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

Just another sister on lockdown

Bread (not pictured) and roses, bread and roses

Just before this year's Significant Birthday, I did a little series of This Much I Know style musings on Facebook. I enjoyed it: the taking stock, the reflecting on things from the perspective of middle age. I like to think I don't feel that different to the way I did 30 years ago, when Young Joella was at her most glorious, but I must. I absolutely have to be a fully-fledged adult by now. I belong to the generation that's in charge here, terrifying as it sounds. 

But whatever any of us thought we knew has taken some punishment in the last 150 days, hey. And there's been no shortage of white middle class takes. Is there ever? But you know the drill: if you don't want mine, you really don't have to read it. Back buttons are available.

Schrodinger's Dad 
This was the big one. The big fella. Sometime in late April, it's a little blurry now, my actually quite beloved dad, my grumpy, stubborn, 20th century, pre-Israel Israeli, principled, heartbroken, sometimes inappropriate, reluctantly-but-in-the-face-of-incontrovertible-evidence evolving dad, was blue-lighted to hospital for the second time in a month. The first time, it was with a recurrence of the thing that keeps coming for him that no one has yet been able to identify. The second time, it was with the Covid-19 that he picked up the first time. I won't lie, I thought he was a goner, that it had finally come to, as he would say, Goodnight Vienna.

I know I am so far from the only person who went through this, and I know that the NHS were doing their absolute valiant best, unlike some people we could mention, but it was terrifying and awful. There were days and nights, long days and longer nights, where I just didn't know whether he was coming, going, or already gone. I couldn't go and see him, he wasn't well enough to call, there was a mega spendy phone number that went to his bedside, but they kept moving him around, so the number kept changing, and when it rang out I didn't know if he wasn't picking up, or someone else's dad wasn't picking up, or it was just ringing into the void. The ward asked for one person to call each day, morning and evening, so they weren't overwhelmed, and one day it was me and I rang in the morning and the person who answered said 'he's asleep'. 'How is he, do you think?' 'Well, he refused his breakfast'.

Two things I now know that I didn't know then: first, he'd lost his sense of smell, so food wasn't that interesting to him, but more importantly, he's vegetarian, and they kept bringing him meat. In those circumstances, refusing breakfast seems reasonable, but at the time, I thought, that's it, he's checking out. The one thing we could do was send messages online, and every morning I typed a little message into a web form, trying to say what I needed to say, and hoped that somehow it would get to him.

He survived, though is yet to fully recover, and I have since been to visit a few times. But there was some point in the 10 days or so he was out of reach where M observed that he was effectively shut in a box with a deadly virus, and until someone opened it we had no idea whether he was alive or dead. I grew that little shell around me that I remember from my mum's terminal illness. Not very much could reach me, but what could absolutely tore me apart.

He's back at Caffe Nero now, and sporting quite the beard. A couple of weeks ago, I was in his kitchen frying up some garlic for pasta puttanesca and he said 'wow, that smells great!'. I looked at him and grinned, and he said 'my god, I can smell!' He dodged the bullet that's now hit the larger part of a million people. May his luck continue to hold.

Reassessing the familiar 
I knew about the obvious key workers. My mum was a nurse. My dad worked in local government. My best friend is from a family of teachers. I have spent most of my own working life in the third sector, but many of the same values hold. It's not about you, it's about everyone. Nobody is ok till everybody is ok. Human rights apply to all humans. Pay your taxes. Vaccinate your children. Vote for progressive government. Check your privilege. Don't be evil.

But I did not fully recognise how reliant we are on the delivery drivers, the corner shops, the butchers, the bakers and the people who keep the lights on. Andy the fish man comes here on a Tuesday. He disappeared for three weeks because Fleetwood fish market closed for physical distancing adjustments. When he came back I nearly cried with happiness. In the deepest lockdown, the appearance of his van was one of the major events of the week. You can't outsource eating. We have to remember that. I can't even go there on the care worker front, I'm still too angry and sad. PAY ALL THESE PEOPLE PROPERLY. THIS IS THE REAL WORK. (Also: monkfish curry is the best).

Inequality begins at home. 
If we're going to have more pandemics, and I imagine we probably are, we need homes we can bear to stay at home in. I'm Generation X, and, broadly speaking, we got a fair deal on the housing front. I hadn't properly realised how precarious this situation is for millennials and Gen Z, and how badly and insecurely so many people are housed. Which is to say, I knew housing was fucked, but I didn't know how fucked. I learnt back in the dying days of Thatcherism that this is a problem the 'market' will never, ever solve. You want to house your citizens decently, you have to invest public money in it. May we finally learn this lesson. May we finally vote accordingly.

Regression
Son of a gun, holy cow. Turns out we need to look after ourselves. There were the sourdough waves, the crafting waves, the Zooming all evening after Zooming all day waves, the allotted hour of exercise waves, but all that passed and we were still here, looking at the walls, wondering how to climb them. And like many people, I fell back on familiar comforts.

A lot of this was around food, and I think this was also linked to where it came from. We do have food available here in Ecoville, and the team who source it bust a gut to keep it coming in, but it is very much at the wholefoods end of things, and I found that I did not want it, even more than I usually find that I do not want it. What I wanted was pie. Fish fingers. Spaghetti hoops. Cheese and pickle toasties. Tuna mayo jacket potatoes. Ham, egg and chips. Instant noodles. There wasn't a supermarket delivery slot for love nor money, and I did not want to go into town.

So I developed a whole new opportunistic way of shopping, which was a mixture of watching the Abel & Cole website like a hawk (and huge props to them for bringing us what they could bring us every single week), and buying stuff in the local villages. I can now tell you what the Halton shop at the top has (Philadelphia! Cream! Koka noodles! Limes! Chillies!) vs the Caton Co-op (Prawns! Organic wine! Refried beans! Parmesan! Parsley!) vs the Bolton le Sands Spar (Locally made pies! Barmcakes! Linguine! Salted pistachios!).

As is the way in this house, I do the sourcing and M does the cooking. So I have been appearing through the door with all kinds of things, and he has dutifully been creating glorious dinners from them. Special mention to the miso ramens topped with fish fingers (aka cheat's tempura), the tuna steaks with chips and creative salad (aka whatever we have to shred), the many and varied frittatas and omelettes (thanks to my well-connected neighbour S, we have been well supplied with local eggs throughout), the (British*) corned beef hash - now just referred to as CBH - and the absolute standby sausage and sardine pastas (these are two pastas, not one, we're not monsters). We have eaten like kings, if the kings had been teenagers in the 80s. We're a bit fatter, but I think everyone is at this point, so that's fine. Who's even looking.

