When I grow up, I want to be an old woman...

I took time out to go and see Michelle Shocked play the Drill Hall yesterday. The Drill Hall is one of those venues where my possible pasts catch up with me big time, and I am amazed to see how so many of them have made it into the present.

I went (up) to Cambridge in October 1988, aged 18, outwardly stroppy and inwardly terrified. I look at some of the photos from that first year and I really cannot believe my own balls. But I guess that's what being 18 is all about. There was nobody like me (there still isn't, but hey, there's nobody like anybody, I know that now) but after a couple of weeks I met E, who was from Cheshire and wore leggings and DMs. I was from Lancashire and wore leggings and DMs, and for a good while we clung onto each other like two ports in a storm. She had a very cool older brother, who was in a band called Wild Bill Harzia and the Malarial Swamp Dogs (if memory serves) and who, more importantly, was in a position to get me a ticket to see Billy Bragg play the Corn Exchange.

Now, I'd had a ticket to see Billy Bragg before. In September 1987, he'd played Blackpool Opera House and E had sorted us out with good seats. But then about five days before the gig, round at our friend D's, he'd held me by the throat and punched the wall next to my stomach. It was one of those nights that creates a spike on the graph of your life. That was the end of me and E, and not before time, but I always kind of regretted not holding out for my ticket.

So there I was, on 16 November 1988, at my first Billy Bragg gig. I went on my own. I still have the T-shirt. And the poster. It was another of those nights... and the support act was Michelle Shocked. She blew me away. Short Sharp Shocked is still one of my favourite albums of all time.

What I didn't know then was that 1987 was a big year for her too - she came over to the UK for the first time, played the Drill Hall, and that was the start of something big. This was a kind of 20 years on celebration of that, and the journey. And it was moving. Michelle Shocked has made it into the present big time. She played Memories of East Texas, and I cried, like I did when I first heard it 20 years ago. It's so weird to have an adult life that stretches out so far, with these powerful constants in it. In many ways she's a thoroughly modern heroine, and I am in awe. But these days she's also a serious god-botherer, and, you know, whatever works, but personally I can't be doing with that sheeeeeit.

I came away with a whole range of things to think about, none of which I'd really expected. And I'm still thinking about them. I feel a bit like the walking wounded. And not just because of my foot.

joella

Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you've got till it's gone

I've just been out on my own, for the first time in nearly a fortnight. Only to the Co-op, and only because I'd run out of wine. M would have gone if I'd asked him to*, but he's not drinking at the moment, and it didn't seem right. 

So I took off my slippers and put my trainers on, and limped slowly down the road in the clocks-gone-back drizzle, sniffing the air like a dog and obstructing the hordes clattering down behind me on their way out to tick another box on their student experience checklist. 

It still hurts to walk. In a 'you probably shouldn't be doing this' sort of way. I have a stitched up wound with various non stitched up bits opening up off it. If it was on my head or my arm or pretty much anywhere except the side of my foot, I think it would be better now, but despite doing *almost nothing* for what feels like forever, keeping it clean, keeping it dry, adding Sterastrips to give the stitches a helping hand, every day it still bleeds a little. 

I have evolved two modes of moving around. The first involves just putting weight on the ball of my foot. You can move quicker that way, but your leg soon cramps up. The second involves putting weight on ball, heel and instep. This can only be done very slowly... any attempt at speed makes you feel like the whole thing might bust open at any moment. Which it might. 

You do of course, at least if you're me, spend much of this time thinking about people who have to walk a long way with wounded feet, and what fucking agony that must be. Or people who can't walk at all. 

My whole life is geared around having functioning feet, I just never realised. And while I usually find the termtime walk to the Co-op fairly oppressive, what with the non-compliant rubbish that the council will never collect, the badly parked Minis that I want to run a key down, the shitty dance music emanating from every window, and the clouds of posh girl perfume that just don't mask the stale smoke and the ghd-singed hairspray... tonight it felt kind of liberating. Look at me! I can walk to the shop! Buy a bottle of Soave and some houmous! Walk home again and put my foot up! I don't care that it's raining! I don't care that I'm in your way, but I will of course let you past if you ask! No, I don't need a bag! Yes, I have a Co-op membership card! I am part of society!  

The odds are that my foot will be completely fine at some point soon. I hope I will remember to celebrate full foot functionality, and also to get a little less annoyed by shit that doesn't actually matter. 

joella

*In fact, M has been a gold-standard boyfriend throughout this whole experience. Except for coming home with No Added Sugar Ribena, but that was an honest mistake.

The wide awake club

God knows, I'm bad at most things, but I'm good at sleeping. It can be hard to get me into bed, but it's nigh on impossible to get me out of it. I can sleep for England. I love to sleep. My Significant Ex and I once slept through the burglar alarm going off at his mum's and the police coming round with his elderly key-holding great aunt to check the place out. We woke up five hours later and wondered if we'd forgotten to set it. 

So why am I awake? I've been awake since four. I'd like to blame the students, who generally get home around that time on a Tuesday morning, but I can't - we discovered the joy of term time ear plugs last year, and haven't looked back. No, I just woke up. I put the light on and finished my novel, then I turned the light off and lay in the darkness for an hour, and then I thought fuck it, I'll get up. This almost never happens. I am not one of those people who creeps round the house in the small hours making cocoa and listening to the World Service. 

I was out last night, had a few drinks. I did have a lychee martini (which, incidentally, tasted like heaven on earth), and gin can mess with your head, but that doesn't account for it. It wasn't one of those panicky fast forward did-I-say-anything-unforgivable depth of the night hangover awakenings. Not even close. 

I'm worried about work things. A sort of mild, bottled panic that might pop its cork anytime but hasn't quite yet. I am over-committed and under-resourced. That's just how it is, probably, I need coping strategies that I haven't managed to develop, but probably will. But normally, when I'm not there, I'm pretty good at not thinking about it. I don't get paid to wake up at four in the morning, you feel me?

Specifically, I'm furious with several of the powers that be at NGO X, who have turned our IT helpdesk into an ITIL-compliant Service Desk. There is a poster on the wall which says 'are you being served?'. Well, possibly, technically, if telling me that the thing I am asking for is not on the list of things that are now permissible counts. You can close that call and hit your target. I've been served, but I've not been *helped*. I'm just looking for another workaround, and feeling sad for the guys who used to be able to help people. While I was lying in the dark, I hit upon the workaround I can use, and wondered if it contravened any policies, and wondered if I cared if it did, but I'm not so sad that this would have actually woken me up. 

My foot hurts. I'm bored of not being able to walk properly. I haven't been able to get to the allotment and water my cabbages. I'm slightly allergic to the dressings I'm using so my foot is itchy as well as sore. I just want it all to heal up and go away. In the back of my mind is the thought that it might not. All reasonable enough, but you know, sleep helps, and I'm tired. So WTF?

I used to go for a weep in Wantage at 7am every Tuesday. It was the hardest thing in the world getting up for that. There's something about the early morning mind that's easier to access, apparently. No wonder, given the chance, I normally sleep till 11. 

joella

Hurty foot update

This isn't a very good 'after' photo: there are still strips covering the stitches and there was a bit of bleeding which I haven't been able to wash off yet. 

But let's just say it hurts. Not so much when I'm not doing anything, but a lot if I try and walk on it. They did warn me. I did say 'yes of course I'll take it easy'. I didn't quite realise I wouldn't have any choice. 

Which made it all the weirder when, nine hours after I can back from hospital, when I was lying on the sofa full of wine, painkillers and macaroni cheese, the doorbell rang in an urgent kind of way. It was the students from next door -- the side we like -- asking if we knew how to turn their water off as their toilet had exploded and the bathroom was flooding. So I grabbed a walking pole and hobbled round. We got the water off but the toilet didn't have an isolator. 

So M followed with my tools, and I ended up breaking all the rules of plumbing: don't do it when you're a bit pissed, don't do it in your favourite trousers, don't do it when you can't walk. Nothing too drastic - just cut the pipe to the toilet and stuck a cap end on it so they could put their water back on, but they couldn't believe their luck, and I woke up the next morning in a codeine haze thinking 'did that really happen?' 

Guess it did. And, as the nurse said, Moley's in a pot now. I wanted to ask how she knew I'd called her Moley, but I guess it's a pretty common name. 

joella

Feet and millimetres and clay and spirits.

I've called her Moley Cyrus. She's 8mm long, and she's coming off tomorrow. 

I won't be digging for a bit, so I made the most of the glorious weather today, and went down to the allotment to plough the fields and scatter (aka pull up a lot of bolted lettuce and weeds, and plant out some spring cabbages that likely won't survive our current plague of whitefly). 

