O, from this time forth, my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!

sometimes I feel very seen

We went to see Hamlet Hail to the Thief last weekend, and it was thrilling. I've never really been one for Shakespeare -- I can see there are stories in there that embody the "nothing new under the sun" message, and I can also see how valuable it is to have those stories, but, mostly, yawn. Too many words, too much leaping around, too much declaiming. I've seen a few of the more famous plays, live and on film, and I studied a few more at school, but they just don't reach me. And it's not that I'm unreachable, is my logic, so it's not on me. If I ever got to go on Desert Island Discs, I'd ask for the complete works of Ursula Le Guin instead. 

But HHttT (as no one called it) was immense. I have seen the full Hamlet twice, so I know how many of the lines are part of the culture, and this seemed to concentrate around the highlights and make them make sense. With additional bonuses of a) incredible physical energy (there was quite a lot of dance) and b) a killer soundtrack (there is little Radiohead I don't love). I laughed out loud several times, and had to look through my fingers several more, and this is rare for me at plays. To be fair I don't go to that many -- the first one I went to that wasn't a school or university performance I tried to leave at the interval because I thought it was finished, so I guess I'm just not much of a thesp. 

I've been thinking about what reached me, and why, and what other recent things have reached me, and why, in the light of my current exploration of the snakes and the ladders. Some of the other recent things include a Richard Dawson gig which I only bought a ticket for on the night, a visit to Levens Hall, a bowl of Bun Bo La Lot at Salvation in Noodles in Finsbury Park, a Lego Serious Play workshop for some of my colleagues that I made happen (and got to attend), a wine-soaked conversation punctuated with birdsong on someone else's riverfront terrace, and a walk with my beloved across the Lots in Silverdale as the sun was setting over Morecambe Bay.

I live, and have generally lived, a life suffused with things that reach me. I want to be reached, and I want to be part of things that reach other people. I think that's important, when I talk about the snakes and the ladders. It really fucking matters to me, the reaching. And I mean reach (and this will come up again later, kids) with good intent. That can mean challenging. That should sometimes mean challenging. Of me, as I am reached, and of others, if I reach them. Or it can mean joy. Or comfort. But if it makes you think, that doesn't make it bad. In my view. If it makes you a little uncomfortable, ditto. 

This musing is prompted, or maybe accelerated, by the fact that here in Ecoville there is a new Common House Floor Cleaning Rota and a new six month rota for the regular cleaning jobs, and as usual (since forever) my name is not on the former and as usual (since 2020) my name is not on the latter. I really thought this time round I'd feel like I could sign up for a job like some of the jobs I used to do -- I have never been able to approach the kitchen but I used to change towels, clean windowsills and communal toilets, tidy shelves, look after the washing machines. 

I'm not the only person whose name doesn't appear on those rotas (I can guess at some other people's reasons, but I'm not going to speculate on them here) and this does cause issues. If it was literally just me, the community impact would not be that great, everything would get done, some people would think less of me, I would accept that, in the sense that getting me back on the rota would not really be worth any community effort. Just leave her be, she's a weird one. 

I'd still be sad, because I am reachable, and my conscience combined with my female socialisation means that I feel bad not being on the rota, but not as bad as being on the rota would make me feel.* Lots of people not being on the rota makes me feel a bit worse, because I think it's hard on the people who do their bit, but then maybe they like it that way, I don't know. 

Because we don't talk about it. Not really. 

But I can. As I said in the trailer, I've been working some of this through in the light of my (very late! go patriarchy! thanks menopause!) autism diagnosis. If you are unfamiliar with some of the dimensions of autistic thought and communication, there's a reasonable summary here. I would say my need for clarity is intense, and couples with my strong justice sensitivity  And one of the biggest WTF elements for me these last couple of years has been the slowly then all at once realisation that for a lot of people, clarity and justice are not nearly as important as everyone being nice to the people who expect people to be nice to them** (I can't even work out how you know who those people are, except by counting my bruises when I hit a nerve that was supposed to be clearly marked "do not discuss"). 

One way this manifests is that I experience fudging as oppression. I therefore want to fight it, and if I can't express myself in words out loud, I'll find another way to do it. Honestly, it's a relief to know this. 

Sometimes that's in t-shirts: the photo above was taken by a neighbour (also a friend and confidante) at one of our General Meetings (GMs). For many years I barely missed a GM: I believed they were where we made decisions, and I believed (in the words of President Bartlet) that decisions are made by the people who show up. You have to be in the room, I thought, because that is the way to ensure that your views are represented. So I made a lot of effort to be in the room. Before we moved in, that represented hundreds of pounds of effort a month, as we had to travel here from Oxford. After, it was more emotional effort: some meetings sent me to bed for the rest of the day. 

I don't believe that anymore, not fundamentally. My loss of faith in consensus decision making is a whole separate post, and a whole separate sadness, as for a long time I was like well, fuck, this is how everyone should do stuff. You don't get 52:48 votes changing the course of history if you're working with consensus -- you have to keep going till you find something that everyone can live with. But it really doesn't work if you are conflict averse, and it really doesn't work if you won't examine your power dynamics. 

