Current Events – Nastasya Parker

Preserving

This Week’s Bit of String: Jam from the hedgerows

The acers behind the school were already blushing scarlet when our new term started on Monday the 2nd of September. It felt too early, as if I’d missed out on something. Shouldn’t we already have got to know our new students and settled them into routine by the time the leaves turn?

There’s no time like autumn to remind us of… time. School starts, orienting students (and those of us working with them) toward exams. The garden outdoes itself and nature accelerates toward harvest. There’s my little Bear’s birthday–they just turned 23 this week. I’ve definitely missed out.

There are new writing deadlines and many special needs care plans to learn. I must jumpstart my diet and catch up on reading while my energy’s still depleted from the summer. Then family crisis strikes, and I’m glad that while I was home I stayed up till midnight scribbling the memories and got up at 5… Preserving things takes a real time commitment.

And yet, or perhaps therefore, I blew off the writing and reading progress I’d scheduled after school and went foraging for berries instead. For one sunny afternoon, I berried for 2 hours, and the following day I collected for over an hour, ending up soaked in a rain shower. The stormwater pooled in the seed-dimples of the blackberries.

Conserving Strength

I’d done this already. In the brief interval between visiting my family and restarting school, I spent hours picking blackberries and elderberries, then making jam. This was all on my to-do list, a great big planned chunk of time: to gather berries, cook it all down, and brutally sieve it smooth. This gave me 4 medium-small jars.

For a fair bit of money, you can get an elderberry concoction at the chemist’s to combat sore throats and infections. I made blackberry-elderberry jam last year, and I swear my horrible, 19-century-consumptive coughs didn’t stick around very long. This could be sheer coincidence, but in case tasty jam can help curtail illness, I’m not taking my chances without it.

This week’s batch of jam came to only half a single big jar. Not very good, is it? After a fair bit of effort. It uncomfortably mirrors certain writing projects once I’ve read through critically and realise the piece isn’t getting anywhere.

But having spent afternoons outside, I felt better than I had since school started. Sometimes the act of choosing what to preserve is as useful as the result. Foraging, alone in a back lane or field, my mind streamlines to one purpose and the many other commitments feel lighter for a while.

And I enjoyed rustling through the hedgerows again. I have great respect for these ecosystems, towering above me at this point in the year. Bright red rosehips like beacons along the top, bindweed buds like kisses and the sun glowing through their flowers’ white petals, the jumbled jewels of blackberry bunches mixing black with still-scarlet. Elderberries are particularly beautiful in my opinion, the delicate network of stems connecting shining berries: black, silvery-red, or pink-flecked green.

Preserving Memories

I realised too why I feel particularly myself when I’m caught in the rain. It’s an unmistakable impression that I’m seizing the day, regardless of the weather. Maybe I’m conflating vitality with inner self, but it’s something worthwhile, either way.

When we’re confronted with the changing of seasons, it can feel as if time picks up tempo exponentially. Every ball we juggle is flying faster, and which one should we chase first? I’m going to work and keeping my house just about clean, and checking in with my family and cooking meals and entering writing competitions and sending out critiques for other writers.

But those hours outside might stick with me most. I scribble daily to recount how I’m building relationships with my students, and my dreams in broken-up nights. Spending quieter moments in the fresh air, focused on hedgerow microcosms or the fine vistas beyond, keeps me in a mindset that livens other descriptions, such as of my walking commute to work. Becoming more aware, I have more to preserve.

I’m probably not the only one who rushes at tasks, clamouring to tick a good variety of them off my list, assuming that the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts. But making jam this week, I realised this isn’t always the case, nor should we wish it to be. Sometimes the act of gathering is more important than the fruit.

This can be true of writing. Staying open to ideas may benefit us more than toiling to write every single one down. It’s definitely true of families–preserving memories is important, but making them will always be the most precious time. And maybe slowing down briefly can be the key to keeping on.

What do you like to preserve, and how do you find the best ways to do it?

Incorporating Wildness

This Week’s Bit of String: S-curves under Main Street

Like many former mill towns, my parents’ town in New Hampshire is built on a river. To be more precise, it is built between a series of riverbends. The Mascoma River threads beneath Main Street twice, and beneath another principal artery around the corner of an intersection.

We moved to this town when I was a somewhat irascible 8-year-old and its charms were lost on me for a decade or two. The town wasn’t really feeling itself for a while there, either. When I visit now, and walk early in the morning to avoid the worst heat, I know to look over both sides of each bridge for heron, deer, and bald eagles. And I’ve started wondering at the river itself.

