Grief is the word

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I fucking miss her though.

joella

Love, food and pants

My mum's bike. We took it to the funeral. 

This is what I said towards the end of my mum's funeral. I also read Dorothy Parker's Fulfillment at the beginning. I held it together pretty well, if I say so myself.

When I was little, I thought all towns were like Blackpool. I thought everyone had seaside and rollercoasters. I also thought everyone had a mum like mine. There was always love, there was always food, there were always pants. She was always there. It wasn’t really till I grew up that I realised how lucky I was, and how remarkable *she* was.

The love, food and pants were unconditional, but she did have a way of letting you know when you were pushing your luck. In my late 20s, I was on the verge of splitting up with the boyfriend I’d been with since Cambridge. I was worried my parents wouldn’t approve of this decision, and I was pretty confused about it myself. I came to Lytham for the weekend to get some space, and I was watching Trish hang out some washing when she said ‘so are you going to tell me what’s going on or not?’ Several hours later, she said hmm, do you know what I think? I said no, what do you think? She said ‘I think you should stop arsing him around and call Pickfords’.

Her advice, as ever, was sound, and eventually I did. Some time later, about 15 years ago now, I introduced her to Miles for the first time. Afterwards she said to me ‘oh, darling, those teeth.’ But then he turned up on the doorstep that Christmas with a giant jar of cashew nuts, and she began to see the point of him. It made me very happy that they got on so well, and he also now goes to the hygienist regularly.

Practical woman that she was, Trish most often came to stay with me when there was work to be done. When we moved to our house in Oxford she came to help clean the flat Sara and I were moving out of. I went to pick her up from the train station and she alighted carrying a Hoover and a bucket. I protested that as a fully grown woman I *had* a Hoover and a bucket, but the look she gave me made it clear that in the world of Hoovers and buckets, I knew nothing. When, ten years later, she came to help me paint the bedroom of that house in Oxford before we put it on the market, she brought her own overalls and brushes, and I didn’t say a word.

Over the years she taught me a lot of practical things -- how to unblock a toilet, how to prune a rose bush, how to split logs with an axe -- and bought me a lot of practical things as well: a dishwasher, a tumble dryer, a shed, a bicycle, another dishwasher. She was a big fan of dishwashers. When she bought me the first one, she said ‘if you’re going to live with a man, dear, you’re going to need one of these.’

One of the things I admired most about her was that she didn’t pretend to be a fan of things she wasn’t a fan of ... shall we visit an art gallery / cocktail bar / sushi restaurant? I’d say. No thank you, darling, she’d reply ... but there were things we both enjoyed, and things we all enjoyed as a family, and I have so many happy memories of time I spent with her. My first biryanis at the Bengal in Preston when I was little. Picking field mushrooms in Ireland when I was a bit bigger. Going for coffee together like grown ups do when I was a teenager. Smoking cigarettes together not very long after that. Being the only two people swimming before breakfast on holiday in Turkey. Walking a few miles of the South West Coast Path just a few years ago. We enjoyed that a lot, and we talked about doing more walking together in the Lakes once I’d moved north.

Sadly, that was not to be. But she was only very rarely a sentimental person, and again, I have a lot to learn from her here. A couple of years ago, as a thank you for helping me paint that bedroom, I took her to the Sanctuary, the women-only spa in Covent Garden. I thought, this is a meaningful thing to do with one’s mother. I decided to go for a naked swim in the famous Sanctuary pool. When I got in the water, she said ‘well, at least you won't sink with bazookas like those’.

I’m desperately sad that I’ve lost my mum, but I’m glad I did move north - it meant I got to spend a lot of time with her during her last year. And I’m desperately glad that I had the benefit of more than 43 years of her humour, warmth, courage, generosity, and common sense. In my drawer at home is the last pair of pants she ever folded for me. It will be a while before I can bear to wear them.

I owe lots of people messages. I'll get there. In the meantime, thanks for all the love, support, cards, messages and donations. They have all been hugely appreciated, I'm just, you know, a bit behind on my correspondence.

joella

Those beautiful brown eyes have closed for the last time

Trish Lyon
 27 February 1944 - 21 August 2013

I'm so sad.
If you knew my mum (or hey, even if you didn't) and would like to make a donation in her memory you can do it here.

joella

You're allowed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

Foothills of end

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

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

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

joella

Echoes

Moving north was supposed to be all about the new. Living in an intentional community by a river in a brand-new eco-home... could there *be* a better opportunity to reassess, reprioritise and reinvent? And there's been some of that, and there will be some more -- not since I went to university 25 years ago has everything about my day-to-day life been so suddenly so different. It's not all marvellous -- if I could draw, there would be a comic strip in me called Harangued By Vegans*, and there are some people, and some places, in Oxford I MISS SO MUCH -- but when I sit back a little and survey my new territory, I think we properly lucked in. If you're going to try and live more sustainably, more mindfully, more (dammit) communally, you'd be hard pushed to find a more, for the most part, resourceful, kind, interesting and diverse group of people to try it with. When it came to the go/no go conversation back in whenever it was, of the two of us, I was the less convinced. But even I thought, hey, if I walk away from an opportunity to be part of something *this* properly groundbreaking, I'm not the woman I thought I was.

But the woman I thought I was had a mother who was all seeing, all knowing and was going to live pretty much forever. She was going to be one of those women who take up marathon running or karate in their 70s and appear to be made mostly of sinew and gold. When I saw the now infamous Twitter post of the son of the woman who confronted the guys who killed the soldier in Woolwich I burst into tears. Because *my mum used to be a motherfucking badass too*. (Except without the swearing, she hates swearing).

In fairness, she's handling her terminal illness absolutely like a motherfucking badass, at least whenever she's had the choice. The times when she doesn't are the hardest for all of us, possibly her included, though these last months I've learnt many things about the boundaries of agency. Things which I'm sure she already knew, being a nurse (and a M-F-B-A), but which for the rest of us, have been a bit WHAT THE FUCK. I've spent a lot of time sad, and a lot of time crying, but you can only spend so much time mired in anticipatory grief, especially when the person in question, on a good day, is adjusting her wig (have I got everything? phone? keys? purse? hair?) and requesting that you get your arse in gear so we can get to the curry house the moment it opens**.

Which brings me to the point. This time of planned beginnings is also a time of unplanned endings. And on the journey between the two, from Lancaster to Lytham, I change trains in Preston, the town (now city) where I was born. Preston Station is part of the landscape of my formative years... any significant journey to anywhere that wasn't in a car went via Preston. The bar in Preston Station was where I had some of my first solo drinking experiences -- hey, anyone can be in transit, I can sit here with my pint of lager, my pack of Embassy Regal and my novel, waiting for a train...

