Should, Want

Things I Should Do Today:

• go for a run
• make soup
• do the laundry
• write at least something related to the book

Things I Want To Do Today:

• sit on the couch bathed in sunlight
• have a nap
  

Er, it's Sunday, and...We're a Little Weird

So, it's Sunday, and it's snowing outside again, so this is what we're doing: sitting in the lounge sipping mulled wine, with a fire going, and Christmas songs playing in the background. No, we are not two months behind the rest of the world; just quirky. Here's proof, in conversation-form:

"Like Good King Wenceslas...he went down..."
"He didn't go down..."
"He did, he went down. On Stephen. And gave him a good feast."

Also, the response that George gives his significant other when she murmurs from the couch, "I'm tired": "I know, but this is, this is rock n' roll, this is the chance you take, going out with a rustic poet like me."

Remember: quirky.

Some Amusing Sunday Things

We got our Official Warning from the TV Licensing division the other day. We've been getting similar warnings for almost a year now, most of which say variations on the theme, "you don't have a TV license, and since we assume you must own a television, that means you're breaking the law, and we're coming to get you." But this one, apparently, is the mother of all warnings, the Real Thing. "This is an official warning that the TV Licensing Enforcement Division will be proceeding with a full investigation of the above address," it starts.

Surely, I think, surely, the government has better things to do. The simple fact is that we have been ignoring these warnings because we are not, in fact, breaking the law. We do not own a television, nor do we "watch or record TV programmes as they are shown on TV" on any kind of device. But we've been amused by the TV Licensing divison's insistance that we're harboring secret television devices. The Man finally called them up to tell them to please stop sending their letters; someone is going to come to our house to make sure we're not lying, apparently. This makes us giggle.

In other news, this, though written back in September, is particularly relevent today. Firstly because it made us laugh, but secondly because I have discovered an alarming derth of socks in my wardrobe. Those that I am still in possession of--mostly holey or unravelling--are never in pairs, EVER. I don't know where they go, but I do know that underneath my boots I'm wearing two completely different kinds of thick wool hiking socks.

And finally, this from Tim Dowling in the Guardian's Saturday magazine: "I file through a mental list of things I have forgotten to worry about." I find Dowling especially likeable, but never more than today, when The Man, discovering this quote, tapped me on the shoulder and simply pointed. Point, as they say, taken.

Things That Have Recently Made Me Smile

• Late night city walks


• The slightly smokey smell of September


• Finally being warm because it's Autumn and I don't have to pretend anymore that the weather is summery and wear skirts and sandals


• My new rust-coloured coat


• Watching bad television online whilst in the bath (glass of wine optional but always appreciated)


• Using the fireplace again


• Woolen jumpers


• My bicycle--avec recently pumped tires


• Walking through Radcliffe Square in the evenings and getting to think, I live here!


• Lazy, lounge-y Sundays with good friends and good food


• Knowing my neighbors (even just a little) and passing gardening equipment over the fence


• Wearing The Man's scarf to work


• The way my coat flutters when I'm cycling
  


• Chocolate in the afternoon

• Being snuggled up when it's cold outside
  

My Age of Anxiety

I was flipping through the Observer magazine yesterday when I came across this article, by Harriet Green, which begins with black, bold lettering: “Welcome to the era of anxiety”. It goes on: “Generalised anxiety disorder is the world’s biggest mental health problem. But do we really have anything to worry about?”

On the facing page, the author holds up a sign that indicates she is worried about the credit crunch, global warming, drinking too much, her sex life, the price of her house, and, of course, being worried.

I waved the magazine excitedly at The Man (who has, if you’ll notice, graduated from being The Boy as his beard has reached an epic stage and he could no more be mistaken for a boy as I could).

“Look!” I cried, pointing. “Who does this remind you of?”

We had a good giggle.

But, as Green points out, “I accept many of my concerns seem unserious. And in public I make light of them, happily casting myself as a kind of female Woody Allen. But when I’m at home those ridiculous concerns can take over.”

Mine took over in spring of 9th grade, when I suddenly and seemingly spontaneously lost the ability to sleep peacefully, something that up until that point I had had no trouble doing at all. My body shook, my head spun, and I lived in a sort of bubble of terror.

To confound matters, I had just acquired my first boyfriend (which is not a term, at the age of 14, that necessarily means the same as it does later, and in this case it meant someone to make out with in the library stacks and hold hands with between classes, more a social rite of passage than a romantic affiliation) and I remember thinking, as I lay awake at night wondering if I was ill or just an insomniac: I have to get to sleep. I can’t be sick. If I don’t get to go to school tomorrow, I don’t get to see him.

