(no subject)
Jan. 24th, 2022 08:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yiskahYes hello FINALLY it is my 2021 update! I mean as long as I get it done before the end of January I count it as a win, okay. As ever, I have been working on this sporadically for weeks which is why bits of it read a bit weird.
Now let's see if I can get a cut to work.
This is what I did for:
New year: Broke lockdown bubbling rules to go round to Claire’s for dinner with her and Conor. We each made a course – mine was a white chocolate and cranberry tart, which was … middling; Claire was six months pregnant so not drinking, and Conor and I proceeded to get very drunk indeed. At midnight we went out onto the street for pandemic-adapted first-footing, and I ended up talking for ages to her opposite neighbour, an elderly woman who kept topping up my empty champagne flute with brandy. Finally went home around 2am, and Claire insisted that Conor walk me home, which offended me deeply at the time but it was probably for the best that he did so as otherwise I would have absolutely gone rogue in Queen’s Park where my other friends were. Woke up with a terrible hangover and a faint memory of being sick in the bath.
Birthday: I had taken myself on a solitary holiday / remote working trip to Orkney for the summer solstice, and so woke up in Kirkwall on my birthday. Got a lift back south with two women in their seventies who were staying in the same hostel / B&B that I was: drove across the island in thick mist, they insisted we visit some Hungarian pigs in a field, and then stopped for coffee with one of their cousins who lives opposite the St Margaret’s Hope ferry terminal. Ferry to Gill’s Bay, and then they drove me on down south to Helmsdale, where I checked into our Airbnb at Helmsdale train station, and was met there a few hours later by Clare, Kat and Nuala for TRIV RETREAT! Had surprise cake, and then went out for dinner at La Mirage (Lama Rage), a fancy Barbara Cartland-themed restaurant in town, which was basically a glorified chip shop with very ostentatious decoration. I turned 43.
Christmas: In Monmouth with my parents, for the first time in three years! After accidentally attending a super-spreader event (where 50% of the attendees ended up with COVID) on 13 December Christmas was temporarily imperilled, but I stayed indoors and tested negative for ten days and made it down to Wales on a horrifically early train to beat the crowds only three days late. Had Christmas Eve dinner and Boxing Day lunch with my aunt Julia and her sister, but otherwise didn’t see anyone because this entire country is a COVID soup right now.
Employment status: As was the case in 2020, I spent the entire calendar year in the same job, more or less, as Education Coordinator for LWF in Myanmar. I think I mentioned last year that I was considering extending my contract (which was then set to expire in May) a bit, but not very much. In the event, the eagle-eyed among you may noticed that Myanmar only went and had a bloody MILITARY COUP on 1 February, so selfish. As a result everything was chaos and disarray, and it didn’t seem like the right time to leave, so at the end of May I reduced to part-time (60%) and kept going. It has been various flavours of frustrating and enraging: the de facto authorities are a complete fucking shitshow; the crisis has spread across the country, while donors have dithered and prevaricated about the extent to which they want to keep supporting Myanmar, leading to reduced donor funds being spread over more areas; LWF continues to be a well-intentioned omnishambles – BUT my team is a fucking delight and the work we do has real and valuable impact and it is really hard to step away from that!
Anyway since going part-time at the start of June I have been picking up work from CGA again – initially on a girls’ education project in Mali that I’d been involved in the scoping for in 2018, and is now, FINALLY, approved; and then on a child benefit cash transfer project for the Central African Republic, for which I was initially put down as education adviser and then it turned out not to have any education elements (because the transfers target children aged zero to five and school in CAR doesn’t start until the age of six, lol); and also a tiny bit of work on a strategy for out of school children in Sierra Leone. This has been, frankly, mixed: I got to go to Mali and CAR, which was SO great after 18 months of pretty much zero travel; the work was mostly very interesting; but for some reason a whole pile of anxiety got attached in my head to the Mali work in particular, and – surprise surprise – it turns out that the various cashflow related issues with CGA, which had driven me away before, have still not been resolved, even though my lovely friend Hannah is now MD (and it’s much less fun to shout at her about money than Charlie). And also, after thinking that I definitely wanted to go back to consultancy once I’d finished with LWF, maybe I actually don’t? Perhaps I will in future – but I think basically I just want to be senior and impressive enough that I am just asked to be part of projects, rather than having to a) spend ages applying for shit and b) eking out an existence doing dull project evaluations. Perhaps that will happen one day!
Soooo I started applying for new jobs in semi-earnest around November – I was trying to be pretty picky and only apply for things I really, really wanted because of various timing complications (mostly because Clare and I were supposed to be going on six weeks of back to back cruises to Antarctica and then across the Atlantic in March-April 2022, which have now been postponed a second time, LET’S NOT DISCUSS IT but that meant I was not really going to be available for new jobs until May 2022), though in the event I did end up applying for more things due to my superstitious need not to have all my eggs in one basket and fix my sights on a single job, only to be crushingly disappointed when I didn’t even get shortlisted. I had been feeling somewhat lacking in confidence as I had been invited to apply for a couple of things earlier in the year that I then hadn’t got (in one case, they didn’t even deign to TELL me and it’s an organisation that I work quite closely with so that was a bit of a kick in the crotch) – but in the event it turned out that once I started applying for things in earnest, my hit rate was much, much better than the last time I was applying for jobs, back in 2019: I put in five applications, got invited for written tests for three, and then interviews for two … and the third written test I cancelled because I WAS OFFERED THE JOB I APPLIED FOR FIRST AND MOST WANTED, hurrah! It is Education in Emergencies Adviser within Save the Children’s Humanitarian Surge Team, which means that I will spend about 50% of the time being deployed to humanitarian and emergency contexts where SCI country teams need more EiE support, and I will spend the rest of the time working from home, supporting country teams remotely. I am obviously far too old and jaded these days to deem anything a Dream Job (I do not dream of labour) (I actually do, shhh) BUT it is pretty much my ideal next step and I am so so so so so excited. I was offered the job the Monday after Christmas and was initially anxious they would take it back when I told them about the cruises but in the event they were totally fine, we agreed a start date of 1 May and then the cruises were cancelled so I’m starting 1 April after all. My LWF contract was extended until end Feb but they made it clear that this was the last time they could extend it without me going back to Myanmar, which LWF can’t seem to make happen right now – it is definitely the right time for me to move on from a career perspective but the end of my contract makes me feel less guilty about leaving my team.
