Day 16: And... relax

Teaching is a notoriously stressful profession, but I think I largely manage to avoid too much stress.  My secret?  Not giving a toss about my job. 

I jest!*

I think one of the main reasons I stay relaxed is by being blisfully childfree and living completely alone.  I've never really understood how teachers manage to keep their sanity when they return home from a busy day in the classroom to be faced with a houseful of kids; the most precious moment of every day for me is when I close the front door, walk into my living room, and savour the wonderful sound of silence.

Other favourite ways to leave behind the chaos of the classroom include:

- Hanging out with some yummy food, a good book and a pint of cider in my favourite Leicester bar, Firebug (book just out of shot in the photograph above!);

- Snuggling under the duvet all morning with my favourite boy;

- Going for a long walk in the countryside, then returning home to a hot cup of tea and a slice of cake;

- When I'm in dire need of relaxation, a spa break at Ragdale Hall, near Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, is the most luxurious treat you can imagine.  They do relatively bargainous (although let's face it, it's still bloody expensive) 'Overnight Reviver' packages, which I sometimes use as a post-Christmas pampering.

- Escaping into a book... any book, any time, any where.  I find YA fiction the absolute best way to completely de-stress.  Perhaps because, as an adult reader, they are undemanding in the sense that they are easy to read (their themes are often anything but undemanding, and I am not for a moment suggesting that fiction for teenagers is 'lesser' than adult fiction, just that as an accomplished adult reader they are quicker to read than, say, Anna Karenina).  I can particularly recommend the novels of David Levithan, which are funny, romantic and sweet, but have just the right amount of 'edge'.  I love them.

* Mostly - I do think there is something to be said for not taking your work home with you (which can mean literally - I am careful to never take marking home at weekends, for example - or figuratively, by not spending your free time worrying about work).

Day 15: Life's a lesson

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.  Security does not exist in nature." 

The words of Helen Keller, and ones which my mum shared with me last year as I was preparing to embark on a daring adventure of my own*.

Like most people, I like to feel safe and secure.  But my inclination is often to avoid risk so thoroughly that I end up doing... nothing.  There is a Midlake song which contains the line, "I'd like to go home and stay out of sight for a long time," and that is often how I feel.  Safe in my little house, with music playing and books to read and a duvet to snuggle beneath.  No scary outside world, no having to connect with people, no having to overcome my shyness.  Some days I find just leaving the house and no longer being "out of sight" difficult. 

Luckily, I am generally pretty good at forcing myself out of my comfort zone.  At recognising that, as scary as it might be, I'd rather have the daring adventure than the illusion of security.  I've travelled a lot on my own, backpacking through South Africa, crossing America by train.  But the big things are often less nerve-wracking than the small; going to a party where I know almost no-one or meeting someone for a blind date**.  When something feels too much or too scary, when I feel overwhelmed by a situation or am finding it difficult to cope, I focus on the daring adventure and it makes it easier to take a deep breath and take the risk.

*an adventure that did not happen in the end, but that's another story.

** It terrifies me how close I came to cancelling my first date with The Boy because I was so nervous.  All I wanted, as I walked to the bus stop, was to return to the imagined security of my living room.  Thank goodness I chose the 'daring adventure' that time!

Day 14: Food glorious food

I absolutely love pottering in the kitchen, the radio playing as I chop, fry, stir and bake.  One of my favourite things to do with The Boy is to cook together; we have perfected our vegan fajitas and do a mean curry, too. 

Left to my own devices, I tend to cook from scratch three or four nights a week, relying on frozen portions of home-cooked meals for the evenings when I'm too knackered to get creative.  One thing I always have the time and energy for, however, is baking.  I have such a sweet tooth and am somehow convinced that homemade treats are better than shop-bought ones.  Here are some of my favourite recipes...
 
Mouthwatering Macaroons, which are surprisingly easy as long as you obey the recipe to the letter.

Rocky Road Bars adapted from a Nigella recipe.

The most incredibly fudgey, gooey, clog-your-arteries Chocolate Brownies.

And my favourite, easy-peasy Lemon Cupcakes. 

