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Three Months in - The List Revisited

April Fools’ Day marked the three month point of my giving up drinking alcohol. I celebrated it by completely forgetting about it. It took a Facebook friend to congratulate me by private message before I even realised.

I went back to my first blog post to revisit my reason for this challenge, and to have a look at my progress so far.

I have to admit, success on the list is not 100% - but it’s not half bad.

The List

  • Learn to sew. Start with cushions, end up with dresses
  • Learn Sign language
  • No drinking for 3 months – re-evaluate on 1st April whether I want to stay off booze for a further 3 months
  • Start writing again – and document my attempts to do all of the above

I haven’t picked up the sewing machine. It has remained at my friend’s house, uncollected and and barely thought about. I have met some local crafty people who teach sewing, and taken their details; but haven’t got around to signing up for any classes.

I have, however, started a BSL course and am 2 months in. I am really enjoying it, although I have missed the last two weeks due to the operation and am fretting a bit about being hopelessly behind, but am loving learning a new skill. I struggle with remembering the correct hand shapes, and am well versed in the particular frown on my tutor’s face that means either ‘that sign is meaningless’ or ‘that sign - I do not think it means what you think it means’. Just as pronunciation and pitch is important in many spoken languages, the correct angle, shape and placement of your hand in BSL is vital. Not just for clarity and understanding but to make sure you’re not saying something unintended. Great hilarity resulted a few weeks ago when a fellow student was trying to sign that he took a bus, but he was actually signing that he took a shit.

Really what I need to do is practice more. I am a lifelong procrastinator however, and my failure to master pretty much anything in life, be it a language, a sport or a skill, is down to my anitpathy to the concept of ‘practice’. It’s very pleasing to be able to understand basic conversation, and learning from a deaf tutor is brilliant as it makes you really focus. I think I will get through this course before I take on a sewing glass. One new skill at a time is probably best, given my apparent allergy to practising things.

With drinking - there it is in black and white. Re-evaluate on 1st April whether I want to stay off booze for a further 3 months.

I am still recovering from my operation, so on the 1st April I wasn’t in any state to immediately launch myself at the nearest pub or neck a bottle of wine. Even if I hadn’t been in recovery however, and even if I was in perfect health, I suspect my reaction would have been similar. I was surprised it had gone by so fast. I was surprised at how easy it was. I was surprised to discover that I was even a little bit disappointed! I don’t want to go back to drinking yet. I am still discovering new things about myself when I go out, I am still working out how drinking fits in my life, how ‘being drunk’ is a facet of my upbringing, my social group, my social comfort blanket. I am not ready to give up this process of discovery. I had absolutely no difficulty (much to Mr RDP’s disappointment, as I think he’d quite like his drinking buddy back) in deciding to extend the experiment for a another three months, to the 1st July.

I suspect the next three months will represent a significantly greater challenge. The three months, amongst other events, include:

  • The wedding of one of my closest friends, a long term partner in party hedonism fun times
  • A family wedding
  • The 30th birthday part of my best mate
  • Mr RDP’s birthday
  • The return from travelling of my #1 drinking enabler, who has sent the somewhat ominous message “It’s almost time to drink up, buttercup.”
  • A visit from Mother DinosaurPirate, from whom I learned that being drunk is fun and hilarious. She can drink most of my friends under the table, while she dances on top of it.

In the last three months I’ve identified habits I’d never have spotted otherwise. I’ve realised that my assumption that I cannot make conversation or be entertaining sober is not only incorrect but also backwards. I am just as easily able to hold a conversation sober, if not more so as I can pay more attention to one thread of conversation AND remember it in the morning. I have realised that it’s not the alcohol that makes me spill drinks and trip over and make conversational faux pas. That’s just me. And perhaps those are areas where increased mindfulness would be good for my personal development, rather than just using drunkenness as an excuse. I have realised that constantly refilling glass is a habit, a tic, possibly a way of dealing with social awkwardness, which is unnecessary and possibly results in epic levels of drunkeness, particularly at house parties.

I have discovered that most of my good friends are charming drunks. I have been able to stay out late at parties and not feel even a little left out out of the fun or the pleasure of being with my friends; with the added advantage that I can sleep well and have MORE DAY in which to do things the next day.

I have started to live in fear of a hangover. I see people posting about them on social media and feel a great sense of relief and peace that I don’t have to feel like that. I see Mr RDP suffering horribly and feel sad for him, and a terror that if I go back to drinking I’ll feel that horrible again.

Most interestingly, as daylight saving arrived, I realised that my usual seasonal depression had been incredibly mild this year, to the point that I barely noticed it. This could be due to me handling it better, but the links between alcohol use and mental health are well documented, and it surely can’t be a coincidence that I haven’t had a panic attack all year.

I want to experience the challenges of the upcoming months and see how far I can take this. I want to see if I can get to the point where I can have a glass of wine because I want a glass of wine and not because I want to get drunk or because I’ve had a bad day or because everyone else is having one. And the strangest thing is that I am looking forward to it.

As for the writing - I’ve managed to blog once a week every week, even when only just out of surgery. As to how successfully I have documented The List, I suspect I have to leave that up to my readers.

Thank you for sticking with me on my journey for the last three months, and let’s raise a glass (of lime and soda) to the next adventure!

 

3 Comments Me Me Me, The List

a non-academic feminist

I discovered that I was a feminist on 4th June 2007.

I can pinpoint it with that much accuracy due to my old LiveJournal. After a particularly bad week of being shouted at in the street or propositioned by strangers I’d made three ranty posts about street harassment in the space of 4 days. In third post, after linking to a no-longer-there site (which later became the Everyday Sexism project) I wrote:

I’ve never been very interested in feminism before, or campaigning for anything really. I’ve got on with what I believe in in my own way[…] Little drops in the ocean. But this has really got me wound up, and the more I dig, the more wound up I get. I can’t tackle this one in a little private way, I’ll probably end either in a ditch having been attacked by a bloke I’ve retaliated to, or in jail, having been arrested for thumping a bloke I’ve retaliated to. […] If I start wearing dungarees, stop washing, and start singing protest songs in parks, someone please kill me. Especially if I start talking about burning my bra.

A number of my friends gently took me to task in the comments:

Trust me dungarees, smelliness and bra burning are not a prerequisite to feminism. Feminism is about realising women are treated differently and less well than men and wanting to do something about it.

One linked me to the Fawcett Society’s “this is what a feminist looks like” campaign .

one commented:

I’ve always thought of you a feminist, even if you’ve never really been interested in it. Your world view seems sufficiently well aligned to mine that I think you have feminist sympathies.

