In defence of silver-tongued fine dining

My interactive Fish 4 Ever installation. Not all tinned fish is the same. We *can* support better choices. This *is* a hill I will die on.

My interactive Fish 4 Ever installation.
Not all tinned fish is the same.
We *can* support better choices.
This *is* a hill I will die on. 

Here at Ecoville, we've entered another phase of skirmishes in our very protracted food wars. Will there be a peace treaty at the end of this one? I don't know. Right now I doubt it, but for a while I thought there might be. Lines on the map seemed to be shifting, fading even, although they had never officially been redrawn or erased. 

Don't call it a war, people said. It puts us into opposing camps and it's not "helpful". Let things take their course. And... I can see why they would say that. I know that a lot of my neighbours find conflict difficult and would rather not get into it. I don't personally love it. I don't seek it out. I don't manufacture it. And it's very tiring, having it out with people, and can detract from all the things we could be doing together to make the world a better place. Something something more in common. I know. 

But. 

When we created our policies and guidelines, many of which have been around in various forms for over 15 years now, they were not permissive. They were not emergent. They did not leave space for things to take their course. There were a lot of very specific requirements and restrictions on everything from pets to parking to planting. 

The ol' cohousing literature, such as it is, is clear that intentional communities need to have a vision, values, supporting policies and an agreed decision-making process. I think we were all broadly ok with that initially -- but a missing piece was "how do we examine these if we feel they are not serving us well as a community?" We've proved to be bad at that. I have my thoughts about why, which are essentially that some people saw moving in as the end of a process: this is who we are, and this is how we live. I've heard the phrase "this is what we did all this work for" more than once. And it was a lot of work, I have some sympathy for that position, though it has eroded over the years. I also have some sympathy with the position that if you're new, you should spend your first year or so listening and learning -- a bit like when you move into a house with a garden in the middle of winter. You just don't know what's going on under the soil till you've experienced a full growing season. But although we joined the community several years after it had been created, we did move into the very first house to be released, coming up 14 years ago now. You can't be the new girl forever. I mean, I've got medals at this point.  

And no one can say I don't put the hours in. I recently went on a course called Working Effectively With Community Conflict - led by someone who has written some of that literature and applied and refined her thinking over many decades of community living. There were aspects of it that I didn't fully agree with (which I may dig into at some point) but I stuck with it for the full 21 hours, and something really resonated with me. 

Essentially, she posits, there are three kinds of conflict that arise in communities like ours. There's interpersonal conflict -- the kind you get everywhere when people don't like each other or don't agree. You can deal with that or not, and whether you do might depend on how much it affects other people and how much anyone cares. Then there's structural conflict -- deeper issues which may manifest as interpersonal conflict but in fact come about because of the lack of a clear vision, values, supporting policies and decision making process (I expected these), but also lack of clear "red lines" (things which are never up for discussion - these can be in your vision and values but they need to be super explicit), a transparent membership process, and effective accountability mechanisms - what happens if people don't do what they're supposed to, or do what they're not supposed to? 

The third kind is what she calls "especially challenging behaviours", and it's when individuals are persistently disruptive (or worse) and refuse to engage with any of the processes that need to be in place to keep the ship on an even keel. 

Well. I love a framework, and I (mostly) really enjoyed engaging with this one. A long time ago now I learnt the phrase "governance drift". It's similar to another phrase I learnt even longer ago, which is "implementation gap". Your implementation gap is when you design a law, a policy, or a piece of legislation, but then fail to create an effective enforcement environment, so people or bodies that choose to ignore or even violate it simply can. Post-apartheid South Africa, for example, created a constitution that absolutely enshrined the rights of women and girls not to be subjected to gender-based violence. As of 2025, fifteen girls and women in South Africa die as a result of GBV every single day. It's not that the laws aren't there, it's that they are broken with impunity. How things are implemented matters. 

Your governance drift starts in a slightly different place. You can collectively agree a set of policies, as we did, and set off with a high degree of compliance with them. You might not like all of them, but you put the hours in, or you arrived into that situation, and you believe that was the best that could be done at the time, and you accept that. You roll with it. 