AHHHHHH I keep getting little spurts of excitement whenever I think of it! Almost certainly by the time I’m back here doing my 2022 updates I will be full of complaints about SCI (and having worked with them over the past few years I am painfully aware that they are a deeply imperfect organisation), but, as I said to a pal who used to work for them, “I know that Save will be enraging, but at least they will be a different flavour of enraging”.
Creative output: Pretty good! Maybe next year I’ll stop feeling the need to reiterate this, but still, again: the shift to making sure I write every day, even if it’s very very little, is a game-changer and I hope I never move back from it. In terms of actual progress made: I’ve done a complete redraft of the second book in my YA trilogy (still not finalised but moving closer and closer); I’ve done some final tinkering on the first book, as I need to make some broad-brush changes to the world of the novels and figure out how best to work them into the actual text. I aimed to write 50,000 words of the third book in the trilogy during NaNo, and although I didn’t make it, I did write about 30,000 new words, and so it’s sitting at about 60k. Plus I’ve kept working on the NEW IDEA that I started during NaNo 2020 – I think by the end of 2020 it was at about 60-65k, and now it is, somehow, over 150k and nowhere close to being done; it’s going to turn out as at least a trilogy and probably something more.
In terms of actually SELLING the books that I seem to keep churning out – I have submitted the trilogy to a few agents, with no success so far, alas: I massively put this off because I love these books so much and I didn’t want my confidence to be knocked, but it turns out that just submitting into the ether and never hearing back doesn’t really knock one’s ego that much, so, okay. I do think, ultimately, I will probably end up pursuing self-publication for them, which is absolutely fine, and I’ve also realised that if I do go that route, I can actually PAY a publicist to do all the stuff that I don’t know how to do and have frankly been dreading. But I should at least give trad pub a proper shot before I do that.
Annnnnddddd much to my surprise, I DO have a book coming out in 2022, and it is none of the above, but in fact After Silence, which I wrote way back in 2009-13 and mysteriously lost confidence in almost as soon as I’d finished it. At some point in 2021 – or maybe even late 2020, I can’t quite recall – I sent it to Angel to get her input as a developmental editor, to find out whether she thought it was salvageable if I effectively ripped it back to the studs and started again, and it turns out … she loves it, and will be publishing it through her small press, Deixis, later this year! WHAT. Of all the things I could have expected to happen in 2021, that wasn’t one of them, and I am just DELIGHTED.
On creativity stuff beyond writing – the Unthanks in-person singing weekend was cancelled AGAIN, sigh, and this time they gave us our money back which is a bit sad as it means that I will have to actually re-apply once they decide when they’re doing in-person events again – though those of us in my position will apparently get first refusal, so hopefully it will be OK. I did do an online singing thing with the Unthanks in November / December which was so, so much nicer than I’d been expecting, and very weirdly it turned out that of the 20 or so people in the group, who were from all around the world, one of them LIVED ON MY ACTUAL STREET (though she has since moved), and though her I have got on the mailing list for Glasgow’s folk choir which I really, really hope will start singing in person sometime in 2022.
Beyond music – I did an evening of Zoom-based life drawing through Scot-Pep in May, and I enjoyed that a surprising amount too. Maybe more drawing in 2022?
Learning: Clare and I just about managed to keep up bio over the course of 2021, though we did have some periods where it lay fallow for a while, and irritatingly we DID NOT QUITE finish the A level course material by the end of the year, despite being so so close. Hopefully it will happen in January.
I have kept up my Duolingo streak and ridiculously am now doing six languages daily: Gaelic, French, German, Russian, Arabic and Spanish. They brought out a whole load more Gaelic content which has been great as I finished the previous course in 2020; I have also finished the frankly not very good Arabic course, but I practice a bit every day as it’s better than nothing.
Financial situation: A bit shakier than I'd like, largely because CGA owes me a five-figure amount again (SIGH) but whatever, it will all be OK and I probably won’t spend my old age living under a bridge. I finally got an INVESTMENT this year, like a grown-up! (It might be a stocks and shares ISA but I don’t really know.)
Not being a dick: I continue with my sporadic and scattershot approach to charitable giving, sigh. This is an area where I really want to step up in 2022, in three main areas: a) stick 10% of my income into a dedicated account for donations to things; b) figure out somewhere I can volunteer that hopefully doesn’t mind that I will have chunks of time when I am unavailable (I have a couple of ideas of places to approach); and c) identify some sort of means to guide my learning in the area of social justice. I feel like there should be some sort of curriculum that I could follow but I haven’t been able to find anything that feels quite right.
