It's an 'end of the rainbow' sort of deal

There were 53 weeks in this year. We won't dwell on that.

For my final week I thought it would be satisfying to finish off with one of my prompts. I took a 12 letter word (housewarming) in January and vowed to use a letter a month as a prompt. November escaped me, so I am left with "ng" this month. Which is as good a prompt as any.

"NG" is the beginning of the postcode of my parents house, and where I lived for 17 years.  That house is 'home' in both the sense of security, of solidity, and in terms of the comprehensible location indicated when people asked me "are you going home for Christmas this year?" But it hasn't been my permanent home for 17 years. Home is also Brighton, and Southampton. 

I'm also not comfortably 'from'  an 'NG' postcode. I don't have a Nottingham accent, I have a Leicestershire one. And as everyone from the East Midlands knows (I think the West Mids has a more distnctive identity) we have little in the way of clear identity - depending on where I am in the country I am understood as either Northern or Southern. My accent also has curious twangs, picked up from North Lincolnshire relatives, time spent living in Lancashire (and with people from Lancashire), and a lifetime of wanting to be identifably from somewhere.

The place I live, the place which is most consistently described as 'home' now, is Southampton. It doesn't feel very much like home, even after a year and half here. My accent seems more Northern here than it did in Brighton, curiously. I wonder how much of that has been to do with how little I have spoken to people this year and something like my childhood accent bubbling back up in my isolation. 

This flat doesn't feel like home though, despite my optimism it might at the beginning of the year. I think part of it is the fact my landlord put it on the market over a year ago and it has sold twice (the first sale fell through, I am unsure if the second has as well) so I've been living with the threat of eviction. But it's also been the stunted sort of life I've been living here. I have only had a handful of people here in the last year, two or three nights of people over for dinner or drinks, no parties since New Year's Eve, and a sense of holding my breath for life to start, for a different way of living to reveal itself. 

Home is about not thinking, not tensing yourself for the next thing, not feeling you are baricading the door against the world. I haven't had much of that feeling here. The pandemic has obviously contributed to that - and this flat has been tremendously accomodating in that respect. I had space to sit outside, to grow plants, to work, and live in a way my flat in Brighton could never have provided. But for so many reasons which go beyond that, this flat has not yet been a place I feel I can breathe out, stop thinking, and feel held. 

I hope 2021 brings me something of that.

I keep experiencing huge sweeps of indecision over the house I am trying to buy (not helped by the total lack of progress on contracts thanks to the seller's solicitors) which has something to do with the state of the country (and world) making it feel like buying a house now might be a truly ridiculous financial choice, and something to do with this idea of needing to make home, and my indecision over whether Southampton can ever be that place. Can I ever achieve that on my own? Do I have enough in me to put down the roots and produce that sense of security needed to craft a home which feels as stable as the place I grew up, in 'NG', did.

• Comment on this entry saying Rhubarb!, and I'll pick three things from your profile interests or tags.
• Write about the words/phrases I picked in your journal and make this same offer. Sharing is caring.

I commented on cosmolinguist's entry and they picked the following from my interest list;
These selections have tickled me no end and I'm especially grateful for the book recommendation which came with the first pick. Let's dive in (a phrase which I've been using all year in my lectures for some reason, odd how you end up hooked on a particular phrase sometimes...)

Alphabetising the world:
I love order. There's little else that gives me such mundane, immediate satisifaction. Back in the days when I worked in my office and could actually print materials off to read instead of having to spend all day and night looking at a screen, I generated a lot of paper that needed filing. The afternoons when nothing was going right and I looked around and realised my office looked like a paper factory had exploded, I would stop and file everything. I have immaculate folders full of essential articles, sub divided by theme or teaching module. My CDs and DVDs (possibly the only person still buying those formats and I have zero regret about that) are beautifully alphabetised. Indeed, one thing I'm especially looking forward to if my house purchase comes off (building surveyor goes in next week, fingers crossed nothing significant is falling down...) is being able to reunite my entire CD collection and have the whole sodding thing ordered.