But that only takes you so far -- and over time those policies can become structural rather than cultural, and seen as constraining rather than enabling. Circumstances change, people change, the world around us changes. And if you can't address that, can't find a way to put more of those hours in, then gradually, people just stop adhering to things that they can't see the point of, or that they find actively harmful to the community they are living in. Not everyone feels that way, but you've collectively lost the faith in the process, so the policies remain, but they are cold and dead, not warm and living, and you drift away from them, either by omission (not doing a thing you said you would do) or commission (doing a thing you said you wouldn't do). 

That's where we've been (in my view) for a long time. And it's not the worst place to be - most of us are community minded people, we consider the impact of our actions on others and adjust them accordingly. But it's created fertile spaces for double standards, for interpersonal conflict which is actually structural, and for especially challenging behaviours that are harder than they should be to respond to. 

There have been some energy shifts over the last year or so - which I see as coming from an "all you need is love" theory of change. Instead of addressing the governance drift, or the areas of conflict, which would be hard and unpleasant, let's focus on celebrating ourselves and doing stuff together. 

It's not been unsuccessful - we've had four "community weekends" where there have been activities and conversations and meals and work parties and informal gatherings of all kinds. I left town for the first one (on which more shortly) but I've participated in and made contributions to the others. They're good. I appreciate the efforts people put in to making them happen. 

And I have some sympathy with the instincts behind the initiative, and behind many other thoughts and deeds. We deserve nice things. I actually think nice things are necessary. But they are not sufficient. If you never ever go there then you're just papering over the cracks, when you could have been rebuilding the wall. 

My theory of change involves paying attention to the root causes of our governance drift, as that's where you identify what's stuck and why, and what we can potentially do about it. To me, they feel screamingly obvious, and I'd prefer to get right into it to see if I'm right, and if I'm not, what they are, and either way, how do we address them. This could include deciding not to address them, but that would be an active choice. This is not that. But I have also learnt that most people find this approach jarring. Go softly, we say. Go slowly. And, ok. 

But what I think many of us mean, is let's not think about this, except when a little bomb goes off. And then we clear up the debris and patch up the wounds, but we don't change the guard at the bomb factory. And my take on SOIL's community conflict framework leads me to think that we're losing even the potential ability to do that, which means we'll be less able to handle the fallout from the little bombs, and our already eroded trust will erode further. Boundaries matter. It's extraordinary to me to be in a situation where we could be co-creating them, and just letting that drift away. 

The last time I wrote about this at length was 11 (eleven!!) years ago, and I went back to it before starting this, to see how much my perspective had changed, how different the vibes were, and whether this was a useful lens. 

And honestly, given where I think we currently are, it made me feel really sad, and fairly convinced that the endless appreciative inquiry approach is at best a waste of energy and at worst something that is explicitly designed to keep us divided into good and bad citizens, where good means "don't make a fuss". 

But there's something else in the mix for me now. Around that 2015 mark, after the very hot period of what is now a fairly cold war, someone said something along the lines of I'm really sick of all this silver tongued talk about fine dining. This was directed at me -- and like all the best insults, it stung. What I heard was "here I am, a simple worthy man, trying to live a simple worthy life in a simple worthy community with like minded folk, and this woman is trying to undermine everything about that with her clever weaselly words and fancy tastes." 

I examined this REALLY HARD at the time, because that wasn't what I was trying to do. But what I didn't have at that point in my life was knowledge of my neurodivergence. Specifically, that I am autistic. I didn't know much about autism at all. I didn't know how it presents differently in women. I knew almost nothing of the challenges that many many autistic people have with food. Or that my own challenges with food, like many other aspects of my autistic presentation, are deeply untypical -- which is one of the reasons my diagnosis came so late -- but no less real. I described them pretty well back in 2015, but I didn't understand why I had them, or why I would genuinely rather not eat than eat a fair proportion of what had been presented to me as inclusive food in an inclusive space and if you don't participate, well that's you being selfish, Jo. Get over yourself. 

Another thing I now know is that my use of language, my celebration of words and the joy I find in deploying them (even my need to deploy them), is also an autistic trait. It's called hyperverbalism, if it matters. Yet another facet of my autistic existence is justice hyperfocus. If I see that something isn't fair, I will work to make it fair, and if that fails I will ask a million questions about why we're ok with leaving injustice unaddressed, and if I don't get answers to those, I will create a sculpture out of fish tins, and write poems on blackboards, and eventually let another blog post escape containment even though I know lots of people would rather I didn't. 

