A tale of two Jamies

Christmas this year really began with listening to my very talented friend Chris singing on the South Bank with his choir Urban Voices, followed by mulled wine with Victoria and Karen. Walking home past the London Eye and trees lit with little blue fairy lights I felt very lucky to be a Londoner and to have the friends I do. Then Jamie and I shopped at Borough Market, and bought our guinea fowl from a butcher who jointed it for me according to the instructions in my Jamie Oliver cook book, despite threatening to charge more because Jamie Oliver is now too much of a big cheese to pass the time of day with him. Then he wouldn't let me over-tip him for the Christmas box.

Christmas proper started with a plate of cheese and preparing a jelly for the next day, then a li'l glass of Prosecco. Jamie and I went to Midnight Mass in St John's at Bethnal Green. I'm not used to a C of E service and so the intoning was a surprise and I found myself flapping desperately through the little blue booklet trying to work out - was it the creed? The eucharist? But it was a very jolly C of E sermon, exhorting us not to feel guilty for not coming to worship more often, telling us to celebrate the birth of Christ by having a good time - though not overdoing it. Rather different to the Quaker meeting I attended recently where people had ministered happily on a new child born to a single mother who is part of the meeting, and in a more conflicted spirit on a concern for the homeless, an anger against consumerism, and a plain refusal to believe a literal truth of the poetry sung in carols. There is a principled facing of the truth with Quakers that I value, but sometimes I do wish that we could just take it easy too.

Today Jamie and I cycled through town in defiance of the rain - and as often happens when you face up to an enemy, the rain melted away. Jamie led, and his confident presence helped me conquer my nerves about tackling the roads. We cycled past a working mans' club in Bethnal Green, adorned by a Banksy graffiti and some cheery teenagers who wished us a happy Christmas, through quiet squares at the back of Kings' Cross, through a sedate Bloomsbury and then Seven Dials in Covent Garden which was decorated with Christmas Lights arranged in the form of Candelabra. From there we went up the sandy path on the Mall, skirted the Queen's home, past the palace of Westminster, and through Whitehall and Piccadilly. We clicked our heels together three times and said There's no place like Soho (not really, but Jamie gave me a Wizard of Oz mug for a present and it was in my mind). As always in Soho we saw the strangest things - a woman walking down the street, oblivious to the twinkling lights of the strip joints and revue bar, with her two toddler-ish sons, who were both wearing toy police-man's helmets; and then a moment later outside Village Soho, a small, localised glitter tornado. Some fragments of the journey were completely new to me, some (Iike Lambs Conduit Street) had impressed me ten years ago and then I had lost them, and some turnings were ingrained in the very movements of my body, places I had worked or met people at, or danced in. Then home, and then we ate a feast, from Jamie Oliver's recipes, with some amendments from our own Jamie. We both worried some about the people we had seen who seemed homeless, or alone, or simply caught in the rain when they wanted to be somewhere else. When we were eating our home-made jelly made with berries, elderflower cordial and prosecco I was so content I could barely form words. Christmas was all I had hoped it would be - calm, luxuriant without obscene consumerism, full of laughter and friendship. It's a good feast to wind down the year. Many thanks to Jamie for making it such a wonderful day. It's never quite easy to decide how much it is fair to enjoy yourself when others do not have the things they most need - companionship, shelter, nourishment of all kinds. But I suppose we too need some leisure and easy time - with an old and dear friend - I think so.

The day I lost the gift of opposable thumbs

I woke up yesterday morning with that queer drifting into consciousness, where I think in indexicals - oh yes, I am me, in this place which I call 'here' and the time is now. Usually my first more complex thought is 'I must make coffee' but yesterday my first thought was 'I am me, yet different.' I had put on false nails the night before, as part of preparations for a New Year More Glamorous - and woke up with a more limited set of abilities than I had had the morning before. Kafka's Metamorphosis drifted through my mind, and as I type, the sound resembles a family of beetles crossing a difficult and hard terrain. I had never before understood the sadness of turning into a beetle in quite the same way, the shame of realising that you like different things - in the beetle's case, a new prediliction for eating shit; in my glamourously nailed form, an aversion to manual labour of even the mildest kind and a fear of hot soapy water. But most of all the sadness of having left your old body behind, of never having realised how good your body was to you, how dear it was and surprisingly adept, how much you took it, tired and plain as it sometimes felt, for granted.