This is in some ways, something which is symptomatic of my anxiety-spiral-OCD-tendencies. Because it probably shouldn't make me feel quite as squicky to have things out of order - or as I think of it "in chaos". But the key thing is, being able to put things in order - specifically alphabetical order - is something which is immediately calming, and something I can offer to other people without much discussion about how it might be helpful to tidy, because it's so comprehensible. If everything got ordered like this (when there is not otherwise a suitable or better system of organisation) the world would be beautifully ordered and then there would be more space for creativity and joy and spontaneity.

Overcoming decadence and nihilism:
This one makes me laugh. It's on the list because years ago, when I was a terrible English Literature undergraduate, and an enormous Manics fan (this one still true, it's just morphed slightly) I would spend hours in one of the college common rooms, smoking cigarettes and talking nonsense about philosophy with a friend. We definitely fancied ourselves as the next great thinkers. I shudder to imagine time travelling to overhear that conversation. At some point I realised that the nihilism I had interpreted to mean that, without meaning, there was also no value to life fuelled a kind of miserable decadence in what I imbibed. Curiously, there's something typically backwards about how I came to link these ideas given Nietzsche looks to nihilism as the response to decadence but perhaps I'm not so terribly out of sync in that those things produce each other. A few years living like there's no tomorrow and drinking like you don't need a liver, oddly (not oddly), produces a self fulfilling prophecy of nothingness.

Somewhere along the line, my grasp of nihilism shifted. I moved away from anomic despair to a more principled embrace of the impossibility of meaning and subjectivity of knowledge which doesn't require me to reject the fundamental underpinings of those big philosopical thoughts, but does point me towards the essential need to continue to operate within the conditions of nothingness, and ultimately, to direct my study toward epistemological positions which are founded on the impossibility of knowledge but the richness of what can be understood by looking at the stiving for meaning - towards deconstructionism, really.

Queer Theory - practice and content: 
Queer theory was a revelation to me. And now I get to introduce students to it as well and for some of them it will be a revelation too and I can't think of a better gift. 

I encountered queer theory towards the end of my final year as an undergrad - barely half a week of content, I think. But it was enough to give me a way to understand there was a world of theory there to do something really - to me - radical. I picked my Masters course on the basis it was the only course in the country built around queer theory and had my mind delightfully bent (pun very much intended) for 9 months and wrote the best piece of academic writing I had produced to date for my dissertation.

Queer theory prompts us to ask why the things that get called normal have ever got to that position. It directs us to the value of knowledge, practice and existence which is not just outside of normal, but which also pressures normal. How does normal try and shore itself up against the destabilising force of the queer other? In what ways does queerness exist? It thinks of queer not as something which is 'gay' in a binary with 'straight', but as something which explodes binaries and exists across, between, against, within, and everywhere. 

This kind of conceptualisation allows us to explore every part of culture and society. To queer - to turn on its side, inside out, to make something new but familiar and different. And in the process, discover something new about the things which feel ordinary or natural.

There are problems with queer theory. My PhD thesis was about confronting, and attempting to explode the implications of the anti-social thesis in queer theory. The anti-social thesis is set of theorising and work which stabilises definitions of queer in ways which start to label people as "queer" or "not queer enough" according to a set of classifications established primarily by people working in an archive of cis gay male activism and theory. It's problematic on a number of levels, but for me one of the most significant failures is that it produces value judgements on people's lives which begin in abstract theorisations but do not acknowledge either the material realities of people's lives and choices, or the material impact such pronouncements have on queer people's lives and relationships with the self which are then possible.

Self, politics, theory and lived experience cannot be disentangled. Queer theory - broadly - acknowledges this and works at what it means when we both acknowledge this and draw on what we can learn and do from these integrated positions. Queer theory also, beautifully, refuses the possibility of an integrated position. Within queer theory we are always becoming, always in process, and always positioned through and in relation to others.

This key idea provides a direction for both researching and producing knowledge; all knowledge is partial, all subjects of research are incomplete and inconsistent. What we can work at picking up and identifying, are the webs of power which structure experience, knowledge, choice, action, and relationships. And that is also what we can feed back; what happens at those junctures between normal and other? How do boundaries move? How are binaries constructed? What does it mean to live against and across instead of with and in line? 

