with and I was standing there looking at it, thinking "where's I protest?". My approach to conflict is not on this list! But, as captured so beautifully by E, I was literally wearing it on my body. 

🎵 It's a sin to kill a man / But I'll be damned if I don't take a stand 🎵

(Note: I would almost certainly not actually kill anyone) 

We had a genteel conflict avoidant conversation about conflict, I'm not sure whose needs were satisfied, but mine weren't. A straw poll indicated that a majority of the people who had got themselves into the room that day saw "conflict" as something we should pay attention to. That was 10 months ago, and I see absolutely fucking zero evidence that we have. 

Jo, I hear myself saying, you could take a lead on this! Yeah, I hear myself saying, look what happened last time you tried taking a lead on this! And the time before. And the time all you did was try and support the other person who was trying to take a lead on this. Et fucking cetera. 

We could say that we only value people who Don't Make A Fuss, Clean The Floors, and are happy to Go Along With Not Upsetting A Specific Group Of People***. We could say that, and I sort of wish that we would, it would be at least helpful for those of us who appreciate clarity. Those of us who have been here for a while once received a printout in our mailboxes about the value of duct tape (over your mouth) and work gloves for new community members****. While this is almost the dictionary definition of passive aggression, when you are actually new it's not terrible advice, especially if you are a white cishet man. 

But if we're talking about the "living phase" as opposed to the "build phase" -- we were literally here second. We did some really fucking hard yards. And even for a lot of the softies who arrived after we had a postcode and a car club and wi-fi and a laundry, they were still basically in at the beginning. How many years till you're allowed to have views? Five? 10? 

To round this post off (I'm trying to keep them at a digestible length) I have learnt that where I live I am seen as difficult and challenging and upsetting, and at times not acceptable. And I felt bad about that for quite a while. I don't try to be those things, except occasionally when I have reached my tolerance limits, or drunk a whole bottle of red (I often go from warm fuzzy to cold fury somewhere between glasses three and four, but this is why I left the community WhatsApp). 

You should hear my inside voice. Honestly, I work hard in a world full of dissembling and fudge, and only occasionally go pop, though fair to say that when I do, we're cleaning it off the walls for years (well, I'm not, as I'm not on the rota). 

As one of my neighbours (who literally rubs my words out every time I write them on a blackboard) bellowed at me once, maybe I should... MOVE OUT!! And I've thought about it. But I love my house, and a lot of my other neighbours are awesome. When virtue signalling was more overt here than it is currently, someone declaimed that we ran the risk of just being a bunch of middle class people living in nice houses by a river. Maybe that's what I am, me and my refusal to clean the floor, but you know, I tried. Another one of them once said "We've (that magic we again) tried very hard to meet your needs". You haven't though, you've never even asked me what they are. 

But I can write about them here, and maybe that will help. Or not, but it will help me, and that's better than a slap in the face with a wet fish. 

joella

*There's always the option of being on the rota but not doing the thing -- I am unable to do this one, I find unilateral active transgression almost impossible. 

**These are usually the power holders in a situation (though not all power holders etc). This can cover unconscious entitlement, extreme wealth, cult leadership, and many things in between. 

*** I have a list of the people who refused to agree the agenda of a meeting that contained some proposals they did not even want to hear. This was an organised exercise and there were 13 of them. Maybe half of them were foot soldiers recruited by the officer class. I'm cool with them, it's hard to say no to that kind of thing if you are asked to pick a team. The officers, I watch. When one of them leaves, I have a silent disco. 

**** This was an excerpt from Finding Community by Diana Leafe Christian. Who visited here once. Lunch was vegan, but my beloved cooked her an omelette. 

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'. 

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

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

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

Breaking the McDonald's seal

Christmas 2003, we went to India for a month. It was one of the best resettings I've ever had, and not just because it was a long one. We did a small group tour with Intrepid Travel, which was organised in partnership with Oxfam Australia, and we visited a bunch of NGO and community projects, including spending a full five days in rural Orissa with Gram Vikas, whose work tilted my world on its axis a little.