Family stuff: No one died, which is the most important thing! After spending more time with my parents in 2020 than I had in years, I then wasn’t able to see them for a good six months from September 2020 until March 2021, due to travel restrictions – which I realise is nothing compared to people with family abroad who’ve not seen them for years – but when one’s father is in his nineties six months feels rather too long. Anyway, I have seen them a few times since then and in January will be going down for close to a month as my mum is having a hip replacement so will need some extra assistance. My dad is not doing so well these days, which is just what happens with aging, APPARENTLY. I haven’t seen either of my brothers this year, but I did have drinks with one of my nephews and one of my nieces in London, and then the same niece came up to Glasgow for a weekend with her girlfriend and stayed with me, which was LOVELY and I got very anxious about being a Cool Aunt without looking like I was trying to be a Cool Aunt. I’ve also seen a fair bit of my own aunt and her sister, and I spent a few days with one of my cousins in Spain in October. One of my other cousins has breast cancer at the moment which is rather worrying but she seems to be doing broadly OK with it.
I mentioned in the last iteration of this post that my parents’ dog, Fido, had been diagnosed with cancer – at the time I was hoping that he would stay alive long enough for me to see him again, but in the end he was put to sleep in January, which was very very sad indeed, particularly for my parents. Happily they self-medicated by almost immediately buying a Jack Russell puppy, Bowie, who is the absolute BEST: I have been saying for years that all dogs are the best dog, and so it's interesting seeing it demonstrated so clearly. He is possibly the smartest dog I have ever met and over the Christmas period I have been very much enjoying training him to sit before fetching.
My South Sudan dog, Pinter, also died in 2021: he would have been ten, which is a very good long life for a Juba dog, and he spent his later years being fussed over by a series of CGA Fellows (= interns). I wish I had got back to see him again but there we are.
Relationship stuff: Nope! I think I am just going to stop having thoughts and opinions about this because it’s starting to feel vanishingly irrelevant, and do I really have anything new to say about it? I think not.
Friend stuff: Hurrah friends! I have been more solidly at home in Glasgow in 2021 than probably any year before, which has been so nice from the perspective of seeing my group of friends up there very regularly. My friend Jo moved up to Glasgow in January and has been absorbed into my core group of Glasgow people (all of whom know each other from South Sudan anyway); also since April when I was freed from lockdown Clare and I have been able to see each other regularly again. A lot of online socialising has died down as the world opened up a bit more but Triv has remained more or less regular (though not as reliably week-to-week as it was in 2020), which has been a joy: and we did TRIV RETREAT in Helmsdale in June, which was brilliant. Predictably enough I’ve not seen much of my further away friends, but I did make it down to London and the south east at the start of August, spent the weekend with Angela and Andrew in Folkestone, saw Rachel in Hastings, stayed with Leda and then Zavy in London, saw Zoë, whom I’d also seen in Glasgow a couple of weeks before. And Clare and I managed to have coffee with our friend Andreea in Chisinau at the end of October. Oh, and Emma moved to Glasgow this year too! HURRAH.
As with 2020, I’ve not made many new friends this year, but I think my favourite new person I met was Carolina, whom I was working with on the Mali project, and with whom I spent two extremely hysterical and chaotic weeks in Mali in July. And also Iain, whom I met through Emma and who entertained me when I went up to Morar for a brief writing retreat at the end of November, which stopped me from becoming completely insane.
One little change I have noticed in my approach to friendships this year, which is probably partly pandemic and partly having my little core group of Glasgow/Scotland-based friends who I see very regularly, is that I feel less of a driving obligation to maintain more distant friendships. I have many friends whom I love dearly and whom I would always love to see, and prior to 2021 I always felt that it was MY responsibility to maintain contact, to suggest meeting up etc. – but I’ve started to do that much less. If people want to see me they know where I am, I don’t have to constantly be nagging people for drinks or lunch dates, and if that means that some friendships drift then … that is OK!
Living situation: I have spent the entire year living in my lovely Glasgow flat, for once! I started the year on my own, and then Jo moved in at the end of January – I got really anxious about it ahead of time as I had really enjoyed being on my own since Claire moved out the previous October, but in the event Jo was much, much easier to live with than Claire (I love Claire dearly, but she has an element of entitlement in her personality which makes it rather challenging to share space with her, especially when it’s YOUR space), and I was actually quite sad when she moved out in September (and also very glad that she only moved around the corner). That said, it has been very nice to be on my own again. I haven’t made as much progress on getting stuff done to my flat as I would have liked, but ‘twas ever thus.
Travel: omg THANK GOD travel has become possible again this year. I have seen various people posting stuff on social media about how terrible 2021 has been, just as bad if not worse that 2020, whereas I’m like nope, it’s been fine! and I realise that is about 95% down to travel being possible again. I have managed three overseas trips, which is NOTHING compared to pre-2020, but I have been so, so grateful for every one. Two of them were work trips – to Mali in July, and to the Central African Republic in September: both of which I had been to before, but this time I got to spend more time in both, and I went to Ségou in Mali and to Mbaïki and Bossambélé and Bouar in CAR and both were fascinating and positive and felt like the world was going a little bit back to normal. And then in October I managed to do a FUN trip for a WHOLE MONTH: first to Spain, where I spent a weekend in Malaga, then five days at my cousin’s place in Orgiva, and a few days in Cordoba (with a side trip to Sevilla); then I flew to Bucharest and got the train to meet Clare in Constanta, worked there for a couple of days, came back to Bucharest and got the train to Iasi and the bus to Chisinau, spent a couple of days there, then a day in Tiraspol; then to Ukraine, where we spent a couple of days in Odessa, then an AMAZING trip to Chornobyl, then Kyiv, then Lviv, where I left Clare and took the coach to Krakow for a few days, including side-trips to Auschwitz and Wielicka Salt Mines. I was away for just over four weeks in total and it was BALM TO THE SOUL. Countries visited: UK, Mali, CAR, Spain, Romania, Moldova, Transdnistria / Pridnestrovie, Ukraine, Poland. New countries: Moldova, Transdnistria (yes, I count it), Ukraine.
