TW: meta-blogging

I woke up on Friday morning - the beginning of my non-working week - wondering what to do with myself. There are some chunky items on the not-so-rolling Big Ticket to-do list. These include

• Work out what to do with the rest of my life 
• Turn vague pension-related anxiety into concrete (and therefore potentially actionable) pension-related anxiety. Something to do with SERPS. I have no idea 
• Finish Marie Kondo'ing. Have got only as far as the fiction plus putting all the non-fiction in a heap, have had a heap of non-fiction for over a month now
• Paint the entire house apart from that one wall we've managed to paint and buy some blinds for the bedrooms
• Make a new will 
• Change the filter in the cooker hood and find some bulbs for it that don't buzz. Doesn't sound chunky but somehow is 

I do know that if I threw myself at any item on the lower end of this list I could make a dent in it. I can be effective. I have skills. But I lack momentum, and am easily daunted at the moment. Well, usually. I need to wait for a gap in the mental traffic and then dart into it. 

And I wasn't feeling very darty so I moved on to the Granular to-do list. This is largely made up of smaller but still life-enhancing items, such as 

• Make that third string lampshade
• Make that third and fourth rag rug seat pad for the outdoor chairs
• Design the Hanging Gardens of Babylon* and go buy the guttering (watch this space)
• Download bank statements before they disappear forever (am pleasingly ahead of the game here but you only get so many months stored online and it never seems to be quite enough for the tax return)
• Hassle the plumber about the toilet and the pressure reducing valve on the hot water cylinder (we are binning one of the eco-toilets. It leaks, it doesn't shift solid matter, it means we get through toilet brushes like there's no tomorrow, and it is generally shit. If it wasn't one with a STUPID concealed cistern I could do it myself, but it is. I have the plumbing skills but not the carpentry and tiling skills, and I don't want a bathroom that looks like I would leave it looking. And the cylinder is an ongoing saga. But the plumber is good, which means he's busy, and this is small beans) 
• Find a home for that extraordinary goth-meets-fuchsia ball dress I wore in 1989 that my mum kept all those years that I can't quite bear just to give to Oxfam

But even this list felt a bit ambitious. I sensed myself gravitating towards the Maintenance of Status Quo to-do list, which includes such lofty ambitions as 

• Make a plan for that parsley in the fridge
• Go to the allotment 
• Laundry
• Ring my dad
• Deal with Ecoville email backlog
• Read books
• In fact do anything that isn't Candy Crush alternating with Twitter and existential despair

In my defence, all this thinking happened before I even got out of bed. Perhaps less impressively, I didn't get out of bed for quite a while. But just before I did, I settled on a manageable-yet-slightly-stretchy item: write a blog post. 

I love this blog. I am its biggest fan. For its first 10 years it documented many of my best thoughts, and many of my stupidest actions. It's been faltering for its last few years though. This is partly because first Facebook and then smartphones came along, and something that might have developed into a blog post became easier and more immediately rewarding to post as a status update - and when you can post something NOW why would you let it settle and ferment, and who would even read my thoughts on Ken Livingstone fully two days later? But also because the internet has become a nasty place for women who express opinions - I've had only the mildest of these experiences (despite being a holder of some pretty strong opinions) and I know that's because, recently, I've done most of my opinion expressing in a less public space than this. If I've expressed them at all. 

Which is all a bit sad, and I want to do better. But also one picks one's battles, and I've had some others on closer to home. And some of that is why I decided to write a blog post on Friday morning, and it's taken me to nearly midnight on Monday to squeeze one out. I have the words, but I'm a little constipated. 

In between, for the record, I've taken pure pleasure in the appearance of my first asparagus spears and in the progress of the baby blackbirds currently living on our balcony. I've had thoughts about privilege and aggression. I've engaged in, and quickly been exhausted by engaging in, FB conversation about Ken and Israel and antisemitism and yada yada. I've made (partly in response) some proper Israeli-style houmous which I enjoyed with my two favourite cis straight white able bodied middle class men (one of them Jewish, which shouldn't matter, but then none of this shit should matter). I have mopped up the urine of a small dog on steroids who had an accident. I've administered pain relief to a terminally ill gerbil. I've drunk too much red wine. I've danced to Prince and sung Springsteen into the wind. I've spent yet more silly money on deodorant that isn't all chemically but probably won't actually work. I've momentarily overcome my fear of Ecoville communal eating and enjoyed a delicious, spicy dinner and a lot of laughing squidged around the All Foods Table. I've learned more than I thought I'd ever need or want to know about the Peninsular War. I've delighted in Lindy West's latest. I've read the first third of Wool. 

And I've written this. It may be a new start, it may not even be that. But I'd like to keep it up. 

joella

* I do still intend to write a post about the many good things about living in Ecoville. But not today. 

The road that takes you to the places where all the things meet, yeah

I get an email which invites me to a local event with "family activities". It ends "volunteers are needed to help – making cakes or preserves in advance, or helping on the day".