More on that another time, but basically I got burnt bad when my intent was good, and I don't react well when that happens. It feels in my head like a portcullis slams down. I can still see the place that I used to be able to hang out, but I can't get there anymore, so I have to adapt. Annoyingly, it's a surprise every time. You'd think I'd learn, but I'm an earnest little bean. 

Adapting often takes the form of withdrawal, but I still need to find a way to express myself -- I need the pressure release valve if I am not to explode with the injustice of everything. This is, I think, what my Ecoville blog posts have often been about. And sometimes I can get myself back in the room, which is how I found myself in a General Meeting where we were ostensibly talking about conflict. I have stuff to say about this, I thought. Finally! 

I am pretty sure my T-shirt choice that day was deliberate, but it was not conscious. I have a bunch of T-shirts that are (arguably) provocative. At least two of them have fish on them, and one just has the word UNAPOLOGETIC. I bought this green one at a Cypress Hill gig, and really for the front of it (which says Cypress Hill in the Rizla font) than for the back. It's a cracking song though. 

But anyway, there I was, wearing it, and there was the session about conflict, and there was the list of ways you might approach it and we were invited to decide which we identified with and I was standing there looking at it, thinking "where's I protest?". My approach to conflict is not on this list! But, as captured so beautifully by E, I was literally wearing it on my body. 

🎵 It's a sin to kill a man / But I'll be damned if I don't take a stand 🎵

(Note: I would almost certainly not actually kill anyone) 

We had a genteel conflict avoidant conversation about conflict, I'm not sure whose needs were satisfied, but mine weren't. A straw poll indicated that a majority of the people who had got themselves into the room that day saw "conflict" as something we should pay attention to. That was 10 months ago, and I see absolutely fucking zero evidence that we have. 

Jo, I hear myself saying, you could take a lead on this! Yeah, I hear myself saying, look what happened last time you tried taking a lead on this! And the time before. And the time all you did was try and support the other person who was trying to take a lead on this. Et fucking cetera. 

We could say that we only value people who Don't Make A Fuss, Clean The Floors, and are happy to Go Along With Not Upsetting A Specific Group Of People***. We could say that, and I sort of wish that we would, it would be at least helpful for those of us who appreciate clarity. Those of us who have been here for a while once received a printout in our mailboxes about the value of duct tape (over your mouth) and work gloves for new community members****. While this is almost the dictionary definition of passive aggression, when you are actually new it's not terrible advice, especially if you are a white cishet man. 

But if we're talking about the "living phase" as opposed to the "build phase" -- we were literally here second. We did some really fucking hard yards. And even for a lot of the softies who arrived after we had a postcode and a car club and wi-fi and a laundry, they were still basically in at the beginning. How many years till you're allowed to have views? Five? 10? 

To round this post off (I'm trying to keep them at a digestible length) I have learnt that where I live I am seen as difficult and challenging and upsetting, and at times not acceptable. And I felt bad about that for quite a while. I don't try to be those things, except occasionally when I have reached my tolerance limits, or drunk a whole bottle of red (I often go from warm fuzzy to cold fury somewhere between glasses three and four, but this is why I left the community WhatsApp). 

You should hear my inside voice. Honestly, I work hard in a world full of dissembling and fudge, and only occasionally go pop, though fair to say that when I do, we're cleaning it off the walls for years (well, I'm not, as I'm not on the rota). 

As one of my neighbours (who literally rubs my words out every time I write them on a blackboard) bellowed at me once, maybe I should... MOVE OUT!! And I've thought about it. But I love my house, and a lot of my other neighbours are awesome. When virtue signalling was more overt here than it is currently, someone declaimed that we ran the risk of just being a bunch of middle class people living in nice houses by a river. Maybe that's what I am, me and my refusal to clean the floor, but you know, I tried. Another one of them once said "We've (that magic we again) tried very hard to meet your needs". You haven't though, you've never even asked me what they are. 

But I can write about them here, and maybe that will help. Or not, but it will help me, and that's better than a slap in the face with a wet fish. 

joella

*There's always the option of being on the rota but not doing the thing -- I am unable to do this one, I find unilateral active transgression almost impossible. 

**These are usually the power holders in a situation (though not all power holders etc). This can cover unconscious entitlement, extreme wealth, cult leadership, and many things in between. 

*** I have a list of the people who refused to agree the agenda of a meeting that contained some proposals they did not even want to hear. This was an organised exercise and there were 13 of them. Maybe half of them were foot soldiers recruited by the officer class. I'm cool with them, it's hard to say no to that kind of thing if you are asked to pick a team. The officers, I watch. When one of them leaves, I have a silent disco. 

**** This was an excerpt from Finding Community by Diana Leafe Christian. Who visited here once. Lunch was vegan, but my beloved cooked her an omelette. 