From that point forward I started to think of myself as a feminist. I didn’t take any courses, or start reading any particular writers, but I started paying more attention to what was around me, what I experienced and started challenging my own perceptions of sex, gender and gender identity. I continued to make ranty posts on my LiveJournal - but as time went on started to find the comments I was getting difficult to deal with. I found it hard to argue back when people disagreed with me. Specifically, when I discussed a feminist issue and men would reply with variations on a theme:

but not all men are like that

but men have problems too

but women are their own worse enemies/women do this too

Eventually I began to shrink from posting anything overtly feminist, or about harassment, patriarchy or objectification simply because I didn’t want to deal with a shitstorm of arguments every time I had an opinion. I didn’t have the language or the skills to argue the points that kept coming up over and over again. Other friends did, and largely did an excellent job of making the arguments for me, and I continued to learn from, and marvel at, the cleverness of my internet friends. It did put me off though, and ultimately I stopped posting anything controversial at all.

In the last few years there have been a number of things that have roused my feminist ire - only now the social media tool of choice is Facebook, not Live Journal. I’ve debated sexism in sport, the questionable feminism of Joss Whedon, gendered insults and swear words (try not using any for a week, it’s HARD.) and most recently That Snickers Advert.

Facebook doesn’t lend itself to debate in quite the same way as LiveJournal. You can support what someone is saying by just a ‘like’. You don’t have to even construct a coherent sentence to agree. The comments fields encourage shorter responses. TL;DR now extends to a comment longer than about an inch. I also am less afraid of just unfriending someone if they really fuck me off. Perhaps that isn’t the most sensible way to encourage open discourse, but it’s my Facebook and I get to chose who has access to my life. But that has the result that I am discussing with a limited pool of people who already agree with me, and not with anyone able to challenge me when they take issue with me.

I am not coming up with my own ideas or theories - I am finding what other people have said and agreeing with them. I am posting other people’s content; finding validation in my half-formed thoughts in articles written by ‘proper’ writers and going ‘THIS’ and posting a link.

Outside of Facebook, it’s a different story. When I first started this blog I had wondered if I would go back to posting some of my glorious feminist rants of the livejournal days. It felt like exposure. Write *MY* words about feminism? I can’t. It terrifies me. I don’t understand the language of feminism. I don’t understand the theories. I read an article in the Guardian about ‘fourth wave feminism and realised I didn’t even know what waves one to three were (I do now. I googled.) I googled ‘intersectionality’ and still didn’t understand it. Sometimes I read articles about Feminism and feel really stupid.

I have had a number of discussions lately with female friends who have said they wanted to share things on Facebook, but felt that they couldn’t, because they didn’t want to have a big argument with people telling them why they are wrong and making them upset - the exact same fears that stopped me posting my thoughts on my LiveJournal. The most eye opening was a discussion with a friend who is a well established blogger who I very much admire. She said that she shied away from discussing feminism because she feels like it’s a subject where she can’t write with any authority - she feels she has things to say but that her views will be rejected by feminist writers. This rang very close to home for me.

Mr RDP is a feminist. It’s one of the many attractive things about him. He’s also an Academic feminist. He wrote his dissertation on Riot Grrl and Third Wave Feminism. He understands the terms and the language of Feminism. He’s read bell hooks and probably knows why you spell her name with small letters. He knows how to debate, and how to form and dissect arguments. As an academic, he carefully constructs an argument before discussing it, testing the hypothesis by debate.

I am an non-academic feminist. My degree was in performance art. I didn’t even have to do dissertation - I created an limited audience participatory site specific piece (I built a maze and had monsters running around in it). Sometimes I make sweeping half humorous statements like “I blame the Spice Girls.” I am not prepared when people actually de-construct my argument - it confuses me because I didn’t really have an argument to begin with. With my arts background I start with a small feeling or statement and develop that into an argument through discussion, building a hypothesis by debate.

When I get involved in a discussion about Feminism my whole point of view, and perception, and all my arguments come from my position of being a woman, living in this world, and the experiences I have of it. I can’t argue from a theoretic point of view or say “well, bell hooks said…”because I haven’t read her. It makes me shy away from having discussions about feminism with Mr RDP because I end up feeling like my opinion doesn’t count because I’m an ill-read woman, and then he feels like I’m calling him an oppressive symbol of patriarchy and we both shout and I cry.

To hear my friend, an excellent writer and someone who has so much to say, voice that she feels shut out of feminist discussion because she doesn’t have the right background made me feel sad. I might have struggled to understand the word ‘intersectionality’ but I understood enough about the concept to see that alienating women from having a voice because they haven’t got an academic background is not exactly in the spirit of third (or fourth?) wave feminism. I can see how it must be frustrating for those who have studied and read feminist writers to have ‘uninformed’ female voices sharing ideas or feelings that have already been covered by writers beforehand; but to say “well, if you’d read X then you’d see that this has already been discussed” is a classic shut-down.

Since my revelation of 4th June 2007 I am a little older, arguably a little wiser, and a fair bit more Teflon of skin. I’m less afraid of a heated discussion, more confident in my feminism and happier to get stuck in to disagreements. I still consider myself relatively new to feminism. I’m still learning. When you are learning you make mistakes and you learn by them. Perhaps this blog post is a mistake I will learn from, but perhaps it will help me lose my fear of writing my own words about feminism in public.

We’re in an era where young people, male and female (and in between - but the gender binary is a whole other blog post…) are getting interested in and fired up by Feminism in an increasingly sexualised and gender divided youth culture (gendered Lego? REALLY?). Feminism is no longer in danger of being seen as the discourse of protest song singing bra burning hippies. If anything, it’s in danger of going too much the other way and becoming acedemicised to the point of excluding those who come to feminism by another less formal route.

In order to continue to encourage people to declare themselves a feminist, we need to make sure all voices are able to be heard, and not frighten away or silence those who really feel they have something to say.

 

5 Comments Me Me Me, my opinions let me show you them

Surgery

As I write, I literally have a head full of fluff. Not ‘literally’ as it has come to mean, whereby people actually mean ‘figuratively’. I really do have a head full of fluff. I am not sure what it is made out of, but am reassured by the surgeon that it will dissolve over the next few days. I also figuratively have a head full of fluff, brought on by the same reason, ergo the surgery, which is making this blog rather harder to write than usual. The super strong painkillers aren’t helping matters.

It’s hard to believe right now, with a head full of gunk and weird fluid coming out of my nose, that this will make a difference. I hope it will. The anaesthetist enthused about the operation, he said he’d had the same thing done 10 years ago and it ‘changed his life’. I am tired, headachey and grumpy. And I am HUNGRY, But eating is a vile experience which makes my nose bleed and I can’t taste anything anyway.

The only reasons I am even writing this week is because I am stubborn and bloody minded and resolved to write every Sunday.

I have had health problems for most of my life. Never an incredibly robust child (perhaps due to poor eating habits…) over the years I managed to collect a huge range of allergies (cats. dogs. horses. trees. flowers. grass. dust. several varieties of anti-biotics. the list goes on.) I suffered regularly from bouts of tonsillitis and sinus infections but despite growing up in the 80s where many of my peers had their tonsils and appendixes taken out for a cough, for some reason mine stayed resolutely in situ. It wasn’t until I was hospitalised at the age of 27 with the worst case of tonsillitis of my life (I actually thought I was dying) that they finally came out.