Intrepid are an Australian company, and our group included quite a few solo Australians, including three women who bonded with each other pretty quickly and were excellent life and soul value. I generally love the Australian women I have met on my travels. They are hilarious while remaining humane. They don't give a shit, while managing not to be dicks. They drink a lot of beer, and they taught me the phrase 'breaking the seal': it's the first time you go for a wee in a drinking session. Once that's happened, you'll be running to the loo all the time, like a proper girl. It resonated hard. My bladder control is on the excellent side, but only till it's not. Oh mate, they'd say, you're breaking the seal. They'd hold on waaaayyyy longer. But everyone's seal breaks in the end.

I have found it to be an adaptable concept. I didn't eat meat for 30 years, with hardly any breaches - and those were mainly politeness-based. Eventually I was someone who didn't eat meat because she didn't eat meat, even though my reasons for not eating any meat didn't fully hold anymore. I used to argue that the people who don't do something because they don't are important - you have to stand for something or you'll fall for anything etc. And I still think that's true - you need the unbenders in lots of situations, to keep you thinking and keep you honest. But I came up against some of the truly unbending, and my contrary self broke the seal.

And I'd like to tell you that every bit of meat I have eaten since has been pasture-fed and out-door reared and organic and free range, but while a lot of it has, you know and I know that would be a big fat lie. I have had an American Hot. I have had a Steak Bake. I have had a gala pie. But till t'other week, I had gone the entirety of the 21st century without a Big Mac.

Till December 2019, I had, in fact, only once been to a McDonald's in the 2000s. It was at 6.30am in January 2002 in Huehuetenango, Guatemala. I was there on a work trip, it was freezing cold, it was literally the only open place in town, and the project officer accompanying us had no idea why two of us hovered on the threshold, wondering what the Spanish for 'we don't visit McDonald's on principle' was. We quite quickly got over ourselves and had a coffee and an Egg McMuffin, but it felt, even in the circs, unpleasantly transgressive. These guys, these guys are part of the problem, we felt.

But there's problems and problems. I mean, look at the Labour Party. And about a month ago, we seemed to be at it again here in Ecoville. It's a long story, and it's been going on a long time. I have written about it before*, but not for a while, not for years. Mainly this is because I know there are people who don't like me writing about it. Or, possibly, anyone writing about it. Which is a challenge, as it's such good material - so good that we actually got covered by a real magazine this year. Which is a good read, I think. But it might have stirred something. Something did, at any rate, as a little bomb went off.

The timing was unfortunate. To live successfully in a place like this you have to work out how to play the long game. You get knocked down, and you get up again, but it can take a while. It's always been important to me to be making a contribution, and I've always found a way to do that. There are low-exposure and high-exposure jobs (which broadly, but not perfectly, equate to low stress and high stress) and there are jobs that anyone can do, and jobs that only some people can do. A few years ago, while I was still very much licking my Food Wars wounds, I found myself a low-exposure job that needed specific skills (treasurer of the co-op that buys stuff for our on-site food and household goods store). This role is actually Quite Hard, but also Mostly Appreciated, and can, if necessary, be done anywhere there's an internet connection. It was a good fit, but I was getting a bit tired of it: sometimes it involves chasing people for money, and I hate that part; there are some bits that are wildly inefficient, by design; and also I just felt it was all a bit staid. A bit wholemeal. I wanted to be a bit more creative with what we bought and where we bought it from. But no one else was interested, not really. You have to pay attention to that, in the long game. Pick your battles, Jo.

So I was thinking well, things feel quite stable at the moment, we're doing ok. M is currently well, my job is going great, my dad's not been in an ambulance for a bit. Maybe I should be offering a bit more. We are, as one of my neighbours beautifully put it, all crew.