Brushing my hand over my eyes was surprisingly painful, and simple actions such as opening a jar of coffee have had to be relearnt with these hard new additions to myself, my fingers not only harder and a centimetre longer, capable of being used as weapons - but also fragile - the first efforts at carrying on household chores, taking care of myself as normal, had snapped off the early efforts at extended nails, and I was running short on glue. Life has slowed down, and become complex in ways I could not have anticipated. Tying my hair back into a ponytail, which I was accustommed to thinking of as one, flowing, impatient movement, driven by a practical need to have my hair out of my eyes - is actually a series of curves, of angulations of my wrists, of tucking my hair in and out of the elasticated band. Doing up my zip and fastening the buttons on my trousers was almost impossible, in fact I almost made Jamie and myself late for midnight mass by taking so long to do myself up. What do women who normally have such nails wear? Tights must be a no-no, as well as anything requiring a bow. And yet the irony is they look so gorgeous - with their French manicure and little arc of silver. I feel gracious and feminine, even as I have to hand Jamie boxes to open because their folds are too complex for my elongated nails to penetrate. I have learnt to press switches by holding my hand flat and using the pad of my fingers, instead of prodding or poking. I stare besottedly at my elegant hands. But I wonder, is there any other example in the animal species of a female voluntarily semi-immobilising herself in order to be more attractive to a potential mate?

Eltham '93 remembered

When I heard that Ade Sofola, the leader of the Youth Act project at the Citizenship Foundation, was going to take young people from Lewisham and Eltham away together on a Youth Act residential, it brought back sharp memories. I only need to hear those two London place names mentioned together and I’m back in 1993, when Lewisham, with a large black population, and Welling, largely white, and home to the BNP, collided. Eltham was where it happened.

I used to get off at the next bus-stop up from the one where Stephen Lawrence was killed, several times a week, to meet my boyfriend Tom. Tom had a knife held to his throat once at the cinema opposite that same bus-stop when we were doing nothing worse than walking down the road looking happy. I was thumped once in Blackheath for trying to stop some drunk men bullying a Chinese family. Although we felt we led sheltered lives, and it was nothing like as bad as the postcode warfare that blights the lives of so many young people today, like any teenagers, we were not entirely safe. But the last thing we were going to do was tell our parents or teachers. They’d have stopped us going out. We valued our freedom more than our safety. But when Stephen Lawrence died, and even more, when the police failed to find his killers, it changed our neck of South East London, and it changed all of us.

I would probably never have thought to join anti-racism societies at university had I not seen my stamping grounds turned into a battleground. When I saw certain political groups in the student union try to claim it as their issue as they went round the residences, recruiting supporters, I slammed the door in their face. It was my neighbourhood, our life, that they were using to score points with. I hadn’t been angry at the time, I didn’t even know how to talk about it with my own friends properly. It only made me angry afterwards that we had been so let down that people, young people, turned on each other in violence. Angry that we didn’t know who to believe or to trust. Angry that a young man had died on our streets and people I met claimed they knew who killed him, but would not name names.

We weren’t scared, we were too young to know what scared meant. We enjoyed the tactics. Meeting my boyfriend and his mates and mapping out which side streets we would use to avoid the gangs we had heard were over from Lewisham for the night. Discussing matter-of-factly with my best friend, who is mixed race, whether we would be safer walking together or separately. The weekend after the killing when I stood by the river, looking at the hill going up from Greenwich towards Eltham, and seeing unexplained fires I had a feeling of threat – but also the exhilaration of not being dead. Then the rumours. Being told by a man we met in the pub that it wasn’t a racist killing, ‘just’ gang warfare. Then as we waited by a bus-stop at the end of the night, seeing that same man face a bus, scratch his armpits and dance from foot to foot, making monkey noises, directed at a black man inside the bus. Then he had gone. It was sickening. A racist telling me that something was not a racist killing.

I believe that we all have the seeds of violence inside us, and that we have the tools in ourselves to make sure that those seeds do not grow. I know that those of us who were in our late teens in South East London in 1992 will not forget what happened. I think if there had been a project like Youth Act there, then, we would have had more of a means not only to make our streets safer, but to talk to each other, and to the police, and the MP, and everybody. We could have maybe seen for ourselves if we thought the police were institutionally racist. Perhaps people would have felt safer in speaking to those police about what the gangs were doing, or we might have known if they actually were on the streets, or were rumours by people who like to frighten other people. Perhaps we would have let our parents know that we thought we might be in danger, but was there still some way we could go to hang out with our friends. Maybe we could not have saved Stephen Lawrence. But we owe it to the memory of every young person who has died in the battles on our streets to bring peace wherever we can.