Um... no. The last local event I was invited to happened directly outside my house. It was fun in many ways, but blighted by (let's call him) W, a man who had drunk so much red wine that his mouth resembled a black cave of horror. M was providing the music for the event, and I was very glad that this was controlled a) largely by a prepared-earlier playlist and b) from upstairs, as after a certain point in the evening, whenever the track changed W would shout 'this is shit!'. When something came on that he did like, he would lurch to the amp, on our front path, and try to turn it up to 11 so "everyone" could dance. My job - which I took upon myself, but someone clearly had to do it - was to deflect him from this mission for long enough for him to forget about it. A couple of times this involved physically pushing him out of my front gate.

Later, he came over to me, and told me I was giving him 'a look'. I'm sorry, I said truthfully. You are pissing me off, but I really was trying to keep my face neutral. Ah, he said, but the more you glare at me, the more I want to impress you.

What larks.

At such moments, I also remember the time X years ago, when one of M's chilblains got (temporarily, as it turned out, in the best Blackpool tradition) engaged. There was a party. It was 17 shades of uncomfortable. And several days beforehand there was an awkward phonecall, where it was suggested to M that I might "like to do the vegetarian food".

Um, no, I said. I cannot think of anything I would like to do less.

And I didn't do it, a fact of which I am now rather proud. I did turn up, but I was somewhat dissolute. Like the monasteries.

All the above sometimes leads me to fear that I am not a communal person, not willing to do my bit, etc, whereas generally I think it's fair to conclude that I'm actually dangerously sane, believing as I do that nobody wants to bake cakes, that men like W should be confined in the nearest cellar till they no longer pose a public nuisance, and that engagement parties are a crime against humanity.

But the sometimes bit twinges, so I was very happy today to be part of a plan to have a Reunion Picnic. It is 10 years (give or take) since I spent a year (give or take) working on the smallish but perfectly formed Millennium Project which was my entry into NGO X. Of the seven other people (plus one husband and one son) present, I still see two regularly and one occasionally, but I was mildly and pleasantly surprised to discover how easy it was to lie on a blanket by the river and laugh with all the others as well. There was no plan as such - beyond two of us bringing blankets and several of us knowing how to find the river - but delegations were formed, roles were assigned and a perfectly serviceable picnic was purchased, consumed and later disposed of in an environmentally friendly fashion.

I conclude that I can do community, as long as it isn't compulsory, and you get to take a packet of leftover cheese and onion sausage-style rolls home afterwards.

joella

Accounting for taste

While I believe it's healthy not to live in a pigeonhole, I also acknowledge that rhyme and reason do not appear to figure in some of my lifestyle choices.

On one hand, I wouldn't dream of buying salad dressing in a bottle, and have four kinds of oil (three olive, one walnut), five kinds of vinegar, three kinds of mustard and two kinds of sugar to hand when I want to make some. On another, I will happily eat white bread sandwiches filled with iceberg lettuce, pickled beetroot, crisps and salad cream. On a third hand, I just bought myself a silk tunic dress in the Toast sale. On a fourth, I wear a dress about four times a year. There's a fifth hand, where I want to live naked by a Finnish lake and smoke my own fish*, and a sixth where I want to put on a lot of black eyeliner, drink a lot of Cinzano and smoke a lot of cocktail Sobranies to a backdrop of arty black and white photos and minimalist electropop.

I read serious novels, and fat books of social history and feminist politics, but then I read borderline-dodgy crime fiction, collections of comic strips, and books about growing vegetables. Top of my last.fm most-listened-to artists list are Ani DiFranco, Nick Cave, Billy Bragg and PJ Harvey, but scroll down a little and you'll find Duran Duran... scroll down a little further and you'll find Meat Loaf**.

This all confuses me sometimes. I like to think - especially at my advanced age - that I choose what to consume for a range of reasons, most of them sensible - what do I like, what can I afford, what is good for me, what is made well, what am I politically comfortable with. I got taught how to think about stuff, and I do. But then there's also what you grew up with, what you seek out in times of trouble, what you retreat to when you want comfort, and what's as much about pleasurable vice as about sensible virtue. Basically, I think it's about living with the sum of your parts.

Which is why, last night, I found myself, for the first time since the early 1980s, in a Badedas bath. It's not all Neal's Yard, this life. And amen to that.

joella

*As one of my favourite recent Twitter tags put it, #notaeuphemism

**Most of the Meat Loaf plays, I suspect***, are me standing on a chair late at night singing Modern Girl into a hairbrush or playing air guitar to Bat Out of Hell, but still.

*** I typed that, then thought, hang on, this is the internet. I don't need to suspect, it knows. And I was right.

The road leading home

I had a lovely evening out tonight with people I last properly saw in the Hot Place. Two of them are temporarily based in the New Building, and a third was passing through. It was a chance to revisit the days of chaos and paranoia from a safe distance, and with our guards much further down.

And I appreciated the chance, even as it was embarrassing to hear how I got stoned by accident - at the time, none of the women I was smoking with knew how to tell the (relatively) senior person from Head Office that the shisha that night was "special", so none of them did. I wondered afterwards why I spent two hours in a paranoid funk writing out all the numbers from my mobile phone longhand. And then washed my hair several times and ate my emergency stash of Bombay Mix. But now I know.