After I had the operation, which in of itself was fine, the recovery was probably one of the worst experiences of my entire life. I was in agony pretty much constantly for a month. I was sure that when I was little and friends of mine had theirs out it was all about missing school and watching cartoons and eating ice cream. It turns out that when you’re an adult it’s all about being signed off work, looking after yourself and having to eat toast and drink water constantly even though swallowing anything is like swallowing broken glass.

At a post-operation appointment I was told that I would also need a sinus operation, as while finally ridding myself of my enormous septic tonsils (the surgeon at the time couldn’t get over them. They wanted to keep them as a training aid) would help prevent recurrent bouts of tonsillitis I’d continue to struggle with my allergies and headaches.

What I didn’t do at that point was pro-actively get on with arranging that operation. What I did do was move house, forget to make a follow up appointment, and quietly dropped the subject, conveniently forgetting all about it. Looking back I wonder if this was a reaction to the horror of recovery from the tonsillectomy. It had been such a dreadful experience perhaps I simply wasn’t capable of putting myself though it again. I also did still suffer from horrible throat infections - nothing as bad as before but the disappointment of discovering that you can still get throat infections without your tonsils was a disillusionment I should have been, but wasn’t, prepared for.

Fast forward. Because we can do that in a blog, the effects are cheap. Just imagine some wiggly-wobbly lines. I have a boyfriend, Mr RDP, who is thoroughly fed up with my constant colds, allergies and headaches. I can’t remember the point at which he snapped, but there’s always a point of snapping when a relatively well person just can’t understand why the other person isn’t Just Well All The Time. WHY? WHY do you have colds ALL THE TIME? WHY ARE THEY SO BAD? And out it came, the information that 8 years ago I was referred for an operation which would, in theory, alleviate much of the suffering and I’d never followed it up because…because…wait, there was definitely a good reason. But after 8 years, I can’t remember what it was.

Mr RDP, being a fan of nagging (he has occasionally blamed his not getting things done on my failure to nag him enough) nagged. And he nagged. Each week he asked “so, have you asked for that referral?”. So I did, just to stop him nagging, which just goes to show that nagging works.

Due to some quirk of the NHS, I had been waiting almost a year for the tonsillectomy 8 years ago. When I tore my knee off last June playing roller derby it took over 6 months to get a diagnoses (“well, you appear to have torn your knee off. But it’s getting better on it’s own.”) For some reason this referral sped through the system. Within a month of the referral I had a scan, and within 3 months of the scan an operation date. And today I sit here, 2 days after the operation, unable to breath or chew or swallow or sleep with a head full of some sort of dissolvable fluff.

There was a minor setback; when the surgeon came and looked at my scan he hummed and harred, wondered away and wondered back with a new consent form, explaining that going by the scan they were going to have to do rather more to me today than I’d originally been admitted for. He must have seen the look of horror on my face as he said “don’t worry, it’s still not as bad as having your tonsils out. And it will make a big difference in the long run”. After the operation he explained carefully and in detail exactly where all the new holes in my face were. Unfortunately I was still coming out of the anaesthetic and now have no idea what he said.

I have to admit, it’s no where near the pain and the agony of the tonsillectomy. As long as nothing touches my nose it doesn’t even hurt that much. It’s just thoroughly uncomfortable and icky. The first relief came when I was able to shower, which I wasn’t allowed to do until 24 hours after the anaesthetic, as I was acutely aware that there was blood in my hair. The painkillers are strong and Mr RDP is looking after me - despite the fact I am a terrible patient. My head does feel lighter, and I am looking forward to the second week of recovery where hopefully I’ll start to feel more normal.

It would help if Mr RDP was also learning BSL, as it’s really difficult for me to speak. Despite my enthusiasm in practising on him the only signs he’s picked up are those for ‘bullshit’ and ‘fart’ which isn’t so useful when I am trying to say “my head hurts please can I have a cup of tea”.

Things I learned this week

  • The NHS are fantastic. I knew this already, but it’s always good to have a reminder.
  • When being admitted to hospital it feels really rather excellent being able to answer the “how many units of alcohol do you drink a week?” question with the answer “none” instead of a lie.
  • I am definitely not one of nature’s bakers.
Comment baking, i am a disaster area, Me Me Me

Undomesticated Goddess

“Cooking? Gardening? Who are you and what have you done with my daughter?
And before you ask Dad for help just remind him about when he thought our Brussels sprouts were cabbages gone to seed…”

This was a comment left by Mother DinosaurPirate on my Facebook page today, in response to a post I made asking if people could identify the plants in our garden from a photograph, so that I knew which ones should be pulled up and which I should leave. She was shocked enough to learn from this blog that I now eat vegetables and make pancakes, but the news that I obsessively vacuum before people come round to our flat and that yesterday I decided, completely of my own volition, to make cupcakes has perhaps made her wonder if I have been taken away by aliens and replaced with a clone.

Interestingly enough when I was very young I had a sort of invisible friend (actually I had several, but that’s perhaps a whole blog post in its own right…) who was my own identical twin sister. I called her Elizabeth. She came out to play whenever I put on a particular princess dress made for me by my Grandmother; when I put the dress on I became Elizabeth. I am sure most children, when inventing their own identical twin imaginary friend, would cast themselves as the good twin and the pretend one as the bad one. Surely that’s the whole point of an imaginary friend.

“Who drank all the medicine?” evil twin. “Who took all the icing sugar out of the cupboard and poured it into puddles made by an overflowing sink in the kitchen to make ‘sugar pools?” evil twin. “Who convinced family friends’ children to leave the house at 3am and play on a thin ice covered lake?” evil twin. Makes sense. However I was not most children and clearly hadn’t thought this through at that stage as I cast Elizabeth as the good twin, and myself as the bad one.

What sort of ridiculous child invents an imaginary twin sister then makes HERSELF the evil twin? It’s true, I was a chaotic, untidy, wilful and stubborn monster of a child. Nonetheless I’d put the sparkly princess dress on and suddenly became helpful, tidy, polite and eager to please.

“Could you tidy your room RockStarDinosaurPirate?”

“I’m not RockStarDinsosaurPirate. I’m Elizabeth. RockStarDinosaurPirate made all this mess, but I’ll tidy it.”

“Will you help me to make dinner RockStarDinosaurPirate?”

“I’m not RockStarDinsosaurPirate. I’m Elizabeth. RockStarDinosaurPirate is naughty and never helps. I’ll help”.

And so I’ve grown into a somewhat chaotic, untidy, wilful and stubborn adult. (I have started to suspect that one of the reasons I’ve managed to not drink for so long, and possibly one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed it so much is because so many people said it would be impossible, and I am stubborn enough to be determined to prove them wrong.) The floor has been where I keep my clothes, documents are filed in their envelopes all over my desk and I’ve always had a regiment of bottles in the shower where I buy new toiletries without quite finishing the old ones but never get around to throwing them away. You’ve already read about my cooking skills.

