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.

TW: meta-blogging

I woke up on Friday morning - the beginning of my non-working week - wondering what to do with myself. There are some chunky items on the not-so-rolling Big Ticket to-do list. These include

• Work out what to do with the rest of my life 
• Turn vague pension-related anxiety into concrete (and therefore potentially actionable) pension-related anxiety. Something to do with SERPS. I have no idea 
• Finish Marie Kondo'ing. Have got only as far as the fiction plus putting all the non-fiction in a heap, have had a heap of non-fiction for over a month now
• Paint the entire house apart from that one wall we've managed to paint and buy some blinds for the bedrooms
• Make a new will 
• Change the filter in the cooker hood and find some bulbs for it that don't buzz. Doesn't sound chunky but somehow is 

I do know that if I threw myself at any item on the lower end of this list I could make a dent in it. I can be effective. I have skills. But I lack momentum, and am easily daunted at the moment. Well, usually. I need to wait for a gap in the mental traffic and then dart into it. 

And I wasn't feeling very darty so I moved on to the Granular to-do list. This is largely made up of smaller but still life-enhancing items, such as 

• Make that third string lampshade
• Make that third and fourth rag rug seat pad for the outdoor chairs
• Design the Hanging Gardens of Babylon* and go buy the guttering (watch this space)
• Download bank statements before they disappear forever (am pleasingly ahead of the game here but you only get so many months stored online and it never seems to be quite enough for the tax return)
• Hassle the plumber about the toilet and the pressure reducing valve on the hot water cylinder (we are binning one of the eco-toilets. It leaks, it doesn't shift solid matter, it means we get through toilet brushes like there's no tomorrow, and it is generally shit. If it wasn't one with a STUPID concealed cistern I could do it myself, but it is. I have the plumbing skills but not the carpentry and tiling skills, and I don't want a bathroom that looks like I would leave it looking. And the cylinder is an ongoing saga. But the plumber is good, which means he's busy, and this is small beans) 
• Find a home for that extraordinary goth-meets-fuchsia ball dress I wore in 1989 that my mum kept all those years that I can't quite bear just to give to Oxfam

But even this list felt a bit ambitious. I sensed myself gravitating towards the Maintenance of Status Quo to-do list, which includes such lofty ambitions as 

• Make a plan for that parsley in the fridge
• Go to the allotment 
• Laundry
• Ring my dad
• Deal with Ecoville email backlog
• Read books
• In fact do anything that isn't Candy Crush alternating with Twitter and existential despair

In my defence, all this thinking happened before I even got out of bed. Perhaps less impressively, I didn't get out of bed for quite a while. But just before I did, I settled on a manageable-yet-slightly-stretchy item: write a blog post. 

I love this blog. I am its biggest fan. For its first 10 years it documented many of my best thoughts, and many of my stupidest actions. It's been faltering for its last few years though. This is partly because first Facebook and then smartphones came along, and something that might have developed into a blog post became easier and more immediately rewarding to post as a status update - and when you can post something NOW why would you let it settle and ferment, and who would even read my thoughts on Ken Livingstone fully two days later? But also because the internet has become a nasty place for women who express opinions - I've had only the mildest of these experiences (despite being a holder of some pretty strong opinions) and I know that's because, recently, I've done most of my opinion expressing in a less public space than this. If I've expressed them at all. 

Which is all a bit sad, and I want to do better. But also one picks one's battles, and I've had some others on closer to home. And some of that is why I decided to write a blog post on Friday morning, and it's taken me to nearly midnight on Monday to squeeze one out. I have the words, but I'm a little constipated. 

In between, for the record, I've taken pure pleasure in the appearance of my first asparagus spears and in the progress of the baby blackbirds currently living on our balcony. I've had thoughts about privilege and aggression. I've engaged in, and quickly been exhausted by engaging in, FB conversation about Ken and Israel and antisemitism and yada yada. I've made (partly in response) some proper Israeli-style houmous which I enjoyed with my two favourite cis straight white able bodied middle class men (one of them Jewish, which shouldn't matter, but then none of this shit should matter). I have mopped up the urine of a small dog on steroids who had an accident. I've administered pain relief to a terminally ill gerbil. I've drunk too much red wine. I've danced to Prince and sung Springsteen into the wind. I've spent yet more silly money on deodorant that isn't all chemically but probably won't actually work. I've momentarily overcome my fear of Ecoville communal eating and enjoyed a delicious, spicy dinner and a lot of laughing squidged around the All Foods Table. I've learned more than I thought I'd ever need or want to know about the Peninsular War. I've delighted in Lindy West's latest. I've read the first third of Wool. 

And I've written this. It may be a new start, it may not even be that. But I'd like to keep it up. 

joella

* I do still intend to write a post about the many good things about living in Ecoville. But not today. 