You can still ignore me. I'm used to it. But I won't stop, because if I stop I go pop. 

And at some level -- at many levels -- I remain absolutely convinced that these are conversations we need to have. Without them, power abuses happen. The strong dominate the weak, and count on the fact that the weak won't protest. Minority voices go unheard and minority interests remain excluded. Our policies are supposed to protect us from that, and our decision making processes are supposed to ensure that those policies are not themselves exploited. 

We have a situation at the moment that isn't about food. I'm calling it Chudgate*. There's a guy (it's pretty much always a guy, right?), who lived here with his partner and their kids. He had the funds to buy a second house here as a buy to let investment. This is something that could arguably be contravention of our lease, but nobody stopped it happening. The vendors wanted shot, and there he was with the money. But then he split up with that partner, and moved away, taking the car they had been sharing with him. That was an EV, and parked in the sweetest (as in most accessible for many of us) parking spot on the street, which has a charging point. As soon as he was gone, a shared car (not an EV, we didn't have the means to fund a shared EV) took over that space. 

But then he decided he was moving back, and this involved bouncing his ex to house #2 and evicting the tenant (a low income single mother with a small child who thought she had a long term tenancy) in the process. This caused the closest thing to a how did we let this happen and can we make it stop? I have seen here, and I was briefly encouraged. It wouldn't have been easy, but we have a lease, we have articles of association, we have policies, we have processes. This guy told us he was leaving because he wasn't enjoying living in the community, and has given 0 indication that he is planning to do anything beyond occupy his house now he's back. 

Someone pointed out the driver of the Chudmobile will never see this as Chudmobiles can literally drive over children without noticing

Someone pointed out the driver of the Chudmobile will never see
this as Chudmobiles can literally drive over children without noticing 

Oh. Except he's arrived with an SUV. A fucking Temu Range Rover!! Which meets the needs of... HIM! And he's bounced the shared car right back out of that space, so he can HAVE IT BACK! That car has occupied the space released by the tenant he evicted, which is an accessible space which someone else was waiting patiently for. We don't have enough parking spaces to have one per house. That was an active choice: it's better for the planet and better for community (which is also better for the planet) if we share cars. But everyone's gotta play. Most of us have tried. Not this guy. He just does him. And we're letting that happen. 

That, my friends, is governance drift in action. Got enough money? Got enough balls? Got enough Teflon? Do what the fuck you want. 

I don't subscribe to this worldview. This is not why I am living here. I'm not an anarchist and I'm not a libertarian, because I've hung out around the edges of some of those spaces and haha who has the power? The same fuckers who always have - white guys with wealth. 

Of course - while I am not a white guy, I am evidently white, clearly able to represent myself (even if I am regularly misread) and I know from what people tell me that I have power of my own, even as a shortarse menopausal woman who has only recently learnt about deadlifting and facial serums. 

And as such, I think I have a degree of responsibility. I'm a clever girl. I could use that irresponsibly, but I try very hard not to. The accusations thrown at me that hurt me the most are the ones that assume I'm doing that, that I'm using my facility with words to engender an outcome that is focused on me. And - honestly - that would be much easier (practically) than what I am actually trying to do, which is to get us to engage in restating / redefining how we live here and why. 

I know there are people who don't trust me. It's annoying, but I accept that they have their reasons. They are generally the same people I don't trust, and I know that I have my reasons. 

So I try to engage with the initiatives that have community support. On the meals front, we've been in a six month "experimental period" for about three years now. The experimental period had its own rules but it also passively expired. And that, for me, is where it got juicy. 

One of the activities that happened in the official experimental period was a policy MOT. We've done policy MOTs a few times - in an environment with well-functioning governance it would be a healthy process: look at the existing meals policy, assess if it's doing its job, identify what further action (if any) is needed. Keep the shizzle to the minimum necessary.

Actual footage of our Meals Policy as it went through its MOT.
(I don't take credit for this joke but it's too good not to share.)

 

Yeah, we MOT'd the Food Policy. It failed. 