I wandered home via Tescopolis, to pick up a pint of milk. In front of me in the queue was a young woman buying a bottle of pink fizz. They have a sign up saying that you will be asked for ID if you look under 25 (this number seems to go up every week) and sure enough, she was carded by the (also young, also female) cashier, who said 'by the way, you forgot your zip'. She felt for her flies, which were down. I felt for mine, which weren't, but the cashier clocked me doing it, so they might as well have been.

Behind me, a someone held up a bag of Tesco Value frozen vegetables. 'Are these any good?' she asked me. 'I'm not really a vegetable person'. I don't know, I said. I mean, I *am* a vegetable person, but I don't buy that kind. 'Right,' she said, and laid them aside.

On the way home, I passed two students flyposting for the Jesus Festival.

All these young women, out on their own late at night, doing things and making decisions. It's like we live in a free country or something.

joella

Rearrange me till I'm sane

I've been back from the Hot Place for a week now. It feels like a lot longer, even though the calendar and the laundry basket both tell me otherwise.

Monday: went into work for a bit. Talked to a lot of people. Hugged some of them. Cried a bit. Came home. Dreamt about deleting things.

Tuesday: stayed at home. Thought I would go to the allotment. I got there eventually but I just sat on a plastic chair, staring at wet clay and hugging my knees. Have you got some time off? said J, from the plot over the way. I've been away, I said. I've just got back. Where have you been? he said. The Hot Place, I said. I work for NGO X. I don't really know what to do with myself. Just potter around for a while, he said, you'll feel better. And I did, for a bit.

Wednesday: went into work but in a drifty sort of way. Rearranged a few meetings, not wanting to be rude, and went to a few others. There is no money for anything at all this year, but we can't do free things because they are not in line with our expensive strategy. I'd taken a break from trying to square this circle, but it is not making any more sense than it did last month. Started to bleed, a week late. A little pressure valve in my head let off some steam. It condensed into tears during the lying down part at the end of yoga. Broke into emergency Temazepam stash.

Thursday: woke up into a softer world, then stayed in bed all day, alternately reading Ruth Rendell, tending to Sultana in Pet Society, surfing Hot Place blogs, and writing my 'learning points'. There are a lot of them. It was a good thing to do. There is a lot of blood as well. I tried to listen to my body, like they say you should. It seemed to be saying 'please drink red wine'. So I did.

Friday: Went into work, and got angry about something that on Wednesday had been down the end of a long tunnel. It's my job to get angry about these things, in a way -- and certainly if I don't, nobody else will, so it felt like a little trip back into the world I am actually supposed to be living in, rather than the one I stepped into briefly, where it is volatile and remote and normal rules do not apply. Here, there might be a point getting angry. But later, I had my first ever argument with housemate P, who is scathing about many things that I believe in, and believes in many things about which I am scathing. M intervened before it got too heated, which was sensible. We shook hands and left it for another day.

Saturday: Friendly allotment working party: lots of digging and we got the early potatoes in. Later, crumpets and a nap. Later still, pasta and vino at Fratelli's, where the lovely Ms Y reinvested the voucher she won in the animal sanctuary raffle. I can't remember what we talked about, which is exactly how I wanted it.

Today: I don't know. I'm still not feeling quite right, but I can see that at some point soon I will be. We've sorted out the shed, which is part of the official welcoming of spring chez joella, and M is cooking the pancakes that I missed out on the week before last. I don't want to *not* think about the Hot Place but I have to separate it out. It's not my story. It fits *into* my story somewhere, my story wanders around water, and women, and the indicators of civilisation, and a lack of faith in a benign universe, but the Hot Place belongs to other people.

This mild, damp, temperate place is my place, and while it can be hard to get your clothes dry, even harder to pay your gas bill and I'm SO BORED of parsnips, I'm mighty glad that my mix and match forbears set me down here.

joella

So, farewell then, 2008

Rising food and utility bills, plunging stock markets, the near collapse of the banking system... 2008's perfect economic storm made it a year in which we survived (or didn't) rather than thrived. And I'm sure when the history books come to be written it will be turn out to be a turning point year in lots of ways... some things, for better or worse, will never be the same again.

When the dust eventually settles, I think there *will* be things that are better -- housing will be more affordable, we will not spend so much money we don't have on things we don't need -- but there is trouble ahead for many of us. For anyone with an anxious streak, it was a traumatic year. There are tectonic plates shifting, and we don't know what the landscape will look like when they stop, and whose lives and livelihoods will turn out to have been built on sand. 

But chez joella, on the whole, things weren't so bad. Financially it's tight, especially as we took out a new fixed rate mortgage just before the interest rates tumbled. But we did well out of it last time, so I guess you win some you lose some. In an attempt to offset this, we changed providers of everything -- broadband, TV, phone, gas, electricity, insurance -- which was as excruciating and turgid a process as I always imagined it would be but I think is probably a necessary 21st century evil. Other frugalities have also come into play, some of which I am quite pleased with. My favourite is the discovery that you can wear disposable contact lenses two days in a row (just store them overnight in clean saline solution). Obviously an optician would Not Recommend This, but it works for me and saves a fortune. 

Other notable (if not conspicuous) consumptions... 

