I hope the Tories love their children too

I wrote this before Lockdown Two but I forgot to post it. Still holds. 

If you know me at all, you'll know I'm a foodie. I have always been a foodie. My tastes have, it must be said, changed somewhat over the decades, but the basic principle is the same: good food makes life immeasurably better, bad food makes it significantly worse, and insufficient food is one of the worst things that can happen to a person, and something we as a society, a species, should constantly strive to ensure does not happen to anyone. 

Which brings us, topically, to half term. When I was a kid, half term meant a trip to Lytham Kitchen with my mum. I remember it as just the two of us, but I'm guessing my sister was there too as I'm not sure where else she'd have been. By the relative sizes of things in my mind (Lytham Kitchen is still there, and not that different in most of the important ways - go there) she might have been in a pushchair. Anyway. The point is, it was a big treat, and I had spaghetti bolognaise followed by a Viennese whirl. 

What, I think, marks me out as a foodie is that I can remember this meal in such detail over 40 years on. The spaghetti was fat and soft, and came mixed in with the sauce, which was not particularly meaty but very juicy, so you would suck the strands up and it would splat on your face. It had grated cheese on it, which was in fat shreds, unlike at home, where my mum used the thin side of the grater. I don't think I was allowed to lick the plate, but I would have. The Viennese whirl was a piped shortcake biscuit that was half dipped in chocolate. I would eat the plain side first, and then the chocolate side, very, very slowly. 

It's always good to feed appreciative people, as I have learnt myself, and I hope it was obvious how much I absolutely loved these meals at the time (one hallmark of my early eating years was if it ain't broke, don't fix it, so I had this over and over again, and to be honest if they still served it I would have it tomorrow, only not the biscuit, and maybe with a glass of red). 

In the year my mum was dying, I would visit most weeks and sit by her bed, chatting to her about anything that came into either of our heads, wanting to acknowledge what was happening but without getting into the deep and dark places. She was not a great opener of cans of worms or boxes of Pandora, like many of her generation, and many of us Gen Xers have learnt to walk that line. But one night, the LKSB (Lytham Kitchen Spaghetti Bolognese) came up, somehow. And by this point there was a fair amount of morphine in the mix, and I learnt that the reason it was just me stuffing my face was because there wasn't the money for both of us to do that. 

This honestly never occurred to me at the time. I was max eight years old, so I can forgive myself, but additionally, she never gave much evidence of enjoying any foodstuffs as much as I enjoyed pretty much all of them. With soooo much hindsight, including knowledge of how her terminal cancer ultimately played out, I can see that she likely always had a vulnerable digestive system, and learnt to manage that by not really eating a lot. And we could get into the thin thing, which I will just touch on: I think my mum was a 10 because she smoked like a chimney for decades and also didn't eat much, then she stopped smoking and she hit like a 14, and then she got cancer and she went down to an 8 and then she died. She bought a tiny suit to wear to the funeral of one of her uncles who'd been a bit 'handsy'. It was her last 'fuck you' and I love her for it while also still dealing with the implications of all of that, not that I explicitly know the facts. She embodied them, as women so often do. 

*Anyway*. Half term to me means spaghetti bolognaise and Viennese whirls with your mum, or whatever the 2020 equivalent is, and to learn that life often gets worse rather than better for kids, over that time, makes me want to howl. And the thought that the government would enforce rather than relieve it, well. 

I look at those pictures of Marcus Rashford and his mum and I think, people like them should be making these decisions, not a bunch of boarding school educated posh boys, many of whom were deliberately starved of that kind of love in order to make them better heartless leaders. I live with one of those boarding school educated posh boys, and I think I can safely say they are a lil fucked up by the system, even if they never had to watch their parents choose between heating and eating. How are we still here, in 2020. 

What can you do? Well, we went swimming on Friday, then went into town and had noodles and a beer in our local Thai restaurant - use it or lose it, guys, and their Pad See Ew is *so good* - then went to Sainsbo's and spent our lunch budget on foodbank supplies, which can conveniently be deposited in between the tills and the exit. 

I have done a lot of buying foodbank supplies, and my general MO is to buy food I would want to eat myself, on the grounds that just because you are in need doesn't mean you want ham in a tin. (I will add that I never ever buy brown things for the foodbank, on the grounds that just because you're in need doesn't mean you should have to eat some do-gooders idea of healthy food). But this time I took my eight year old self shopping, and bought everything that she would want. Instant mash. Hotdogs. Tinned ravioli. Curly Wurlies. Sardines in tomato sauce. SuperNoodles. Jelly. Twenty five quids worth of joy, and I put it all in the collection box and then had a little cry on the way home. I'm so sorry. I'm so fucking sorry. 

joella

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

Three weddings, two funerals, and a tumour

We don't have an anniversary as such, M and I. We've never got married, mainly because patriarchy. I never wanted to be anyone's wife. When I was a teenager I used to stand on street corners on summer Saturdays shouting "DON'T DO IT!" at passing bridal cars. You could argue that we're in a long term monogamous relationship, we *might as well* be married, but it's the principle of the thing. I still don't want to be anyone's wife. I especially don't want to be anyone's second wife - no offence to anyone else in the mix, it's just not a very tail-end second-wave radical feminist move, dude.