Did we engage with the details? Or did we run around flapping our arms and then have a lie down? (Clue: it wasn't the first one). 

So there I was. This policy isn't in effect. We don't think it's fit for purpose. But we don't collectively have the capability / capacity / courage to address it. What happens now? 

I did draw a distinction between omission and commission. I can defend it, but I acknowledge it. I organised something that (in a scientifically very minor and if you weren't paying attention, which most people aren't, undetectable) way was not permitted. I did it fairly out loud, in the sense that I offered it as an invitation to anyone who would like to be there, as part of a birthday celebration for my beloved. 

I knew I was crossing a line - but I knew that multiple other lines have been crossed, in multiple other ways. We can't live in limbo forever, was my logic. This is a very low impact test case, was my logic. If there's going to be pushback, I'll at least get some intel on the reasons behind it, and that will be helpful, because I really don't understand why there should be, was my logic. 

Short version: there was pushback. Only from one person, but it went via three different teams and my beloved himself. It's hard to explain why I held out on every one of those fronts. But I did. And it happened, and in its way it was a magical evening. Not for that person, and I feel bad about that. I wrote to them and said so, and that I was open to dialogue, and that still holds. 

Our most "powerful" team - our directors - were one of the teams involved and when they made a statement (at the request of that one person), I challenged their decision to do that. My challenge was about 2500 words long, but was basically - why does this particular issue have weight for you? Was it because someone raised it at all? Should we all raise all of our issues to you? Is it about the person making the challenge? Is it to do with the nature of the challenge? Do we care more about birthday fish soup than SUVs and evictions? 

Our directors have, entirely reasonably, tried to avoid being police - but here they were doing that. I felt policed. They pulled back from it, in writing so I feel better, but you know what, I still felt policed. I'm working on it, but essentially I am as much a member of this community as anyone else or you have to tell me that I'm not. That's what caused me to leave town for the first community weekend. I couldn't be there and feel acceptable, or accepted. So we went to Manchester, stayed in a hotel, had some absolutely fantastic Thai food, saw some incredible art, and generally shook shook shook it off. 

It's not all of my neighbours who are like this, obviously. In fact it's hardly any. I think they have more power than they should, but they may well think the same about me. One of the reasons I did the conflict course was because I do recognise that for some people I'm part of the problem. You probably could actually pay me to go away, but it would need to be a sum commensurate with the profit made by people who bought their houses at a massive discount and sold them on at market rate. I might even put some of that sum towards funding a house that can be rented at an affordable rate to people who actually want to live here (there would be one condition: no shaming people for their food choices). 

Because they *are* choices. And if you know me at all, you know I make my choices carefully, and I reassess them regularly. If I don't agree with you, it doesn't mean I haven't thought about it, and it doesn't mean I don't care about the world and everything in it. 

Turns out one person's silver-tongued fine dining is another person's authentic expression in a world that is built for chuds. We may have had more in common than we thought, but I think that ship has sailed. 

joella

* My sensitivity reader questioned my use of "chud" as he didn't know what it meant. I said it was a non sweary alternative to a word of the same length beginning with the same letter, but the Merriam-Webster definition is here. 

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 

Pivoting to Asda (and beyond)

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

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

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.

Aromatherapy

This morning my house's perfume is hyacinth with a base note of devilled kidney. I like both of these smells - though together they are a little challenging - as they remind me that I am still evolving. 

I used to eschew cut flowers, on the basis that they were produced in faraway countries under appalling conditions then flown across the world to become short-lived, shallow gestures of affection, purchased on petrol station forecourts by men who thought that was what women wanted. This is not who I am, I used to say. Do not buy me flowers. 

But what I meant was, do not buy me *those* flowers. It turns out I actually LOVE flowers, and if I had the money I would have them in the house always. I would buy them from British farms or other sustainable places and in summer I would grow my own*. And I got a huge bunch of spring flowers for my birthday and they are bringing me joy. 