And I find myself in the same bar (less seedy these days, more's the pity), waiting for the same train, the hourly Colne > Blackpool South, that punctuated my life all those years ago. If the sun is past the yard arm, I order a glass of red wine and a mini tube of salt and vinegar Pringles. Every time this happens, a line from Michelle Shocked's Memories of East Texas plays in my head... "looking back on the road I'd come, thinking I had not come that far..." But then, I alway think (the repetition is one of the echoes) I have gone far, I've just come back. I never thought I would, but I did. And, I alway think, is that a good thing or a bad thing? 

Unless I (and, frankly, science) buck the trend set by all my grandparents, and now my mother, I'm definitely in the second half of my life. There are a squillion cliches about this, none of which I wish to quote, but suffice it to say that I only just realised it. Longevity-wise, I've peaked. To that extent, in no way is forty the new thirty. Forty is halfway to fucking eighty. I don't come from a tribe that sees eighty. So, y'know, get ready to crumble.

ON THE OTHER HAND who the hell wants to be eighty? I'm not sure I do. So maybe this is all kind of timely. You've gathered enough input, love. You've had enough stimuli. Work out what it is you want to do with it all. Stop consuming***, start producing.

These are my thoughts at the moment. I expected to be carving out new territory, but instead I often find myself in strange familiar places, wading through layers of memories. Not so long ago, I was almost never allowed to cook a meal in my mother's kitchen, that was her job. These days, I cook nearly every visit. One of my regular dishes is spaghetti bolognaise. I make it with Quorn mince, as everyone bar me is now pretty much veggie (as I was until I was Harangued By Vegans), but as I put it in the pan to brown, I remember being sent to Clarkes butchers as a child for three quarters of a pound of minced beef. I remember queuing up, thinking 'I can't see over the counter, will they see me?' (they always did, but that never stopped me worrying that they wouldn't) and John, the big butcher with blood under his nails, putting his hand in a bag and using that to grab the mince. He was nearly always spot on.

When I chop the garlic, I remember working in Pleasant Street restaurant just down the road, where I learnt to smash garlic cloves with the flat blade of a knife, to get the skin off more easily. I also remember having to do that with six bulbs of garlic every Saturday morning, to make the garlic butter for the house vegetables for the week, how sticky my fingers got with garlic juice, and how my mum taught me how to get the smell out with Vanish, which she used on the collars of my dad's shirts. With the peppers, I remember the dreadful experimental dishes of the 70s. There was something called March Pork, featuring pork and red peppers, which my mum made once, and which I point blank refused to eat. I did the same with Hungarian Goulash. Still can't do much that involves peppers and rice. But I also remember, many years later, reading a book recommended to me by my friend V, about a British Pakistani family, where one of the characters watches a friend chopping a pepper and throwing away the stalk and seeds, and is reminded of her mother, who makes a special dish from these unwanted parts, like vegetable offal. I've always wanted to taste that dish.

The mushroom thing has been there for a while... about 20 years ago I was chopping mushrooms for a lasagne with my friend N, and she was throwing all the stalks away. I asked her why, and she said that when *she* was growing up, her parents used to eat the mushroom caps and give the stalks to the kids, and she was never going to eat a mushroom stalk again. I immediately started throwing stalks away in solidarity. A few years ago I saw her chopping mushrooms again, and she wasn't doing it anymore. Oh, I'm over that now, she said. I wasn't. To this day I always chuck one or two stalks in the compost bucket, just because I can.

Every meal I make there, and increasingly elsewhere, is like that. Something as simple as cooking dinner suddenly seems to be suffused with the cooking of every dinner ever. I am meeting myself coming back. I don't know if I like it, but there doesn't seem to be much choice in the matter. Is this growing up?

I am hoping it's not followed by an overwhelming desire to pass on mushroom-chopping traditions to the next generation, because I've left that a bit late. I am the end of the line. All that will be left of me is blog posts, rag rugs, sloe gin, playlists and pickles. And I don't mind about that. At least, not yet.

Pink Floyd are finally on Spotify! Here are some more echoes.

joella

*Not all the vegans. Just one or two of them. But there's no haranguing like it. 
** My dad has his own role in all this, and one which merits at least as many words. But for now he has taken on the role of parent-who-will-live-more-or-less-forever. Now I think about it, *both* my parents are M-F-B-As. 
*** I say this as someone who's been a taxpayer for 20 years. I'm not talking about financials.      

Brazzaville Beach

Not Brazzaville Beach

It's getting on two years since we had a holiday, and *that* was a snatched week on the Kent coast (above), where we took our laptops and spent a goodly portion of each day looking for cafes with wifi so we could keep up with our lives.

We did do some good walking, and drank some good beer in some good pubs, had a sandwich in Sandwich, and I re-read The Crimson Petal and the White... so it was a break, but mainly of the relative-calm-before-the-enormous-storm kind. It was the week we put our house on the market, and nothing has been the same since.

We used to be quite good at holidays, but they take time, planning and cash. All of the above disappeared into the vortex of our decision to join Lancaster Cohousing... a weekend of meetings every month, with train fares and finding places to stay, selling a house, moving to the Interim Bungalow, project commitments, trying to spend more time up north and less time down south, failing, trying to manage two lives ... it's not very sustainable, and it's completely exhausting.

When I look back I wonder if we should have made the break sooner, but then we had our own place in Oxford, and good friends all around, and we knew how everything worked. We didn't have much fun in our temporary northern accommodation, and anyway you don't leave Oxford lightly, not if you've loved it longtime. But then I also wonder if we should have taken it more gradually, moved in slowly, instead of basically camping in a house full of boxes with no internet, no washing machine, no transport, in the middle of a building site with a postcode that didn't really exist. In the end, we felt that would have just prolonged all the above agonies. We were absolutely in accord that we should just get on with it, so we did. But shit, it was hard. We were very tired.

And we still are. There hasn't been any respite... if anything the reverse. I've had more work travel this year than ever before -- I'm not proud of this, carbon footprint-wise, and it's probably a one-off, but in the last 12 months I've hauled my arse to Boston, New York (same trip, and I did get the train between them...), the Netherlands, Cambodia, the Netherlands again, and Tanzania. I also go to Oxford every six weeks or so to catch up with people in the NGO X mothership, and to Lytham every week - to spend time with my mum while I still can, and to give my dad, who is too sensible to drink alone, a reason to open a decent bottle of red and take a little time out from the main event. 