Since we moved into our new flat however some hidden switch seems to have been flicked. I can’t bear the sight of washing up not put away, or dishes in the sink for more than a day. I am constantly pulling cushions and throws back into place over the sofa making tutting noises and bemoaning how the carpet seems to pick up fluff and fibres just a day after I vacuum. I put my possessions away in places I’ve decided they belong and leave little passive aggressive piles of Mr RPD’s possessions on his side of the bed. Last weekend I even bought weedkiller and enthusiastically set to the garden with a trowel I found in the shed, digging out all of the moss and grass in between the stones of our little back garden. I have left the borders, as I have no idea whether the plants in there are weeds or real plants, hence my Facebook request for help. I did spend some time in a local Stuffmonger (you know, a shop that sells lots of stuff, mostly cheap, 60% useful. As oppose to a Niknakerist, which sells lots of stuff, mostly overpriced, 99% useless.) staring at packets of seeds before I slunk away, enthusiasm waning, as I realised seeds have instructions on them considerably more complicated than ‘put in earth. keep sort of damp’.

With guests coming round, the flat pleasingly tidy and a new BBQ purchased (yes, it’s only early Spring and we’re not even into clocks forward times; but we’ve persevered with BBQs in late summer in gale force winds and torrential rain so we’re not going to let little things like early sunsets and chilly evenings stop us) and with Mr R D P happily marinading large amounts of meat, flush with my recent Pancake Success, I decided to make cupcakes. Friends offered some easy recipes for a beginner and a Google search found some easy ones on the internet. I decided on a Nigella recipe which was designed to be really straightforward for children. Then I got distracted by the sidebar ‘related Nigella recipes’, which linked to Maple Buttercream Cupcakes with Bacon Sprinkles.

1 - I am vegetarian

2 - I wanted to make dairy free cupcakes

3 - I don’t even know what buttercream is

therefore it was entirely logical that these were the cupcakes I wanted to make. Being an avid fan of the Great British Bake Off I am aware that baking requires precision and demands that the recipe be followed exactly and to the letter, and that you concentrate on getting the bake right. Therefore it was entirely logical that I swap all the dairy ingredients for soy ones, use wholewheat flour and vegetarian bacon bits and that I watch the Men’s Roller Derby World cup while I baked. I discovered after the cupcakes came out of the oven that a muffin tin is a necessity when baking…

2014-03-15 15.10.16
Multi-tasking, yo
2014-03-15 15.50.48
Oops.
2014-03-15 15.55.17
um. yeah.
2014-03-15 16.44.59
Decoration is everything

I covered the cupcakes in silver glitter frosting spray and THINGS FROM SPACE in the hope that they would distract people from the unconventional shapes, and then accosted our poor dinner guests as they arrived. “HELLO, welcome to my flat. LOOK I made vegetarian bacon cupcakes. They don’t bounce like the ones I made 5 years ago. They look kind of crap. But also ROCKETS AND STARS AND SPACE. Please eat one and tell me what it’s like!”.

Bless my friends, and their tolerance for my whims. Every single guest had one. One guest ate TWO. All guest declared them delicious. After allowing about 45 minutes to observe any ill effects (rashes, vomiting, death etc) I braved one myself and bugger me if they weren’t actually really tasty! The texture was weird because you can’t sieve wholewheat flour properly (or maybe you can but I haven’t the patience) but apart from that they were genuinely pleasant to eat. I am definitely going to try again. Hopefully that won’t put friends off coming round.

Next - to send photos of the plants in my garden to garden-savvy friends (and to my Dad - should be safe enough seeing as I don’t plan to grow sprouts or cabbages) for identification so that I can start making the garden a beautiful place, rather than just a bit of concrete with some weeds.

Perhaps rather than aliens replacing me with a clone, I am finally managing to merge the good and evil twins into one person. I’ll never be truly tidy or organised like Imaginary Good Twin Elizabeth; but I’ll settle for being neat enough and being able to make passable cakes that taste nice. And I do so like being chaotic and wilful.

1 Comment baking, i am a disaster area, Me Me Me, the garden

Can't cook, shan't cook

This weekend I made pancakes. This sounds like such a simple statement, right? Millions of people make pancakes in March for pancake day. People make pancakes all the time. They aren’t really particularly complex. The thing is, I don’t. I am in my mid thirties and I have never made pancakes. In fact, I don’t really cook at all. I’ve ‘helped’ other people make pancakes. I ‘help’ Mr RDP cook often. ‘Helping’ generally means chopping, stirring, getting ingredients all over the floor and eating the tastiest raw ingredients when the person cooking isn’t looking.

I have in the past set fire to kitchens on at least 4 occasions. Two of those were within the same week, in the same kitchen, setting fire to something I’d placed on top of the grill while using it to cook veggie sausages. One was trying to make toast under the grill and forgetting. Others generally involve forgetting that I am heating something up, having wondered away and seen something shiny.

I have cooked meals for past partners so bad that they’ve suggested we get takeaway instead. One ex loves to bring out the hilarious tale of how, early in our relationship, I asked if he wanted some food before we went out to a club. I returned from the kitchen with 10 vegetarian frankfurters on a plate and a bottle of ketchup. Another enjoys reminding me of the time I tried to made a veggie spaghetti bolognese but didn’t rinse the sieve properly and the whole dish tasted of Fairy liquid. I tried to make cupcakes once for a charity bake sale. They tasted like jelly beans, with a not dissimilar texture. They bounced when you dropped them.

My inability/reluctance to cook, or in fact eat much at all, goes way back. I was a picky eater for most of my early years, working out rather early on that ‘moo cow’ and ‘baa lamb’ were both the cute animals outside my window and the meat on my plate. From that point on I would only eat meat as long as it didn’t look like meat, which meant that my diet consisted of processed things like chicken nuggets and fishfingers. I would also refuse all vegetables, convinced that I did’t like them. I’d only eat melted cheese. I didn’t like crunchy or crispy things as I didn’t like noisy food.

As I grew, my diet became more limited as I discovered what a ‘vegetarian’ was and started to insist I wanted to be one. It reached the point where the only things I would eat was soup or pasta and sauce. When after years of badgering Mummy Dinosaur finally capitulated. “FINE you can be a vegetarian. But seeing as you don’t like vegetables you’d better learn how to cook, because I’m not cooking separate things for you. What are you going to live on? Soup?”. And thus from the age of 13 to the age of 23 I pretty much lived on condensed soup and pasta, with the occasional veggie sausage. At university I would make a big batch of condensed-soup-pasta on a Sunday night and eat it throughout the week.

This continued up until I moved in with a close friend who, after several weeks of watching me eat nothing but pasta and veggie sausages, snapped and made it her life’s mission to get me eating vegetables. Each week she’d cook something delicious, place it in front of me and wander off. “Eat it, or don’t. But at least try it, because I cooked it for you so if you don’t eat it you’re basically a massive dickhead”. Within the space of a month, I discovered a whole new world of vegetably things that were actually tasty. Spinach! Peppers! Red Onion! Leeks! Who knew. I started to wonder why I’d refused so steadfastly as a child to eat all of these things, and how that stubborn refusal had turned in adulthood to a belief that I hated vegetables.