There were also many years - several decades even - when I would not have countenanced a kidney. I have already covered my journey from teenage vegetarianism to middle-aged omnivory at some length. And I have more to say, including the extent to which I see it as a one-way thing - but for now, I scan the horizons for organic lamb's kidneys (harder to find than they should be) and I buy them when I see them. I'm not a nose to tail evangelist - I find all that marrow sucking a bit macho, if I'm honest - but I do have a weakness for offal that runs pretty deep, and there's something very satisfying about getting so much eating pleasure from something that is generally seen as a long way from the main event.  It's all relative, I know, but in the current scheme of things I am cool with kidneys. 

joella

* I am trying that for the first time this year. 

More words about buildings and food

Happy New Year to all my readers! You're wanting a communal meals update, right? Sorry to disappoint, but let's just say me too. Getting on four months after the Fish Finger Hate Crime Affair, we still don't have a new Meals Agreement. Or a new Meals Policy. Or enough communal meals for some people's liking (though still too many for some other people's liking). And still many dark evenings with a dark Common House, while we sit severally and variously in our dimly-lit eco-homes, thinking several and various dark thoughts.

But hey, hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way. And it's not all bad. There *has* been the review of the process of the review process, which didn't reveal any hate crime (phew), but did say that maybe the remit could have been clearer (yup), maybe the Meals Review Team could have had more process support (yup)... oh, and that just possibly we -- big we, not Meals Review Team we -- should have anticipated that by even raising certain issues, or, in some cases, any issues at all, we were essentially picking a giant scab off a giant flesh wound.

Yeah. That. Let's just say that if I had a fish finger / caper / anchovy / gherkin / jar of mayo / ciabatta roll / little gem lettuce / sprinkling of black pepper for everyone who's said 'it's not really about food, though, is it', I'd have a mighty fine fish finger sandwich.

*takes fish finger sandwich break lasting several weeks*

No, it's not really about food. I've identified four things I think it *is* about, and only one of them -- the extent to which being vegan/vegetarian friendly goes beyond providing high quality food for vegans and vegetarians and into guaranteeing entirely meat- and fish- free communal space (some of it sometimes? all of it sometimes? some of it all times? all of it all times? if I eat a fish finger sandwich in the Common House and I'm the only one in there, does a tree fall in the forest?) -- has anything to do with what any of us actually has for dinner.

The other three (in my personal view, YMMV, definitely not agreed by consensus etc) are...

• Equity in current work contribution. At the moment, we're all supposed to do three hours a week on essential cohousing tasks, *and* cook once a month and clean up once a month. Some people clearly do more than three hours a week, and some clearly do less. A lot of people, in fact most people, even more clearly (because we have the numbers) cook and clean up less than once a month. This causes huge resentment. But does it make sense to require the same number of hours of everyone, regardless of how often they are on site / how old or strong or fit and well they are / how many hours a week they have other paid or unpaid work commitments? And should someone who eats a common meal once a fortnight be required to cook and clean as often as someone who eats three meals a week? 
• Equity in historic work (and other) contribution. Some people spent years of time and effort and energy, in some cases to the point of burnout, fighting seriously hefty odds to get the project off the ground. They also took a much greater financial risk, and carried the majority of the project load all the way through the build. Those who came along later paid more, in some cases a lot more, for their houses, and inevitably had less say in the design and build decisions. That's just how it is, as in, it couldn't have been any other way, but it isn't necessarily fair and it's hard to know what we can do about that. 
• Adherence to policy / agreements about how we live here that we may or may not have been directly involved in making. There was an explicit 'policy lock' in force for several years, so as not to deflect energy from the build, but I don't think anyone really knew what would happen at the end of it -- what's non-negotiable? What's totally negotiable? What's somewhere in between? And who decides? Yes, there were policies and agreements written back in 2006 about cars and food and smoking and pets (all available here if you're interested) but back then the plan was that it would be an urban project with around 24 homes. We ended up as 41 homes by a river, on the edge of a village, with lots of wildlife but a shitty bus service. And we're all new here. So what should we change? And do we all have the same ability to influence that? 

... and they’re about fairness and power and justice. The big stuff gets writ small in pizza toppings. We have some big cracks, and what the Meals Review did was remind us that in some cases we'd merely papered over them. That was expedient when we had houses to build (and sell) but now... well here we all are and what the hell are we going to do about it?

