Well then, 2018. I mean, what the actual?

Shadow and light on Marine Drive, Morecambe: 8 Jan 2019

I don't think I knew what a bad year was till 1998. That was my first one. I had my fair share of adolescent misery but it was all standard issue (even the Thatcherism was standard issue, as I was unaware that there were alternatives, like a war baby only with more vitamin C, and, temporarily, milk) and I knew it was transient. 1998 was different - everything changed: I split up with my Significant Ex, spent some time living off Spar lager and Bombay Mix, chopped a lot of wood while listening to Ani DiFranco mix tapes, and got a tattoo. It doesn't sound so traumatic, really, does it? And with hindsight, yeah, fair point. But I genuinely did not know why this was all happening to me, at least till I got some therapy, and for a while I was very freaked out that I was not the person I had long thought myself to be.

That new person had to get another job, for reasons, and in early 1999, she did. It wasn't the right job, so she got another one - at NGO X - in early 2000, at which point she felt fairly sure that she had finally found her tribe. This, she thought. This is where I live now.

And you know, ups and downs, squalls and storms, a bit of existential bleakness, but the next 12 years, pretty good on the whole. Most of them are obliquely documented on this here website but tl;dr = when there was adversity, it was generally overcome, and along the way, at the risk of sounding like something someone would put on a cushion, there was a lot of love and laughter.

Then we made the Great Leap Northwards, and *that* year was a whole new deal. New house, new way of living, new dying mum. Same boyfriend, same job, but everything else was swirling strangeness, and much of it not of the good kind. It was another 'shit, who am I?' year, and I did not enjoy much of it very much at all.

When my mum died, I was so sad I didn't know what to do with myself. I also thought I was probably dying myself, of non-specific everything disease (kind of what did for her, to be honest), and I went to the doctor's.

I got the kind of GP that is nearly retired, the kind that wears a cardigan, and has seen a lot of people who think they're dying because their mum just died. He was so lovely to me. He said, well, we'll do some blood tests just in case but I think probably you just need to give this time, and he printed off an A4 page with a list of sensible things to remember to do (eat vegetables, sleep, go for a walk etc). I still have that piece of paper in my bag, and every now and again I pull it out to remind myself of the basics.

Grief does what it does, but it does eventually ease (though it will come back for another go every now and again). The year after, I reached the top of the allotment waiting list, and each season, as we clear a little more and grow a little more, I sit on one of the chairs up there (which belonged to M's late mum) and feel I am coming back to myself, albeit a self that will never quite be the same.

And we live here now, we know how it works. There are aspects of life in Ecoville that I will never love, and we have conflicts that may never get resolved, but no one's accused me of anti-vegan hate crime for a while (indeed the man who did has taken his business elsewhere, much to my relief). And so many things about living here are amazing, and so many of the people are too, and we are all, I think, gradually coming through the forming and storming. Who knew it would take so long? (Oh, everyone who's ever done it, duh).

So I wasn't expecting to step into an avalanche last year, but I did. And just like Leonard says, it covered up my soul.

I guess it started in February, when NGO X had a major crisis. It wasn't something I was directly involved in, but it had a profound effect on me and many of the people I love. It shone light into some dark corners, catalysed some long-overdue conversations and actions, and generally prompted the kind of soul-searching that is hard enough to do in private, and extraordinarily difficult to do in full media (and social media) glare. My faith in humanity did not grow in those months. What grew instead was anger at the horrendous pressure the situation put on the people trying to deal with it - most of them conscientious, thoughtful, compassionate, talented humans who were stretched, some of them, to breaking point. A surprising number of them are still standing, still doing their jobs, and I honestly do not know how. I spent a couple of weeks in March doing some direct support (not even on anything sensitive), and I encountered a lot of thousand yard stares.

The fallout also, obviously, had an impact on funding, and before too long it was clear that if there was reduced project funding, there would need to be a commensurate reduction in the functions supporting them. There was a Change Process. I've been through many of these (including one where they literally forgot about me till afterwards, which was interesting) and they are usually fairly predictable affairs, even those which are financially, rather than strategically, driven. This one was different, in that it was executed largely behind closed doors, with much of the work being done by the very same people who were already halfway on their knees. Most of the rest of us mooned around, feeling a bit useless and a bit anxious, and wondering if it was worth starting anything new.