Snakes and Ladders

I've started to write this series of posts multiple times, I have scraps and fragments in drafts, in notebooks, in late night voice notes I've sent to myself . I've wanted to write it for years. I've trailed it more than once, hoping that would give me the juice to get going. But every time, it's run into the sand. 

I'm hoping this time will be different, because I have Done Some Work on why I want to write it and what's getting in the way. I think I'll start there. 

Snakes and Ladders is one of the framings I've used over the last few years to think about my life in Ecoville. If I reach square 100, I clean the Common House floor. This is something we are all supposed to do a couple of times a year - there's a rota and everything. 

I have never cleaned the Common House floor. I have also never paid anyone to clean the Common House floor for me, which is one way to avoid cleaning the Common House floor. It's not that I wouldn't clean the Common House floor, I can see that it needs to be cleaned, I am capable of cleaning it. It's not even a job I would find that unpleasant, in and of itself. 

But I never get to square 100, so I can't. I've come close a few times, but then I've hit a snake. 

The dice in this game of snakes and ladders is just life -- things that come along in the course of a day or a week or a month. Things you have to deal with. We're all rolling the dice, all the time. Am I going to go for a walk? Should I catch up on my emails? Is it time to do the laundry? In an intentional community, even the most basic level of "just life" involves other people, that's kind of the idea. We have meetings and make decisions and run into each other by the mailboxes and share cars (some of us) and meals (some of us) and hang out in various permutations and combinations. You can totally be an introvert here, but you can't be an isolationist. 

Sometimes, there are ladders. Someone is kind in a way you didn't expect, something works out in a way that is deeply pleasing for all involved, serendipity delivers an outcome that is fully greater than the sum of its parts. We put some of the conditions in place to encourage and enable these things, and we work to maintain them, but they are no less delightful as a result. Wow, I say, when I zoom up a ladder, look what we did! Aren't we lucky to live here! Isn't it worth all of the... 

...Snakes. Oh, the snakes. The snakes, for me, are mostly the things I didn't see coming. The feedback. The accusations. The behaviours that make it entirely, devastatingly clear that person x doesn't trust you and quite possibly never did, but never said. The cloaking of dogma in appreciative inquiry. The unspoken, unwritten red lines that you don't know about till you cross them. The use of "us" and "we" in a way that doesn't have you in it. 

I struggle with the snakes because I don't understand them. And that's why I want to write this, because I want to understand them, and writing is one of the ways I do that. I don't think we all have to like each other. I'd kind of worry if we did. And I know that I personally can be a bit Marmite -- I struggle with small talk, I don't really do 'nice', I swear freely, I give direct answers to direct questions. I like to make myself laugh, I like to make other people laugh. I'm not always as kind as I could be. But I'm not devious. I'd be a terrible politician. 

I think that might be at the heart of it. I certainly think it's worth exploring. In terms of what's been stopping me, it's partly writing discipline and partly fear of feedback. (#notallfeedback - I also know a lot of people have found things that I write helpful). 

On the former, I've just reduced my working hours to give me a bit more time for mental and physical exercise each week. On the latter, I have been seeing a therapist for a while to help me process my autism diagnosis. And we talk about feedback a lot. I don't have to take it on board if I don't think it's valid. And I have taken a lot on board: I like to write for an audience, but it needs to be a willing one. Some folk just ain't going to like what I have to say, and I shouldn't push it at them. It's a lot harder to get here than it used to be, and I did that on purpose. 

So let's fucking go. That floor's not going to clean itself.

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

The less I seek my source for some definitive

A little journey story. Because I want to say it out loud. YM, as ever, MV.

When, some years ago, I first started seeing the blunt statement "trans women are women", I baulked at it a bit. I felt it was being thrown at me across the room, no returns, closing down issues and concerns. Pick your side and fight the other, or shut up. As Josie Long said yesterday, I deeply hate this entire discourse. I also felt I had a horse in the race, as it were (and horse racing can kill horses), as second wave feminism shaped my world, my thinking, my identity. It's part of me. A lot of  the older women I grew up reading and was influenced by, the radical feminists who now identify as 'gender critical' (aka TERFs, but that is often used as a slur), don't believe this. I took this seriously. Same with a lot of women my age and a bit younger, mostly (but not all, it's never all), who are now powerful presences in the media, politics, elsewhere. Some of them are my friends, and I always take my friends seriously.

But I could also see that many people younger than me have absolutely no problem accepting this statement, like, of course? Nbd? Why are we even talking about this? And I thought about the slow, gradual unpicking of centuries of misogyny by generations of feminists that gave me the ability to take up space in the world, and the work that still needs to be done there, and the slow, gradual work (with occasional explosions) done by generations of activists fighting other kinds of prejudice, oppression and discrimination. And the relative ease with which younger generations can take some of that for granted, the battles that are (for now, in some places) over, look around and say 'what do we need to do next?' (You can be legit asexual these days, guys! I wish someone had told me that when I was 15. I could have skipped a whole load of UTIs, for starters.) Some of these younger people are now also my friends, and I always take my friends seriously.