Well, it turns out we are going to approach it very, very carefully and very, very slowly. We will have conversations, but they will be very, very tightly managed. There will be meetings, but they will be very, very heavily facilitated. It will take a long time, but, ideally, no one will cry, or leave the room, or accuse another person of a god-damn hate crime.

Part of me is 'holy shit, we really have to do it like this?' but another part of me got accused of a god-damn hate crime for trying to do it in a more ‘given that we know all this, let’s get it all out on the table’ kind of a way. *And* that wasn't the end of the super-helpful 'feedback'. SO I get that we have to do it like this. No, really, I do.

No, *really*, I do. No, really, I *do*.

*checks privilege*

*takes another fish finger sandwich break lasting several weeks*

I might write a book about this one day, having assigned elemental pseudonyms to the key players (every community needs a Boron). But I might not. And really, I do know that here, I should basically Write About Me. So here are my two biggest thoughts from my first four months as a fish finger hate-crimeist.

1. Food is way more complex than I thought. 
We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're a long way past having any kind of 'natural' relationship with food. It's all about choices -- these may be heavily constrained in various ways, but anyone who fancies themselves some shade of green, or anyone who cares about animal welfare, or anyone who cares about their own health in a specific way, or anyone who has body-image issues, or anyone who has a physical or mental health issue which affects, or is affected by, what and how they eat, or anyone who has food allergies or intolerances ... all these variables and more need to be held in balance when deciding what to have for dinner.

These are mostly #firstworldproblems, for sure, but they all play their part in how we relate to food. And the more people you're trying to cook for, the harder it gets to find a way of doing it that works for everyone: if it's just me, and I have the time, money and skills, I can eat exactly what I like. If there are two of us, then I have another set of needs to take into account. Once you get to four, you're into complex territory (ask anyone who cooks for a family), and hell, we're looking at forty, sometimes more. Some needs are harder to cater for than others, some are in conflict with others, some are seen as 'normal', and some, at least here, are seen as... I don't know, 'better'. It's not an easy problem to solve, and logic and proportion can really go to shit sometimes.

Until I got here, unless I was in sub-Saharan Africa I thought I was pretty easy to feed (and being difficult to feed in sub-Saharan Africa is one of the reasons I stopped being vegetarian. I'm still an AVML on the way there though). My mum used to get all the major food groups into me without me complaining much; I have been able to feed myself, and indeed others, quite happily since I was a student (others may not have been overwhelmed by Super Noodles with tuna, tomatoes and Tabasco, but a variant of this is still a staple 10 minute dinner in these parts); and M has been very successfully feeding me for years. In terms of mass catering, I didn't have the best experience of school dinners, but by then I was a vegetarian, so it was cheese salad every day, and always the same cheese. But I managed reasonably well with Hall dining at Cambridge (soup and chips if I couldn't bear the vegetarian option, they weren't so great in the early 90s), and I actively enjoyed the food side of my brief kibbutz experience. Olives! Proper tomatoes! Coleslaw! Vegetarian schnitzel! But I find our communal meals genuinely profoundly disappointing and actually pretty stressful, so clearly there's something else at play.

I'm not 100% sure what it is. But it has to do with the fact that we live in a world where many, many people, especially many, many women, have a miserable, disordered relationship with food, and one of the things I am proudest of is that I am not one of them. I have been on a diet precisely once in my life, when I was 14, and it was a bleak experience. I got the recipes out of the back pages of a book my mum had bought me about Becoming A Woman. I ate meals without the good bits for a couple of weeks, maybe not even that long, and all I could think about was food. I drank black coffee and smoked out the window to dull the hunger pangs. It was terrible, and I decided that it was worse than Being Fat (which actually I wasn't, but I thought I was, not having a thigh gap). So I vowed that all the effort and energy I would otherwise put into Being Thin I would put into Not Caring About Not Being Thin, and that I would henceforth get on with enjoying my food.

And it worked, and I have, and I do. I don't weigh stuff, I don't count stuff, I don't buy low fat cheese, I don't drink slimline tonic. I've never done a 5:2 or a juice cleanse or tried to live off cabbage soup or milk-free milkshakes or egg-white omelettes. I also don't weigh myself. I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't secretly love to be a thin woman (I'd have to live on another planet to be immune to *that* particular message), but I stand by my adolescent conclusion that a *lot* of things taste better than skinny feels. Food is GREAT. Food is one of the best things in the world, and being able to enjoy its delights with largely intact self esteem (I don't feel good about myself when I eat a whole box of Roka Cheese Crispies in one go, to be fair, but I will happily eat a butter pie) makes me One Of The Luckiest People Alive.