The town buildings of Main Street, mainly originating in the late 1800s or early 1900s, are built right next to the river but a fair way up in elevation. The banks are unbreached walls of leaves. Boulders stand in the water as if swept there by glaciers, just a car park away from the former laundromat (future microbrewery). There’s a heavily wooded peninsula in the middle of the river section near the Lutheran church. I’ve never seen a person down there but have seen a pair of deer drinking.

I’ve started wondering about all this. What was the river like before the town was built? Was it a great deal wilder in its natural state? Did boats travel down it when the mill was functioning, somehow steering around the boulders?

Inner Wilds

While contemplating how closely we can live with wildness in nature, I began drawing parallels to inner life. We grow up civilising ourselves, so to speak: building various blocks we deem useful or desirable within our minds. As we develop our mental landscape and moderate our personalities, what torrents gush, untameable, between these blocks?

*This is actually right in the middle of town.*

An interesting analogy as I traipse through the grey-gold dawn in my childhood town, and reflect on different incarnations of myself. I wonder at which point I was the most wild, the most untamed. It’s the moments when I feel most unique that I feel most myself, like when I used to run outside alone into thunderstorms. But there are so many shared characteristics among us all, equating identity with individuality may just be another societal pressure.

As an oldest child of four, and in a religious family, I’m not sure how wild I’ve ever been, really. Who knows what my natural state would be, and whether my eagerness to conform affects my writing. Most likely, my writing is where I break free from it a little.

Defying Expectations

After all, the problem with trying to conform is that there are so many standards to meet from others, and often they are contradictory. It’s cool to be non-conformist, at such times when society expects it from us. It’s equally challenging with writing: be clear but don’t over-reveal. Ensure your characters are unique, but recognisable and likeable.

*Even the built-up bits won’t last forever. The mill upriver from town.*

Writing a happy ending is practically an act of rebellion these days. Allowing a villain to be truly villainous breaks the writing mould (and I don’t think I have it in me to do that, although I’m happy to read it). Similarly, opting for quiet, non-busy moments in real life may be the ultimate subversion. Am I at my wildest when I’m out hiking or when I’m curled up reading a book?

By linking the word wild to its root of natural (with connections to wold; woodlands), then it’s easier to accept these contradictions. After all, nature can be both calm and then fierce. Sometimes at the same time—tonight I tried to connect with my wild self by going out in rolling thunder and glimmers of lightning, but it barely even rained. Well, I was there even if the storm wasn’t quite.

What wildness have you built your life around, and how do you reconnect with it every now and then?

New Pleasures Prove

This Week’s Bit of String: Tale of two benches

Last Saturday night we went on a date. We got dinner from the chippy and sat in the rare clear evening on a bench above the car park.

“Like two yoofs,” my husband said as we popped open our cans of Rio tropical drink. “But without the cheeky ciggy.”

After our chips, we did a cultural about-face at the town cinema watching a broadcast of the National Theatre’s excellent The Motive and the Cue. Based on diaries from when John Gielgud directed Richard Burton in Hamlet, it made us want to see the actual 1964 production. It was my kind of nerdiness and luckily, my husband was all for it.

I remembered when we first moved to the town, new to the area (in my case, new to the whole nation) and unsure how to entertain our 3-year-old. We wandered up to a school playground on a typical cloudy afternoon. A plain, plasticky bench had a slightly rusting plaque: “In memory…” and a person’s name.

“Not the most flattering tribute,” said my husband.

“Well, it doesn’t say ‘In loving memory’ or anything,” I pointed out.

That made him laugh, and I felt smart and seen for a minute. That didn’t often happen in the first months as an immigrant and wife.

This week is our 20th anniversary. We’d used a John Donne quote from “The Bait” on our wedding invitations.

“Come live with me, and be my love, And we will some new pleasures prove…”

I didn’t really have an idea what those pleasures would look like (does anybody?), and it took us a while to find the confidence and freedom–and economic stability–to come up with the successful melding of tastes like we had last week.

If That’s All We Have

It took time. Two decades ago, our wedding song was Louis Armstrong’s “We Have All the Time in the World,” from the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. That is my husband’s type of nerdiness: gadgetry and fast cars and also outer space.