Transgression
Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in an old midnight choir, I have tried, in my way, to be eco. I have taken this a lot further than many people, to the extent that I could probably give you a list, but I won't, because then I'd sound smug, or defensive, or both, and that's not where I want to go with this. Where I want to go with this is that we all have our limits, in the places where we have a choice, and a whole myriad of factors affect those limits, as well as those choices.

When it all went tits with the Covid, a lot of those limits and those choices became really exposed, and I had a kind of dual experience of it. On the one hand there was the mainstream realisation that we are interdependent beings. Supply chains fail if even one of their links doesn't work. I had a higher than average awareness of this, partly because I'm quite old and I remember the days before you could think oh, I'd like x, and within minutes x appears in your life, as if by magic. And partly because I've spent a bit of time at the other end of those supply chains, on farms in developing countries, with small producers, with the people who don't get prioritised for anything, basically. We mostly don't know we're born, the water comes out of the taps, the lights stay on, and the shops have stuff in them. The difference between that happening and not happening is extremely finely balanced. The more of us who understand this, and make our choices accordingly, the better, and I have noticed the increasing awareness of this. Might we come out of this... better? (I'm not hugely hopeful, but there have been moments). The deep satisfaction that can come from scoring macaroni in a time of scarcity... I think, for a time there, we all appreciated that we should not take this for granted.

On the other, there was the choices that are supported here in Ecoville. I don't think we've had a good war. It's admittedly pretty challenging when you've deliberately designed a set up that relies on sharing facilities (washing machines, cars, bins, play spaces, stores, communal areas) and suddenly all of them are danger zones. There's been a lot of helping each other out, as you might expect. But as a collective, as a whole, we have not, in many instances, opened our minds to new possibilities, or extended each other generosity. In fact, we managed to weaponise the word 'generosity' a while back, which would be impressive if it weren't so depressing. 

I have instead sensed something of a hardening. The lines that have hardened are not a great surprise, maybe - I'm going to avoid the gory details, but we've had the Tinned Fish Wars, the Don't Tell Us What To Do Wars, and the Trampoline Wars. I mean, we're all a bit broken. Who can say they're at their best in "these times"? And I do, honestly, try and access my empathy (as I imagine others do too, at least those who've done even the tiniest bit of therapy) but then I boing up against its limits and ping off in the other direction. I guess you could say this is a counterpose, if the pandemic were a yoga class, which it in no way is, but we can try. 

The first sign was the washing up. I hate washing up, and we do have a dishwasher, but three meals a day at home, every day, there's stuff that needs dealing with. We ran out of washing up liquid. What's supposed to happen is you take your bottle down the street and refill it from a giant vat of Ecover. This can take a while, it's pretty viscous, but I have been dutifully doing it. And I thought no. Fuck this. I want proper washing up liquid. And I went out and bought a bottle of Fairy Eucalyptus Anti-Bacterial. Oh, the joy those bubbles brought me. I blew the little ones round the kitchen, and made giant ones with my hands. I poured it into running hot water like a cocktail waiter with a bottle of Galliano. 

I was a bit unstoppable after that. Dettol wipes. Tesco Click and Collect, feat. hash browns. Air freighted roses from Sainsbury's (see above. Fairtrade, of course, I'm not a monster). Giant bars of Cadbury's Dairy Milk. Even (and I do feel bad about this, just not bad enough) a strimmer, a whole strimmer, just for my allotment, because the communal strimmer battery went missing and I could. not. be. arsed. waiting for it to be found. So I bought a strimmer. Off Amazon.

I know these decisions are taking me in the wrong direction. We need to be doing less of this, and I have been doing more. I'm still trying to fathom why, as I'm fairly sure it's a slippery slope between this kind of thing and refusing to wear a mask because yada yada freedom. (I am not refusing to wear a mask, of course. I'm not a monster). I suspect it might be actually quite linked to the regression thing. I try and make principled choices, but actually I don't always find that easy. You have to work at it, all of the time. And when you take a kicking for not being principled *enough* (I'm not expecting medals, just not "feedback"), and then there's a *pandemic*, I think what happens is a little switch flips. I have, these last few months, rediscovered the deeeeep pleasure of driving fast, on my own, windows open, loud music playing. I thought those days were long behind me. Turns out not. Quite tempted to make a roll up at the traffic lights singing along to I Am The Resurrection, go full 90s.

Anger. 
If you're not angry, you're not paying attention. I started a 21 day Deepak Chopra abundance meditation thing that one of my lovely Australian half-aunts was hosting, because I thought it might do me some good. But I dropped out from fury on day... 4? Not now, Deepak, I thought. People are dying fully preventable deaths. I could say more about the anger (I could always say more about the anger) but actually, I read this on the LRB blog a long three months ago now and I can't top it. It's really very good.

And now what? 
I work with futurists, and the futurists are busy as hell. This has been like a fracture in time, a deep but sharp shifting of the tectonic plates. We have none of us any certainty about what comes next, and if we do, we're deluding ourselves. So much possibility has been revealed, as has so much vulnerability. Many of us have had the opportunity to think deeply about what really matters, and some of us have taken it. The bare brick of the structural inequalities in our world has been exposed in a way that I have never experienced before - at least, not in the country I live in. 

We could adapt -- we've had a sense of how fast things can change when the political will is there. But I am not sure that we will. We present as a democracy, and heaven knows it could be worse, but our electoral system is so unfit for its 21st century purpose that we have somehow ended up being led by amoral narcissists advised by monsters, and we might quite possibly be fucked. I watch the signals that my colleagues produce that indicate which trajectory we may be on... zero sum game competition for limited resources? trading privacy for access to goods and services? a radically different, regenerative future? something else? Who will decide? 