But an important part of that is not excluding things -- or at least not excluding things that I love to eat. Once I get into excluding territory then I start to lose my balance. This meal isn't a great meal. It's just calories. What's the point? I mean, we *need* calories, but I don't need as many as I eat, clearly, so why am I eating this? Should I eat it? I get anxious going off in that direction. That way Issues With Food lie.

The things I love to eat have changed radically over the years. As a child it was sausages in finger rolls with tomato ketchup. I can still remember the texture of the rolls, spread with butter from the fridge, the slightly burnt sausages. And vegetable biryanis with omelette baked onto the rice, I bloody loved those. As a teenager, it was Marks & Spencer cheese ravioli with garlicky tomato sauce. I was gutted when they discontinued it. Also those layered salads with cheese or prawns on top. Glad to see those have survived. My 20s were about making friends with chilli and becoming a serious fan of Tom Yam Goong. But it was also when I learnt to cook for myself and discovered the joy of a nut roast with buttered pasta, and Greek lentil soup. And then I met M, who is a fantastic cook and loves food as much as I do, if not more. Ranchos huevos, carrot fritters, smoked tofu carbonara, all manner of curries and noodles and salads and soups and stews. And that's all *before* I started eating meat and he could devil me some kidneys.

But essentially I am about the umami, the contrast of tastes and textures, the sharpness and the spice. I like my food with salt in and my salads dressed. I am not a fan of the sweet (which has in honesty probably saved me from being the size of a house) or the creamy or the heavy or the bland. Many of the things I now love (kale with chilli and garlic! raita! smoked mackerel! pomegranate seeds! avocado! almonds!) are "healthy", but I do not love them for their "healthiness", I just love them. Likewise, many are vegetarian, even vegan, but many are not.

And there's the how as well as the what. I like to eat my dinner in a calm environment, once I've decompressed from the day, with good lighting, off a nice plate, with a knife and fork that match, and a napkin (paper is fine, I'm never sure about how often to wash cloth ones). We usually have a glass or two of wine, and some of our best conversations. If there are four or six or eight of us, (or three or five or seven) even better. I am not so great if I'm eating alone, but I still set food out on the plate with care, sit at a table, listen to Radio 4, think some thoughts.

So I have realised that I make my food choices based on taste and a very personal perception of 'goodness' (avoiding foie gras and air-freighted asparagus, for example, but maybe not avoiding sashimi or out of season green beans if they're Fairtrade), rather than because it's healthy, or because there are things it doesn't contain. That's how I like to eat. That's how M likes to eat. That's how a lot of people I used to eat with like to eat. I kind of imagined it's how everyone would like to eat, if their circumstances permitted, so *there's* a big fat learning point. Another big fat learning point is that if my relationship with food is to stay healthy and happy and un-disordered, and by extension if *I* am to stay healthy and happy and un-disordered, I think it might be how I *need* to eat.

I just can't do food I don't like at a time I don't want to eat in an environment I don't enjoy eating in. I mean, of course I could if I had to, if I didn't have a choice, but I do have a choice, and because I do, I can't. If I can't have something, I just miss it more and want it more. And *that* way also Issues With Food lie.

That may not be as convincing a reason as some can produce for wanting things a certain way, but it's the best I can do. And at this point I'm not even trying to persuade anyone that how I like to eat is the way to go, just to be left alone to cook and eat in peace. I *did* like the idea of shared meals. I still do. Just not these ones.

2. Don't put all your eggs in one basket
This time last year, I didn't have a lot of energy. I was low on spoons. I was still very much  dealing with the trauma and grief of my mum's death, which itself was layered on the disruption and uncertainty of moving up north. I'd left behind old friends and familiar places and decent internet (not to mention proper sushi) for a whole new way of doing things, and then the world suddenly tilted on its axis, never to tilt back. It felt like I'd fallen off something, hadn't landed, and didn't know who I would be when I did. I still don't really know how I didn't break anything, or myself, though there were definitely a few times when I came close.