We live in a peaceful, calm, warm, comfortable house which I do not regret for a moment moving to, which has felt like home since the moment we stepped through the door, and which has a view of the mighty River Lune which I could look at forever. I knew the first time I stood on the footpath near what became my house that this was the place I wanted to live for the next part of my life. But unlike the house, many aspects of living here are not yet peaceful, calm, warm or comfortable, and some may never be. If I had what I have come to think of as my usual resources, which have seen me through life pretty well so far, I think I'd be relishing some of the challenges that living in an intentional community can bring. I know how to represent myself, and I know it's not all about me. 

But I don't have my usual resources, they have disappeared into a swirling vortex of lost certainties. I'm pretty sure I still know who I am, but quite a lot else is All New Here. My head is so full it might burst. And it's a long, long time since I had one of those weeks where you can't remember what day it is and all you have to think about is which book to read next and whether it's too early for lunch. 

Enter Brazzaville Beach, which M borrowed from the library. It lay on the top of the book heap in the bedroom for the couple of months it took him to get around to reading it, and I have become a little fixated with it. Not the novel, but the place. And not even really the place, as the place in the book is a fictional beach which is nowhere near the real Brazzaville. The real Brazzaville does have a part of it called Brazzaville Beach, but that's not really a beach. 

But none of that is really the point. The point is that Brazzaville Beach is a place that's as far away as it's possible to get. They do things differently there. It will be hot, and the food will be strange. There will be mosquitoes and poor sanitation. You will keep your wallet, which will be full of brightly coloured notes with elephants on them, which you need thousands of to buy a beer, zipped into your trousers-with-many-pockets. You will feel like the whitest person in the world, and you will seek out breezy seafront places to drink that beer, which will come in large, slightly wonky brown bottles. The sun will drop out of the sky like a stone at six in the evening, leaving a jet black sky covered in unfamiliar stars. You will sleep with the noise of calls to prayer and barking dogs competing with the air conditioning, which will go off with the electricity several times a night. 

It will all be a bit scary at first, but you will gradually work out how to read situations, and make friends with taxi drivers and waiters, who will find out what you like to eat and where you want to go, and tell you about their families. If you stay long enough, you'll rent a house and start buying food at the market and sending your washing to the laundry. But you'll never belong there. You'll always be insulated from how life really is, and there will be a space around you that will stay empty, that you can use to think about which book to read next and whether it's too early for lunch. And the rest of the world just gets further and further away. 

That is the space I want, and the more different everything else is, the easier it is to find. I have no actual great desire to go to the Republic of the Congo, but I have a feeling that a week in Devon just wouldn't cut it right now. There's no imminent likelihood even of that, to be honest, so we battle on, relying on the odd yoga class and the odd bottle of single malt to provide their different forms of respite. I haven't read the book myself yet -- novels remain a form of escape, as they always have, but somehow I want to keep this one till I really am on Brazzaville Beach, wherever that turns out to be. 

joella

Half a century of nursing

It's pretty hard watching your mum die. I ain't gonna lie. But when I try and project myself into the future, to when she's gone, I can see I will be glad to have had some notice of my imminent motherlessness. I have had some amazing messages of support, especially from people who have been here. One of them said 'take what you can from [this time]. There are good moments'.

I already agree. When I was younger, till probably about 10 years ago in fact, I thought I had precious little in common with my mum. I loved her very much, and we got on fine, but we never hung out in that spa-break chicklit sort of way. I took her to the Sanctuary once, by way of a thank you for a lot of decorating she helped me do, and the look she gave the woman who approached with complimentary macaroons and pink Prosecco would have felled a tree. I tried a naked swim in the famous Sanctuary pool, based on an assumption that she would be unfazed. She was unfazed. In fact she said 'well at least you won't sink with bazookas like those'.

But recently, when she's been well enough, we've done a lot of talking, and I've learnt a few things about her that I never knew. My mum started nursing when she was 18, and would have marked 50 years as a state-registered nurse if she hadn't had to give up work when she became ill in September. It's a side of her I have experienced at home - when she looked after me when I was ill as a child and young adult, or more recently when I've rung her up to ask how to treat something afflicting me or M - but I've never known much about her working life. I guess I never asked. Oh, the arrogance of youth.

What a time to have nursed through. At her mother's insistence, she applied to and got a place at St Thomas's teaching hospital, v prestigious, but she would have had to wait a year before she could take it up, and she decided she couldn't be bothered. So she went out and bought the Nursing Times and wrote off to various hospitals running training courses. They all offered her a place and she chose St Nicholas's Hospital in Plumstead because it had a brand new nurses home with central heating.

She said that Plumstead in 1962 "smelt like burnt carrots". The course itself, and the nurses home, had near-military levels of discipline, but she'd grown up with a tyrannical father, and been to 11 schools as they moved around after the war (he was in the RAF) and she wasn't bothered. She liked the central heating, and the hot running water. And she liked the nursing - she has quite bad dyslexia, so she found the exams terrifying, but she was great at the practicals. Her fellow students were from all over the Commonwealth - the hospital took Rhodes Scholars, so she trained with women from Ceylon, Malaya, Burma, Canada and South Africa. It must have been amazing. I'd seen some photos from her student days, but somehow never wondered how such a diverse range of young women came to be hanging out together in the early 60s. There was also a nurse from Orkney, who nobody could understand because her accent was so thick. She got pregnant, and had to leave. The ward sisters sounded terrifying, but as my mum says, they'd lived through the war, they weren't young anymore, and "life had given them a box of broken biscuits".

They were not easy times. She remembers girls coming in with septicemia from illegal backstreet abortions. When termination became legal, she remembers sobbing 14 year olds being brought in by their mothers, who didn't stay to hold their hands. And she remembers, when it was still a criminal offence to kill yourself, the police coming into the hospital to try and arrest people recovering from failed suicide attempts.

But the NHS was still young and hopeful, and she saw some amazing things as well. In the very early days of microsurgery, she looked after one of the first people to have a corneal graft. She was at his bedside holding his hand when they took off the bandages and asked him what he could see. He looked at my mum and said 'the most beautiful pair of brown eyes you could imagine'. She had a little cry when she told me about that, and I had a little cry with her.

Since then she's worked in all kinds of places - in A&E, where she was put off alcohol for life, in obs & gynae, on geriatric wards, in a hospice, as a school nurse, in a baby clinic, on surgical wards. She knows how to look after people. Now it should be our turn to look after her, but she still does a lot of it herself, except when things are really bad. She has a blue bucket by the bed. I recognise that bucket, I said. Oh yes, she said, we've all been sick in that bucket.