To be in darkness was unbearable; I left the light on all night (almost a sin in our solar-powered house) and sometimes, when I thought I could hear the silence crawling into my ears and playing in my head, I put a CD into the boombox and listened to celtic guitar, or medieval chanting, at a volume just quiet enough to not float through the floor and into my parent’s bedroom. I was just old enough to recognize the shame in waking them for such a trivial matter, but just young enough, too, to wish that I could.

This was when I discovered that nights are twice as long as days, and a thousand times as lonely. By dawn I would drift into a state of half-sleep, and the singing of the alarm clock an hour later sounded like relief to my soul.

To comfort me, my father told me that when he was little and trying to get to sleep, he used to get the feeling that the corners of the room where forever receding; but by nighttime I felt alone again. I didn’t try to make a connection with my mother’s famous highway panic-attack, which crippled her driving confidence for years (only recently has she begun making the trek down to Orange County again on her own), or the stresses (mostly social) of my first year in high school.

Instead, I sought rescue in routine, and a host of obsessive-compulsive activities. I started sucking on “Moonlight Mints,” homeopathic, supposedly-sleep-inducing sweets my mother had picked up in an airport at some point, each evening, trying to convince myself that they were in some small way making me weary.

If the sleeplessness passed, the worry certainly never did. Five fretful years later, I found myself in a doctor’s office. I had passed from innocently anxious to severely obsessive-compulsive and back again. On the eve before I started a new job, I awoke with a jolt to all my old symptoms: the walls of my room seemed to be receding before my very eyes, I couldn’t be sure if I was nauseous or not, my heart beat fast. I went upstairs (I was staying the summer in my parents’ house) to the living room and flopped down on the couch. I fell asleep re-reading the same dull passage in Cosmopolitan about how to make your guy lust for you even more, but all summer long I battled with sleeplessness and shakiness, until one panicky evening, my father suggested that I might be suffering from an anxiety disorder.

“What?” I said.
“You know, panic attacks, that sort of thing,” he said. “Look it up.”
I went online. I couldn’t believe this had never occurred to me before. Every single one of my symptoms was named as an indication of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I felt instantly, physically better just knowing this.

I told the doctor that it wasn’t the worry, so much, but the physical symptoms, that I needed help with. I wanted some kind of reassurance that this was normal:

“I’m just amazed at how physical the manifestations are,” I told him. He was a physician’s assistant I had never seen before, our family doctor being on holiday, and he looked at me kindly.
“There’s no need to be embarrassed about it,” he said. “It happens to a lot of people.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to decide if this made me feel better or worse. I wanted to tell him about the way the room spun, the way my stomach churned and my heart raced how I shivered even in the heat of a California summer, but part of me worried (yes, worried) that he would tell me how unnatural this was. It had certainly not occurred to me, however, to be embarrassed about it.
“Sure,” he went on soothingly. “It even happened to me, when I was going through a really stressful time. You are talking about loose stool, aren’t you?”
I wanted to laugh with relief.
“No,” I said.
"Ah," he murmured. And I fancy that, despite his advice to me, he was slightly embarrassed now.

He gave me some pills, which I took home and promptly stashed away. I was genuinely afraid to take them. I read the possible side effects (always a mistake). I flipped through my copy of Overcoming Anxiety for Dummies so often that the pages started to look tired, trying to convince myself that what the doctor had prescribed me would help. Finally, egged on my parents, who I think were growing weary of having a 19-year-old worry-wort wandering the corridors at night, I swallowed the first pill. I awoke in a panic several hours later.

“Um, I think I’m having a bad reaction to the pills,” I told my parents, holding out my hand to show that it was trembling.
“I think,” my father suggested delicately (bless him), “that you might just be worrying about them.”

A few weeks later I wondered why I had made such a big deal of it.

But Harriet Green adds another perspective to her article, which I take to heart because, well, it’s really aimed at people my age: “we are entering a new age of anxiety. As the economic situation worsens, so fretting in the general population rises. In the past year, oil prices have risen by 50%, basic foods such as rice have soared by as much as 70% and house prices are plummeting at a faster rate than we’ve seen in a long time. Those in the know are starting to whisper that we’re heading for the mother of all recessions.” Or, as Merryn Somerset Webb, editor of MoneyWeek, so comfortingly puts it: “People are anxious, and they are right to be…People under 40 are not used to losing jobs or being made redundant.”