I know other unmarried couples who still have an anniversary though... the first date they went on, or some other appropriate milestone. My Significant Ex and I used to have an anniversary, to the extent that my mum used to send us cards on it. But my beginnings with M were messier. If we were going to have a date, it would probably be the night we came out as a couple at the office summer party, by way of me wearing his new green jumper and, later, snogging in the pool.

I can't remember that date, and if I can't M certainly can't, and it's not one we've ever marked. But it was sometime in the late summer of 1998, which means we have been an item for twenty of your earth years now. We've loved each other across two millennia and four prime ministers (technically it kind of started under Major but that was part of the messiness, and we did not declare till Blair), and we're not done yet. 

We've had a lot of stupendously good times, but they haven't all been easy years, and in some ways the last six have been the most challenging. Moving to Ecoville has brought some wonderful things into our lives, but only counts as a walk in the park if the park has several angry men in it who shout at you (and on occasion *specifically at you*) from a range of soapboxes you hadn't previously been aware of. We also now live in the rural north, where the effects of austerity are undeniable. Our MP is a complacent Tory, the majority of our non-Ecovillanese neighbours voted Leave, parts of the local area are spectacularly deprived, and there are even fewer buses than there used to be. Let's just say that on pretty much all fronts I spend a lot more time thinking about the concept, and reality, of entitlement than I used to.

But, you know, this is all mind-expanding stuff - and even at the points where living here has been at its most uncomfortable and conflict-ridden, whenever people have asked me about it I've said 'well, it's never boring'. And it never is. And we've slowly come through the culture shock, both the regional and the hyper-local, finished falling out with the people we were maybe always going to fall out with, got to know and in many cases love a whole load of other people, painted a few walls, put up a few pictures, tamed a wild allotment, built up what can with a fair wind be called a yoga practice, developed a whole new way of cooking and eating*, started reading the London Review of Books, walked up more hills than I ever previously would have countenanced, and generally - finally - just about worked out how to live here. We used to be Team Warneford, after the street that our house was on. Now we're Team Warneford in the North.

So this was supposed to be a different kind of summer. The year started pretty well, with good habits and better intentions. We did our usual Dry January, and M decided to carry on and just be Dry. This was in part so he could apply himself to his Grade 6 piano exam, which he did, and which he passed. I had no such driver, but there was definitely a knock on effect, and I even managed to quit Candy Crush Saga. We read things. We planted things. We planned things. Our little clam shells were more open to passing plankton than they have been in a while.

We also accepted invitations to THREE weddings. This has happened only once before - in 2007, when, if you were my age or a bit younger, it was marrying time. These were all a little different - one getting around to the whole business a little later than usual (but with no dilution of enthusiasm, if anything quite the delightful reverse), one my littlest cousin, and one ex-housemate S's niece - the latter two firmly in the standard marrying time window, but both with the added twist that I was *at both of their parents' weddings*. I am now going to second generation weddings. I old.

If I old then M very old, but we like to think that we can still give good wedding guest, and we duly organised our other summer commitments around these milestones. There were really only two at the outset: one work trip for me, to Myanmar, (which turned into a whole existential crisis of its own, in that I found out I was losing my job while I was there - of which more another time, and it was pretty hellish tbh, but at least I didn't miss any weddings for it) and one trip to visit friends who have bought a shack (technical term) in a naturist resort near Bordeaux. I was still dealing with the existential crisis, but there was a lot to nakedly enjoy about that week, and I also read three whole books. I was going to say novels but they might not all have been... the only one I remember right now is Amos Oz's Judas, which is just heart-stoppingly brilliant. Read it.

But while all this was going on, there were a couple of people in our orbit busy dying. One of them was B's dad P - B is married to M's son, and I didn't really know her dad, but over the last 10+ years I've come to know her pretty well. We have spent many evenings together talking about travelling, growing food, and losing mothers, these being the things we have most in common, aside from the men in our lives, with their big hair and their ridiculous love of the ridiculous and their ability to sail through (almost) everything. My dad is still, at time of writing, with us, so I haven't had the full parental loss experience, but I know enough to know it's a huge fucking deal and *of course* we went to P's funeral.