So this International Women's Day, I celebrate my lovely mum, and thank her for showing me what it means to engage with the world on your own terms.

joella

Adventures in omnivory

So the resolution to write a blog post at least once a week has gone a bit wobbly already. Maybe that was too much to expect, though there are posts forming in my head all the time, the way they used to, so possibly it's about finding new ways to catch them as they are forming, before they slip away. As for Sober January... well, I have a bit of a hangover this morning [that was 31 Jan], so go figure. But I think there have been 25 sober days this month, so I shall put that in my pipe and smoke it. 

The meat eating on the other hand is going swimmingly. Here is all the meat I have eaten: 

1. The chicken livers. I ordered these in the restaurant of the Imperial Hotel in Blackpool with M, Plumbing S and small T. It was overall such a surreal experience that I almost forgot about it. The livers were good -- we had them on melba toast. I remember them from working in a fancy restaurant in Lytham when I was a teenager. I was already a vegetarian, but I diidn't mind dealing with the chicken livers.
   
2. Lambs liver the first. It came in a packet from Abel and Cole. It originally came from a lamb on a farm in Gloucestershire. How cheap is lamb's liver?? Amazingly cheap. M coated it in flour and mustard powder and fried it, and we had it with mashed potato and savoy cabbage. And a nice Chianti (this was in Drunk December). I liked it, but I did think it was a bit dry. And I did spend a lot of time thinking 'hmm, this is an animal, how do I feel about that?'. 
3. The free range pork pie. This came from Booths. I forget where the pig came from but it did say. It was not at all cheap, but I wanted to be sure I was buying pork of good provenance. It was absolutely a hundred percent amazing. I had my half with Branston pickle. I could eat a free range pork pie every day, but I suspect this is not a good idea. 
4. The slice of salami. This was in the fridge ... M had bought it from Booths. Originally from Italy. Salami is something I used to love as a child, and I had high hopes, but it was a bit disappointing. Also I didn't know anything about the pig, so I felt bad. 
5. Lambs liver the second. This came from the local butcher. I suspect this is where we should buy meat, but I am a bit shy of asking him about where it comes from in case he thinks I am a middle class hippie. But for now I'm assuming it's local -- it was the sheep on the hills round here that got me thinking about meat in the first place. That and the vegans. M cooked liver the second in the same way as liver the first, but with my leftover reduced onion soup as gravy. It was superb. I also came away with a leaflet titled 'It's all about offal'. 
6. The lamb rogan josh. I read the all about offal leaflet and decided that oxtail would be a good thing to try (I have fond memories of oxtail soup from a bed & breakfast we stayed at in Whitley Bay in 1979). We went back to the butcher's to get one but he didn't have any in. So we looked at what was there and bought some lamb pieces, which M made into a rogan josh from a Madhur Jaffrey recipe. It was fabulous -- I'd never eaten lamb curry in my life and it's the business, tasty, spicy, all the good things. Though I'd say it was a bit too much meat for me... I enjoyed the leftovers the next day just as much if not more, mixed in with fried rice and vegetables.
   
7. The partridge soup. There was a Meat & Fish Eaters Night in Ecoville -- da-da-DAH! The worms are turning! Unfortunately I was at my parents and couldn't be there, but I knew the plan was roast lamb and fish pie. But when A went to buy the lamb from the market she found out that local lamb isn't in season. What's in season is partridge. So she bought a bunch (I think technically a brace) of them, and roasted them instead. I suppose it's obvious that lamb's not in season, but that does beg the question where does our local butcher get his lamb? I leave that mystery for another day. Anyway, I missed the roast partridge, which I didn't mind so much as I'm still not sure how good I'd be with all the bones and business, but there were carcasses, so there was soup. And it was interesting. I think it could have done with some vegetables in it, but it sure tasted of bird.
   
8. Lambs liver the third. This was in Fashionable East London, Dalston to be precise, the Stone Cave Turkish Restaurant to be exact. We were eating mezze before heading to Cafe Oto to see some experimental music. All good. Now, I clearly know nothing of the provenance of the meat in the Stone Cave, so arguably it has no place in my new Dead Animal Lexicon. But it's Turkish mezze where all this started -- back in the days when I used to get howlingly premenstrual, I would want to go for mezze with someone likely to order the fried liver (M, or plumbing S) and steal a bit off their plate.It was good. It was very, very good. Oh yeah. 
9. The spaghetti carbonara. Well this was interesting. We have a great recipe for smoked tofu carbonara, or carbonararara as it was known in M's previous life. I love smoked tofu carbonararara. But he picked up some pancetta in M&S. From 'assured farms in Italy'. I'm a sucker for brand loyalty, and I looked at their pictures of happy British Plan A pigs on the wall and thought, well, it's probably fine. It was very tasty. I could get a taste for pancetta, I'm pretty sure of that. But I'd probably want to find some that was from closer to home. And if smoked tofu remains easy to come by (which seems likely in Ecoville) I feel it may win the day.
   
10. The spaghetti bolognese. This should have been devilled kidneys, which I ordered from Abel & Cole, but they were out of stock. So we went to the butcher to see if *he* had any, and he only had two. M said this wasn't enough, so we bought some minced beef instead. 'I tell you what I do have, though,' said the butcher, and he went in the back and came back with an oxtail. We were so impressed he'd remembered that we bought that as well. That went in the fridge for another day, and that night we had spag bol. This is something that my mum *did* used to make, back in the day, and I remember being sent to the butcher to buy the mince for it. I like to think I make a pretty good quorn bolognaise, but I have to say the real thing tasted v v g too. Smoother, somehow. More integrated. But it didn't taste that meaty. I didn't think, yay, must always have meat on my spaghetti. But I did think, hmm, wonder what that would taste like in a lasagne.
    
11. Lambs liver the fourth. This was unplanned. We semi-spontaneously booked a car and drove over to Ingleton to see N & D and their girls, who were staying in a camping barn there for the weekend with a bunch of their friends. We'd sort of imagined we would eat with them but we hadn't made any plans, and it turned out they were all (about 20 of them) going to the local pub for dinner. They were happy to add us on but everyone had pre-ordered, and when I looked at the menu the vegetarian options looked pretty stodgy, as is so often the case in your small town pub. But they had liver with madeira and mushroom sauce and mashed potato. You know what, I said, I think I'll have that. Me too, said M. 'Two livers!' we called over to the guy on the phone to the pub. He said 'I like your style'. And I thought, oh no, I like being a meat eater now. It was delicious, as well, but there was way too much of it. I'd have gladly swapped half of it for a heap of kale. I like being a vegetable eater too.
    

