Same old shit, different century

Not a great week for the ladies. Over here, we find out more about the man who killed his wife, daughter, horses and dogs before burning down his house, like they were so many things to cross off a list. Rich and dead, or poor and alive, I wonder which they'd have chosen if he'd bothered to ask them?

Over there, we have the public flogging of a teenage girl, for being in the same house as an electrician, at whom she may or may not have made eyes. The government are at least protesting, which is more than can be said a bit further over there, which is busy legalising rape within marriage, and making it illegal for women to *leave* the house without their husband's permission, unless it's an emergency, like maybe the electrician coming round.

Says one over there MP: "Men and women have equal rights under Islam but there are differences in the way men and women are created. Men are stronger and women are a little bit weaker; even in the west you do not see women working as firefighters."

Now a) if you don't see them that's because you're not looking, and b) I don't quite see how firefighting relates to consensual sex and personal freedom. But that's possibly because I'm, you know, a little bit weak.

And back over here, of course, there was Masturgate. Clearly Ms Smith has not covered herself in glory of late, but now we've all had to think about what her husband's been covering himself in, I can't help but feel sorry for her.

If it weren't for Michelle O, it'd be hell in a handcart all round at the moment.

joella

Wok 2.0

We have a bit of a carrot glut at the moment, so I went looking for carrot recipes while M watched The Simpsons. I did this via old skool cookbooks... you get a feel for the author whose recipes you are in the mood for, and I was feeling a bit Prue Leith. I can't find her carrot fritters recipe online, but there is an Anthony Worrall Thompson one that is remarkably similar.

We got to work. I don't get on with the wok (partly because it lives on top of the cupboard and I can't reach it without standing on a chair, and partly because it has a complicated aftercare ritual), so M was doing the honours. He was grating away, and I was whizzing yoghurt with herbs and shredding lettuce. I only have one thing to ask of you, he said. Please don't Twitter about your fritter*.

As soon as the carrot hit the hot oil I had an urge to hear Neutral Milk Hotel's King of Carrot Flowers Part 1 - a song I just can't get enough of, but I worry that I play too much. Saturation means I might go off it, though come to think of it that's never worked for gherkins, The Wire, sleeping or any of the other things I indulge in too much of. Patience, joella, I thought to myself, and instead I lined up all 58 of the songs that come up on Spotify (today) if you search on 'carrot'.

There are worse ways to choose the soundtrack for dinner, though there was rather too much Beefheart (=any Beefheart) for my liking.

joella

*and I'm not, see?

Can I just say...

Three things, having just watched Newsnight.

1. The opposite of anti-abortion is NOT pro-abortion. Nobody is pro-abortion, at least nobody I've ever met. The opposite of anti-abortion is pro-choice.

2. Relatedly, young people do not get pregnant. Young women get pregnant. Can we please at least MENTION gender when we talk about teenage pregnancy?

3. Like Stephen Fry once said about Noel Edmonds: a short word about Michael Winner - No. A long word about Michael Winner - Unconscionable.

Calm down dear, I know.

joella

If I don't make it back...

... said M, as he set off bravely into the drizzle in search of a bottle of white, you've been a very understanding girlfriend.

Glad you see it that way, I said. I worry that I have termagant tendencies.

But it takes all sorts to make a world.

joella

Reflections on power, cheese, and deserts

Last week at work, a decision I have been pushing for for nearly a year finally got made, and got made in the direction I'd been pushing for. I was momentarily jubilant, then I went for a wee and when I came back the person who had been pushing just as hard in the other direction was a bit tearful. And I know, if it had gone the other way, which it so easily could have, so very nearly did, then the tears would have been mine. I had shed some only the night before. Yes, I thought it was that important. And so did she.

I wonder if my currency is higher, or things are moving faster, because of what happened in the Hot Place. Crises make careers, everyone knows that, even if you happened to be there by accident. For years I have had nothing but carrots, now, briefly, there is a small stick, and I get to wave it. My report about learning points has been read by high-ups and pissed a couple of them off, and I'm not used to that either. I am used to toiling in the detail round the edges of the main story, taken seriously by a few people (and I love you all) and reassured that my stuff is of course *important* but not, you know, important enough to do anything *about*. So I don't bother pulling my punches, because I'm not usually hitting anyone who's noticing.

It might be an interesting week.

Meanwhile, my personal equilibrium swings like a pendulum do. Well, maybe more like Newton's cradle do, as I think it's slowly coming back to rest somewhere manageable. Sunday evenings are warm times chez joella, as M and I both love to listen to Freakzone, which seems to occupy the interesting part of the intersection of our respective musical tastes. Freakzone listening happens in the kitchen, where one of us will tidy up while the other cooks dinner.

But tonight we both wanted to cook. I made lentil soup, which I have been making for ten years, can make with my eyes closed, and relies on a failsafe combination of good olive oil, cheap red wine and bay leaves. We didn't have any bread, so M baked cheese scones to go with it. I have never had a home made cheese scone before. What have I been doing with my life?

Towards the end of the programme, Freakzone played us Water is Life. Immediately, over wine, cheese and lentils, we hatched a plan to visit next year's Festival Au Desert. And this just two weeks after I swore never to leave the country again.

So I guess hope springs eternal. And amen to that.

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

Here's one I prepared earlier

[STARTS]

The international staff who work in the NGO X Field Office live together in a ramshackle guest house. It is truly international -- at the moment there are people there from Malaysia, Chile, Kenya, Iraq, Sweden, New Zealand, the US and the UK. It is also truly ramshackle, though necessity is the mother of invention and people produce the most surprising things -- nutritional yeast for vegetarian pasta sauce, data projectors for outdoor film screenings, shisha pipes, ipod speakers, taco shells... the plumbing may leave a lot to be desired but you can have a surprisingly relaxing time on a Thursday night, considering.

I believe that diversity is good, and I love being in the middle of it, but you're never quite sure of yourself and there are occasional misunderstandings. My UNHAS flight back to the Capital City was one of them. It was made entirely clear to me (for reasons that may now be obvious) that I should return no later than Monday, but it remained entirely unclear to me who was booking it, and whether or not I needed to chase it up. It turned out that it was entirely unclear to everyone who was booking it, and that in fact it wasn't booked, but it could just as easily been entirely in hand.

So on Saturday, a rush booking was made for Tuesday. (There is a three day lead time because bookings need to be approved via official channels, and official channels take three days. You know if you have cleared the channels when your name appears on the flight manifest.) On Sunday, Monday's manifest arrived. My name was on it. And on Tuesday's. I had two flights out.

But two is a lot better than none. I condensed everything into faster typing, shorter conversations, detailed emails, and ran around looking for a pair of trousers that had mysteriously disappeared. All schedules are out the window at the moment anyway, and the only thing you can expect is the unexpected, so it actually seemed fairly unremarkable that I had my last couple of meetings at top speed while I was eating my lunch, while the car waiting to take me to the airport waited outside the gate.

'You'll see we have saved the bum beans for your last day', said one of my colleagues. She has quite a strong English accent, I wasn't sure if I'd heard her right. Sorry? I said. 'The bum beans,' she said. 'I hate the bum beans'. I looked down at my plate. I was indeed the only person in the room eating the ful -- cooked fava beans, raw onion, undersalted, not great, and with flatulence guaranteed. But if you want to be a vegetarian in the Hot Place, you take your protein where you find it.

I rolled my eyes, and said yeah, but what can you do?

The room fell quiet as we ate, and there were more of the dull, reverberating thudding noises that I'd heard first thing in the morning. I'd been ignoring it, as I'd been ignoring the late night gunfire ("usually a wedding, don't worry about it"), and the fighter jets screaming overhead, because everybody else did. The jets are so loud that you can't hear anything else over them, and they reminded me, in a weird sort of way, of the weekly fire alarm tests in the New Building, where everyone stops mid sentence for five seconds, then picks up exactly where they left off.