It's been an interesting time for those of us who straddle various divides, or, to use the new parlance, inhabit several bubbles. Not sure I'd wish these times on anyone, but they aren't boring. There is possibility, for those who are able (and allowed) to lift their heads up high enough to see it. There is a lot of bleakness for those who aren't or can't. I don't know where to put myself really. But imma stashing some tins of sardines, just in case.

joella

*This isn't a Brexity thing, it's a rainforest thing

Lights are changing

I don't work on Fridays, as a rule. I generally use them to get things done (admin, digging, shopping) but I spent a good few hours of this one lying in bed, interspersing staring at the ceiling with staring at the wall. I associate this kind of lying around with grief, I did a fair amount of it after my mum died. And if I try to untangle the thoughts in my head, I think I am grieving. Not for anyone in particular, though I have read and heard stories over the last few weeks that have had tears rolling down my cheeks, and I have a few (#metoo) of my own. But for all of us who will never express our fullest humanity, never do our best work, because we are too scared. I'm going to be generous and include the men, even the ones who are very much not woke, because we are taught to be endlessly generous to the men, and I haven't run out of that yet. It's like Catholicism, never quite leaves you.

This stuff has been building for a year at least, since the US managed to elect a full strength no filter misogynist to the most powerful office in the world. History will damn them for that, if there are any of us left around to write it, but in the meantime we have to live with it, and the pressure is starting to build. The pussy grabber in chief seems fairly inviolable himself (he is the President, ergo his conduct is presidential, right?), but elsewhere, cracks are appearing in conspiracies of silence that have lasted near-lifetimes. And it's waking up all kinds of sleeping feelings.

(No content warning here apart from general fucking patriarchy, but I know it's been a hard month)

I think what set me off was the Hallowe'en episode of the new season of Stranger Things. It ended with the Ghostbusters song and suddenly (and unexpectedly) I wanted to cry. I was back on an overnight ferry to Rotterdam, in the autumn of 1985. I had just started my A-level Geography course and we were going on a field trip. There was a bar, and a dance floor, and I was a couple of Southern Comforts in (nobody bothered too much about underage drinking in those days) and Ghostbusters came on. And I *knew the moves*. So I was up and out there and giving it my all. Very enthusiastically, as I recall. At some point during the song, one of my schoolmates came and shouted in my ear. She said 'Joella*, stop it, you look like you're for sale'.

Seems weird that I remember this so clearly, but it was a proper Moment in my young life, and I do. I remember stopping my dancing, a little out of breath and a little sweaty, and wondering what on earth she meant. I remember looking down at myself, and I was wearing a white T-shirt tucked into a pair of (I now realise) terrible 80s jumbo cords, and bare feet - I still prefer to dance in bare feet. I probably didn't have a bra on, but I was a late developer and didn't have much to put into one at the time, and I could never really be arsed with them till I did. Then I looked around me, and I realised that everyone else who was dancing was a boy. I think that was her issue. That, and my inelegance maybe. I've never been a smooth mover.

But seriously, I was DOING THE GHOSTBUSTERS DANCE. I was FIFTEEN YEARS OLD. I was dancing with boys my own age, who were doing the SAME DANCE. It was FINE. None of them fancied me anyway, because I was stroppy and had no tits. We were CHILDREN.

I mean, I say that, but I had a Saturday job in a bread shop by then, and I'd already experienced (among other delights) its owner coming over while I was setting out the barmcakes, sticking his erection into my thigh and muttering 'if you were sixteen, I'd rape you'. I knew about the evil that men did, all fifteen year old girls do. I wasn't an idiot. But I was at a fucking disco on a fucking ferry getting a bit pissed and having a laugh, and I got policed by one of my own. That's what stayed with me. They make us police ourselves. Then it's even more our fault if something bad happens.**

I could tell you more about my schooldays but life's too short. I genuinely worry for people who see them as the best days of their life, and suspect most of them weren't girls. But whatevs. We grew on up and we grew on out. And we ended up in a world where versions of this self-policing are entirely normal: don't do this, don't wear that, don't go there.

For example. Some twenty years later, I was completing my plumbing NVQ, and installing a pretend bathroom in a workshop to get the requisite number of points. This required being in college in the daytime, with the apprentices doing their day release. It was educational, though none of them took the slightest notice of me. Apart from the only girl among them, who came to talk to me. How do I get them to leave me alone, she said. They never leave me alone.

Well, I said. I can tell you it gets better eventually, but in the meantime, the only thing I can say is, tie your hair back. Don't wear any make up to college or on site. Wear a crew neck top so they can't look down it when you're bending over, and find workwear trousers that fit you round the waist, so they can't look down those when you're installing your pretend bathroom. Don't flirt, don't giggle, and get the best marks. Basically, don't give them anything to work with.

What I *didn't* say was 'talk to the tutors and let them know you're uncomfortable', because they were my tutors too, and I knew it wouldn't have made any difference. It's on you to manage this, is basically what I said, and you will have to learn how to do it.

I might as well have said, don't look like you're for sale. Don't have any fun, don't play around and explore the power that you *do* have, don't mess with the programme. I thought I was giving sensible advice, and - given that not long before that I'd been squatting on top of an industrial fridge in a pub kitchen drilling holes in the wall for pipe clips and one of the chefs reached up in passing to squeeze the only part of me he could reach - arguably I was. He got my knee, which was his bad luck, as my trousers had kneepads, but seriously, you're out there, you're fair game, even when you're nearly 40, even in a fleece hoodie and steel toecaps and armed with a drill, even when your boss is two metres away.

But it's not the answer, is it. It just makes us all responsible for our own vulnerability, and that fucking stinks. These stories that are tumbling out now, piling up like snowdrifts, are the consequence of that. It's not like we haven't had feminism for decades, it just hasn't been enough. It still isn't. I feel a strange sense of shame that I've internalised all of this, developed my strategies, been grateful to get older and have to deal with it less, while more generations of girls grow up and go out into the world and find themselves needing to work out how to deal with something they should never have to experience, at best, and survive something much, much worse at worst. The stories from women in their 20s and 30s have made me rage. We should have sorted this shit out by now.

But this might be a moment that there's no going back from. We might get to smash a little bit of the patriarchy, finally. I hope I'm not too old to play my part in that. I'm certainly angry enough.

joella

tl;dr: (and related to the title of this post) oh my heart is sore at the moment. If yours is too, listen to this and it might help a little.