The oxtail stew awaits tomorrow. We were going to have it on Sunday but that would have been meat three days in a row, and that's not what this is all about. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't looking forward to it. My dad asked me if being harangued by vegans had turned me into a meat eater out of stubborness, and I raised my eyebrows and said 'Possibly. Would that remind you of anyone?'. Which made him laugh, which isn't the commonest thing in the world at the moment, so I was happy. And if I'm honest, there's some truth in it -- there's nothing I hate more than being told what to think, and parts of the Great Cohousing Food Wars of 2012 came with the kind of sanctimonious overtones that made me want to run screaming to the nearest McDonald's just to make a point.

But I do try not to cut off my nose to spite my face, and it's closer to the truth to say that really what happened is I gave the whole Food Issue a great deal of thought, as a result of above-mentioned Food Wars, and came down in a different place to the one I had been in before. I now appear to be a flexitarian -- which is slightly annoying, as that's bang on trend. I hate being bang on trend. But I do like liver.

joella

Monochrome tendencies

Here I am, a day late already, so much for resolve. But in my defence, I've been ill. The kind of ill you get better from, so I don't need any sympathy, but also the kind of ill that sends you falling into to bed with such lassitude that whole days drift past and you've done nothing more strenuous than turn the pillow over looking for a cool bit. Maybe drink a Lemsip and deign to get in a bath that has been run for you. If it'd been left to you it would have overflowed and you'd have found it hard to care. Meetings are missed, emails are unsent, pyjamas are unchanged out of. I already had a policy of avoiding people who cost me energy, but for the last week or so I've just been avoiding people full stop.

I probably had it coming. I had a cold when my mum first went into hospital back in September, but I only remember it because I hovered in the doorway for fear of passing it onto her... it wasn't a showstopper. But apart from that I've been fine for months, through the Big Move, through the days of no broadband, through the long fading of light into a winter of sombre significance and many train journeys. I used to melt into a puddle of blood and tears every month, but that's been under control for over a year now, thanks to the marvels of artificial progestogen (I think I may be a little tougher and less accommodating than I used to be but hey, WORTH IT). I ain't no hippie but I do think when you have to power through, you power through, and then you have a little break from all the powering, and then you fall over. There's probably science that explains that, right?

Anyway, when it comes, it comes, and I'm well brought up enough to know that you can't fight it, all you can do is ride it out. You can go for a little walk in the woods, watch the snow falling on the river, and shed a few tears for all the sadness in the world. You can catch up on all the Nordic Noir you've been missing. You can rediscover the joy of soup. You can read a bit of Tove Jansson, who writes so beautifully about the introspective moods of midwinter. You can spend a lot of time thinking about trees, and a little bit of time talking to them.

This morning the sun rose and shone into my bedroom, and I sat up in bed and saw the heron sitting on his (her? how can you tell?) favourite rock in the river. It was magical. I can do melancholy with the best of them - in Rupert Thomson's Divided Kingdom I would definitely live in the Green Quarter - but it's good to remember that colour floods back into the world just as surely as it can drain out.

joella

Resolve

I'm always quite relieved to get to Twelfth Night, having been at the humbug end of the Christmas spectrum for the past 20 years or so. Oh, but it's lovely for children, people say. Yeah, but I'm not one and haven't got any, I reply. For me it's just a lot of random expense, long journeys at the most inhospitable time of the year, inane music, even more inane television, more stuff that I don't need, and way too much Organised Fun. I'd rather stay in on my own for the duration with some posh gin and Inspector Morse, honest to god, but a) nobody believes me and b) even if they do I'm not allowed.

This year was different, of course (what do you buy the woman who's busy getting rid of things? I could tell you, but you might cry). Gin and Morse was not an option. But, while it was hard for me to tell, because it's a while since I've spent Christmas at the parental home so all the rituals were slightly unfamiliar, I think it went off pretty well. We had a splendid dinner, cooked by my sister's friend O and his boyfriend, who, it turned out, is a chef - poor guy had already done about 1200 Christmas dinners, but we were all very appreciative of his final eight. Cranberry-topped nut roast FTW. We also did quite a bit of Walking the Dog, and Drinking the Wine, and Watching the Queen. It was all as it should be, except not. What else can you do?

Boxing Day was at my aunt's -- and in many ways even more familiar and even stranger. The lasagne, the egg mayonnaise, the tuna pasta salad, the quiche, the rolled up slices of smoked salmon, the lemon meringue pie... all the food and the people and the animals who should have been there (with the exception of my cousin P, who lives in Hong Kong), the men talking about the latest gadget (G's Raspberry Pi), the women sitting round the kitchen table, various people keen to ask me if I really have started eating meat (of which more later). This is what we've always done, but it was a little bit like watching it through a video camera, or from down a long corridor. It was most peculiar. I expect there's a word for it. I wouldn't have been anywhere else, but at the same time, I can't completely say I was there.

New Year was entirely different, and if anything even odder. There was a revue then a ceilidh planned in the Common House, and I am mildly to severely allergic to both of these things. They're not compulsory, of course, just as I am not contractually obliged to eat Mung Bean Surprise, but it's surprisingly difficult to assert your right to, you know, stay in with posh gin and Inspector Morse.

In the end, I had a lovely evening. E came to drink sherry with me and let me be a bit sad for a while, then two people asked if they could come and watch Morse too, which was perfect gentle company. Several others dropped in and out around midnight, and I was finally tempted down the street once I was assured all remaining fun was distinctly disorganised. It does get a bit fuzzy after that point but I remember skidding down the floor to Praise You, and pogoing to Reward till I nearly-fell-over-but-didn't. I didn't feel very shiny the next day (in fact I didn't get dressed) but there in the background was the little glow of knowing that I'm not on my own with the strangeness (or the sadness). I have comrades, and I'm lucky.

In between the two Big Ones we had a delightful visit from Mr B, who came bearing wine, gifts from Turkey and an electric cigarette, which I had a go on after we'd drunk some of the wine (verdict: enjoyable, but probably best avoided unless the alternative is real cigarettes). He'd texted ahead to say he wanted to eat communal lentils, which was not quite possible, but we improvised and sat round our old table with our new friends and ate Greek lentil soup adapted from the recipe of my Significant Ex's best friend from school's mum. It was a good collision of worlds. I do miss Mr B.

But all in all, various things notwithstanding, I was pretty glad to get shot of 2012. We've still got most of the winter to get through, but I find there's something calming and palate cleansing about the tinsel-free bleakness of early January, at least as long as I don't have to go very far and have a decent stack of library books.

So, to resolutions. I have three this year.