Ingredients

- 4oz caster sugar
- 4oz self-raising flour
- 4oz butter
- Grated rind of one lemon plus a squeeze of juice
- 2 medium free-range eggs

Method

1. Preheat the oven to gas mark 4, 170 degrees C.

2. Beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.  Add the eggs a little at a time and beat well.

3. Stir in the flour and the lemon rind.  Add a squeeze of lemon juice to the mixture and stir.

4. Put into cupcake cases and bake for 12-16 minutes, until very pale brown and firm to the touch.

5. Mix the rest of the lemon juice with a tablespoon of softened butter and 6oz icing sugar. Beat to form a smooth icing (adding a splash of water if required).

6. When the cakes are cool, ice them, and try not to eat them all in one go.

Not long ago I read a (hopefully tongue-in-cheek) socialist critique of cupcakes that suggested they represent the ultimate triumph of the individual over the collective, a sort of cake version of Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women...".  It went on to say that the departure from traditional British confections (such as the more restrained scone and rock cake), and the growing popularity of cupcakes (with their extravagant decoration and gaudy colours) somehow represented the increasing influence of a capitalist and consumerist society.

Now I like I good socialist critique as much as the next person, but as far as I am concerned any foodstuff in which the cake to icing ratio is often approaching 50/50 is ok with me, and politics be damned.

Day 13: Go green

Do you ever feel that, no matter how many bottles you recycle; no matter how many shopping bags you re-use; no matter how much you reduce your energy consumption, ultimately the measures needed to control climate change will always be blocked by the money men in suits with opinions like this one?  I try not to be defeatist about it, but my gosh, it makes depressing reading when I open the paper and discover that global carbon levels have reached a historic high, or that the Kyoto protocols still haven't been implemented fully.

All I can do, on an individual level, is try to live out the maxim, "Be the change you want to see in the world."  Small actions can have big effects, and the fact that the notion of 'being green' is an accepted and mainstream idea shows how far we have come in the past twenty years.  I just wish there wasn't still quite so far to go...

Day 12: Collecting

I like to think I live a simple life, unencumbered by excess consumption and clutter.  But this is a massive self-deception.

 

The truth is, I love stuff.  I adore my many collections... of books, of music, of art, of any random thing I find at vintage fairs and charity shops and when I travel.  I have been known to spend happy evenings gazing at my lovely things and murmering, "my precious," in the manner of Gollum.

 

These four collections are just a fraction of the things I like to seek out. My collections also include wooden printing blocks and typography prints; vintage cookware; patterened china teacups and plates; fabric. Minimalism? What's that?!

 

Two collections in one here - books themselves (currently around a thousand, and counting), and South African stuff, from sculptures like this one, to framed prints, wall hangings, fabric, table mats, basketwork, even Nelson Mandela coasters.  There's not a room in my house which doesn't have something South African in it.



Penguin Books ephemera.

Black & white photography (again, also showcasing some other obsessions of mine: South Africa (two pictures top left), Yorkshire (bottom right), intitial and lettering, and music).

Day 11: The books that changed my life

Oh my, if ever there was a Blog Every Day in May topic made for me, it's this one: Book Love.  Since I learnt to read at the age of three (first book tackled on my own: The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe, which I got bored of waiting for my mum to read to me at bedtime), I have been an avid reader. 

 

Books have been my solace in times of trouble, my companions when I was lonely, my entertainment when I needed cheering up.  I studied English Literature at university, I own upwards of a thousand books, I teach English, I go on a near-annual pilgrimage to the ultimate book town, Hay-On-Wye.  In short, I like books.  Therefore my only problem with this post was deciding what, exactly, to write about.  Having already blogged about my recommended reads a few times, I thought that this time I'd instead highlight those books which had a greater impact on me than just, "wow, that book was great".

 

The book which taught me that being an imaginative, bookish, slightly weird kid was ok
My mum had been trying to convince me to tackle her lovely hardback pile of Anne novels for years, but I resisted (I hate being told what to read) until the BBC began showing the wonderful 1980s adaptations starring Megan Followes.  That was it: straight after the first episode aired, I grabbed the books and headed to my room, working my way through the entire series in the space of about a week. 

Anne of Green Gables is the first and still the best in the series, and together with Jo March in Little Women, Anne-with-an-e is the patron saint for all bookish girls who live as much in their heads as they do in the real world.  Although I was altogether better at avoiding scrapes than Anne was, her flights of fancy, her quest for "kindred spirits", her powerful determination to prove herself as good as - if not better - than the boys at school... these were all qualities that I could see in myself.