The sun was going down, and it was just me and J from over the way left on the site. "Don't overdo it," he said, as he loaded up his bicycle. 

One of the many, many reasons I love my allotment is because I get to hang out with people like J, men who are either retired or very partially employed, who practically live on their plot (they have sheds, and quite likely *have* spent the night there on occasion), whose wives probably despair of them in a well-at-least-I-know-where-he-is-and-I've-not-had-to-buy-an-onion-since-1983 sort of way, and who are generous with both their advice and their surplus apples. 

I'm fine, I said. Beautiful day, isnt' it? 

It is, he said. I just spent the last half hour drinking whisky in the sun and doing nothing. 

I'd guessed whisky was one of the many things J keeps in his capacious bike basket. He has that look, and occasionally that smell, about him. But he has asparagus beds, and has just single-handedly built his own polytunnel. I aspire. 

He checked I had a key on me, in a delightful slightly pissed courteous way, and took his leave. I stayed there a while longer, pulling out the bad stuff and leaving in the good. 

Listening to: See that my grave is kept clean - Diamanda Galas

joella

Free at the point of use

I have this brown mark on my foot. It just kind of arrived a couple of years ago. My mother said I was getting old. I *am* getting old.

Over the summer, my friend N came to stay. A few years ago she went into hospital Up North (where she lives) to have a mole removed from one of her eyebrows. You can see the scar if you know where to look, but they did a lovely job. More importantly, while it turned out to be a Bad Mole, she has since been given the all clear.

She spotted the mark on my foot when we were both curled up on the sofa watching TV and said 'has anyone looked at that?'. No, I said. 'Go to see your GP', she said.

So I booked an appointment via the EMIS system. I've been going to the same GP practice for over 10 years, and I think it's great. I got to see the doctor I always try to see - one of the partners, who is also a trained homeopath and the closest thing to a British bluestocking I can imagine. She had a student in with her, and they both looked at my foot. 'Need to refer that, I'm afraid,' she said, and filled in a form. It was ticked 'urgent', which alarmed me slightly. I took it downstairs and gave it to the receptionists.

A couple of days later I got a phonecall at work from the Dermatology department at the Churchill, who'd called me at home and got the number from M. She offered me a 9.30 appointment the following Tuesday. I said I *could* make that, but I was supposed to be in an all day meeting that day, but I wasn't working on the Friday? She said I could come at 9am on Friday instead. I said thanks. She said she'd send me a letter to confim but it might not arrive on time, but there was a map on the website. I said thanks. I took advantage of this. 

[NB The letter did arrive on time, but I didn't open it, which I'm quite glad about, as it told me I had an appointment at a Tumour Clinic and I should try not to worry.]

I turned up at the appointed hour, and was directed to Waiting Area 2, where five minutes later a doctor called me in and asked me some questions. Do you want to see my foot? I said. I want to see all your skin, she said. We went into an examining room, I went down to my bra and pants and she looked at all my various moles. Right, she said, we do need to get the consultant to look at that foot. There will be a short wait.

She handed me one of those hospital gowns with no back, and went back into the outer office. I put it on, then lay down on the examining couch to read my book. After a couple of minutes, I put my socks back on, as it was a little chilly. Five minutes later, she came back in. Are you ok? she said. The consultant is coming soon.

Five minutes after that, he burst through the door with a student in tow and bearing a special mole magnifier. I took my socks off and he had a good look. Then he talked about the ABCD of moles to the student and got her to have a look too. Colour was his main concern. Can I see? I said. It was a bit tricky because of the angle, but I could see that it might look basically brown, but is actually very splotchy.

How did you get here? he said. I got dropped off, I said. How are you getting home? he said. I'm going to walk, I said. Ah, he said. Not if we take this off now. Oh, I said.

Well, we don't have to do it today, he said. But I want that off in the next two weeks. Because of where it is, you won't be able to walk for a few days, and you'll have to take it very easy for a couple of weeks to make sure it heals properly.

Oh, I said. I'm supposed to be going to Brussels next week for work. Not if we take it off today, he said. Oh, I said. Is the week after next ok? I mean, is it dumb to wait?

It's fine, he said. Chances are it's not melanoma but not worth the risk of leaving it there. There's something not right about it.

OK, I said. Thanks.

So I got dressed, the first doctor took an MRSA swab from my nostril (I have no idea why), and gave me a green form and a white form, which I took back to reception.

The receptionist took the white one, and directed me down the hall to the surgery appointments office. The woman in there looked through her bookings. It looks full, she said, but I keep a few slots hidden for two-weekers like you. How about 1.30 on the 14th?

Great, I said. She gave me an appointment card and a leaflet about minor surgery, and I walked home via the public right of way across the golf course.

When I got home I opened the original letter they'd sent me, where it did say that they also treat private patients. One wonders what extra you'd get for the money.

And while the ultra-specialist part of my care so far has been delivered via a male consultant, who was brusque but not bossy, every other contact I've had has been with a woman. And they've all thought about how I might be feeling and what else might be going on in my life. 

So I have to say to Ms Death Panel Palin and her freakish ilk: if this is socialised medicine, you guys should Bring It On. 

joella

Celebrations

It's been a month of earthly and other-worldly delights.

Walking tours. Two of them. Both on the same weekend, celebrating P's 60th birthday and discovering many things about London. The first one accompanied Radical Nature, an exhibition at the Barbican, which I could not wholeheartedly recommend. The dolphin embassy is hilarious, and Agnes Denes's wheatfield is spectacular, but most of the 21st century 'interventions' are fairly excruciating.

The walking tour, though, was brilliant. We thought we would be visiting private green spaces not normally open to the public. Instead a softly spoken man with a satchel and a passion for tiger moth caterpillars showed us wild plants and flowers growing in obscure corners and crevices around the complex. Catch it if you can... as C pointed out, the botanist who leads it looks like he might disappear back into the brickwork at any moment.

The following day we explored Subterranean London, and learnt how John Snow worked out what was causing the cholera epidemic in Soho in 1854, and how Joseph Bazalgette banished it forever out by sorting out sewers in a big way. Kind of sobering to think about all the cities where people still get cholera because their shit runs down the middle of the street, and then remember that it was only 150 years ago that happened right in the middle of London. Amazing. Also recommended.

Over in art world, for M's birthday I took him to 'experience' Susurrus in the Botanic Gardens. Verdict: hmm. It's a glorious time of year there, so I'd say take your own iPod, stick on something mournful and lovely, like say the new Unthanks album, walk slowly and forget about the play.

I finished Infinite Jest, all 1079 pages of it. I am rather haunted by images of broken, addicted people in a broken, polluted world, but it's also hellishly funny. If you have the time, it's worth the time.

I went out for dinner with my Significant Ex (preceded by beer in the Wheatsheaf where they now have Proper Pint Jugs, very excitingly) and came home with Here Come The Snakes, which I haven't heard for years, since my tape of his album was destroyed by the tape deck of the 2cv. For years that was my very best tape, HCTS on one side and Stone Roses/Stone Roses on the other... but while the latter album is now near-ubiquitous, the former is hard to find except in expanded expensive reissued form. As great lost albums go, they don't get much greater than this one, and I stuck it on, turned it up, and had a large glass of red and a little weep. No shame in that, every now and again.

The allotment produced so much stuff last week (mostly potatoes, but also chard, French beans, carrots, gherkins, and lettuce) that I had to bring it all home in a wheelbarrow. Add this to last month's stellar red onion haul and the squash still to come and I'm coming over all Little House in the Big Woods.

Only *they* didn't have to deal with the annual migration of the Brookesalikes. But I'll save my griping for another day. There's digging to do.

joella

Season to taste

A couple of weeks back, when ex-Saturday-job-comrade N and her family came to stay, we went to the Elder Stubbs Festival. We'd probably have gone anyway, it is a highlight of the East Oxford summer calendar. But it was even more fun with a bunch of Lancastrians-turned-Mancunians, who boggled gratifyingly at the patchouli-and-patchwork people, the wicker sculptures, and the bands who all sound like Hawkwind. This scene somehow blends seamlessly with whatever the collective noun is for upscale off-road pushchairs full of Boden-clad kids. We played NGO X bingo, and it didn't take long to get a full house.

But the festival's raison d'etre is mental health awareness. The allotment site has strong links with Restore, a fine organisation which also runs a cafe, garden and craft shop round the corner from us. The party bag contained a copy of One In Four magazine, which I found myself reading in bed the other day. It had an article about SAD, which I thought was a bit odd, as *I* struggle with summertime, but I thought I was unusual.

But then I realised that the magazine was nine months old. Maybe it's because we got there late.

