Me and JC

So, Jeremy Corbyn. I've never been a member of the Labour party, although I've always voted Labour in general elections. And this one was no exception, though they basically had to drag the vote out of me. I wanted to vote Green, because their policies were closest to my heart, but several thoughtful people counselled me otherwise, as this was a marginal Con-Lab seat that Labour could have won. And in the end I went to listen to the candidates, and I liked the Labour candidate the best. I'm sorry she lost and I'm glad I voted for her. I'm sorry Labour lost and I think it's a tragedy for the country. I liked Red Ed, the man and his politics, but I can totally see why many people couldn't see him as prime minister, and it was a pretty wet campaign overall. That stone. That sandwich. That mug. That van. And the whole messaging on the economy. It was there for the losing, with hindsight, and it was lost. And Ed had to go. 

My interest in Corbyn was first piqued by Cat Smith, new Labour MP for Lancaster & Fleetwood (I like to think of her as my MP, as my actual MP says nothing to me about my life), who nominated him straight away, boom. And it's just grown from there really. Ten years ago I spent three years working for NGO X's UK Poverty Programme and I learnt a huge amount about poverty and inequality in the UK. It's appalling, and over the last five years it's only got worse, and over the next five, well no prizes for guessing who austerity will bite the hardest. And since I moved back to the north west from the bright shiny Oxford bubble, with its artisanal sourdough, its Mini-driving students, its insane house prices and its, again with hindsight, extraordinary complacency, I've seen a lot more of that biting happening around me. 

And you know, #poorlivesmatter. Of course you know, you're my friends, you're not dicks. But it's easy to forget, when you're not living it and neither is anyone you know*. I'm ashamed of what this government is doing to people who were barely able to cope *before* this ideology-driven onslaught. There are plenty of economists arguing that there's nothing necessary, or inevitable, about austerity. It's a political choice, and we need to be putting forward better choices, ones that people who can see past the end of their own noses (and that's fucking loads of us, right) can, and will, vote for. 

And that's where Mr Corbyn has come in. Everything he's said on austerity, I've been 'why hasn't the Labour party been saying this all along?'. How on earth did the shadow Cabinet come not to vote against the Welfare Bill? What sort of bullshit opposition is abstention? Jesus. 

So there's that. And then the renationalisation of the railways, which is such an eye-wateringly obvious thing to do I would put it on the Jo Stone. And the buses. The way we run the buses in this country, outside London, is FUBAR. Come ON. It's 2015. We can do better. 

And then there's housing. You don't have to be a Marxist to know that the glorious free market will never, ever, deliver decent affordable housing to people in low paid jobs. Never has, anywhere on earth, never will. And when I stop to think about it, which is often (this being one of the things that *did* affect a lot of people in Oxford, and affects Morecambe in a totally different way) it makes me HOPPING SPITTING MAD that all that lovely housing benefit, which is public money raised by taxing the securely employed and housed, goes, in many cases, to exploitative dickwads who couldn't give less of a shit about the quality of the housing they are providing to the insecurely employed and housed. Market forces can do one here. Get in the fucking sea. 

So Jeremy C is a tick tick tick for me on those things. Other things, I'd say I'm broadly in agreement on the big picture, though clearly more work is needed on a lot of the foreign policy stuff. 

But that brings me to the man himself. I love the collaborative process he used to put together his Northern Future manifesto. I love the way he 'doesn't do personal' (something I totally fail at myself). I love the way he's a Marxist and he uses the royal We. He's not in it for the personal glory, and there seems to be a remarkable consensus, even among people who hate his politics, that has him as a decent guy who is doing this because he's the best person to do it right now, and hell, someone's got to. 

And yet there's been an immense 'anyone but Jeremy' Labour establishment backlash, culminating this week with the whole 'we want to be a party of government not a party of protest' thing.

Well, here's the other thing, If he wasn't standing, I wouldn't be voting. I have never in my whole little life seen anyone galvanise the young and disaffected like this. All those people who didn't vote. All those people who thought mainstream politics had nothing to offer them. All those people who couldn't make time for getting their vote out because they were too busy being ill / disabled / working three jobs on poverty wages and what was the point anyway? I love to vote, I've said so many times, but I get to participate. I get to matter. I am one fucking lucky individual and if there's a credible politician out there who speaks for and will act for the people who don't have my privilege, then that person gets my vote. 

And I don't appreciate the patronising tone of the party grandees and many of the mainstream media commentators with this 'oh you naive things, this man could never win in 2020' line. Really? And the other candidates could? All three of them are basically the same age as me, we have similar-ish lower middle-class public sector backgrounds, we all went to Oxbridge in the era when you could leave university with no debt at all if you drank cider and didn't buy too many books. I should identify with at least one of them. But I don't. They seem to have had a collective charisma bypass, though if you twisted my arm really hard and said I had to go to the pub with one of them, it would be Yvette. Obvs. And if *I* can't warm to them, people I could have read Marxism Today, drunk Newcastle Brown and danced to Free Nelson Mandela with, what hope is there for the rest of the Great British Public? Jeremy doesn't even go to the pub, and he's 20 years older than me, and I still think he's the best woman for the job. 

So Im voting for the politics of hope. I really can't see what else to do. YMMV, and I may eat my hat, but then again, it could be the Best Thing Ever. 

joella

* Speaking for myself here, not making assumptions about anyone reading this. I know people in precarious situations, but nobody without some support from friends and family.

Creating new micro-rituals

A month or so ago we went to visit the FinnFans. They used to live in Swansea, but now they live in Norwich. We used to live in Oxford, but now we live in Ecoville. K and I talked about this a lot, in fact we've been talking about it for years, as we both knew we were moving for a couple of years before it actually happened, this massive disruption on the event horizon that you can't stop and you can't really prepare for, you just know it's coming, and then it does.

And then you're somewhere else. You've left the town where they know what you're like and don't mind, where you know where to buy the right size bin liners (Boswells), or Dr Hauschka Melissa Day Cream (also Boswells), where to get a Thai curry with a pint of real ale (The Old Tom), and which bus to catch where. You emerge, blinking, onto strange streets, and you think 'what do I do here? what am I like here?'

