Love of the Day: New Year's Resolutions

Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash

It seems to have become fashionable, in the last few years, to reject the making of New Year’s resolutions. The first day of the year stumbles dazedly in to find social media – and traditional media – suddenly a-crow with proclamations that there’s no such thing as a ‘new you’, that resolutions are an affront to the modern goals of self-acceptance and (shudder) self-love, and that no-one keeps them past the first week anyway so why beat yourself up trying in the first place?  Well, these naysayers can go f*** themselves as far as I’m concerned. 

Sure, self-acceptance is something we should all aim for in general, but who the hell should accept the selves that are in evidence on 1 Jan? The self I am at this time of year, and I’m pretty sure I’m joined in this by 98% of the population of the Christmas-celebrating world, is not exactly a thing of radiant beauty.  No, it is grey and pallid, having been deprived of all sunlight and air by Midwinter. It is creaky and flaccid from ten days of sitting on its arse being drip-fed a continuous flow of sugary, fatty treats and prevented from exercising by being (literally and figuratively) a hundred miles away from its gym membership and yoga studio. It is a strange, co-dependent, sloth-like creature, trained only to watch festive TV, bicker with family or, at the very most, play the odd board game. Add the traditional NYE alcohol consumption into this mix and the particular me that I am on New Year’s Day is definitely not one that should be encouraged to hang around.

In my opinion, New Year’s resolutions are absolutely vital for the post-festive-season animal to catapult themselves out of the holiday torpor and back into the world of the living. They are necessary to remind us all that we are better than the slobbish teenager we have regressed into over recent weeks, that we are capable of more. Resolutions provide me with the exact motor I need to carry me through the bumpy landing of returning to normal life and routine, and on through the still-dark days and over the steep hill to where the warmth and light of Spring are waiting.  I need the glowing will’o-the-wisps of somewhat unachievable goals to focus on so that I can survive the grey drear of January and February.  Yes, it’s a massive comedown littered with dying Christmas trees, we’re all broke and unhealthy, and the weather is actually getting worse not better, but Lo a Better Future is nigh! If you can just envisage it, if you just sit down and make a Ten-Point List for the Achievement of Perfection, then perfection will truly be yours!

Just to be clear, I don’t care if perfection will truly be mine, that’s not the point. Of course I know that I’m not more likely to drink gallons of water, have a daily yoga practice, or ‘get good skin’ at this time of year than I was in lovely, sun-drenched, outdoorsy June.  I just need some renewed hope and intention to stop me from shrivelling up entirely and taking permanently to my bed. And who can tell, maybe 2020 WILL be the year I finally write a novel and get a job I actually like? I’m not holding my breath on the good skin front, obviously, I’m not completely insane. But if I can hang onto the tail of even one of my glittering dreams until Summer, then resolving them into existence now will have been worth it.

Love of the Day: Spoken Word Poets

I used to have major misgivings about poetry as an art form. It always seemed either insipid or painfully cringe-worthy. As I've got older I've started to appreciate it more, but until recently I still had resistance to the idea of it being read aloud, especially from a stage and to an audience *shudder*. I'm really not sure why, when I love live music performance with lyrics so much. But anyway, all that has changed with the entrance of spoken word poetry into my life.

I wish I could say that it was a live show that changed my mind, but in fact it was just happening to watch a video of Cecilia Knapp performing this on iPlayer one day:

(I can't find the BBC video anywhere but this also has a TED talk and then a second poem that made me cry on it, so it's even better)

It made a big impression on me. Cecilia Knapp is amazing specifically, but there's something about spoken word in general that has the ability to be incredibly moving. Whether it's the rhythm, or the emotional intensity that comes from someone laying themselves bare to say these kind of things in person, not hiding behind ink on paper. Ooooh I could never do it. Imagine making yourself that vulnerable! 

But there's another reason that I'm currently enjoying spoken word poetry so much and that is the fact that there are so many people who are evidently 'working-class' or from a minority group of various kinds (queer, POC, disabled) getting up on stage and just blazing out their point of view in an amazingly creative, intelligent and beautiful way. So many people being bold and inspiring and just destroying the kind of stereotypes my over-privileged-straight-white-boarding-school-posh-boy university contemporaries most definitely held about the other ends of the British spectrum. One really great example is Deanna Rodger:

I'm a class mongrel. Economically I was raised a member of the 'underclass', those who scrape along the UK poverty line - I grew up in a house where there was never any money, a house that was owned by the council, full of grotty threadbare carpets, mismatched furniture held together by parcel tape and walls that collected moisture. We didn’t have a washing machine, a toaster, a microwave, a car, a phone, or a colour TV and my clothes came from charity shops way before this became an acceptable way to dress.