As in 2020, I’ve also done a load of amazing trips within Scotland. In May, a group of us went to Portavadie for Josh’s 40th, and then Hannah M, Tina and I continued on for a week to Glenborrodale, then to Skye, and finally to Applecross. In June I took myself off to work from Orkney for a few days, and then went back south to Helmsdale where I met Kat, Clare and Nuala for Triv Retreat and a few days of exploring the north east. And then in August, Clare and I had a week on Mull and Iona, and a weekend at the Loch Fyne Spa in Inveraray on the way back.
Health: Once again, very good. I still haven’t had COVID, despite having been at a super-spreader dinner in December where five out of the ten people there ended up with it – on one hand this feels like good going, but on the other it feels so inevitable that I will get it at some point that I just want it to HAPPEN, as getting it right now, on 31 December 2021, will be less disruptive than getting it at any point over the next few months, for various reasons. But I am double vaxxed plus boosted now, so maybe I will just NEVER get it?! I got a cold in September while in CAR which was the first cold I’d had since December 2019, and which just seemed to go on and on and on – there were two quite unpleasant weeks in the middle where I had a horrible incessant cough and could barely sleep and after about a week of feeling like I was getting better and then being worse again the next day, I demanded antibiotics from my doctor which mostly sorted things out. However I would say that it lasted for a good month, and I STILL have the tail end of that cough, and yet it was somehow not COVID, according to multiple LFTs and at least two PCRs.
Other than that, the most dramatic health-related thing that happened this year was breaking my elbow in April – the first time I have ever broken a bone (aside from maybe breaking my coccyx when I was eleven or twelve). This happened on the very day that Scotland started to open up again, but rather than having gone to the pub and tumbled over when drunk, I was in fact on my way back from a run, having just been to Sainsbury’s and stubbornly refused to get a bag, meaning that I was cradling my groceries in my arms and didn’t see something in the street which I tripped over. I had always thought that if you break something YOU KNOW, that said body part immediately turns black and the pain is agonising and possibly there is an alarming snapping noise, but none of that happened: it was very painful but not like a totally different order of pain, so I assumed I’d just strained or sprained something. It wasn’t until the next day when Flatmate Jo pointed out that my hand was very swollen that I grudgingly went along to minor injuries, where they x-rayed me. Apparently this sort of elbow break is pretty common when you fall hard and put out your hand to catch yourself, and if you’re going to break something it’s probably the best thing to break, as I didn’t have to have a cast and only actually had a sling for about a week, and after that was told to use it as much as possible as the greater danger AT MY AGE (oh hush) is to lose mobility through inactivity. Anyway I could use it pretty much normally after a few weeks, and there have been no lasting ill-effects except MAYBE it doesn’t straighten as far as it used to, but both my elbows hyper-extend so actually possibly now it’s just a normal elbow. Also weirdly enough after I had my first COVID jab one of my side effects was that it reignited the pain in my elbow for a few hours, even though it was over a month since I’d broken it and it was otherwise fine.
In the last iteration of this meme I had just started running 3k a day, which I thought might be a game-changer in terms of how I approach exercise, and it turns out it really was! I had to stop running for a while after breaking the elbow but I have walked or run at least 3k a day all this year, AND I have done yoga every day this year (admittedly on some days this was extremely half-arsed – but on fewer days than I would’ve thought) – and it’s definitely the case that aiming to do something EVERY SINGLE DAY is much more manageable for my ADHD brain.
General mental state: Surprisingly OK, all things considered. I got ridiculously anxious about Mali stuff for no discernible reason, so I am quite glad that that is over now. I also took a break from ADHD coaching on the pretext of trying actual counselling to look at some of the … emotional underpinnings and results of my lovely RSD, and have proceeded to do absolutely nothing about it, but it’s on the list for January.
Weddings attended: None, again, for obvious reasons.
Babies born: Claire had baby Gabriel in March, and he is an absolute delight. She lives about ten minutes from me now and I see him every week or so, and in the last few months he has turned from being a dull blob of a newborn (all newborns are dull blobs to me, it’s not personal) to a fascinating and engaged little person who, I have to say, is really really into me (and that is probably a big part of why I love him as much as I do). It is so nice to have regular access to a baby, much more so than I would have guessed!
I’m sure other people have had babies but the only other one I can remember is my cousin Poppy’s daughter Uma, whom I will hopefully meet next year when they come over from Australia. Oh, and my old uni friend Susy had Athina!
Best books read: I read 116 books (by 95 authors) in 2021, one less than I read in 2020, and four less than I aimed to read, but okay. 24% of the books I read and 29% of the authors were authors of colour, and 89% of the books I read and 79% of the authors were women or non-binary people. Which I feel is about where it was in 2020.
The best book I read – or, perhaps, the book that affected me the most; I think I have read other books that are objectively better – was definitely The Kingdoms, by Natasha Pulley, which affected me in a way I don’t really understand and which I am still thinking about, seven months after I finished it.