Moving to Ecoville had its own special challenges in the early days of course, including living on a building site, not having a postcode, not having a car or a washing machine or a phone line or internet access, but any big move is going to have some of those. And then there was the shock and awe of the Food Wars and the Parking Skirmishes and the tedious-yet-terrifying prospect of spending the next x years arguing with the vigilante defenders of the two legs better stuff. But I've covered that*. Oh yeah, and my mum died.

K's also had seismic stuff to deal with above and beyond moving city. But we've all been where we are for a while now, and what I'm left thinking about is how hard it is, how long it takes, to feel that a new place is home. Not a new house, especially, I bonded with our new house almost immediately, but a new place.

On a sunny weekend afternoon in Oxford, we would probably go to the allotment for a bit. A while later, someone would go and get some beers, or we'd retire to the Rusty Bicycle. On a cloudy Monday morning between May & September, I'd almost certainly cycle to Hinksey Pool. Afterwards, there would be coffee and one of those little Portuguese custard cakes at the cafe round the corner on Abingdon Rd. I might meet ex-housemate S in town, in the cafe at Modern Art Oxford, or latterly at Zappi's on St Michael's St, and we'd mooch around semi-aimlessly with whichever of her children was of the appropriate age for mooching with. These things didn't feel like rituals at the time, and indeed they were fairly fluid, in that they came and went and changed (no longer does a Friday night inevitably end with after-hours messiness in the Kari King - there are no after hours any more, there is no more Kari King, and anyway I am too old), but they were how we engaged with the city.

And a lot of our friends would be doing those things too, so you'd bump into people, or make an easy arrangement to meet up, maybe. It was a 'this is how we live here' thing. When we moved, we didn't have them anymore, and we were lost.

But slowly, we're making new ones. I call them micro-rituals. Some of them overlap with Project Anywhere But Here, but micro-rituals are more about grounding than escape.

One of the first, and maybe still the best, is walking to Woodies. Woodies is a breezeblock hut in the car park at the Crook O'Lune, where you can get a bacon roll and a hot Vimto, Friday to Sunday, ten till three. Initially it seemed a strange place to fête, as I didn't eat bacon (though they will do you a beanburger) and hadn't had hot Vimto for many years, and, frankly, it's a hut in a car park which is hardly ever open. But I have come to love it. The bacon rolls are excellent, though I do still go for a beanburger from time to time, hot Vimto is the business, especially in the winter, and it's round the corner from one of the most glorious views in Lancashire, if not The World. You get there by walking down the river, through meadow and woodland, then across a field full of sheep. It's a sad day indeed when I can't be tempted to walk to Woodies.

A much less charming walk, but with a much more charming destination, is a trip to the Red Door. The Red Door is a cafe and gallery that opened almost exactly a year ago in what had for a long time been a derelict pub. The Red Door has changed our lives. Its opening hours are slightly more generous than Woodies', and although it doesn't have the view, what it does have is an Aga and a proper coffee machine, from which flow flat whites and fine, fine food. We love to lunch at the Red Door. There's a dog, a woodburner, interesting things to read, good music, great people. And in summer, a courtyard garden out the back with a little brook running past. Let's just say, when the going gets tough, the tough go to the Red Door for some quiche like their Significant Ex's mum used to make**.

And there's the allotment, of course. The allotment is a source of pleasure, exercise, glut-based creativity (rhubarb and lentil curry, anyone?) and easily accessible escape. It takes work, both physical and mental, and taking it on was a commitment I was not sure I was ready to make, but actually it's been a sanity saver. Five minutes walk away is a different world, where there's always stuff to do, and you always feel better for having done a bit of it. We go up there together, and spend an hour or two working on different things. We may barely say a word, but we come away happier.

Sometimes we go for a pint on the way home from the allotment, as our local pub is at the bottom of the steps in the far corner of the site. I'd like to say that going to our local pub is one of our micro-rituals, but it's never quite made it. I'm grateful to *have* a local pub, don't get me wrong, and we went through a phase of having our dinner there every couple of weeks, but it was just a phase. The vegetarian main course option is lasagne with garlic bread and chips, or as my vegetarian friend M puts it, carb with carb and carb. As I say, please don't close, local pub o'mine (and to be fair I am sure I give it more business than most of my neighbours), but I await your discovery of the pea shoot, the avocado, and the playlist that stretches past 80s greatest hits.

On the other hand, the local shops have revealed their micro-ritual charms, albeit slowly. Central to them (charm-wise, not geography-wise) is the butcher, who we know as Pete the Meat. Pete the Meat sells good meat (fell-bred beef and lamb, free range pork and chicken) but also vegetables, salad, bread rolls, pies, potted shrimps, and other local delights. If only he sold wine. The newsagents has good ice cream. The fish and chip shop has good fish and chips. The general store is very much at the Happy Shopper end of things, which is something of a disappointment (terrible wine), but it does exist. Likewise the pharmacy, the very part time Post Office and the ultra part time library. We are at the edge of viable walkable provisioning, but once you have the opening hours memorised, if you don't work on Mondays you can get a fair bit of it done.

This all sounds like it's stretched a little thin, compared with the delights of Oxford. And to be honest, it is. But living here is a fair bit slower, way, way cheaper, and I spend a lot more time outside, or inside looking out, at the trees and the birds and the river. I tell M that I would like to spend a year reading the London Review of Books and making art. That would have been unthinkable five years ago, in that I literally would not have thought it, but now it feels only a small (mostly financial) stretch away. Who knew? And we have friends who live next door, who come round to watch Orange is the New Black with us in their pyjamas. I haven't done communal pyjama-based television since we used to get stoned and watch Morse in a companionable heap at Cambridge. It's wonderful (though I am yet to convince said friends, or indeed M, of the merits of Endeavour, sadly).

So I can't say it's always existentially comfortable, and when I'm down I struggle being so far away from the easy pleasures of urban living, but I am getting something from re-casting those same needs differently. I"m not sure it's better for me yet, but I have some faith that it will turn out that way. If I can only handle the neighbours.

joella

* Well, kind of. I have more to say, but the next Ecoville update will be positive, in the interests of balance.
** My own mum did not have an Aga, and rarely made quiche. Her mum also did not have an Aga, but made a lot of quiche. Unfortunately, it being the 70s, she used to put it straight in the deep freeze, to be defrosted months later into something resembling an egg-based jelly with bits in. Never freeze your quiche, kids.

Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness

It's my birthday today. I was born exactly 25 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, which anniversary is now marked every year as Holocaust Memorial Day. Today we remember the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis, and all the other people that regime set about systematically annihilating because they were gay or Roma or mentally 'defective' or Communist or or or. We also remember those who died in subsequent genocides, in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur. Et al.

HMD was first marked in the UK in 2001. Until then, I had no idea of the date's significance. Initially, I was pretty pissed off that it was on my birthday. But I've been coming round.

This is me and my grandma in 1988, when I spent three months in Israel during my year off. She was born in 1920, and left Germany for Palestine, with her father and siblings, in 1928.

So she survived. My dad got born - during the war, when Auschwitz was still in full swing. Some years later, I got born too.

Today, I missed my mum a bit, had a lovely lunch with M and my dad, had a brief love-in with Otto the dachshund, bought some chicken noodle soup in Booths, and came home to do an hour or so's work. I could have gone to the HMD event in Lancaster, where one of Anish Kapoor's 70 candles for 70 years was being lit. But I went to yoga instead, and did my remembering there.

Check our matching noses. Keep the memory alive.

joella

More words about buildings and food

Happy New Year to all my readers! You're wanting a communal meals update, right? Sorry to disappoint, but let's just say me too. Getting on four months after the Fish Finger Hate Crime Affair, we still don't have a new Meals Agreement. Or a new Meals Policy. Or enough communal meals for some people's liking (though still too many for some other people's liking). And still many dark evenings with a dark Common House, while we sit severally and variously in our dimly-lit eco-homes, thinking several and various dark thoughts.

But hey, hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way. And it's not all bad. There *has* been the review of the process of the review process, which didn't reveal any hate crime (phew), but did say that maybe the remit could have been clearer (yup), maybe the Meals Review Team could have had more process support (yup)... oh, and that just possibly we -- big we, not Meals Review Team we -- should have anticipated that by even raising certain issues, or, in some cases, any issues at all, we were essentially picking a giant scab off a giant flesh wound.

Yeah. That. Let's just say that if I had a fish finger / caper / anchovy / gherkin / jar of mayo / ciabatta roll / little gem lettuce / sprinkling of black pepper for everyone who's said 'it's not really about food, though, is it', I'd have a mighty fine fish finger sandwich.

*takes fish finger sandwich break lasting several weeks*

No, it's not really about food. I've identified four things I think it *is* about, and only one of them -- the extent to which being vegan/vegetarian friendly goes beyond providing high quality food for vegans and vegetarians and into guaranteeing entirely meat- and fish- free communal space (some of it sometimes? all of it sometimes? some of it all times? all of it all times? if I eat a fish finger sandwich in the Common House and I'm the only one in there, does a tree fall in the forest?) -- has anything to do with what any of us actually has for dinner.

The other three (in my personal view, YMMV, definitely not agreed by consensus etc) are...

• Equity in current work contribution. At the moment, we're all supposed to do three hours a week on essential cohousing tasks, *and* cook once a month and clean up once a month. Some people clearly do more than three hours a week, and some clearly do less. A lot of people, in fact most people, even more clearly (because we have the numbers) cook and clean up less than once a month. This causes huge resentment. But does it make sense to require the same number of hours of everyone, regardless of how often they are on site / how old or strong or fit and well they are / how many hours a week they have other paid or unpaid work commitments? And should someone who eats a common meal once a fortnight be required to cook and clean as often as someone who eats three meals a week? 
• Equity in historic work (and other) contribution. Some people spent years of time and effort and energy, in some cases to the point of burnout, fighting seriously hefty odds to get the project off the ground. They also took a much greater financial risk, and carried the majority of the project load all the way through the build. Those who came along later paid more, in some cases a lot more, for their houses, and inevitably had less say in the design and build decisions. That's just how it is, as in, it couldn't have been any other way, but it isn't necessarily fair and it's hard to know what we can do about that. 
• Adherence to policy / agreements about how we live here that we may or may not have been directly involved in making. There was an explicit 'policy lock' in force for several years, so as not to deflect energy from the build, but I don't think anyone really knew what would happen at the end of it -- what's non-negotiable? What's totally negotiable? What's somewhere in between? And who decides? Yes, there were policies and agreements written back in 2006 about cars and food and smoking and pets (all available here if you're interested) but back then the plan was that it would be an urban project with around 24 homes. We ended up as 41 homes by a river, on the edge of a village, with lots of wildlife but a shitty bus service. And we're all new here. So what should we change? And do we all have the same ability to influence that? 

... and they’re about fairness and power and justice. The big stuff gets writ small in pizza toppings. We have some big cracks, and what the Meals Review did was remind us that in some cases we'd merely papered over them. That was expedient when we had houses to build (and sell) but now... well here we all are and what the hell are we going to do about it?

Well, it turns out we are going to approach it very, very carefully and very, very slowly. We will have conversations, but they will be very, very tightly managed. There will be meetings, but they will be very, very heavily facilitated. It will take a long time, but, ideally, no one will cry, or leave the room, or accuse another person of a god-damn hate crime.

Part of me is 'holy shit, we really have to do it like this?' but another part of me got accused of a god-damn hate crime for trying to do it in a more ‘given that we know all this, let’s get it all out on the table’ kind of a way. *And* that wasn't the end of the super-helpful 'feedback'. SO I get that we have to do it like this. No, really, I do.

No, *really*, I do. No, really, I *do*.

*checks privilege*

*takes another fish finger sandwich break lasting several weeks*

I might write a book about this one day, having assigned elemental pseudonyms to the key players (every community needs a Boron). But I might not. And really, I do know that here, I should basically Write About Me. So here are my two biggest thoughts from my first four months as a fish finger hate-crimeist.

1. Food is way more complex than I thought. 
We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're a long way past having any kind of 'natural' relationship with food. It's all about choices -- these may be heavily constrained in various ways, but anyone who fancies themselves some shade of green, or anyone who cares about animal welfare, or anyone who cares about their own health in a specific way, or anyone who has body-image issues, or anyone who has a physical or mental health issue which affects, or is affected by, what and how they eat, or anyone who has food allergies or intolerances ... all these variables and more need to be held in balance when deciding what to have for dinner.

