Making it through the rain

Some local snowdrops yesterday

I set great store by snowdrops. They hang out underground all year, then they stick their tiny heads up just when we need them most. Hey! they say. You've nearly done another winter. Well done you. It will get brighter later, but for now, see how much hope you can find in our bursts of tiny whiteness.

Around Ecoville there is abundant woodland, some of which we own and manage. After we moved in, we (not us personally, there are many sizes of we around here) cleared a patch of gloomy leylandii just by our houses and uncovered an old woodland garden stuffed full of bulbs. Some hundreds, if not thousands, of them are snowdrops, and they're almost ready to pop.

And I am so ready for them. I'm actually not minding January too much, it has a minimalism that I can get behind (we're eating a lot of Japanese food, clearing out cupboards, and generally being sober). It's December I'm needing to get over, December and all who sailed in her. 

I meant to follow up a little 'turkey and the patriarchy' rant last month, but I never got around to it, and it went off the boil. But it started simmering again when I heard an item on Woman's Hour earlier this month about the Irish tradition of Little Christmas, also known as Women's Christmas.

Essentially (and I'm not saying I don't approve) this is a day in early January when Irish women go off and do something nice together on their own, to recover from Big Christmas, on the grounds that it is, overwhelmingly, them (us) who take the emotional, logistical and physical responsibility for the Most Wonderful Time Of The Year. 

Hmm. There are things I like about Big Christmas. I like the cards - not the ones you get from hotels you've stayed in or from financial advisors, but the ones you get from your friends, especially when you recognise their handwriting on the envelope from all the letters you used to write each other in the days when that's how staying in touch was done. I like sending them, and I like receiving them. I like carols, especially the ones with descants in, and I have a life-long love of fairy lights. And I remember the excitement of being a child at Christmas, decorating the tree, putting presents under it, staring at them for days. 

But I'd happily leave it at that, maybe minus most of the presents (I don't actually need anything and neither do most of the people I know). And I've kind of tried to, but I'm not allowed. 

Christmas is relentless - the build up, the pressure, the consumption, the long distance travelling when it's cold, dark and generally inhospitable time, the waste. The energy. You can do it on someone else's terms, as I suppose we all do when we're children, or you can take on hosting and organising yourself, which isn't for everyone, but does give you some kind of control of the situation. 

On the whole, I prefer the latter, and M loves to cook, so for the last n years we've done some version of that*, but the 2016 version wiped me out, and I put in a 2017 bid for ignoring the whole thing. And I honestly tried, but I would have had to have barricaded myself in my bedroom for the duration to avoid every festivity (which, you know, brings its own issues), so I did find myself in various Christmas type situations. 

And overwhelmingly, I observed (with varying degrees of grace) that they represent a shit-ton of work, and that most of that work is done by women. Now you could argue that we could all sit on our hands and eventually the planning, the shopping, the wrapping, the table-setting, the scene-setting, the serving, the clearing would get done anyway. And there are times when I deliberately do this. But I find it really hard, because I can see that there are things that need to be done, and I am amazed at the proportion of men (#notallmen, do not @ me) who somehow don't. 

I absolutely refuse to believe that this is nature rather than nurture, indeed I seem to remember learning it. And if I managed to unlearn it, I would only become part of the problem. 

But my real beef is why exactly are we doing this in the first place? Who benefits, exactly? I think pretty much the whole business is the Emperor's New Jumper, nothing but market-based tinsel-covered displacement activity, covering the gaping hole in our souls. 

And we let it control us, and deplete us, and we watch it happen, and we just somehow don't call it out. Well, I'm over it. I've said it before but I mean it this time.

Well, that's better out than in. Happy January! 

joella 

*ok, tbf there was a Christmas in a caravan a few years ago which was lovely. There's a way. 

Resolve

I'm always quite relieved to get to Twelfth Night, having been at the humbug end of the Christmas spectrum for the past 20 years or so. Oh, but it's lovely for children, people say. Yeah, but I'm not one and haven't got any, I reply. For me it's just a lot of random expense, long journeys at the most inhospitable time of the year, inane music, even more inane television, more stuff that I don't need, and way too much Organised Fun. I'd rather stay in on my own for the duration with some posh gin and Inspector Morse, honest to god, but a) nobody believes me and b) even if they do I'm not allowed.