Other highlights include:
Beowulf, the new Maria Dahvana Headey translation
The Rules Do Not Apply, Ariel Levy
Concrete Rose, Angie Thomas
A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate, Naomi Novik
Last Night at the Telegraph Club, Malinda Lo (this was SO good and I feel like it hasn’t had enough attention)
Khirbet Khizeh, S. Yizhar (probably deserves a prize for the book that’s been unread on my Kindle for longest)
Daisy Jones and the Six, Taylor Jenkins-Reid
Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters
Joyland, Stephen King
Basically everything by AJ Demas, which I read in a rush in March: beautifully written queer romance set in an alternate version of the ancient Mediterranean, so so lovely and affirming
Her Body and Other Stories, Carmen Maria Machado
Girl A, Abigail Dean
Me and White Supremacy, Layla Saad
The Rule of Wolves, Leigh Bardugo
Point of Sighs, Melissa Scott
Burnt Sugar, Avni Doshi
Moonstone, Sjón
Silence is My Mother Tongue, Sulaiman Addonia
The Night Country, Melissa Albert (I feel like this book and its prequel also haven’t had anywhere near the attention they deserve)
Help, Simon Amstell
Ghosts, Dolly Alderton
Ink and Steel, Elizabeth Bear (deeply imperfect but also very compelling and I really admire the scope and ambition of it)
Mister Impossible, Maggie Stiefvater
Punpkin, Julie Murphy
Felix Ever After, Kacen Callender
Swimming With Seals, Victoria Whitworth
The Book of Silence, Sara Maitland
Subtle Blood, KJ Charles
Memorial, Bryan Washington
Any Way the Wind Blows, Rainbow Rowell
Predators, Anna Salter
The Witness for the Dead, Katherine Addison
A Ghost in the Throat, Dioreann Ní Ghríofa (I had some reservations about this, specifically the extent to which it conflates the experience of womanhood with motherhood, yes yes I know get off your soapbox Gregson, but it was otherwise excellent)
Billy Summer, Stephen King
Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch
Radio Silence, Alice Oseman
Peter Cabot Gets Lost, Cat Sebastian (oh god I adored this! I have been reading Cat Sebastian for a few years and never quite loved any of her other books but something about this one was just on another level)
The Pisces, Melissa Broder
The Fortune Men, Nadifa Mohamed
Peter Darling, Austin Chant
Sisters, Daisy Johnson
Split Tooth, Tanya Taqag
Filthy Animals, Brandon Taylor
Jews Don’t Count, David Baddiel
Summer Sons, Lee Mandelo
Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood
The Unspoken Name, AK Larkwood
I Am the Tiger, John Ajvide Lindqvist
The Nobleman’s Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks, Mackenzi Lee
Year of the Reaper, Makiia Lucier (another author who I don’t think gets the attention she deserves)
On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
Best TV watched: Stand-out TV watching this year has undoubtedly been Succession. Clare and I watched the first episode or two of this in January 2020 in Sittwe, and I think we both enjoyed it but didn’t quite get the hype and didn’t continue watching. But then this year we tried again while we were on holiday in Mull and became immediately OBSESSED and watched the first two seasons in under a week, and then watched season 3 together over Skype when it came out later in the year. I genuinely think it’s the best television I’ve seen since The Wire and Breaking Bad: I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such skilful characterisation, the way that every single character manages to be irredeemably vile and yet also deeply sympathetic.
I also watched a load of other good stuff and I did write it down somewhere but now I can’t find it so will just have to do it from memory. When Jo moved in she brought her TV license with her (I don’t know why, as I pay for any number of streaming services, but I DRAW THE LINE at paying a TV license for the very few times I want to use iPlayer) and so I watched a load of BBC things I’d been meaning to watch: Normal People and A Suitable Boy and I May Destroy You, which were all incredible. What else? I continue to watch and love Taskmasker. Clare and I watched the start of Only Murders in the Building in Lviv and then finished it on new year’s day so that’s probably more of a 2022 thing.
Best films seen: I watched more films in 2021 than I had watched in years: due to Triv film club, where we tried to watch a film a month (though I think we’ve only managed five, thanks to the world opening up again and things becoming harder to schedule); then when HM and Jo and I were bubbled together in January to March we had a semi-regular movie club, and then Jo and I had a spin-off movie club after accidentally watching Midsommar with HM who REALLY doesn’t like horror films and spent most of the time with her jumper over her head. Anyway the things that have stuck in my head the most are Casablanca, which Nuala hosted for the Triv Crew on 1 January 2021; Pride, which I think was Kat’s pick for Triv Film Club in February; Hereditary, which Jo and I watched together and which is still sporadically traumatising me (THAT ONE SCENE); and Nae Pasaran, which HM and I watched in November (the Spanish version, which meant she had to do muttered simultaneous translation for me).
Best other stuff seen: I HAVE BEEN TO SEE THINGS IN 2021!!! I cannot think of a single thing I saw that was not comedy, but that is more than enough. I went to see a load of things in Edinburgh in the summer with Clare and HM, and then Clare and I went to Aberystwyth Comedy Festival at the start of October, and then I went to see Stewart Lee in Glasgow with HM and Tina in December (which felt very much like the Last Normal Thing before the oncoming omicron wave, and then the very next day I found out that I had been exposed to COVID, though weirdly enough it was not in the crammed windowless basement full of people drinking beer and laughing, but at the sedate ten-person dinner in the otherwise empty restaurant I’d been at right before). Honestly I loved everything I saw, and the main takeaway for me is how much I like Work In Progress comedy shows – possibly even more than the finished product, because they’re intimate and a bit chaotic and I like to see the way these things are put together.