My 12 letter prompt of 'housewarming' brings me to 'i' this month. I have chosen to go for statements beginning with "I am"

I am exhausted
I am drained
I am worn out and washed out
I am feeling unseen and unheard
I am feeling unappreciated
I am overworked
I am finding it impossible to imagine completing the full academic year like this
I am angry at the Government
I am exasperated at University Management
I am lacking compassion for students who seem to treat me like an automaton without feelings instead of a fellow human being trying their hardest
I am finding hope hard to hold on to
I am lonely
I am feeling isolated while immersed in endless communication
I am grateful for every kind word or consideration
I am living life in little gasps of relief from all of this
I am so tired.

It's been a hard week. I have a foggy brain and an intimidating to do list.

Instead of spending energy I don't think I have left on scraping something together I will instead link you to my two most recent blog entries on my other blog. The first provides reasonable explanation of why I've got nothing in the tank to populate an entry here;


And from August...

 The 12 letter prompt of 'housewarming' today brings me to 'm'. After hesitating for half a week I've decided to go for 'me' and essentially update my 'intro' post from 3 years ago.

I am [about to turn] 36. I work in a 'prestigious' university in the south of England. I put prestigious in inverted commas because I am deeply critical of the system of university rankings, and things like 'Russell Group' which ensure money and resources flow around a ring fenced group of already over-funded institutions who select students from selective schools and...it's a pyramid scheme. I have worked at less prestigious universities which do better, more exciting research with less money, and make an objectively bigger impact in the lives of their non-elite students than this one does. I work here because they hired me for a permanent role and the lookout for careers in academia right now is terrible. I like my colleagues, I like many of my students, I work hard (sometimes too hard) for the community I am part of but I am never going to toe the party line on being 'world-leading' simply because of what some dodgy metrics say about the institution as a whole.

I am a cis woman. I think gender is a trap. I have always, as long as I can remember asking questions, been baffled by binary conceptualisations of gender and I have never easily fit either 'girl' or 'woman'. Woman, right now, is a word I choose. But more often I like to roll my descriptors of gender and sexuality into one and use 'queer'. I like the indeterminacy of queer. I like the history of that word and how it still needles at the norm, how it says 'I am against and across and strange and uncomfortable and making you uncomfortable'. I find it fascinating how and when I get misgendered and I find it fascinating when I get called "lady". The latter makes me more unhappy than the former.

I also use bisexual to describe my sexuality. A word which I painfully tore out of me and presented to the world when I was about 15 and which I clung to in the face of all the horribleness that can attend coming out. For a number of years I dropped bisexual because I had internalised too many negative stereotypes and associations with that word. Recently, after an inspiring keynote address entitled 'lesbian nation' by Campbell X at a conference, I claimed 'lesbian' as a word I had a right to. I mix my words all the time. Did I mention I like indeterminacy? I don't owe anyone a box to put me in. The words I use are expression, not definition.

My work mixes my life. I do research about LGBTQ people, families, childhood, gender, relationships. I don't write about that in much detail as I try to maintain some division of my professional and personal online existence.

One of the roles I have in my job involves supporting students who encounter a range of difficulties during their studies; I am determined to do all I can to kick open the door to Higher Education and use my entire body to stop it slamming shut on people. On some occasions this is harder to acheive than at others. I am continually learning about doors I didn't even know existed and how they exclude people.

I have a long term mental health issue. I write about it in more detail on my wordpress blog. I write about it here too, but typically in less detail. It's a useful background piece of information to have if you're coming to read. I am, as mentioned above, hitting my late 30s. I've been told that this stage of life often includes a worsening of bipolar spectrum disorders, that's something I've been wrestling for a while now. I've also been told that it kind of shakes out by the time you're 40 and you can just get on with it - whatever level you end up at. I hope that's true. I work hard to be well. My success on this front is, predictably, variable.