My inability and/or reluctance to cook certainly doesn’t come from the paternal side. My Dad’s family are part Italian - food is important. It must be tasty and plentiful. My Dad is an excellent cook - when my parents ran a B&B in my childhood I remember sumptuous meals - roast dinners, shepherd’s pie, faggots and mash.
My dearly missed Grandmother GG was known for her feasts. She’d make vast 3 and 4 course meals, make sure everyone had seconds and thirds of everything and there were always at least 4 choices of dessert. One Christmas of family legend everyone had eaten so much that no one could move, lolling on the sofas groaning and replete; GG entered from the kitchen and breezily asked “Cheese and biscuits anyone?” after a loaded silence my uncle J said “oh piss off mum”.

On the maternal side, Mummy Dinosaur can cook very well - but I’ve always suspected she doesn’t really enjoy it. She likes having cooked something that people enjoy, but she doesn’t like all the faff and preparation, and definitely doesn’t like the clearing up afterwards. She now runs a B&B in South Africa with Step-Daveosaur. He does the cooked breakfasts, she makes the fruit salad, they pay someone to clean up; a perfect arrangement. It appears I take after my mother.

Mr RDP loves to cook. He’ll get excited about recipes and ingredients, always slightly changing a dish to make it his own. He understands seasoning and temperatures and the difference between leaving a lid on or off. My approach to seasoning is to just put smoked paprika on everything. Even a BBQ isn’t a simple affair for Mr RDP. My BBQs usually involve me discovering that disposable BBQs are on offer in the supermarket, the weather is nice, RESULT, I don’t have to wash up later. He needs several days to prepare so he can make complicated marinades and sauces and an Excel spreadsheet with all the exact timings for each dish.

Mr RDP has, in the course of our relationship, gently encouraged, forcefully hinted and downright nagged at me to learn to cook. I’ve made the odd simple pasta sauce here and there but my repertoire remains basic. I can cook a veggie spag bol, a stir fry and a basic noodle ramen. It’s all I know and I am terrified of following recipes. Therefore it was with some shock and a fair amount of trepidation that he reacted to my announcement yesterday morning that I was “going to make PANCAKES. Proper ones. Dairy free. With wholemeal flour and almond milk”.

I don’t know why I wanted to make pancakes. I’d never made them before. I had a vague sense that they weren’t complicated. So I Googled, found a recipe and hit the supermarket. My very first pancake was too thick and didn’t cook in the middle. The second I left for too long and it burnt. The third was going really well until I over-enthusiastically flipped it and it broke in half. The fourth? LOOKED LIKE A PANCAKE. After 10 minutes, I had a little stack of small, unevenly sized and misshapen pancakes. I piled them up, added blueberries, maple syrup and some melted dark chocolate mixed with soy cream (we hadn’t been able to find nut & dairy free chocolate spread. I have low dairy tolerance, Mr RDP doesn’t do nuts).

The first attempt
The first attempt

I served them to Mr RDP with pride. He had the look of a parent that, having said “what a lovely picture” now realises that the picture will have to stay on the fridge FOREVER. Having encouraged me to take an interest in cooking, he now had to eat the result. We survived to tell the tale. Not only were they not bad, they were actually rather tasty.

This morning, buoyed by my success the previous evening I decided that I would make a pancake brunch and set to the ingredients with an enthusiasm I didn’t think I was able to muster when it comes to cooking. After a shaky start I achieved two breakfast brunch stacks. I largely gave myself the misshapen monstrosity early attempts, giving Mr RDP the ones that looked like pancakes you might actually want to eat.

Unconventional, but tasty. No, really.
Unconventional, but tasty. No, really.
brunch me baby
brunch me baby

I admit, there was a moment in Sainsbury’s where I was staring at a wall of flour, googling on my phone to check whether ‘wholewheat’ and ‘wholemeal’ meant the same thing, and wondering what on earth ‘baking soda’ actually was, when I was tempted to just buy the 99p bottle of pre-made pancake mix. I am glad I didn’t - not only because mine were handmade and healthier, but because now I have the ingredients in the cupboard I can make MORE PANCAKES.

Ok, it isn’t much. I follow a few food bloggers and to put these sad attempts next to one of Jack Munroe’s amazing austerity dishes or one of Cookwitch’s foodporn creations is just embarrassing. But I am unspeakably proud of having MADE something. I followed a RECIPE and didn’t set fire to anything, or break anything, or make anyone sick. I actually made something really tasty, and I enjoyed making it. I might even try giving cupcakes a go again. Hopefully this time they won’t double up as a squash ball.

4 Comments i am a disaster area, Me Me Me

storm clouds and silver linings

It’s funny how sometimes the worst situations can actually bring out the best in the world around you; how sometimes an unexpectedly positive aftermath of the most unsettling or upsetting of events can almost make you glad the dreadful thing happened. This week was one of those weeks. It started with a very sick kitty indeed, making a stop at a £200 set of new locks via a pickpocket before the final destination of renewed faith in humanity…

With our usual excellent planning skills Mr RDP and I accidentally adopted a rescue kitten in the same week we moved in to our new flat. Much deliberation was had over what to name him - I favour silly names like ‘Pumpkin’, Mr Darcy’ or ‘Schmetterling’. Mr RDP likes unlikely human names, such as ‘Steve’, ‘Bruce’ or ‘Rob’. We toyed for a Yiddish word for a while - perhaps ‘Dybbuk’ or ‘Lokshen’; but finally settled on ‘Manny’. For Mr RDP that means he’s named after a character from his favourite computer game, Grim Fandango. For me he’s named after Manny from Black Books. This means that I constantly say things to him like “did you eat all my bees?” and “you’re a LONELY soldier”.

Mr RDP has never had a pet before, and so having a small furry monster around the place is a whole new experience. I had numerous pets as a child - as a small dinosaur I lived in the West Country where my parents ran a B&B. At one point we had a dog, three cats, a hamster and numerous goldfish. I went through goldfish at a rapid pace because, well, three cats. When my parents divorced mum and I kept two of the cats - one a clawless toothless softhearted old lady called Mungo, who had been a somewhat untraditional wedding present to my parents, the other a younger scrappy character called Sooty, an unwise 4th birthday present to me. Both sadly were put down when I was a teenager due to a series of unfortunate events and I’d not wanted to own a pet since; partly due to trauma avoidance, partly because they require more care and attention and money than I was prepared to give, and mostly because I am horribly allergic to all furry animals. I build up a tolerance to specific animals if I am around them often, but it takes weeks of sneezing and sniffling and red eyes and itchyness. However, Mr RDP had fallen in love at first sight with the-furmonster-subsequently-known-as-Manny so despite all my “are you sure? It’s a big responsibility…” type concerns, the kitten moved in to the new flat on the same day as us.