So I have done a lot of reading and a lot of thinking, and a lot of talking to people who I feel safe talking to about this kind of thing (which is quite a few, I have some excellent friends, these are the ones I take extra seriously), and I have essentially come to the conclusion that you can absolutely be a feminist (even, maybe especially, with radfem tendencies) and a trans ally at the same time. Put at its simplest, I don't want or need anyone to tell me what being a woman means, so I have no interest in or need to tell anyone else. And we can take the rest from there. You can quote me on that.

That only really fully crystallised with me this week, when I read That Blog Post. Lots of shit things have happened since, not least to the author, and believing she is a) wrong and b) should not have used her platform in this way does not make them any less shit. I deeply hate this entire discourse.

But as Eddie Redmayne responded nice and clearly (and for the record I'm just fine with posh white men saying what needs to be said): trans women are women. Trans men are men. Non-binary identities are valid. I was just going to post that, but I thought some of you might appreciate some of the context in which I am saying it.

I have no interest in, and no energy for, going over the same ground again and again with people who are not for examining their own views, privilege and prejudices, or those who do not even acknowledge that they have those things. You know, at some level, who you are. Don't @ me. But if you're on this journey too, stay with it. It's worth it.

This song has been my friend since I first heard it over 30 years ago. It still does the job. SOUND UP, as the kids say.

joella

Breaking the McDonald's seal

Christmas 2003, we went to India for a month. It was one of the best resettings I've ever had, and not just because it was a long one. We did a small group tour with Intrepid Travel, which was organised in partnership with Oxfam Australia, and we visited a bunch of NGO and community projects, including spending a full five days in rural Orissa with Gram Vikas, whose work tilted my world on its axis a little.

Intrepid are an Australian company, and our group included quite a few solo Australians, including three women who bonded with each other pretty quickly and were excellent life and soul value. I generally love the Australian women I have met on my travels. They are hilarious while remaining humane. They don't give a shit, while managing not to be dicks. They drink a lot of beer, and they taught me the phrase 'breaking the seal': it's the first time you go for a wee in a drinking session. Once that's happened, you'll be running to the loo all the time, like a proper girl. It resonated hard. My bladder control is on the excellent side, but only till it's not. Oh mate, they'd say, you're breaking the seal. They'd hold on waaaayyyy longer. But everyone's seal breaks in the end.

I have found it to be an adaptable concept. I didn't eat meat for 30 years, with hardly any breaches - and those were mainly politeness-based. Eventually I was someone who didn't eat meat because she didn't eat meat, even though my reasons for not eating any meat didn't fully hold anymore. I used to argue that the people who don't do something because they don't are important - you have to stand for something or you'll fall for anything etc. And I still think that's true - you need the unbenders in lots of situations, to keep you thinking and keep you honest. But I came up against some of the truly unbending, and my contrary self broke the seal.

And I'd like to tell you that every bit of meat I have eaten since has been pasture-fed and out-door reared and organic and free range, but while a lot of it has, you know and I know that would be a big fat lie. I have had an American Hot. I have had a Steak Bake. I have had a gala pie. But till t'other week, I had gone the entirety of the 21st century without a Big Mac.

Till December 2019, I had, in fact, only once been to a McDonald's in the 2000s. It was at 6.30am in January 2002 in Huehuetenango, Guatemala. I was there on a work trip, it was freezing cold, it was literally the only open place in town, and the project officer accompanying us had no idea why two of us hovered on the threshold, wondering what the Spanish for 'we don't visit McDonald's on principle' was. We quite quickly got over ourselves and had a coffee and an Egg McMuffin, but it felt, even in the circs, unpleasantly transgressive. These guys, these guys are part of the problem, we felt.

But there's problems and problems. I mean, look at the Labour Party. And about a month ago, we seemed to be at it again here in Ecoville. It's a long story, and it's been going on a long time. I have written about it before*, but not for a while, not for years. Mainly this is because I know there are people who don't like me writing about it. Or, possibly, anyone writing about it. Which is a challenge, as it's such good material - so good that we actually got covered by a real magazine this year. Which is a good read, I think. But it might have stirred something. Something did, at any rate, as a little bomb went off.

The timing was unfortunate. To live successfully in a place like this you have to work out how to play the long game. You get knocked down, and you get up again, but it can take a while. It's always been important to me to be making a contribution, and I've always found a way to do that. There are low-exposure and high-exposure jobs (which broadly, but not perfectly, equate to low stress and high stress) and there are jobs that anyone can do, and jobs that only some people can do. A few years ago, while I was still very much licking my Food Wars wounds, I found myself a low-exposure job that needed specific skills (treasurer of the co-op that buys stuff for our on-site food and household goods store). This role is actually Quite Hard, but also Mostly Appreciated, and can, if necessary, be done anywhere there's an internet connection. It was a good fit, but I was getting a bit tired of it: sometimes it involves chasing people for money, and I hate that part; there are some bits that are wildly inefficient, by design; and also I just felt it was all a bit staid. A bit wholemeal. I wanted to be a bit more creative with what we bought and where we bought it from. But no one else was interested, not really. You have to pay attention to that, in the long game. Pick your battles, Jo.