But this noise was different. And then I realised that it wasn't an everyday noise, and that it was getting to people. And *then* I realised that D hadn't been talking about bum beans, she'd been talking about bombings. And then I felt like an idiot. And then I left.

However, safely back in Capital City, I had to run back from dinner, slithering around on the sand in an undignified fashion as my stomach made ominous noises. I reached the guest house just in time, and as the world fell out of my bottom it occurred to me that she might have meant bum beans after all.

[ENDS]

I am back now. There's another post, but I think it may need vetting, so maybe I won't. I don't really know at the moment, and I'm not really ok, but I have Talked To Someone, and apparently if I'm still crying randomly and dreaming about deleting files in five days time, then I might have a problem, but until then, it's all to be expected. In the meantime I am drinking red wine, lying under a blanket, listening to 80s tag last.fm and trying not to think about anything very much.

joella

Blogging by VSAT

I'm having trouble putting my thoughts into words at the moment, I am in The Field (well, in a field office, The Field is down the road) and I have a million things to say. The first one is, for anyone watching the situation in the Hot Place, I'm fine. We're all fine.

The rest has to do with stars and sand and guns and water. It feels like a waste of bandwidth to compose online, as bandwidth is hard to come by round here, but tomorrow is our day off, and I shall attempt to write something.

Till then, let's say I'm not spending much time thinking about the recession. It's in the background, but the foreground doesn't leave much spare space.

joella

Going once more a-roving

By popular demand, I am going back to the Hot Place. It won't be quite so hot, but there will be other complications. I will be playing with Jing, so I have got myself a microphone headset, so I will in theory be Skypeable. I won't be Twittering, but I might be Yammering. I'll be blogging obliquely. I'll be MSNing. All of this is of course assuming there's an internet connection. There was last time, but that don't mean a thing.

I'm so looking forward to coming back. February will be over, the sap will be rising, and I can start on Project Gherkin (involving a propagator and some Seeds of Italy) and Project Skirting (involving a sewing machine and something from Clothkits).

joella

Holy Ikea, Vatman!

So I went to Rome. It was a significant birthday of my Significant Aunt, and there was a gathering of the clan. I didn't think I'd be able to make it, as I was supposed to be going back to the Hot Place. But that got postponed (only till this time next week, however, when I will again be engaged with the information management side-effects of protracted instability), my passport came back from the Embassy, and I was good to go. 

When I was 17, I went post A-level InterRailing with my friend R. We spent a few days in Milan, during which time we were harassed so relentlessly (the high point being when a traffic policeman touched me up while we were crossing the road) that we decided to hang out with three boys from Macclesfield who were staying in the same Youth Hostel. They weren't much better: we drank far, far too much, I was sick in a park, and even that didn't stop them trying to get off with us. 

I refused to go any further into Italy, and I haven't been back since. I can hold a grudge for a very long time, but I admit it was time to reassess. 

My very first impression was not great, but one should never judge a country by the men who try to get you into a taxi at the airport. I should also say that the combination of capital city prices and euro exhange rate make pretty much everything eyewateringly expensive. 

But it's beyootiful, it really is, and the food is astonishingly good. It doesn't seem to matter where you eat or what you order, it was all totally delicious. They have the kind of restaurants that we just don't, I think -- little places doing local food all over the place. I had some artichoke ravioli that I think I will remember forever, and the best minestrone soup I have ever tasted. And the Chianti, well. 

It wasn't all eating and drinking, of course, though I wouldn't have minded if it had been. We went on an open top bus to the Vatican, to marvel at the baroque wonders and sheer hugeness of St Peter's Basilica. As a firmly lapsed Catholic, I wondered if I might be smote down by a giant sword, or at the very least feel an urge to get myself to a nunnery, but I am relieved to report that I emerged with nothing worse than a cricked neck and a sense of awe. Dometastic! 

The Sistine Chapel was a different matter. To get there, you first have to walk for about a mile, then you have to part with quite a lot of cash, and then you have to walk another mile, but this one inside, through endless galleries and chambers and chapels and corridors plastered (often literally) with cherubs and saints and gilt and bleeding hearts (but no liberals, not even one). You can't just check out the bit you came all this way to see, oh no. You have to traipse past every last statue and frieze and tapestry and mosaic they've picked up in the last five centuries. It's like Ikea on acid. 

I'm not sure why they make you do that, but it does mean that by the time you stare up at Michaelangelo's ceiling your feet have properly suffered and you have an appropriate sense of your own insignificance. And you've made a donation to the men who did this to you. They're not as green as they're cabbage looking, that's for damn sure. 

There are a few photos here, if you're interested (I'm waiting on the one with all of us and a gold sofa in it). And of course, it was great to see everyone. Jerusalem next time? (Just kidding).

joella

New boots and panties

The boots have arrived! Just too late for me to look glamorous in them in Rome this weekend. Although I am not sure I could ever look glamorous in Rome. Or at all really. However I did get some green sunglasses there that someone said I looked 'mysterious' in this morning, and that's at least as good.

And they fit! And I think I love them as much as I did before the saga started, but even if I don't, I'm wearing them anyway. With my green sunglasses. Watch out Michelle Obama.

So that's the boots. The panties, well I can't be the only woman in the world to have been forwarded this link by her boyfriend. I do have a pair of pink pants (about which, strangely, I have previously written), where do I send them?

joella

I'll be out for a while

But I'll be back in a bit. I am just walking through the snow, finding out if this is it.

(That's a bastardised quote, so extra points if you get it).

I have SO MUCH to write about -- dressing for success, the absence of snow ploughs, the Beautiful Georgian City of Bath, whether or not 25 random things about me are interesting in any way, how much I am enjoying the West Wing. But I am flat out stressed out at the moment, mainly because I am currently doing an old-fashioned five day week in order to complete an impossible assignment.

I have some new photos of toilets, too. Oh well. I have to focus on the urgent, and the urgent is currently a slippery walk away.

laters

joella

When I was a lass...

... it did snow more. It *did*. I remember walking to school in my wellies, which were higher than my socks, and the rub rub rub of cold rubber against bare legs. I can still feel it now. That must have been in the 1970s, so we had more snow *and* long hot summers. Who said the past didn't go anywhere.

And then there was the big freeze of... 1981? 1982? Somewhere round there. School was no longer within walking distance, though it was only shut for a day. It might have been that day, or it might have been a non-school day thenabouts that I offered to go shopping for various little old ladies in a nearby cul de sac. There was a Spar down the road, and I attached the laundry basket to the toboggan with bungee cords (I may have had adult assistance for this) and then hitched up the dachshunds. They couldn't actually pull me, of course, not actually being huskies, but they did manage a load of Ambrosia Creamed Rice, teabags, barley sugars etc with only a couple of disappearing into snowdrift incidents. I felt as much like Laura Ingalls Wilder as it was possible to feel on a housing estate in Lancashire.

We knew how to make our own fun in those days.

joella

Cash in boots

My lovely parents bought me some lovely boots for my lovely birthday. The boots I settled on were from the Gudrun Sjoden winter sale. You can only buy Gudrun Sjoden stuff online, unless you live in Stockholm, Malmö, Gothenburg, Oslo, Copenhagen, Hamburg or Nuremberg, and it's a bit of a pain, frankly. But the clothes are so completely unlike anything I see anywhere else that occasionally it's worth it. In the sale -- as they are also on the pricy side.