And then I carried on reading, and discovered there is also 'reverse SAD': rare but real, apparently. I wouldn't claim anything like full-blown depression, it's more that some days are edged with black. The sunnier the day, the deeper the edging. As soon as there's a chill in the air, I rest a little easier, despite the price of gas. So yeah, I can vouch for the existence of the summertime blues, and minimal research confirms I'm not alone.

But I can also vouch for the therapeutic value of growing stuff. Or, for that matter, just having your hands in the earth. I have spent hours over the last few days digging the summer's spent allotment beds, breaking the big chunks into little chunks, pulling out the couch grass roots and making a pile of weed spaghetti. The soil needs to be in the right heart (as I believe it's called) before you can do this ... too dry and you'll never break it up, too wet and it sucks you down. Right now, our soil is perfect for it. Most people don't do it by hand, but I'm cool with that. Then I put my jumper on and smile inside.

joella

Yay autumn!

I survived another summer without getting sunburned, getting stuck in a traffic jam on the M6, going anywhere *near* a caravan, making forced smalltalk with other people's husbands over disappointing barbecues (barbecues are always disappointing, in my experience, plus they are deeply ethically suspect) or - worst of all - having to play rounders or otherwise throw and catch things in the name of good clean fun.

I hate good clean fun. As August progresses I become more and more misanthropic, and by the time the Bank Holiday weekend comes around I just don't want to see anyone or do anything. Let it be over!

And it seems that it is. M accidentally invited his whole offspring-plus-significant-others collection round for dinner last night and I nearly hid in my bedroom till they'd all gone, but in the end I rallied. I don't think they noticed, or only a bit.

Only a bit is ok, I don't mind being discernibly prickly. Most of my favourite people are.

And now I can start wearing jumpers again. Hooray.

joella

It's all relative

Last night M asks, as he cooks lentil and chard soup, whether there's anything on the 'tellybox' (this is what people from the 70s call it, I gather). I go look it up. Of course there is stuff on, but most of it, as usual, appears to involve a) football or b) quiz/reality/talent shows designed and presented by obscenely well-paid people which dangle transient fame or potentially-large-but-almost-certainly-small cash sums in front of the kinds of people willing to abase themselves on camera in pursuit of the same. I have zero interest in the former, and the latter make me feel kind of hollow inside.

Well, I said, Miami Vice is on at 9?

Maybe I was still stuck in my A-level reverie. I remember my Geography teacher looking me up and down when I first turned up in the sixth form in my regulation grey suit (the grey was regulation, but the suit itself was up to you) and saying 'how come everyone else looks like they're at school and you look like you're auditioning for a part in Miami Vice?' I was secretly very pleased. Not quite as pleased as I was four years later when I was sitting on the Backs in my dungarees, reading Kate Millett, I wouldn't be surprised, and one of my friends came by and said 'how come everyone else looks like they're at Glyndebourne and you look like you're at Greenham Common?', but still.

Anyway, we watched it. It was kind of shit, of course. Ultimately harmless, probably, though I have even less faith in my 15-year old taste than I used to. And Colin Farrell can't hold a candle to Don Johnson circa '85. At least, so I thought till I did that Google images search.

joella

The male of the species

I returned my mum's call the night before the night before last. She was still in bed (she works nights). I had a nice chat with my dad.

The night before last she called back, but I was out.

Last night I called. She was out. I had a much shorter chat with my dad.

Tonight, I called. 'She's still not back', he said. I'd forgotten. I thought she'd been at work the previous night, but in fact she is visiting her sister.

My mistake, I said. Do you have anything new to say to me since yesterday?

Not really, he said.

Bye then, I said.

Bye.

Dads are great.

joella

Summer: nowhere near infinite

Like lots of other people, I started the summer with the intention of finishing Infinite Jest by the end of it. It's not going to happen... I am only 400 pages in.

I read like a fiend, but IJ is just so *dense*. I have had to keep taking a break. Interleaved with it over the last couple of months have been the following, all of which are a walk in the park by contrast and which I thoroughly recommend:

• Consider the Lobster. Also by David Foster Wallace, but essays rather than a novel. I learnt things about the porn industry from its opener, Big Red Son (originally published as 'Neither Adult Nor Entertainment'), that I really wish I didn't know, so I might counsel against that particular chapter if you are sensitive that way. But the title chapter, plus the ones on 9/11, Tracy Austin and John McCain, are total blinding genius. 
• Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire. I have a weakness for crime novels but I see it *as* a weakness because such books generally deal with crime and violence without doing much (in fact usually doing precisely nothing) to analyse the power structures underlying them. Larsson totally rocks on that front. Both adult and entertainment. 
• John Le Carre's latest. I managed my first under-140-character book review on this: Slightly heartbroken at the end of A Most Wanted Man. It seems love will not save the world after all. Not much to add to that, except it's beautifully written and plays you like a pro. 
• I think there have been a couple of others, but I forget them now. 

I am still committed to finishing IJ, mind. I'll get there, I estimate, by the end of October. We all need something to help us through the long nights, and immersion in bleak toxic dystopia could be just the thing.

joella

Third Thursday in August

'Can *you* remember getting your A-level results?' said M.

I know he's not actually joking, because I know that he remembers almost nothing about anything. And I can see the advantages of that. As Ani DiFranco wrote about the goldfish, the little plastic castle is a surprise every time.

I can remember getting my A-level results like it was yesterday.

I had two such experiences, as I took General Studies A level in the Lower Sixth, and Maths, Chemistry, Geography and a Cambridge STEP (Sixth Term Examination Paper) in Geography in the Upper Sixth. At least two of these qualifications probably don't exist anymore.

I really enjoyed my General Studies exams. Writing an essay about morals and answering multiple choice spatial reasoning questions was fairly close to my idea of a good time when I was 16. Might still be now, in fact. My boyfriend at the time was in the year above, and took the exact same exam (I took it a year early because I was a geek. I was already a year ahead of myself because I was a precocious geek) at the exact same time. The difference was that he walked out of it early, while I was still chewing my pencil and being thankful I'd revised my Greek gods.

We had to go into school to get our results. By that time he'd dumped me, for a variety of reasons, most (in retrospect) having to do with my non-compliance with 1980s Blackpool girlfriend norms. It was bruising. But it wasn't over. I spent literally hours getting ready. I had my hair in a massive back-combed ponytail with a white scarf round my head, I was wearing copper-coloured eyeshadow and frosted peach lip-gloss, plus a white cotton jersey zip up jacket with shoulder pads and a second-hand black tube skirt. And many, many gypsy-style silver-style bangles. (There are no photos of that day so I can't prove any of this. But I'm ridiculously sure.)

I got an A in my General Studies A level. Like all anxious brainy girls, I never really thought I would. But I wasn't over the moon, as I knew I was *capable* of getting an A. It was more a relief.

I met up with schoolmate S, who wasn't getting any results but came along to hang out anyway, and we went to the Winmarith pub across the road. At some point, E showed up. We pointedly ignored each other for a while, but eventually came face to face.

'You actually look all right', he said, in an 'I'm surprised to find myself not embarrassed at having gone out with you' sort of a way. I presented my new enigmatic 'your loss' look, and put 'I am a rock' on the jukebox. (Again).

E got an F in his General Studies A level.

That day was a turning point for me. Though it still wasn't over.

And yeah, I remember it.

joella

Staying home, playing out

We spent our holidays at home this year, primarily for financial reasons (roof replacement, window renovation, lodger shortfall) but also because, after a stressful interlude, we have the house back to ourselves for a while, and we wanted to reclaim it. There was a fair amount of reclaiming to do, so we decided to spend the first week dealing with house stuff and the second week resolutely not dealing with anything.

It went pretty well, though we discovered that it takes more time and effort than you would ever think possible to change the colour of a front door from faded, chipped, rattling-paned blue to zingy, glossy, freshly puttied green. It's greener than either of us expected*. But I think it will be fine when we've offset it with some chartreuse foliage. Mmm, chartreuse.

And then I cut down most of the ceanothus - beautiful in May, but a big fat bully the rest of the time - and took it to the tip. And then we cleaned the bathroom to within an inch of its life, and the kitchen to within several inches. Or maybe a couple of feet: the oven was not approached. And then we lay down for a while, rising only for a splendid boozy lunch at Fishers. Boozy lunch! We don't do enough boozy lunch.

And *then*, as I hope the displacement of Ani DiFranco by Mika in my last.fm playlist might indicate, we had visitors. The Finnfans came to stay and we cranked the Oxford-as-pleasure-garden engine up a gear.