So I was thinking well, things feel quite stable at the moment, we're doing ok. M is currently well, my job is going great, my dad's not been in an ambulance for a bit. Maybe I should be offering a bit more. We are, as one of my neighbours beautifully put it, all crew.

We elect company directors every year - lots of people have done the job (it's a two year term) but it's very much at the high exposure end of things. There are never quite enough people willing to stand - certainly not in recent years. I think we could have up to 12, and there are currently five. So if you decide it's a thing you can do, you're pretty much guaranteed to get the job. So. Hey, I'm a company director! Go me. So is M. Go us. We thought about it a lot, and figured it was our turn to take some of that stuff for the team. He's done it before, I haven't, but when he did, it was all in the house anyway, whatever he was dealing with, so I figured it was worth doing it together. Deep breaths, I thought. We're growing up and growing past and growing on.

BLAM!

(Actually, maybe it was that that was the trigger? It's fine to do the books but not to make decisions about [checks agenda] firewood and trampolines? I don't know).

Also - and this has happened several times - like a lot of people, we're supposed to do a lot more communal meal cooking than we actually do, and it's a point of some contention in our house. I know I should try harder, but how we eat together, or don't, is at the absolute heart of a lot of my own sadness, anger and frustration about living here. It's the main thing I am trying to grow past, so I can focus on the joyful, creative, productive parts. But it takes me actual months to build up the energy and the enthusiasm. And then... just when I do, (and I try, I really do - this time I'd sourced a special ingredient from a kosher deli, ffs), BLAM! Someone says something, someone does something, and I think oh fuck it, I am not giving this a day of my life, and we invite people we like around for sausage pasta** instead.

Instead (and I do get the inherent tension here, so don't even think about explaining it to me, I'm not in the mood, I'll never be in the mood even when I'm in my best mood) there was a proposal for a Saturday morning conversation whose framing included the question "Do you think that a public blog is a useful way to initiate discussion and facilitate change in a community?" No. Of course it's not a useful way to initiate discussion and facilitate change in a community. But hey fellas, neither is a lot of the other stuff that's happened around here, a lot of it more in your face and screamy than that, and some of it pretty gangy-uppy, at least in my experience. Specifically, men claiming exclusive knowledge of the concept of inclusivity really. pushes. my. buttons.

And I have buttons. Your correspondent tried to do all the things she was supposed to do. She joined the teams. She turned up for the discussions. She explained why she was unhappy with the things she was unhappy with. She engaged with every single process at every single point. The above things happened anyway (most of them before she wrote a single blog post about them).

And this time she tried again. She lost a lot of sleep in the build up to the conversation, and did not practise her best self care. She may have drunk too much wine, stridden around the house ranting about 'this fucking place', done some sobbing and wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, but she got some wise counsel, she calmed the fuck down and she showed the fuck up.

As did around 20 other people, which is pretty impressive for a Saturday in December. She proposed a reframing of the questions, because she thought they were the wrong ones. We need to be talking about how to deal with conflict before it becomes a cold stale deposit in our arteries, congestion in our lungs. We've unpacked the shit out of this, years after the events, and it hasn't really helped, so why dwell?

And we took that forward, the kind, thoughtful people who'd shown up wanting to move this on, and we had four separate conversations about different aspects of the challenges ahead, and it was hopeful and energising and actually, maybe, worth the angst. (Jury's out on that one, I was planning a calm December and did not get one, but whatevs.)

Two hours we were there, and then four of us went to McDonald's. I had a Big Mac Meal with a full fat Coke, and I enjoyed every inch of it. The following week, I went to London for work, and thanked my colleagues for helping me learn more about systems and how they work, and how important it is to ask the right question, diagnose the problem whose addressing will have actual impact.

The last night I was there, I left the pub four pints deep and made my way back to the YHA. I got off the bus outside the Oxford St McDonald's. Yes! I thought, and I ordered a Filet-O-Fish from a machine. It arrived, about 45 seconds later, and I ate it, surrounded by girls from many nations and women of all classes. It tasted like very heaven.

Another seal done gone.

joella

* Links available on request
** One of our very favourite comfort dinners. It's by Jamie Oliver, and the recipe is here. It's not vegan, vegetarian, kosher or gluten free and it has wine in it for extra points.

The art of floating

This tree's story is near the end (sorry)

I'm aware that I've left a pretty devastating post up here for several months now - and you might, if you don't know me IRL or on Facebook, not have had an update since then. So here's one. Short version = I'm still here, it's all a bit better (and some of it's a lot better), but nothing will ever be the same again.

If you want the longer version...

Stories generally have a beginning, a middle and an end, but lives - except in their extremities - aren't so clear cut. We have our milestones, we humans, but it's not always obvious at the time which of them are the start of something, the end of something, or even events of any significance at all.