* Not actually Joella, but I don't go by the name they called me at school no more. 
** She went on to become Head Girl, and I, despite my "Oxbridge potential", subsequently realised, did not even get to be a prefect. I don't really know why (and at this point I really, really don't care) but I expect it was because of this kind of behaviour. They knocked my school down the other week, and I can't say I was sad. I always had the impression they never really wanted to let girls in in the first place, and they certainly didn't want ones who made any noise. 

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.

Oh, what a mess we made

Well, you couldn't call it a slow news month. Amy Winehouse has crashed and burnt. The press is not free. Europe is broken. There's a famine in parts of Somalia, where Islamist extremists are restricting aid agencies' access while people starve. Not all extremists are Islamists, of course, there are white ones too: in America they are about to piss on all the chips in the west, and in Norway they shoot children.

And I've spent some time trying to imagine circumstances under which a hotel maid would actually want to suck a 60 year old Frenchman off and you know what, I can't. I also can't really imagine that a 60 year old Frenchman could, but you know what they say about power and corruption.

I am friends with Professor Edith Hall, one of the cleverest people around and currently campaigning against the closure of the Department of Classics and Philosophy at Royal Holloway. A post in the campaign's Facebook group (here, if you want to join) highlights a talk she is giving today in Cambridge about the six basic 'rules' of competent decision-making in ancient Greece: deliberate slowly, take into account all historical precedents, don’t intimidate your interlocutors, listen to all viewpoints, verify all information, and think through all consequences.

We ignore these things at our peril, and we should know that by now.

Oh, and no one's bought our house yet.

joella

All over bar the recycling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

It takes a nation of homeowners to hold us back

I have a deep sense of foreboding about this government. I didn't vote for them, fairly obviously, but I don't believe that the people who did vote for them are getting what they voted for, especially the ones who put the tick in the orange box. Instead they are getting to witness the taking of a battering ram to the public sector - up to and including the NHS and the BBC. And like Humpty Dumpty, once it falls off the wall, that's it, we've had it, we are living in America.

It's being sold as inevitable, on the grounds that the last government broke the economy.

I believe this is bullshit on both counts. It's not inevitable, and it wasn't the government that broke the economy, it was the unregulated hyper-capitalist banking system. No. This a concerted attack on local government, the post-war welfare state and anything funded with public money.

The private sector can do it better, they argue, and if the private sector can't do it better we shouldn't be doing it at all. I don't agree. As my friend Dr A put it recently, it's "more about the ideology of a smaller state than the economics of a smaller deficit".

For the middle classes, things may get tighter, but relatively few things will break (though, with luck, Cath Kidston's bottom line might suffer a bit). It's the breadline workers and those reliant on benefits (who are often the same people, or in the same households) whose coping strategies will fail. I'd recommend Polly Toynbee's Hard Work, a book which paints a bleak picture of life in low-pay Britain. And that was under a Labour government who invested in improvements to social housing and introduced a minimum wage.

Some of the people she worked with are dinner ladies and hospital porters, who were once public sector employees. These jobs still have to be done (at least while we still believe we should feed schoolchildren and wheel people round hospitals) but they are now done by agency staff who are worse paid, unrepresented, and have minimal job security.

There's money being made, tons of it, but it's not going into their pockets. The private companies which took over these contracts, and will take over many more essential services, are constituted to make money for their shareholders. They will pay as little as they can get away with, and cut whatever corners can be cut, in order to maximise their profits. That's what private service provision companies do. That's what they have to do. CSR only comes into it if someone with a spreadsheet has worked out that it's a money-spinner. They would pay less than the minimum wage if there wasn't a law against it.

This is what we will see more of. Less accountability, worse services, and more money in fewer pockets. Depend on it.

I do think it was time for a change of leadership, and I also think there are policy areas where reform is much needed. Too much time at the top is bad for anyone, and even the most faithful had lost their faith in shiny Tony (and isn't he looking old these days?) and dull Gordon. I wasn't one of the most faithful - I have never been a member of any political party - but I believed, at the beginning, in the New Labour project, and only later wondered exactly what it was which was sold down the river in the name of electability. The public gets what the public wants, until there's a Global Financial Meltdown, and that's part of the problem.

Ultimately, I wish, as a nation, we were braver. I wish we were genuinely prepared to throw our private hat collections in a communal ring, and could do so with the confidence that our freely-elected milliners were the best they could be. Sadly, this is not the case. They say we get the government we deserve, and sometimes I think they might be right.

I am thinking radical thoughts. It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.

joella

Oh Lord, won't you erase all memory of every interaction with Mercedes-Benz

I'm going to tell you what happened to the car. I'll try and keep it brief, because it's not really the interesting bit, but it's important background.

Summer 1998: M buys Velba, a dark green ex-demo Mercedes A140, from Inchcape, aka Mercedes-Benz of Oxford. It wasn't that he *wanted* a Mercedes, it was more that the ancient Golf he'd driven away from his marriage in got written off by a bus, and the ancient Golf he replaced it with was fading fast. There was something about wanting to have a decent car, something about having the money to buy one (hey, it was 1998 - Things Could Only Get Better), and something about liking the shape of it. There are loads of cars that look like the Mercedes A Class now, but there weren't then. And the early ones were especially pleasing. So he bought one.

Summer 1998 - January 2010: M drives Velba, and, especially after we moved in together in 2001 and I sold my beloved 2cv, so do I. I think it's fair to say that we love Velba, and, the vast majority of the time, she loves us right back. She has a comfortable driving seat, which you can raise and lower and move backwards and forwards, and lovely glowing lights to welcome you back when you press the 'unlock' button from ten metres away across a dark car park. She is warm in the winter and, for a while, cool in the summer, though the air conditioning packed up about five years ago and we never got it fixed. She has an incredible haulage capacity for a small car: you can get a lot in the boot, but if you need more, you can fold the back seats forward in several different ways, and even, in extremis, take them out altogether. She can carry two full size bikes and a week's worth of self-catering supplies, or a whole band's equipment, or a toilet and basin and all the tools, fittings and pipes you need to put them in. She's economical on petrol, starts first time every time, and parks like a dream. They know how to build cars, do Mercedes-Benz.