It was like a Proper Holiday. We harvested lettuce and gherkins**. We ate lasagne and stewed fruits. We did an epic trek which took in parks South, Headington Hill and University-via-Mesopotamia, the Turf, the Covered Market (for the purchasing of pies and radishes), the towpath, Port Meadow (for the eating of pies and radishes), and the Perch. We called a massive taxi to take us all home because we could walk no further. We went out for pizza and Sambuca. We played late night Jim Steinman**. We applied clay mud masks and sat in deckchairs with slices of cucumber over our eyes while they dried***. Or, if we did not do that, we watched Brazil. We went for afternoon tea in the Old Kitchens at Magdalen College, having first tried to explain to a polite Japanese lady why we were playing Poohsticks on Addisons Walk. We explored the bounties of the Eau de Cologne range carried by Boswells**. Or, if we did not do that, we explored the bounties of the Norrington Room. We went for an early evening swim in Hinksey Pool and made like Putin with the butterfly stroke, only possibly not quite as good. We had a massive fish pie Friday feast, followed by crème brûlée, which M persuaded me to brule with my blowtorch.

Remarkably, we got up early the next day and undertook a joint road trip to Slimbridge Wetland Centre, where we fed geese, admired flamingoes (best done from a distance, they really stink) and fell in love with the rare things with green beaks that honk like pigs. The Finnfans took their leave after lunch, and we wandered a little further, out past hide after hide all the way to the Severn Estuary. On the way we gathered fallen damsons, which are now steeping in gin.

I also got another 80-odd pages of Infinite Jest under my belt, though found that while lying on a blanket by the river, it serves better as a pillow than as a book.

joella

* The colour is called Indian Ivy 5. There will be photos, but it's still not finished and consequently looks a bit shit.
** Appreciate these list items are minority interest. Tho' the rest of you are missing out.
*** I see now the instructions say you should not let them dry out, but that would spoil the fun.

Jetlag dreams

I find myself talking to the landlady of a go-go bar in Oxford on a quiet night when one of the resident dancers hasn't turned up. Apparently these women are very unreliable. So she asks me if I'll do the warm up for the main act, who is the real Bada Bing pole dancing deal.

And so there follow several months where I dance at the same time every week in a tiny room (accessible from an even tinier dressing room, where I smoke roll-ups with the Bada Bing pole dancer and put a lot of make up on), wearing the same dress, which I do not take off and which is entirely unrevealing, to the same song, which does not exist but which can best be described as a cross between Standing In the Way of Control and No More The Fool. I do not use the pole on principle, I am no better a dancer in my dreams than I am in real life (well, maybe a bit), and I get paid in cash that the audience gives to the landlady because there is nowhere in my outfit to stick it.

And I never get busted. This is my secret life until there is a Christmas break, when the landlady is kind of vague about what day she's opening up again. But I pride myself on my reliability, so I am walking round town looking for the alleyway that the bar is down with my dress in a plastic bag, getting a bit panicky because I can't find it and I need to get my make up on before I am on at 9.30. Then I bump into Ex-Schoolmate R and Ex-Housemate S. We have a conversation about the ethics of dancing in bars for money, and then I say I have something to tell them and I'll be back in half an hour.

When I find the bar it has children in it, and I wonder about the ethics of this as well. Then I realise it is under new management, and has in fact turned into a subterranean Chinese children's party venue. It now echoes like a swimming pool and there is lots of screaming.

I feel that I should be pissed off with the landlady for not telling me, but I am secretly relieved that I have got out of the dancing in a bar for money game without letting anyone down. I knew it wasn't really for me.

joella

Legal alien

This morning, I got to nurse my hangover in the Olympic Flame Diner on W 60th St in NYC, eating a three egg feta cheese omelette with fried potatoes, drinking bottomless coffee and listening to Pat Benatar. I couldn't have been happier.

This followed three days spent staying at the seriously weird and cool Hudson Hotel courtesy of the much less weird but just as cool Open Society Institute. I am doing a bit of guerilla knowledge management at NGO X using a platform that they have developed. I love these guys. They are thoughtful, serious and funny all at once, and I get to be the least geeky person in the room for a while. Loads to think about.

And they are fantastic hosts. I arrived on Monday a little dazed and confused, and fairly shortly afterwards someone said 'so if I took you out and bought you a beer would you drink it?' I knew from that point on that I was going to have a good time, and I did. There were frozen pomegranate margaritas, there was a long walk downtown to eat gelato in the new High Line park, there was some amazing food, and there were discussions ranging from democracy to permaculture to the origins of morality. It was, as we used to say in Blackpool in 1984, ace. *And* I did it without a credit card.

I said yes to everything because I don't know if I'll ever get back there. Which was a great strategy, and je ne regrette rien, but as a consequence I am now feeling like shit. Plus, I'm waiting for a delayed seven hour five time zone flight in an overcrowded JFK. It's going to be a long night.

joella

Guerilla plumbing

One of the many medium-level irritants for the politically aware water obsessive who lives in shonky East Oxford is pointless water wastage. You see it quite a lot round here, with our Victorian-era HMOs and their evil tightarse landlords and lazy letting agents. You hear it first... patter patter patter... in the winter it could be snow melting off a pitched roof faster than the gutters can cope with, pretty much anytime it could be broken gutters after heavy rain, but generally it's neither. It's a faulty float valve in a cold water storage cistern or a WC cistern, and it's pouring out of the overflow. 

For days. Weeks. Months, sometimes. Litres a minute, for months. In a region which is water stressed -- hard as that is to believe when it pisses down nearly every day -- because we have few reservoirs Down South, relying on our ground water supplies, and our ground water supplies are not replenished like they used to be because we have paved over every possible inch of land. Meanwhile we put in power showers like there's no tomorrow. Keep on like this, there'll be fewer of them, most def. 

In an occupied house, it's not hard to change a float valve. I've done lots of them in WCs. CWSCs in loft spaces are a bit harder, because of access, but still no big deal. But your evil tightarse landlord can't be arsed to spend the <£100 it would cost. In an empty house, it's even easier to deal with, just isolate the valve, or turn off the water. Deal with it later. But they can't even be arsed to do that. 

Last time there was such a leak on our street, I stomped into the letting agents at least three times. Every time, a smarmy slick wanker with a shiny tie said 'yes, a plumber has been called'. You are lying, I said, on the third occasion. And I *am* a fucking plumber, give me the keys and I'll do it. Oddly, it did get sorted shortly after that. 

And then a month or so ago there was another one round the corner, running down the outside wall of an empty house, day after day, week after week. Marginal plants were beginning to grow in the permapuddles. The letting agents had a sign up but it was broken, so the phone number was incomplete. Every time I saw it, I reached for my phone, sighed, vowed to Google them when I got home, never did. 

Last week, we were walking past the pattering house on our way back from a pizza we went out for because I came home from work needing to sink some red wine and have a big rant. There were wheelie bins littering the pavement -- the students left before their rubbish did and it's left to the permanent residents to put the bins back in the front gardens -- and I had an idea. 

The long-suffering M helped me manoeuvre an empty 240 litre wheelie bin into a position where it would catch the falling water. I'll come back for that, I said, and I'll wheel it down to the allotment and use it on the gherkins. (I had sunk some red wine, so wasn't really thinking through the physics involved here). 

Two days later, I walked past again. The wheelie bin was exactly where I'd left it, and full of water, as I would have expected. But the water had also stopped falling. Someone had turned it off. I wonder if a visible quarter-tonne of water in less than 48 hours (and probably less than 24) finally pressed some shiny-tied bastard's shame button in a way that damp brickwork and environmental sustainability messages just never could. 

I'd like to think it did. 

joella

Kicking against the pricks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Is that an ideological position?' he asked. 

Yeah, I said. Mostly. 

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

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

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

joella

A new Particle in development

I am delighted to be able to report that ex-housemate S is up the stick again. 

This is excellent news. Baby Tungsten, marvellous as he is, could benefit from a serious challenge to his current 'I am the centre of the universe and I will glare at you till you agree with me' world view. I know this because I had that world view myself once. Still do, some would say, but there's nothing like having to share to make you buck your ideas up and get devious. 

And given that this is *my* blog and therefore as much all about me as my two year old self was, I look forward to having another baby to talk about. If you're a woman in her 30s, a fair proportion of your peer conversations will be about babies. If you are child free / childless / a tragic barren spinster (delete as per your secret view on this issue), it's a bit of a challenge. It reminds me of the time all my friends were having driving lessons and I was still too young. I spent hours listening to stories of stalling and clutch control and reversing round corners and accidental dual carriageway encounters and I had nothing to say. But I knew I would learn to drive one day (predictably, by the time I did nobody wanted to hear my tales of driving my dad's car into a fence, not even my dad, dammit) and the same cannot be said of pushing one out. 