Socio-culturally, though, I am pretty sure we were middle class (despite my parents' adamant assertion of being some kind of separate bohemian artisan class, sorry guys). My council house was also full of classical music, art and books. My parents encouraged knowledge acquisition and engagement with High Culture. My mum spent the tiny bits of money that she had on music lessons and healthy food - the things she felt were important and something I will always be grateful for, however much it frustrated me at the time. I don't have a regional accent. I do yoga and go to art galleries and use long words with no embarrassment. I'm called Felicity for god's sake. If you met me you would never in a million years guess I grew up qualifying for free school dinners, buying my uniform with a grant and only dreaming of one day owning name-brand anything. 

As a kid my class mongrelity felt hard. I got picked on twice over; on the one hand for sounding posh and getting good grades, and on the other for having shit clothes and no car (because kids have no sense of irony). My academic performance and appreciation for creative cultural things didn't stop me having to live through the dragging, dreary greyness of being poor and never having what I wanted, never being able to do the things other people did. Years and years of life-drizzle, with no swimming lessons or trips to the cinema to brighten things up. I carried around the feeling of being inherently not as good as other people, of never being good enough, an underlying sense of shame.

But as an adult I am able to appreciate what it's given me - some understanding of what it's like to be 'othered', to be on the fringes, to struggle, to fight against a stereotype. It's helped me understand what absence of privilege means and appreciate what privileges I have. White privilege for instance. The advantages my non-regional accent and air of being middle-class give me. I try never  to judge anyone before getting to know them and although I give off every impression of being middle-class, my sympathies lie very firmly on the working and under-class side of the divide - on the subaltern side of any divide. So all these spoken word poets out there waging this dazzling war on stereotypes? I blimmin love them. I might not be capable of this kind of thing myself, but I'm so glad that someone is. THIS IS WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS.

Bug of the Day: Locking Myself Out

Having posted two Loves in a row, I've been racking my brains this week for a Bug to balance things out a bit (never let it be said that I have a positivity bias). While I'm obviously constantly pissed off about something or other, they're not always suitable subjects for a blog post. But then today, locking myself out suddenly became a clear candidate for the Bug category... SIGH.

Despite my best efforts to be a mature and responsible grown-up, there is one aspect (probably more than one, but humour me) of an organised adult life that persistently eludes me: managing to have my keys in my possession at all required times.

Arriving gratefully at your beloved home, only to realise that you have no way of getting into it, has to be near the top of the 'most frustrating experiences in life' list. Suddenly the most basic, taken for granted thing becomes unachievable and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it except stand there seething with disbelief, watching your plans for the next bit of time dribble away into nothing. Plus you have no-one but yourself to blame! At the very best it's extremely annoying. In the last three months, for example, I have had to wait for hours in the park with my weekly shop for a flatmate to return from a day trip, had to go round to a friends house to frantically email the same flatmate to let me in because I had left both my keys and my phone at home, and then today - I went out with my new flatmates to get some farmers' market food, headed sensibly home early to get some Sunday tasks done and was rewarded for my diligence with the sight of my locked front door and an empty pocket. In the meantime they had gone on to a faraway pub, meaning I had to walk miles back on myself to borrow keys from them, in rather uncomfortable boots, weeping metaphorical tears of rage and stupidity.

But the out-and-out worst case of this imbecility has to be the time I was house-sitting in Taiwan. Part of the deal was looking after these two tiny, overexcited dogs with very small bladders who had to be carried up and down many flights of stairs three times a day so they could pee/run manically around outside. It was very humidly hot and I was very not good at getting up early enough to do the first walk of the day. About the fourth day in, I stumbled blearily out of bed, trying to avoid tripping over the tiny yappers whilst grabbing leads, poo bags etc. and, you guessed it, locked myself out with no phone, passport, money or keys. I didn't know anyone in Taiwan. 

I massively freaked out and essentially took on the behaviour of the frantic little dogs, running manically up and down the stairs sweating profusely and making tiny yelping noises. After a bit I calmed down enough to knock on all the other apartment doors, but no-one was home except a teenage girl getting ready for school who was clearly nearly as freaked out as me by my stuttering Mandarin. I think I basically said 'Neighbour. No key. Please help!!!!'  At first she actually replied 'I can't help you, sorry' and closed the door in my face, resulting in me sitting down in the horrible dirty concrete doorway and being maybe a little more hysterical than I would like anyone to ever witness.

Anyway, the long and short of it was that most Taiwanese residential complexes have a security guard who sits in a little guard box near the front entrance and in the end the girl got our one to come and confirm that he had indeed seen me around walking the dogs, and sort out a locksmith to come and open the door. He was very nice and after that we waved and said hello to each other every time the tiny dogs dragged me past. THANK GOD FOR TAIWANESE COMMUNITY-NESS. 

But really, you'd think I would have learned my lesson after that wouldn't you? Apparently not though. Pffff.