Not me, so much. I had two chunky pieces of work to do, both of which were providing direct support to programme teams, and one of which involved a programme visit. I hardly ever get to do this kind of thing, and I was really looking forward to it. There's only really me doing the kind of thing that I do, and I have to say no to most of the requests that come my way, so I wasn't feeling too worried. I thought my post might move, I thought it might change, and I could see the logic in both of those things, but I didn't think it would be cut. Specifically, the change proposal was due to be shared with staff on a Tuesday, with those whose jobs were significantly affected to be told on the Monday. The Saturday before that, I flew to Yangon to kick off one of those pieces of work. They surely wouldn't let me fly all that way, I thought, to let me start something they weren't going to let me finish, and to tell me that when I would be on my own for 12 days in a city where I knew nobody. In the rainy season. No, they'd tell me before I left. I even had a meeting in my calendar with my manager for the previous Thursday, and it got cancelled. Nothing to see here. Let's go do stuff.

Yeah. No. I worked a full jet-lagged day in an office where you leave your shoes outside and everyone is *incredibly* polite, got thoroughly drenched on my way back to the hotel because I had no idea how hard it could rain in June and my umbrella was not up to the job, then spent half an hour getting Skype working so I could learn that I wasn't going to have a job anymore. The edict that everyone should be told on the same day was apparently in order that it should be "fair". Fair on whom, I am not sure. It was epically shit for me, and it was probably almost as shit for the person who had to tell me - she had to have that conversation, or a version of it, about 20 times in succession. Whoever wrote *that* slide did not know the difference between equality and equity, and, frankly, fucking well should have. I expected more. Something broke that day.

I have another little post to come about how that experience brought me a whole new imaginary friend, which was useful, because I was powerfully lonely the whole time I was there. People did get in touch with me - indeed I had beery, teary Skype chats most evenings - but there was no one who could actually touch me. I grew some kind of shell. When I got home I couldn't shake it off, and that was before the extra fun of having to answer the 'how was your trip?' question over and over again.

In theory I could have fought to keep my job, or some job, at NGO X. There was a consultation period, there were hypothetical options. But I was done. I knew I was done, although it took me a while before I could say it out loud. Eighteen years is a relationship. And I didn't see it coming, so I had no idea what to do next. It was all very bewildering. And then of course, in the middle of a season of weddings and funerals, M was diagnosed with bladder cancer.

I think September was the worst month. I was having apocalyptic dreams already, then (in real life) my dad ended up in hospital, one of my best friends lost her mum, and Ecoville decided it was finally time to stir up the mud at the bottom of the Great Food Wars pond. It would have been a pretty intense time even in a good year. I gradually realised that I couldn't have proper conversations, couldn't hold thoughts for any length of time, couldn't concentrate at work, couldn't read books, couldn't do anything very much apart from just about stop myself screaming. Everything was very loud and bright and I could not filter anything properly. Jo, I said to myself one lunchtime, as I was crying into my soup, I think you probably need some help.

And, well, I got some. I called up NGO X's 'employee assistance programme', and they sorted me out with some telephone counselling within a couple of days. I also went to the doctor's. And so it was that within the space of a week three people (the initial EAP screening person, the counsellor, and the GP) asked me if I was thinking about taking my own life. I wasn't (I really wasn't), but it was all a bit whoah, is this where this might be going? I will say that I've had 'who am I' times before, but this was my first 'why am I', and it was pretty scary.

However. The counselling sessions stopped me panicking. We took the big old snarled up ball of wool that was in my head and teased the threads out of it one by one. It was helpful. I wrote little notes in pencil in a little notebook. I was allotted six sessions, and after the first three, I spread them out further and further apart, and I could see that every time we spoke, things were more manageable than the last time. That was also helpful. And the GP, well, the GP was great. She did a little test of my anxiety levels (high! But we knew that!) and depression levels (medium) and we talked about what to do. I asked about medication, and she said well, do you think you need the extra help? Yes, I said. Yes, right now I do.