This year was different, of course (what do you buy the woman who's busy getting rid of things? I could tell you, but you might cry). Gin and Morse was not an option. But, while it was hard for me to tell, because it's a while since I've spent Christmas at the parental home so all the rituals were slightly unfamiliar, I think it went off pretty well. We had a splendid dinner, cooked by my sister's friend O and his boyfriend, who, it turned out, is a chef - poor guy had already done about 1200 Christmas dinners, but we were all very appreciative of his final eight. Cranberry-topped nut roast FTW. We also did quite a bit of Walking the Dog, and Drinking the Wine, and Watching the Queen. It was all as it should be, except not. What else can you do?

Boxing Day was at my aunt's -- and in many ways even more familiar and even stranger. The lasagne, the egg mayonnaise, the tuna pasta salad, the quiche, the rolled up slices of smoked salmon, the lemon meringue pie... all the food and the people and the animals who should have been there (with the exception of my cousin P, who lives in Hong Kong), the men talking about the latest gadget (G's Raspberry Pi), the women sitting round the kitchen table, various people keen to ask me if I really have started eating meat (of which more later). This is what we've always done, but it was a little bit like watching it through a video camera, or from down a long corridor. It was most peculiar. I expect there's a word for it. I wouldn't have been anywhere else, but at the same time, I can't completely say I was there.

New Year was entirely different, and if anything even odder. There was a revue then a ceilidh planned in the Common House, and I am mildly to severely allergic to both of these things. They're not compulsory, of course, just as I am not contractually obliged to eat Mung Bean Surprise, but it's surprisingly difficult to assert your right to, you know, stay in with posh gin and Inspector Morse.

In the end, I had a lovely evening. E came to drink sherry with me and let me be a bit sad for a while, then two people asked if they could come and watch Morse too, which was perfect gentle company. Several others dropped in and out around midnight, and I was finally tempted down the street once I was assured all remaining fun was distinctly disorganised. It does get a bit fuzzy after that point but I remember skidding down the floor to Praise You, and pogoing to Reward till I nearly-fell-over-but-didn't. I didn't feel very shiny the next day (in fact I didn't get dressed) but there in the background was the little glow of knowing that I'm not on my own with the strangeness (or the sadness). I have comrades, and I'm lucky.

In between the two Big Ones we had a delightful visit from Mr B, who came bearing wine, gifts from Turkey and an electric cigarette, which I had a go on after we'd drunk some of the wine (verdict: enjoyable, but probably best avoided unless the alternative is real cigarettes). He'd texted ahead to say he wanted to eat communal lentils, which was not quite possible, but we improvised and sat round our old table with our new friends and ate Greek lentil soup adapted from the recipe of my Significant Ex's best friend from school's mum. It was a good collision of worlds. I do miss Mr B.

But all in all, various things notwithstanding, I was pretty glad to get shot of 2012. We've still got most of the winter to get through, but I find there's something calming and palate cleansing about the tinsel-free bleakness of early January, at least as long as I don't have to go very far and have a decent stack of library books.

So, to resolutions. I have three this year.

1. Blog at least once a week.
2. Sober January. Well, sober most of January, as we are heading to East London to celebrate my birthday and I don't see that happening without a Negroni or two. I might make the days up in February. It's going ok so far, in the sort of extended hangover feat. scary dreams fashion I remember from previous detoxes.
3. Eat meat at least once a month. That's high quality meat of known and ethical provenance, preferably local. So far (not all this year) I have had lambs liver for dinner twice, once from Abel & Cole, once from our local butcher, and half a free range Lancastrian pork pie. I think this may be like discovering classical music after a lifetime of alt-folk. It's a whole new thing. And deserves further expounding, when I've worked out what the hell it is I think I'm doing.

Onwards.

joella

Emerging, blinking, into spring

The Crook O'Lune this Aft O'Noon #whyiammovingbacktolancashire
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

It's been a bit of a long dark winter, to be honest. It's had its upsides -- not least the discovery that this view appears on the cycle path from Halton to Caton -- which, come June, will be the location of my local Co-op. Just when it feels like this is the hardest thing I've ever done, the reasons for doing it reassert themselves big time.