Within 2 weeks of the three of us taking up residence together, Manny fell ill. Having been an absolute terror, running all over the place and eating everything in sight (apart from cucumber, which is thus far the only thing that he won’t try to eat), when we came home from work to find him curled up in a sad little ball, shrinking from our touch and refusing even Cat Crack (aka Dreamies) we knew something was seriously wrong . The vet was concerned at his presentation and high temperature and admitted him for an overnight stay so he could go on an antibiotic drip. Poor little furball. On the way home in the car I realised I was desperately worried, and that I’d fallen in love with the little monster despite my own better judgement. How do cats do that?
They are basically furry little psychopaths who are only nice to us because we give them food. And yet we love them.

Fortunately he was fine and recovered overnight, so when I got the call from the Vet the next day that I could pick him up at 5 I arranged to leave work early and rushed home to get the cat box and hopped on the train - Mr RDP being once again away for the weekend (how does he always manage to time being away when Things Go Wrong?)

Mr RDP had suggested I get a cab home, but I figured the train journey was so easy - only a 5 minute walk at either end - that I would SAVE MONEY by just getting the train. Remeber that, ladies and gentlemen. I was trying to SAVE MONEY. When I got off the train near our flat and went to touch out with my Osytercard I experienced that feeling. You know the one - like a horrible cold dead hand slowly encircling your heart and giving it a slow and delibrate squeeze. The feeling you get when you realise your wallet is no longer in your bag. Your wallet containing your Osytercard. All of your cash. Your bank card. and your HOUSE KEYS. Then that feeling when you can’t quite feel your arms or feet or knees when you realise that not only do you not have your house keys, but that you have absolutely no way of getting into your house, because your other half is away. And you’ve not got around to giving a locally living friend a spare set of keys, despite talking about it for weeks. Fortunately, I’d taken my phone out of my wallet to take a photograph of the cat to send to MR RDP, so at least I had that and so poor Mr RDP received an hysterical phonecall from the Rockstar Dinosaur Pirate who was standing in the middle of a street in East London with a cat in a box, no money and no way to get into the flat for the next two days.

Mr RDP gave me the audio equivalent of a couple of slaps to the face to snap me out of my panicked hysterics and told me to find somewhere warm to settle while he called the locksmith. Stumbling along the street I passed a new coffee shop and more or less fell through the doorway.

The owners of the café fed me. I was given tea, cake, sandwiches. Manny stole most of the cake - so at least I knew he was feeling better. They offered their wireless password and their phone so I could call the police and cancel my cards. They gave me a tissue to sob into and let me sit in the cafe for an hour while waiting for the locksmith even though they knew I couldn’t pay them anything. They even offered to lend me money and made sure I had somewhere safe to go for the night. I started sobbing all over again at their kindness.

Once the locksmith arrived I discovered that Mr RDP and I had originally bought very good locks indeed. With a spate of burglaries in our local area recently, it’s good to know that it took a professional locksmith well over an hour to break into the flat. Of course with a spate of burglaries in the local area recently, a guy noisily breaking into a flat for an hour attracts rather a lot of attention. I was deeply embarrassed. I felt like I was wearing a sign that said HI. YES. WE’VE JUST MOVED IN. SORRY CHAPS. THERE GOES THE NEIGHBOURHOOD. Several neighbours all around me came out to see what the noise was and I apologised profusely to every one of them. And yet, none of them were cross or annoyed by the noise - just concerned for this tearful cold girl, alone in the street with a cat in a box.

I was given a card for a builder by the man opposite so we could get a better front door. A chap down the road with a lovely big dog had a long chat with the cat. I was offered tea by several of them which I initially refused out of embarrassment until one neighbour insisted that I mustn’t stand out on the street and ushered me into her house while the locksmith carried on breaking into ours. Thus I found myself in my neighbour’s flat with a mug of peppermint tea in my hand, watching Kung Fu Panda with her son.

The next day I called the train station as recommended by the police - they had my purse. It had been a gift, and means a great deal to me, so to have it back in my hands was a relief. The station staff let me travel on the train for free to collect it, as I had no means to pay for the journey. The purse itself had been emptied of most things of monetary value (except for my Costa Coffee card with £8 on it. HAH opportunistic scumbag, you may take my keys but you’ll never take my soy latte) but bank and oyster cards are replaceable, and our locks were already replaced. The station staff had found the purse on the floor, someone clearly having nabbed it, taken what they could and thrown the purse itself away. I went into my bank where the staff were exceptional, allowing me to take cash out over the counter having verified my account information with the phone banking people. With enough money to get by until a new bank card arrived, I bought a small bunch of flowers and popped into the coffee shop that had rescued me the day before.

The owner was so touched by what I considered a small gestures compared to the kindness they’d shown me the day before. Her reaction had me in tears again as I walked away. “You didn’t need to say thank you” she told me. “We’re neighbours. That is what neighbours do. They help each other. You would do the same for me if I were in need”.

London has a bad reputation when it comes to community spirit. Apparently no one speaks to each other. You mustn’t make eye contact on the tube. Or in lifts. Or on the streets. In fact, just avoid eye contact at all times, with everyone. Apparently no one knows their neighbours names. When I first moved to London friends said they could tell I grew up in the countryside because I still said “thank you” to bus drivers and started conversations with shop assistants.

I am not sure that it is true that Londoners are so unfriendly. With the day to day routine perhaps Londoners aren’t generally that friendly, or open or welcoming. But at times of stress or trouble London can be at it’s best - as demonstrated by the aftermath of the London Riots’ ‘broom army’.

While a stressful (and expensive) experience, it has reminded me, a West Country girl at heart, that a smile and a kind word can go much further than you realise. I am determined to pay it back - and forward - for my community by trying to be a good neighbour. I am going to start by making sure I take everyone I know to that little coffee shop on the corner, and by putting a thank you card thorough my neighbour’s door. Strong communities start with small kindnesses.

3 Comments i am a disaster area, Me Me Me

The benefits of clarity, the price of Tch

The last week of Dry January has been an easy one for me - very few opportunities or temptations as Mr RockstarDinosaurPirate and I are moving into a little flat he’s just bought - he’s on the first rung of a very expensive property ladder. Therefore this week has featured mainly planning, packing, and occasionally camping out in the flat enjoying the empty space before it’s taken over by all of our possessions (we have so much stuff. Oh god. So. Much. Stuff.) The activity and minor stress of the week has left little space for drinking, and I haven’t wanted one.

Mr RDP completed in the week that it was revealed that the average house price in Hackney, where I lived happily for years before moving in with Mr RDP and where I work, is HALF A MILLION. Don’t get me wrong, I love Hackney, I think it’s great, but HALF A MILLION? House prices are high across the country, but in London they are insane. BabySisterDinosaur (my half sister is in her mid twenties and she’ll be my baby sister for ever. Even when she’s sixty and I’m seventymumble.) has also recently bought a flat, but in North Devon. The comparison size for size, cost for cost, finish for finish from her place to Mr RDP’s place is not favourable. By comparison, hers is a sprawling perfect palace at a teeny price. Not, of course, if you factor in wage difference etc etc, but it’s hard not to make that comparison.