My NGO X story took up nearly all of my 30s, and most of my 40s. I've been thinking a lot recently about its last chapter. It was about six years long, and in my head now, it started in one South East Asian swimming pool and ended in another.

The first was in Cambodia. At the time I had a manager who pushed me out into a space she thought I might be able to make sense of. My first attempt failed - there wasn't anyone to work with out there - but the second attempt, a year or so later, landed. I got invited to a global IT meeting in Phnom Penh, completely winged it (wung it?) and came out leading a piece of work to design something that wasn't remotely well defined but everyone knew we needed.

Now, I'm ok with that kind of thing, so although this was several levels more politically complex than anything I'd done before, I wasn't a bad choice - indeed, my ability to say 'well I have no idea what to do for this part of it, so better get some help' was a positive asset. But I had a bit of a wild ride on the way - the trip was literally three days after we'd moved north, so I was already spinning with strangeness. While I was there I saw someone get their skull caved in by a moped metres away from me (do not romanticise the lack of traffic regulation in developing countries, do not do that), and then came back to the hotel to the news that my friend W's terminal illness was approaching the terminal part. The last night of the meeting I drank far too much minibar whisky (arguably any amount of minibar whisky is too much) and spent an absolute fortune sobbing incoherently down the phone to M.

The next morning I went down to breakfast a sorry mess of puffy eyes and existential dread. Everyone who'd flown in had been staying in the same hotel, and most of them were off sightseeing in Phnom Penh or flying to Angkor Wat for the weekend. I mean, who travels economy for 24 hours for a three day meeting with vicious jet lag and doesn't take in the sights afterwards, especially in a country with a history like Cambodia's? Well, me, it turns out. I had barely managed to find my passport and update my jabs. Our house was so new it didn't have a postcode yet. I needed to get back to it.

So I was heading to the airport that afternoon, and I didn't even have the energy to visit the, you know, genocide museum. My bad. But I wasn't quite on my own - for a couple of hours that morning I sat with N, a colleague of mine who at the time I barely knew - I'd only met him three days earlier - and he asked me how I was, and I told him, and he listened, and it was the kindest thing anyone could have done. After a while I made my excuses and said I needed to be in the water: there was a swimming pool in the hotel's courtyard, and I went up to my room, got changed, did a little bit of swimming up and down, then just settled for floating on my back, like a starfish.

I remember learning to float like that - it's easy once you know how, but not everyone does. It's all in the breath, like so many things. And you need an empty pool, as you will drift, and they don't come along that often unless you're in the 1%. But once you've mastered it, when you have a place to do it it's profoundly relaxing. And, I suspect, highly beneficial, especially if you are emotionally dessicated.

I remember reading Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation when it came out and being highly irritated by it generally, and especially the parts of it where she would say things like 'I was so depressed that year I have no idea how I managed to win the Rolling Stone college journalism prize'. You can't have been *that* depressed, love, I thought. But you know, I came back from that trip to Cambodia and within a month my mum was in hospital, and within a year she had died. We didn't have broadband for nearly four months, we didn't have an office for 13 months, so we were sharing a desk in our spare bedroom (sitting on opposite sides of it, each trying to use the same 3G mifi - remember mifi?), our house was full of boxes and our lives were upside down. Yet *somehow* I coordinated a team of five (in four countries on three continents, all working part time on this) and a consultant and we held three workshops in three countries and pulled a solid business case together. Which landed on the day of the Boston marathon bombing, and the project sponsor was in Boston. He did not like the business case, but he was also in lockdown. To be fair, I did not like the business case either, but for different reasons. We all learnt something that day.

But we still needed the thing. (The thing is what is now known rather imprecisely as a 'digital workplace' - I could talk about that for days but what the thing is doesn't really matter, it's how it happens, or doesn't happen). And so we went back to the drawing board, we got some more external help - focusing *right in* on the politics of the situation, that was a laser-sharp piece of work - and we reworked it. And we got the go ahead, and we secured not enough budget but a lot more budget than no budget, which is what we had before, and we were off!

Around this time, it became perfectly clear, not least to me, that I was not the right person to lead the project anymore. I am not a technical project manager. I do not sprint. If you want someone to do a politically-savvy-yet-complexity-aware job of prioritising your wish list, I am that woman, but just a few steps down the line of breaking that down into work units, my eyes glaze. And hell, there are people who are *great* at this. That same sponsor (and I remain super-fond of him) yelled at me "are you trying to tell me you've never delivered a global IT project?" and I yelled back "Yes!" He said "Wrong answer!"

Long story short - and man, this is a looooong story, but don't worry I won't be telling all of it - he recruited N to do that job. N was by now a friend of mine - one of the many people who'd supported me through my mum's illness and death, and one of the few who had been there himself. I knew N much better by this point, and I was beyond delighted that he was going to be taking this madly political, essential-yet-vulnerable piece of work forwards. 