These ones are purple. They call it aubergine. They were £160, now £120. This makes them the most expensive boots I have ever owned by a factor of at least two, but they are lovely, and when things are lovely I wear them for years and years. I looked at a photo of them for several months, and I didn't want them any less. These are not a crush, or an impulse purchase. This is love.

So I ordered them. They took ages to arrive. Imagine my excitement when they arrived the Friday before my birthday, and imagine my disappointment when they turned out to be too big. They came straight off like wellies. I tried them with my very biggest socks (which are very big) but no. If you're going to have posh boots, they have to be the right size.

I checked on the website, and they still had the 37s in stock. I rang up to double check and it was the last pair. I asked them if they could put them aside for me until I could return the other ones but they said they couldn't. So I had to buy another pair. At this point I had spent £240 on boots. At the end of the month. My overdraft was creaking. I packed up the 38s to go back asap for a refund.

Then yesterday I got an email saying that the 37s had, in fact been out of stock, so they had refunded my (second) £120, but they would be back *in* stock on Feb 4, so I might like to re-order them.

I rang them up again. They said they had one pair. I should buy them now. I said hang on, you've taken £120 for the first pair, which were too big, so I'm sending them back, but you still have my £120. You've taken £120 for the second pair, which you say you've refunded, but it hasn't appeared in my bank account yet. Now you want £120 for a third pair? This could go on forever! Am I financing your entire operation?

Ah, she said. Well, I can put this pair on hold for you. I wish you'd done that last time, I said, when you said you couldn't. But great, thank you. So if I send back the 38s, you'll replace them with the last pair of 37s, which you're putting on hold?

Well, she said, when you send back the 38s, it will look like the 37s are out of stock, because they're on hold, so you'll have to put a note on the return slip to tell them that they aren't really out of stock.

Right, I said. OK.

So at the moment I am down £240 (actually, technically now I am down £120 and my dad is down £120 as in the meantime his money came through) and have no boots, but you've got to (try and) have faith. If these ones don't fit, I'll cry. And there has to be an easier way to get shod.

joella

You're so old

You must be 23
You spent the year
In a drunken frenzy
Lied to your friends
Adopted false ideas
Quit your job
Because it made you crazy

[If you don't know this album, check it out. And I suspect this could be one of those years...]

joella

The devil in the detail

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

The interconnectedness of all things

I do heart Last.fm. I don't use it all the time, as I have a big CD and small vinyl collection (not to mention the tapes) but I listen to Last.fm radio a lot at work -- 80s electronica when I'm trying to write something, Scandinavian post-rock when I'm trying to read something, other things when I'm just trying to shut out the noise and think. Some people can't work to music but I'm the opposite -- I think it occupies the restless, anxious part of my mind so the rest of it can focus on something. 

But of course you get lots of other lovely Web 2.0 type stuff along with your music, and it was while listening to Damon and Naomi tag radio that I discovered they were playing last week at the Luminaire in Kilburn: a venue I have now been to twice and can't recommend highly enough. There's open parking after 6.30, there's a South Indian restaurant that serves masala dosas just round the corner, and there are signs everywhere saying things like 'you've come here to listen to the music: if you want to talk to your friends go to the pub downstairs'. 

Last.fm also lets you see which other last.fm'ers are going to the gig, which is good as you can then go and listen to their radio stations, but best of all it provides a Flickr machine tag for photos, which is a genius idea. I was right at the front and I did take a couple of photos, but a) I don't really have the camera for it and b) I hate that thing that happens at gigs now where all you get is a sea of cameras and mobile phones pointing at the stage, like it's more important to record your experience of being there rather than just be there. And anyway, Damon and Naomi don't exactly put on a show, their magic is to be found in stillness and space. You need to involve yourself. 

So I was rather hoping that someone else would take some photos and machine-tag them, and indeed someone did -- the guy who was standing next to us, by the looks of the angles, and his photos are great, a lot better than mine would have been however many I'd taken. We should come to a citizen's arrangement that there should only be one person taking photos at a gig and they should put them up on the internet. Think how marvellous that would be. 

Anyway, it was a gorgeous gig, and I was very thankful to have found out about it. Thank you, Last.fm. 

But there are always drawbacks. We had people round for dinner on Friday. The kinds of people who know how to make an occasion. I don't exactly remember going to bed, but I knew when I woke up on Saturday morning that there would be chaos downstairs. I had memories of an impatient taxi driver, a struggle over the volume knob (with me on the side of caution, but *you* try arguing with J when he's had a few) and some headbanging. 

And there was Last.fm still open, and able to inform me that the last song we played was Ace of Spades, at 2 am. I'm not sure I wanted to know that. 

joella

I scream, you scream, we all scream

I was at my absolute most irritable time of month last night, and my mood was not helped by the fact that I had to bring some work home. I did it after dinner, sitting at the big table, drinking beer in an effort to feel less irritable, which sort of works, but has an obvious knock-on effect on one's ability to process information and articulate sensible responses to it.

The table is practically *in* next door's house, so if the students open the windows and start screaming, as they do with tedious regularity (what can be so exciting? Did I spend my 20th year making mindless screechy woo noises? I don't think I did, but perhaps I've just forgotten) it can get oppressive pretty quickly. Sure enough, the noise started and I gritted my teeth, glared pointlessly in their general direction, and stabbed away at the keyboard. 

But then there was a genuinely horrific scream and my blood went cold. It sounded like one of them was being attacked, or someone had cut their head open. I ran out into the garden and looked over the fence into their back room, trying to see what was wrong. 

But they were all in there, drinking and smoking and laughing away. Then I realised the noise was coming from our house. 

Turned out it was housemate P listening to Diamanda Galas Really Pretty Loud. Drown out the screaming with more screaming, well, why not? 

I laughed, went back inside and turned up the PJ Harvey. 

joella

Celeriac dreams

It's counter intuitive, but getting an organic veg box delivered has saved us a lot of money. The vegetables may be relatively expensive, but they arrive every week demanding to be eaten. We peer into the box every Tuesday and then make plans, which generally involve things we have in the cupboard. Plus cheese. 

So we hardly go to the supermarket at all -- I do an online shop (or go to Sainsburys on a Saturday morning with ex housemate S and baby Tungsten) every month or so to replenish the things that live in the cupboard, plus cheese, and we are blessed with corner shops (one of which sells samosas) to meet most other conceivable food needs. 

I used to go to Tesco at least once a week, and somehow ended up buying lots of random stuff, plus things like ready meals that we just don't eat anymore because we've all the veg to get through. 

We use Abel & Cole, derided by hardcore greenies as the supermarket of veg box schemes, but they have two big advantages over genuinely local set-ups: first, you can tell them that you don't like Jerusalem artichokes and you won't get any, and second, they do use non-UK produce (though they don't air freight) from time to time, so it's not root vegetables and nothing but root vegetables the whole winter through. 

It's not far off it though, and I am beginning to run out of inspired things to do with parsnips, and to tire of scraping mud off carrots. I cannot imagine ever running out of onions, or to think 'hmm, I fancy swede tonight'. 

Perhaps the biggest challenge has been the celeriac -- they are so damn big. Two hungry people can only eat half a celeriac a day tops, and once you've had a celeriac day, you need a few days off. I've put them in soups and mashed them with potatoes; M has made stew with them and grated them into salads. Yet still they come. 

But hey, we have the internet. So I was delighted to find this recipe for smoked salmon and celeriac dauphinoise -- sounds posh, but it's dead easy (especially for me, as I didn't cook it...). We had it with rocket salad and something Jamie Oliverish involving beetroot and thyme. Mmmmm. I'd say the smoked salmon was optional, but you'd be hard pushed to make a decent vegan version.