Enter ex-housemate S. Baby Tungsten has totally delivered for me here. I had the details. I have talked at length about his chucking up, his early love of salt and vinegar crisps (just like his mother!), his first deliberate breakages, his steadfast and admirable refusal to smile on demand. He rocks. 

But he's getting on a bit. The last time we went swimming (possibly the same day the photo linked to above was taken, those are my goggles he is modelling), he stood there in the middle of the changing rooms, pointed at me and shouted 'Jo's nipples!' with the unfettered joy of one who has learnt the name for something interesting since the last time he saw them. He has his own social life now, involving playdates, edutainment and nursery school. We still get on, but I sense our paths will cross less frequently. Which is cool. We'll always have Bracknell Coral Reef. 

And now Particle is on the way. I'm an old hand now. It will all be easier this time. 

joella

I went out drinking with Thomas Paine...

... he said that all revolutions are not the same...

This song came out in 1991, right in the middle of the last big fat recession. It's amazing how sharp it suddenly sounds. 

And its inspiration, Thomas Paine, died 200 years ago. It's amazing how sharp *he* suddenly sounds as well. Fairtrade cotton company Gossypium (based in his home town of Lewes) have just released a very cool T-shirt in his honour. I am tempted. As BB also famously (chez joella at least) said, the revolution is just a T-shirt away. 

Or maybe it's more the case that we just carry on reinventing a broken wheel until we go the way of the dinosaurs. In which case, I'm having one for the road. 

joella

The May to September Fish Lines

When I was about 12, I had a sort of all in one halterneck top and shorts. It was banana yellow, and every time I put it on, which took a while as it was complicated, I experienced massive dissonance between how I would like to have felt wearing it - leggy, tanned, cartwheeling, glorious - and how I actually did feel -pallid, clumsy, exposed, and profoundly self-conscious. I kept thinking this would change, but it never did.

Summer clothes still have that effect on me. In fact summer itself still has that effect on me - I can't stay long in the sun, I only go to the beach when it's cool and breezy, and when I watch the brown, wiry Palestinian woman who has the allotment a few plots down from mine striding around purposefully in vest, shorts and wellies, I feel 12 years old all over again. Her plants grow tall and strong, mine give up and wilt.

But then there is Hinksey Pool, Oxford's seasonally open municipal lido, which lives in the middle of a park full of towering conifers. Somehow, it's different there. Pale Aquarians emerge blinking from the breezeblock cubicles, pile up their towels, put on their goggles and slip into the water. There, as the children go home for their tea and the shadows lengthen, women of an uncertain age swim up and down, up and down, along the lines of fish painted on the bottom of the pool. Above us is only sky, blue or grey it doesn't matter, because it's warm in the pool, as long as you keep moving.

Hinksey Pool is a strange organic shape, so no two crossings of it are the same length. The fish lines provide general direction, and there are men who plough up and down them, refusing to deflect. The women of an uncertain age travel along the same lines, but differently. Occasionally, I have swum up the longest fish line directly behind my friend H -- one woman can be knocked off course, but two are harder to shift. Eventually, though, one of them kicks you in the cheekbone, because ultimately, you are making an artistic statement, and they are making an autistic one.

There is plenty of shade around Hinksey Pool, and there is also a kiosk which sells chips and ice lollies. It's absolutely English, and absolutely wonderful. Last night, I swam over to the edge to climb out, and another woman was waiting by the ladder so she could climb in. 'This is like a tropical scene,' she said, 'and you're like a dolphin swimming towards me!'. I sort of knew what she meant, but I wasn't quite sure what to say. So I smiled, and said 'I love it here'.

We all do, she said. We all do.

joella

An invitation to the School of Life

I got a phone call a few weeks ago from Roman Krznaric, who I have met a few times - I once hung a radiator in his front room, and for several years I had a wood chest in my garden that used to belong to him and his partner K. He was calling because he is leading the 'Work' course at the School of Life, and he wanted to know if I would come and give a talk about becoming a Lady Plumber.

I was full of reasons why I might not be a good person to give such a talk - I am not really a plumber (or am I? I don't know), I'm still a 0.6 FTE NGO X wage slave, I actually bring in substantially less money that I did before I hatched this plan (though I grow my own salad leaves now, thus saving untold ££s), I don't really know what happens next - but he said no, that was all cool, and the course was just as much about questions as about answers. OK then, I said, you're on.

I was more nervous than I thought I would be, but maybe everyone is when they talk about themselves. Plumbing is quite easy to play for laughs, which helped, and there is a story in there - the Dark Days in the New Building, the inspiring if unpredictable presence of J the plumber, the urge to challenge a few stereotypes, and hell, to do something new. I don't think there's anything extraordinary about my experience, and nobody who finds it as hard to get out of bed in the morning as I do is ever going to change the world, but maybe that's the point.

And it was great fun. The best bit was the Q&A session... it was interesting to say out loud things that I have only really ever said to myself. Someone asked if I'd thought about going back to help out at the college, and wouldn't that be a good thing to do, and I'd sort of thought about it, but not for a while, and yes it would.

Generally, it was inspiring to be around such active thinking about the nature of work, what's important about it, and how it defines our lives. I'd like to have more of these conversations out loud. It's not an easy thing to do, so respect to the School of Life for starting some those conversations off.

joella

I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours

I have this rumbling fear that the country is sinking into right wing bigoted quicksand, and over the next decade we will all be suffocated slowly by our own fear and intolerance. It will be bad for lots of people, and lots of those people will be women.

Example 1: Female journalist is pilloried on CiF for suggesting, actually quite apologetically, that the students at St Annes College Oxford who elected a "white heterosexual male officer" were fuckwits and worse. Whereas anyone who has had to walk into a party full of shitfaced six foot rugby players to retrieve their stolen underwear from someone's head could tell you that whatever white heterosexual Oxbridge males need, it's not more representation.

Example 2: Successful-and-thin Liz Jones writes about how appalling it was to actually eat (her version of) normally for three whole weeks. This article made me feel very, very weird. I don't think I know a woman who has a relationship with food that is completely free of complications, and really, the last thing any of us needs is 'I know I am so wrong to basically starve myself but it is the only thing that validates me and I can't wait to get back to it' shit like this.

Example 3: A bad habit of mine is playing online puzzle games when I'm bored. Which is how I came by BubbleBox.com. The game types: Action, Adventure, Puzzle, Skill, Sport, Sandbox and... Girls. The top Girls ones include Cake Mania, Beauty Resort, Personal Shopper, and My New Room. On the one hand there is stuff, and on the other there is stuff - pink, sparkly stuff - for girls. A trivial concern, maybe. Or maybe not.

There is the odd glimmer of light. For a couple of years now I have been following I Blame The Patriarchy - beautifully written (the posts - one can't always say the same for the comments), furious radical feminism mixed with heartwarming nature crap. Google Reader suggested I might like it, and I do. Even though I, you know, live with a dude.

It was IBTP which pointed me at Sarah Haskins. And also taught me the word 'cuntalina', though that didn't go down so well with the radfems. Anyway, this is one of the things I read in my spare time. I don't share every sentiment, but it goes a long way to reminding me that Femail (and, let's face it, Observer Woman) are, basically, part of the problem.

But I don't see it getting better anytime soon. I think the solution might involve moving to a log cabin by a lake and listening to nothing but birdsong till we sort this shit out. Anyone want to come along?

This post was brought to you by Talking World War III Blues - Bob Dylan.

joella

The road leading home

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

It's not dark yet, but it's getting there

I heard Nick Griffin on the radio a couple of years ago, and one of the few consoling thoughts was that he was pretty much a lone voice in the fascist wilderness.

But no more. No, the good people of the North West have gone and democratically elected him to the European Parliament, despite the fact that fewer people voted BNP than five years ago. What the fuck was everyone else doing? Singing Dixie?

I had an extended blog / Twitter / pub argument with a friend of mine in his early 20s who said he wasn't voting because there isn't any point. Here in the South East we have exactly the same MEP representation as we did last time, so he could claim QED, but you know what they say on the West Wing - decisions do get made by the people who show up.

Today there is an online outpouring of anger and angst. I am slightly reassured by this, as I'm sure is anyone else who had assorted family members made into lampshades, or is, like Housemate P, both British and black. 'They keep talking about indigenous Britons,' he said, 'but I don't think they're talking about me'.

No. I don't think they are. And yeah, online outpouring is important and cathartic. But Facebook petitions, Twitter hashtags and Not In My Name websites don't keep fascists out of parliaments. Only voting for non-fascists does that.

I *know* the Labour party have been banging nails into their own coffin ever since the invasion of Iraq, and I *know* politicians of all persuasions have covered themselves in shit with the expenses debacle. I can see why people are disillusioned with the political process. And I can see how fundamentalist Islam, cheap Eastern European labour and growing inequality feed the fire of discontent in the belly of our ill-educated, debt-ridden, benefit-dependent lumpenproletariat, who really, really want someone to tell them it would all be different if it wasn't for the foreigners. You are entitled to a better life! You are white!