Daddy RockstarDinosaurPirate and The Wicked Stepmother (a long used and utterly inaccurate nickname for her, for she is not at all wicked, and is in fact completely lovely) came to visit this weekend Daddy Dinosaur is a builder by trade, and he spent several hours happily knocking on internal walls, poking things, making ‘humph’ and ‘tch’ noises, scrambling around in the loft (to my alarm; he’s 60 and needs an artificial hip) and drawing on the walls. They also live in North Devon, and were shocked at the comparison to BabySisterDinosaur’s flat. I had a copy of a local paper and showed them some of the other properties that are going in our area, where prices have risen about 20% in the last 6 months (partially due to Hackney becoming so unaffordable). You would naturally expect prices in London to be more, and living here I guess I get a little desensitised to it. Seeing the folks’ reaction to it from the perspective of outsiders really brought it into focus. Especially when Dad started pointing out all the things in the flat that needed doing up, fixing, changing and improving and how much these things might cost.

Due to excellent planning, entirely typical of the RockstarDinosaurPirate household, Mr RDP is away for the weekend with some old schoolfriends, back late tonight, with the removal van arriving tomorrow. While ‘camping’ at the new place, we discovered that there was a gas leak. This resulted in me camping at the new place on my own for most of the weekend while gas men make ‘tch’ noises at the boiler (illegal) and the pipework (nonsensical). The costs of buying the place itself was bad enough, but all the ‘tch’ noises I’ve heard this weekend seem to add up to lots of ££££. I have been astounded at all the things a survey *doesn’t* bring up.

I suspect that if I wasn’t on my non drinking trip, while camping I would have got myself a bottle of wine or some boozy ginger beers, thinking that they’d cheer me up and make the weekend more fun and bearable - but in the cold light of sobriety it’s clear that actually they would have made me less able to cope with the ‘tch’ news and the early mornings and the bad news. The clarity brought by lack of booze-fog has made being a Practical Grownup so much easier.

Ok, so perhaps being in my pyjamas on a Saturday night by 6pm and watching Miss Marple isn’t the most rock and roll ways to spend a Saturday night, but I didn’t feel sad, or anxious, or lonely. BabySisterDinosaur even commented on my FB this week that “You’re so happy all the time when you don’t drink!”. I made a joke about it on the time, but have been thinking about that comment a lot - have I? Has it been easier to cope with stress and ‘tch’ when you just have to get on and COPE, and not go fuck it, I’ll have a glass of wine to chill out? This is something I’ll have to think about as the months go by. I have had problems in the past with anxiety and depression, and there are clear links between mental health issues and alcohol. I’d never even considered in the early days of my non-drinking experiment that a side effect could be improved mental happiness. I’d been more worried about people thinking I am boring, not going out as I wouldn’t know what to say or how to have fun, and getting more depressed. But perhaps the opposite is true.

Judging by the about of ‘tching’ I can hear from the gas men in the kitchen right now, I am going to be glad I am not spending money on booze as much of it might be needed to go into this flat, and glad of increased resilience over the next few months.

1 Comment Drinking, Me Me Me

Reward and Punishment

This week has been hard. My job can be pretty stressful at times, and this week - Friday in particular - was really tough.

By the end of Friday I wanted a glass of wine (and wine isn’t usually my go-to drink of choice) so badly that it made me grumpy. Of course the result of the week and that day in particular being stressful contributed to that grumpiness, but the fact I wasn’t able to relieve that stress and grump with a class of wine made it worse.

I am pleased that at no point did I seriously consider just giving in and having a booze - that wasn’t an option and never even entered my mind - but I was keenly aware of how much I wanted one, how I felt I deserved one, and how I ‘knew’ that nothing else would achieve the same result.

I asked on my facebook: “Work day from HELL. What can I do after work that will achieve the same result as a large glass of wine without being alcoholic or fattening?”

Some of the answers (I suspect some may be more serious than others)

  • Go to the Gym
  • Listen to loud music
  • Crystal Meth
  • Valium
  • Spliff
  • Drive really fast
  • Karaoke
  • Trampolining
  • Cocaine
  • Just have a bloody drink woman

I think you will notice a theme to the list without my assistance. I realised as the evening wore on that the things I most wanted to do in the absence of a large glass of wine was

  1. Eat ALL OF THE BREAD
  2. Eat ALL OF THE CHOCOLATE
  3. Buy ALL OF THE SHOES

In short, my brain appears to be wired to find relaxation/pleasure/reward in drinking, eating carbs, eating sugar and spending money on pretty-but-pointless things. If I am going to survive this year without growing much fatter, poorer or running out of space to keep shoes I’ll never wear then I am going to have to find alternative coping mechanisms - because while Friday was a considerably more stressful day at work than usual there will be many more over the coming year which will need to be Coped With.

There were a number of people that suggested gym classes - and it appears my gym does offer an interesting sounding class on a Friday evening. I shall experiment with this and report back. It is going to be difficult though because unlike wine, carbs, sugar and shoes my brain’s reward centre does not see gym classes or exercise as any sort of reward; in fact it’s quite the opposite. I have to FORCE myself to the gym. Once I am there, and once the class kicks in, I generally do enjoy it, get those little wooshy work out endorphins and feel all smug and relieved afterwards. But those don’t last until my next workout session and I have to go through it all over again, cajoling and bribing myself to go to the gym, trying to remind myself that I’ll enjoy it once I am there (or if not I’ll be glad afterwards that I did it). It’s a battle to get my brain to accept that working out is Good Thing.

I don’t have to dig too deeply to work out why I have such a strong aversion to exercise.

The whole experience of PE, from having to be in public in gym knickers to being shouted at in front of the class for coming last in Cross Country, is one of the single most dreadful experiences in my whole life, and has genuinely affected me well into adulthood.

If you were sporty at school or good at games, you may not understand. But for those of us who were not terribly good at any of it, PE was HELL.

The assumption is that those of us who aren’t fast runners, or that can’t hit a hockey ball in a straight line, or can’t jump a long way into a sandpit are just NOT TRYING. It’s not that we aren’t any good at it, or have poor co-ordination, or painful feet, or any other reason. No. We’re just NOT TRYING.

And, as a result, PE for those of us who clearly AREN’T TRYING was a regular session of ritualised embarrassment, ridicule and punishment. The girls who were good at tennis, or hockey, or lacrosse, or cross-country, or track-and-field; they got encouragement and support. Those of us that weren’t could never please. Our individual improvement didn’t matter, that we’d maybe run 5 minutes faster in cross country this week that last week. It didn’t matter because we weren’t good at it. SO there was no point trying to improve yourself, because you’d never be as good as the golden sporty ones.

The emphasis was very much on the school winning against other schools, or Your class win against Other class, or if you went somewhere really posh, that your house won against the other houses. If you couldn’t help your fellow students win things against The Other Ones, then you were useless.