Right, must dash, I've a date with a cabbage.

joella

What goes around comes around

I spent a goodly portion of Tuesday tidying my bedroom and making a charity shop pile. I do this a couple of times a year -- anything I hovered over last time but haven't worn / used / given a second thought to since goes. It generally works well, though there's a denim skirt I still miss.

This time round, I gave the briefcase a hard stare. I haven't used it for years, but I've hesitated to part with it during previous purges because a) it was a gift, and b) I could see an occasion when I might want to use a briefcase again happening before an occasion when I might buy another one. For a while I felt like that about my suit, but I got rid of *that* (M&S, machine washable, utterly charmless) ages ago.

I opened the briefcase to see if it was empty. It wasn't, but everything in it -- business cards from the House on the Hill, pre-rebrand Tampax, out of date painkillers, a mousemat from a conference -- was dial-up ancient. The most recent thing in there was a print out of my presentation for my first job interview at NGO X, which happened some time in early 2000. There was also a Parker mechanical pencil (result! I'd totally forgotten I'd ever owned such a thing) and a rather smart notebook. Was a time I passed as a proper grown up. I had more expensive hair then, too.

I flicked through the notebook, which mostly consisted of notes I took while covering the conference that provided the mousemat... end of 1998, I'd guess, possibly end of 1997. There were conversations with PR people (never my favourites) and marketing managers (only marginally better). There were lots of words with 'fucking' inserted in the middle, like 'super-fucking-highway' and 'stra-fucking-tegic'. Some things never change, I thought to myself.

And then I came upon the knowledge-fucking-management notes, taken during a conference session, I imagine, where I was probably both desperately hungover and spectacularly bored. Let's just say there are some environments where you wait a long time for a quotable quote, and this was one of them. But the scary thing wasn't my palpable uninterest or casual profanity, it was that the questions outlined by the speaker, which I dutifully wrote down, in my handwriting which hasn't changed a bit but which looks somehow like it comes from another world -- 'Who owns KM? How do information management people get senior managers to take it seriously? Why don't IT departments understand it?' are, at least in the NGO world, still not resolved. 

I struggle every (working) day with the same things those people were struggling with OVER TEN YEARS AGO. The wheel is still being invented, the mire is just as deep. I found this profoundly depressing. There is no way I want to keep that briefcase now.

I went back to work this morning. At least it was warm there.

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

I demand a better future

I'm just back from Telford and Manchester, a sewing machine richer, a Swiss Army Knife poorer, and full of the reflected warmth of family and old friends N & D plus their two-and-a-bit children -- the soon-to-be-middle one of whom I am reluctant godmother to. The reluctance is all to do with the god part and nothing to do with her: she is small and thoughtful and determined, and can already paint with one hand and eat with the other with only minor crossover complications.

Her mother N is one of my favourite people in the whole world -- also small (though quite big at the moment) and thoughtful and determined. We met when she was 14 and I was 15 and we worked together in a bread shop on Saturdays. 'Something reminded me of the Bread Oven the other day,' I said. 'I can't remember what it was now'*.

Really stale bread? she said. Or did you meet a Nazi?

She was referring to Grant the baker, who terrorised us both from our arrival at 8.30 each Saturday until he left around noon. It was so bad that we used to meet somewhere else at 8 -- the lorry driver's cafe in the winter, on the beach in the summer -- to gather our strength and so we would always arrive together. Then we would take it in turns to be the one who first ventured into the back of the shop to get the pork pies out of the fridge. He hated us both -- me because I tried to stand up to him and N because she didn't -- and me a little bit more (maybe) because I didn't hide the fact I was a little bit Jewish and a little bit academic and he didn't hide the fact that he was more than a little bit Jew-hating and more than a little bit of a porn-eating book burner. There were bruises along the way, and none of them on him.

I hope he's dead now, she said. I really do. I do too, I said. Let me know if you hear anything, so I can leave a pork pie and a gherkin on his grave.

The next morning, we were dissecting the Guardian Family Section article about tomboys. In my view, like most Guardian Family Section articles, it raised a potentially interesting issue then drowned it in mediocre middle class reportage. The tomboy in the 1970s sense -- the girl who wants to be a boy, as epitomised by George in the Famous Five -- is a fascinating creature. Does she want to be a boy because boys have freedom of movement and expression that girls are denied? Does she want to be a boy because she can see that boys are more valued in the world? Does she actually identify as a boy? Or does she just hate wearing dresses and playing with dolls and being expected to be passive and nice?

Th article didn't really tell us. The 'genuine tomboy' they interviewed did seem to have some interesting stuff going on, and I think that was handled well, though all the stuff about the 'anonymous mothers' of other tomboys rather diluted the positivity of the story of the lone seven year old whose mother doesn't mind.

But I ain't her, and neither is N, yet we were both labelled tomboys in our time. I don't want to be a boy, I said to N, while a little on the drunk side, and I never have. I just want to be taken seriously.

Exactly, she said. And I fucking hate (she added, five months pregnant, stone cold sober and waving a spatula) wearing a dress. When you wear a dress everyone looks at you, and tells you how great you look, and you know, it's nobody's fucking business how I look except mine.

This is a wilderness point of view in a world that has plastic surgery ads on the back of buses. But it's one I share, and we clinked glasses and toasted a better future for her daughters. I'd like to think they will have more options than we had, but observing our overmediated, X-factored, pink and blue-drenched age, I am not so sure.

Having said that, I had the late night munchies last night, and ate cheese and crackers sitting on the loo while M danced round the kitchen singing 'she's a matzo girl, living in a matzo world'. There's a place for everyone, if we can only find it.

joella

* I have remembered and forgotten what it was several times since first drafting this. Getting up early? Eccles cakes? Parkin?

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

Topical poll

I could do this as a proper poll in the sidebar, as I have seen other bloggers do. But I don't envisage doing it often, and I know people get here mostly by accident (which is fine, this being the internet) or by design (which is better, but sidebar polls do not show up in feed readers).

So... the topic of the evening, with R & Ms Y and housemate P and post parsnip soup and sloe gin was -- who should Madonna go out with next?

The various suggestions were...

a) Justin Timberlake
b) George Formby (assuming he wasn't, you know, dead)
c) George Clooney
d) Grace Jones
e) M (though given the choice he'd go for Bjork)
f) P Diddy
g) Bill Clinton

It's a tricky one, and your thoughts would be welcome.

joella

Between the Lines

There are two things I often want to blog about and don't.

1. Work. As previously mentioned, NGO X has a blogging policy. This means I can't say anything BAD about the place, or anything MEAN about anyone who works there. So if, say, I felt that there were some DUMB things happening, I would have to keep them under my virtual hat. I'm not saying that, of course. I'm just saying that there's a box of wine in the fridge.

2. The challenges of stepmotherhood, which come and go in a way I cannot anticipate, especially at this most fraught time of year. I *thought* we'd made it perfectly clear that there were no obligations, no strings, see you whenever, but an unwelcome third-party analysis suggests otherwise. I'm not saying it's not hard for them. I'm just saying there's a box of wine in the fridge.

joella

Woolly thoughts

I can't say I did much to save Woolworths, but then there hasn't been one in Oxford city centre since I've lived here, or not so as I can remember anyway. But I'm far from the first to note that it has a special place in the national psyche, and mine is no different -- even though I hate Pick'N'Mix.

Lytham Woolworths: small-ish, surprisingly well stocked and recently closed. The site was purchased by Tesco, which is alarming in itself, but that's for another time. I spent many, many hours in this shop as a teenager, as it was the only local source of music once The Disc Centre became a handbag shop. A girl I once babysat worked in there when she left school -- her name was Johanna. Whenever I bought blank C90s from her she would look right through me (to be fair, I was not very good at babysitting), and I would notice that her name badge said 'Helen' or 'Andrea' or anything female except Johanna. I asked my mother, who knew her mother, about this once, and she said that they were required to wear a name badge, presumably so people could complain (or, I guess, write letters of fulsome praise) about them, but nobody actually said it had to be their own. I rather admired the low-level anarchy of this action.