I am fortunate to have a huge range of people in my life. I have a biological family who live far away and who I have limited contact with, this includes three brothers, and two parents. I have a chosen family of friends who live much closer and who fill me up with love and kindess and sometimes beer. I am [recently] poly after being single for a decade. I got to poly through a lot of reflection on what I can and can't do in relationships and how I want to be able to build relationships with people. I am finding the space, communication, and conscious choice of commitment which poly centres incredibly positive and freeing. At the time of writing, I am in one relationship of note and that's with 'Teddy'. They are on dreamwidth as well and next-to-no-sleuthing will reveal their dw username to anyone who wishes to put together such a puzzle.

I am a nerd for pop culture and a deep love of sci-fi (especially Star Trek) has been a constant in my life. I am a lifer fan of Manic Street Preachers, even though I haven't liked any music they've released for nearly a decade. I have a soul deep love for David Bowie and our bond will never be broken. 

I read the journal of everyone I subscribe to but I am an inconsistent commenter. 

One of my new[ish] Southampton friends invited me to go on a road trip with her to Glastonbury yesterday to walk up the Tor and generally have a day out. It was a very long journey thanks to the always-over-capacity A303 and then a 3-car pile up on the way home which brought us to a standstill for an hour (punctuated only by a bomb squad van coming down with blue lights on and parting the stationary traffic).

We had a good day. She's very easy to talk to, very good at something I am terrible at (asking for more information on topics she doesn't understand or know about if I raise them, and then listening carefully to my explanations), and very nice to be around. I am glad of being friends with her.

The Tor was sort of underwhelming. It's a lovely view from the top but I would have liked it much more if it had been deserted. The numbers of people - I suspect quite few in the grand scheme of things - just milling around made it feel like a place you couldn't just stand and take in. We kept moving.

After we walked into the town we got lunch and then went into the Abbey grounds (wildly overpriced) which were lovely. Again, more people than I really would have liked but in many ways I enjoyed it more there than I did up on the Tor. The afternoon light was beautiful and it was warm and pleasant in the very particular way sunny September days are.

I am looking forward to owning a car again so I can be the architect of such days, rather than co-pilot.

 It's been a draining week for lots of small reasons which add up to just feeling done in.

Some things will be resolved by the end of next week, some things have already been worked through and made light, some things I'm choosing to step away from for now.

I don't want to give more energy to detailing any of it. But it's useful to me to note that some weeks you're just running to stand still. And remember that not every week will be this week.

This time next week I'll be one night away from seeing Teddy. I'll be on annual leave. I'll have crossed a job off my work to do list that's been nagging for months. And I hope I'll be feeling lighter.

There are still loads of wonderful, good things in my life. There are WhatsApp messages pinging away on my phone from lots of different people who are letting me know in lots of different ways that I matter to them. There are people who have gone out of their way today, been generous, and made my life better. And those things are cumulatively huge. When my energy restores I can pay all that care forward again. The cycles of generosity and random acts of kindness which shape my days are spectacular and make me marvel at what we can all do for each other with such small steps 

My annual leave week seemed to flash past, although it was filled with wonderful things, places and people. 

I managed 4 swims - one in the lido on Monday; one in the sea, along the coast in Bournemouth, on Wednesday; and two in the Severn when visiting Teddy this [long] weekend. 

The lido swim was the best, because it allows proper swimming and a good steady thump thump thump pace that seems to hammer my brain out flat again. Because the lido had only been filled (from the natural spring it is built atop) 3 days earlier, the water was not fully warmed by the sun and hovering around 18 degrees with the air temp around the same. This meant that while it was a comfortable temperature to swim it wasn't particularly easy to feel your muscles well enough to identify strain. Given it's been more than 4 months since I've been in a pool, I was really conscious of the need to be careful and stop after 30 mins regardless of how I felt so I only got to 1km, instead of my usual 2km+ I'd normally do. Came away with no injuries but could feel it the next day in my legs so I was right to stop when I did, much as I wanted to stay in the pool for the next year.

The sea and river swims were wonderful in an entirely different way, less thump thump thump to peace, and more a surrender to the elements. Just being able to let my body go, crash through waves, sink into the cool stillness, unfurl every single bit of muscle, to feel the cold creep up your body as you wade in, to note the way the distinction between hot and cold changes when you are fully submerged and the water becomes the baseline temperature.

Swimming is the time I feel absolutely at one with my body. I know where every part of me is, I know how to move, it comes naturally in a way little else does.  Everything is awake, everything is switched on, everything works.