Love of the Day: Absolute Beginners Ballet with David Kierce

I'm pretty late to the whole 'ballet class party' - about 30 years too late if we're talking prima ballerina ambitions (I'm clearly not). I didn't really have the kind of childhood that included dance classes and in any case, as a die-hard tomboy, I couldn't have been less interested. Horse riding, maybe. Ballet? noooooo way.  However, a couple of years' inept dabbling with yoga, aerial circus and hard-core barre classes at hipster gyms (Blok in Clapton is great if you want your ass properly kicked) have culminated in the veils of ignorance being lifted from my eyes!

I look JUST like this doing ballet

I had always seen ballet as overly-feminine, overly-trained, overly-classical, but coming to it via other disciplines has completely changed my point of view - it is quite obviously GREAT. On the most basic level, it gives you an endorphin hit just like any kind of exercise. On top of that it teaches you how to hold yourself in a way that helps with any aerial, gymnastics, pilates or yoga type activities you might be doing. It encourages you to stand up tall and assume postures that achieve the brilliant confidence-boosting, mood-enhancing effects that Amy Cuddy describes in her crazy popular Ted talk, in a similar way to yoga. But, like aerial circus, ballet gives you something extra, and that is the fact that you are Striving For Beauty. You may not actually be attaining it (I'm pretty sure I'm not) but just aiming to create something beautiful with your body movements has some kind of magical quality. It's uplifting. It's transcendent.

Anyway, I've tried a few different 'beginners' classes in London and every single one has been too god damn hard (Pineapple and Danceworks, I'm looking at you. Why advertise your class as being for beginners when it just really, really isn't?). So I was pretty much overcome with jubilation when I finally plucked up the courage to go along to David Kierce's Absolute Beginners class at the Central School of Ballet, despite the intimidatingly professional-sounding venue. Man, what a difference! Finally some steps and instructions simple and repetitive enough for me to follow and maybe even improve at! There's no denying that the class is simply huge - 60 people to one teacher, omg - when I first walked in I was like Holy S**t, this is going to be useless. But David is like a ballet sergeant major, in complete command at all times,easy to follow, and with the amazing ability to give everyone there a few moments of bespoke guidance. This guy is loud, Australian and - the most important element - genuinely funny. I've never had such an enjoyable class experience.

There's tons of emphasis on technique, but it's delivered in a low pressure, understanding and humorous way. The class also somehow simultaneously allows you to exist in some kind of dance fantasy in which you can express emotion through these super basic movements, possibly due to the brilliant music choices. This is how adult ballet SHOULD be, surely? Not all grim discipline, elitism and hectoring - none of us are ever going to make it to the stage after all - but a fun, constructive session that you look forward to going to each week.  I bound out of it feeling good about myself and the world, determined to carry on with the slightly ridiculous task of learning to move my brain-carrying machine with elegance and grace.

Love of the Day: Astrology

You may not know this, but Mercury's in retrograde right now. That means it's a bad time to start anything new, especially things to do with electronics and/or communication (so basically the whole of the internet-based modern life), but a good time to complete unfinished projects, or look back at things you have done in the past.

So, instead of starting a new electronically communicated blog this week, as I've been thinking of doing, I've decided to reinvigorate this baby. Well, why not eh? I still have loves and I definitely still have bugs!

Chances are that you are one of those people who does NOT care about astrology and is NOT INTERESTED in such rubbish - shutters slammed down, science and logic only here please, metaphysics move right along! And I respect that. I know astrology is not really logical; I appreciate that the idea of those big balls of rock and molten metal out there in our solar system exerting an influence on our lives can seem utterly far-fetched. And to be fair, I completely understand if the term 'celestial bodies' puts you right off, it probably would me too.

But I don't love astrology because it's logical (... haven't our greatest thinkers established that logic its very self is nought but a construct anyway? Just saying). I don't love it because I think it's 'true' and can accurately predict the future, so that we should all be living according to it's advice. I love astrology because it's interesting. For me it's a kind of acetate scrawled with archaic designs that I can lay over the humdrum, strip-lit, grey, work-a-day life. It adds an extra dimension of fascination to encountering and getting to know the intricacies of a new human's personality. 

I am not 100% convinced about the workings behind astrology, but I do see patterns of accuracy in it that I can observe with my own 12-boxed brain (oh, you're an Aquarius? In you pop, box no.1 on the left there!). Time and again I see patterns: Sagittarius and Virgo couples, for example, Taurus and Pisces friendships. People SO strongly reminding me of someone else that I just know they're the same sign - and then having it confirmed. Who cares if there's logic to that? It's fun! I love being right and astrology makes me feel secretly right about things that are otherwise absolutely nothing to do with me - yesssss!