Cambridge Woolworths: big, central, and featuring, at least in the late 1980s, a formica-tastic cafe on the first floor. I've never admitted this in public before, but I used to hide out in there on my own when I first went to university, so overwhelmed was I by the poshness and unfamiliarity of gowns and drinks parties and teenagers with their own cafetieres. In my first term I would take a book up there and drink milkshakes and eat toasted teacakes and smoke cheap cigarettes and look out the window and wonder if I'd made a terrible mistake. Then I would go back downstairs and buy some blank C90s and get on with it.

I can sort of see why what's happened has happened ... unclear retail proposition, online competition blah blah blah. But I wonder where, in the future, will we be able to buy a hot water bottle, a Tupperware box, some glitter pens, daffodil bulbs and a large box of Dairy Milk all under one comforting roof?

joella

Seasonal oppression

Here it comes again. I feel overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time. There must be a word for this?

The house is a mess, and this is compounded by a) the makings of various home made gifts (austerity Christmas, you see -- more stressful than you think it's going to be) and b) the fact that it's freezing (austerity gas consumption), so the colder rooms have an air of neglect. This includes the bathroom, which has a radiator that's on but about to spring a leak, just to add a little edge to things. The bathroom is mainly used by housemate P... I don't know when his cleaning gene kicks in, but I've seen no sign of it yet.

A couple of weeks ago, I thought I would cheer myself up by buying something from the Gudrun Sjoden sale. But as with so many mail order things, it just doesn't look right on. So that's another post office queue to endure.

On the other hand, I don't have any plumbing this week, and I am off to buy a samosa in the sunshine.

joella

Of rats and rock stars

I was stashing my plumbing stuff in the shed on Monday afternoon when M came out to empty the mixing bowl of compostables into the compost bin. He took the lid off the bin and then yelped. He yelps rather fetchingly, but it's always hard to tell whether it's something serious (eg he's fallen off a ladder while holding the electric hedge trimmer) or not (eg there's an episode of The Simpsons on that he hasn't seen yet).

It was a rat, rapidly disappearing into the cabbage leaves and coffee grounds. And no, we have never added any meat, fish, bread, or cooked food to the compost, nor, for the last couple of years, any egg shells. And still we are infested. I blame the cold. And the students. Most things are their fault.

Our local council offer a free rat management service (which gives you an idea of the extent of the rat issue in these parts) so, after a little vegetarian soul searching, I booked a visit from the rat man. Those who have already met him claim he is exactly what you would expect -- "there's something medieval about him" -- so I'm kind of looking forward to it in a life's rich tapestry sort of way. But also oppressed by having vermin to deal with as well as a leaky roof and a global recession. No fair.

And it's absolutely freezing, and I've got a cold coming on, so the next day I was beginning to wish I *hadn't* agreed to go all the way to sodding Birmingham to see Jarvis Cocker on a school night. I just wanted to stay in with a hot water bottle and a good book and forget about the world out there.

But, as my Significant Ex used to say, it's amazing how wrong one person can be. For it was a near-perfect gig experience, despite being held in a Carling *spit* Academy, where there is no proper beer and they won't let you buy water in a bottle, never mind take it in, and the annual toilet paper budget is used up by the middle of February.

Against all odds, we found the venue and managed to park close by, then bought our Guinnesses and found a spot that was acceptable for me (5'4"), for P (boyfriend of one of M's daughters, who is something like 6'6"), and for our respective companions (both somewhere in between). The place filled up benignly around us, the support band were pretty good, we gradually warmed up and then on he came.

For the first half of the set, he bore an uncanny resemblance to Mr W, the man who taught me Physical Geography in the sixth form. This was quite confusing, as I do not recall finding Mr W remotely attractive, though he did unknowingly play a cameo role on the day of my deflowering.

By the end he looked much more like the beardy one out of Parts & Labor, or indeed several other beardy geek noise merchants, and calm was restored.

And from start to finish, he rocked, in a funny, clever, cool, Northern, totally right on but not at all earnest sort of a way. I don't think there's anyone else who can do that. I was completely into it, in that rest of the world falling away, nowhere else I'd rather be sense. I don't get that feeling very often, but it's up there with the best feelings in the world when it happens.

And it was even better because it was unexpected... we have a copy of Jarvis in the house but I've never got into it. Seeing it live, it all made sense.

The first encore ended with Don't Let Him Waste Your Time, which is a beautiful song to hear a rock star singing. I was suddenly reminded again of Mr W, and had a little vision of him shrugging off his anorak and flinging himself around the playing fields singing it to me as I blinked back my first 'was that it? And why is he ignoring me?' teenage tears.

I don't think I'd have listened to him, though. You have to find some things out the hard way, and thank god we have music for when we do.

joella

The mathematician and the Muslim

I left the room because nobody wanted to talk about poverty and faith and gender, and that's my topic of the day. I went to a seriously interesting talk about this (among many other things) at lunchtime, so in a way I started it, but it went off in its own direction and I was suddenly on the outside.

Housemate P was talking about faith. M was talking about maths.

But what happened, said P, before there was algebra?

There's always been algebra, said M. There might not have been anyone around to experience it, but it was still there. All of existence is numbers. Numbers is all of existence.

Heck. I shall go and tend the fire. *There's* something I believe in.

joella

Sloe business

A month ago, there were two litres of sloe gin, steeping, we said as we stabbed the sloes with forks, for Christmas. Now there is one litre.

I have no regrets. The sloe gathering was huge fun, and only minor injuries were sustained. Likewise the preparation. The end product, even with inadequate steepage, was glorious. No lives were lost, and many arguments were augmented.

No, the problem is as follows: I'd like to see if we can get more sloe gin out of the prematurely drained sloes, by adding more gin and more sugar to the empty (bar sloes) bottle. It's a high risk manoeuvre, but it might just work. M agrees the risk is high, and would like to spread it across both bottles: decant half the gin from the already steeped litre into the drained one, then add more sugar and gin to both. I would rather risk losing a litre of cheap gin (well, 750 ml, the rest is sloes) by adding sugar to it and have nothing else happen than compromise the quality of our remaining purple ambrosia. 

What to do (given that there is still a month to go till Christmas)?

joella

Post-viral reality TV

Right, I said to M last night as we watched Survivors, if I get it first, fill the bath with cold water. And every pan in the house. Maybe we should get a water butt after all.

Jo, he said, it's television. It's not really happening.

Hmm, I said. OK, let's have another sloe gin.

Later, the ethnically diverse bunch of sensible women (apart from the one in shock) and aggressive men (apart from the little boy) that were left to carry on the human race stood on the fast lane of the M25 and wondered where to go.

Well somewhere with a well and a septic tank, obviously, I said. Like, duh.

Jo, he said.

OK, OK, I said. But you know, if J the plumber and M the Field Secretary have made it, I reckon we'll be all right.

joella

No BNP near me

A request came round this week to join a 'working party' on the allotments this morning -- there was a chopped down tree to clear, and some hedging to plant. It was a glorious morning, so we girded our loins, rugged up and got on down there. I wasn't really sure what to do, but direction was provided, and pretty soon we were lopping and wheeling and dragging dead wood up the site and handing it over to a man who was building a bonfire with the look of someone who has been building bonfires for many years. It was amazing how quickly the tree was broken down and shifted, and then we started digging holes for hazel and buckthorn and spindle.