As the days lengthened, and the distance grew, I did start to feel a little resurgence, and a few more spoons appeared. It was unpredictable, but it felt like it was going in the right direction. I'd pulled right back from a lot of cohousing things (apart from managing the laundry tokens, because that's a job you can do sobbing at 3 am) and I was feeling that I should start re-engaging. This place doesn't run itself. So while I didn't nominate myself for the Meals Review Team, when lots of other people did, I thought, well, it's a dirty job but someone's got to do it, and it looks like it's got my name on it.

From this vantage point, I mostly* wish I hadn't thought that. Because I didn't really have the energy. Or rather, it took all the spare energy I had. We did an extraordinary amount of work over a bunch of lovely summer days when I could have been digging my allotment, or painting the house, or walking in the hills, or sorting out the office, or basically anything that would have been fruitful, in a mental and physical health sort of a way. This was not fruitful. It felt like it might be for a time, as we uncovered stories and sorted statements and looked at possibilities, but if ever there was a poisoned chalice it was this one. I didn't really see it coming, but at the moment it feels like we could have pulled a bunch of ideas out of a hat and saved ourselves the time. That was precious time and precious energy, and I spent it on the wrong thing.

M has made some similar mistakes, we both have a tendency to get over-invested in these things. At work I'm pretty good at picking my battles but it doesn't always play out in other areas. Anyway, we had a good old long old think and talk about it and decided to diversify. We have a new initiative, which is called Project Anywhere But Here.

Project ABH (as it was immediately dubbed by the first neighbour I explained it to) is very simple in concept. If it's not a working day, get up and get out. Anywhere. Do not lie around working on proposals for better ways to do things. Get your coat on and leave the house. The easiest thing to do is go up to the allotment, and the beginning of Project ABH coincided neatly with the onset of Digging Season. A couple of hours up there, in the sunshine with a view over the hills, and equilibrium starts to return. We also have a new local cafe, where there is a large dog to stroke, and flat whites and Aga-cooked lunches can be had. On our first ABH outing we had some of those before walking over the hill to Williamson Park, where we drank beer in the chilly autumn sunshine and visited the butterfly house. Sometimes we only get as far as cycling into town to go to the library and have coffee (not in the library, that coffee is not good), sometimes we go to Carnforth, or the garden centre at Bolton le Sands, or the beach at Hest Bank. But we do get out.

I have big plans for Project ABH in 2015, which involve writing ideas on index cards based on how long they take (and what the weather needs to be like), and then using them to plan ahead a bit. If you have a whole day, you can go and do something in Manchester, for example, and one day, when I wasn't far enough away, I was sorely tempted to get on a bus I saw idling in the city centre which was going to Knott End. They have a ferry there. And that's before you get to the joy of the 555. This is a beautiful part of the world, and we've barely started exploring it. There's joy to be had in that.

We made a healthy start by spending both Christmas and New Year ABH -- but not very far away. We went to Silverdale for Christmas and stayed at Holgates Holiday Park with M's offspring. I've never been great at enjoying Christmas, but it turns out that's because I've never spent it in a static caravan with a sea view, a big hill to walk over, a swimming pool and a real ale pub with a big fire and singalong carols. Everyone enjoyed it! It was great! And for New Year we went with good friends (also good neighbours, a fine combination, as someone may already have noted) to Black Fell Cottage, where there were Picklebacks (exhilarating), tons of cheese, jigsaws, blustery walks, films, Monkey 47 gin (terrifying) and a walk by moonlight to dinner at the splendid Drunken Duck. I still have party bruises. I love those guys.

It was all absolutely marvellous, but it was also good to get home. Which is important. I don't actually want to live anywhere else, I just need to get better at managing my boundaries. And hey, if you've got this far, thanks for sticking with me.

*fixes eyes on horizon, walks forward*

joella

*I say mostly because it wasn't all bad. I enjoyed all the 1-1 conversations I had with people, and learnt a lot about different people's perspectives on cooking and eating, and just about them really. Conversations are good. And I really enjoyed working with the other three people in the team, we were very different people with a shared task and we did some good stuff together.