Astrology is also, to me, my childhood. It's my family, back when they were still a big, bright, messy collective who sat around the dinner table, eyes flashing and tongues wagging. Rushing to opinionate in conversations that almost always involved sentences like  'well, obviously she would - she's a Leo for god's sake! Blimmin Leos.' It's part of my nostalgic-family-feeling from before each of them were, one by one, drawn away from the glowing dining room and into the dimness of distance by thin threads of beloved resentments, cherished hurts, 'irreconcilable differences'.

Mercury is in retrograde, and it's a time for nostalgia, so today I am also nostalgia-ising about my big old broken family, who used to float around me with loving arms and hot-beating hearts, but now drift in distant seas. And I'm listening to Joni Mitchell because we all liked her, bunch of hippies that we were/are. Joni understood about distance and love, and she understood about astrology too.

Awww, just look at her shine:

Love of the Day: Looking Up

'Lift up your eyes upon

The day breaking for you.'

Maya Angelou

London may not be full of the natural, untamed beauty that raises you out of yourself, lifts up your heart and refreshes you, that settles over you like a soft green veil - but it is full of man-made beauty along with the urban grit.  So much graceful architecture and history, creativity and interesting design around, it’s impossible not to marvel at it. And, every now and again, look up past it. 

Wherever you are in the world, whatever is going on in your life, you can always look up. The wide, wild sky is always there, with its changing colours and clouds. Its population of birds wheeling and living their fierce, free lives, independent of you or your human concerns. The tiny, high-up aeroplanes with their trails, escaping to somewhere far away and unknown.   It’s something I find oddly pleasing to remember. That there's one thing that you can do anywhere, as long as you are out of doors, to get a bit of different perspective on things.

You can look up in the countryside of course, but it’s particularly good if you’re ensconced in a city, with all its busy-ness and built-up streets - it can be so easy to get caught up with all the stuff going on at ground level. With a million signs, window displays, interesting places and people, traffic, adverts and lights everywhere, there’s a whole lot of distraction always there to suck you in.  (That’s not even counting the ever-present internal monologue that can take over from reality at any time, making the actuality of your environment all but invisible). 

Apart from the sky though, I love looking up at the funny little things to be found stuck on the tops of buildings. Weathervanes and decorations, domes and spires and little turrets. Interesting pieces of art or graffitti, tiles, signs and window-boxes. Sometimes there are whole gardens up there, or roof-top bars strung with fairy lights that you would never normally notice.  Sometimes there are people who have climbed out of a random window, just hanging out on a ledge above everyone's heads.  And there's also something to be said for just the loveliness of the outlines of buildings and trees against the sky. If I'm feeling particularly vague and floaty, I like just noticing the shapes that they make and pretending that I'll try and draw them one day (I never do).

Occasionally in the morning I get lucky and nab myself a seat at the front of the top deck on the bus (to any readers of the last post - my commute has now changed!) and then I get to have the unadulterated pleasure of being swung through the streets, with my music in my ears and all the good stuff spooling out before me, just looking up.

Bug of the Day: Commuting Into Central London During Rush Hour

Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0

I've recently started working in Central London, which means I have no choice but to travel in to the depths of Dante's Inferno during rush hour. Uurrrrrgggggggh. I kind of knew doing this was gonna be a bit hectic and tiring, but HOLY CRAP, I have never experienced anything like it. An hour and a quarter of unadulterated misery, twice a day, day in and day out.  How do people - so very, very many people, in fact - do this??!

I now start my mornings with an invigorating sprint to the local train station, ram myself into a train packed to the rafters with puffy-faced office workers  (there's no hope of a seat. Ever. Not even if you get up at 6am), and proceed to take part in a game of uncomfortable Commuter Twister: balanced on one leg, an arm behind my back hanging onto the nearest pole, face squashed against someone's pinstriped arm, I sway along with the sleepy crowd down the tracks to Waterloo.  Spat out into a maelstrom of humanity, faces looming into mine, people striding in every conceivable permutation of a direction, clashing, tutting and huffing, tripping over each others heels, clipping sides with newspapers, umbrellas, bags, ducking, dodging, sidestepping... I arrive at work every day reeling, exhausted and with the knowledge that the same in reverse awaits me at the end of the day sitting on my shoulders, like a wretched crow.

The first day that I did this I arrived home with actual bruises from the journey, having been trodden on by a crocodile of French teenagers near Covent Garden and then smacked into by a woman running headlong for her connection at Waterloo (lady, you cannot run at Waterloo at 6pm, you are literally just beating people up with your front).

In short, Central London at rush hour makes me feel like a sheep - one of a million poor, stupid creatures being herded along, up stairs and through stiles, bumping into each other, clashing hooves and climbing over each other's backs - an angry, angry, trampled sheep.  BAAAAAAAA!!!!

Bug of the Day, oh yes indeedy.  Bug of the Day every single blimmin' weekday stretching into eternity, UGH. Good job I like my new work, that's all I can say!