The only drawback is that when stuff needs doing, and it regularly does, it costs a screaming arm and a screaming leg. The car never actually breaks down, she is designed to fail elegantly, but over the years M spends what, in retrospect, is an eye-watering amount of money on her. Mainly this is because he continues to get her looked after by Mercedes-Benz of Oxford, so various warranties and guarantees and service histories are maintained. After a certain point this becomes economically pointless, as the car is not worth enough to make those warranties and guarantees and service histories anything like worthwhile, but we don't really notice that point passing. And it's hardly in their interest to point out that we could get the same work done tons cheaper elsewhere, so of course they don't.

A bit like when we were briefly members of Esporta, I am faintly ashamed, even once removed, of my association with Mercedes-Benz of Oxford and their Living The Dream, You're Worth It, Finer Things In Life aesthetic. When I go with M to drop off or pick up Velba, we get to sit on shiny chairs and drink coffee from a shiny machine, brought over by a young woman with shiny hair and shiny lips. There are flowers in shiny bowls, of the type you find on the tables at a certain kind of wedding, and a range of Mercedes-Benz merchandise (cufflinks, pens, clothing) in shiny cabinets. Through my head, without fail, plays 'what the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here...'

But the car is not like that. The car has values we share. The car is worth it.

Until the big snow. Actually, until the service just before the big snow, when N, the Human Face of Mercedes-Benz of Oxford (whom I am only annoyed with because if he wasn't actually a nice guy we might have moved on several years ago), pointed out that the clutch was 'on the way out' and that to carry out that scale of repair on a car of Velba's age was possibly not the best decision. So, he advised us, we should think about what we wanted to do when that happened.

And then it snowed. I was the first person to drive Velba after the roads cleared, and there was a strange engine noise. A couple of days later we were taking stuff to the tip, and there was a loud cracking noise as M moved the driving seat from 5'4" to 5'11".

There was no obvious performance impact resulting from either of these things, but the noises were a little alarming, so we booked her in for a check-up. M dropped her off, and caught the bus* back to Oxford. Later that day, they called M and informed him that repairs would cost £1200, including-but-not-limited-to new shock absorbers, tyres and windscreen wipers. This was a shock that needed absorbing in its own right, but for various reasons, including-but-not-limited-to a daughter who wanted to borrow the car that weekend, he agreed to go ahead without much further deliberation.

M's thinking was that this would see the car through until the clutch needed replacing. This would give us the time to think about our options, which, despite N's advice, we had not really done. There was no suggestion whatever that these repairs might not fix the problems he had reported (and indeed he paid over £100 for 'diagnosis').

But they didn't. When Velba was ready, he caught the bus* to collect her, paid the bill of £1196.61, filled in a form saying he was happy with the service he had received, and drove her back to Oxford. By the time he got back, the car was making the same noise as before, so he turned round and drove straight back to the garage.

And from then on it just got worse. M was informed that more diagnosis would involve 'dropping the engine out' (at a cost of more hundreds of pounds), but that the car was 'probably' fine to drive around town. He drove home, and later rang to complain about the service he'd received. There was an offer to diagnose the problem free of charge, but, once the car was returned yet again, this was retracted... the person who had made the offer was over-ruled by the Service Manager.

This same man would not come and talk to us when we both caught the bus* to the garage to try and resolve things. We drove the rattly car home again knowing nothing more than it might be something to do with the alternator, or it might be something to do with the air conditioner. It was probably the latter, said the Service Manager, when he finally did return M's calls, and it would probably 'last longer than the clutch'. (Subtext: stop making a fuss, and go away).

It wasn't, and it didn't. Less than a week later the alternator went bang while M was driving me to work. We have had a dead car parked outside the house ever since, and two more calls to the Service Manager have gone unreturned. I feel he may be the kind of man who is rude to his wife in company.

It's all been very, very stressful. M has been wounded, and not just financially, because he still puts value on loyalty, and doing the right thing, and it pains him when in fact there's nothing behind the facade of 'service' beyond naked capitalism. I am less surprised and more angry, because when it comes down to it, naked capitalism is breaking the world, and makes decent people, who have to work in it, miserable.

But maybe my car days are over. I am exploring my thoughts about this, but gently, as they were formed over 20 years ago when the car keys in my pocket ignited a whole lot more than petrol.

Meanwhile I stroke Velba's flank gently as I pass her, and tell her that we know it's not her fault. And maybe as car doors close, other doors open. To be continued.

joella

* Technically, two buses - Mercedes-Benz of Oxford is actually in Kidlington. But Mercedes-Benz of Kidlington would not sound so Finer Things in Life, would it.

Is that an iPhone in your pocket...

I was gathering my thoughts on the news that Apple has pulled its pornographic, sorry, 'adult-themed'* iPhone apps.

My first thought was that it's a sign of how much the world has changed since ye olde webbe was invented that you can buy software that makes women's breasts wobble to put on your phone and everyone thinks it's a jolly good laugh.

I think the vast, vast majority of pornography is unpleasant-to-vile-to-worse, and distorting of sexuality, and invades women's lives in ways they generally would rather it didn't if you actually asked them, and all that stuff, but I've always thought that, and it's an increasingly marginal point of view. You see it everywhere, and if you're a fusty old feminist, you just learn to ignore it, like mosquitoes, except when it comes dangerously close to being right in your face.

Some of the comments on the news articles and blog posts I've read reporting Apple's move have been in the 'bunch of puritanical Dworkinites' vein, as you might expect. But even the commenters - men and women - who can see the point of maybe not having a free-for-all wankfest available for consumption in the office toilet or on the Clapham omnibus generally make a point of saying something along the lines of 'obviously, I have no problem with porn per se...'. To these people I say (actually, I don't, I say it to the readers of this blog, but I don't want to be out there getting Dworkin-flamed) check out the first chapter of David Foster Wallace's Consider The Lobster, and then say 'obviously' again.**

My second thought was that I don't believe Apple have suddenly decided to do the right thing by every woman who might pick up her boyfriend's iPhone and then wish she hadn't. Their spokesman said "we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable" (a bit degrading and objectionable is probably ok, as you can get that in Nuts magazine or on Channel Five any day of the week), but I get the strong impression that they are just 'protecting the brand', and if degrading and objectionable content was going to benefit the brand, they'd be there like a bear.

And that's about as far as I'd got, but luckily Jill Psmith over at I Blame the Patriarchy is a faster thinker than I am. Even if you are not a regular patriarchy blamer, you'll rarely find a more sharply written blog on this subject or indeed any other, and I can thoroughly recommend More Adventures with the Antithesis of Enlightenment as One Of Those Posts I Can Only Dream Of Writing.