These are mostly #firstworldproblems, for sure, but they all play their part in how we relate to food. And the more people you're trying to cook for, the harder it gets to find a way of doing it that works for everyone: if it's just me, and I have the time, money and skills, I can eat exactly what I like. If there are two of us, then I have another set of needs to take into account. Once you get to four, you're into complex territory (ask anyone who cooks for a family), and hell, we're looking at forty, sometimes more. Some needs are harder to cater for than others, some are in conflict with others, some are seen as 'normal', and some, at least here, are seen as... I don't know, 'better'. It's not an easy problem to solve, and logic and proportion can really go to shit sometimes.

Until I got here, unless I was in sub-Saharan Africa I thought I was pretty easy to feed (and being difficult to feed in sub-Saharan Africa is one of the reasons I stopped being vegetarian. I'm still an AVML on the way there though). My mum used to get all the major food groups into me without me complaining much; I have been able to feed myself, and indeed others, quite happily since I was a student (others may not have been overwhelmed by Super Noodles with tuna, tomatoes and Tabasco, but a variant of this is still a staple 10 minute dinner in these parts); and M has been very successfully feeding me for years. In terms of mass catering, I didn't have the best experience of school dinners, but by then I was a vegetarian, so it was cheese salad every day, and always the same cheese. But I managed reasonably well with Hall dining at Cambridge (soup and chips if I couldn't bear the vegetarian option, they weren't so great in the early 90s), and I actively enjoyed the food side of my brief kibbutz experience. Olives! Proper tomatoes! Coleslaw! Vegetarian schnitzel! But I find our communal meals genuinely profoundly disappointing and actually pretty stressful, so clearly there's something else at play.

I'm not 100% sure what it is. But it has to do with the fact that we live in a world where many, many people, especially many, many women, have a miserable, disordered relationship with food, and one of the things I am proudest of is that I am not one of them. I have been on a diet precisely once in my life, when I was 14, and it was a bleak experience. I got the recipes out of the back pages of a book my mum had bought me about Becoming A Woman. I ate meals without the good bits for a couple of weeks, maybe not even that long, and all I could think about was food. I drank black coffee and smoked out the window to dull the hunger pangs. It was terrible, and I decided that it was worse than Being Fat (which actually I wasn't, but I thought I was, not having a thigh gap). So I vowed that all the effort and energy I would otherwise put into Being Thin I would put into Not Caring About Not Being Thin, and that I would henceforth get on with enjoying my food.

And it worked, and I have, and I do. I don't weigh stuff, I don't count stuff, I don't buy low fat cheese, I don't drink slimline tonic. I've never done a 5:2 or a juice cleanse or tried to live off cabbage soup or milk-free milkshakes or egg-white omelettes. I also don't weigh myself. I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't secretly love to be a thin woman (I'd have to live on another planet to be immune to *that* particular message), but I stand by my adolescent conclusion that a *lot* of things taste better than skinny feels. Food is GREAT. Food is one of the best things in the world, and being able to enjoy its delights with largely intact self esteem (I don't feel good about myself when I eat a whole box of Roka Cheese Crispies in one go, to be fair, but I will happily eat a butter pie) makes me One Of The Luckiest People Alive.

But an important part of that is not excluding things -- or at least not excluding things that I love to eat. Once I get into excluding territory then I start to lose my balance. This meal isn't a great meal. It's just calories. What's the point? I mean, we *need* calories, but I don't need as many as I eat, clearly, so why am I eating this? Should I eat it? I get anxious going off in that direction. That way Issues With Food lie.

The things I love to eat have changed radically over the years. As a child it was sausages in finger rolls with tomato ketchup. I can still remember the texture of the rolls, spread with butter from the fridge, the slightly burnt sausages. And vegetable biryanis with omelette baked onto the rice, I bloody loved those. As a teenager, it was Marks & Spencer cheese ravioli with garlicky tomato sauce. I was gutted when they discontinued it. Also those layered salads with cheese or prawns on top. Glad to see those have survived. My 20s were about making friends with chilli and becoming a serious fan of Tom Yam Goong. But it was also when I learnt to cook for myself and discovered the joy of a nut roast with buttered pasta, and Greek lentil soup. And then I met M, who is a fantastic cook and loves food as much as I do, if not more. Ranchos huevos, carrot fritters, smoked tofu carbonara, all manner of curries and noodles and salads and soups and stews. And that's all *before* I started eating meat and he could devil me some kidneys.

But essentially I am about the umami, the contrast of tastes and textures, the sharpness and the spice. I like my food with salt in and my salads dressed. I am not a fan of the sweet (which has in honesty probably saved me from being the size of a house) or the creamy or the heavy or the bland. Many of the things I now love (kale with chilli and garlic! raita! smoked mackerel! pomegranate seeds! avocado! almonds!) are "healthy", but I do not love them for their "healthiness", I just love them. Likewise, many are vegetarian, even vegan, but many are not.

And there's the how as well as the what. I like to eat my dinner in a calm environment, once I've decompressed from the day, with good lighting, off a nice plate, with a knife and fork that match, and a napkin (paper is fine, I'm never sure about how often to wash cloth ones). We usually have a glass or two of wine, and some of our best conversations. If there are four or six or eight of us, (or three or five or seven) even better. I am not so great if I'm eating alone, but I still set food out on the plate with care, sit at a table, listen to Radio 4, think some thoughts.

So I have realised that I make my food choices based on taste and a very personal perception of 'goodness' (avoiding foie gras and air-freighted asparagus, for example, but maybe not avoiding sashimi or out of season green beans if they're Fairtrade), rather than because it's healthy, or because there are things it doesn't contain. That's how I like to eat. That's how M likes to eat. That's how a lot of people I used to eat with like to eat. I kind of imagined it's how everyone would like to eat, if their circumstances permitted, so *there's* a big fat learning point. Another big fat learning point is that if my relationship with food is to stay healthy and happy and un-disordered, and by extension if *I* am to stay healthy and happy and un-disordered, I think it might be how I *need* to eat.

I just can't do food I don't like at a time I don't want to eat in an environment I don't enjoy eating in. I mean, of course I could if I had to, if I didn't have a choice, but I do have a choice, and because I do, I can't. If I can't have something, I just miss it more and want it more. And *that* way also Issues With Food lie.