1. Blog at least once a week.
2. Sober January. Well, sober most of January, as we are heading to East London to celebrate my birthday and I don't see that happening without a Negroni or two. I might make the days up in February. It's going ok so far, in the sort of extended hangover feat. scary dreams fashion I remember from previous detoxes.
3. Eat meat at least once a month. That's high quality meat of known and ethical provenance, preferably local. So far (not all this year) I have had lambs liver for dinner twice, once from Abel & Cole, once from our local butcher, and half a free range Lancastrian pork pie. I think this may be like discovering classical music after a lifetime of alt-folk. It's a whole new thing. And deserves further expounding, when I've worked out what the hell it is I think I'm doing.

Onwards.

joella

Moving and shaking

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

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

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

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

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

June:

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

July

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

August

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

September

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

October

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

November

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

What all that means is...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

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

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

Leaving Oxford in 100 blog posts: 7. The river

Every city should have a river. Being a bit fancy pants, Oxford has two, the Thames (aka the Isis) and the Cherwell. Plus a canal.

All that water get can very confusing, especially in places like Osney Island and Mesopotamia, and it can sometimes get a bit floody as well, but without the river(s), we wouldn't have the river magic. And we have a lot of that.

The river has flowed in and out of my life here. When I first used to come here to visit my Significant Ex, we would sometimes sneak out of his mum's house at night, cross the railway line, and walk across a field full of buzzing pylons and down a pitch black towpath to sit on a footbridge over the water.

We would wrap ourselves in a blanket, share a joint and look at the reflections of the trees in the river. On a still night, they looked like giant moths.

Once we moved to East Oxford we were further from the wilderness, but closer to the Isis Tavern, in whose idyllic garden we spent long summer evenings getting wasted and feeling just a little bit gilded. One night the water was still as glass, and Dave the Rave and I had to hold on to each other just to make sure neither of us jumped into the abyss.

There was (and occasionally still is) also punting, of course... and although to my mind the Cherwell's not a patch on the Cam for that, only a churl could fail to enjoy drifting by punt through the University Parks. They know how to do a weeping willow, do the University Parks. I did once have to do a nature poo there, but we'll gloss over that.

When we split up, I moved to West Oxford, living briefly on Osney Island, where our local pub was the Waterman's Arms. They had a sign up over the bar saying 'Man seeks wife with own boat. Please send picture of boat.' I loved it in there, in fact it may merit a post of its own. I loved living so close to the river as well, and stayed close when then-housemate-S and I took tenancy of the Bungalow-On-Top-Of-A-Storage-Building just down the road. When I finally embraced cycling in Oxford, which wasn't till I got my job at NGO X, my first route to work was down the river, then over to the canal, then through the back streets of Jericho.

You need to see the river regularly to have a proper relationship with it, though, and once M, then-housemate-S and I moved back east-side, we didn't hang out there so much... the odd walk through Christchurch Meadows, the odd trip to the Isis Tavern. Occasionally we would cycle back from town that way, but it was a long way round, and in the summer the towpath fairly swarms with slow-moving tourists, making cycling somewhat hazardous. I don't think that really changed until Hinksey Pool appeared in my life, when I worked out that I could cycle there by heading over to Donnington Bridge and then heading down the towpath. I enjoyed that ride so much -- through patchwork backstreets, past allotments, under cherry trees, alongside water -- that I wanted to film it, but it never happened.

It wasn't till last summer, though, that I actually went river-swimming in Oxford -- I'd had an ambition to swim at Tumbling Bay for years, but never done it. But I knew we were leaving, and I wanted to do it before it was too late. So one hot humid afternoon last July we cycled over there. There were people there catching crayfish, there was a guy drinking Stella and dancing by himself, there was an old friend of M's who lives nearby and swims there all the time. But otherwise it was deserted. It was a glorious experience.

And then we moved to the Interim Bungalow, and suddenly there was a lot more river. Once you get your bike over the Killer Bridge, the river is the way to everywhere. I go down it for a bit in the morning, on the way to the ring road cycle path to work, I go in the opposite direction and come off at Donnington Bridge for East Oxford, or by University College boat house for Hinksey Pool, or at Folly Bridge if I'm feeling energetic and have cycled all the way into town. We did it in the depths of winter, gliding over icy puddles and feeling intrepid, through the spring, as the green appeared, and then through the near-floods of April and the heat of late May. When you go to the river several times a week, you notice the flora and fauna changing, you notice the level rising and falling, you notice the smells and the sounds and the million shades of green and brown, and the way the second you cross under the ring road on the way out of the city, the towpath changes and it all gets wilder and more unkempt.

We were sitting at our desks last Sunday afternoon, feeling hot and irritable, when I got a text from wild-swimming H: 'fancy a swim in the river? meet you on the meadow opposite the big house?' It was a bit squidgy on the way in, but then it was cool and dark green and lovely. We swam upstream for a little while, drifted back down, then lay on the bank (where I took the photo at the top) and watched the world go by, slowly, feeling that sense of deep calm that is so elusive at the moment. Water is the best.

I love Bruce Springsteen's River, and Joni Mitchell's. But the song I associate with Oxford's river is the Grateful Dead's Ripple. Like the river itself, it is made of wistfulness.

 

 joella

Postcard from a long ago holiday

In the latest of a long series of clearouts I decide I can part with my notebook that used to be a plastic box. It contains many shopping and party invite lists, notes from meetings, plumbing diagrams, things Mick the builder said when he was stoned, and this rather cryptic collection of notes from the lake. Oh, the lake. I want to go back to the lake. K and I have promised ourselves it will happen as soon as our respective lives have settled in their respective new cities.  

Wed 23. Tampere, vodka

Thur 24. Adventure park. Gherkin lunch. Tornado. Rapids & water guns. Harald the Viking

Fri 25: A litre of peas and a litre of cherries. Bus via Lahti with stickers on seats. Meeting A & L in Kuortti. The mission for mayonnaise. Welcomed by the bear. Crackling sauna. Into the lake. 

Sat 26. Sauna lake sauna. Coffee on the swing seat. LOST. S & H arrive! The first big fish. Pertunmaa. Lake night lake watching. 

Sun 27. ALKO is closed. Sauna lake sauna lake. 100 backstroke out. The second big fish. Night sauna. 

Mon 28. Sauna lake sauna lake sauna lake. Fishy omelette. Out to ALKO. Cool recycling machine. Swimming noodles. Fishshot. Lentil soup & halloumi. Cardy. Balcony dancing. Naked swimming. General craziness. 

Tues 29. Red wine head. Much sleep. 100 degree sauna. Giant midget. 

Wed 30. Calm & fresh. Healthy. Boys rowing. Sauna lake sauna lake sauna lake with K. 

Thu 31. Hot on the deck. Bleeding. Schnapps. Jews. 

Fri 1. Poetry bark. Plumbing talk. Meatballs. Ballet. Drinking the house dry. Moondance. 