Gig of the year: it hasn't been a huge year for gigs, but there have been a few... the highlight was probably Rachel Unthank & The Winterset, at the Holywell Music Rooms in Oxford. Their live version of Robert Wyatt's Sea Song is a heart stopper. If that doesn't count as a gig, what with it being sitting down and having no bar, I'd go for the unexpectedly moving Bevis Frond gig at the Luminaire in Kilburn. I first saw the Bevis Frond when I was 20, and I hadn't realised quite how long ago that was. 

Album of the year: not new, but new to me -- In the Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. Came to me via the website of the year: Last.fm. And there is now a copy of the book about it in the house, which I look forward to reading. 

Book of the year: it was going to be Revolutionary Road, which was thrust upon M by the new man of Plumbing S, and which left me speechless. But it was pipped to the post by On Chesil Beach, which I got for Christmas. I read it in one go on December 30th and then I had a big weep. It's set around the same time as Revolutionary Road, though in Oxford rather than Connecticut, and there's something about the fragile modernity of the central relationships that just hurts. If only men and women could actually talk to each other. We still struggle, but we do better than that these days, I hope. 

TV show of the year: The Wire, duh. Season 4 was my favourite. 

Hangover of the year: also no contest. One night at the lake K looked at me with a bottle of Finlandia in her hand and a glint in her eye and said 'I want to drink myself insensible'. It was the morning after that. 

Childcare triumph of the year: taking baby Tungsten swimming at Coral Reef in Bracknell All By Myself while ex-housemate S was Going Ape to celebrate her big Four-O. There aren't many things I'd choose childcare over, but swinging through trees is one of them. And as it turned out we both behaved ourselves very well, and shared a secret packet of salt and vinegar afterwards to celebrate. 

Meal of the year: Out... I had a splendid birthday lunch at the Inn at Whitewell. In... well our now-traditional cheese fondue and winter salad Christmas dinner has to be up there. Elsewhere... the big dinners at the lake: smoked fish, gherkins, halloumi, what's not to love? 

Other highlights... fitting T's bathroom round the corner for £50, a curry, and the knowledge that my NVQ was then in sight. Getting to sauna, swim, sauna, swim all day long on a proper summer holiday with some proper summer holiday companions. Drinking pints of mild by a peat fire in rural Lancashire with snow falling outside. The flurry of text messages letting me know about a certain resignation from a certain NGO. Getting on the plane home from the Hot Place knowing that I did something useful, however small. Harvesting onions and potatoes and broad beans and sweetcorn and chard and spinach that we had grown ourselves. 

There were lowlights as well... a vile sinus infection, many allotment mistakes, days of mildly depressed inertia, some truly frustrating experiences at work, the truly scary moment I deposited housemate P's rent the day after the government bailed out the banks and thought 'hang on, am I mad to be putting money *into* the bank?', a general inability, which blights my life, not to seize the day. 

But the lowlights are always on my mind, so for 2009 I plan to try and dwell on what grows, what works, and what doesn't cost much. It'll be all right, I reckon. It usually is. 

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

While You Were Out...

Today I have been mostly sleeping, and catching up on the things that happened while I was in the Hot Place. It wasn't that I didn't have internet access, I did... it was just that these things all seemed irrelevant. And probably were.

But they don't feel so here. And so we have:

1. The return of the students.

The neighbourhood is again full of badly parked cars and badly sorted rubbish (I'm thinking of offering lessons in both), and Tesco is again full of young people sporting tiny iPods and huge hair and buying Taboo and Doritos. One lot of our neighbours are mostly the same as last year's, and they were generally ok, but the other side are new. We hated their predecessors, but one ought to show willing, so we went round to introduce ourselves. They assured us that they were 'just five girls', were quiet and hard working, and will be sure to let us know if they have any parties. Splendid, we said. We'll get on fine then. And I hope it's true. In my mind they are already Posh Caroline, Ginger Caroline, Sporty Caroline, Scary Caroline and Baby Caroline.

2. Google Chrome.

I was quite excited about this for a while, as the work laptop I was using only had IE 6 on it (oh, the joys of a 'trailing edge' IT strategy) and I couldn't bear it. So I downloaded it, but gave up on it after a couple of days... a bit like early Gmail and its lack of a Delete option, I found its lack of a 'home' button annoying (I liked that there is no 'homepage' as such, I liked that a lot, but I wanted to be able to get back to that from another page without opening a new tab, and I didn't find a way to do that). The clincher though was that a lot of pages didn't work -- and didn't work in an ugly, flickery, jumpy sort of way -- because I didn't have the "right plug-ins installed". And I couldn't install them without downloading them over my shitty connection and then logging in as an administrator. As these pages worked just fine in IE I didn't *quite* understand what the problem was -- maybe GC doesn't do backwards compatibility -- but I also couldn't be arsed to find out. So I uninstalled it. I thought I might try again when I got home, but then I discovered that Firefox 3 had also happened while I was away, and its Most Visited and site tagging give me some nice new things to play with. So I can't see the 'value added', as they say in local government, of getting my head round GC for the time being. I'll watch this space though.