Yeah, I can see all that. But I don't have to like it. And it gives me what my friend K would call the serious wiggins. You've got to have faith, but days like these, it's mighty hard to have much of it.

joella

Here be dragons

They ask me sometimes what PMS is like, those people who don't have it. I never quite know how to describe it, though I can tell stories of skidding across a kitchen floor on the half a kilo of dried penne I had just thrown on it, of sobbing on a swing surrounded by a shredded loaf of bread, of spending an hour crouched on the floor cleaning the gunk out of the bit of the dishwasher you only see when the door is open, of learning the hard way never, ever to make major life decisions when the moon is swelling.

Basically, it's a random mixture of big horror and fixation with tiny details. You don't look forward to it, but hey, it's not boring. Yesterday I was down at the allotment by myself. There are a million things that need doing at the moment... digging, watering, hoeing, hacking at nettles, more digging... but the only thing I wanted to do was squat by the rocket patch and thin out the seedlings.

I'd left this a tiny bit late and it was a delicate job, stroking the leaves apart and feeling down underneath the little clumps to tease a stem away and pull it out without disturbing any of the others. It was hot and the soil was almost steamy (I worked out it was easier to pull out damp seedlings than dry ones) and it was kind of mesmerising. I was fascinated by my own fingertips and the things they can feel. It was restful to be focusing on a little patch of earth and not having to think about the rest of the big scary world.

And then I had a flash of a TV programme about hand transplants that I saw many years ago. It was disturbing, these men with someone else's hand sewn on the end of their arm, learning how to pick up coffee cups. One of them went all purple and had to be taken off again. Big, clumpy dead men's hands.

And then I couldn't thin the rocket anymore. An hour or so later, there was the little dark stab of pain that let me know it was ok to put my pyjamas on and curl up in a ball. No more dead men's hands for another month, hooray!

joella

"What is lawful is appropriate"

What a charming man Bill Cash must be. They didn't say I *couldn't* bleed the country dry, mum!

I picked up this story because my blog stats shot up suddenly. This has happened before and only ever means a surge of interest in my 2003 post about the equally charming Laetitia Cash. Booze soaked old school feminism remains a minority interest, sadly.

Still, it's great to have new visitors. Thanks Laetitia! Can I buy you a drink? Oh, hang on, I'm a taxpayer. I already have.

joella

Target Women

How did I not know about Sarah Haskins till yesterday? More on how I came to know about her another time, this is too good not to share. Enjoy.

joella

Cornwall: the verdict

Executive summary

Not at all like Lancashire. Well, maybe a little bit.

Full report

Pluses

• Fish. I first "got" fish in 1992. My Significant Ex and I were staying on Kovalam Beach in Kerala, which in those days wasn't much more than a bunch of £1 a night huts and some bars playing Santana. The boats would come in, the sun would go down, we would have a little fishy (from the tandoor) on a little dishy (made of banana leaf), and it would blow our tiny minds. I have been few places since that have had the same effect but Cornwall is one of them. It's turbot-charged.
• Cliffs. Where I come from, we don't have cliffs. We have epic stretches of sand that move almost seamlessly (give or take a few sand dunes full of shagging teenagers) into market garden-friendly terminal moraine. The whole of the Fylde coast is one long ribbon development, where the streets are wide and the bungalows are many. Cornwall has tiny steep sea apertures, where the gradients are perilous and the cottages are miniscule. 
• Industry. Well, ex-industry. I heartily recommend the Charlestown Shipwreck & Heritage Centre. It gives some wild insights into life in a china clay exporting tiny steep sea aperture (by way of mannequins eating pasties with big boots on) while also and fairly unrelatedly packing thousands of shipwreck, rescue and salvage-related facts and artifacts into old clay tunnels. It's passion-led preservation at its best. Go see it. 
• Enviro-art. You know about the Eden Project. It has its critics but I was charmed. I particularly liked the WEEE Man (though would have preferred a WEEE Woman, naturally) and the rainforest biome. It was getting hot in there. We took off some of our clothes. 
• Horticultural Victoriana. The ancient rhododendrons and gunnera in the Lost Gardens of Heligan (warning: shit website - why do people still use Flash like that?) will stay with me for a long time. The whole place seems to be decaying gently even as it is restored, but if you narrow your eyes you can just about imagine what it must have been like at the height of the Empire. 
• Beer. They do lovely milds (I am getting quite into mild, in my old age), and they do it all over the place. Pretty much every pub is excellent, in a real ale real fire dog-friendly stylee.  In winter I imagine you may find yourself stranded in one for several weeks, but I could also imagine many worse places to be stranded. 
  

Minuses 

• Petrol consumption. It's kind of a nightmare to drive around, as the roads are miniscule and the parking impossible, but the geography means there's not a lot of alternative. And this was May - I would not like to get stuck on the main street in Mevagissey in August, you'd still be there in September. We saw the occasional intrepid cyclist, and some impressive bus driving, so maybe you could do it without a car if you were organised about it. There are lots of pubs to stop in, after all. 
• Time warp. It has a sort of stuck in the 1970s feel to it, and a lot about the 1970s was well worth leaving behind. Where there is money it is flashed around, where there is not it is all a bit bleak. Our hotel had something of the Grace Brothers about it, plus a disco on the Friday night that I seriously thought was ironic (I sat in the bar with my dad for an hour and didn't hear a single song recorded after 1985), but wasn't. I approved of the kippers for breakfast and original Armitage Shanks bathroom suites with matching tiles, however, and once you accept you're living in a world where chintz has never gone out of fashion and golfing clothes are normal, it ain't so bad. 
• Politics. You have to order the Guardian in specially. I think it comes by helicopter. 

joella

What we did on our holidays part 2: the Whitley Bay years

For a lot of the 1970s and early 1980s my dad was an officer in the ACF. He called it 'playing soldiers'. It didn't have that much impact on me, though I occasionally went out with him at weekends, and developed crushes of varying proportions on various boys (they were all boys) in uniform. I had my first 'nature wee' with the ACF, when we were doing something in a wood. I turned out not to be very good at it and my dad dried out the resulting yellow socks on the dashboard of the Austin Maxi.

In the summer, he would go off to play soldiers for two whole weeks. My mother often took us away on holiday at the same time, and for a couple of these years we went to Whitley Bay.

Now, I grew up about seven miles from Blackpool. Why we would therefore travel 150 miles across the country to stay in a seaside resort with an amusement park is still beyond me. It was certainly beyond my sister, who in those days used to get spectacularly travel sick. The first year we went, we got the coach, and then a taxi. Just as we pulled up at Mrs Cowan's, she vommed copiously over the back seat. I can still recall the taxi driver wiping sick off his vinyl while various women stood around wringing their hands.

Mrs Cowan's was a trad 1970s B&B, in that we had to be out between 9am and 5pm, the bathroom was down the hall, and hot water was only available for two hours a day. We shared scalding baths in the early evening before heading down to the dining room for a Three Course Dinner (thinking about it, it was a DB&B). The first course was always soup, reconstituted from powder stored in huge plastic tubs on top of the kitchen units, marked with things like Scotch Broth and Cream of Vegetable. There was tinned orange juice served in tiny glasses from a trolley. It was great.

After dinner we would watch TV in the TV lounge, and then head to bed so we could be up and out in the morning.

Which worked fine if it was sunny, and I impressed my first ever admirer (who was called Stephen - check him out!!) with a large crab I made out of pebbles. We went on a date to the Spanish City and he held my hand on the Waltzer when our mothers weren't looking.

But most of the time it was pelting down. We wandered between cafes and amusement arcades, making a dash for the beach or the climbing frames if the sun even threatened to come out. But a lot of the time there was no chance. Mrs Cowan generously relaxed the rules, and we spent long rainy afternoons watching TV and cutting things out of Richard Scarry books.

But one afternoon, my mother had had enough. Get your cagoules on, she said, we're going out. And off we went to the beach, to collect shells and seaweed in the middle of what Mick the Builder would call a Terminal Piss Down Situation. We were the only people in sight, not that we could see very far.

And then across the beach came a young woman in sandals, a summer skirt, and a far-from-all-weather coat. Trailing her was a miserable looking man with a large bag. They were a reporter and a photographer from the local paper, sent to find evidence of the Dunkirk spirit on what we later found out was "the wettest day in August for seven years". They took our photo, and ran it with some quotes about a little bit of rain never doing anyone any harm.