After a couple of hours, we knocked the dirt off our spades and began taking our leave -- M had offered housemate P a lift to the bus stop with his music gear, and anyway our lower backs were feeling the pinch. Well you can't go *yet*, said M the Field Secretary. We're just about to have a drink. And he produced a bottle of Southern Comfort which he proceeded to mix with hot blackcurrant squash from a giant Thermos and hand round in plastic beakers.

Southern Comfort was briefly my drink of choice, just after my vodka and lime phase. I decided it was cool, in the same way I decided that Sobranie Cocktail cigarettes were cool, and I drank it, and smoked them (on special occasions -- the rest of the time it was mostly Embassy Regal), until I moved onto beer and roll ups when I became a Proper Student.

I've hardly had Southern Comfort since, for the very good reason that it is pretty disgusting, but this was different. It was a hot sweet drink on a cold sharp day, stomping on the ground to keep warm, looking around and laughing with everyone taking the serious piss out of Joe Swift, and realising that I was the youngest and the smallest and the only female person there, and certainly (with the possible exception of M) knew the least about growing vegetables, but that this didn't, at that moment, matter one iota. Knowledge comes, and I can drag a chunk of tree with the best of them.

I set off home feeling warm of heart, muzzy of head and heavy of foot, as there was a massive clump of clay firmly attached to each of my wellies. There was a clear need for snacks, so I took a detour via the Best Samosa Shop In Town, a tiny, friendly Muslim-run newsagent on Magdalen Road where I made my purchases on the threshold because by the time I got there I was shedding mud with every step.

Then I poured a glass of white and spent a little while getting to know my enemy by perusing the leaked list of BNP members. Lancashire doesn't come out of it well, I have to say, and there is one on the street I grew up on, which is rather sad but not that surprising. But Oxford, for a city, doesn't do so bad. You can see the list on wikileaks, or for a neat graphic representation, which doesn't name names, check out BNP Near Me? You'd think, looking at that, that the centre of Oxford was completely BNP free, but scrutiny of the list reveals that there is one instance where the OX4 postcode has been typo-ed as OX41. A&L, he's on your street. Sorry about that.

But I'm looking on the bright side. The bonfire will be lit on the winter solstice, and there will be more Southern Comfort and stomping to do.

joella

Willing to fight?

I bought the Guardian as usual on Saturday, having returned to the newspapers, if not the radio, with the Obama victory. I normally buy it, with a loaf of Polish bread, from our local Asian newsagents. This week though, I bought it in the Co-op, from the smiling young man of African extraction who usually makes a point of asking if I have any ID, and then laughing a lot, because from him I am usually buying wine.

But he wasn't smiling when I handed the paper over. 'Everybody wants to talk about Baby P', he said. There was nobody waiting behind me, and we both stood there together for a few moments, looking down at the photo of him on the front page. It felt like we should mark the unspeakable awfulness of it, but we didn't have a very good way of doing it.

To be frank, I felt much the same way about the Remembrance Sunday ceremony I attended the previous weekend while I was Up North visiting the parentals. My dad came out of the cafe opposite the War Memorial at about 30 seconds to 11, stayed for the two minutes silence and then disappeared back in. I lasted a little bit longer on either side, but not much. 'I didn't expect there to be so much God stuff in it,' I said as I squeezed back into the booth. And I didn't -- he did, which is why he timed his cheese toastie with such precision: he's done this before. Atheists want to do their remembering too.

To make matters worse it was the unchallenging yet somehow non-inclusive sort of God stuff that I find so non-comforting at funerals. Every self-important civic dignitary, committee member and general do-gooder in town was there, plus some embarrassed looking naval cadets, a sprinkling of elderly veterans and a truly awful brass band. But that was about it. Large swathes of the Great British Public, in fact, were largely unrepresented, maybe because they couldn't be arsed, but also because I suspect it would have been as irrelevant, or worse, a ceremony to the great majority as it was to me. And I think we should be able to do better than that.

I always buy, and wear, a red poppy, and when I can get hold of one I wear a white poppy too. When I was at school I used to buy two red ones and paint one of them with Tipp-Ex (which is quite sweet when I look back at it), because I had no idea where to get a white one. There still weren't any other white poppies on display in small town Lancashire last weekend. Can't say I'm surprised: to my mind, the white poppy is for the grey areas, and I didn't sense much desire to acknowledge those.

joella

Me, my dad, and Lytham windmill

Me and my dad
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

We were on our way to the second hand bookshop. The wind was like icy knives, the fighter planes were roaring over on their practice runs from Warton, and we were talking about the demise of Preston docks.

And then the sun came out. Sometimes I wonder, why would I want to be anywhere else?

joella

We have lift off! (Probably)

So BJ the plumbing assessor looked at my plasterboard chase photo, looked sideways at me and said 'are you left-handed?'.

Yes, I said.

Hmmm, he said. And then he signed it off.

So unless the small detail of it being the wrong type of wall is picked up by the IV (internal verifier) or the EV (external verifier), I have finished my NVQ.

Congratulations lass, he said, shaking my hand. Cheers, I said, grinning like an idiot.

He gave me a receipt for my folder. I shall stick that on the wall till the certificate arrives. I agreed to come back and have my photo taken for diversity purposes. A genuine woman! And a left-hander!

And now I'm off to Lancashire to connect with my past and convene with my kin. And raise a glass to the free world.

joella

Interim review

What feels like a long time ago, but was probably about four years, I took a deep breath and walked into a plumber's merchants on a Saturday morning. 'I'd like a WC siphon please', I said, when the man behind the counter eventually looked over at me.

'Round or square'? he said.

Shit. I had no idea, as the thing I had in mind had kind of rounded bits and kind of square bits. I nearly legged it and never went back, but instead I blushed and said 'um, can I see them both?'.

It was a square one, most of them are. In fact I've only ever seen one round one and it was from the 1950s. The cistern was made from asbestos. I'm sure he knew that.

On Monday I went into see D, the plumber's merchant that J the plumber introduced me to. They've known each other since they were 10, and call each other 'Marmite mangler', which seems to me to be a 10 year old's insult if ever there was one.

All right? he said. What can I do for you today?

I need a WC siphon please, I said. Low level? he said. No, close-coupled, I said. And it needs to be kind of short. Eight inch two-part do you? he said. Perfect, I said. And a doughnut washer, please.

Rubber or foam? he said. Oooh, I said, I've only used the foam ones. What do you think?

I'd go for rubber, he said, you get a bit more give.

Rubber it is then, I said. (And he was right). In fact I got two, and am currently wearing the other one as a sort of 80s-style bangle.

I'm still waiting for the final photo opportunity that will seal my NVQ (I thought a plasterboard chase would do, but turns out it needs to be masonry). But nonetheless, there is progress.

joella

F**kin' A!

Nice work America! This is my favourite version of the song of the year. Be grateful I'm sparing you the Billy Bragg version, which is heartwarming but also kind of shit.



joella

Evening in America?

If evening in America is the end of the day that began with Reagan's Morning, then I do So Hope So. I am more excited than I expected to be, and more anxious than I'd like to be. I've had a Genius playlist based on Young Americans on all day, which I'm tempering now with a bit of Gil Scott Heron, and I'm wondering what time to set the alarm for. This might be the first time I turn on the Today Programme in weeks.

But I remember 1992, when we went to bed thinking we might have a Labour government, or at worst a hung parliament, and woke up to five years of John Major. I was teaching A level sociology in a crammer college in Oxford at the time. I walked around all day saying 'how can so many people be so stupid?', and being met with incredulous / condescending / outright hostile stares.