We elect company directors every year - lots of people have done the job (it's a two year term) but it's very much at the high exposure end of things. There are never quite enough people willing to stand - certainly not in recent years. I think we could have up to 12, and there are currently five. So if you decide it's a thing you can do, you're pretty much guaranteed to get the job. So. Hey, I'm a company director! Go me. So is M. Go us. We thought about it a lot, and figured it was our turn to take some of that stuff for the team. He's done it before, I haven't, but when he did, it was all in the house anyway, whatever he was dealing with, so I figured it was worth doing it together. Deep breaths, I thought. We're growing up and growing past and growing on.

BLAM!

(Actually, maybe it was that that was the trigger? It's fine to do the books but not to make decisions about [checks agenda] firewood and trampolines? I don't know).

Also - and this has happened several times - like a lot of people, we're supposed to do a lot more communal meal cooking than we actually do, and it's a point of some contention in our house. I know I should try harder, but how we eat together, or don't, is at the absolute heart of a lot of my own sadness, anger and frustration about living here. It's the main thing I am trying to grow past, so I can focus on the joyful, creative, productive parts. But it takes me actual months to build up the energy and the enthusiasm. And then... just when I do, (and I try, I really do - this time I'd sourced a special ingredient from a kosher deli, ffs), BLAM! Someone says something, someone does something, and I think oh fuck it, I am not giving this a day of my life, and we invite people we like around for sausage pasta** instead.

Instead (and I do get the inherent tension here, so don't even think about explaining it to me, I'm not in the mood, I'll never be in the mood even when I'm in my best mood) there was a proposal for a Saturday morning conversation whose framing included the question "Do you think that a public blog is a useful way to initiate discussion and facilitate change in a community?" No. Of course it's not a useful way to initiate discussion and facilitate change in a community. But hey fellas, neither is a lot of the other stuff that's happened around here, a lot of it more in your face and screamy than that, and some of it pretty gangy-uppy, at least in my experience. Specifically, men claiming exclusive knowledge of the concept of inclusivity really. pushes. my. buttons.

And I have buttons. Your correspondent tried to do all the things she was supposed to do. She joined the teams. She turned up for the discussions. She explained why she was unhappy with the things she was unhappy with. She engaged with every single process at every single point. The above things happened anyway (most of them before she wrote a single blog post about them).

And this time she tried again. She lost a lot of sleep in the build up to the conversation, and did not practise her best self care. She may have drunk too much wine, stridden around the house ranting about 'this fucking place', done some sobbing and wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, but she got some wise counsel, she calmed the fuck down and she showed the fuck up.

As did around 20 other people, which is pretty impressive for a Saturday in December. She proposed a reframing of the questions, because she thought they were the wrong ones. We need to be talking about how to deal with conflict before it becomes a cold stale deposit in our arteries, congestion in our lungs. We've unpacked the shit out of this, years after the events, and it hasn't really helped, so why dwell?

And we took that forward, the kind, thoughtful people who'd shown up wanting to move this on, and we had four separate conversations about different aspects of the challenges ahead, and it was hopeful and energising and actually, maybe, worth the angst. (Jury's out on that one, I was planning a calm December and did not get one, but whatevs.)

Two hours we were there, and then four of us went to McDonald's. I had a Big Mac Meal with a full fat Coke, and I enjoyed every inch of it. The following week, I went to London for work, and thanked my colleagues for helping me learn more about systems and how they work, and how important it is to ask the right question, diagnose the problem whose addressing will have actual impact.

The last night I was there, I left the pub four pints deep and made my way back to the YHA. I got off the bus outside the Oxford St McDonald's. Yes! I thought, and I ordered a Filet-O-Fish from a machine. It arrived, about 45 seconds later, and I ate it, surrounded by girls from many nations and women of all classes. It tasted like very heaven.

Another seal done gone.

joella

* Links available on request
** One of our very favourite comfort dinners. It's by Jamie Oliver, and the recipe is here. It's not vegan, vegetarian, kosher or gluten free and it has wine in it for extra points.