And you know what? It didn't.

joella

What we did on our holidays part 1: the Spanish building site

Inspired by Jonathan Crinklybee's latest... I am only just beginning to realise that my childhood is now part of a different era, and has stories to tell.

I don't remember going on holiday before 1975, but to be fair I don't remember much of anything before 1975. That year was a landmark one: I started school, and we went on our first Foreign Holiday. We went to Majorca in low season, I think October, with some family friends who had children sort of the same age. I think it may have been their first Foreign Holiday too.

The first thing I remember about it is that the hotel we were supposed to be staying in hadn't actually been built yet. I think that was standard practice for the 1970s package holiday, and thinking about it it must have been horribly stressful for my parents, but when you're five you really don't notice these things. We were put in another hotel, and I loved it. I remember the checked bedspreads, the hot chocolate for breakfast, and tasting my first pistachio nut. Other good things I remember include having *lots* of different swimming costumes to wear (all but one of which had been borrowed from my friends), and some fat spiky cactus like plants that grew on the path down to the beach. There was also some spiny grass growing there, and I spent a lot of time snapping off spiky cactus, threading it onto spiny grass and making necklaces to wear with my many swimming costumes. This makes me sound like a little princess but the limited photographic evidence suggests I was a podgy pale kid having fun on a beach next to a building site. And why not.

I wasn't always wearing my many swimming costumes though (which was all more ok in the 1970s) and my #1 Majorca memory is of sudden excruciating pain between my legs. I remember screaming, and fighting with my mother, sudden cessation of pain, and some blood. Some years later I asked her about it and she told me that I'd managed - god knows how - to get a large pointy seed from the tall spiny grass stuck in my little vagina, and the cessation of pain was her hoiking it out. Maybe that's what did for my hymen, of which there was no sign when the time came.

Yeah, so I possibly lost my virginity to a grass seed in Majorca. Good start. Maybe I should count my blessings there was no one waiting outside a front bedroom in Blackpool 11 years later to hoist a bloody sheet up the flagpole as evidence of my honour.

joella

A girl can dream

We paid a visit to my Significant Aunt in Shropshire last weekend, and a lot of fun it was too, although the main purpose of the visit, the initiation of Project Skirting, was shelved. I have never been able to get my sewing machine to run properly, it keeps clunking and jamming. It turns out that this is actually because there is something wrong with it, rather than because I am unable to RTFM. Which was disappointing, but also a relief. I don't like to fail with machinery. We discussed making it with her machine instead, which is many years older, many times heavier, and works beautifully, but it didn't feel like the right thing to do.

So we did other things instead, including consume rather a lot of Stinking Bishop cheese, together with the perry it is named for, following a walk of just the right Sunday length along the Shropshire Union Canal. We spent a lot of time in the kitchen, which is huge, solidly built, beautifully designed and stupendously clean. My favourite thing in it is the rubber gloves holder, which was constructed from the poles of two wooden kitchen roll holders sawn off at a slight angle and mounted on the same base. But I also like the Aga.

The reason the kitchen is so bang-on in every respect is that it was decades in the planning. My aunt and uncle spent many years living in married quarters on RAF bases dreaming of the kitchen they would one day build. And now they have.

As I thought about this, I realised that for years I have been doing the same thing, but not for a kitchen. There is a dream bathroom in my mind, which slowly evolves and may one day take shape. Not in this house though... my dream bathroom cannot be accommodated in a Victorian terrace with dodgy plumbing. I am not even sure it can be accommodated in Oxford, as the water here is hard hard hard, and my dream bathroom has a lot of glass to keep clean.

I already pretty much have my dream bath, which is long and narrow and deep and made of steel. But in my dream bathroom it would not have a shower over it and serious grouting issues. It would have space around it and a view out of a non-frosted window. There would be a big radiator with a rail over it for my big fluffy towel, a shelf or table for books, drinks, snacks etc, and some large potted plants oxygenating the steamy bathroom air. The floor would ideally be painted and sealed wood, with a deep pile bath mat one could wriggle one's toes in. The bath mat would have its own place on the wall (or maybe on one of those ceiling-mounted clothes airers with a pulley and a cleat) so it didn't stay on the floor getting manky. The lighting would be bright, I am not one of those candles in the bath people.

Baths are solo things, though we usually share the water to avoid enviro-guilt, but there would be a walk-in glass shower enclosure with two showers in it so two people could shower at the same time in the morning. This is the bit our plumbing could not cope with. Megaflos and power showers are even worse for the environment than baths, and also a maintenance headache, and electric showers are just a bit crap, so it would be a case of a decent boiler, a large hot water cylinder and a large head of pressure. Am sure it's possible.

The basin would be a classic, with two taps and a pedestal and a plug on a chain. I do not have this European insistence on mixer taps, I hate pop-up wastes, and I am fine with visible pipework, as long as it is elegantly done. It would have a normal mirror over it, plus one of those cool adjustable magnifying ones for detailed facial scrutiny, but there would otherwise be no mirrors in the room.

There would be two WCs, part of the bathroom but in separate alcoves. I am not squeamish about these things, but I like the idea of having my own toilet. If they're next to each other, with changing room-style swing doors, the plumbing wouldn't be overly complicated and there would be no arguments about who gets to go first or who left reading material about avant garde 20th century music all over the floor.

Finally, there would be a raised platform, ideally with a view out of the same window as the bath, which would be carpeted and which would have a couple of comfy armchairs and a small table for more books, a radio, snacks and drinks. This is where one would recline while waiting for the bath to fill, or to talk to the person who was in it, or to curl up afterwards wrapped in towels.

There would be lots of hooks on the walls for dressing gowns etc. And there would be lots of pictures on the wall. There would be minimal tiling, apart from splashbacks around the bath and basin, and lots of tongue and groove in seaside colours.

I have never seen this bathroom. I am rather hoping I never do until I get to make it myself. It would be very hard to appreciate my own bathroom once that had happened, and my own bathroom does its best with what it has.

joella

Not so much about the workers

Ten or so years ago, when I was young and shiny and we believed in our political leaders, M and I got up (or possibly stayed up, I have done it both ways round and can't quite remember) for May Morning. It was a glorious dawn, and on the way into town we bumped into two of our friends, heading in the same direction, and we all parked our bikes together and walked up to Magdalen Tower.

These two were rarely seen out together, as one of them was married to someone else at the time. I don't approve of That Sort Of Thing, but I'd only really ever known them as a couple, and who was I (or indeed am I) to tell other people how to manage their relationships. It wasn't the first liaison of its kind, I did know that, and I assumed there was some kind of tacit 'arrangement' in place.

We were early enough to find a great spot, listened to the singing, squeezed into the very unfashionable Mitre for a couple of pints, wandered down to the Covered Market for a drunken breakfast and then parted ways.

It was the perfect Oxford May Day experience, except for the fact that when that week's Oxford Times came out, there we all were on the front page, beaming up at the tower. Whatever kind of arrangement *was* in place, I can imagine it didn't encompass appearing together in the local press. Rumour has it someone went round buying up every copy of that week's edition in West Oxfordshire. I still have mine.

By the time it came around to falling on a weekend again, we lived on the other side of the bridge (which is always closed from around 4am to stop drunken students jumping off and braining themselves on shopping trolleys other drunken students have thrown in the river). We wandered up Cowley Road around 5ish, stopping to pick up various friends on the way, feeling like we were calling for them on the way to school. We stayed east afterwards as well, drinking Guinness at the Temple Bar (still in its pre-makeover formica and urinal cakes phase if memory serves) then back to ours for kedgeree and Bloody Marys in the garden.

It's great, is May Morning, if you do it right. There's something deliciously transgressive about going to the pub before breakfast... it sort of reminds me of Lytham Club Day in my teens, when the pubs were open ALL DAY. Hard to imagine now what people used to do between 3pm and 7pm on sunny bank holidays.

And if you're only here for a few years, then yes, clearly you must get up and get out there. If you live here though, and you don't have a thing for Morris dancing, and you have to go to work afterwards, and you're SO not a morning person, then all you get is the aftermath... girls with smudged mascara and bleeding feet, boys who have been drinking for so many hours that every civilising vestige of their expensive education has been obliterated and you just want to drive a stake through them and their can of Red Bull.

On balance though, I wouldn't be without it.

joella

No country for old brands

This morning we found ourselves at a Welcome Break on the M42, needing a brief respite from lorry spray, tailbacks and general greyness. In the coffee queue, I saw a sign that awarded the southbound M42 outlet of this forgettably named hot-drinks-and-panini franchise five stars, for attaining '96% brand compliance'. I thought this was about the most depressing thing imaginable - although then I sat down and opened the complimentary copy of the Daily *spit* Mail, a brand from hell if ever there was one.