But there have been some downsides too. I had a little meltdown just before Christmas. I was cycling back to the Interim Bungalow in the dark and the cold, having just failed to get a project agreed by the technology board at NGO X, and on the same day having had a really disheartening conversation with someone who I'd been pinning a lot of hopes on for another project, and I burst into tears. The project should have been agreed, but I hadn't put enough time into it. The conversation should have gone better -- I have since learnt that he's a man not known for his listening skills, but I could have prepared better for it. A third project should have got external funding and didn't -- nothing I could have done about that but now we needed a Plan B, and I hadn't given that any thought at all for weeks. And there were other things, that people who work for organisations with blogging policies don't write about on their blogs. Work was looking shit from all directions, basically. I hadn't seen it coming, and I didn't know what to do.

I am generally one of those people who steps into a vacuum, says 'oh all right, I know it's not technically my job, but then it's not technically *anyone's* job, so I'll have a go at sorting that out'. Several of those projects landed on my desk that way. And usually that's fine, but there were too many of them, they were all going wrong, and -- crucially -- I didn't have any expansion space. I have been working part time for five years and it's one of the best decisions I ever made, but before Lancaster Cohousing came along, before I was selling a house and living in two places and grappling with logistics and managing a website and a document collection and coordinating an allotment group and trying to do all this by bike and bus and train... if I needed to do a bit more, then I did. I think all part time managers do -- they check their email, they make themselves available, they spend a couple of hours here and there on their non-working days thinking about things that need thinking about, writing things that need writing, generally aiming to cover the gaps while not losing their precious work-life balance.

But I can't do that at the moment. I felt like it had been raining for about two months then there was a huge mudslide.

And then there was Christmas, which was also kind of dark. What I really wanted to do was sleep, and hang out in my pyjamas watching Inspector Morse. What happened was we had Christmas Day with ex-housemate S, her Quiet Young Man, his parents, Tungsten & Particle, all three of M's offspring, his ex-wife, and her mother. This was not my idea, and I initially resisted it pretty assertively. But it was our last Christmas in Oxford, and in the end I went along with it because both M and ex-housemate S like having a house full of people at Christmas, M really wanted to see his children on the day, and this was the only way it was likely to happen. I didn't think there was a way I could reasonably avoid it without making a statement that I didn't want to make (nobody who likes Christmas ever believes that some of us really would be happier on our own with some sherry and a good book) -- but I was tired, I was stressed, I drank too much and it was generally not my finest hour. Boxing Day was no fun at all.

It was all linked with the wider malaise though, which itself is all linked with bigger, deeper changes, and maybe it was worth going through it -- as several days later my head cleared and a possible way forward emerged. I talked stuff through with my manager right at the end of December, and we made some decisions that weren't that easy (giving stuff up is hard, especially if you are the one who made it happen in the first place) but I think will see me through this transition year, work wise, and then we will reassess.

Not out of the woods yet, but the light is returning and the crocuses are out, so optimism is easier. My new house has a roof and windows, and is no longer an abstract concept. And I've joined Pinterest, to help me start imagining what Lancaster Jo's life will be like.

joella

All over bar the recycling

That's done for another year. I confess to spending the whole of yesterday in bed, eating toast, keeping warm, reading Any Human Heart, and rejoicing when the sun broke through the clouds to shine on Christopher, truly a bear for all seasons.

I'm getting better at it, but I don't think I'll ever be a natural. I hate enforced jollity, I hate having carcasses in the kitchen, and I hate waste. Christmas seems to be full of all three, unless you opt out completely, which I've tried, but then I just feel bleak and selfish.

These last two years we've had ex-housemate S, her Young Man, Tungsten, Particle and her in-laws over on the day. The in-laws bring much wine and a ton of cheese, S brings the turkey and we do the rest. There was a moment when the oven started leaking beetroot juice all over the floor, and another when Tungsten attempted to sabotage the beautiful-yet-delicate Moomin mobile we got Particle (textbook inner fury of the firstborn - I do feel for him, but he's not getting away with wilful damage on my watch), but on the whole it went off extremely well. No tears, no swearing. Well, not much.

And we had M's offspring and associated others over on Christmas Eve, where we had a vegetarian curry extravaganza with mulled cider and it was all fleecy blankets and festive warmth *and* they went home in time for us to have a small sherry and open a present each. Mine was a Rob Ryan tile, which made me cry a bit.