The other of them was our next door neighbour. He moved here about 18 months ago. He already had incurable cancer, but it was one of the blood ones and there were drugs keeping it at bay. Until they stopped working and (long story short) he died. I have thoughts about aspects of R's journey that I don't think it's fair to write about here, but one thing I will say is that it is properly challenging to live next door to someone as their boundaries are disintegrating. I think we did our best to respect his wishes, and we did go to (part of) his funeral - the interment of his coffin in a green burial site, overlooked by cows. It was not like any funeral I've been to before. The whole thing left me with a lot to think about, not least a very strong reminder that we pass through this world but once. It all matters, or maybe none of it matters.

My dad often quotes Longfellow: into every life some rain must fall. And he's not wrong, but it's a quote that doesn't really account for extreme weather events. Some years, pretty Mediterranean. Most years, classic Lancashire. Occasional years: terminal piss down situation with localised flash flooding.

And this year, despite all the love, is giving us a proper drenching. I am already getting made redundant, remember, and then it goes a little something like:

Wedding #1: M notices bright red streaks in his urine after dancing. Carries on dancing regardless.

The following Monday: M notices more of the same and does about turn on train to visit client Down South in order to see GP asap. Gets fast track urology appointment for the following week.

Funeral #1: tells his kids. I mean, handy to have them all in the same place. But a bastard of a place to have to land (at this point still potential) bad news. 

The week after: M has urology appointment and is advised there is a tumour in his bladder, but it's 90% likely to be 100% sortable (slight paraphrase). This news arrives the day our neighbour dies.

Wedding #2: The post-cystoscopy urine situation is code red. M does his best to carry on dancing regardless, with some success, but it's a little challenging.

Funeral #2: We are waiting for a date for tumour surgery. The funeral seems to take over our entire community for several days. We are not in a good place.

Tiny bit of good news: the date is just after wedding #3, so we can go!

Wedding #3: we stay till the very end and do absolutely all the dancing possible (this is a lot of dancing). The next day, for reasons I don't fully understand, we find our hungover** selves in the Wohl Pathology Museum. Look! I say. They have a bladder with a tumour in it! We look at the bladder with a tumour in it. We look at many of the other preserved body parts gone wrong. We go back to our hotel and go back to sleep. I mean, there was some fascinating stuff in there, but on balance I don't recommend it if you're about to go into hospital.

Tumour #1: is removed. But unfortunately this isn't the end of the story: turns out M is (unusually for him) in the unlucky 10% this time.

We are waiting for the full picture (and it's not my story to tell), but there seem to be options that have a fair chance of dealing with it in a reasonably manageable fashion. Let's say that he seems to be in a much better place, prognosis-wise, than my mum was at this point in her cancer 'journey' (I hate that word. I'm using it reluctantly). But it's not great. It's a lot to process. Whatever happens is going to be unpleasant and uncomfortable at absolute best. And there are moments, like when he puts his (now very old green) jumper on back to front and doesn't notice, that my heart fairly breaks for him.

So we're sitting here, with our newly uncertain future... wondering where all of this will take us, and how, if it's bad, we will cope. I'm quite an anxious person generally - it doesn't take much to get me imagining all of the awful things that are but one misfortune away. And most of them don't happen, but the ones that do can be just as shatteringly awful as you expected, which doesn't, you know, help with the optimism. I've done some work on that, in the past, but I might need to start doing a bit more. We have a lot of good things to build on, and a lot of love around us as well as between us, but honestly. This. Fucking. Year.

So watch this space. In the meantime, I may not be at my most accessible (and sorry if I already owe you an email or similar)... but we will both be doing our best to get this bit right. As a wiser man than I once wrote, it takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry.

joella

* New to us, that is, there's nothing particularly groundbreaking about it, but it's very different from the Red Star Noodle Bar days

**  By this point M has started drinking again, and I have reinstalled Candy Crush Saga

Lights are changing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

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

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

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

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

All I want is life beyond the Thunderdome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

Grief is the word

In the month or so after her death, I had some very vivid dreams about my mum. In my favourite, she was in the bath, and she asked me to scrub her back. This was a thing that actually happened a lot -- I don't know anyone who saw their mum naked more often than I saw mine. She never got self-conscious, even in her last year, when her body changed so much, from the vibrant and healthy thing I'd seen a changing-but-the-same version of all my life, to something tiny, punctured, and randomly (or so it seemed a lot of the time) unreliable.

In my dream, she had her old body, the one that worked... with the strong, broad back, the hair in a headband, the freckly white skin that was so smooth but reddened so easily. She always liked a proper back scrub, though, so that's what I did, and then she looked up at me, stood up in the water, and gave me a proper big hug. I woke up feeling that I'd said the proper physical goodbye that I never managed in real life. I used to hug her a lot, but by the time we knew she was dying, she was too frail and too encumbered for anything more than holding of hand and stroking of head. So I thank my subconscious for bringing me that hug.