Enjoy.

joella

* I hate this use of the word 'adult'.
** A more 'obviously' feminist reading list can be provided on request.

We're all going to hell in a shopping cart

I get very annoyed by the 10:10 campaign. I've never commuted. Or bought (or for that matter worn) disposable nappies. We fitted eco lightbulbs, turned down our thermostats and got into economy gastronomy *years* ago. The council delivered us a little bin for waste food collection this week, and I'm struggling to find anything to put in it (Current contents: some dried out feta, a bit of fish skin and some baklava that wasn't very nice). We went exactly nowhere on holiday this year, though to be fair that had more to do with having to get the roof fixed than with being green. And we had a lovely time staycationing.

So yeah, I could find another 10%, but not without buying a new fridge, a new boiler, or new windows. Only the first of these lies within my means, and there's nothing wrong with the fridge apart from it being 30 years old and full of CFCs that are better off inside it than out in the world.

And 10% of what? Our neighbours are posh students, whose parents are paying their utility bills and who live off ready meals, Dominos pizza and alcopops. You never see anything on their washing lines. You never see anything in their recycling bins. They drive or get cabs everywhere. They couldn't give a shit.

Go a bit further down the road, where incomes are lower and houses are smaller, and it's an orgy of consumption. Primark, B&Q, Lidl, Matalan et al are still piling it high and selling it cheap. And *they're* buying it even cheaper from the world's newly industrialised countries, who will cut every corner, emit every gas and fell every tree necessary to keep the profit margin up.

And there's my *real* problem with 10:10 - at the end of the day, 10% isn't going to make any difference. Sure, there's the low-impact hardcore eco-vegans out there, and more power to them, but they're outside the system. The system isn't going to destroy itself anytime soon, and if it did, what would we replace it with?

This first became clear to me when I watched The Corporation back in 2003. I was mad with big business in all sorts of ways and always have been, but I hadn't fully realised that the basic building block of the modern capitalist economy is pretty much legally obliged to take the course of action that will generate the most money for its shareholders. So you can cycle to work as much as you like, but if your bikes is made in China and you work for the Man, it's all just so much pissing in the wind.

And if your bike is hand-made by artisans in the Black Country, your tyres are fairly traded rubber and you work in an organic swede field, it's still pissing in the wind, but at least you have the moral high ground. Counts for something, high ground, these days.

This is the sort of grumpy realeconomik dialogue that I have with myself a lot of the time. I still cut up my old T-shirts for rags, but only because I was brought up right, not because I think it will save the world. So I wasn't the most welcoming when a bouncy young woman came round the office on Friday to ask us all if we were going to The Wave. No, I said. Why not? she asked.

I wanted to say... because we chose to consume rather than to conserve hundreds of years ago, and painting ourselves blue now won't make any fucking difference. I wanted to point her at this excellent article by Paul Kingsnorth, who says "democracies predicated on giving their consumer citizens what they want are unable to tell them what they cannot have". I wanted to tell her that I was luckier than her, because I was born in the 1970s. Because I am part of the generation who got to ride the last wave, who saw coral without knowing it was dying, who escaped obesity, who knew off-grid freedom, who only had one coat at a time, and who will die, in all likelihood, both after Margaret Thatcher and before all the fish.

But I didn't. I said that I was going to Lancashire because it was my dad's birthday, and there wasn't a train I could get on the Sunday so I had to go on Saturday. Almost as true, but not nearly as honest. But I couldn't bring myself, as my friend L would say, to trample on her flower.

I'm prepared to be proved wrong on this. We may all wake up the day after Copenhagen to realise that the best things in life are, after all, free. But I'm not holding my breath.

joella

Kicking against the pricks

One of those possibly ill-advised work-related posts. But hey. 

There's a pay freeze this year for UK-based staff at NGO X. I kind of get why. Were it up to me, I'd freeze the higher salaries and up the lower ones a bit, but it's not up to me. We do have a union, of which I am a member, and if there's an argument to be had, it's in a collective bargaining environment. It's a free country still, and we shouldn't lose sight of that. 

But there are some money saving measures which have been introduced with (to my knowledge) no consultation at all. For example, you can now no longer request a cash float if you are travelling within the UK, the EU or the US. You should use your NGO X credit card, they now say, or pay with your own funds and then claim it back. This is more cost-effective. 

Well, not for me it's not. I do not have an NGO X credit card. I also do not have a personal credit card. I once had the former, but they cut back on them a few years ago, and to be fair I never missed it that much. I have never had the latter.

But I will be in New York for work from 27-31 July, which is (to state the obvious) the end of the month. And at the end of the month, I'm skint. This is what happens when you have a fixed rate mortgage and a part time salary. And generally it's fine, because generally I can control my expenditure. But four days in New York will cost money that I will not have at my disposal and cannot easily access right now. 

My manager was happy to support the case for an exception, and I'm optimistic that, because I was brave enough to ask and she is senior enough to have influence, there will be a cash float forthcoming. But it's a dumb thing, speaking-in-a-personal-capacity, to have a blanket policy on. It assumes individual staff members have a) a corporate credit card, b) pillowed personal finances or c) easy access to credit, and a) are rare unless you are relatively senior and travel a lot, b) is a palpably unfair assumption and c) is what got the world into this mess. 

So I was recounting this saga to a colleague earlier today. I got to the 'and I don't *have* a personal credit card' bit. 

'Is that an ideological position?' he asked. 

Yeah, I said. Mostly. 

And it is, but not many people notice that. I could afford to pay my Poll Tax back in 1989 (I was at university and my parents basically said 'send us the bill') but I chose not to, because it was ill-thought through and wholly inequitable. If only those who literally cannot comply do not comply, it becomes something about them rather than something about the thing they are not complying with. 

Sometimes, you've got to exercise the choices you're lucky enough to have. On the whole, I don't believe in credit. Mortgages, yes, and microcredit, yes, but generally, if you can't afford it, save up for it and then buy it, do not buy it and then worry about how you're going to pay for it. So why would I *need* a credit card? 