I tend to get excellent presents from M, because a) he knows me best, and b) he has an extravagant streak I haven't quite talked him out of yet. And I get good things from my parents, because I get to choose them. And a few other people stick to the failsafe brands - Hendricks, Dr Hauschka, Neal's Yard, Kniepp, Toast, Pukka Tea, Real Seed Catalogue - or simply look at my Amazon wishlist, which I endeavour to keep in reasonable shape at this time of year. These are things I would buy for myself if I had an extravagant streak of my own. You can make me very happy with a visit to a single corner of Boswells, if you so choose. Or you can not get me anything, and I won't mind at all.

But what I find hard is the gimmicky presents - "funny" books, novelty chocolates, DVDs that I'll never watch, chemical toiletries, things made of plastic then sealed in more plastic, generic girl-gifts that sparkle with man-made geegaws.

I don't want this stuff. It's keeping someone in business, but it's killing us all softly. When I get it, I put it straight in a bag, and take the bag to the nearest charity shop as soon as they open after Christmas. Each year, I swear I will broadcast that this is what I do, but I never quite have the balls.

So this is an aide memoire for next year. I vow to say to these people: please, if you don't want to get me something I would get for myself, save your money. If you still want to spend, do something useful with it. Build a toilet. Buy some sanitary towels for girls in Uganda. Get me some peace oil, man.

I'm a bleeding heart liberal, I know. Sue me.

Now I'm annoying the man of the house by playing tunes I remember dancing to in Blackpool nightclubs in the 80s. All together now, heaven must be missing an angel...

joella

Seasonal highlights part two: to Christmas and beyond!

It was all a bit last minute. On Christmas Eve I was slightly hungover, having had an unexpected (and very enjoyable) evening out with my Significant Ex the night before. Not so's I couldn't function, but there was the whole house to clean, all the decorations to put up, the presents to wrap and the nut roast to cook. It needed to be done early because there was a giant turkey too (Peach Croft Farm's finest*), which was going to leave mere millimetres to spare in the oven.

In the end, the wrapping, apart from for M (who anyway had half a washing machine to look at if he was after shiny) was done on a 'they're coming up the path now' basis. I can recommend this approach as long as you have sellotape in one of those quick-action dispensers.

Christmas Day itself had something of the military about it, in the early part anyway. The nut roast never did get done on Christmas Eve, so there were back of envelope calculations about oven timings and temperatures, and there was a mountain of potatoes, parsnips, sprouts, carrots, swede, broccoli, and two colours of cabbage to prepare. This was because M had offered to feed ex-housemate S, her Young Man, Big Boy Tungsten and Baby Particle (well, at one remove). Somewhere along the line her Young Man's parents were added into the equation, but by then it was well into sheep as a lamb territory anyway.

One of the indisputable joys of living in East Oxford is that if you decide you absolutely must have six cans of Coca Cola and a Swiss roll (for trifle) at 1.30pm on Christmas Day, there's a shop open that will sell them to you, and you can have a little solitary walk there and back through the churchyard. After dinner, which was a success of epic proportions for which I can take only minor credit (nut roast, some peeling, excavation of posh wine glasses, table decorations) I had another burst of claustrophobia, and this time managed to persuade ex-housemate S to come for a short stomp with me over South Park as the sun went down. Then we all watched the Gruffalo together and I thought, maybe I'm not such a misanthrope after all.

Boxing Day featured more wrapping and more eating, this time with M's offspring. They are all proper grown ups these days, and it doesn't half make life easier. For them as well as me, I'm sure. We had a splendid cheese fondue with an enormous winter salad and drank a bit too much (or was that just me?) without it getting messy.

And then there was peace, interspersed with spontaneous socialising, which I think is the kind I like the best these days. Right now I have a streaming cold, but one that is containable as long as there is a generous supply of Lemsip Max and those tissues that don't make your nose hurt. We went to see Avatar last night (a shit Hollywood plot that you can almost but not quite ignore because the 3D special effects are so awesome) and tonight I am going to share a little sloe Sambuca at either or possibly both of two gatherings, one of which is largely made up of people I last saw in the Hot Place.