Two hit wonder

When I was in Pret yesterday I noticed that instead of offering 'strong' coffee you are prompted to order a 'two hit' one. After a brief struggle between a commitment to plain English and caffeine addiction, the devil won and I obediently asked a 'barista' for a two hit cappuccino, despite thinking it sounded like a summary of John Prescott's relationship with journalists.

She stared at me blankly, and asked her colleague for advice. He stood beside her supportively and stared at me blankly. After a moment I asked for a double cappuccino, and they smiled and got me one. I explained I had just been asking for what it said on the board. It's ridiculous, they said, in Southern European accented English. It's Oxford Street, most of the people who come in to this place don't speak English as a first language, why do they make it more difficult? Marketing, I guess, after all, I feel much more kinship with the staff of a cafe if I know that they have the same problems as me in understanding management speak.

I like the Anthony Gormley statues

I like the Anthony Gormley statues dotted around rooftops in London. They seem vulnerable and lofty, which is a very good image for life alone in the city. The fact that there are several of them within eye-shot of each other also works - that's what friendships are like here. We can't necessarily be close but we look out for each other.

Sounds of power

I was once having lunch with a man that I had had a minor affair with. He was in London for a few days between postings in Iraq and Nigeria, and asked, as he always did about my personal life, and as always, I replied that I was single. He looked unperturbed and explained that women had much less need of a relationship because they had the emotional support of a network of female friends. Yes, I said wistfully, but men are good at carrying heavy things...

This rainy bank holiday has been a saga of carrying heavy things and spending ages up to my elbows in stereo wiring, and I am proud to report that my new CD/radio, speakers and record player are now blasting out sound and I DID IT MYSELF, waded straight into that masculine world of heavy things and wire. My old stereo was a Eurovision casualty, more proof that bad music kills. I had a dreadful stereo one year at university and unsurprisingly went into depression. Today I feel a sense of feminism I haven't had since I was sixteen. It really is important to be able to do this stuff yourself.

And resulting from this afternoon's wiring magic - has anyone listened to Primal Scream's Screamadelica recently? I celebrated having a record player with my old double LP - the one with little messages from Bobby Gillespie scratched into the run off - and had forgotten how unbelievably good it sounds. I'd like to take this opportunity to say that I request 'Don't Fight It, Feel It' to be played at my funeral, along with 'Jump' by Madonna and the penultimate song from the Air album that Annika and I were listening to in South Africa, she knows what I mean. Then the third movement from the Beethoven late quartet in A minor either as people are coming in or leaving. That's all!

Housing Association (Rights and Representation) Bill

This bill is going through its second reading in the House of Commons today. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmbills/035/2007035.pdf
I'm in a shared ownership property, which means that the biggest financial commitment I have ever made is with an organisation that I find curious and baffling and to which I am intimately bound. The mysterious place they call ‘Head Office’ in which decisions about my domestic circumstances are made is completely unknown to me and yet every inch of my carpet is known to them. They are certainly autocratic and whimsical, often quiet and obscure, and may be relatively benevolent, but after four years of sharing a flat our hearts are still strangers to one another.

This bill appears to rebalance the situation towards the tenant. My reading of the bill is that it would require housing associations to produce a service agreement which would be approved by either the Housing Corporation or a tenants' jury. An inspection of the housing association and whether or not it is living up to its service promise can be requested by the tenants association. If the housing association continually fails to deliver on its service, the Housing Corporation may ballot the tenants on whether the management should be transferred to another housing association.

I have encouraged the residents in my block to write to our MP to recommend she support this bill, but it belatedly occurred to me that I have no idea whether this would be a good thing or not. How can I find out? And how can I find a website that decodes parliamentary bills into plain English?

If you are also a tenant of a housing association these links might be useful:

The website of the housing association regulator:
http://www.housingcorp.gov.uk/index.php

If you want to contact your MP about the bill you can look them up on http://www.theyworkforyou.com/

Why is this here?

When I was a little girl my grandfather and I used to spend some time contemplating the questions that haunt young children and old people – such as what would happen to all the new dead people when the sky reached capacity, and whether that cast the idea of heaven into doubt, and whether porridge was nice or nasty. We couldn’t really afford to spend too much time on all that stuff , because there were always rocks to climb, willow twigs to turn into whistles and potatoes to get from market for my granny. So after some contemplation my grandfather would take refuge in the incontradictable ‘Näin on marjat’ – that’s the way the berries are. And on we would go, hunting trolls, dreaming about having a boat, and wondering whether an open topped sausage sandwich was available from granny. These days I find things are more complicated, or there is more apparent need to have an opinion. So this blogspot is for the things that I have contemplated and can’t answer. If anyone can tell me how the berries really are, I would be very grateful.