And I can count the times I've wished I'd had one on the fingers of one hand. I may be weird, but I may also be the future. So now I need to work on that policy. Wish me luck.  

joella

The devil in the detail

I'm trying hard to make myself recession-resistant, but it's hard when there's a rat in my kitchen (possibly now a rat corpse, either way full of raisins), a leak in my roof, and the cold wind blowing. In days like these you'd think, as I always have in fact, that a fixed rate mortgage would make sense, in the spirit of 'best to know what you're committed to' shoebox full of envelopes type budgeting.

And it might, if we hadn't sodding well remortgaged at 5.79% for three years just before the Bank of England got busy. It's eye watering, but at the time it felt like the safest thing to do. I was talking to my dad about it, as he was about to transfer me the money for the new boots my parents have bought me for my birthday and I need it to come through as I've already paid for the boots and I can't otherwise pay my tax bill. It's not desperate, I have a job and there are some envelopes whose contents can be moved around a bit, but it's tighter than I can remember for many many years.

Have you thought about switching deals? he said. But there's a penalty, I said. Yes, he said, but if you were to save several hundred pounds a month, then over three years it might well be worth it.

He's right, he usually is. It's just he's not the one who has to do it. I decided to be brave and raise the subject last night, when I got back from drinking strange and interesting beer with A and L. M was already in bed, so I cut straight to the point. He looked at me calmly, put in his earplugs, and turned off his light.

It feels a bit like the Ryanair dilemma. You can save forty quid by taking a four hour bus journey to Stansted, being driven onto a plane with a cattle prod, paying good money for bad sandwiches, and fighting a passport control bottleneck battle at two in the morning with the entire population of Essex. OR you can go to Heathrow and get on a proper flight.

I don't know if there is a right answer. I have changed providers of pretty much everything in the last 12 months, usually for the first time, and it's almost always been a miserable, drawn out experience involving endless phone calls to call centres in far off places following attempted scrutiny of inscrutable small print. And I am numerate, literate, and practical. The less money you have, the more time you have to spend making sure you're not getting ripped off. There's something wrong with this equation.

joella

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

Know your onions

I get very upset when I stand behind people in supermarkets who are buying those microwavable cheeseburgers already in a bun. Food is one of life's greatest pleasures, and we've never had it so good, but you have to know what to do with it, and millions of people don't.

These days I sometimes go to Sainsburys on a Saturday morning with ex-housemate S and baby Tungsten. She's come a long way from the days when she'd ring me up from the Co-op in Botley and say 'what should I buy?', but she'll still stand there at the meat counter and ask me questions about stew. S, I say, I haven't eaten meat since 1983. I've never cooked the stuff. I have no sodding idea.

Her mother was what used to be called a 'good plain cook'. Her cheese and onion pie was one of the highlights of my late adolescence. But S was the youngest of five, and somehow never learnt. Most of her recipes are mine. Most of *mine* I made up in my early 20s, many of them based on things that the mother of my Significant Ex used to cook on her Aga. When I was living at home, I somehow never learnt either.

I'd never cooked anything till I went to university. My first recipe was pasta with sauce made from a tin of chopped tomatoes mixed with packets of minestrone Cup A Soup. The soup had croutons. It was kind of crunchy. I can't believe I fed this to people. But I worked at it, and these days I am a passable cook. I am best at soups and things which spend a long time in the oven, like roasted vegetables and pasta bakes. I think this must be an Aga throwback thing.

This is a rather long-winded way of admitting that I am again taking my hat off to Jamie Oliver, if as begrudgingly as last time-- he still gets right on my tits. The first episode of the Ministry of Food made me cry. If we lived in a decent social democracy this would be a public health issue the government addressed at its root, as in fact it did during the war, but as we in fact live in a celebrity-obsessed Daily Mail reading dystopia, it's down to Jamie to enrich the lives of those single mothers on benefits. 

But if he *can* get people learning how to boil spaghetti, it might just save us all. It's not just poor people who can't cook, I've seen plenty of middle class fridges full of Waitrose ready meals and mouldering bags of salad, but it's mainly poor people who live in such a nutritional desert, with all. The reasons for this stretch back forever, as Felicity Lawrence explains very well, and will stretch forward forever too if we don't do something about it. It's a national tragedy. 

joella

Don't you bring me down today

... I don't need any help in that department.

One of the interesting side effects of blogging is mining the archives of your life. Like therapy, they allows you to discern patterns in your life that you might otherwise not have identified. I have an annual cycle: broadly speaking I am optimistic in spring, oppressed in summer, reflective in autumn and resigned in winter. I also have a monthly cycle, fairly obviously: I slide into a trough of anxious pessimism around ovulation time, which slowly transforms into a manic furious premenstrual spike, which collapses in an instant into a sharp hit of terror and vulnerability, from which calm is temporarily restored. Never a dull moment.

I have a daily cycle too. I never want to wake up, and I never want to go to sleep. The only thing that could make me a morning person would be a Wallace & Gromit style contraption that would heat up a big vat of hot water at the appointed hour, then pull off the duvet and tip me off the mattress down a slide into it. With some sort of pyjama-removing contraption on the way. 'Seize the afternoon!' is our household motto. It doesn't, as my friend E used to say, get the baby a new bonnet.

So it's early summer, and we're on day 12 of 28. I am splattered in Night Jewels (which sounds rude, but is in fact just the colour that the shower room will be once I have finished painting it). M was home late after his Orpheus rehearsal and we didn't eat till nearly 11. Didn't drink, either (even I know that you don't drink and decorate), but then we watched the last in the series of Mad Men -- which I can't recommend highly enough -- and I got stuck in front of News 24 with a large Manzanilla.

An hour later, I was still there, drinking in the full horror of global political and economic meltdown. There will be no oil. There will be no jobs. We will have no home. Inflation will be a million per cent. The dried beans and bottled water I keep for post-apocalyptic survival will be stolen by marauding child-rapers. I know *this* is part of a cycle, too, but last time we had a recession we didn't have rolling news channels. They are a terrible idea.

At 1.30 M came to get me, at which point I realised that it was raining, and remembered that the roof is leaking over the bed, but unpredictably, and not from anywhere I could spot when I hung precariously out of the skylight to inspect the slates. I sat on the edge of the bed staring gloomily at the place where it leaked last time.

Get into bed, he said.
You have no idea what it's like being me, I replied.
No, he said, but I know what it's like living with you. Get into bed.