And generally, I am sleeping better since she died than I did during her last months. There's nothing I can do for her now, and however mind-gapingly awful her illness was, it's over. I feel huge - at times overwhelming - sadness much of the time, but I also know that, at least while she was ill, I did my best. That was something I learnt from Trish herself -- if you've done your best, you have nothing to feel guilty about. You may wish you were a better person or that circumstances had been different, but you can't do much about that and there's no point wasting energy on it.

There are (fairly obviously, I guess) some teenage moments I wish I could revisit, and many years of self-absorption where a bit of "it's not all about you, love" might have helped, but for much of my 30s, and my early 40s, we both worked to find a space where we could do things together that we both enjoyed, and we managed that. I'd (fairly obviously, I guess) have made more effort if I'd known she wouldn't live forever, but shit, she was the strongest person I knew. You just don't believe someone with her resilience will go and fucking die on you. She didn't believe it either. One of the last things she did was order a new bathroom. By the time they came to fit it, she was in the hospice. One of the others was to plant a monkey puzzle tree in the front garden. By the time that's grown up, we'll all be ashes.

Every day, there is a moment where I remember that my mum's dead. Sometimes it's like being hit with a blunt instrument somewhere deep inside, other days it rips my surface, like trying to crawl out of a bramble patch in your pants. Many days, whether raw or deep, it's nothing worse than sadness, which, at this point, feels like an achievement. I shed some tears on a bus, or in the supermarket, or when I catch a certain smell or hear a certain song. But sometimes it just stops me in my tracks, and for a few hours, there's quite literally nothing I can do.

I never read self-help books just like I never weigh myself. But you don't get to be 43 without absorbing some common wisdom about grief, if only by emotional osmosis. I know about the stages-that-aren't-really-stages. I know it's different-for-everyone. I know that losing a parent is massively significant, whether you got on with them or you didn't. That constant, that given, whether a presence or an absence, a source of pleasure or pain, now gone. If you're an adult, it knocks you forward into another phase of your life, closer to the centre of your family web if you have children of your own, more aware of your genetic cul-de-sac if you don't. I think I was prepared for that, to some extent, given that I had some notice. And my mother was one of the good guys. Our differences were non-toxic, our disagreements benign. I thought I had nothing really to fear but the sadness. I thought that I was probably at the lucky end of the people-whose-mothers-are-dying spectrum, however shitty a spectrum it may be. And that may indeed be so. But there are two facets of this beast called grief that I wasn't expecting.

One of them began to crystallise at her funeral, when my dad spoke about their life together and said, of its last phase, after they moved back to Lytham in 1997, "she really loved her life here". And she did. She really did. She was part of the fabric of that small town for more than half her life, she loved the house she lived in and the people she knew, and she loved her job and her family and my dad and the comfort that came from the rewards of their long years of careful sifting and saving. My mother was the very model of economy, but she loved to be generous, including to herself. Such balance I will always envy, and it will take me a long time to reconcile myself to the fundamental unfairness that a woman who overcame so many obstacles, and displayed such tenacity and grit, never got to spend that much time in the (figurative - remembering the white skin and the freckles) sun, and spent a year dying horribly before she was even 70. There are millions of people who can't see the point of life, and millions more who build their lives and their livelihoods on the exploitation of others. Why do some of them get to live out their old age when my mum, who wanted to be alive and spent her life (working and otherwise) looking after other people, doesn't? Huh? Where's the justice in that?

(I do know that there ain't no justice, before anyone sends me a book about it).

The other facet is harder to articulate, because it's the one I *really* didn't expect. I knew I was going to lose my mum. What I didn't fully appreciate was that she was the family's UN-Security-Council-cum-ACAS. Not that we're a family at war. More that I suddenly realise there was someone gently representing everyone's interests to everyone else, and negotiating settlements without anyone else involved (or at least me) really knowing there were issues to be settled. I just lost my best defender and I never even knew I needed defending. I have a bunch of relationships to renegotiate now, not with my dad, fortunately, as that has always been relatively unmediated, but from there on out, I'm like a wheel without a centre. There are times I think 'why didn't you *say* anything?' ... but then I think, hey, that was the secret of her success. Why would I expect her to change the habits of a lifetime on her deathbed? She took a bunch of our secrets and lies with her, and she absolutely had that right.

I fucking miss her though.

joella

You're allowed

In 2005 a Zambian colleague of mine took me onto a public ward in the main hospital in Kitwe. It was the size of a school assembly hall, and it was full of women dying from AIDS, each lying glassy-eyed and skeletal on a blanket. They were all surrounded by relatives looking down at them, unable to do anything about it. Downstairs, there was a coffin shop. That, said my colleague, as we left, is what poverty looks like. When I close my eyes, I can still see that ward. I think I kept my face straight, but in my head I looked like Munch's Scream.