Sat 2. Consequences. Nature walk. Stories. Egg & gherkin salad. Fizzy grapefruit. 

Sun 3. Puppet museum. Rowing to Pertunmaa. Beer & peas. Sauna lake sauna lake sauna. After dinner walk. Ice cream. 

joella

You don't know what it's like

I am enjoying White Heat more than M, who was the same generation (more or less) as the protagonists, and is therefore jarred by the inconsistencies in a way that I’m not. The scene between Charlotte and Jack after Thatcher was elected, for example, where she was claiming it was a milestone for feminism and he was arguing that the new Prime Minister’s vagina was irrelevant in the wider context of her evil political agenda.

Now, I remember being greatly cheered, as a nine year old girl, by the fact that our new Prime Minister was a woman. It was made a big deal of in my primary school, where we debated what it might mean for us when we grew up, and whether or not she would be called the Prime Mistress. M, on the other hand, already married and a father by 1979, can only remember the despair which flooded the left, with the feminists as gloomed as the men who still expected them to make the tea.

In a similar way, I remember the Falklands conflict very differently to anyone who was an adult at the time. I can remember it, but I was 12. My mum worked nights and I used to go shopping for her in the holidays while she was in bed – I remember holding my shopping list at the Booths meat counter and quizzing the staff over the provenance of the corned beef. They assured me that it was form Uruguay, but I remember not really believing them. I remember sitting on a beanbag in my nightie in front of the TV, watching Brian Hanrahan as he ‘counted them all out and counted them all back’. I remember yomping, and Goose Green, and Gotcha. I remember being absolutely amazed that there were still actual foreign wars where actual soldiers from Britain actually died. (There was Northern Ireland, of course, but nobody understood that).

And then it was over. When it was actually announced on the news I had already gone to bed, but my mum came and woke me up and gave me a Kit Kat. I remember wondering if she’d got them in specially, anticipating the inevitable supremacy of our Paras. I also remember learning that most of the Argentinian soldiers were conscripts, and that some of them were begging for food from the islanders, some of whom fed them. I didn’t understand how a government could send soldiers somewhere without sending plenty of food with them. I was so young.

Thinking about it now, I probably have a worse understanding of that war than someone either older or younger – the former had a sense of context and nuance, the latter have the benefit of hindsight and history teachers. I hadn’t lived through any wars, hot or cold, and the axis of evil hadn’t been invented yet.

So I am finding out about it all over again as a grown up with the 30^th anniversary commemorations, and it’s quite a revelation. Over 250 British soldiers killed in 74 days – that’s astonishing. And I cried into the pan as I was cooking dinner yesterday while listening to Fathers and Sons: From the Falklands to Helmand on Radio 4 – the story of two men from very different backgrounds who fought in the Falklands conflict whose sons both followed them into the army and ended up in Afghanistan. It’s worth a listen.

This all makes me think about the newest word in my vocabulary: Umwelt – which arrived on 1 April courtesy of xkcd. The definition is in the image text (what you see when you hover over the image). The joke may still elude you (it did me), but a good explanation can be found on reddit. But it’s a great word. We are each the sum of all our parts, and only the sum of all our parts.

joella

Emerging, blinking, into spring

The Crook O'Lune this Aft O'Noon #whyiammovingbacktolancashire
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

It's been a bit of a long dark winter, to be honest. It's had its upsides -- not least the discovery that this view appears on the cycle path from Halton to Caton -- which, come June, will be the location of my local Co-op. Just when it feels like this is the hardest thing I've ever done, the reasons for doing it reassert themselves big time.

But there have been some downsides too. I had a little meltdown just before Christmas. I was cycling back to the Interim Bungalow in the dark and the cold, having just failed to get a project agreed by the technology board at NGO X, and on the same day having had a really disheartening conversation with someone who I'd been pinning a lot of hopes on for another project, and I burst into tears. The project should have been agreed, but I hadn't put enough time into it. The conversation should have gone better -- I have since learnt that he's a man not known for his listening skills, but I could have prepared better for it. A third project should have got external funding and didn't -- nothing I could have done about that but now we needed a Plan B, and I hadn't given that any thought at all for weeks. And there were other things, that people who work for organisations with blogging policies don't write about on their blogs. Work was looking shit from all directions, basically. I hadn't seen it coming, and I didn't know what to do.

I am generally one of those people who steps into a vacuum, says 'oh all right, I know it's not technically my job, but then it's not technically *anyone's* job, so I'll have a go at sorting that out'. Several of those projects landed on my desk that way. And usually that's fine, but there were too many of them, they were all going wrong, and -- crucially -- I didn't have any expansion space. I have been working part time for five years and it's one of the best decisions I ever made, but before Lancaster Cohousing came along, before I was selling a house and living in two places and grappling with logistics and managing a website and a document collection and coordinating an allotment group and trying to do all this by bike and bus and train... if I needed to do a bit more, then I did. I think all part time managers do -- they check their email, they make themselves available, they spend a couple of hours here and there on their non-working days thinking about things that need thinking about, writing things that need writing, generally aiming to cover the gaps while not losing their precious work-life balance.

But I can't do that at the moment. I felt like it had been raining for about two months then there was a huge mudslide.

And then there was Christmas, which was also kind of dark. What I really wanted to do was sleep, and hang out in my pyjamas watching Inspector Morse. What happened was we had Christmas Day with ex-housemate S, her Quiet Young Man, his parents, Tungsten & Particle, all three of M's offspring, his ex-wife, and her mother. This was not my idea, and I initially resisted it pretty assertively. But it was our last Christmas in Oxford, and in the end I went along with it because both M and ex-housemate S like having a house full of people at Christmas, M really wanted to see his children on the day, and this was the only way it was likely to happen. I didn't think there was a way I could reasonably avoid it without making a statement that I didn't want to make (nobody who likes Christmas ever believes that some of us really would be happier on our own with some sherry and a good book) -- but I was tired, I was stressed, I drank too much and it was generally not my finest hour. Boxing Day was no fun at all.

It was all linked with the wider malaise though, which itself is all linked with bigger, deeper changes, and maybe it was worth going through it -- as several days later my head cleared and a possible way forward emerged. I talked stuff through with my manager right at the end of December, and we made some decisions that weren't that easy (giving stuff up is hard, especially if you are the one who made it happen in the first place) but I think will see me through this transition year, work wise, and then we will reassess.