3. Sarah Palin.

Wow. She's a whole new kind of woman, and I am Very Afraid. I'm not sure what she *is*, but she is *not* a feminist, and I really don't see how she or anyone else can claim otherwise. Having a woman running for high office means there has been feminism, and that that woman has benefited from the achievements of feminism. It does not mean she embodies those values or will promote or even protect them. We had a million years of Thatcher, we should know that by now.

Now, personally, I also don't buy the 'Feminists For Life' thing. I don't think you can be a feminist and not support a woman's right to choose to have an abortion. Not in a world where women don't have the right to choose not to get pregnant, or even in a world where they do, but they don't exercise it, or something goes wrong, or they thought it would be ok, or they don't want to make a fuss, or they didn't or couldn't care about themselves enough to stop it happening. We need to work on all that, for sure, and the best case scenario is a world where no one gets up the stick without wanting to be there. I support all moves in that direction, and if we got there, then abortion, like the Marxist state, would wither away. But while we're, you know, waiting for utopia, any move to outlaw abortion is a misogynist move. In my opinion.

But that's far from my only beef with Ms Moose Hunter. The thing that really sets my teeth on edge is her claim to be "just your average hockey mom". I'm not quite sure what a hockey mom is, but I'm always uncomfortable when women go round defining themselves by their relationships to other people. Especially when, like the Carolines, they use the word 'just'. Feminist it ain't, either, but I think I should move on from that -- my discomfort is more about the passive-aggressive pressure that is put on children when their mother (or father) has a deal of her own identity or self-esteem invested in their prowess.

I think my own mother did me proud in this regard -- though if she *had* had the desire to be a hockey mom she would have been sadly disappointed -- most of the time I was supposed to be playing hockey at school I actually spent hiding in the toilets, and when I couldn't manage to hide I always tried to be Left Half (or is that netball?) as that seemed to be the position where it was easiest to do nothing without getting shouted at. The only time my games teacher noticed me was when she was comparing me to a dead body.

She did me proud in other regards too though: when I was the same age as Bristol Palin (and a year younger than the "young man she will marry"), she walked into the room where I was doing my chemistry homework, closed the door and leaned back against it, and said 'I think you should get fitted for a diaphragm'. I remember looking down at the long carbon-based equation I was drawing out on my narrow-lined page, putting down my pencil, and saying 'I do know about Durex you know'. (We didn't call them condoms in those days, that all came with AIDS).

No, she said, you need something you take care of yourself. I'm not sure she'd call herself a feminist even now, but that was a remarkable thing to say to your 17 year old daughter. And so I went off on my own (I don't think I asked her to come with me, and I don't think she offered) to the anachronistically named Family Planning Clinic, to have an Amazonian woman in a white coat stick half her hand up me and say 'oooh, more room than I thought, let's try a 70!'. I emerged feeling small and invaded, bearing a large plastic box with my new diaphragm and a large tube of spermicidal gel which I would, in time, come to work out that I was allergic to.

But that box was as important to me as my first car. Thanks, non-hockey mom.

God, I take myself seriously at the moment, don't I? Let me get my alcohol intake back up and I'm sure normal service will be resumed shortly.

joella

Stork talk

A colleague tells me she is expecting twins. She has the sort of figure I have always yearned for, tall, willowy, strong. Even though she sits two desks away, I have obviously not looked below her neck for the last couple of months, as she's suddenly a completely different shape.

I'm delighted for her. And she will be a brilliant mother, she is one of the most clear-headed and right-minded people I have ever met, but something registers deeper inside me. She was one of the ones I was watching, to see if she would. Most women do, and many that don't, would if they could, if their bodies worked better, or their lives had gone differently. I keep an eye out for the ones who choose not to. They are the ones I want to find, to talk to. There are hardly any of us... sometimes I think I've found one but it turns out there's a story of loss, of pain, of regret. You can't tell by looking.

I'm pretty confident I've made the right choice, but you never know. It's a big choice, so it's good to have it challenged, especially as the door is closing. I wouldn't want to get to the other side of it and realise I'd spent the last 30 years in denial of my maternal instinct. That would be dumb. But I get plenty of challenges. Every bump, every birth, every raise of the eyebrows and 'so have you and M ever thought about...'

Yes of course we fucking have. *He's* already done it... there are three full-size people wandering around as a result. So it wouldn't be for him. And me... no, I just don't want to. Never have. Not *enough*. There are many reasons, some healthier than others, and maybe one day I will write them all down. But the main one is simple: I like my space. *That's* the conversation I want to have, about the guilty pleasure of empty Sundays, hours of mental and physical wandering through books and music and streets and gardens. I have time to hang out the washing. Learn to use power tools. Make things instead of buying them. Think a lot. Sleep a lot. Care about the detail. If I want to. Engage with the big picture. If I want to. Answer to nobody, pretty much.