She was right, that *was* what poverty looks like - nearly all of those women were younger than me, and if they'd been living my life, they wouldn't have got HIV in the first place, and if they had they'd have had access to treatment, support and some of the best healthcare anyone gets anywhere.

But hell, that only takes you so far. My mum's had all those things, and she's still dying. She's now lying in a bed in a hospice looking just like that, while we stand around her smiling brightly with internal Scream faces.

It won't be long now. She read her last book a long time ago. Last week, she did her last crossword and had her last food. A couple of days ago, she watched her last TV programme. She won't get out of bed again.

She's so very, very tired, but she's also still in there, in that tiny body that has taken such punishment over the last year. Yesterday, I was sitting by the bed holding her hand. What *is* that noise, said my dad. I said 'oh, it's me, I was humming'. There was a little noise from the bed, and my mum raised her eyebrow and said 'You're allowed'.

I hadn't even known I was doing it, I think it was just something to fill the void. Later on I did it again and that's when I realised what it was... at a friend's funeral on Saturday (yeah, quite a month for dying) one of the songs they played was a girl's choir singing Fix You. I don't even *like* Coldplay. But like the man says, I am about to lose something I cannot replace.

But this is where we are. This person who has done so much for me, for so many other people, who has helped so many people through what she is now dealing with, is running out of road. There's not much left she can do for us, and there's not much left we can do for her except hold her hand and hum.

So, you know, mum, you can go any time you want. You're allowed.

joella

Foothills of end

My lovely friend W, who died of cancer last year, kept up her Facebook correspondence until she started to, quite literally, lose her mind. It was tremendously sad to see her incisive, unsentimental updates start to falter, and her phrasing and spelling begin to disintegrate. Then for a few days there were just ‘likes’, and then there was nothing at all. The update that sent a little shock through me, and sent me down to the river to have a proper cry, opened with the words 'foothills of end now'.

It’s a killer of a phrase: you haven’t got long, and it’s only going to get harder. Looks like my mum’s just approaching those hills now. We hoped she’d have a few months on the post-chemotherapy plateau, hanging out in her tent there, relaxing with a book or two, maybe adventuring the odd picnic or day trip. That was why she put herself through it.

But that isn’t what’s happening. No. Instead she has to pack up her rucksack again and start climbing, only she’s not as strong as she was before, and the paths are rockier, and there's no map for this country.

joella

Moving and shaking

Well, it's nearly the end of November* and I couldn't let a fifth (nearly sixth) month pass without a blog post... actually, I could, but I didn't want to, as Joella first put nicotine-stained fingers to red-wine-stained keyboard ten years ago this month, and I felt the occasion should be marked.

And it's not that there hasn't been stuff going on, quite the reverse. If I had to sum up the last six months in less than, say, 140 characters, it would be something along the lines of TOO MUCH STUFF ALREADY. NOW LEAVE ME ALONE.

In the early days of the blogosphere, I used to write pithy and/or incoherent and/or cryptic posts even when things were kind of weird. We have Facebook and Twitter for that these days, and in many ways I think they do a better job. But (as I've said before, and I'm not the only one) something that could have stood a paragraph or two, a bit of reflection or expansion, become a little self-contained note about life in the 21st century, can, when condensed to a tweet or a status update, just disappear into the stream that flows past us all, all the time.

So I regret my blogular silence, not least because this exercise has always been as much for my own benefit as anyone else's. These months have not been easy, but they have been significant. I would like to get back to blogging, it's a medium I'm fond of. Writing is still one of the things I like doing best of all. It's early for a New Year's Resolution, but I have a good experience to build on: this year's was to refuse to visit the Daily Mail website, however chain-yanking the link-bait, and I have kept the faith. So in 2013, which I fully expect will not be an easy year either, I resolve to blog at least once a week.

A tweet or two from each week since I last blogged... for the sake of the record: 

June:

• Project Interim Hair Colour is moving into phase 2: goodbye Dirty Blonde, hello Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlights.
  
• Shit is relative, as Freud almost said.
• Pint of Isis Pale Ale in between a Hinksey swim and spaghetti carbonara (v). Happy end to a weekend of heated long distance debate.
• We argue while boarding the 35. M: 'you just wanted to say "hegemony" on the bus, didn't you?'. Me: 'yeah, a bit'.
  

July

• Drinking spicy Turkish turnip juice in East London.     http://t.co/QLnTqQkT
• We had the Cohousing Conversation About Meat. Nobody died.
  
• The horses in the field next to our temporary Lancs home trot over every time we walk down our long drive. Horses are GREAT. I'd forgotten.
• History of the toilet programme on BBC4 right now making this sociologist-plumber very happy.
  
• So that was odd, but mostly in a good way. Like us, I guess. Yay. And an extra yay for the Saudi women. In black, at the back, but here.

August

• Home alone with an End of an Era hangover. Nothing in the house but plums and Parmesan heels. Time for a bath with Georgette Heyer.
  