In the four years that followed, N would often describe me as the project's "vision holder" - a title I loved to think I might embody, and in return I would say that he kept the project on the rails *and* kept everyone in the tent through some insane in the membrane level organisational weirdness. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was that if you try to run ahead of your organisation's evolution, or to cut across its grain, you will fail. And I agree... though I'd add that even if you don't, then you might still fail, but in a different way. We had some long dark teatimes of the soul. One of the longest and darkest lasted about three months, when a meeting of some Powers That Be decided it wasn't a priority and should be stopped, even though that wasn't the question they were asked, and everything went a bit crazy for a while. Because, man, we still needed the thing. So we carried on, even though we'd sort of been told not to, only we could sort of pretend we hadn't because the minutes of that meeting were never shared. It was that kind of a time.

I absolutely love most of the people who were on that team, and they remain people I would climb mountains for (and I *hate* climbing mountains). And gradually but inexorably, because we simply refused to entertain the idea that it wasn't going to, the thing took shape. It's not the sort of project you can ever call finished, and the place we got to was different in many ways from the one we'd originally imagined, but essentially, we did what we set out to, and now there is a whole excellent team who are helping it grow and making it better and enabling and supporting whole new endeavours and possibilities. I am really so proud to have been a part of it. It is a testament to the power of diverse teams.

But the reason I slogged away for so long with the political heavy lifting was not simply because I wanted the thing. It was because without the thing, I couldn't do what I *really* wanted to do, which was to Solve Knowledge Problems. That, ultimately, is my game. And the technology, in a big global organisation, is necessary but not sufficient. And what we finally had, a couple of years ago, was the potential. We talked about it at conferences, I shared it with the NGO network I was a part of. This is great! people who know how hard it can be to do this stuff on a non-corporate budget said. Well done you.

I mean, not everyone saw it that way. One of the criticisms that is often (and fairly) levelled at me is that I am not very good at showing my workings. Partly because I don't always understand them myself, but mainly because I think writing long documents that no one will ever read is a colossal waste of time and energy. I once spent a month on a piece of work and produced a three page executive summary and slides that everyone *loved*, with a note at the end saying 'full report available on request'. There was no full report, but it didn't matter, because No one. Ever. Asked. But I know why I wrote what I wrote, or designed what I did, mostly, and there are always reasons. I'm not random. But you might not know that, to meet me, and especially not if you don't get how hard it is to do this kind of thing well. It isn't rocket science, but at least if you're a rocket scientist people recognise your expertise. If you're a knowledge manager, not so much.

Which is the deal - a lot of knowledge management / digital workplace people will recognise the 'can't we just' mentality. Um, no? And we could tell you why, but we'd all get bored. Maybe we should put you through it a bit more often than we do, but you know what, I'm boring myself now.

And then there are the people who *should* support you, because they work in the same field and for the same organisation, whose first instinct should be 'tell me how this all works then, so I can understand how we got here' but who don't. Oh, the power plays. Never, as Anne Robinson once said, underestimate the treachery of the workplace. We're not all out for each other's best interests, guys, even when we're trying to change the world. No. Some of your colleagues will break your (metaphorical) knees soon as look at you, if there's a sniff that you might be in their way.

We live, we learn, and there's always another chance to get your heart stamped on, and (bear in mind this is still the short version) that is what happened. I emerged from a bunker with hopes and dreams and a toolbox and the long view - and there was no home for any of it. That was a political failure on my part, for sure, but I thought I had enough currency in the bank to see me through.

And I was wrong. I managed another couple of years on the back of existing networks and relationships, and built some new little pockets of interest in what I had to offer, but it was no substitute for the kind of backing that I would have needed in order to have any significant effect on organisational impact (aka changing the world). It was table scraps, really, and while I am forever grateful to the people who held me close through those times, it maybe stopped me from seeing the inevitable hovering on the horizon.

When I say "the inevitable", I mean inevitable given the way that I played it. I could have been more ambitious. I could have been harder and faster. I could have been working full time these last ten years, and building my empire. My thinking is good. My political acuity is strong. My organisational awareness was excellent. But I had a terrible bullying experience in 2006-7, and it wasn't managed well, and something switched in my head. I still wanted to be working for a better world, but not any longer at the expense of my health.

So... Like so many women before me, though not for the most common reason, when I was approaching the peak of my powers, I "went part time". It was a great life decision, but (though it took a while to manifest) a bad career one.

I don't really know why I thought I could do it any differently, especially after I moved north in 2012 and became both part time and remote. Don't go getting any ideas, love, is what they should have told me. And maybe I only managed it for so long because I am actually *very good at what I do* and because I wanted to keep doing it. (I am saying this as someone whose self-esteem is remarkably good most of the time, I am blessed). And On That Basis, I sought out opportunities, and made cases to follow them up. Some of them were so obviously describing those Knowledge Problems that I had spent years getting ready to be able to solve that I literally jumped up and down in my eagerness to be given the opportunity to work on them. (While spending most of the rest of my time writing turgid, tedious - but still pretty short - papers about my 'offer' that no one ever read).