Best things bought: As ever, books and travel! I have not been as profligate on my clothing spending as I was in 2020, but I have still bought a number of lovely new items, like the vegan brown and gold boots I bought from Esska last month, and which I am wearing as I type. Beyond that – I have bought a couple of excellent practical items, particularly my Phone Rope, which has meant that I have not lost or broken my phone in a year, and also my excellent gold flask, which meant that I could make coffee at 10pm and it was still warm when drinking it on the train down to Wales horribly early the next morning.
OH and my Minyades bat necklace! That is excellent. And I bought a new laptop this year, which doesn’t feel like a particularly interesting or exciting purchase but is certainly the new thing that I have used the most. AND I have bought some excellent pieces of art, like the Richie Htet poster I bought in the Myanmar poster sale, or the amazing print of a lady I bought in the gallery in Iona, or the Shorsh Saleh print I bought from the Migration Museum (though it has yet to arrive).
Things lost: I lost my debit card a couple of times AGAIN, and … maybe that is all? I temporarily lost a few things, like my kindle and my sleep headband and some other stuff, but generally got them back. Right now I do not know where my Australian citizenship certificate is, which is a right pain in the arse because I need it to get a new Australian passport, so need to make a concerted effort to find it in the new year.
Also I will probably have forgotten this by the time I do my 2022 update, but this is just to say that as of 9 January, I have already lost a glove, a debit card and a pair of glasses in 2022, which supports my long-held theory that I lose much more stuff at times of upheaval, even when it is GOOD upheaval.
(Slightly later update: the glove did show up, having evidently been drunkenly crammed into the sleeve of my coat.)
The music of 2021: Yeah yeah yeah typical downbeat indie folk like every fucking year, what do you want from me. That said I did also get very into Lizzo (yeah, several years after everyone else, what of it) in autumn and had a lovely time stomping through rainy Glasgow with her in my ears.
Fashion concept (such as it is): 2021 has continued 2020’s gradual shift to greater flamboyance and androgyny, as well as buying fewer but better quality items. I did a big clothing clear-out a couple of weeks ago and found myself getting rid of a load of dresses and ballerina pumps, which are just not really my thing any more.
Global happenings and politics: Two main things have dominated my landscape this year, one (obviously) being the ongoing pandemic, and the second being Myanmar’s military coup on 1 February and its aftermath, which has been utterly heartbreaking. Ofc I am no stranger to watching a country that I love descend into chaos and horror (looking at you, South Sudan) (looking at you, UK) but this one has felt like a real kick in the balls – particularly working as I do with a particularly marginalised and persecuted population within a country that is descending into civil war and watching donor funds get pulled and / or get spread much more thinly and having to repeatedly advocate that yes, that new crisis IS very shiny and interesting but also please recall that there are 140,000 Rohingya stuck in internment camps since 2012 and while it is very sad that this kid from the Yangon suburbs has had their education disrupted by COVID and the coup, maybe do not forget the 10,000 kids who literally have ZERO access to education beyond the Grade 1 to 4 classes provided by humanitarian organisations and now possibly not even that because you have failed to renew our funding, THANKS.
Anyway. Beyond that … ongoing Tory fuckery (though the North Shropshire by-election was a nice little glimmer of hope); the Capitol riots, which we watched unfold in real time while playing Triv, and which I still can’t quite believe happened; Afghanistan going sadly and predictably tits-up in … whenever that was. Tigray. Doubtless other stuff I’ve forgotten. Climate catastrophe. Argh.
OH and the murders of Sarah Everard and Sabrina Nessa and their aftermaths.
Things never done before: Broke a bone! (Officially.) Got scammed out of a load of money. Visited Ukraine, and Moldova, and Transnistria. Saw a moose in the wild, POSSIBLY saw an otter in the wild! Did pilates with goats. Got three COVID vaccinations! Had a tick on me!
Highlights of 2021:
- Won the Blackwells Book Quiz in January, with my stalwart team, Something Suffragey! (We have had to change our team name because transphobes ruin everything.) I think we won it at least once more since, too.
- Ongoing Triv throughout the year, as well as the addition of Triv film club!
- A load of very chilly historical walks with Claire (heavily pregnant) around our neighbourhood, especially discovering the secret burial ground next to Lidl.
- The Big Freeze in early January in Glasgow, bright sunny snowy days and people ice skating in Queens Park.
- Impromptu park walks with Cait and Ros and their dogs.
- Sledging in the park with Jo and Rob, and Rob’s socially distanced birthday celebrations.
- Projector movie nights with Jo and Hannah M, and cooking with Jo.
- Stomping around Whitelees Windfarm, as the only countryside-y place we were allowed to go for ages, having intense conversations with Hannah and Jo about psychology (and also antisocial hiking with Hannah, where we walked together listening to separate audiobooks / podcasts and then discussed them in the car coming back).
- Finally getting down to visit my parents in March after six months, and meeting wee Bowie for the first time.
- Sporadic walks with my aunt-in-law – to Tintern and Penterry, and along the Wye.
- Weekend bike ride to Paisley and back with Tina and Jo, and seeing the alien gargoyle on the abbey.
- Spontaneous day trip to Great Cumbrae with Hannah M the day Glasgow’s travel restrictions were lifted: walking by the sea listening to poetry podcasts, and eating fish and chips by the water.