It's been a funny old year, what with the global economic meltdown, a trip to quite possibly the worst place on earth, dealing with leaks in roofs and radiators, and nearly having skin cancer. Perhaps the funniest thing is it feels like it's not been a bad one. Maybe close escapes are good for the soul.

joella

* Going to pick up the turkey on the 23rd with M and the ex-housemate S collective was about the most middle class thing I have ever done. There was a big marquee with heaters and mulled wine and carols playing. I was sitting with Particle and a posh lady said 'how *delightful* to have a new baby at Christmas!'. Oh, I said. He's not mine. Fortunately, I didn't get arrested or anything.

What's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding?

I'm still sworn off the Today programme, but I'm as all over the BBC News website as ever I was... I find the newfangled Have Your Say bits deeply tedious, but it's as well to remind oneself that most people with strong points of view and the time/inclination to expound them in a random and anonymous fashion are both blinkered and borderline illiterate. LOL.

And I love the fact that you can spend time following a story that's caught your eye, come back to it later to see what's happened. The most recent of these for me is the story of Dr Humayra Abedin, a London GP trying to escape from a marriage she was forced into in Pakistan.

I was once stuck for many hours on a train limping north with no lights or heating -- I was travelling in the smoking carriage (it was a long time ago) with then-housemate S, and the woman behind us turned out to have some tea lights on her, so we lit them, passed the tobacco around and got chatting. She was British Asian, a doctor, and on her way to Edinburgh to see a man she'd met via a personal ad. She hoped he would still be there when she arrived -- we were running about three hours late and neither of them had a mobile phone (it was a really long time ago). She also hoped the sex would be ok and he wouldn't be too old.

I said I hope she didn't mind me saying, but she didn't look like the sort of person who would be travelling to Edinburgh to have sex with a man she'd never met. And then she told us that when she was 16 she'd had a white boyfriend, and her parents had taken her to Pakistan on holiday. When they got there they said she wasn't coming back, and that she could either train as a doctor or get married. Then they left.

She was there for seven years, and came back to the UK as a qualified doctor, whereupon she married pretty much the first man she met. He turned out to be a) lazy and b) violent, and a few years later she divorced him, bringing double shame on the family. We met her a few years after *that*, where she was having random sex with men she met via personal ads.

I have thought of her from time to time, perhaps most recently when I was watching a TV programme about the porn industry. Asked how she ended up in her line of work, one of the actresses explained how her dad used to rape her when she was a child. Now she makes porn films to get back at him -- all these men can have her seventeen ways to Sunday, but he can't touch her. Look what you're missing, dad! It was fair heartbreaking, it was.

On the face of it, Little Miss White Trash Porn Star and Dr Abedin have nothing whatever in common, but R, the woman on the train, made a link for me. I wish them all well, but there are mountains to climb.

So all I really want for Christmas is for women (everywhere -- not just the stroppy difficult ones) to be able to define themselves, carve out their own space in the world and inhabit it, rather than have their lives bounded by the expectations, the reflections, and the desires -- real and perceived -- of the people who have more power than they do and do not use it well. Oh and for the Pope to Get An Afterlife and leave this one to people who know what they're talking about. 

Since that's all up there with the moon on a stick, I'll settle for a new bottle of Yardley Sandalwood Eau de Toilette, the perfume of switched on spinsters everywhere.

joella

Topical poll

I could do this as a proper poll in the sidebar, as I have seen other bloggers do. But I don't envisage doing it often, and I know people get here mostly by accident (which is fine, this being the internet) or by design (which is better, but sidebar polls do not show up in feed readers).

So... the topic of the evening, with R & Ms Y and housemate P and post parsnip soup and sloe gin was -- who should Madonna go out with next?

The various suggestions were...

a) Justin Timberlake
b) George Formby (assuming he wasn't, you know, dead)
c) George Clooney
d) Grace Jones
e) M (though given the choice he'd go for Bjork)
f) P Diddy
g) Bill Clinton

It's a tricky one, and your thoughts would be welcome.

joella

Between the Lines

There are two things I often want to blog about and don't.

1. Work. As previously mentioned, NGO X has a blogging policy. This means I can't say anything BAD about the place, or anything MEAN about anyone who works there. So if, say, I felt that there were some DUMB things happening, I would have to keep them under my virtual hat. I'm not saying that, of course. I'm just saying that there's a box of wine in the fridge.