I had never taken any head meds before, and I started on a tiny dose of Citalopram. The leaflet says that it takes a few weeks to kick in, and I'd say that was true for the depression, but it hit my anxiety levels within a couple of days. Maybe I have particularly susceptible neurons, maybe it was a placebo effect, I don't know. And nor do I care. It was a profound relief. I have heard people describe SSRIs as giving them 'breathing space' and that's exactly what it felt like: breathing space, thinking space, sleeping space. Nothing goes away, but you can look at it from a slight distance, with a bit of perspective, from more than one angle. I feel insanely (or maybe sanely) grateful for that space. One of the things I have found most interesting is that I am still having the same textbook anxiety dreams that I have always had - cars with no brakes, losing my passport in a foreign country, accidentally killing people etc - but (still in my dream) *these things are not bothering me*. I just get on and deal with them. It's extraordinary. And it makes waking up a far nicer experience too.

So we get to early November, and I'm not freaking out, and this is very good news. I had a couple of weeks off work while I was dealing with the Citalopram side effects, and a couple more weeks of short days (aka getting to have afternoon naps). I'm eating, I'm sleeping, I'm exercising. But I'm still as flat as a pancake. People keep asking me when I'm leaving NGO X (I don't know - to some extent this is up to me, and I can't decide) and what I'm going to do next (I don't know - this is entirely up to me, and I can't think about it) and how M is (we don't know - and this is largely unknowable). I went back to the doctors for a review.

This GP was the absolute bollocks. I told him my sorry saga and he listened, and asked good questions, and was generally both super-empathetic and super-confidence-inspiring. I'm still feeling pretty depressed, I said. Maybe I should take a slightly higher dose for a while, do you think that would be worth a try? Yes, he said, I think from what you've said it would really just give you that lift. So I left with a new prescription. That was on a Monday.

I work on Tuesdays, and I went into the office and thought, right, time to tidy up my desktop. I was closing Chrome tabs and I saw a job advert that someone had sent me a couple of weeks earlier, saying 'you should look at this, it's a very cool job and I think it would be a really good fit for you' ... and I'd immediately discounted it (though not closed the tab, interestingly) as it was a) full time, b) London-based and c) would have required me to feel that I was someone you might want to work with. I looked at the closing date. It was midnight on that day.

And it *was* a cool job, and it *did* feel like a good fit, and maybe I *was* starting to feel like I might be someone you might want to work with, one day, maybe. So I banged out an application letter in three hours flat, got M to read it, and sent it off before I could tell myself it was a terrible idea.

Two days later, they invited me to London for an interview the following week, and I went. I was still feeling a little like Suzanne Vega's Neighborhood Girl - looking out at people from the back of my mind - but I prepared hard (thanks to an interview preparation course that NGO X offers people who are getting made redundant - I had to do it in a flat rush but it was really helpful) and met up with my friend E for coffee beforehand, which made me feel more like a real human. And it was a friendly interview, there was nothing to be scared of. And I found I had things to say. By the time I left a little hopeful part of me had woken up, but I was a bit worried about that, hope can be a scary thing.

When I got the invite for the second interview, I knew that I really wanted the job, and I knew that I had all of the things they were looking for, but I still wasn't quite in the place where I thought that they might want to give it to me. The brutal thing about depression is you literally stop seeing the point of yourself. I hadn't gone quite far enough down the track that I couldn't see that this was a thing that was happening, rather than being completely sunk in it, but it was still a battle to try and imagine myself past it, rather than paint a 'well I used to be a person who brought energy and enthusiasm to things, those were the days, but I live in a hole now' kind of a picture. There's nothing original about this, I realise, but I have generally found enthusiasm pretty easy to access, and I felt its absence keenly. Also, I had a really shitty cold.

I went down to London the night before, and the lovely E met me again and we went for Thai food. I slept in a huge pile of duvets on her sofa bed, and in the morning she walked me to a little coffee shop by Harringay station, and then waited for the train to Old Street with me. It was pouring with rain, and the train was packed to the gills. I was the last person on, and could literally not move an inch for two stops. I fell out at the other end sweaty and snotty and a little bit tearful, and I thought, no, really, I should just go home now.