When we met and I was nearly 20, I was keen to lose myself. The movies we watched were ones he thought I should see, and I was thrilled to be trusted with them. We had 20 days together—weird how this number keeps popping up today—between meeting and my return from Old England to New. At some point in that mad rush, he played “We Have All the Time in the World” for me, and I was moved to the point of no return.

I’ve written about time before, though. It can be more romantic when you don’t have much of it, in the same way we sometimes use it better when we know it’s scarce.

When we said our wedding vows and I eventually sorted the paperwork for our kiddo and me to emigrate, the dream of being together became a promise. One of those takes more work than the other!

*Poses like these! New Orleans, New Years 2024*

The effort has been amply rewarded. My husband is a musician, so in addition to being immersed in James Bond and Star Trek, I get to be a jazz band groupie. I would never have imagined that my cautious British physicist would turn out to be a star poser for photos, or that he’d come along to Shakespeare performances.

Sticking with it for the amount of time that change requires is a small miracle. Other times, we swoop to each other’s rescue in an instant. That’s another miracle: when one vulnerable person reveals their desperation and their partner responds with care, no matter how lost and alone they too may feel.

Suddenly You Flare in My Sight

If a story equals character plus event plus time, there are infinite combinations. I come up with fiction ideas by asking “What if…?” sometimes about real-life situations, but not usually about my personal ones. Lately, though, I imagine alternative realities which would have unspooled had I made different choices.

We often liked to tell people, if they asked how we met, that we never would have if he’d been a moment later heading back to his uni, and had missed the train. But what if we’d met seven years ago, or ten, instead of twenty-three? If we met the same way, as students with no assets swiftly adding a child to the mix—we’d never have been able to live together as a family. The immigration laws are so tight now, they keep increasing the amount a British citizen must have in the bank to earn the right to bring an international spouse home. I ache for the people kept apart because of this, because of meeting each other a decade too late.

This helps me appreciate what we have, and I track our moments of delight in my daily scribbles. As favours we gave all our wedding guests copies of Wendell Berry’s poem “The Wild Rose.” He compares his longtime partner to a wild rose blooming… “where yesterday there was only shade, and once more I am blessed, choosing again what I chose before.”

There are so many twists in life which we can’t control, and always a fair few choices to regret. It’s nice to remember the ones we’re more than satisfied with, even—dare I say it—proud of. What surprising choices would you make all over again?

Seven Wanders of 2023

Hiking around and seeing new places inspire me as much as reading other writers’ work. I don’t necessarily end up writing new stories about the places I see, but glimpses of the spectacular keep some spark alive inside me when the rest of life seems a great stack of to-do lists.

Feeling like an adventurer in the real world can’t hurt our creative life, right? Here are some of my favourite explorations, why they ignited my imagination, and a smattering of my photos.

See also previous years’ top wanders: 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022.

Festive Cirencester, Cotswolds UK

We gave ourselves a couple hours’ break between getting COVID in December and finishing work and sorting out Christmas and travel preparations. Cirencester is fairly local and its alleys and Cotswolds stone lend themselves well to the festive season.

A wander, the purchase of a jungly fern from a back alley shop overflowing with plants, and cups of hot chocolate at a specialty chocolatier renewed the season’s sparkle.

*Black Jack Mews, back alley plant shop, wreath of pine cone kernels and moss*

Widworthy Barton, South Devon UK

While staying near the Jurassic Coast in Southern England, I went out for exercise and discovered a fascinating little story as well. Uphill from the thatched farmhouse we’d rented, I came across an even smaller hamlet and a square-towered stone church with its graveyard.

A lustrous black gravestone memorialised the village’s matriarch and her husband. He was a holocaust survivor and popularised the Rubik’s cube, and she bought the local manor house and revitalised the community, abseiling down the church tower in her 70s to raise money for roof repairs.

*The Widworthy Barton church, the Kremer graves, and the fields and hills of South Devon*

Dovedale Stepping Stones, Peak District UK

In late September we had a rather cold, frequently wet camping trip and finally explored a Peak District destination I’d wanted to see for some time. We were lucky to have a sunny morning at the Stepping Stones, casting a sharp, bright contrast between peaks.

The stones are set firm and flat in the river like molars, and after crossing, we followed the path under trees and past sparkling reflections. There was a good climb up smooth-worn stone steps laid by Italian prisoners of war during WWII, and then a further walk along the river with pale bluffs on our other side, rising up like mighty ship hulls with dark bird barnacles. We later did a longer, more rugged walk to reach the Chee Dale Stepping Stones–those are quite scenic, too.