When I got into work this morning, there was a bag of sack cloth under my desk. I have no idea who put it there.

joella

Boris: a momentary lapse of reason?

... or the beginning of the end? I can't decide. I'd like to think it was the former, because I can't actually believe that SO MANY PEOPLE COULD BE SO STUPID, but I also worry that Britain is actually largely made up of people who like being told what to do by public schoolboys with floppy hair. Can we really not break this habit? Must we really revert to a world of Us and Them? Must we really fucking *vote* for one? I can't bear it.

I leave slagging off of the man himself and what he actually stands for to Zoe Williams, who says it better than I could. But I remain, frankly, amazed that this has happened. I plan to move to a smallholding in Finland, eat berries, build a bunker and await the end of civilisation. We're all going to hell in a handcart.

joella

Happy Easter! Or something.

Can I say something difficult on my blog? I ask myself. Yes, I tell myself. Like the man on The Road always says to his son when he wants to do something that might bring him a sliver of relief in a hopeless world, of course you can. Of course you can.

(An aside: the only criticism I have of The Road is that it would have been better if the man had had a daughter, as then there would have been less chance of personal pronoun confusion. I guess this is a novel that would work better in Finnish, where, I gather, they have a case for everything. Though I can't imagine the Finns letting the world get to that state.)

So. I didn't get up this morning. I lay in bed all morning: it was chilly, I had a good book to finish (not The Road, I finished that on Thursday, another good book), and I never get up in the morning if I don't have to.

I got up early this afternoon, planning to make coffee plus cheese-and-mushroom-and-tomato on toast. Mmm. I padded downstairs in pyjamas and a big jumper, thinking that I might never want to get up, but life's not so bad really.

Then I found that the dishwasher has broken again. That's the third time in six months (though it's something different this time: this time it hasn't drained -- the pump's packed up probably -- leaving 2-3 inches of cold, greasy water in the bottom). Housemate C had missed this when she emptied and re-filled it.

Easy to miss, I guess, when it's not your dishwasher (and I am not having a go at housemate C here). But I don't miss these things. And I feel it's my responsibility to sort them out. I should not be overwhelmed by a packed up dishwasher. We have a sink, we have hot water. Nothing is fundamentally threatened.

But it was, somehow, overwhelming. I hauled everything out of the dishwasher, and washed it all up badly. M shouted down that he was trying to have a shower (the shower only works when there is no other water running -- another entirely surmountable obstacle but one which gets to me far more than it should). I shouted back. By the time he came down to make breakfast (and it was totally my turn, and it was way past breakfast time), I was sitting in my red bucket chair, my arms curled round my knees, fat tears rolling down my cheeks.

I don't understand, I said, why the world can't work better. And it upsets me so much that it doesn't. How do you know what to buy? How do you know who to trust?

I'm sorry, said M. I can't do much about it, but do you want to go out for lunch?

I did. We did. We went to Shiraz -- a known quantity in a scary world. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Much later, I rang my mum. We had a long chat about, among other things, dishwashers, weddings, madness, the weather, and the power of novels. Oh, and my dad's earache. She poked him awake to talk to me. I tried a variant of his own joke on him (How many ears does Mr Spock have? Three: his left ear, his right ear and his final frontier) but quickly retreated. And before long I was back on the dishwasher-as-life metaphor.

Looks like you bought the wrong dishwasher, he said.

Dad, I said, it's a Bosch!

Well, said my Jewish, avowedly apolitical, always-knowingly-understated father, I'm not sure you want to trust the Germans, dear.

The older I get, the more I get the point of literature.

joella

Oh no! I left the personal details of 25 million babies on the bus!

What a remarkable story. I knew it was safer not to have any.

And another nail in the ID cards coffin, I imagine. Which I welcome. I have nothing much against them in a perfect world, but a) we all know colossal fuck ups like this one happen and b) at least some of us have read the Handmaid's Tale.

When she was about 20, ex-housemate S ended up with a big overdraft. She paid it off by getting a job in a casino, and when it was done, she closed her bank account. She spent the next couple of years getting her wages in brown envelopes. 'You know where you are with cash', she would say.

Increasingly, I agree with her.

joella

Reluctant exercising of consumer choice

So I said something very like:

Dear Stagecoach Oxford

Yesterday afternoon I boarded one of your #1 buses from Oxford city centre to Cowley Road, as I do regularly. 'Tesco, please!' I said to the driver, as I do regularly. He said 'two pounds'. I thought he'd misheard me, or maybe thought I wanted the big Tesco right at the end of Cowley Road (not that the bus goes there), so I said, no, the second stop on Cowley Road, the one before Manzil Way. He said 'two pounds'. I said 'it's not two pounds, it's £1.30'. Which it is. He waved me away and said 'get the other bus then'.

I stood there for a while, and he sold tickets to the people behind me, who asked for St Clements. He charged them 80p. I said 'I just want the stop after that'. He said 'two pounds, or get the other bus'. I argued a bit longer, asking how much to Manzil Way, because that costs £1.30, and I want the stop before it, but he wasn't going to sell me a ticket for less than two pounds. And I wasn't paying two pounds.

I figured I would stand my ground, as I had a lot of stuff with me and I thought eventually someone else would get on and ask for the stop I wanted and I could just say 'same as them!', but there was a huge queue behind me getting impatient, and he'd clearly decided he wasn't backing down. So in the end I said forget it and got off. I then ran for the Oxford Bus Company's #5, and asked for Tesco. The driver said '£1.30, love'. I nearly cried.

I found your driver's behaviour to be upsetting, unpleasant and rude. And I don't know why he didn't want me on his bus, unless there was some complicated face saving thing going on. If he was, as I believe, wrong about the fare, I would like him to know that's how I felt, and I would like you to know that he did it. I wouldn't want anyone else to have that experience, it was horrible. If on the other hand your fare from Oxford to Tesco *has* gone up to two pounds, *I'd* like to know, so I can make sure to avoid your buses in future.

The Oxford Bus Company's bus delivered me to Tesco sooner than your bus, possibly because of the queue that built up behind me while your driver was intent on overcharging me. So when I got off, I took a photo of it (attached), the registration number is visible as OV51KAJ, and you should be able to work out who the driver was.

Cheers
joella

Haven't heard anything yet. Bus drivers were never this unpleasant in small town Lancashire.

joella