They have public toilets in Old Street, and I went into the Ladies, and sat in a cubicle for ten minutes, and gathered myself. I'd had a Lemsip before I left, and I squirted some Otrivine up my nose and held my head back till it cleared. I washed my face, put on some perfume (Jo Malone's Sea Salt and Wood Sage, which I call The Smell of a Simpler Time), had a drink of water, and thought right, get out there and do the thing.

I did the thing. I found my enthusiasm, and later that day, after I'd travelled home and was lying on the sofa listening to Radio 4 and drinking wine, my mobile rang and it was the recruiting manager offering me the job. I squealed with delight for the first time in a very long time, and I am squealing a little bit still. I haven't started yet (I do not technically finish with NGO X till the end of this month) but I am looking forward to it very much.

So there was a very good thing that happened at the end of a very bad year, and I am super-thankful for that. We had a low-key festive season, which we navigated successfully, we have entered Dry January, and I have accidentally joined a gym. There is more energy around, for sure, and there is more light.

And while I don't feel that I'm completely out of the woods - there is still uncertainty around M's prognosis (though he is feeling fine right now), and hey, no one could be unaffected by the geopolitical shitstorm that was 2018 - I have access to most of my usual resources, and I'm doing my best to deploy them effectively. They say that when the shit goes down, you find out who your friends are, and they are of course right. My friends have been amazing, some of them exceptionally so. Multiple little (and bigger) acts of love and generosity have made such a difference this year, especially at times when I have not been feeling very lovable. I've also been surprised by the power of the chance encounter - a few unplanned conversations have shifted whole chunks of my thinking. But they're not quite chance, are they. People must rate you a bit if they suggest things to you, you argue, and that can help you remember that you rate yourself.

I think we can largely thank millennials for changing the conversation about mental health - I don't know that I'd have sought help at the point where I did if that hadn't been a message that had been coming through loud and clear from some very articulate writers. It really doesn't seem to have the stigma that it once did, and that can only be a good thing. But I think I was also very lucky that I appear to have landed with something that worked pretty much straight off, first go, with nothing too bonkers in the side effects department. And I got to see fantastic doctors, and take some time off work, and spend many afternoons curled up in bed with my beloved and the Cat Who Doesn't Live Here, reading and snoozing and waiting for the clouds to lift. I wish we could all be so well cared for.

But me, I am, and I live to fight another year. And, I hope, to be there for other people like they were there for me.

joella

Wearing badges is not enough

All Jeremy Corbyn references entirely subconscious

I'm not a campaigner. I'm too anxious, too cautious, too self-conscious, too easily daunted. But I know a lot of campaigners. They are some of my favourite people. They fight the good fight, and they fight it for a long time, because change, if it comes, is usually incrementally, glacially slow. They have thick skins, boundless energy and creativity, and eternal optimism. They get knocked down and, usually, they get up again. They do it, I think, because they have to, and I have massive respect for them, not least because they throw some of the best parties you'll ever go to.

Campaigners fight for and give a voice to the world's, the country's, the neighbourhood's most vulnerable and disadvantaged people. And over the years, they've made some serious progress. Many of the rights now enshrined in law, at least in the global north, would pop the eyes out of the average Victorian. So much progress on so many fronts, so many opportunities for more progress. Things can only get

Oh.

I'm descended from travellers, pipe makers and smugglers. Not so many generations back the birth certificates are signed with an X because nobody involved in making the baby could write their own name. Two world wars stirred shit up a bit (short version), and I'm a half immigrant social mobility success story. I am a home owner. I am part of the 'knowledge economy'. I've travelled to five continents. I am vaccinated against all the things*. I have controlled my own fertility since I became sexually active. I have all my own teeth. I've read Infinite Jest (though I wouldn't necessarily recommend it).

I also have a degree in social and political science from one of the best universities in the world, gained in the dying years of Thatcherism. I loved studying the politics of the welfare state: I got a first in that paper. One of the quotes (I've always loved a good quote) I wrote over and over again was RH Tawney's "The most important thing about a man is what he takes for granted."