In other words: this is a hell of a time to be a newly-indoctrinated adult. Adulthood, I’ve recently learned, is hard enough (who knew that paying your own rent could be so painful?—let alone paying for, say, a second degree from, say, a foreign university?). But being told that in the current climate, we’re right to be anxious adds another layer to it entirely. A new age of anxiety? But I thought I’d already had my age(s) of anxiety.

So I’m starting to think that what remains to be done is follow the advice of Tom Hodgkinson (editor of The Idler, who, if you’ll remember, was partly responsible for the pig-roast in a London traffic island): “Anxiety will drive us back into our comfort blankets of credit-card shopping and bad food—the system deliberately produces anxiety while simultaneously promising to take it away,” Hodgkinson is quoted as saying in Green’s article; he “encourages us to take matters into our own hands and simply shed the burden.”

Yesterday, we went and pulled up all our potatoes and had a gorgeous Sunday roast, complete with chilled rosé and a peach-and-shortbread pudding. Of all the places I’ve lived (and, granted, there haven’t been so very many), England has perfected the art of the Sunday: shops close early still, and the most famous tradition (apart from churchgoing, which frankly I can take or leave) is centered around eating, and, in our young lives, good friends. I know I’ll always have a battle with anxiety—and maybe it’ll be a bigger battle because of the environmental and economic climate, I don’t know. But I do know it’ll be an easier battle with things like long, lazy sunday lunches to look forward to.



"Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy."
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Sunday News Summary Volume I

It occurs to me today that Sunday is, without doubt, one of the best days of the week.  You can, for instance, as we've done today, have tea in the morning, read the Observer Magazine, then head to the pub down the road for a cheap lunch (and a pint) whilst perusing the rest of the paper.  And all this before the frenzy of potato-picking-and-washing (fresh from our garden, some of the tiniest potatoes I've ever seen!), cooking, crossword-doing, chattering: a wine-soaked evening ritual that ends inevitably in a serene sigh, a weary sinking into bed, half a chapter read before eyes droop and drool crawls out the corners of our happy mouths.

In my afternoon's perusal of the Observer today, however, I started doing that thing.  You know the thing I mean, for even if you don't do it yourself, someone you know inevitably does: the half-mumbling, the sighs, the frustrated slap of hand on paper, the shaking of the head.  The Man was watching the football and I was leafing through the news section.  We ate our sandwiches (roast beef and horseradish sauce and bacon and brie, respectively), salads, and chips in contented, domestic happiness, but a cloud started to come over me as I reached the end of the paper.  It's not that I expect--or even want--reporting of nothing-but-the-happy-bits.  No; what I want is to be able to vent at my newspaper.  So with that in mind, a summary of the day's stories, as selected by, well, me:

In this story, we learn that Oxford University has decided to give a better chance of being selected for an interview to applicants who live in low-income areas of the country.  It sounds nice, I suppose--state-school educated youths given a chance to breach the iron gates, handed a golden key to a previously inaccessible city of eternal learning.  But what I suspect this policy will actually do is hurt upper-middle class youngsters, whose families may not have the monetary clout to send their children to posh schools but who otherwise have known no real financial hardship.  Such students might perform just as well as their counterparts on both ends of the financial spectrum, but now they're left out completely, while advantage is given to the very poor and the very rich.  Like affirmative action before it, the policy has admirable roots but suffers from flawed implementation.  (Bear in mind this is all speculation).

This one just makes me angry.  No, no, no, and no again: offshore drilling in the USA is NOT the answer to the energy crisis.  John McCain can champion the cause till the cows come home, but Nancy Pelosi should know better than to hint that "she might allow a vote on the drilling ban if it was part of a wider energy agenda," and Obama too--it could be part of a new energy strategy, in theory--but on its own, "more oil" doesn't sound especially new to me.   And I know the high price of gas has hit people hard; I know it's painful, and I'm thankful that I live in a place where not having a car is a viable--even a preferable option--and yes, I feel for the families and the individuals who have struggled as a result of rocketing prices, but I have also felt that there's one good thing that's come from all of this, and it's that for once, people have started to think about alternative energy, and alternative (read: public) transportation not in the hazy terms of dreamers and environmental radicals, but as real possibilities.  Why squander the opportunity to turn this into strong action?

This is just ludicrous. 

This article makes me wonder where the balance lies between the most basic quality of life (just having a roof over your head) and the slightly less basic, but no less desirable, kind of qualities, like having a garden behind your house.  If we have to destroy people's green spaces in order to give other people a chance to own a home, then the line must be very fine indeed, and as someone with a lovely garden (and an enormous appreciation for the things), I hope there's another solution somewhere.