The art of floating

This tree's story is near the end (sorry)

I'm aware that I've left a pretty devastating post up here for several months now - and you might, if you don't know me IRL or on Facebook, not have had an update since then. So here's one. Short version = I'm still here, it's all a bit better (and some of it's a lot better), but nothing will ever be the same again.

If you want the longer version...

Stories generally have a beginning, a middle and an end, but lives - except in their extremities - aren't so clear cut. We have our milestones, we humans, but it's not always obvious at the time which of them are the start of something, the end of something, or even events of any significance at all.

My NGO X story took up nearly all of my 30s, and most of my 40s. I've been thinking a lot recently about its last chapter. It was about six years long, and in my head now, it started in one South East Asian swimming pool and ended in another.

The first was in Cambodia. At the time I had a manager who pushed me out into a space she thought I might be able to make sense of. My first attempt failed - there wasn't anyone to work with out there - but the second attempt, a year or so later, landed. I got invited to a global IT meeting in Phnom Penh, completely winged it (wung it?) and came out leading a piece of work to design something that wasn't remotely well defined but everyone knew we needed.

Now, I'm ok with that kind of thing, so although this was several levels more politically complex than anything I'd done before, I wasn't a bad choice - indeed, my ability to say 'well I have no idea what to do for this part of it, so better get some help' was a positive asset. But I had a bit of a wild ride on the way - the trip was literally three days after we'd moved north, so I was already spinning with strangeness. While I was there I saw someone get their skull caved in by a moped metres away from me (do not romanticise the lack of traffic regulation in developing countries, do not do that), and then came back to the hotel to the news that my friend W's terminal illness was approaching the terminal part. The last night of the meeting I drank far too much minibar whisky (arguably any amount of minibar whisky is too much) and spent an absolute fortune sobbing incoherently down the phone to M.

The next morning I went down to breakfast a sorry mess of puffy eyes and existential dread. Everyone who'd flown in had been staying in the same hotel, and most of them were off sightseeing in Phnom Penh or flying to Angkor Wat for the weekend. I mean, who travels economy for 24 hours for a three day meeting with vicious jet lag and doesn't take in the sights afterwards, especially in a country with a history like Cambodia's? Well, me, it turns out. I had barely managed to find my passport and update my jabs. Our house was so new it didn't have a postcode yet. I needed to get back to it.

So I was heading to the airport that afternoon, and I didn't even have the energy to visit the, you know, genocide museum. My bad. But I wasn't quite on my own - for a couple of hours that morning I sat with N, a colleague of mine who at the time I barely knew - I'd only met him three days earlier - and he asked me how I was, and I told him, and he listened, and it was the kindest thing anyone could have done. After a while I made my excuses and said I needed to be in the water: there was a swimming pool in the hotel's courtyard, and I went up to my room, got changed, did a little bit of swimming up and down, then just settled for floating on my back, like a starfish.

I remember learning to float like that - it's easy once you know how, but not everyone does. It's all in the breath, like so many things. And you need an empty pool, as you will drift, and they don't come along that often unless you're in the 1%. But once you've mastered it, when you have a place to do it it's profoundly relaxing. And, I suspect, highly beneficial, especially if you are emotionally dessicated.

I remember reading Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation when it came out and being highly irritated by it generally, and especially the parts of it where she would say things like 'I was so depressed that year I have no idea how I managed to win the Rolling Stone college journalism prize'. You can't have been *that* depressed, love, I thought. But you know, I came back from that trip to Cambodia and within a month my mum was in hospital, and within a year she had died. We didn't have broadband for nearly four months, we didn't have an office for 13 months, so we were sharing a desk in our spare bedroom (sitting on opposite sides of it, each trying to use the same 3G mifi - remember mifi?), our house was full of boxes and our lives were upside down. Yet *somehow* I coordinated a team of five (in four countries on three continents, all working part time on this) and a consultant and we held three workshops in three countries and pulled a solid business case together. Which landed on the day of the Boston marathon bombing, and the project sponsor was in Boston. He did not like the business case, but he was also in lockdown. To be fair, I did not like the business case either, but for different reasons. We all learnt something that day.