Isn't it though. I think one of the things I took for granted till just a few years ago was that social progress was irreversible. That we would gradually get more multicultural (whatever that means, but I thought I knew, once), less unequal, with our life chances less defined by our gender or our caste or the colour of our skin. That we would combine our resources and our knowledge and our talents and our energy to tackle the huge challenges facing humanity and the planet, and together we would adapt and survive. The campaigners were out on the front line of that fight, and people like me were in the background, keeping the faith, doing our bit, applying the metadata, caring for the evidence base.

But I increasingly feel that this faith was a product of two things: my own life, spent bouncing between a series of interlinked and mutually reinforcing liberal bubbles, and the era I came of age in. For most of the New Labour years, many of the indicators were moving in that direction, and unless you're a better historian than I am I think you have to live long enough to see things turn back on themselves to realise that actually, this shit isn't linear.

Wearing badges is not enough**, but right now I have no idea what is. I have fantasised about taking all of the post-truthers out in one go with a strategically placed measles germ, but I suspect that would only deal with the stupid ones (and the collateral damage would be unpalatable: I have a heart). It's the clever ones, who foment backlash against 'experts' with the zeal of the architects of the Cultural Revolution while maintaining cutting edge healthcare and offshore banking services for themselves, that we really have to worry about, and they are in the ascendant.

And of course it hasn't just been a terrible year for politics: I've shed tears for the loss of Bowie, Prince, Leonard and George, who all shone a light into the dark places and made them a bit more livable. And then there was Jo Cox (the only person I knew with a name shorter than mine), who was so skilled, so committed, and so clearly on the side of progress, tolerance and love. She was the ultimate campaigner, and she paid the ultimate price.

I'm obviously not alone (just check the MSM!) in proclaiming this a uniquely shit year, and I do believe it has something of the night about it. But I remember a message I got from a friend who lost his mum about five years before I lost mine. I had written something about how much I'd learnt from my mum and how sad I was to have lost that, and he said he had learnt more from his mum since she'd gone than ever before. And you know what, he was right.

So maybe 2017 is the year all us PC SJWs have to reach for our inner campaigners. We got the education. We got the love. We've got to use them.

joella

* Well, not rabies. But pretty much everything else.
** Kind of terrifying how this song has come back around.

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. 

I don't need another hero, I don't need to know the way home...

(and as those of you from the 80s will already know) ...

All I want is life beyond the Thunderdome.

 Well, it's been a bastard of a year. Can't wait to see the back of it. Started it with a full complement of parents, while knowing that I'd likely be down at least one of them by this point. (I say at least one, because my mum was pretty much a racing certainty - so on the grounds that the average number of legs people have is less than two, there was always the chance I could lose the full set).

The year went with the odds, and so I have joined the ranks of the motherless. And the only good thing I can say about that is that you only have to do it once. At this point, four months in, I can sense my resources regrouping. I can see that at some point, and it probably won't be too long off, one of my friends will tell me that her/his mother is dying.

And I will know what that feels like, and I will know what to say, and I will offer some of the things people offered to me. Being, variously, bodily warmth, hot dinners, large glasses of red, packets of tissues, links to useful reading, handwritten letters, space to vent, walks on beaches, turning up at short notice with low-effort plans, saying 'I know how you feel'.

And *their* mother dying will make *my* loss easier to bear (like I'm sure my loss did, though no one said that out loud, because you don't, do you) because it will be a reminder, though I shouldn't need one really, that this is a normal thing, it happens to everyone, unless their story is even sadder, because they don't have a mother in their life, or because they die first. And what I'm saying here is that if a) you mourn the loss of your mother, and if b) you're 43 and that's the biggest loss, by far, BY FAR, that you've ever had to bear, you can't be doing too badly, in a world that contains, just this year, Syria and the Philippines and South Sudan and the Central African Republic and Dasani the invisible child.