*Dovedale Stepping Stones, fossils in one of the stones close up, Thorpe Cloud*

Newfound Lake, New Hampshire USA

For me, summer is most blissful at a New England lake. This summer we had a few days with the entire family at Newfound Lake. It’s the third biggest lake in the state and the deepest, reaching 183 feet deep. It’s thought to be one of the cleanest in the world, and the sunsets over low-slung mountains off in a corner were spectacular, the reflections pristine.

We had the trilling cry of the loons at night and that cool lake smell in the mornings. Woods of oak and pine separated the holiday houses, but we got a glimpse when we were out on our kayaks. One house even had its own massive inflatable waterslide tower out in the water, with “No trespassing” painted all over its base.

*Sunset over Newfound, mushrooms in the woods, little free library: Slow down, enjoy life*

Portobello Road and Notting Hill, London

I don’t know if it’s hard for places like this to keep living up to their reputation. Do the streets made famous in Disney songs and late 90s films want a break sometimes, want to drop the facade? Well, we took a good walk along here and enjoyed the mix of shabby and cheesy and pushing the boundaries.

We perused stalls and shops selling everything from wool berets to sequined jackets, to prints made from photos of your iris, to last minute pumpkins for Halloween the next day, and we had lunch at a place called Egg Slut–absolutely delicious. Then we did a further loop through the posh neighbourhoods of Notting Hill, with big, pastel townhouses dripping with gauze webs and jack o’lanterns for the holiday. Imagine trick or treating here!

*Portobello Road street market, painted door, decorated Notting Hill Halloween*

Brecon Beacons Four Waterfalls Walk, Wales UK

Another hike I’d been sizing up for a few years, this too proved well worth it. It was cloudy, but the falls are still quite spectacular. I guess we can thank the rather wet year for that.

Because it’s quite a popular destination, we couldn’t always get close to the cascades, or behind them. Still, I love seeing how torrents slice through rock, and all the greenery that scales the damp cliff face around and behind the water. One waterfall had dozens if not hundreds of little rock cairns built in the stream below.

To save backtracking the long, muddy, crowded access path at the last fall, we found a vague trail up the bank and did some rugged scaling. This earned us extra waterfall views from the top and made us feel quite intrepid.

*Falls and cairns. Note fallen tree in first photo and tent on the left in the third photo for scale*

City Park, New Orleans Museum of Art Sculpture Garden, Esplanade Avenue, and St Louis Cemetery #3–Louisiana, USA

Did something completely different over the Christmas holidays and visited America’s deep South . We met up with our kiddo in Houston, then my husband and I roadtripped along the Gulf of Mexico and the bayou, and spent New Year’s in New Orleans.

Staying in the French Quarter, we had the experience you might hope for: strolling out for morning beignets under wrought-iron balconies trailing ferns, pausing to hear jazz bands in the street. Later, we stopped at City Park, a massive public space half again as big as NYC’s Central Park.

*City Park ibises, The Ptolemecist sculpture and live oak, St Louis Cemetery*

We were greeted by long-beaked ibises when we got out of the hired car, and we ambled through the Besthoff Sculpture Garden beneath live oaks dangling Spanish moss and resurrection ferns (ferns that go grey and curl, allowing themselves to survive losing over 70% of their moisture in dry spells). The statues combined cultural elements of the city’s past: a Rodin, a ghostly dress with a solar system model for a head, a conquistador helmet turned to a snail with a little boy riding its back, a glorious African woman, her garment a series of impeccably formed coils.

From there we walked down Esplanade Avenue, with pretty pillared houses and more live oaks, the trees so mighty they were busting up sidewalks and weighing down overhead electric cables. We came back through one of New Orleans’s famous cemeteries, with aboveground vaults since you can’t dig graves below sea level. Some vaults have lots of cupboards in them for family remains, and one had a small ornate frame fixed to it with a photo of the occupants behind a convex lens, like a locket, so you could see the faces of the African-American couple who passed away in the 1980s. It seemed a privilege to actually see what they looked like, and I wish that idea might catch on.

*Esplanade Avenue house, decorated post, and bougainvillea*

What were your favourite visits and meanders this year? How did you keep your spark alight?

Antici…PAtion!

This Week’s Bit of String: Silent night

One of my earliest memories takes place at Christmas. My small New England town put on a Christmas pageant at the church, one of those crowned white ones on a pristine green.