- Various barbecues of the spring and summer – with Ros and Cait, and Hannah and Josh and others.
- Spontaneous day trip to Stirling to meet Clare after having been separated by COVID for NEARLY SEVEN MONTHS, and a beautiful walk along the Water of Allan to Dunblane.
- And actually PLANNED reunion weekend (Stirling was due to restrictions being lifted early) with Clare, two nights at Dalmahoy House where we swam and spa’d, and went to Jupiter Artland…
- Followed by a solo trip down to Eyemouth where Hannah M met me the next day and we walked out to St Abbs Head.
- Portavadie weekend for Josh’s 40th, followed by…
- Week away with Hannah M and Tina, wending our way up the west coast. Particular highlights: hiking in and out to Singing Sands and doing our first sea swim; boat trip to Lock Coruisk on Skye; amazing double rainbow witchy spell night; driving over Bealach na Ba; swimming at the coral beach in the forest south of Applecross; glorious day of hiking and swimming around Shieldaig and Loch Damh. SCOTLAAANNNNDDD. And a whole load of delicious food, including a final meal at the Applecross Inn, sun setting behind Raasay, anticipating returning to Glasgow and going back into lockdown (as the rest of the country was moving down a level but we were being held back like a recalcitrant kindergartener).
- Finally getting vaccinated, and post-vax cocktails at BAaD (and then Eurovision!).
- ANOTHER impromptu reunion trip with Clare once Glasgow levelled down again, to Dundee this time, where we went to the V&A and to the beach at Broughty Ferry and slept in the hottest hotel room in the world, only to discover there had been a fan in our cupboard all the time as we were checking out.
- Followed by a long summer afternoon pub drinking, canal walking and ice cream eating with Jo and Jay in Edinburgh.
- Helping Jo buy her new flat, just around the corner from me! And drinking champagne on the floor the day she got her keys.
- Solo trip to Orkney. Particular highlights: walking up Wideford Hill to see the burial cairn; exploring the various Neolithic sites on the Mainland on the summer solstice; day trip to Rousay to clamber all over (closed) burial cairns; AMAZING day on Hoy, hiking out to the Old Man of Hoy and then back to the ferry through Rackwick Glen.
- Followed by TRIV RETREAT in Helmsdale! Particular highlights: INCREDIBLE lunch at Cote du Nord; coastal walk near Scrabster with SURPRISE PUFFINS; blanket bog!; walking down the coast from Brora to Golspie and swimming in the sea.
- Day out with Kat to visit Kirst in Lochwinnoch, swimming in a SECRET WATERFALL POOL in a forest, drinking wine in the garden, and then back to Glasgow for cocktails and dinner with Joss at Sylvan.
- Swimming in the sea at Troon with Lisa and her dog Ness…
- Followed by a quick trip to St Andrew’s and Anstruther to meet Clare, and have her thrice-rescheduled birthday lunch at the Cellar.
- Work trip to Bamako! Very stressful in parts but also very good fun, got to spend Tabaski with Ibrahim and his family, explore more of Bamako, and drive up to Ségou. Also ridiculous night in Ségou where everyone got shitfaced on whisky (I was the least drunk of everyone there) and ended up fully dressed in the pool. OH and our ridiculous last night when Abdalla took us to see live music (and then insisted on taking us to a nightclub and we missed the flight, let’s draw a veil over that thanks).
- RIDICULOUS dinner at Andrew Fairlie at Gleneagles with Clare, for no particular reason besides gross indulgence (followed by a night at a much more modest B&B in Aucherader, up the road).
- Quick trip to ACTUAL ENGLAND, visiting Angela and Andrew in their new house in Folkestone, watching a load of Olympics while drinking, visited Dungeness and maybe saw a rare bird, visited Rachel in Hastings, and then a few days in London boozing with Leda and Zavy and others.
- Oh yeah, surprise cocktails with Zoe when she had to come up to Glasgow to get a new passport!
- Day trip to Bute with Hannahs G and M where we drove around and did lovely walks and ate cakes from the Syrian bakery, while Rob, Josh, Tina and Jo were doing the Five Ferries Challenge.
- To Mull with Clare! Particular highlights: sculpture trail at Calgary; Tobermory’s adorable aquarium; dinner at Pennygate Lodge; evening walk out to Tobermory Lighthouse; couple of hours on Ulva.
- INCREDIBLE day trip to Staffa (after which Clare had to assist in removing a tick from my person)…
- and then a gorgeous couple of days in baking sunshine on Iona, culminating in an evening walk home in the mist with BATS swooping overhead.
- Final weekend in Inveraray, watching Succession, getting massages, visiting the castle and then driving back to Glasgow via the torpedo station on Loch Long and the old Cardross Seminary.
- HM’s 40th birthday weekend: cabaret and dancing at the Polo Lounge; extensive lunch at the Gannet; day trip to Irvine to swim in the sea and play boules on the beach.
- Official last day of summer, post-work swim in Fannyside Loch.
- I tend to be fairly dependent on my Instagram to remind me of highlights and when things happened, but it seems I have no record of going across to Edinburgh a couple of times for festival things, including Elf Lyons and Catherine Bohart and Joke Thieves and the Alternative Comedy Memorial Society, and also dinner and cocktails with Clare’s parents in Glasgow, and visiting Mary King’s Close in Edinburgh which I’ve wanted to do for ages.