But we still needed the thing. (The thing is what is now known rather imprecisely as a 'digital workplace' - I could talk about that for days but what the thing is doesn't really matter, it's how it happens, or doesn't happen). And so we went back to the drawing board, we got some more external help - focusing *right in* on the politics of the situation, that was a laser-sharp piece of work - and we reworked it. And we got the go ahead, and we secured not enough budget but a lot more budget than no budget, which is what we had before, and we were off!

Around this time, it became perfectly clear, not least to me, that I was not the right person to lead the project anymore. I am not a technical project manager. I do not sprint. If you want someone to do a politically-savvy-yet-complexity-aware job of prioritising your wish list, I am that woman, but just a few steps down the line of breaking that down into work units, my eyes glaze. And hell, there are people who are *great* at this. That same sponsor (and I remain super-fond of him) yelled at me "are you trying to tell me you've never delivered a global IT project?" and I yelled back "Yes!" He said "Wrong answer!"

Long story short - and man, this is a looooong story, but don't worry I won't be telling all of it - he recruited N to do that job. N was by now a friend of mine - one of the many people who'd supported me through my mum's illness and death, and one of the few who had been there himself. I knew N much better by this point, and I was beyond delighted that he was going to be taking this madly political, essential-yet-vulnerable piece of work forwards. 

In the four years that followed, N would often describe me as the project's "vision holder" - a title I loved to think I might embody, and in return I would say that he kept the project on the rails *and* kept everyone in the tent through some insane in the membrane level organisational weirdness. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was that if you try to run ahead of your organisation's evolution, or to cut across its grain, you will fail. And I agree... though I'd add that even if you don't, then you might still fail, but in a different way. We had some long dark teatimes of the soul. One of the longest and darkest lasted about three months, when a meeting of some Powers That Be decided it wasn't a priority and should be stopped, even though that wasn't the question they were asked, and everything went a bit crazy for a while. Because, man, we still needed the thing. So we carried on, even though we'd sort of been told not to, only we could sort of pretend we hadn't because the minutes of that meeting were never shared. It was that kind of a time.

I absolutely love most of the people who were on that team, and they remain people I would climb mountains for (and I *hate* climbing mountains). And gradually but inexorably, because we simply refused to entertain the idea that it wasn't going to, the thing took shape. It's not the sort of project you can ever call finished, and the place we got to was different in many ways from the one we'd originally imagined, but essentially, we did what we set out to, and now there is a whole excellent team who are helping it grow and making it better and enabling and supporting whole new endeavours and possibilities. I am really so proud to have been a part of it. It is a testament to the power of diverse teams.

But the reason I slogged away for so long with the political heavy lifting was not simply because I wanted the thing. It was because without the thing, I couldn't do what I *really* wanted to do, which was to Solve Knowledge Problems. That, ultimately, is my game. And the technology, in a big global organisation, is necessary but not sufficient. And what we finally had, a couple of years ago, was the potential. We talked about it at conferences, I shared it with the NGO network I was a part of. This is great! people who know how hard it can be to do this stuff on a non-corporate budget said. Well done you.

I mean, not everyone saw it that way. One of the criticisms that is often (and fairly) levelled at me is that I am not very good at showing my workings. Partly because I don't always understand them myself, but mainly because I think writing long documents that no one will ever read is a colossal waste of time and energy. I once spent a month on a piece of work and produced a three page executive summary and slides that everyone *loved*, with a note at the end saying 'full report available on request'. There was no full report, but it didn't matter, because No one. Ever. Asked. But I know why I wrote what I wrote, or designed what I did, mostly, and there are always reasons. I'm not random. But you might not know that, to meet me, and especially not if you don't get how hard it is to do this kind of thing well. It isn't rocket science, but at least if you're a rocket scientist people recognise your expertise. If you're a knowledge manager, not so much.