Summer feels like a season of excess sensation - everything is turned up. Cold water and swimming, hot sun on skin, rich scents after rain, the smell that drifts in bedroom windows as the air cools in the evening at the end of a hot day.  

On Sunday before I climbed in the car to drive the 2 hour 45 minutes (I am being precise instead of rounding up because it sounds much less far for being "2 hours something" instead of "3 hours") home, Teddy and I went for a walk along the river. The path was lined with blackberry bushes, all in full fruit. I always appreciate my nearly 6 foot of height at times like this - I can reach to the higher branches, not yet stripped by passing pedestrians unable to resist that shiny, plump fruit, and pull down perfectly ripe berrries. But in the face of such abundance, I could hardly manage to select a single fruit to pluck from the bush. While I hesitated over a hundred options, selecting just a couple, Teddy had picked a handful. We walked along, sharing that little pile of fruit from their hand. Long after the first burst of freshness was gone, the sweetness remained on my lips, intensified by the warmth of the sun, and the contentment of my week which was carried along in each bit of my body.

Continuing with my twelve letter prompt, of housewarming, which this month brings me to 'a'.

I am going for "anomaly".

I had another week. More bad than good this time. Work was just too much and then it broke my head in the very specific way that happens sometimes but always catches me by surprise. I always consider this an anomaly. That this is exceptional. 

It's not.

I want it to be. I want it to be a thing that does not happen. That is not part of me. 

I feel like I need to believe in it being an anomaly and not a thing to be expected or accomodated in the ordinary run of my life. I'm not sure that's going to cut it because I end up feeling deep shame at it, as is.

Don't know. Don't know what to do with it. Don't think it can be avoided. Don't like when it happens. Don't like myself for it. Don't want it not to be an anomaly. Don't want to accept it. Don't want it accepted.

1. What’s the weather outside your window doing right now? If that’s not inspiring, what’s the weather like somewhere you wish you could be?
It's sunny, breezy, bit of cloud, really fresh clean air. There is a lot more traffic about now so my flat is much less quiet than it has been the past few weeks when I have the doors and windows open. I miss the silence and the birds. I'm glad of the clear freshness.

2. What’s for breakfast? Lunch? Dinner?
I keep forgetting to eat meals in recognisable intervals since lockdown. Partly it's the disruption to my regular schedule, partly I guess I rely on the rhythms of other people and that's disappeared. Today for breakfast I had marmalade on toast. For lunch I had a wrap with some of last night's stir fried veg, cheese and quorn ham. Who knows what's for tea, or indeed when it will be.

3. What are things you can’t go without?
The only thing I really struggle to go without is a glass of orange juice and a cup of tea. Every day. Without fail. Possessions wise, everything is a bit up for grabs. The last three months of not being able to indulge my terrible shopping habit which I can afford but don't like as a sort of unnecessary consumption thing, has been good for reassuring myself I can do with less and have a less significant attachment to objects than I feared. So the anser is 'not much'.

4. How did your parents choose your name?
My parents picked my name because they'd, at some point not that long before I was born, traced our family tree by going to parish churches and going through their records. They discovered a long history of [name]. So they picked it for me. I have tried to imagine some sort of connection to a long line of [name]s and wonder if they would be delighted to imagine our lineage. Given women lose their names through marriage I do feel carrying a name is some valuing of the invisible lives of those women.

But I often joke (ish) that I'm a changeling, I have so little in common with my family. I think that's part of why my name doesn't feel like my name - it's forcing me to fit a family I don't quite belong to. It's like a lock rather than an anchor. It wasn't a name picked for me, it was impressed upon me. 

5. If you could travel back in time, where and when would you go?
I find this utterly impossible to answer because I can only imagine the hardships or difficulties of different times. If I could be gifted with a rosetta stone/TARDIS translation/babelfish then I would love to visit the Library of Alexandria and spend a day hanging out with those lads. Or rather more mundane, to be at the 1973 Hammersmith Odeon Ziggy show....and then about 10 other Bowie shows. Including his appearance at the 1969 Beckenham Arts Festival, because that song is just so beautiful.