The books which got me through those painful early-teenage years
Paula Danziger's novels brilliantly capture how it feels to be awkward and unhappy for no particular reason.  To fancy boys but not understand them (or even like them very much).  To feel frustrated with your family even while you love them.  In short, they capture exactly how it feels to be thirteen.  I devoured the whole set, often on long car journeys while my brothers squabbled next to be in the back seat, and still return to them when I want a satisfying and quick read.  At the time, my favourite was the girl-coping-with-divorce-and-new-step-family story The Divorce Express, but now it's all about There's A Bat In Bunk Five, in which main character Marcy discovers self-confidence, herself, and love at summer camp.

The book that all disaffected teens adore... and I was no exception
What can I say about The Catcher In The Rye that hasn't already been said?  Returning to it as an adult reader, I tend to find narrator Holden Caulfield an irritant, but as a sixteen year old I thought he was the ultimate rebel without a cause.

The book that showed me an alternative way to live
Poppy Z Brite's two novels set in New Orleans and Missing Mile, North Carolina, Drawing Blood and Lost Souls, fired something within me: a desire to be 'other'.  Her depictions of people living on the edges of society - artists, computer hackers, strippers, musicians, bar tenders - are so seductive that I immediately set about seeking out the corners of my community where mainstream culture refused to go.  Part of what made me fall instantly in love with Alcatraz (the nightclub I wrote about a few days ago for #BEDM First Job) was that it reminded me powerfully of the bar in Missing Mile, The Sacred Yew.  Her description of a nightclub that was home to "poets and painters, firebrands and fuckups, innocents and wantons" had left me yearning to find a similar place of my own, and in Alcatraz I found the best approximation that I could.

The book which made me realise I would never be a writer, because someone else had already written 'my' story... and more perfectly than I ever could
Reading Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld for the first time was the most incredibly uncomfortable experience.  It felt rather as if she had crawled inside my mind and then set down on paper everything she found there.  Although the novel deals with protagonist Lee Fiora's time at boarding school, it was a pretty perfect approximation of my experiences in Halls of Residence at university.  The fact that Lee is a hugely flawed character only made the reading of Prep more uncomfortable, as I was forced to face up to the ways in which my own behaviour had contributed to my unhappiness.  I knew after reading it that I could pretty much give up my dream of being a novelist, because Prep is exactly what I wanted to write; better than I could ever hope to write it.

The book which changed my attitude to work, money and consumerism
I read How To Be Free two summers ago, just after returning from America.  The trip had already got me thinking about the way I lived and my work-life balance (or lack thereof), and Tom Hodgkinson's book - which is part comic writing, part political polemic, part philosophy, part manual for changing your life - was just what I needed to bring my thoughts into sharper focus.  It kickstarted my Not Buying It experiment in autumn 2011, and indirectly led to my £100 Challenge in autumn 2012.  As a result of reading this book, I cut my hours at work and managed to pay off a large chunk of credit card debt*.  It genuinely changed my life.

* Ahem, we'll ignore the fact that all this to-ing and fro-ing to the continent to see The Boy has kind of racked that debt back up again.  The point is, I managed to get rid of it for a while!

Day 10: Travel dreams



I love travelling.  I love planning trips, I love reading travel guides and making bookings.  I love airports and train stations.  I love that feeling of arriving in a place where no-one knows you and being totally free to explore.  I'm different when I travel: more confident, more relaxed, happier.  And I am incredibly lucky to have a job that not only affords me plenty of holiday time, but that also pays me well enough to be able to afford to do some (if not all) of the trips I have long dreamed about.

 

Sunrise over Table Mountain, August 2012

Over the past few years I have had some incredible holidays: a week of hiking and book buying in Scotland's Highlands and the Isle of Skye with my brother in August 2010 was a somewhat damp but still great experience.  The following summer, I travelled across America by train - from New York to Seattle, via New Orleans, San Francisco, Eugene and Portland - in what was truly the trip of a lifetime and later in 2011, I went to Iceland with a colleague for a few days.  Summer 2012 found me in South Africa, and 2013 so far has taken me to the Netherlands three times, plus a wonderfully romantic weekend in Paris with The Boy.  Meeting him has reminded me of the joys of travelling with someone else; after years of solo trips, its great fun to explore new places with a partner in crime.

 

Spring blossoms on the Ile de la Cite, April 2013 

 

I know I am utterly spoilt to have so many great holidays, but I choose to spend the lions share of my income on travel.  I drive an old banger of a car, my house needs updating, but my priority has always been to see as much of the world as I can.