Which is the deal - a lot of knowledge management / digital workplace people will recognise the 'can't we just' mentality. Um, no? And we could tell you why, but we'd all get bored. Maybe we should put you through it a bit more often than we do, but you know what, I'm boring myself now.

And then there are the people who *should* support you, because they work in the same field and for the same organisation, whose first instinct should be 'tell me how this all works then, so I can understand how we got here' but who don't. Oh, the power plays. Never, as Anne Robinson once said, underestimate the treachery of the workplace. We're not all out for each other's best interests, guys, even when we're trying to change the world. No. Some of your colleagues will break your (metaphorical) knees soon as look at you, if there's a sniff that you might be in their way.

We live, we learn, and there's always another chance to get your heart stamped on, and (bear in mind this is still the short version) that is what happened. I emerged from a bunker with hopes and dreams and a toolbox and the long view - and there was no home for any of it. That was a political failure on my part, for sure, but I thought I had enough currency in the bank to see me through.

And I was wrong. I managed another couple of years on the back of existing networks and relationships, and built some new little pockets of interest in what I had to offer, but it was no substitute for the kind of backing that I would have needed in order to have any significant effect on organisational impact (aka changing the world). It was table scraps, really, and while I am forever grateful to the people who held me close through those times, it maybe stopped me from seeing the inevitable hovering on the horizon.

When I say "the inevitable", I mean inevitable given the way that I played it. I could have been more ambitious. I could have been harder and faster. I could have been working full time these last ten years, and building my empire. My thinking is good. My political acuity is strong. My organisational awareness was excellent. But I had a terrible bullying experience in 2006-7, and it wasn't managed well, and something switched in my head. I still wanted to be working for a better world, but not any longer at the expense of my health.

So... Like so many women before me, though not for the most common reason, when I was approaching the peak of my powers, I "went part time". It was a great life decision, but (though it took a while to manifest) a bad career one.

I don't really know why I thought I could do it any differently, especially after I moved north in 2012 and became both part time and remote. Don't go getting any ideas, love, is what they should have told me. And maybe I only managed it for so long because I am actually *very good at what I do* and because I wanted to keep doing it. (I am saying this as someone whose self-esteem is remarkably good most of the time, I am blessed). And On That Basis, I sought out opportunities, and made cases to follow them up. Some of them were so obviously describing those Knowledge Problems that I had spent years getting ready to be able to solve that I literally jumped up and down in my eagerness to be given the opportunity to work on them. (While spending most of the rest of my time writing turgid, tedious - but still pretty short - papers about my 'offer' that no one ever read).

And, to start to bring this sorry tale to a close, there were two that really got traction - in one case because it was a complex programme in a conflict-affected country (South Sudan) which had a strong learning element, and in the other because there was £ available from a global 'knowledge fund' that was successfully applied for by a country team (Myanmar) with a relatively young programme including a new humanitarian response.

I never got to go to South Sudan - it was a hard programme to support remotely, but we also need to get better at this. I enjoyed the challenge, and the other constraints, and designing something that (potentially) made really good use of the shared platforms we'd spent so long pulling together. I still think that template could be a gold standard for an endeavour with that many stakeholders. I will be drawing on that thinking for a long time.

I *did* get to go to Myanmar, and that is where my story went south. I've covered this already, kinda. But in so many ways that could have been (and in some ways anyway was) SUCH A GREAT piece of work. It had so many good elements - country support, interest and capacity, high quality work, excellent team, specific technology challenges that could be addressed, good connectivity, high interest in learning... It could have been a model in so many ways. And, so far as I know, it succeeded and is still succeeding on its own terms, which I couldn't be happier about, but the longer, wider, broader pieces... I am not sure how you build that culture without someone in a role like mine.