Candles glow in frosty windows as Mary and Joseph journey to the manger and kneel respectfully. Junior high angels dance down the aisles, bare feet thumping over cast iron grates, and the kings stride in their colourful robes.

At the end, the choir sings “Silent Night” as everyone files off the darkened stage. Kings, shepherds, angels and kindergarten cherubs. Joseph, penultimately, exits down the centre aisle and finally Mary, sombre and alone, disappears into a side door. The lights come up and everyone bursts into “Joy to the World.”

*Some of my favourite ornaments, carrying lots of memories*

Can you spot what they forgot? My just-turned-three-year-old self was keenly aware that everyone left the infant Messiah behind. The wooden box-manger only held a doll, but I was inconsolable; to me dolls were as real as anything. I was outraged at the abandonment, sobbing amongst the heavily coated crowd.

My parents found the girl who played Mary, but I wanted nothing to do with that traitorous mother. Then I was introduced to the person who owned the Baby Jesus doll, and that alone calmed me down.

I still wonder at the order of that pageant, unchanged in decades. Through the ensuing years, I loved the pageant, thought it beautiful–but also tenderly sad. That’s Christmas for you, I guess; moments of quiet, of loss, of sudden delight. I was taught that when setting up a collection of short stories, you showcase the best ones first. Maybe it’s our instinct to start strong, but this can result in an anticlimax.

Maintaining Order

Four decades and an ocean now separate me from that distraught doll-defending girl at her first nativity play. I’ve been around long enough to know my ideal festive sequence of events, even if I can’t always control it.

The key is to avoid letdown. You have to hit your checklist in the right moments, before the season over-ripens to wistfulness. Most Christmas films have an element of nostalgia and wish fulfillment that’s too sad the day after Christmas. The build-up is the best part of Christmas, really. Putting ornaments on the tree is a lot more special than taking them down.

*There can be a lot of stress at Christmas, but Obie the Bosscat is keeping on top of things.*

The word anticipate shares a root with capture. It means to grasp something beforehand. That’s quite exciting, isn’t it? Not like the tedium of just waiting, because at least we know that December 25th will, in fact, arrive (unlike a lucrative writing contract, for example).

I get Christmas tunes playing in my earbuds during hikes around mid-November, and the lights and decorations go up at the very start of December, so I can enjoy them for longer. Everything must be in place for the cosy moments between all the running around. At some point, I will be reminded that it matters more to me than to others, and each sparkle will disappear from centre stage.

Heightened Sensations

Christmas forms strong memories because it engages all our senses. We associate smells, tastes, sights, sounds, and feelings with the holiday. When a moment incorporates all senses, I think our memories cohere around it more firmly.

We’ve got Christmas songs, both jolly or deeply moving, we’ve got sparkly lights and shiny ornaments and the contrasts of crimson berries against sharp green holly. We’ve got smells of cinnamon and pine, and tastes of citrus and chocolate. We’ve got the sensations of warm hearths and fuzzy jumpers and the bracing chill from anaemic skies.

Great storytelling engages all the senses as well, which is why Christmas stories and films and songs can be particularly moving. Listening, viewing, reading them, and even creating our own helps us to seize those moments because otherwise, we might forget the bits that turned out how we wanted, when some events inevitably proceed less smoothly.

I wonder if our relentless preparations are partly an attempt to find exactly the right combination of sensory stimuli that make us feel young, make us feel loved and valued as we believe we once did. We are desperate to capture something, maybe that outpouring that George Bailey finds at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, or the kindness and mutual appreciation of a goose dinner at the Cratchit family table.

What are your favourite moments to capture in the holidays? How do you manage to seize them, and do they fall before December 25th or after?

Checking the Story

This Week’s Bit of String: Sudden appearances

During a research project on Brazil, my Year 11 student enjoyed quizzing me with each fact he found. We learned it can rain up to 394 inches per year in the Amazon, and that the rainforest covers twice the size of India. He also took a few side quests with Google: the deepest hole in the earth, the biggest airplane.

Then he asked, “You know that Boeing 747 that disappeared?”

“Um… which one? Do you know what year it was, where the flight was from?”

“I don’t know. But they’ve just found it; look! Here’s the plane.”

*Don’t believe everything you think–street art in Cheltenham*

He angled his laptop screen to me. He’d put “Boeing 747 disappeared” into Google and then gone to the images tab. For all I knew, every picture was of a different plane and completely different circumstances and who could say from each photo whether that plane ever had, in fact, disappeared.