 

Travel, for me, is about escape: from the drudgery of every day life, from the small annoyances and big responsibilities of work and home.  It is about seeing how other people live and work, exploring new places, finding out about the history and culture of an area.  I love nosing in new bookshops and vintage stores, drinking in interesting bars and eating the local cuisine.  It always amazes me how different even the countries closest to home are; the Netherlands or France - despite being two of our nearest neighbours - are so different from the UK and also easily distinguishable from each other.

 

There are so many places I dream of going: Vietnam, Laos, Bali, New Zealand, Botswana, Cuba, Costa Rica, Sweden, Greece, Turkey... the list goes on and on.  But if I could be anywhere in the world right now?  That's easy...

 

Image from Wikimedia

How can you fail to love a city which has 'Keep Portland Weird' as its unofficial slogan? 

A city where you're more likely to see someone commuting by skateboard than by car. 

A city with a vintage store on every corner.

A city which, so I'm told, has a vegan stripclub. 

A city that's home to the best bookshop in the world. 

A city where the per capita ownership of tattoos is higher than anywhere else in the USA (I might be making that last one up - but it certainly feels like it's true).

Portland, Oregon is my absolute favourite place on earth, and if I could be anywhere in the world right now, it would be there.  I'd throw on a funky vintage dress and some red lipstick (all the better to fit in with the hip-but-not-hipster residents), pack my resusable cotton shopping bags and head over to the Hawthorne district to browse the craft and vintage stores, before heading back downtown to buy a stack of books from Powells, pick up snacks from a food truck and go for a hike and a picnic in Forest Park.  Finally, I'd repair to McMenamins for a restorative pint of cider. 

Day 9: What my social media updates say about me

 

28% #BEDM
The Blog Every Day In May hashtag has dominated my Twitter feed for the last week.  Although I'm finding it a challenge to write something every day, the bigger challenge is keeping up with reading everyone else's brilliant posts: it's so time-consuming that I'm barely reading anything else other than blogs.

20% I'm in love, and I'm going to tell the world!
Last time I did a 'What my social media updates say about me' post, I was chiefly concerned with dating stress.  Worrying about what to wear, about when to "put the crazy out there", about why he hadn't kissed me yet.  Well, who would have predicted from those neurotic tweets that, six months later, I'd be madly in love with that same boy? 

But unfortunately for my friends on social media, from the day we first said "I love you" (which I unwisely and drunkenly commemorated by tweeting from the pub), I have become that person: the one who clogs your Facebook feed with praise for her perfect boyfriend, who constantly Instagrams pictures of their amazing dates.  I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to everyone who has wanted to vomit on reading my lovestruck updates.  I do make myself sick too, if that's any help, but I'm really just so damned happy that it's hard to keep it inside.

18% Travel plans
What with the whole long distance relationship thing, at the moment I'm always either getting ready for a trip, booking flights and trains, or just arrived back home.  I'm lucky to be in a position - both financially and in terms of free time - to be able to pack my bags and go away at the drop of a hat, but it must make for tedious reading when every other status and tweet is, "Booked my Eurostar tickets," or "On my way to the airport, I can't wait!"

14% Boo, I have no money
See above!

10% Mmm, food
For some reason, I'm obsessed with homemade guacamole at the moment and have tweeted about it far more than is normal. 

10% Books
Books I love, books I want to recommend to people, updates to my Goodreads app that then appear on my Facebook feed: literature is always a common theme of my social media use.  Recently I've been discussing Wonder with Sarah on Twitter, enjoying Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal on Goodreads, and recommending great holiday reads in blog comments.

Day 8: The job that changed my life

Strictly speaking, the first jobs I had were as a paper girl when I was 13, and a Christmas spent behind the tills at BHS when I was 16.  But those jobs didn't mean anything; they were just something I did to earn a bit of pocket money.  However some jobs change your life, and the one I had between the ages of 18 and 20 was just that. 

I still remember the first time that I walked into Alctraz.  I'd been in Leicester for a few weeks and realised pretty quickly that the usual fresher activities and uni nights out were not for me.  The mid-nineties were a time when alternative culture was still very much just that: alternative.  The vast majority of my fellow students were incredibly mainstream and they found me - with my dyed hair, nose piercing, jumble sale clothes from before vintage was cool, and esotoric music taste - baffling.  An old school friend who was studying at De Montfort University took pity on me and, one Saturday night, we walked through the doors of the place that was to define me for the remainder of the decade.