And in the 7 Days section, we learn the following things: that Sam Cameron, wife of Tory leader David, has "had rave reviews for her newly designed handbag...retailing at a mere £775"; that "the world's most expensive house" has just been purchased by an anonymous Russian for about £400m; that a king penguin (yes, you read that right--I had to scan the paragraph several times to make sure) has been granted regimental knighthood by the Royal Guard in Norway; and that olympic swimmer Michael Phelps adheres to a 12,000 calorie-a-day-diet (again, you read that right).  

This is truly the stuff that the Harper's Index is made of.

And I Think I Like How the Day Sounds

I'm feeling more human. Last night we had one of our epic Sunday meals. We're pinching pennies so it was meatless, but what I find as an ex-vegetarian is that meatless meals feel just as natural as any other kind. The crown jewel was the pudding--boiled pears drizzled in chocolate and chili, which we followed with coffee and calvados, which is nicest if you don't put too much of the spirit in (I did). It was a warm evening so we ate in the garden.

While we were cooking, we shared a jug of Pimms. I wanted to know what my life looked like from the outside. I went to the far reaches of the garden; I could see the terraced houses of East Oxford just starting to light up, and the potato plants that have begun to droop onto the walkway, and the window to the spare bedroom, and the garden shed that houses a broken bicycle, a bird's nest, a veritable lace net of cobwebs, a host of dusty tools and cleaning supplies. I went closer so I could see through the window into the kitchen. There was a lot of food, and bottles of wine, and some handpicked lavender in a vase, and four young Englishmen, and an incongruous salt lamp from Poland (it really is made of salt--about twelve people, including me, have licked it to check). So that's what it looks like, I thought.

Today I take the recycling out. I say hello to my bicycle, which is something I do every day. I make a salad of avocado, mozzarella, and French dressing. I idly rearrange some books, which is what I do when I think I want to clean the house but know deep down I don't really. I wonder if I want a bath or not. I think I'll likely walk into town later for a drink, if it isn't raining, and if it doesn't take me too long to get dressed (it always does).

So that's what it looks like.

The Things We Know (or Don't) About Food

For breakfast, he makes us boiled eggs; and gives me the egg cup while he utilizes a half-empty Ox cube box, which I find simultaneously chivalrous and ingenious of him. Then he watches while I struggle through the egg (I haven't had a boiled egg in years, I tell him, truthfully and a bit defensively), giving me the occasional and helpful pointer, until I cry out:

"You can't assume that I know everything about eggs!"

(And then add, in a very small voice: "and just because I don't doesn't make me any less of a person.")

Things are fine until we start on the toast:

"This is good marmalade!" he says.
"Mmm. Good, proper, marmalade-y marmalade," I agree. Then I add, because I somehow think this is relevant to the discussion: "It's just from the shop around the corner. We bought it in October."
"I know," he says. "We keep forgetting to use it because it's been in the fridge."
"You have to refrigerate it!" I say. This is an argument of ours; well, I say argument. It's more like a mild but irrevocable cultural rift.
"No, you don't."
"Oh I know," I concede, as if he's somehow dragged it out of me after hours of hard debate, "But it's better if you do."
"It's got preservatives. It'll keep for months out," he tells me, for the thousandth time in our relationship. Then he adds thoughtfully, "hmm, lucky we did put it in the fridge, really, given that we got it in October."
"Hah!" I say, and we reach a quiet sandstill, punctuated by chewing and swallowing and a sort of haughtiness that neither of us quite deserves. I finish my toast. I say:
"Anyway, I like jams better when they've been refrigerated."
"You do?"
"I like the cool taste of refrigerated jam contrasted with the hot crunchy feeling of buttered toast," I tell him; and I mean it, I think.
"Um," he says.
"Well, it's true."
"All I'm saying is that it isn't necessary." He checks the jar of marmalade. "See? It doesn't say 'refrigerate after opening'"
"It's British. Of course it doesn't; nothing ever does." I can't tell if I sound righteous or jealous; briefly, I picture a world in which my kitchen actions are not dictated by the words printed on cans and jars--free, free! Oh, you lucky Brits.
"That's not true."
"Well, apart from milk."
"And hummus!" he says.
"Oh! You're right. And hummus."

And where can we go from here? We crawl into the lounge and watch the day, which hasn't yet decided if it wants to be cloudy-miserable or only partially so. We have been recovering from illness all week, and are giddy with it. Wellness is in reach, but we haven't yet reached it. We listen to Radio 4 and put aside our culinary differences for a bit. There's a special on street food; in South Korea, we learn, street vendors have composed a song to promote their craft, as they fear their kind are endangered by a government that sees a vendor-free country. "We're human too," is one of the lines; the music sounds like a boisterous, march-like carousel tune.