That was the day I realised three important things:

1. There are a lot of Tories in the world and they are not all older than me (they weren't even all older than me *then*)
2. I should have paid the damn Poll Tax and voted Labour. Instead I refused to join the electoral register and lost my vote. I've always wondered how many other people did exactly the same, and what effect our votes might have had.
3. People lie in exit polls. It had never occurred to me that you might vote one way and say you had voted another. I defend your right to do so, but it sucks.

So... it ain't over till the skinny black guy says Yes We Can. But the signs are good, the signs are good.

joella

Because I'm worth it

Last Friday I had a meeting with my mentor. He is someone I see every couple of months -- I explain what I'm trying to do at work and he picks gentle holes in it. I close the hole, and another one appears. After a couple of hours he says 'yes, that just about makes sense' and I leave feeling a bit tender but much happier. It's very therapeutic. And the idea is that I do a better job as a result, which is why NGO X is prepared to spring for an off peak train ticket to London and a sandwich afterwards.

Normally I try and combine this with another meeting in London, as by the time I've got myself back to the office it's hardly worth it, but last Friday I decided instead to take the afternoon off. I was on the South Bank, so I thought of the Hayward or Tate Modern, but those are default choices. I wanted to be intrepid.

Intrepidness also involves avoiding the Tube, so I decided to go somewhere I could walk to. I settled on the Imperial War Museum, which I don't think I've been to before (or if I have it was a long, long time ago). I got most of the way there by walking along the river, past the London Aquarium, which awoke my Blackpool nerve endings... water noises, chill wind, the smell of cheap food, hordes of disoriented people having organised fun a long way from home.

In the IWM cafe, I read my book about growing vegetables over a homity pie and a glass of red, which led to a conversation about the trials of clay soil and the joys of sweetcorn with an elderly couple with cut-glass accents. Turned out he owns a farm just outside Oxford. She lives in Chiswick. I suspect they were having an assignation.

I stumbled into a First World War trench on the way to the loo, which was interesting, but I still had Blackpool on my mind and it was a bit too reminiscent of the Gold Mine ride on the Pleasure Beach. Anyway, what I'd really come to see was the Holocaust Exhibition.

I've been to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and to the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam, and seen various films and read various books - most recently The Lost, by Daniel Mendelsohn (a hefty tome that I read in Finland and which M dubbed 'Jo's Bumper Book of Jews'). I've learned something from all of them. But the exhibition at the IWM is easily, far and away, the best thing I've ever seen, read, watched or listened to on the subject. It manages to combine the sort of historical analysis that can only happen from a reasonable distance with survivors' testimony that can only be gathered from living memories. I was in there for hours, and then, by the exit, I sat down and wept.

I started to wander through the In Memoriam exhibition about WW1 afterwards, which is also excellent, but I couldn't really take it in. So instead I wandered around the park outside for a while, then headed back over the river to meet my friend R after work. I did this by getting on a bus, and I was incredibly pleased with myself for managing to avoid rush hour Tube hell *and* get a great top-deck view all the way over Westminster Bridge and into Soho.

I was hoping I could persuade R into the Intrepid Fox, which I used to love. I wanted a shot of the legendary, terrifying toilets for my collection. But sadly, it is boarded up. We went instead to the gorgeous Busaba, and then to a strange little wine cafe on Lexington Street where we squeezed into the tiniest space imaginable and drank something exorbitantly priced but delicious while trying (and failing) not to bang our heads on the legs of ham swinging from hooks around the place. Not that it was a problem, we were too busy talking talking talking.

I couldn't avoid the Tube forever, and I used it to get myself to Paddington in time for the last sensible train back to Oxford. En route I checked my phone to find a text message confirming a rumour that I hadn't dared really believe might be true. I was hoping M would be up to help me celebrate, but figured I would probably, in my half cut state, be rather annoying company. But then halfway home I looked up at a familiar window, to see someone leaning out of it, surveying the street scene. It wasn't C, as I had expected, but his 17 year old daughter G, who invited me up. There was a little session going on, of the sort I almost never get to take part in these days. I wondered at the appropriateness of this, and then thought 'fuck it'.

So I got home smelling of smoke and pork, giggling a little and giddy with happiness. I"m guessing most people's Me Time won't look anything like mine, and I wouldn't try and persuade you that it should. But I would try and persuade you that it's worth taking some. The glow still hasn't quite worn off.

joella

Many switch in, switch on, switch off

Got a text message from local government the other day
Opened it and read it, it said they were suckers
Wanted me to put out my blue recycling box and garden waste bag for collection before 7 am tomorrow
Picture me giving a damn?
I said ooh, I'm glad I subscribed to that, I'd have forgotten otherwise.

joella
 

Recession playlist: track #3

The Bevis Frond's Maybe - part obliteration, part all seeing. A mainstay of my soundtrack to the last recession, and important for other reasons too. At least one boat is named for this song.

And are we the worst, who see it all, and still refuse to act?

Yeah, maybe.

joella

Party like it's 1991

I'm just back from a municipal swimming experience. Which is better than no swimming experience at all, but it did make me pine for the lake. In the lake, you could swim and swim and swim, turning thoughts over in your mind until they came to rest naturally.

And while I was there, swimming in the lake, I thought a lot about calmness, and how I should strive for more of it. Which of course I forgot as soon as I got home and got furious with the shrieking students and the parking hell and the relentless greyness and the price of butter. But as I was swimming today, for the first time in ages, my muscles seemed to remember, and I found myself thinking about calmness again.

I get angry too quickly. Not as quickly as J the plumber, who goes from 0 to C-word in about five seconds, but too quickly. With people, not with things. I am quite patient with things. But with people, I get furious, because they are so often Inconsiderate Or Just Plain Thick. Or are they?

Take the students next door (I wish someone would, BA BOOM!). Now, I graduated into a recession, and it wasn't much fun. Some people got jobs, but they were mostly the ones who had confused me by suddenly cutting their hair and putting on a suit around the beginning of their third year. That was their "student experience", and now it was time for their "junior financial analyst experience". Or whatever.

Those of us without a five year plan, or an old school tie network, who had thought we'd maybe see what happened next, found that what happened next was we signed on. My dad kept asking me when I was going to become a yuppie, I wrapped my oversized Oxfam overcoat more tightly around me and glared at him.

And got wrecked. A lot. For quite a long time. It was great fun. But it was also about the only thing that made any sense. And we were a luckier generation than this lot -- we were impoverished but we weren't hugely indebted. Nobody delivered us pizzas, so we could more or less cook; nobody had invented alcopops, so we drank cheap beer, and we didn't have mobile phones or laptops or iPods to maintain. It was all a lot more manageable. I'm also pretty sure we spent considerably less on personal grooming. Or maybe that was just me.

After a year or so, I borrowed some money and went travelling with my Significant Ex for a year, during which I'm pretty sure we spent less than we would have if we'd stayed at home. Eventually, of course, I did get a job, and pretty grim it was too. But that's another story.

So I do have sympathy with my neighbours' regular, valiant attempts to obliterate reality by means of vodka, class As and screaming*. It's cold, and it's going to get colder. And if you've been overindulged to the extent that you tumble dry your washing all year round, it's going to be tough when those bills start coming in and your dad's not paying them anymore.  

joella

* Not limitless sympathy, mind. Though they have been a lot better since M went round in his pink dressing gown and yelled 'I'm not interested in 'sorry', I'm interested in you shutting up'. 

Middle room finds fame

M's band's first YouTube video - shot by M himself (he asked me to do it, but I was too embarrassed: I am possibly fleetingly visible making soup in the kitchen) in our middle room.