That's a lot to give up. If I'd had pregnancy thrust upon me, so to speak, I'm sure I'd have got on with it and never looked back. But no, I had a choice, and I've taken it. I used to think everyone was like me, and hugely surprised to find out they weren't. The surprise has got milder over the years, but it's still there.

joella

Can't sleep, bed's on fire

We're both a little bewildered this Mon-Tues-Weds (we don't have a word for the early part of the week, do we? Does anyone?). It may be down to essential post-weekend regrouping of neurons and nephrons. It may be down to PMT (mine, obviously) and its ripple effect (I shouted at a colleague today, I think it was merited, it was remarkably effective but I am still hollow with embarrassment), it may just be one of those things.

Whatever. I went to see the bum lady on Monday, seeking clarity via plumbing-assisted decongestion. The sort of bowel equivalent of having a facial. I returned cleansed but a little vulnerable and even more random.

You look like someone who's fallen out of a tree, said M. You're scrabbling round in the leaf litter wondering what's happened.

Thanks, I said. Would you care for a pickled onion?

I'm not sure I can handle any more responsibility at the moment, he replied.

joella

That was the year that was

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

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

In photos:

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

Happenings of note:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

Semi-obligatory tangentially Diana-related post

You're always going to remember where you were when you hear big news, but big news notwithstanding, I'd still remember the night Diana died.

It was a big family gathering, and these are rare. There are lots of people I am related to, but they don't often seem to constitute a family. They are geographically dispersed, culturally disparate, and separated by many other elements of time, space, history and consequence. The older I get, the more I understand why this is so, and the more normal it seems.

My mother and her sister C have always been close though, so it was natural that she and my dad, plus my sister, me and my Significant Ex should be invited to the Big Do to celebrate C's silver wedding anniversary. Also being celebrated were Significant Birthdays of each of their two sons, P and P. It was held on an RAF base, as my uncle was in the RAF at the time and that's where they lived. They put us up in the Officers' Mess. I was mildly freaked out by this at the time, as a fully paid-up member of the anti-Establishment, but I got over it. There were more important things to worry about.

It was the summer of meltdown with my Significant Ex. We weren't getting on, but we were doing our arguing behind closed doors. Most of the world still had no idea there was anything wrong. Consequently, we both got absolutely hammered. I danced the Macarena with 18 year olds who smelt faintly of vomit, and wondered if I was too old to do a 'tactical chunder', as we used to call them at college, myself. He spent a large part of the evening playing snooker with my half-uncle, who did have an idea.

Around 1 am I was sitting on a bar stool next to my aunt C, of whom I am extremely fond. She was telling me that the dangerous thing about the Officers' Mess is that they let you sign for drinks. By this point in the evening she was having trouble doing the signing, and I think we were both having trouble staying on the stools. But she got more vodkas in nonetheless.

Can I ask you something? I said. How do you manage to stay with someone for 25 years? Cos I don't think I'm going to make ten. She gave me a long sideways look. I don't think she'd realised.

Well, she said, when it's just me and G, we're fine. We've always been fine. The problems only come when you have to deal with the rest of the world. It's the rest of the world that can get in the way.

She was absolutely bang on. But I still don't know how we could have stopped it.

The next morning, the breakfast room was full of Diana news. The rest of the world got in *her* way something chronic, I thought.

We had an argument about my wanting to watch the funeral. Looking back, it was probably an argument about something else in disguise, most of them were. In the end I went to London and watched it with ex-schoolmate-not-yet-housemate S, who had recently lost her own mother and was house-sitting in Hackney. I mixed jugs of Bloody Marys, she lined up the Silk Cut, and we sobbed for our respective losses.

Later, her ex Chris came round and took us out for a drink in the pub we'd been too scared to go into on our own. He went off to work his shift in a casino in Leicester Square, but later came back having bunked off. We drank more, got stoned and ended up playing backgammon, each of us looking through one eye because we couldn't focus with two.

When the vodka ran out, we got some duvets and bedded down in a companionable heap on the giant sofa. I'd told Chris I was there because things weren't so great at home. S fell asleep first, and he made a move. I kicked him. He took it on the chin.

Life seems simpler now. But this could be just an illusion. The world's always out there, waiting to get in the way.

joella

Nice weather for slugs

I was aquaplaning to work yesterday, pressing random buttons hoping the rear windscreen wiper would come on (how often do you need to use that, eh? pretty much never) and twirling random dials trying to stop the windscreen misting up when a big orange light came on on the dashboard. Shit, I thought, I've just drained the brake fluid or something. This is no time to be breaking down, I'll drown if I get out of the car. I tested all the vital functions I could think of (brakes, lights, er, that's it), and proceeded in mild terror, trying my very hardest not to soak people waiting at bus stops with my backwash. It was a bit like negotiating a hovercraft. The light continued to glare at me.

When I got to work I parked up and dug out the user manual, hoping whatever was wrong wouldn't cost hundreds of pounds to fix, but fearing that it would, as everything that goes wrong with M's car costs hundreds of pounds to fix.

But I was in luck: the warning light in question turned out to be a 'drive carefully, it's pissing it down' light. How very useful, I'd never have worked that out for myself. My 2cv used to warn you of the same thing by dripping gently into your lap through the hole in the roof.