That may not be as convincing a reason as some can produce for wanting things a certain way, but it's the best I can do. And at this point I'm not even trying to persuade anyone that how I like to eat is the way to go, just to be left alone to cook and eat in peace. I *did* like the idea of shared meals. I still do. Just not these ones.

2. Don't put all your eggs in one basket
This time last year, I didn't have a lot of energy. I was low on spoons. I was still very much  dealing with the trauma and grief of my mum's death, which itself was layered on the disruption and uncertainty of moving up north. I'd left behind old friends and familiar places and decent internet (not to mention proper sushi) for a whole new way of doing things, and then the world suddenly tilted on its axis, never to tilt back. It felt like I'd fallen off something, hadn't landed, and didn't know who I would be when I did. I still don't really know how I didn't break anything, or myself, though there were definitely a few times when I came close.

As the days lengthened, and the distance grew, I did start to feel a little resurgence, and a few more spoons appeared. It was unpredictable, but it felt like it was going in the right direction. I'd pulled right back from a lot of cohousing things (apart from managing the laundry tokens, because that's a job you can do sobbing at 3 am) and I was feeling that I should start re-engaging. This place doesn't run itself. So while I didn't nominate myself for the Meals Review Team, when lots of other people did, I thought, well, it's a dirty job but someone's got to do it, and it looks like it's got my name on it.

From this vantage point, I mostly* wish I hadn't thought that. Because I didn't really have the energy. Or rather, it took all the spare energy I had. We did an extraordinary amount of work over a bunch of lovely summer days when I could have been digging my allotment, or painting the house, or walking in the hills, or sorting out the office, or basically anything that would have been fruitful, in a mental and physical health sort of a way. This was not fruitful. It felt like it might be for a time, as we uncovered stories and sorted statements and looked at possibilities, but if ever there was a poisoned chalice it was this one. I didn't really see it coming, but at the moment it feels like we could have pulled a bunch of ideas out of a hat and saved ourselves the time. That was precious time and precious energy, and I spent it on the wrong thing.

M has made some similar mistakes, we both have a tendency to get over-invested in these things. At work I'm pretty good at picking my battles but it doesn't always play out in other areas. Anyway, we had a good old long old think and talk about it and decided to diversify. We have a new initiative, which is called Project Anywhere But Here.

Project ABH (as it was immediately dubbed by the first neighbour I explained it to) is very simple in concept. If it's not a working day, get up and get out. Anywhere. Do not lie around working on proposals for better ways to do things. Get your coat on and leave the house. The easiest thing to do is go up to the allotment, and the beginning of Project ABH coincided neatly with the onset of Digging Season. A couple of hours up there, in the sunshine with a view over the hills, and equilibrium starts to return. We also have a new local cafe, where there is a large dog to stroke, and flat whites and Aga-cooked lunches can be had. On our first ABH outing we had some of those before walking over the hill to Williamson Park, where we drank beer in the chilly autumn sunshine and visited the butterfly house. Sometimes we only get as far as cycling into town to go to the library and have coffee (not in the library, that coffee is not good), sometimes we go to Carnforth, or the garden centre at Bolton le Sands, or the beach at Hest Bank. But we do get out.

I have big plans for Project ABH in 2015, which involve writing ideas on index cards based on how long they take (and what the weather needs to be like), and then using them to plan ahead a bit. If you have a whole day, you can go and do something in Manchester, for example, and one day, when I wasn't far enough away, I was sorely tempted to get on a bus I saw idling in the city centre which was going to Knott End. They have a ferry there. And that's before you get to the joy of the 555. This is a beautiful part of the world, and we've barely started exploring it. There's joy to be had in that.

We made a healthy start by spending both Christmas and New Year ABH -- but not very far away. We went to Silverdale for Christmas and stayed at Holgates Holiday Park with M's offspring. I've never been great at enjoying Christmas, but it turns out that's because I've never spent it in a static caravan with a sea view, a big hill to walk over, a swimming pool and a real ale pub with a big fire and singalong carols. Everyone enjoyed it! It was great! And for New Year we went with good friends (also good neighbours, a fine combination, as someone may already have noted) to Black Fell Cottage, where there were Picklebacks (exhilarating), tons of cheese, jigsaws, blustery walks, films, Monkey 47 gin (terrifying) and a walk by moonlight to dinner at the splendid Drunken Duck. I still have party bruises. I love those guys.

It was all absolutely marvellous, but it was also good to get home. Which is important. I don't actually want to live anywhere else, I just need to get better at managing my boundaries. And hey, if you've got this far, thanks for sticking with me.

*fixes eyes on horizon, walks forward*

joella

*I say mostly because it wasn't all bad. I enjoyed all the 1-1 conversations I had with people, and learnt a lot about different people's perspectives on cooking and eating, and just about them really. Conversations are good. And I really enjoyed working with the other three people in the team, we were very different people with a shared task and we did some good stuff together. 

The hate crime that is a fish finger sandwich

It’s hard being a blogger in an intentional community. Hundreds of fascinating things happen, half of them inspiring, half of them infuriating, and you think about what a good blog post most of them would make. But is it ok to write about them?

I watched 20,000 Days on Earth last week, where Nick Cave talked about cannibalising his relationship with his wife for his songwriting. Presumably, she’s all right about that, and hey, she gets to be married to Nick Cave. I write about M sometimes, and generally assume that he doesn’t mind. I write about events long ago or far away, and generally assume that the distance is sufficient for it to be safe. And I’ve written about people who will never know, and I generally assume that they wouldn’t care.

But the space in the middle is a bit grey. If it’s something lovely, or about someone lovely, I tend to go ahead, though I might not use real names. If it’s something highly personal about me, but featuring other people, I tend to do the same. In the next circle out, I might change any identifying details, or be generally more oblique. If I have something I want to say, I try and find a way to say it, but I walk a delicate line. I had to retrospectively sanitise a few posts about NGO X once they introduced a blogging policy, but the policy itself was quite helpful. There’s a social media policy as well now, which says you can say that you work for NGO X, but you should include the statement “all views expressed are personal”.

And I’ve not written much about my (still fairly new) neighbours, because it’s hard to know where the boundary is between what’s my story and what’s someone else’s, so intertwined are they. And we all live in a yellow submarine, so the whole anonymity thing gets a bit challenging, and I don’t want to piss anyone off unduly.