And, as we all know, at the end of my first working day in Yangon I heard that my post was being cut. As I've said, I could have played a different game, but I didn't. I had some faith, and it was misplaced, and well, I'm not the first girl in the world to have that experience, right?

But I do think that it was an experience that has changed me forever - not least because of the way that it was done. Rainy season south east Asia is oppressive at the best of times. It's hot, it's 100% humid always, and about 12 hours a day it's absolutely pissing it down. Add full-strength jetlag and 11 days till you can get a hug from someone who loves you (or even knows you) and you have a little idea of how profoundly weird and lonely an experience my redundancy news was.

It came on the Monday. I did not sleep on the Monday night. I worked on the Tuesday, and Tuesday night I took some Valium and got about four hours (and met my new imaginary friend Alice, more from her next time!). Wednesday I worked, and also got about four hours, because I had to leave the hotel at 5 am to fly to Sittwe. Thursday night, I howled down the phone to a colleague in the UK, then went out with Myanmar colleagues to a restaurant on the coast. It was an almost perfect NGO X experience: principled, interesting, skilled, committed people from all round the world having some beers and eating some food together and having Real Talk. I loved it, but I knew it was probably the last time I'd get to do it, and part of me was hovering above the table, observing, and mourning.

On Friday afternoon, we flew back to Yangon, and I returned to Hotel M, where I checked back into room 207, with its dark wood floors, cool marble bathroom and window shutters. You could hear the rain over the air con, and the air con was pretty loud. Me again, I said. I am hoping I might sleep in you this time.

That night was the first time I'd got a full night's sleep in over a week. I slept through hotel breakfast time (though I drank some instant coffee and ate some leftover pizza that I'd stashed in the minibar fridge because that's the kind of girl I am) and I decided that, although I really just wanted to lie in bed and cry, that I should get out there and do something. Around noon, it stopped raining. I have never really been a very good solo tourist but I gathered my defences and got a taxi to the Shwedagon Pagoda.

Which was a *good* decision. I scorched the bottom of my feet because you have to take your shoes off and when it's not raining, it's very very hot, but I accepted an offer from a private guide, who was tiny and lovely and spoke just about the right level of English to tell me things but not ask me anything, and she showed me the Tuesday corner (I was born on a Tuesday, so she had me do some kind of ritual there, and the Tuesday corner's animal is a lion, which pleased me) and also the palm tree - see above - which has survived everything life can throw at it. All my photos are terrible, as it was so bright I couldn't see what I was doing, and I returned to the hotel a full sweaty mess, but I was proud of myself. And it still wasn't raining, so I decided to go for a swim.

Oh, that pool. I was the only person in it, and I swam diagonally back and forth across it for a while, crying gently, and wondering when I'd been in a pool before with water that tasted like that (it was the pool in Cambodia, but it took me a while to remember). And then I lay on my back, and I floated. When I started to wrinkle, I climbed out and lay on a sun lounger - by some miracle the sun had gone in so I did not immediately burn to a crisp but it wasn't yet raining again. And I slept out there, warm and sad but bolstered by towels (I love towels), till big fat raindrops drove me back in about an hour later.

That was one of the best naps of my life. After it, I thought, well, this is all still terrible and I have no idea what to feel, but I am no longer sleep deprived, so I can see that, eventually, I. Will. Be. OK.

I didn't know how long it would take, or that I would still be so angry about it nearly a year later, but here we are. I have come through it, and I have a new job that I am enjoying hugely, and new colleagues who are just as principled, interesting, skilled and committed - pursuing different ends but ones with which I am no less aligned. In fact, more so, maybe. It's really great and I feel both lucky to have landed it and inspired to be there. I got my heart broken on the way - properly, properly broken, but you know what, you live, and you learn to float.

I needed to write this and I am grateful to anyone who has found the energy to read it till the end! And I think that's me done with NGO X, I don't have to dwell on it anymore. She labels it, she lets it go.

joella