Closing it with a shudder, I drank my bucket of Americano and thought about brands. They are fascinating things. Brand compliance at the Welcome Break is about replicating the Coffee Shack (or whatever) experience. I may find the Coffee Shack experience soul-destroying (because what I really want to find on the M42 is someone offering tiny espressos and spicy noodle soup in a Vietnamese roadside stylee, and that is *never* going to happen), but there are times when we all look for the comfort of the familiar. For example, there was nothing to compare to my happiness when I sourced Laughing Cow cheese and Vimto in the Hot Place. You know where you are with Laughing Cow cheese and Vimto, and I needed to know where I was. Maybe some people feel like that after they've survived the M5-M6 merge, and Coffee Shack is there to deliver.

But if that's all there was to it we'd still all be driving Austin Maestros and cleaning our bathrooms with Vim powder, and Little Chef wouldn't be in so much trouble. We must all spend more, on new things, all the time, or capitalism will FAIL! (Um...)

Enter marketing, and hate it as I do (and I've linked to Bill Hicks on the subject before, but it's worth doing again) I have my buttons and there are brands that push them.

Sometimes, there's a brand that just gets it right. You want their stuff because it feels good, it looks good, it works better than anything comparable, it makes you feel good. It also tends to cost twice as much, but you think to yourself, maybe it's worth saving up for. And maybe it is. Apple, DeWalt and Le Creuset all come to mind.

But much more often there are the brands that you want because their marketing people have done a good job. If they've done a *really* good job you think these brands somehow help you say something about yourself. In my purchasing lifetime I've fallen for JPS, Ellesse, Aveda, Stolichnaya and Billy Bag, among many others, in this way. None of them worth the money (though my Ellesse trainers are now 12 years old and serving well on the allotment).

Somewhere in the middle there are the brands that help you navigate the overwhelming choice of everything everywhere. You have to wash your hair with something. You have to put something on your toast in the morning. You place yourself somewhere on the multidimensional axes of smell, taste, cost, quality, aesthetics, ethics etc, you make your choice, and if you've got any sense you stick to it. Here I would put Lurpak, Neals Yard, Fat Face, Moleskine, and the Co-op Bank

Having said all that, my Feelgood Wine Of The Summer for 2009 is Black Tower Pinot Grigio. Go figure.

joella

Up and down and round and round

There I was, thinking that I never did anything anymore except darn socks, explore cabbage recipes and stick pins in voodoo dolls of the Carolines next door, but it's shaping up to be quite an eventful spring.

Gigular, in particular. David Byrne played Oxford the Thursday before Easter. Wasn't planning to go, but then M read the reviews of previous shows and decided that we had to. And there were still tickets, so we did. It was awesome. There were tears, there was dancing (incredible on stage, impressively awful in the aisles), there was jumping up and down and shouting of THIS AIN'T NO FOOLING AROUND. And there were men in tutus. They can burn down my house anytime.

A far more select gathering was the spring outing of Nonstop Tango. They make it as difficult as possible for people to come to their gigs by having them in out of the way places and not telling anyone about them. Which is a shame in a way as I think they're getting pretty good. They can practise in my middle room anytime.

NST played in the Brookes Drama Studio... just around the corner a couple of weeks later the mighty Polly Jean Harvey played the main Brookes venue with John Parish. I *hate* this venue, it's an overcrowded misshapen muffled-yet-booming hellhole where they won't sell you a bottle of water with the lid still on and you can't generally see a damn thing unless you're six feet tall thanks to all the corn fed students with hats on jammed up the front. *But* Andy made me an offer I couldn't refuse and I'm glad I didn't. We wedged ourselves into a good spot in the middle, and she delivered a pretty amazing set - I didn't know much of it, but that made the screams even screamier. Pig Will Not is the song of the season.

And we've also been away to see the Finnfans in sunny Swansea, where we dragged a crippled child to the beach (above) in the boot of the car and later ate nettle tops. It was excellent, as ever, and also featured gin, before, during and after the Marriage of Figaro.

So it's not a bad life, all things considered, though I wish my gherkin seeds would germinate and my shower would stop blowing its fuse for reasons I Do Not Understand.

joella

Reality Checkpoint

... is a real place. Someone took me there once when I was a little, how shall we say, boxed. It's stayed with me.

So I was slightly freaked the other day when, walking up the stairs, I tugged at a corner of wallpaper till it started coming away. Feeling guilty (we have agreed to strip the wallpaper but we haven't actually agreed to start stripping the wallpaper, as we can't rewallpaper till we've rewired, and we haven't any money for rewiring, what with the Global Economic Downturn), I carried on up to my room. And then I saw on the wall, in tiny letters, in *my own handwriting*, the words PEEL ME.

Eight years nearly, we've lived in this house. I wonder when I wrote that.

joella

Spring cleaning

I finally tidied up my Blogger template. I'm not using Blogger Layouts, which would make it easy to add things and take things away, because I've been around longer than they have. I could switch, but then I would lose all my template tweaks, and there are quite a lot of them - the random top right photo code, the archive posts in latest-first order code, some of the styles in the stylesheet.

But not switching means I have to add widgets manually, which means delving into already fairly messy code with my rusting HTML skills. So nothing changed for a while.

But then I noticed that my Jaiku badge and my last.fm quilt had both stopped working, and I don't like joella to look neglected. So I opened up TextPad and got to work.

1. Links to Atom feed and old blogs are gone: the first is now irrelevant - surely everyone can do feeds these days - and the old stuff, well, I know where it is if I want to read it again, but why would anyone else?
2. Jaiku = out. I had high hopes when Google bought it, and I liked the multiple feed 'activity stream', though it seems to have broken when they closed down for the Google migration, and I can't work out how to start it up again. And generally, I think they might have missed the boat. Though I'm keeping my account, just in case. It has cool.
3. Last.fm album quilt - I didn't fix this but changed instead to a 'recently played' list. I use last.fm all over the place now - with iTunes, on its own and with the awesome Spotify, so it's a better reflection of what I'm actually listening to than it used to be.
4. Twitter = in. I resisted for a long time, but then two things happened: first, I realised that several people who aren't on FB and I want to be in touch with *are* on Twitter, and second, the Facebook Twitter app meant I could update FB status via Twitter. They're a little bit different, I know, but I don't like the tedious RTing of bit.ly links that seems to make up the majority of (*shudder*) Tweets at the moment. It will evolve as a medium, I'm sure though, and I do like the 140 character constraint. Constraints are good for creativity. But yes, anyway, I've been using Twitter for a while, so it made sense to make the link. But if I start doing that blogging about updating Twitter and Twittering about updating my blog thing, someone please shoot me.
5. Tidied up the 'blogs I read' list. There are other blogs I read, but many of them are only updated v sporadically, or I read them for a very specific reason. So these are more like the blogs I would recommend. There aren't very many of them, but lots of my favourite correspondents just won't blog, dammit.

That's about it. And this is one of those posts that is mainly for my own future information. Sorry about that.

joella

And so to shed

It's a non-working Monday. I'm getting back into the habit.

One thing I have realised from a couple of years of mostly non-working Mondays (and quite a lot of non-working Tuesdays) is that I don't, after all, hate summer. No. It is mornings that I hate. If I don't have a reason to rise, then 11 is the earliest you're likely to see me. Quite likely later, in these days of wireless internet access, or if I am reading a good book.

I wish it were otherwise, but it's not, and I've gradually come to the conclusion that it's hard-wired. It gets gradually better with age -- was a time you wouldn't see me before 3pm -- but in those days my phamaceutical intake was more creative and I regularly stayed up till dawn. But I am not, never have been and never will be a morning person. In the winter, this doesn't feel so bad (except on the days when I don't get up till it's actually dark, those aren't good) but in the spring and summer it feels like a criminal waste to still be lying in bed managing anxieties while the man next door but two with the mail order bride* has been up and tending to his brassicas for, ooh, hours.

It is the modest ambition of the rest of my 30s to come to terms with this shortcoming. When I think about it, it has shaped my life. I have never commuted to work, I simply can't get up early enough, so my career has been defined by the jobs available within five miles - this makes me green, but that's an accident, not a design. I never went to nine o'clock lectures at university, and have but a sketchy understanding of the thoughts of Hobbes and Locke as a result. I don't make weekend plans before lunchtime. I have only very briefly considered having children, and one of the (many) reasons for not doing it is I couldn't face the early starts. I have never caught the worm. Our household motto is 'seize the afternoon'.

And I don't think that's going to change. So my new working hypothesis is 'that's ok'. Lots of good things happen in the afternoon, and I'm about to go and plant my gherkin seeds to prove it.

joella

* No empirical evidence of this. But I can't imagine this union happening any other way.