But I figure once you’ve been accused of a hate crime, all bets are off.

So here we go. It's quite long. All views expressed are personal.

Over in Ecoville, we have a Communal Meals Policy. It was written in 2006, and it states that we wish to provide “a vegetarian and vegan friendly environment, whilst recognising that many members may also wish to eat meat from time to time”. The person who wrote it was vegan. She never actually moved into Ecoville, but I have heard various interpretations of this policy from people who were around at the time, ranging from “Y never wanted a vegan-only environment, that’s not the kind of community she wanted to live in”, to “if you didn’t want to live in a vegan community, you should have started your own”, via “the first three meals every week will be vegan”.

The person asserting this last, henceforth to be known as Z (for ZOMG!), told me this first on a visit to another cohousing project, a long time before we, or indeed anyone, moved into Ecoville, but several months after we’d parted with a large sum of money and put our house on the market.

It was news to me, and was the first thing that started my (then Ocado pescatarian, currently locavore omnivore, if you're asking) alarm bells ringing, because I Am Not Vegan*. Z was convinced this had been agreed at some point, and I'm not saying it hadn't, but unfortunately no one had seen fit to put it in the meals policy, the decision log, or the minutes of any meeting for which minutes exist. So it can’t reasonably be said to be something we’d “signed up for”... indeed, if it had been called Veganville, we’d never have got on the bus.

As we got closer to move-in date, M and I joined the team looking at how our meals would actually work, which process quickly revealed itself to be Extremely Hard Work. By the time what has become known as the August Agreement was finally hammered out, the Meals Team had to have their meetings mediated by the Process Team. (Not a joke, not even a little one).

And I think it’s a terrible agreement. I didn’t agree with substantial chunks of it at the time, though didn’t get to register that on the day except by proxy, as it was passed at one of the very few General Meetings I wasn’t able to attend. Its worst bit is the Plate Apartheid... if, in the limited set of circumstances when it is not verboten, one chooses to consume something non-vegetarian in the Common House, one must carry it in on a separate plate, use separate cutlery and serving utensils, and carry it all home again dirty afterwards. If you think this is overkill for a sausage roll, imagine how annoying it is when you drop your fork and have to go home to get another one because you can’t use one that’s already there and you can’t wash the one you already have.

The Plate Apartheid rules are, in my personal view, insane in the membrane. They mean that visiting friends and family, who we sometimes take in there to eat as we no longer have a large dining table at home (having donated it to the Common House because one of the things about cohousing is you don't need to have a big table in your house, or indeed a big house, because when you have guests, you can use the communal ones), think we live with a bunch of freaks and weirdos. They mean that you end up walking down the street with sharp knives sticking out at dangerous angles because you’re also trying to carry eight plates and eight sets of cutlery. They mean you are called over by one of your neighbours and asked to explain to his six year old son why he has to eat his pie off a different kind of plate, and you can’t give a reason that a six year old can understand, because there isn’t one. They mean that you have to gesticulate wildly at people who are about to pick up the wrong kind of plate, or stop them taking your wrong kind of plate away to put it in the dishwasher. And they mean that any shared eating experience that is conducted in this way, and they are few and far between because of all the other rules, starts with a good 20 minutes of talking about how insane in the membrane it all is. In no way do they promote peace, love and understanding, and quite often people break them, even when they’re trying hard not to, like when you turn on the light even though you know there’s a power cut.

So how's this all working out for us? Well, meals have happened, and do happen, and while I think they tend towards being brown, bland or bizarre (and sometimes all three), some of the people think they're great and some of the other people think they're fine... although they are not happening nearly as often as the seven times a week they are supposed to. In practice, it's averaged around four, because hardly anyone signs up to cook as often as they have in theory agreed to. Not much else happens in the Common House on other evenings, because there in theory *should* be a meal, so at any moment there *could* be a meal, so it's pretty difficult to organise anything else. So many nights, it sits dark and empty, and on some of those nights small groups sit in atomised small living spaces eating spare ribs off their laps and bitching about the August Agreement. Meanwhile, those who thought the AA was a great thing sit around bitching about the lazy arses who aren't pulling their weight / are shirking / are taking the piss / etc.

Why have we carried on like this? Well, another of the agreements that pre-dated our arrival on the scene, catalysed, so far as I know, by earlier challenges to the food policy, was that all policies and associated agreements would stay in force until six months after the last household had moved in. I can see the sense in that, you can't be going around moving goalposts while you're also trying to build and sell houses, but in practice the whole moving in phase lasted over a year, so the last person's six months was the first person's getting on 20.

But eventually, the requisite number of months had passed and the Meals could be Reviewed. We agreed that the Meals Review Team should be elected rather than made up of volunteers, and we were all invited to nominate people. I didn't nominate myself, because I had such a shitty experience the first time around. Let some other fool do loads of work and then get shouted at, I thought. I'm not stupid.

But then I got more nominations than anyone else. Which did genuinely surprise me, as I have largely been avoiding communal meals (which I have described elsewhere as food I don't want to eat, at a time I don't want to eat, in an environment I don't want to eat in), and I haven't made any secret of how much I dislike the Food Rules. I thought people would choose calm, kind, gentle souls to do this job. But I talked to a few people, and I thought no, there was definitely a reason people nominated me, so I stood, making my position as clear as I could in the process. And four people were duly elected, including me.

That was in February. Since then we've met nearly every Monday morning. We've had 1-1 conversations with every single person who lives here, we've recorded what they've said about what's working and not working for them and what they'd like to see done differently, we've sorted those (thousands of) comments into themes, we've held 'listening circles' to hear people's views on inclusion, integrity, and the purpose of meals, we've provided regular progress updates to our monthly General Meetings, the last of which, in July, said we would be bringing proposals to the September meeting. Which. We. Did... in the form of a draft new agreement, accompanying guidelines, and an evidence document explaining our findings and workings.

We followed the agreed process in submitting the agenda item, and we turned up on the day to present it. We knew that there would be some vegan resistance to some of the things we were proposing, and that there would doubtless be more work needed on these areas - around bringing meat and fish in from home (we weren't proposing that it should be cooked or even offered as part of communal meals), keeping it warm, and the whole Plates Situation - but we put them in because lots of people felt excluded by the current set of rules, and we wanted to propose softer boundaries and explore where these might be acceptable.