• If the Spice Girls are the 'originators of girl power' I want a fucking refund. Off to bed.
• Coffee at Restore after pre-Cambodia jabs at East Oxford Health Centre. Hurty arm. Quite a stressy month, all told.
  
• On our way To The North. http://t.co/BXLMLCiM
• Woke up, thought what's that noise, it's like living on a building site. Oh. But VIEW!  http://t.co/bMgZ02tw
  
• Like Guinness in Ireland, Singha only tastes right in Thailand. BKK airport just about counts, specially on 'WTF is the time?' time.
• It appears I am now a "Crazy Goat".  http://t.co/9dMG1H3c
  

September

• I just dropped a litre of Tanqueray in the middle of Abu Dhabi airport. The staff were amazing. The man who got gin on his ankles, less so.
• Oppressed by boxes in multiple different ways. Oppressed by lack of internet in the Glorious Eco Home. But feeling resilient, mostly.
  
• I feel like a pendulum swinging between 'unstoppable force' and 'immovable object'. Both have their merits, but it's not very zen.
• Finding some calm at the end of a hectic not-over-yet week with a Lune-inspired playlist... Rivery http://t.co/FA2mrOIa #Spotify
  
• Discovered today that we live about three miles (maybe four via bike down towpath) from this: http://t.co/L9p2clkw

October

• Going off-grid* for a few days.  *leaving town with only one internet-enabled device
  
• Thanks to my lovely boyfriend for support through one of the hardest weeks of my life. And for eating THREE meals with gherkins in today XX
• #justthewomen - I despair.
• Feeling a little mutinous. And possibly a little carnivorous. Could be ominous. Could be fun.
  
• THREE MONTHS since we placed a BT landline order and they still won't give us a date. Well, they've given us many dates, but no landline.

November

• "Because of you, I doubted my own sanity." Go Carrie! Stick it to the man. #homeland
  
• Our old table in its new home: fish pie & champagne in the Common House with some of our lovely cohousing neighbours http://t.co/xwlsBAIF
• Day 87 in the house with no landline. Putting finishing touches to my 1700-word letter of complaint to BT.
  
• Hot Ribena and hot Vimto at the Crook O'Lune http://t.co/eCbqK1f7
• After 11 years cohabiting, we are merging our book collections. Our Bodies Ourselves now lives next to Mathematical Puzzlements.
  

What all that means is...

1. On 19 August we left our Interim Bungalow for the long journey north. It was good to us, was the Interim Bungalow, and I very much enjoyed living next door to ex-housemate S, her Young Man, Tungsten and Particle for the best part of a year, but if I had my time again I'd do it differently. We'd have stayed there for a few months, through the winter, and then made a clean break and rented a house in Lancaster till the Passivhaus was ready. That way I'd have done the shift to remote working, got to know a new city, said the big goodbyes to Oxford, all while the days were lengthening and while the shops were in walking distance. Instead we did a halfway thing, and sublet a couple of rooms off another cohousing couple who had rented a big house (so big it was immediately nicknamed the Massivhaus) near the site as their own interim base. The idea was we'd live there some of the time and in the Interim Bungalow some of the time. But that didn't work out... it was never a space we felt at home in, and it was never a space we even felt that warm in. It was a long way from town, up a hill, right next to the M6. A good setting for a novel, but not a good start to our life in Lancaster. We liked the horses in the field next door. We liked the view over the hills as we walked to the bus stop. We liked the wild garlic and the bluebells in the spring. But really, when we were there, we always wanted to be in Oxford, where we could eat what we wanted and watch TV in our pants if we wanted. These things happen, and it seemed like a good idea at the time, but ... it made the leaving harder. 

2. When we arrived, we were the first people to move in. On the upside, it was a celebratory weekend -- both before we left, when we had a lovely Isis-and-curry night on the Friday, and a big Flowing Well meal on the Saturday with the ex-housemate S massive plus C, who drove a van down from Lancaster to pick us and our stuff up -- and when we arrived, when there were loads of people waiting to welcome us and help us unload the van. We hadn't been in our house, or any of the houses, before we took possession of the keys, and the whole thing was both surreal and overwhelming. I think only four properties were released that week, and we were the only ones who were moving any distance, so everyone else moved in gradually, while we got the big bang. And it was pretty weird. A brand new house has no coat hooks, no towel rails, no lampshades, no clues as to how you should occupy its space. This one also had an awful lot of new things to get our heads round -- MVHR, district heating, an induction hob, a water-efficient bathroom -- plus a whole bunch of stuff that simply wasn't finished or in place yet... no communal indoor or outdoor space, no laundry room, no car pool, no phones or internet, a postcode so new that for delivery purposes, we just didn't exist. Where do we do our washing? How do I do my job? Where's the post box? How do I go shopping? What the hell am I doing here? 