My mum died. It was awful. I don't cry every day anymore, but I still cry every week. She was dealt a shitty hand in her last year (and that's another story) but even given that, she was loved, she wasn't poor, and she got some of the best care that the National Health Service has ever been able to offer. She might even have hit the apogee of what the American Right calls 'socialised health care' - let's just hope that if/when I get my terminal cancer diagnosis in 25 years' time, we've sorted out assisted dying. The last bit was medieval. We should be better at this by now.

But life does go on. The clocks do not stop. And I have gradually worked out that I still have everything my mum gave me, plus all the things I learnt when she was dying and that I've learnt since she died. I'd love to ask her about some of those things, but I just have to live with that.

What she didn't give me was belief in anything above or beyond or outside this life. She was brought up Catholic herself, and brought me and my sister up Catholic too, but once we were teenagers and (certainly in my case) had reviewed the evidence for there being a God and found it lacking, she sacked it all off. Possibly with some relief, but I don't recall ever talking about it. She chose a Catholic funeral director, but (without us knowing) she went in to see him before she died and told him she wanted a cardboard coffin and a non-religious ceremony. He did a fantastic job - at the crematorium he read Dust If You Must. She did a fantastic job too, I am comfortable in my atheist skin, but I do light the odd candle for her here and there, most recently in Norwich Cathedral's Peace Globe.

But I can do that within a secular world view. As I do everything else. And there's something both sharp and sweet about realising that you only pass this way but once. Get On With It. Well, tomorrow. Tonight I'm drinking too much sherry and watching Inspector Morse.

In my world, 2013 was the year of Trish. She was, as JP would say, a ledge. 2014 will be the year of the rest of us. Let's hope we get it right.

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.

That was the year that was

I spent an hour waiting to see the doctor this morning, probably contracting a fair few new infections from the festering antechamber in the process. But he was delightfully sympathetic ("Oh dear! Poor you! Bad luck!") and wrote me a prescription for highly specific antibiotics, which I carted off to Boots just as fast as my ragged urethra would allow. God bless the NHS, I thought, as I climbed gingerly onto the bus home. It's wonky, but it's saved my life on a couple of occasions and my quality of life on countless others. If your urino-genital system is, shall we say, sub-prime, you could live in a lot worse places.

I am, however, consigned to the sofa for the duration of New Year's Eve, wrapped in a blanket and watching the fire. So I have an unusually timely opportunity to reflect.

In photos:

January: Elephant riding, Kerala. February: Snowdrops, Christ Church Meadows. March: Luminox, Broad Street.
April: Pebbles and sea, Westward Ho! May: Baby Tungsten, our garden. June: Cow parsley, Thrupp.
July: M on the jetty, Lytham. August: Road sign, Cowley Road. September: Wire waiting for Charlie, Chatsworth.
October: No Entry, Harcourt Arboretum. November: At home. December: Recovering from shopping, St Michael's St.

Happenings of note:

For the first time in years (ten? fifteen?) I have taken only one flight this year, though it was a long one: coming home from India, where we spent last Christmas. We holidayed in the UK, and work didn't take me away. And I have no complaints about either of these things, though I already know neither will pertain in 2008.

A side effect of this is that I am eligible to give blood for the first time in about the same number of years (they don't want you if you've been anywhere malarial, or had a tattoo, or had your wisdom teeth out, or any number of other things I seem to have spent my 20s and 30s doing). I have put my name down, as I am rhesus negative and there's never enough of us to go around.

I emerged from the Dark Days. I have already written about this so will not dwell on it further here.

Rediscoveries: frugality, thanks to part-time working; long-lost or nearly-lost people, thanks to Facebook and the internet more generally; music, thanks to last.fm, 6Music and iTunes; vegetables, thanks (however reluctantly) to Abel & Cole; hanging out with ex-housemate S, thanks to baby Tungsten and aforementioned part-time working.

First time discoveries: walking in the Peak District, working (however sporadically and unconventionally) in the manual trades, power tools, Woman's Hour, friends from the internet.

Must not forget life's great continuities: old and new friends, front crawl (not enough of that, mind), OX4, FY8, too much booze, inner fury, good food, Evening Primrose Oil, a lovely boyfriend, a roof over my head, a town where they know what I'm like and don't mind.

To paraphrase my favourite toast, may the worst years of our lives be like this one.

joella