And then thirteen people -- most of the current Meals Team, most of the vegans, and a few of what I have come to think of as the Old Guard -- refused to agree the meeting agenda. They did not want this proposal presented, because they didn't like what was in it. No one's ever blocked a meeting item before, as far as I know. Nobody knew what to do. So we spent half an hour of a four hour meeting talking about whether we should be allowed to go ahead or not.

The whole thing was a deliberate and orchestrated attempt to derail things, and the fall out has been enormous. Nasty little emails have circulated with accusations about "some people's intentions", and anonymous pass-agg things have been stuck up on noticeboards in the night. We're now in the process of reviewing the process of the Meals Review. It's like living in a cross between Heathers and Brazil, with a bit of Life of Brian thrown in for good measure.

And it's exhausting. The best thing for me, personally, would be no communal meals at all, and a space we can use to do what we want in. Want to eat some brown pasta with some lentils (seriously, what is it about brown pasta?) Be my guest. But me, over here, I’m having a pint and an organic pork pie. But I wouldn't get close to proposing that, because I am an adult and I know I have to live with other people. And equally, if everyone else thought that meals were just awesomely excellent for them, I’d have backed off and worked out what to do next for myself, rather than proposing changes to a functioning system. But that’s not what happened.

This was a fair proposal, in that it took into consideration the views of the whole community, not just those who have the loudest voices or those who have been here the longest. I have no doubt that it would need to be modified before it could be agreed, but to say that it can’t be heard is... illuminating. There’s a reason we haven’t been able to debate this before now, and it’s because there are people who are scared of having the dominant orthodoxies challenged, in case they don't remain dominant. We don't want to talk about this, and we were here first, so *you* can't talk about it. It’s not been a fun couple of weeks.

We would never have deliberately moved to a hotbed of vegan zealotry**, trust me... though I do wonder if we should have asked, at our first communal meal, which was pretty awful, food-wise, if this is what people had in mind. We just assumed it was because everyone was tired after a full day of meetings and they couldn’t find the butter or the cheese, or, for that matter, the salt, the lemon juice, the Tabasco or the salad dressing. It's possible that if we had asked, and they'd said yes, we are happy to eat like this all the time, we wouldn't be here. This is no place for an Ocado pescatarian.

But we are here. And 'here' is a place where M says hello to Z in the street, in the interests of neighbourly living (he is a gentler soul than I, I am still burning with fury at being silenced after having done a job I was elected to do, which involved a fuckload of work), and was subjected to a rant about the obscenity of us proposing something that Z once nearly did himself***, that was in line with a definition of ‘vegan friendly’ that he put forward himself****, and how our proposal generally amounts to a “white collar hate crime”.

That’s a serious accusation. And, seriously, Z and his separatist mung bean manifesto can fuck right off. I give slightly less of a shit about how he feels than I did before I spent two years getting treated like a menstruating Bangladeshi peasant woman for wanting anchovies on my pizza, it’s true, but I’m still not the one around here doing the hating.

joella

*I have had some awesome vegan meals, truly, but they have been awesome because they’ve been awesome, not because they’ve been vegan. Most vegan meals are at the ‘this might be ok if it had some cheese on it’ end of things, in my experience. And you don't persuade people of the merits of veganism by making them cook food they don't want to eat, or eat food they wouldn't want to cook. 

** Not all the vegans are zealots. One of them is on the review team, and I now actively want to cook him dinner. 

*** One Friday night there was no meal arranged and another neighbour, let's call her X, suggested a chippy run. Our local fish and chip shop also does veggie burgers, which are vegan, so everyone had an option that was better than 'just chips', and Z went along with X to pick it up. They brought it back to the Common House, where Z suggested putting it all in the oven to keep warm... until (pescatarian) X pointed out that this is verboten under the August Agreement. Yet proposed use of the hob and oven for the keeping warm of non-vegetarian food is one of the things that is now 'obscene'. 

**** This comes from the 'Fellowship for Intentional Community' -- there are levels 0 (we kill vegans) to 10 (a vegan world) and v7 ("All dishes, including desserts, if not vegan, have sumptuous vegan equivalents; everything is well-labeled, and non-vegans don't consider it a hassle or burden to provide vegan food") is the level that was proposed by the vegans who live here. We thought that was fair and achievable, apart from the bit that describes how people should feel. You can't tell people that they won't find meeting your needs a pain in the arse, especially if you accuse them of hate crimes while they're attempting to find an inclusive way of doing just that.

To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower

The day we arrived on the Isle of Man I made a waxing appointment. It's one of my few grooming rituals, maybe the only one (bar moisturising every day) since I stopped dying my roots. Every four weeks, half leg and eyebrows, sorted. But I missed one, and hadn't managed to remake the appointment... I've not been up north long enough to be a regular with anyone yet, and I called a couple of times but didn't get a call back and I just got hairy. It's not the end of the world. But there was a beauty room right there in Peel, and she could fit me in at the end of the day on Monday. Perfect.

There's something about being a beauty therapist, you have to be good at talking to people or it can make a strangely intimate situation pretty awkward. And this one was very good... quite a lot younger than me (they nearly all are these days), a little self-conscious (also not uncommon) but at the same time self-assured - it takes skill and hard work to run that kind of business, and while she hadn't been set up on her own there for that long, she had big plans.

But what I found fascinating was that she was born in Peel and had lived there all her life... although she'd been 'across' (as she put it), I got the sense it hadn't been for very long and she had no great interest in it, or anywhere further afield. Her parents live up the road, and she and her sister have daughters the same age, who go to the same primary school as they did.

If I'd grown up in Peel it would have driven me CRAZY. A small town (village, really, even though it's got a castle and a cathedral, so is technically actually a city) on the other side of a small island from its capital, which itself isn't very big - essentially a place where the main story is a) the best part of 1000 years old or b) about a motorbike race that regularly kills people... I can't imagine the depths of anomie to which my teenage self would have sunk. I was once at a Mick Thomas gig with my friend Pete, and at the opening bars of The Lonely Goth he leant over and shouted 'this song always reminds me of you!' in my ear.