3. Less than a week later, I flew to Cambodia for NGO X's annual Global IT Summit. As a non-IT person, I felt it was a significant invitation and not one I should turn down -- indeed it was one of the best such events I've ever attended, it has given my work new energy and was a great place to forge and renew the relationships without which my job is almost impossible. And there were good reasons for it being in Cambodia -- it's the first NGO X 'model office', where staff of multiple affiliates share resources and services and deliver a shared programme [oversimplification, but that's a whole other post], and part of the remit of the summit was to evaluate the approach taken. Professionally, it was a great trip. Personally, it was tough, I was pretty wiped out emotionally by the move, and also trying to come to terms with the fact that my good friend W, who I met in my first year at Cambridge, was dying of cancer. There's nothing you can do, but that's almost the worst part. One night we were all on our way to a traditional dance production put on by an NGO which cares for orphans... I know, I know, we really do this stuff. I was feeling a little disconnected and was looking out the window of the minibus, and I saw a guy lying in the road, head caved in, blood everywhere, just been killed by a motorbike. I was a long, long way from home and I didn't even know what home was. I had a bad night with too much minibar Scotch, called M and sobbed for 20 minutes at £X per minute (couldn't Skype, plenty of internet in Phnom Penh, but none in Lancashire), woke up next morning with puffy eyes and an 'oh shit' feeling. There was a bright side... NGO X is stuffed full of people who turn out to be way more than colleagues, if you find yourself in a situation where that's what you need, and I had some properly bolstering conversations over the next 24 hours. I am still feeling the warmth. 

4. And thank whoever for that, because it turns out I never needed it more. Flew back into Manchester, accidentally smashing two litres of gin in two continents en route, and arrived home to find still no landline, still no internet, still no washing machine, but lots of jetlag. We had our first Oxford visitor the morning I came home, wild-swimming H, a fellow native Lancastrian, on her way back from visiting her parents. That was the sanest moment of my week... the next day I naively / optimistically climbed the hill to the Massivhaus with my laptop (to use the broadband) and a suitcase full of laundry (to use the washing machine) to find ourselves ... I don't really know how to put this diplomatically, not very welcome. Kind of fair enough, as we were no longer paying rent, though we had paid half-occupancy rent for nine months of one-fifth occupancy, so I had anticipated a bit of leeway. It was made very clear that our room full of boxes was also no longer welcome, despite explicit previous assurances to the contrary. There is obviously a parallel narrative here, but hey, that's for someone else to blog about. Let's just say that from my perspective it was the last thing I needed. We made alternative arrangements as soon as we could -- we rented some temporary office space in town, and eventually started shelling out stupid money for mobile broadband, which does just good enough a job to allow you to function, while being just flaky enough to keep you on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Don't believe the EE hype, people. You have to reboot at least three times a day, and they block Skype while lying about it. 1998 ADSL never looked so good. 

5. So there we are, struggling to 'work from home', with BT acting like a new build development three miles from Lancaster is equivalent to establishing a new nation state on a Pacific coral reef when it comes to giving us landlines and broadband. It's still going on, over three months later, but I do now get regular phone calls from Alison in the High Level Complaints team. You take your pleasures where you can. Especially when your mother, who has been as fit as a butcher's dog and as strong as an ox for your ENTIRE LIFE, apart from that time she had to go to hospital after your sister was born, and that other time they took her toenail off, and that other other time when she was in hospital for a week having a hysterectomy and we ate out of tins and off paper bags to save on washing up, but that was like 1979 and she hasn't been ill since then, especially when she tells you that she's not feeling well but she doesn't want to worry you because you've got enough on your plate. Which you have, but then you get the call on your mobile, which starts 'isn't your landline working yet?' and no, no it's not, but it does ring and ring and ring, and that's what she did first, losing some minutes of breath that she doesn't have, because what she's ringing to tell you is that she can't breathe and the ambulance is on its way. 

6. So then my most excellent and indefatigable mother, who was surely going to outlive us all, and was planning to do my wallpapering and walk some Lake District hills with me, among other things, is in hospital for three weeks, and leaves (after experiencing some brutality but also much humanity) with a diagnosis of terminal adenocarcinoma. Having googled 'pleural effusion' (which is what sent her into hospital) I knew that was a strong possibility, but when you're waiting for that kind of diagnosis, you live in a Schroedinger place -- until they say that's what it is, it isn't anything. She was in hospital in Blackpool -- maybe 45 minutes by car, but we don't have one, and we didn't have access to one... so we we went by bus, or by train to Lytham and then with my dad in his car. I spent a lot of time at the parental home during those weeks -- it seemed important to keep up standards, and to make sure everyone was eating properly. Not saying we managed it, they were dark weeks. And in the middle of them, in fact while were were on the bus from Blackpool back to Lancaster, we got a call to say that (despite re-negotiated agreements around boxes and having already taken half of them away) we needed to come and get the rest of them, like, now. In a couple of years, when all is calm, I might get over that request being made at that time, parallel narrative, yadda yadda, but I don't have a lot of spare empathy right now, so fuck it. We complied -- well, technically, M complied, with the strength of the furious, while I moved boxes round to make space for more boxes, while swigging whisky and crying. And it meant we could draw a line under something. 