I follow political news avidly (it’s a not-particularly-healthy habit of mine) so I hear and worry about the spread of misinformation influencing elections, and about voters being in their own, social media-cultivated bubbles. But what I witnessed here drove it home in an entirely new way.

Suddenly it hit me, anyone can Google, for example, “Joe Biden senile” and the algorithms will present them with exactly what they want to see. And thus the course of human history could be affected.

Refining Terms

When we factor in the literacy struggles which some people have–why search for information to read when a picture will do? The problem is, a picture could depict anything and be from anyone. Someone could Google “Israel terrorists” and I hate to imagine what photos would come up.

The intent can be ambiguous, too. “Israel terrorists” could mean terror acts against Israeli persons, or terrorist acts committed by them… And viewers of Google images might get both but assume all confirm their viewpoint. Sites label photos with whatever fits their agenda.

Intent matters… Online algorithms are desperately trying to work out what we want to see, and it’s on us to return the favour by investigating the motives of people who post and share content.

Writers are infamous for spending our time on side research. Sometimes, it’s easier to check what wallpaper would be accurate for a time period than to actually write some plot. I generally don’t have much time to spare, so I keep my search terms precise. This is useful in following current events as well.

Just Asking Questions

Along with honing our queries to ensure we get the right information and checking the reliability of our sources, it’s crucial to interrogate our own motivations. I think we have an instinct to villainise certain people and idolise others. Once we’ve selected someone for those roles, we exclusively seek evidence supporting our decision.

*An image is only a confined window from a greater story. Selfridges, London*

Last week I had to resolve an altercation between a Year 13 student and a teacher. She calls him Scary Man and she and laughs about it with her friends to cover her fear about his shoutiness, and how it made her cry in one of his lessons.

When I talked to the teacher about her difficulties, he was spectacularly morose. “I don’t want to make children cry,” he kept saying. He knows they call him Scary Man. He tries to be gentle, and when they don’t appreciate this he snaps. They’re each as insecure as each other.

“It’s exciting to rally with our friends against a villain,” I said to my student in our discussion later. “But an inanimate one would be preferable.”

Goodness knows I’ve been guilty of the same thing, not least when I was her age; I signed someone’s yearbook thanking them for hating one of the same girls I did. Not very graceful or empathetic of me, but that too would have come from insecurity and from wanting to form a particular connection.

Humans tend to construct narratives. We like to see an arc of justice, and it’s reassuring when good guys and bad guys are clearly delineated. We love being right so much, we’re perversely happy to sniff out confirmation of our most bitter suspicions.

Real life doesn’t often fit into these binaries and these smooth tracks, though. If things are lining up too well with what we expect and what we want, it may be worth looking deeper into the story, and looking behind the scenes of the presented picture.

Pivotally, let’s try to keep sight of what underlying insecurities motivate those who seem like villains. We wouldn’t write a completely un-nuanced character without backstory, would we? We can’t assume real humans are without them.

Careful Content

This Week’s Bit of String: Birthday cake beheadings

My mother was really great at baking us birthday cakes catered to our interests. I think there was a Cabbage Patch cake once and Maiden Fairhair barbie type ones, I had a Scarlett O’Hara cake in seventh grade, and with four kids in the family I can’t even remember all the other characters and critters we must have gone through.

The problem with this, of course, is that those cakes then get eaten.

One year, my dad shouted ‘Off with its head!’ as the cake was cut into, and because I got so upset about it, he made sure to do it every time after. Even now, I don’t like eating chocolate bunnies at Easter because I feel bad biting their heads.

*I make strictly inanimate cakes. Like this piano for my Bear’s 18th birthday.*

I absolutely can’t bear thinking about executions. I remember preparing to emigrate to the UK, I was up late packing because I couldn’t do so during the day as a working single mum, and on one of the two channels my New Hampshire TV picked up, there was a documentary about Shakespeare. It said how in his time, when someone was accused of treason, their entire family was publicly tortured to death. This seems to have happened to Shakespeare’s mother’s cousin as well.

Through the exhausting process of sorting all mine and my toddler’s belongings, through the emotional goodbyes and the harrowing paperwork, I think this was the moment when I was most hesitant about changing countries. I’m going to a place that did THAT to people?

Personal Triggers

My sensitivity about this topic has become more ingrained with time. As a senior in high school I was traumatised for weeks because I saw a black and white predecessor to The King and I in which the Tuptim character and her partner get burned at the stake. I forced myself to learn all about burnings because that was my biggest fear.