The sun continues to play games with the window; it's shining through now, now it's not, now it is. It's a kind of seasonal hide-and-seek: here's spring, in all its hot glory; now where's it gone?

Last night we heard fireworks going off; they sounded so close, so random, that they could have been gunshots, or thunder, so we opened our window and peered out; across the street we could see green bursts reflected in a dark window.

Cloudy again. The marmalade is still out on the table.

Vegetables in Their Native Habitat

We went out into the garden on Sunday. I mean to say, we went into the garden properly on Sunday. Not as we do generally, with winter gloom all seeped into our pores, and a fog hovering on the horizon: rushing, in the last moments of daylight, to pour compost into the bin, to watch the finish of a brilliant sunset, to catch one more breath of fresh cold outside air before we retire inside, where it is warm, full of snuggles and food with the heater going and a glass of red wine in hand.

No—we actually went out into the garden for the sake of going out into the garden on Sunday.

There is a large part of both of us, I think, which wants desperately to be proficient in the wordless, yet timeless, language of gardening. Each of us would like to be able to coax things into being with nothing but soil and water and will; for there is a way, I suppose, in which gardening satisfies the ego, is a bit like playing God, whereby you can create, where once was merely dirt and emptiness, something that lives, and breathes; something which can get sick, can die, can reproduce, can flourish, and yet which can also satisfy basic human needs: the need for beauty, the need for sustenance. In this way we are merely arrogant in our desire to garden.

Also we are conscious of something: some pleasure felt when we know that the herbs we’ve used to spice our meal came not from some anonymous field thousands of miles and infinite worlds away, but from outside our very own back door, from a terrain we know (know well) and love. The only energy required to obtain these herbs, we can say, was the energy to take a few wavering steps into darkness with an electric torch, to bend and pluck from the earth itself a leaf; to straighten up, return inside, crush into food that sizzles with pleasure upon being seasoned.

When food loses its anonymity, it becomes something more than “food” in its most modern sense. MacDonald’s is food; Kentucky Fried Chicken is food. But what history have you with a Bic Mac? I know the world is a very large place; but there is a part of me which wants to say that we may not necessarily have the right to consume without contributing; at least, we certainly do not have the right to consume without understanding. There is a process to food: it is not born the way it is served.

So we went out into the garden. Neither of us properly knows what to do with a garden but we each know that we want to make one which will bear us vegetables, which will suck up time on the weekends and drink water when it rains and which will make our fingernails black with dirt and our knees sore from kneeling. And we figured we could start with the most basic sorts of things; it is only early February, after all, and we live in a northern climate, a cold place, a wet place, where winter means something beyond temperature and daylight hours.

So he plucked the weeds from the vegetable patch while I raked the leaves that had caked themselves onto the path. I swept along the sides of the wall and tidied the area that had been used until now as a catch-all: outside, but still part of the house, it had accrued all kinds of detritus--half of an old welcome mat, most of which had rotted away; banana peels and old sagging flowers, all dried out; old clothespins which had fallen from the line in summer, when all it took to dry the laundry was a bit of sun and a warm breeze. When he had wrestled all of the weeds from the patch, we switched jobs, and I raked over the mud searching for rogue roots while he darted from one corner of the garden to the other, mending things, moving things, bending close to things and examining them.

It reminded me of something we’d done in California close to Christmas, when my parents had wanted us to help them ready their own small vegetable patch for regrowth later in the year. So we spent a sunny afternoon removing dead tomato plants which had tied themselves to each other; plucking out old carrots which had become withered and shrunken in their abandonment; raking over the soil, smoothing it, soothing it, readying it for more, more, more growth. At the end of the day we wiped sweaty brows and went back up the house for a beer and some warm soup.

There is a curious kind of satisfaction in doing something like that: destruction for reconstruction’s sake, you could almost say. On Sunday we left the garden looking more barren than it has for months; yet infinitely more hopeful than it has since I can ever remember. Is that not utterly strange? We cleared things away; we put a human stamp on something that had begun to decay, to dishevel, to become a messy knot of inattention. The only sign, at the end of the day, of our interference, was that things looked even less likely to grow there: for what, you find yourself thinking, wants to grow where there are no sweaty piles of leaves on the path, no weeds sprouting, no clothespins lying like a broken promise of warmer weather?

And yet from the tidiness we created, we hope (we know)--green things will happen, in time, with care.