I was hit with a wall of music and smoke, the interior so dark that at first glance I could barely discern what was going on.  The dancefloor was packed with people who looked a bit like me but more so - more pierced, more funkily dressed - thrashing around to Rage Against The Machine.  The walls were covered with brightly coloured murals.  The bar staff all looked incredibly and intimidatingly cool.  That first night at Alcatraz I didn't dance, I barely drank.  I just sat and looked around with eyes wide, amazed that a place like this existed and that it could be mine to visit.

Me, circa 1998.  Annoyingly I can't find the photograph that I know exists somewhere, of me behind the bar at Alcatraz wearing my awesome Spiderman t-shirt (age 9-10)

I became a regular, often going out on my own for lack of fellow indie and rock fans to accompany me.  I would float between the dancefloor and the quieter back room, clutching my drink, trying not to look too awkward and alone.  It always felt like more than just a nightclub; there was something friendly and relaxed about the place even though it could also be cliquey.  And so when posters advertising part-time jobs appeared around the club, I jumped at the chance to apply, but assumed that nothing would come of it.  I didn't think I was hip enough to work there, and could hardly believe it when I got a call to go and try out for a coveted place behind the bar.

I did my first shifts in May 1997, had a month off for exams and to go to Glastonbury, then returned at the start of July for the best summer of my life.  Those intimidatingly cool staff turned out to be some of the nicest, funniest, most interesting people I'd met.  And best of all, they were willing to let me - me! - join their gang.  After being the swotty geek kid at school, then the weird indie kid at sixth form and university, Alctraz was the first time in my life that I had ever truly belonged anywhere.

At Alcatraz I found my place in the world.  That summer, and for many summers afterwards, it became a home-from-home where the music was always good, the beer always cheap, my friends always behind the bar or on the dancefloor.  We - Kirsty, Dave, Steve, Millar, Rebecca... too many others to name - would go to the pub before starting our shifts, hang out after work into the early hours, go to the park together during the day.  We lived and breathed Alcatraz.  There were so many of us having fun behind that bar, and we were all so young, and had so few responsibilities.  We were beautiful, in a very mid-90s, skater chic way, and we snogged and slept our way through our colleagues and the clientele of the club.  We drank, and drank, and drank, and slept very little.

In retrospect, working at Alcatraz indirectly led to all sorts of dumb life decisions; dropping out of university during my final semester being one of them (turns out that working until 3am four days a week, and going out every other night, isn't conducive to academic success!  Who knew?).  But it changed my life for the better, too, making me more self-assured and bolshy and happier than I had ever been before, and giving me the confidence to be myself.

Alcatraz is long gone now, a victim of too many rival clubs opening as alternative music and fashion started being cool in the early 00s.  Gone, maybe, but not forgotten by me and the legions of other people who loved it.  And I will always remember how good it felt to stand behind the bar on a Saturday night, listening as the DJ played music that could lurch from Britney Spears to Tool to Blur to Run DMC within the space of 20 minutes, drinking cheap cocktails, having water fights, laughing, dancing... being part of something awesome.

Day 7: On not liking animals

I hate animals. Yep, you heard me, I hate them. I mean, I'm glad they exist - fragile ecosystems and all that - but I just don't want the smelly, hairy, noisy, biting creatures anywhere near me, thank you very much. I don't watch wildlife programmes (boring), I've never had a pet (expensive), and I really don't appreciate your dog jumping on me.

The only exception to my anti-animal views (apart from cats, which I don't mind but am allergic to), are lambs.

 

Photograph via @Herdyshepherd1

Ickle bah-lambs! Running and jumping and being oh-so-cute! Just one glimpse of a lamb, and I turn from sarcastic misanthrope to user of horrifically cutesy babytalk. I've threatened to put one in my rucksack on many a hike, and it's only the knowledge that the adorable baby lamb will turn into a big, smelly sheep that stops me. I'm genuinely devestated that BBC2 seems to have abandoned Lambing Live, which was my yearly fix of lamb-related geekiness, although @HerdyShepherd1 on Twitter is doing a very good job of replacing it with daily lamb updates from Cumbria. It's ace for when you're feeling a bit miz - just look at photos of lambs and everything feels better.