Spring cleaning

I finally tidied up my Blogger template. I'm not using Blogger Layouts, which would make it easy to add things and take things away, because I've been around longer than they have. I could switch, but then I would lose all my template tweaks, and there are quite a lot of them - the random top right photo code, the archive posts in latest-first order code, some of the styles in the stylesheet.

But not switching means I have to add widgets manually, which means delving into already fairly messy code with my rusting HTML skills. So nothing changed for a while.

But then I noticed that my Jaiku badge and my last.fm quilt had both stopped working, and I don't like joella to look neglected. So I opened up TextPad and got to work.

1. Links to Atom feed and old blogs are gone: the first is now irrelevant - surely everyone can do feeds these days - and the old stuff, well, I know where it is if I want to read it again, but why would anyone else?
2. Jaiku = out. I had high hopes when Google bought it, and I liked the multiple feed 'activity stream', though it seems to have broken when they closed down for the Google migration, and I can't work out how to start it up again. And generally, I think they might have missed the boat. Though I'm keeping my account, just in case. It has cool.
3. Last.fm album quilt - I didn't fix this but changed instead to a 'recently played' list. I use last.fm all over the place now - with iTunes, on its own and with the awesome Spotify, so it's a better reflection of what I'm actually listening to than it used to be.
4. Twitter = in. I resisted for a long time, but then two things happened: first, I realised that several people who aren't on FB and I want to be in touch with *are* on Twitter, and second, the Facebook Twitter app meant I could update FB status via Twitter. They're a little bit different, I know, but I don't like the tedious RTing of bit.ly links that seems to make up the majority of (*shudder*) Tweets at the moment. It will evolve as a medium, I'm sure though, and I do like the 140 character constraint. Constraints are good for creativity. But yes, anyway, I've been using Twitter for a while, so it made sense to make the link. But if I start doing that blogging about updating Twitter and Twittering about updating my blog thing, someone please shoot me.
5. Tidied up the 'blogs I read' list. There are other blogs I read, but many of them are only updated v sporadically, or I read them for a very specific reason. So these are more like the blogs I would recommend. There aren't very many of them, but lots of my favourite correspondents just won't blog, dammit.

That's about it. And this is one of those posts that is mainly for my own future information. Sorry about that.

joella

These are my personal views etc

I discovered today by accident that NGO X now has a blogging policy. It states that you should tell your manager if you "already have a personal blog, website or social network page which indicates in any way that you work for [NGO X]".

Bugger. Here I have been carefully self-regulating all these years, but now we have OfBlog. I think I'm caught out by that "in any way". You would not need to be Inspector Morse to work out who I am and where I am a 0.6FTE.

The policy goes on to say, in essence and inter alia, that I must not say anything "potentially offensive" on my blog about anyone else who works for NGO X. Even if in-my-personal-view-and-not-that-of-my-employer it happens to be bang on.

Theoretically, I've done that. As in, there is someone who might theoretically get to joella and theoretically recognise herself and theoretically be offended. So I need to pare. I think they'll let me get away with saying that the lightbulbs in the New Building gave me a headache, but I should probably cleanse certain other references before I present myself for inspection.

I have a feeling that edited-and-republished posts appear as new in certain RSS readers, so bear with me if you get a lot of sanitised old stuff popping up.

Part of me thinks it's fair enough, another part knows that there ain't no justice.

joella

"welcome to joella, my reflective if slightly alcoholic alter ego"

joella's first post was five years ago today. The title of this post was her first blog strapline. It's gone now, though maybe it exists in a cache somewhere.

I started blogging because I was working in NGO X's internet team and the media unit wanted to know how hard it was to set a blog up. I set one up in about three minutes.

They never used it. I could have told them they wouldn't, and in fact I did. But to see how hard *that* was, I set up another one and started writing. And the rest is archives.

By way of celebration, here are my favourite posts from five successive Novembers:

November 2002: Still baffled by FTP. Post #3. Still getting the hang of it.

November 2003: You can take to multiculture even if they don't drink. An early example of a headline-led post. And interesting now, as I can't *believe* there was a time I didn't know what Eid was.
November 2004: Cure for the common cold. Folk music and coal mining. To be fair, there weren't many coal mines in the Fylde, but I think I was talking of the North of England in general. This is a storytelling post, and when they work I like them the best.

November 2005: Women! Don't expect any help on.... Short and a tiny bit ranty. Still makes me smile. And by 2005 there are comments!

November 2006: No heroines. I was proper angry when I wrote this, and I'm glad to have a record. I wouldn't really want 32 Flavors played at my funeral, mind. Insufficiently understated. Suzanne Vega's Left of Center was the first funeral song I settled on, and I still think you could do a lot worse.

And thank you to anyone who's ever read any of them. It would have been no fun without you.

joella