7. But it left a bad taste, and so did the food wars, which coincidentally -- or maybe not -- largely consisted of us (representing omnivorous diversity) arguing with one of them (representing hardline veganism) about our competing interpretations of the Food Policy. Those are hours of my life I'll never get back. In the end, the whole group hammered out a starting position, which in parts still felt way too extreme for me (if you want to eat a fish finger in the Common House on one of the days it is permitted, you have to cook it elsewhere [fair enough] but also bring your own plate and knife and fork to eat it with and take them home afterwards to wash up [completely mental]), but does at least allow for the existence of cheese and wine. In theory anyway -- in practice the initial food ordering seemed to take a look at everything in a hardline vegan kitchen and buy 25kg of it. We will not run out of pearl barley or soya milk for decades. There are some people who are ignoring all this and getting on with producing delightful food from stuff they've bought at Sainsbury's, but somehow, because I was so bruised by the process, I can't. But I'm not so sure I like communal meals anyway. They make me feel a bit panicky and weird. Safer to stay home and eat exactly what I want, at least at the moment. Which might include liver and pork pies: I've realised I am SO NOT A VEGAN that I'm probably a meat eater, though I haven't actually done a very good job of eating meat yet.  

So yeah, it's been a "journey". Writing about it all in one go I'm amazed that I haven't fallen over. A couple of weeks ago I did spend the whole weekend in bed reading novels and ignoring the doorbell, but I have days like that at the best of times. It's also safe to say I am not sticking within the government's alcohol guidance at the moment, but when did I ever? 

And I am still struggling to keep firing on all cylinders, but it's gradually getting easier. The house is delightful, a space I loved immediately. It's been home since the day we set foot in it, despite the boxes and the fact that it was in the middle of a building site. There are about 20 homes occupied now, and we have a car club, a laundry room, guest rooms and a common house with a wood burner. And of course neighbours, many of whom I like a great deal and some of whom I already think of as my friends. The site is muddy but beautiful... we regularly walk through the woods to the Crook O'Lune and have a hot Vimto at Woodies. The cycle track over the river takes us to Caton in 15 minutes, where we can shop at the Co-op or have dinner at the Ship, or to Lancaster in 25 minutes, where I am gradually discovering new places and getting less lost. We are four miles from the sea, and have spent time exploring the delights of Hest Bank and Morecambe. Further afield, but not much, are Arnside & Silverdale, and we've also been to Ambleside, Bowness and Windermere, thanks to the splendid 555 bus. This is a beautiful part of the world, and I am glad we moved here. I just wish it hadn't been so hard. I feel like we're plants that have been uprooted and lost nearly all their topsoil in the process. Luckily our roots are tangled up together, I think without M, I would probably have just given up for a while and let everything go dark. He's been a brick. Or is it a rock. Something of both. 

My mum's still got cancer though. Not a hell of a lot I can do about that. She is having chemotherapy in the New Year but it's not about curing it, that's not going to happen**. I hope to find some midwinter space to retreat and regroup, because next year I am going to need to be a big brave girl. Watch this space. 

joella

* now December, but I wrote most of this in November, so I'm giving it a November date. Because I can. 

** I don't want to write a cancer blog. At least not yet. But her initial diagnosis was Cancer of Unknown Primary, which has a pretty bleak prognosis. 

Postscript

While I was writing my post about feeling a bit lost, I was also listening to back to back Gil Scott-Heron, having only just heard about the loss of someone who could fill such a big space. I only saw him live once, but it was one of the best gigs of my life. Merits a post all of its own, and maybe it will get one soon, as part of the upcoming 'leaving town' series...

When I ran out of obvious GSH I turned to Diana Jones, who does lonesome and bleak pretty damn well. But that wasn't quite working for me, so I clicked around the related artists on Spotify and decided to check out Iris DeMent's Infamous Angel. Five songs in, she sang Kate Rusby's Our Town, a song off Sleepless which was what took me to see her play live in 2004, and which, though she didn't play it that night, has stayed with me ever since.

I had a little cry, and dug out the album to hear what I thought was the original, only to find, thanks to the sleeve notes (you never get those on Spotify, do you, huh?) that it was in fact an Iris DeMent original. Respect to her for that, it's amazing.

But having given them both several listens, I have to go with the English interpretation. If your head's at anywhere near where mine's at, this song is a killer.

joella

PS I'm fine though. Don't go fretting.