2. The challenges of stepmotherhood, which come and go in a way I cannot anticipate, especially at this most fraught time of year. I *thought* we'd made it perfectly clear that there were no obligations, no strings, see you whenever, but an unwelcome third-party analysis suggests otherwise. I'm not saying it's not hard for them. I'm just saying there's a box of wine in the fridge.

joella

So there it was, merry Christmas

At the age of 37, I have of course realised that I'll never drive through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in my hair. But there are consolations. I've also finally, *finally*, realised that the secret to the perfect Christmas Day lies in escaping expectations, and striking the right balance between sociability and misanthropy. You do not have to leave the country. You barely have to leave the house. Thanks are due to Jeremy for some sound and timely advice on this.

It goes a little something like this:

1. Wake up in the bed of a teenage girl.
(She wasn't there, but I like to think some of her cool rubbed off)

2. Put last night's clothes back on, eat Plumbing S's maple syrup crepes while little T freaks everyone, including herself, out with Real Scorpion Toffee.

3. Come home and open presents. Top gifts this year included a radio-cum-iPod-dock for the kitchen, so I can now boil an egg to the Ace of Spades if I want to, and, following weeks of big fat hints, the complete Morse on DVD. I don't understand you, said M, you don't like box sets and you don't believe in owning DVDs, so why on earth would you want this? I can't really explain.

4. Receive guests while still feeling sparkly-yet-manky. Drink posh wine.

5. Decide not to eat dinner till *after* sunset walk in Shotover.

6. Go for sunset walk in Shotover with the kind of friends who think to bring mince pies and sloe gin.

7. Have a big nap.

8. Eat cheese fondue and a big salad.

9. Watch a good film (well, we watched Love Actually, which I don't think counts, but the intention was good).

10. Dance away the clearing up, helped along by little sambucas in new little sambuca glasses. Go to bed.

It was great. We rose on Boxing Day ready to cook up a Claudia Roden storm. Our 'Open House' from 2-6 degenerated into fire, music and mayhem till midnight. All the major world religions were represented, and it seems everything now smells of woodsmoke and fish.

joella

The wind goes right through you, it's no place for the old

I've come to the realisation that while I will never like Christmas, I can bear it in the following circumstances:

1. I either don't go anywhere or I go a long, long way away.
2. If the former, a project management approach is adopted. I cannot muddle along tinsel-headed having a gay old time.
3. I do not enter a city centre on a Saturday or watch any commercial TV station at any time for the two months previous.
4. I get horribly drunk on mulled wine early enough in the season to hate myself for several days afterwards and adopt a more balanced approach to subsequent festivities.
5. The house looks as much like Blackpool Illuminations as environmental conscience can allow.
6. Nobody makes me play charades. In fact nobody makes me do anything.
7. At a time of my choosing, I get to eat a whole tin of Roka Cheese Crispies to myself while watching Morse in a misanthropic funk.

Beyond this, terms are negotiable.

joella

The night before Christmas, Nilgiris-style

I came to the Nilgiri Hills a long time ago, when my Significant Ex and I were backpacking round India on a shoestring. I remember it rained, and everything felt grey, chilly and overpriced. I didn't really see the point of hill stations anyway (all those *hills*), and was happy to move on.

This time, I feel like I could live here. This is in no small part down to the wonderful hospitality of our host family, who have fed us royally, given us a cosy cottage to stay in with views of endless green hills, and taken us places we would never have found by ourselves. But it's also down to the sheer beauty of the place, the sparkly clean air, and the relaxed pace of lives lived largely in harmony, rather than competition, with the suroundings.

We've been walking through Shola forests and tea fields, and down winding roads past blue and pink villages with technicolour temples. There are little tea shops (and government liquor shops) and snack stalls, like everywhere, but there is also broadband and fully computerised banking. The cows are milked by hand, and the roads are mended (or not) by barefoot men and women balanced precariously on hillsides, but these same men and women have better mobile phone services and more TV channels than we do. It's a lot to get your head round.

Most everyone's a Hindu round here, but Christmas is celebrated too, in a slightly surreal kind of way. I'm looking forward to it.

joella

Reluctantly...two festive things

Sound is required for both of these...

1. Oxfam Unwrapped meets Mastercard on YouTube. I laughed at this despite myself.

2. Away - the Christmas single from Nonstop Tango on MySpace. Mawkish it ain't.

joella