- Fancy lunch at Cail Bruich with Clare and Nuala (also reorganised once due to COVID), followed by…
- Hosting my niece Ellie and her gf Betty in Glasgow for a weekend, and getting to feel sliiiiightly like a Cool Aunt.
- Work trip to CAR, particularly bouncing around the countryside with Yannick and Leonce.
- Aberystwyth Comedy Festival with Clare, going up a FUNICULAR, putting my feet in the sea.
- Ten days in SPAAAAIIIIIN, solo weekend in Malaga; a few days in Orgiva with family; solo weekend in Cordoba and Sevilla. Sunshine! Andalucian architecture! Delicious foods even though I was mysteriously too anxious to go into restaurants most of the time!
- To Constanta, to meet Clare! Black Sea sunrises, beach walks, art museums and a surprisingly delicious dinner in an Irish pub, before taking the train back to Bucharest for a sumptuous meal and then overnight train to Iasi and a bus onwards to…
- MOLDOVA, first new country since 2019!!! Lovely couple of days exploring Chisinau, unexpected coffee with our friend Andreea, the discovery of HAZELNUT SNICKERS and the rediscovery of elderflower Fanta, and then…
- TRANSNISTRIA, where we spent a brilliantly weird 24 hours or so looking at Ottoman fortresses and statues of Lenin and walking for miles and miles, and then on to..
- UKRAINE, which was genuinely brilliant and I would highly recommend it for a holiday destination! We went to Odessa, Chornobyl, Kyiv and Lviv, all of which were fascinating and surprisingly different from one another, but the highlight was definitely Chornobyl, which was like nowhere else I have ever been. Another unexpected highlight was the food, which was universally outstanding, from the eel risotto I had on arrival in Odessa, to the final set of cherry dumplings we had in Lviv before I got on a (horrific) coach to…
- Krakow! I had technically been once before but I had been (blimey) NINETEEN at the time and had forgotten a lot. And this time I was not on a shoestring budget so I got to do things like eat in decent restaurants and stay in a fairly nice hotel and visit Auschwitz, which I have always wanted to do.
- Weekend trip to Fife for Tina’s birthday, where we did pilates with goats and then took over a local pub and drank prosecco and ate Indian food in a back room.
- Solitary long weekend trip to Morar where I ploughed through the line edits to After Silence and hung out with Emma’s pal Iain, including one absolutely glorous walk along the northern shore of Loch Morar.
- Hannah G’s surprise b’day, even though it turned out to be a superspreader event, followed by Stewart Lee, which felt at the time like it was probably going to be the last normal thing for a while due to omicron … but from where I type in the second half of January, it feels like we’re already coming out the other side.
- Quiet Christmas in Monmouth with the parents, followed by…
- Finishing the year in Aviemore with Clare, and mince pies and mulled wine on a steam train on the final day of the year (though Hogmanay itself belongs in the 2022 version of this update).
Lowlights of 2021:
- Ongoing pandemic
- The Myanmar coup and its aftermath
- Being scammed out of £10k in January (I got it back a few months later but MAN)
- Breaking my elbow
- Some work fuckery, in various jobs
- Fido dying, and Pinter dying
- Some other deaths in my broader familial social circle – notably my mum’s best friend’s husband, and the person who has probably been my dad’s best friend over the past few years.
- It feels like quite a few of my friends have been going through particularly unpleasant break-ups and / or relationship fuckery over the past year.
- Gross cold (NOT COVID) that I got in September that had me working from bed for close to a month and honestly the cough has STILL not entirely gone away.
Resolutions / intentions kept:
- Let’s carry over the sex one, shall we? Maybe 2021 will be the year! Oh god.
Hahahahahaha.
- Sort out my fucking sleep, which is absolutely terrible.
I reckon this has definitely got better in 2021, though there have been peaks and troughs. Tracking it has helped a lot, as I now know that I feel pretty much OK on 6.5 hours of sleep, but I need to be in bed for at least 8 hours to make sure that happens.
- Make a concerted fucking effort to get my writing OUT THERE this year, to agents or publishers or whatever. I’d love to end 2021 with an agent and a clear route to publishing for at least one of my many completed manuscripts but that is beyond my control, so I’ll just commit to doing my part and hopefully it will garner good results.
This has happened, though absolutely not in the way that I thought it would! Thanks, universe, you sneaky prick.
Intentions for 2022: Nah, I don’t think so. I’ve already formed the good habits that I want to form (daily exercise, daily fiction writing, daily journal writing), am making ongoing progress in the areas of my life that I want to progress, and am entering 2022 with a book to be published and a new job that I am really excited about. So, let’s just leave that gently there and back away from it slowly, okay! Ofc now I’ve said that the universe will no doubt smite me for my smugness, so look forward to an update a year from now full of hubristic calamity.
Past years: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002
no subject
Date: 2022-01-24 03:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-25 11:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-28 10:05 am (UTC)I was going to say "How do you fit so many different things into your day!?!?!?!!"; however, I'm quite good at sleeping.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-28 10:31 am (UTC)You should definitely visit Poland in any case, but I now wonder whether it could be found in a Polski Sklep.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-24 08:58 pm (UTC)I appear an acceptable number of times in this, thank you. Especially my tick removal triumph.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-25 10:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-25 02:00 pm (UTC)Congrats on the new job, can't wait to hear more about it.
re: Social Justice stuff - do you follow No White Saviors? Love them so hard and have enjoyed their zoom lectures.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-26 10:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-25 07:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-26 10:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-02 02:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-09 11:00 am (UTC)