Later I learnt of children stranded in schools, unreachable villages and cancelled festivals, so I felt I had got off pretty lightly, but that didn't stop me getting furious when our student neighbours poached the taxi we'd booked to save us waiting damply at the bus stop laden with food for dinner with our friends C&G. Little bastards (our neighbours, not C&G). But we got there in the end, and it was dry when we left, full of curry and watermelon, a little stoned, and just in the mood for a stroll past Evenlode Tower. It's beautiful at night, whatever they say. The Blackbird at chucking out time is not beautiful (it's an unfulfilled ambition of mine to find someone willing to take me in there for a pint, but this may be one of those ambitions best left unfulfilled), but the bus stop opposite was only mildly intimidating, and even at that time of night you've never more than 10 minutes to wait for a bus. Cities are great.

When we got home, there was a slug party happening on the path. I think they were eating the entrails of a snail that had perished there previously. See that? I said (or maybe just thought, I was a bit out of it). That's what little boys are made of. Some of them grow up ok though.

joella

Thoughts

I am so tired that I can't string a whole post together. So here are the thoughts that I might have developed into posts if I had a bit more energy.

• I am so happy to have Peep Show back!
• If I see that fucking M&S advert with Mylene Klass in it one more time I'm going to change the underwear buying habits of a lifetime.
• Is there a more offensive poster on the high street at the moment than the one in the window of KFC advertising the 'Mum's night off family bucket'?
• What the hell are we going to do with the giant (as in 4'x3') poster of a surrealist dog kennel that M brought back from the Rock in Opposition festival? Will it stay rolled up in the middle of the living room forever?
  
• I have trousers to take up. I'm 5'4". I therefore always have trousers to take up, why can't I sew properly?
• I hope it rains soon. I've had to take a hosepipe to the new perennials, and it made me feel a bit transgressive.
  
  
• 

joella

Multiple deprivation

I found out this week, via Meg, via Zoe Williams, via Loyd Grossman Sauces, that most British people a) have around four staple meals, the most popular being spaghetti bolognese, sausages and mash, chicken tikka masala and chilli con carne, and b) eat precious little else. I am not sure I trust the agenda of a readymade sauce manufacturer any more than I trust readymade sauces themselves, but even if it's only a bit true it's not a very cheery thought.

There are some staple meals chez joella, of course, and some of them - lentil soup, nut roast, celery-mushroom-pasta-bake, fishy-eggy-ricy-thing, tuna-noodle-pickled-vegetable - have been around for a decade or more. I also keep a jar of pesto in the fridge, which I eat with pasta and without shame.

But most of the time, we make it up, depending what we feel like, how much time we've got, who's in the mood to cook, what veg we have in, and what's in the fridge. Sometimes it's a disaster (I won't be doing those beetroot and sweet potato fritters again), but it's rarely out of a jar. And every time I buy a crap ready meal or eat rubbish takeaway food I curse a culture that can so shamelessly sell us something so utterly devoid of all the things food should have and so utterly full of all the things it shouldn't. Then I curse myself for being disorganised, lazy or drunk enough to be giving it stomach room. But now I think, how many people think this is normal?

I was in fact musing on this as I was bashing my leadwork around in plumbing class this week, when the subject of books came up. I have no idea how, given what followed, but it wasn't me who mentioned them first. The guy next to me said 'I never read books'. What are you talking about, I said. 'I reckon I've read two books in my life,' he said. I just looked at him. I think my mouth may have fallen open. Wow, I said. I think I'd die without books. I probably read about a book a week. I never stop reading. I have been known to read books by Andy McNab in the absence of anything else to read.

We looked at each other in mutual incomprehension for a few seconds, then got back to hitting things. But then I don't like football, so what do I know?

joella

A tale of two postcodes

Fitting a torpedo hot water cylinder in a mean part of town
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

This morning, I got up early to drive into deepest darkest Oxfordshire to hand tools to J the plumber while he changed a hot water cylinder for a housing association. I was proper work experience girl.

The plumbing side of it was interesting, and I learnt a lot. I cut some pipe and did some soldering and melted something I shouldn't've (which fazed J not one iota, and he patched it up beautifully).

But the human side of it was even more interesting. The sun was shining when we arrived, and the houses, set round a grassy common area, seemed cheerful and full of life.

Then J took a call from his wife while he was hacking away at the thin-walled copper in the airing cupboard (there was a copper shortage in the 80s and this was all local authorities could get) and said 'yeah, I'm out in Drugland'.

I thought it looked quite nice round here, I said, and he took me into the back bedroom and pointed out the window to where the neighbourhood changes. Two streets over, he said, and I wouldn't be taking you into those houses. He then told me some stories (he's not a big guy, but you really, really wouldn't mess with him) that I don't feel that comfortable repeating.

The teenage daughter of the house was sitting on Bebo downstairs, wrapped in a Playboy pink fleece blanket (wrong on so many levels) because the front door was open while we drained down the hot water and the central heating. She told us that they'd just been allocated another house, as they'd wanted to move ever since her mum got beaten up by one of the neighbours. They'll be moving in four weeks or so, but they've already packed.

It's shit round here, she said, it's all smackheads and single mothers. J asked her if she was doing her GCSEs, and she laughed and said she left school ages ago, she works in childcare.

I liked her, she seemed smart and together and focused. I wish someone would send girls like her off for a shit hot sixth form education. She'd go miles, I'm sure, given the chance.