Not out of the woods yet, but the light is returning and the crocuses are out, so optimism is easier. My new house has a roof and windows, and is no longer an abstract concept. And I've joined Pinterest, to help me start imagining what Lancaster Jo's life will be like.

joella

Leaving Oxford in 100 blog posts: 6. 28 Beaumont Street

When I first moved to Oxford, I registered at the Kennington Health Centre, which was fine. There was the one deeply embarrassing experience when I went for a smear test and I still had my diaphragm in, and then had to count on my fingers how many hours it was since I'd had sex to see if it was safe to take it out, but that was hardly their fault. But when my Significant Ex and I moved to Cowley Road, we switched to one of the practices based at the East Oxford Health Centre. And that wasn't so great.

I never had a problem with the GP I usually went to see, though I never warmed to her. She was always a bit rushed, a bit distracted, not the sort of person who has the time or the inclination to pick up on the things you're not saying -- but I was young, I was reasonably healthy, and it didn't matter that much. But there was another GP at the same practice, the one my Significant Ex went to see about his mystery abdominal pain, who was an arrogant arse. 'It's an ulcer,' he was told, and sent away with a giant bottle of Gaviscon which made no difference whatsoever. The pains came more frequently, bent him over double and took the light out of his eyes. You don't want to see anyone in that kind of pain, and you certainly don't want a GP who says 'well, you clearly think you know better than me, so what do *you* think it is?'.

In the end, his mum took him to A&E, and they diagnosed acute gall bladder inflammation. Which is rare in young men, but HAD, in fact, been picked up by his previous GP, at the Kennington Health Centre, who unfortunately sent the referral letter to number 127 Our Road instead of number 227 Our Road just before we moved, and the people at number 127 hadn't sent it back. So he missed the appointment, then he moved GPs, and the new one did not deign to investigate that closely. Three months later he had his gall bladder removed -- they would have taken it out there and then, but it was so inflamed by that point it would probably have exploded.

I wrote a letter of complaint, but I was young, and I was reasonably healthy, and I never sent it. I wish I had. But both of us left that practice as fast as we could. We joined 28 Beaumont Street, on the recommendation of a friend, who said 'I think you'd like Dr F'.

I did like Dr F, and I still do. In fact I reckon moving to 28 Beaumont Street is one of the healthiest decisions I've ever made in my life. Dr F is the doctor I see most often. She has a certain brusqueness, but mixed in with that is a great deal of experience, especially in women's health issues, and a great deal of humanity. She's a qualified homeopath as well as a GP -- I had a homeopathic consultation with her once about 10 years ago, after a laparoscopy revealed there was nothing specifically wrong with my patently sub-optimal urino-genital system, so there was nothing specific that Western medicine could offer apart from 'keep taking the codeine, love' or putting me back on the Pill. She prescribed sepia. I can't say it fixed me (and I do basically think that homeopathy is bunk) but it did get me thinking about my menstrual cycle and its effect on me in a much more holistic way, which in turn meant things did get better.

Over the last 15 years or so she's also referred me to a knee clinic for an MRI scan on my dodgy knee (not much to be done), a podiatrist for my dodgy feet (the main cause of the dodgy knee - they made me some orthotics which I usually remember to wear when walking any distance), a breast clinic for ultrasound and a lump biopsy (turned out to be benign), a dermatology clinic for a strange mole on my foot (they took it off but that turned out to be benign as well), an endoscopy clinic for my digestive issues (congenitally sluggish, but no intervention deemed necessary), an eye clinic for a scar on my eyeball that was picked up by the optician (turns out I have a scar on my eyeball), and most recently for a pelvic ultrasound to have another look at that sub-optimal female area (still a bit shit but nothing really bad going on, so back to a review of 'other options'). Plus the odd course of antibiotics to deal with UTIs, sinus infections and the like.

This all makes me sound like a raving hypochondriac, but we're talking about a decade and a half here. The main point is that I think if over that time there'd been anything really wrong with me, a) I'd have gone to talk to her about it, and b) she'd have listened, and got a second opinion and/or more information if she deemed it necessary. I know that's what GPs are *supposed* to do, but that's not to say it always happens*. There are some skills you've either got or you haven't, and she has. I think she rocks. She's a Girton woman, I think that might be part of it.

Many of her colleagues are very fine too. The nurses can take a smear test almost as fast as you can say 'Ow!', and have blood out of you before you've even noticed. During my latest review of other options, Dr F gave me a very clear explanation of the reasons why 40-something hormone levels can wreak havoc on a person's life, and suggested I talk to Dr M, who knows a lot about progestogen management. Dr M rang me while I was waiting for a train at Radley, and we had a detailed conversation about coils and implants and progestogen-only pills which prompted M, sitting on the bench next to me, to seek more knowledge of such things himself. I don't think he'd realised there was so much to it, just that for mysterious reasons I was spending more time than usual in a sobbing heap.

Cerazette is what she recommended for starters -- ten weeks in and I've been hardly sobbing at all.

But extra-special mention must go to Dr S, who I went to see in the Dark Days in the New Building, when I was (basically) in a total state. I came down with a sore throat and tried to make an appointment with Dr F. She wasn't available, so I opted for Dr S instead. He called me in and I started telling him about my sore throat and how I thought it was tonsilitis, and I probably needed some antibiotics. Hmm, he said, and how are things at home? Well, all right, I said, bit stressful (these were dark days for M as well, all his children had fallen out with him and he was very upset). And how are things at work, he said. And I found myself telling him all about it.

Jo, he said, you don't need antibiotics, you need sleep. And he wrote me a prescription for Temazepam and signed me off for a week, which, looking back, is one of the single best things anyone's ever done for me. A month later I went back and said 'these Temazepam are BRILLIANT, can I have some more?' and he said well, they are rather addictive, so you can have one more lot, but that's it. That was over five years ago and I still have a few of them left. I use them for very special occasions when I need to wake up into a benign world.

And that, I think, is what I love about 28 Beaumont Street. They hear the things you aren't telling them. I'm not a great one for league tables, but I did check out their score in the NHS Quality And Outcomes Framework. Generally on a par or just above the average results for the PCT, and generally a little above the England average, which, knowing Oxford as I do, is just about what I'd expect. But their Patient Experience results are 99.7% -- 14% above the PCT average, and 27% above the England average. Which is basically about can you see the doctor you want when you want to, and do you get enough time with them. If you can say yes to these things, you're doing something right.

I can see that once we've moved, travelling over 200 miles to see my GP isn't going to be feasible, and they probably wouldn't let me stay on the books even if I wanted to. But on the grounds that you're nowhere without your health, I will miss that practice more than I care to acknowledge.

joella

*I once had to get the morning after pill on a Saturday, and the GP I went to see took my blood pressure and wrote the prescription on his doorstep. The GP I had in Cambridge tried to put every female student who went to see her on the Pill (presumably so her Saturday mornings would be uninterrupted).