And, to start to bring this sorry tale to a close, there were two that really got traction - in one case because it was a complex programme in a conflict-affected country (South Sudan) which had a strong learning element, and in the other because there was £ available from a global 'knowledge fund' that was successfully applied for by a country team (Myanmar) with a relatively young programme including a new humanitarian response.

I never got to go to South Sudan - it was a hard programme to support remotely, but we also need to get better at this. I enjoyed the challenge, and the other constraints, and designing something that (potentially) made really good use of the shared platforms we'd spent so long pulling together. I still think that template could be a gold standard for an endeavour with that many stakeholders. I will be drawing on that thinking for a long time.

I *did* get to go to Myanmar, and that is where my story went south. I've covered this already, kinda. But in so many ways that could have been (and in some ways anyway was) SUCH A GREAT piece of work. It had so many good elements - country support, interest and capacity, high quality work, excellent team, specific technology challenges that could be addressed, good connectivity, high interest in learning... It could have been a model in so many ways. And, so far as I know, it succeeded and is still succeeding on its own terms, which I couldn't be happier about, but the longer, wider, broader pieces... I am not sure how you build that culture without someone in a role like mine.

And, as we all know, at the end of my first working day in Yangon I heard that my post was being cut. As I've said, I could have played a different game, but I didn't. I had some faith, and it was misplaced, and well, I'm not the first girl in the world to have that experience, right?

But I do think that it was an experience that has changed me forever - not least because of the way that it was done. Rainy season south east Asia is oppressive at the best of times. It's hot, it's 100% humid always, and about 12 hours a day it's absolutely pissing it down. Add full-strength jetlag and 11 days till you can get a hug from someone who loves you (or even knows you) and you have a little idea of how profoundly weird and lonely an experience my redundancy news was.

It came on the Monday. I did not sleep on the Monday night. I worked on the Tuesday, and Tuesday night I took some Valium and got about four hours (and met my new imaginary friend Alice, more from her next time!). Wednesday I worked, and also got about four hours, because I had to leave the hotel at 5 am to fly to Sittwe. Thursday night, I howled down the phone to a colleague in the UK, then went out with Myanmar colleagues to a restaurant on the coast. It was an almost perfect NGO X experience: principled, interesting, skilled, committed people from all round the world having some beers and eating some food together and having Real Talk. I loved it, but I knew it was probably the last time I'd get to do it, and part of me was hovering above the table, observing, and mourning.

On Friday afternoon, we flew back to Yangon, and I returned to Hotel M, where I checked back into room 207, with its dark wood floors, cool marble bathroom and window shutters. You could hear the rain over the air con, and the air con was pretty loud. Me again, I said. I am hoping I might sleep in you this time.

That night was the first time I'd got a full night's sleep in over a week. I slept through hotel breakfast time (though I drank some instant coffee and ate some leftover pizza that I'd stashed in the minibar fridge because that's the kind of girl I am) and I decided that, although I really just wanted to lie in bed and cry, that I should get out there and do something. Around noon, it stopped raining. I have never really been a very good solo tourist but I gathered my defences and got a taxi to the Shwedagon Pagoda.

Which was a *good* decision. I scorched the bottom of my feet because you have to take your shoes off and when it's not raining, it's very very hot, but I accepted an offer from a private guide, who was tiny and lovely and spoke just about the right level of English to tell me things but not ask me anything, and she showed me the Tuesday corner (I was born on a Tuesday, so she had me do some kind of ritual there, and the Tuesday corner's animal is a lion, which pleased me) and also the palm tree - see above - which has survived everything life can throw at it. All my photos are terrible, as it was so bright I couldn't see what I was doing, and I returned to the hotel a full sweaty mess, but I was proud of myself. And it still wasn't raining, so I decided to go for a swim.

Oh, that pool. I was the only person in it, and I swam diagonally back and forth across it for a while, crying gently, and wondering when I'd been in a pool before with water that tasted like that (it was the pool in Cambodia, but it took me a while to remember). And then I lay on my back, and I floated. When I started to wrinkle, I climbed out and lay on a sun lounger - by some miracle the sun had gone in so I did not immediately burn to a crisp but it wasn't yet raining again. And I slept out there, warm and sad but bolstered by towels (I love towels), till big fat raindrops drove me back in about an hour later.

That was one of the best naps of my life. After it, I thought, well, this is all still terrible and I have no idea what to feel, but I am no longer sleep deprived, so I can see that, eventually, I. Will. Be. OK.

I didn't know how long it would take, or that I would still be so angry about it nearly a year later, but here we are. I have come through it, and I have a new job that I am enjoying hugely, and new colleagues who are just as principled, interesting, skilled and committed - pursuing different ends but ones with which I am no less aligned. In fact, more so, maybe. It's really great and I feel both lucky to have landed it and inspired to be there. I got my heart broken on the way - properly, properly broken, but you know what, you live, and you learn to float.

I needed to write this and I am grateful to anyone who has found the energy to read it till the end! And I think that's me done with NGO X, I don't have to dwell on it anymore. She labels it, she lets it go.

joella

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.