I protested that I was never (really) a Goth - I wore a lot of black, and I had hair like Robert Smith for a while, but there was no PVC in my wardrobe, and I did have other looks. But I know what he meant. I grew up in a small town - bigger than Peel, but with less to say for itself... also on the coast, also (in those days) playing very much second fiddle to Blackpool, where the bright lights were, and Preston, the nearest town of any size. It was intensely suburban. It was intensely provincial. I was intensely bored. There was (of course) nobody who understood me. Well, there were a couple of friends, and we would exchange books on radical feminism and tape albums for each other, but there was no critical mass of interesting, no cultural stimuli that I was drawn towards. I would play my Springsteen, my Leonard Cohen, my Suzanne Vega, and literally ache to get out of this place, to where there were highways, there were ideas, there were tea and oranges that came all the way from China.

And as soon as I could, I did. I went InterRailing with my friend R after my A-levels, and saw the Eiffel Tower and the Berlin Wall and the Anne Frank museum, slept in a train station a couple of times, and learnt that you *can indeed* live off bread, Laughing Cow cheese and cheap red wine. By my early 20s I'd spent three years at Cambridge, getting off my head in various new ways and absorbing as much horizon-expanding input as I could fit into my expanding horizon. Then I went out and saw as many different places as I could fit into a year on a shoestring. It wasn't wildly original, even then, but while there were Lonely Planet guidebooks in the early 90s, there wasn't any internet or any mobile phones, so you were on your own out there, even when there were two of you. And we went to the Pyramids and the Taj Mahal and Masada and the Great Wall of China and Lake Baikal, did a bungee jump in New Zealand, spent Christmas Eve on Had Rin beach, travelled to mountains and lakes and jungles and deserts, nearly died of typhoid (that was just me, but my Significant Ex did get dysentery three times *and then* giardia), recovered, had some meals I remember to this day for their fabulousness (a Yemeni lunch in Israel cooked by my cousin's husband's mother, my first masala dosa in what was then still Bombay, a fish and chilli salad near the Thai-Burmese border) or for their awfulness (instant noodles in Australian hostels, the food desert that was Moscow in 1993, 'vegetarian' options with bits of fur and claw in in China).

I'm not claiming any of this changed the world, apart from messing with the ozone layer more than staying at home would have done, but I couldn't get enough of it. And I didn't stop there, and I still haven't... when I joined NGO X I said I'd stay till I'd been able to see more of Africa than Egypt. Fourteen years later I've got a yellow fever vaccination certificate in my passport, together with stamps from South Africa, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania and Mozambique. Not forgetting Sudan. As if anyone could forget Sudan. And if you said to me tomorrow, hey, fancy a couple of weeks' work in Dakar / Dhaka / Dili I'd still be there like a bear.

And yet. As the Charlene song so beautifully put it, I've been to Nice and the isles of Greece, and I've sipped champagne on a yacht. But does it make any actual difference? Am I a better person than if I'd never left Lytham St Annes?

I think probably yes. I wanted to know what was out there in the world. No doubt having the option to find out was, and still is, a huge privilege, but if I hadn't I think I'd have been miserable. I've never actually *lived* anywhere but England, and I've never wanted to... I've thought about it, but a summer in the isles of Greece put me right off. And yet here I am, living 40 miles from where I grew up, less than 30 miles from where I was born. And yes, I have a fair idea how lucky I am.

I first came across this (I now know famous) TS Eliot quote on the wall of my ex-mother-in-common-law's house in 1989.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Twenty five years later, I can see he had a point.

And yet. I admire you, girl from Peel.

joella

I can stand the rain

I'm having an interesting 2014 and I want to do a better job of writing about it than I have managed so far. I keep saying this, so I am making no promises, not even to myself, but what I do know is that there's not a single blog post I've ever written, apart from the ones that got deleted the morning after the night before, that I regret writing. Not even the one where I admitted to voting for the Respect Party once (it was a long time ago). Or the other one where I said I thought Tony Blair wasn't such a bad guy (also a long time ago). You live, you learn.

This morning, M got up at 7 and went for a run with our neighbour A. On the way back, they jumped in the river. He came home, had a bath, and at 8.45 he went out to an Empathy Circle to practise his new NVC skills. He came back from that, cooked me some cheesy scrambled egg on homemade toast, then cycled off into town to donate his blood platelets. It's fair to say he's thriving in the North, and I couldn't be happier about that, but today, if I didn't love him, I'd hate him for all that joie de vivre.

Because I Have A Cold. And it's a nasty one. I got through a lot of last year on adrenaline and fury, and I think I may now be paying the price for that. I woke up this morning with the kind of sore throat that comes from a night of swollen glands and snoring. I could barely speak. While M was out running, I fell back to sleep and dreamt that all I could do was honk like a goose. The harder I tried, the more I coughed, the more agitated I got, the louder I honked. He came back from his run and brought me a glass of red wine. This is my fate, I realised in my dream, I will lie here drinking wine and honking, while everyone else runs up hills and swims in rivers.

I finally rose around 10. I spent the rest of the day moving very slowly, because I Have A Cold, but moving nonetheless (apart from the Long Nap between 17.30 and 19.30). I tidied up the kitchen, cleaned all the surfaces and did a load of laundry. I listened to the wedding drama on the Archers. I walked up the hill to the part-time Post Office to return the dress I bought in the Toast mini-sale that, if I'm honest, I knew probably wouldn't fit me. I bought some Old English sausages from our local butcher (aka Pete the Meat). They have beef, pork and lamb all in one sausage. I'm may be new to meat eating but that strikes me as the glorious opposite of horse in your lasagne.

So I was hardly qualifying, even on my own terms, as a General Total Failure* But when it started raining, I silently rejoiced. I love the rain. I always have, though I haven't always loved walking to the Post Office in it. But, unless you're homeless or on a camping holiday, the rain gives you a break. Whatever you're doing, if you get it done in the rain you get more points. And if you choose to stay in and read a novel instead, well hey, that's just fine. Rain makes me feel like a natural person. So, let it rain on me. And Kimya.

joella

*My Significant Ex went to Eton, and this was a category used by one of the masters when reading out exam results. It's stayed with me, in an Aim Higher Than GTF sense.

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

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

All I want is life beyond the Thunderdome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

joella

Grief is the word

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I fucking miss her though.

joella

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