There was no education about how your muscles worked. About how important it is to keep hydrated as you exercise. How exercise affects your health and well being. There was no encouragement to the non-sporty (NOT TRYING!) ones to exercise for the sake of fitness itself. There was in fact no encouragement to exercise for the sake of fitness itself at all. As a result, the sporty ones got fitter because they liked to, and the non sporty ones got the impression that exercise FUCKING SUCKS.

Is it any wonder, really, that so many of us leave school firmly associating exercise with pain, humiliation and just general awfulness? Is it any wonder that so many of us even now have a MASSIVE mental block about going to the gym?

I really enjoy the gym classes I go to, I know I do, I feel great during them, after them, and I sleep better, feel better and am much fitter. But making myself go is such a massive effort of will, because I have it deeply ingrained deeply into my very soul that I HATE PE, and PE = EXERCISE and therefore I HATE EXERCISE.

Alcohol, chocolate and shopping are a different kettle of fish though. All the marketing aimed at us tells us that these will make us better and happier INSTANTLY, but I’m a fairly intelligent marketing-cynical woman and I don’t think it’s the marketing that makes my brain and body yearn for high fat high sugar high spend mental rewards. While I know where my deep seated fear/hatred of working out comes from, I don’t know how it came to the point where my whole being demands these unhealthy and unwise rewards for getting through a difficult day. Was is something from my childhood, whereby pudding was only allowed if I ate the vegetables? I do know I was a very picky eater. Where chocolate was only allowed if I’d been good? I don’t remember sweets being used as rewards so much as a child, but I do remember gifts being used as bribes. I remember Mum promising me a new Garfield toy if I was good at a family gathering once. I remember for university essays I would buy a massive bag of mini eggs and allow myself one for every 200 words. Do we all have this unhealthy reward reaction, or is it just some of us who learn that booze/sugar/shoes are the reward for life, rather than *life* being the reward for life? This all needs exploring in more depth and perhaps this time off the alcohol will help give me the time and the clarity of thought to really unpick it.

As for the fear of working out, this is something I managed to lose while I was playing roller derby and learning that my body was a tool and a weapon, and was powerful in its own right, and I learned to love my body and what it could do. Over the months after the injury and retirement I have lost that along the way and need to rediscover it. I know where the work-out fear comes from though, and I know how to beat it. I do think however that a link between the rising obesity of young people in this country has something to do with PE in schools and the sorts of experiences I had.

Perhaps a solution to the so called ‘obesity crisis’ is to shift the emphasis on PE in schools away from ‘winning’ and overall achievement to a greater emphasis on personal fitness, on how your muscles work, on how to keep fit, and most importantly, that exercise can be fun, and that it can make you feel really good, and that it is a means to its own reward - not because you can allow yourself some cake afterwards. Working out IS the cake. As it were.

I have struggled for most of my life with my weight and fitness. If anyone at school had said to me ‘it’s really not whether you win, or how fast you run. It’s about getting your body moving so that it gets stronger, and you feel better’ I think it would have made a HUGE difference.

If I was queen of the universe, PE would become ‘Health and Fitness’ and would consist of a much wider breadth of sports covered, it would focus on individual improvement over school attainment, and would teach children how important exercise is, and that exercise is fun.

And I’d make gym knickers and communal changing rooms illegal.

4 Comments From The Vaults, Me Me Me

Introduction to the Rockstar Dinosaur Princess Pirate

When I was 5 I wanted to be a rockstar dinosaur pirate princess when I grew up.

30 years later I am none of these things, although I was briefly one for a while and one out of 4 of such lofty goals ain’t bad.

2014 is the year I will be closer to 40 than 30 and this makes no sense to me whatsoever. When I was 5 and had my rocking giant lizard corsair dreams 40 was so incredibly old I couldn’t even imagine ever reaching it.

2013 was the year I quit roller derby - the only hobby I’d ever truly stuck with - and it left a gaping hole in my life that I soon realised had, pre-roller derby, been filled with drinking, partying and general excesses. I made a list of things I wanted to achieve in the yawning chasm that became my spare time. Here is that list:

  • Learn to sew. Start with cushions, end up with dresses
  • Learn Sign language
  • Start writing again

It’s not a big list. And for the 6 months after roller derby I did nothing with that list other than make a half hearted and not terribly good cushion out of a roller derby t-shirt and ask a friend if I could borrow a sewing machine, which is still sitting in her hallway months later waiting for me to pick it up. The knee injury that hastened my retirement from sport became an excuse to do nothing and eat everything and my weight slowly crept back up to a level it hadn’t been at since a year on Weightwatchers back in 2002. I let life slide along, not entirely miserable but not exactly happy either. I started to feel like I was somehow participating in my life but not really living it; going through the motions but not really taking part.

Then New Year’s Eve 2013 happened. I don’t quite know what happened - but the short version is I had a horrible drinking experience. Possibly the worst of my life (and I have had some pretty horrible drinking experiences in my time) which lead to much sobbing, several panic attacks, a three day (at least, I’m still living it) hangover. It nearly ended my relationship. It’s a blessing almost that I don’t remember exactly what happened while drunk, but what I have been told makes me very sad indeed. Both the dreadful things I did and said, and the wonderful things that happened that I cannot remember. It made me really think about my relationship with alcohol, and how it has impacted on so many parts of my life.

I have a number of friends doing dry January, which I’d never even considered before. I’ve always been of the belief that January was miserable enough without denying yourself the best escape from that miserableness. But then I re-evaluated that statement. What it is about alcohol that makes it so important in my life? I mentioned to a few people I was considering going off the booze for January, and possibly longer. Reactions were a mix of horror, disbelief, condemnation and ridicule. This only made me think more about how alcohol - in particular social drinking - has taken on this huge significance in my life and that of my work colleagues, my friends and my family. How the act of not just drinking but of *being drunk* is tied up in my psyche. I want to really think about this in 2014 and unpick it.

So back to The List. It has grown, and changed.

  • Learn to sew. Start with cushions, end up with dresses
  • Learn Sign language
  • No drinking for 3 months - re-evaluate on 1st April whether I want to stay off booze for a further 3 months
  • Start writing again - and document my attempts to do all of the above

New Year’s Resolutions can go so horribly wrong, especially when you announce them to the entire world. It remains to be seen whether I will wake up in a pool of my own dribble after a massive bender in two weeks’ time, whether that sewing machine will remain in my friend’s hallway and whether my knowledge of sign language will be limited to the alphabet.

Possibly the hardest thing will be getting into the habit of writing weekly. I can’t even promise that my weekly posts will be about The List - I have a tendency to get an idea or a rant in my head which has to come out - so future posts might even cover feminism, politics, society, animals, the weather or whatever it is that has made me think or feel or cross or cheerful that week. I am open to suggestions.

So to sum up, just as I am not the Rock Star Dinosaur Pirate Princess I aimed to be when I was 5, this experiment of mine may turn out to be something quite different than where it started - with The List. But much like those intervening 30 years, it could also turn out to be just as interesting.

2 Comments Me Me Me, The List