J did a pretty tidy and thoroughly kosher job, though it's hard to know who would have cared if he hadn't (which gives me pause for thought given my previous rant about social housing which passes into private ownership). I helped tidy up, then headed back to a land where people separate their recyclables and add essential oils to their biodegradable washing liquid.

About an hour later, as I was eating sunflower seeds and drinking green tea, my mobile chirped. Did I want to come and check out a float valve replacement on a close-coupled cistern that was pissing water everywhere? Sure I did, and headed over to a privately rented flat in a part of town where they brought in residents parking so the nannies and the cleaners wouldn't have to compete with commuters for parking spaces.

We're talking Montessori Ashtanga wine cellar central. This is not just ladies who lunch, this is ladies who lunch and then go to the M&S food hall on their way home.

Having said all that, the plumbing in this flat was just as shit as the plumbing in the previous house, in an absentee-landlord-letting-agent-managed sort of way. It was functioning, and its worst excesses were largely hidden by the upmarket his-and-hers toiletries, but you really wouldn't need to be an expert to spot the bodges -- the best one was the basin in the bathroom, which had a hot tap on the right, not connected to anything, and a mixer tap on the left where the cold tap used to be, which was plumbed in but which was so badly fitted you could twist it round 180 degrees.

I am left, overall, with a philosophical question: if nobody actually cares whether you do a good job, and you will get paid the same amount whether you do one or not, is there any point in doing one?

Maybe I should listen to Adam Curtis and get busy, game-theory-stylee, focusing entirely on my own self-interest of making as much money as possible. But hang on, isn't having pride in one's work essential for self-esteem? Doesn't it pay long term societal dividends to make things look good and work properly? Or am I just hopelessly out of date?

joella

The Blue Peter blues

Another week, another two days off. I really must get my arse in gear. This week though I drew the joella mela to a close by managing to go out for dinner with three ex-schoolmates simultaneously. Which was quite good going as one of them was supposed to be in Australia and one of them was supposed to be giving birth.

We reminisced about being teenagers in Blackpool for about 30 seconds, before remembering that it didn't have a whole heap to recommend it beyond the fact that you could buy single Cocktail Sobranies from Smoky Joes in town to coordinate with your outfit. We pre-dated alcopops, so to drink it was Blue Bols, Campari, Pernod and black or Midori, depending. I feel a bit ill just thinking about it.

We are altogether more sensible these days of course, *and* have better hair. It perhaps wasn't the best idea to squelch back through South Park, but the view was nice and the mud will come out eventually.

It was all a bit anticlimactic yesterday though (well possibly not for ex-housemate S, but haven't heard anything yet). I waved Australia R off, put the laundry on, ate posh chocolates, sprayed WD40 round the place to loosen things up, but still felt edgy and weird. M settled me under a blanket before I could cut through any live wires, and turned on CBBC.

On came Blue Peter, which I can't have watched in the last 20 years. They have a presenter from Northern Ireland now, who'd have thought. They showed us some footage from Andy's trip to Malawi, where he has been visiting children living with HIV. Apparently 300 pairs of shoes make a bicycle. I remembered lying under another blanket in another place when I had been visiting people who were, largely, failing to live with HIV. Big fat tears rolled out of the corners of my eyes and splotched onto the cushions.

I guess I've just been too bouncy recently. It's going to catch up with you sometime. Now I'm going to send all my shoes off to save the world.

joella

All that glisters is not gold

I haven't started my plumbing sunlighting yet, so I have Mondays and Tuesdays to myself. People keep asking me what I am doing with all this extra time.

Trying hard not to spend any money, obviously, as annoyingly if you only work three days a week they only pay you for three days a week. I haven't been this skint for years. But, you know, potatoes don't cost much.

And I've been thinking a lot. Not getting up on Monday morning is *great*, you can listen to all of Start the Week without having to start the week. I could have done without Hanif Kureishi, obviously, a man's man if ever there was one, but it was interesting to hear Ed Zwick about talking about Blood Diamond.

A week or so ago we sat in a little shop in Mamallapuram while a young Kashmiri guy offered us rubies and sapphires. I rolled my eyes at M. 'One of the things I like best about you,' he said with the air of a man who has not always been so blessed, 'is that you don't want me to buy you expensive jewellery'.

It's true. I have a gold ring, which was made by melting down an identity bracelet; a gold bracelet, which used to be half my great-grandfather's watch chain; and a pair of diamond earrings, whose stones were originally set in an engagement ring (not mine). But not much else.

Partly, this is for all the right reasons. There's the issue of dirty gold and blood diamonds, but there's also just the miserable, miserable, miserable conditions that many mineworkers live and work in. I read some stuff about gold mining when I was in South Africa that will never leave me.

But you can get ethically sourced / environmentally friendly precious metals and gemstones if you really want to, like you can get Fairtrade cut flowers and organic tiger prawns. Thing is, I don't. Because my genuinely favourite ever piece of jewellery cost £45. It turns my neck green, but that just reminds me not to wear it every day. Essentially, I'm a cheap date. Everyone's a winner.

joella