Advisory: mostly work-safe, but does contain the clearly discernible word "wanking".

joella

Keep Calm And Carry On

I'm basically living in a self-imposed news blackout at the moment. I am waking up to silence rather than the Today programme, avoiding news.bbc.co.uk (a harder thing to do than I ever imagined), switching off the television set (not very hard at all) and not buying newspapers.

It's not that I don't care about global economic meltdown, but there is Nothing I Can Do. For anxious people, this is all the chickens come home to roost. We secretly knew they would. We hate being right.

But I can see no point in immersing myself in the current media frenzy, with its heated debates and BIG DOWNWARD POINTING ARROWS. It doesn't help, it just makes the dull screaming noise that's usually far in the distance much, much louder. I don't need the dull screaming noise right now. I've got stuff to do.

The dust will settle, and I will re-engage. A lot of it will be bad, but there are good bits too. One of them, of course, is the death of Thatcherism. I am glad she lived to see it. There are many, many things that the free market will never provide, and they are mostly the same many, many things that are worth celebrating about humanity.

So here's to more human times, eventually, and in the meantime check out this glorious Steve Bell cartoon. I broke my news blackout for this one, and it's going on the wall.

joella

joella

No blanket

One of my oldest friends is waiting for her decree absolute. I know her finances are precarious, and these are times when we all need some friendliness around, and you know, I love this woman, so the other night I gave her a ring.

It was one of those decisions where you wonder if there is a sort of sixth sense at work. It was her birthday, but she was in bed when I called at 9pm. I was on my way down to the Co-op for a bottle of wine, she was exhausted. The usual -- a long day at work plus solo early evening grappling with a recalcitrant three year old (possibly with a sixth sense of her own) -- but - happy birthday! - compounded by a letter from the lawyer of her nearly-ex husband. Something to do with the mortgage -- I didn't see any logic in the details, in fact the whole thing sounded rather bizarre and unhinged.

Which was what was troubling her. 'It's out of character, Jo,' she said. 'And that's when I get scared'.

This is a man who I know goes on days-long vodka and cocaine benders. He gets through cash like it's water. He's a useless waste of space, with fading looks and waning charm. And he has been a spectacularly rubbish husband and father. But... scared?

Scared? I said. But he's never... has he?

There was one of those silences when your stomach lurches, when you know there's something big that you didn't know, should you have known? Did she say something that you should have heard? Or did she not want you to know? If you had known, what would you have done? What could you have done?

Well, she said quietly, that's why the baby was born prematurely.

I was home by this point, bottle of wine open, red mist forming, tears rolling. Mate, I said, I am so sorry. I didn't know. I am so sorry.

I regret and resent every ounce of effort and energy I have ever expended on this man. But I also know that it won't be the last time -- there will be more instances in my life when I will prioritise the feelings of and cook food and pour wine for men and (more rarely, but not never) women who are abusing people I care about.

Usually, as in this case, I will not know what is happening. But not always. The first time I swallowed my disgust at the behaviour of the boyfriend of one of my friends, I was fifteen years old and she had an eating disorder. I said what I thought, and it wasn't me who got the hard time, it was her. What do you do?

I am not claiming moral high ground here, and in fact I don't think there is any. I have sustained bruises and gone back for more -- a long time ago now, but you don't forget -- and it could happen again, it could happen to anyone. One of the formative moments of my life was reading a -- I was going to write Guardian but it was before I was buying my own newspapers and my parents are not Guardian readers so probably -- Times article about Hedda Nussbaum's relationship with Joel Steinberg. She was a well-educated, middle class Jewish girl. He would beat her up and make her sleep in the bath, with only a blanket, "except when he said 'no blanket'".

I have been haunted by the words 'no blanket' all my adult life. They make me a kinder person as well as a more aware one. Technically, we all have the potential to be the abuser as well as the abused. The hippie in me says, let's just not fuck each other over for a bit, right? Life's hard enough right now. The pragmatist in me says, let's do the right thing by each other when it happens.

Now, where's my axe?

joella

Recession playlist: track #2

This one's for Gordon. I used to love this song back when I had a broken heart in the dark days of Thatcherism.

joella

Under Sink Cupboard

Under Sink Cupboard
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

We plumber-sociologists can tell a lot about a person by the state of the cupboard under their kitchen sink. I've seen a lot of these cupboards, not because I've worked on a lot of kitchen sinks (although I have worked on a few) but because that is usually where you find the mains stop tap -- and even if it's not there, it's the first place you look.

They are often pretty disgusting places. This is for two main reasons:

1. Hardly anyone ever cleans them out. A clean bathroom is no indicator of a clean under-sink-cupboard (USC) -- in fact a clean bathroom often means that the person who lives there pays someone else to clean it. You deal with your USC yourself, you do, and it separates the men from the boys.

2. They are wet and/or greasy. New kitchens are often put in in a tearing hurry, no corner left uncut, and the traps leak or the seal round the sink doesn't work properly, or, as in the case of our cheap kitchen sink and every other cheap kitchen sink like it, the pop up waste is a load of leaky old shit and the water gets in round the edges and drips straight down onto the Brillo pads underneath, creating a big lump of smelly sticky rust. (There are not words for how much I hate pop up wastes. They should be banned. But that's another story).

Sometimes you find that USC is empty. This is either because the customer has thought ahead and cleared it out -- that's only happened to me once -- or because they don't own any cleaning products. These people will also not have any milk. They are squatters in their own homes. They will probably have a big leather sofa though, and their new sanitaryware will be oversized and cheap. I do not often warm to these people.

Other times, you will find that it is so absolutely rammed with random crap that it takes about 20 minutes to empty it. This is especially frustrating when it turns out that the stop tap is not actually in there after all, but you don't find that out until you've decanted years and multiples of methylated spirit, J-cloths, picnic paraphernalia, tea lights, shoe polish, light bulbs, hoover bags, paint brushes, pet food etc. These people will also have a fridge full of random crap, some of it also not excavated for years. Their bathroom will be painted in an unexpected colour, which they'll have done themselves and never quite finished. It will be impossible to work in without knocking over an MFI shelving unit that contains 47 bottles of random toiletries, and it will feature lots of cobwebs. These people buy TOO MUCH STUFF, all of it cheap. They watch lifestyle programmes on TV but never manage to change their lifestyles. They are forthcoming with cups of tea, though, and nearly always have biscuits in.

Other times again, it will just be a bit manky and contain brushes, cloths, rubber gloves, cleaning products, washing powder, dishwasher tablets and the household carrier bag collection. If they're in, these people will apologise profusely for the mess it's in and insist on emptying it themselves. You might not even need to go there, because these are the people who also know where their stop tap is, and turn that off themselves as well. They clean their toilets regularly, including the walls and floor around it, and they also often have real coffee. They generally find a plumber first and then decide what to do, rather than spending a fortune in Bathstore on stuff that will never look right in their house or work right with their plumbing. These are the slightly anxious people and I like them best.

Possibly because I've had so many of them inflicted on me, cleaning out my own USC has been on my to do list for about two years, even though the only person who I'm likely to inflict it on is myself. Last weekend, I did it. Check it out.

I probably don't need to add that I am very pleased with myself. In the process I discovered a bottle of descaler, so I descaled the kettle (satisfying); I discovered an ancient bottle of Lemon Ajax and a Spontex scourer, so I cleaned the outside of the kettle (*very* satisfying); and I discovered a packet of silver dip cleaner, so I cleaned all the silver plated cutlery that used to be M's mother's and had been slowly turning black (*incredibly* satisfying).

Rainy Sunday afternoons aren't all bad. They allow one's hidden domestic goddess a brief moment in the sun.

joella

Recession playlist: track #1

Here's a good starter. I reckon we'll be onto Leonard Cohen by the end of the week.

joella