*It actually took me a couple of years till I was brave enough to even light candles without thinking about hideous deaths.*

I have tried a brutal, immersive approach at times, reading accounts of drawings and quarterings and whatnot. That hasn’t helped me sleep better at night. When I’m up in the small, dark hours, there are doors in my mind I have to keep closed or I’ll be too terrified of nightmares to let myself fall asleep. I have lots of ready-made furniture to pile against that mental door: memories of my Grammy, planning the meals for the week; heck, how about naming all the titles from The Baby-Sitters Club?

I have concluded that executions are something I have to give myself a permanent holiday from thinking about. Is that so wrong? Maybe it’s just chemistry, certain things can’t mix. So I artfully plan a printing mission and slip out of the GCSE English classroom during the bit in Macbeth when they go after Macduff’s family. I would certainly never dream of watching something like Game of Thrones and prodigiously avoid anything about Roman times and how they treated captives.

It could be the cruel inevitability of a planned execution that upsets me so much. The anticipation and the degradation and the helplessness. Some part of my mind may connect it to the traumas I experienced, because I couldn’t figure out how to stop those happening and they, too, carried an element of shame.

Content Warnings

To be a productive individual, there are certain topics I have to avoid. It’s tremendously helpful if there’s a content warning which guides me in that. Of course, I then need the self-discipline and self-care to act on the warning. Sometimes a warning makes me think, Ooh, I’d better try and suck up my feelings and read it anyway, what right do I have to an easy existence? But then it kind of wrecks me.

Took this picture in London. The Tyburn Tree was a gallows that could hang 24 people at once. In the 1570s alone, over 700 people were killed here, right above Hyde Park. It’s awful but I did my due diligence and researched it and didn’t freak out too much.

Content warnings are sometimes portrayed as a snowflakey, excessively woke, mollycoddling sort of thing. But there’s a strength and, again, a discipline in knowing our limits. Just because I’m unable to cope with accounts of Tudor torture or Jim Crow lynchings (and honestly, I’ve TRIED), it doesn’t mean I’m ignoring important issues of the day. Hopefully that is clear from my writing.

On a slight side note, I’m glad terminology has shifted from “trigger warning” to “content warning.” The word trigger itself could be triggering, particularly in my home country considering the dangers of gun violence.

Does it really help the world if I get into a bit of a hole and read avidly about brutal colonial punishments in the Belgian Congo, then can’t sleep for several nights and am off my game as a teaching assistant and mum? I’m not sure it does. So, as Guy Fawkes night approaches, I’ll be giving that one some berth, particularly as he may have been set up and led into the gunpowder plot. Didn’t the bloke get tortured enough; why are people celebrating his burning for centuries after? I can’t think of any other holiday which so blatantly revels in pain… Good Friday and Remembrance Day are a great deal more respectful.

Have you found certain content that you need to avoid? Or, what are your strategies for dealing with things that slip through your defences without warning?

Pride and Joy

This Week’s Bit of String: A lick of paint

Last Easter, after nine years living in our house, I realised I hated the colour of the lounge. Dismissing it as beige would be too good for it; it was a dingy, pinkish, dirty-flesh, off-white hue.

At the time, my 20-year-old kiddo was about to move to the USA, my husband was struggling, and I would sit in the lounge not daring to take up a project of my own because either they would need me for something or I would need to convince them to do something, at any moment. And as I stared at the walls and considered how best to help my family, whether to push or to cajole or to leave alone, I noticed that I loathed the room.

It took nearly a year to get round to changing it. I think it took 75% of that time for me to effectively communicate that I couldn’t bear it anymore. By now my little Bear was fairly settled overseas and my husband was doing well also. He has a very good sense for matters of structure and decor, and where I was desperate for almost any fresh paint at all, he was quite sensible and had lots of good ideas and eventually, with a tremendous amount of work, we unbeiged.

*Unbeiged walls best complemented by garden roses and gorgeous baby cat.*

We now have deep teal at one end of the lounge, and clean, pale greenish-aqua on the longest two walls. It’s fresh like a pool you could dive into. Might paint the final wall teal but that end is, unsurprisingly, taken up by large, full bookshelves, so my sense of urgency has faded.

It’s funny how we get these sudden revelations that something is intolerable. It’s funny too how things that have always been there, we’ll only start to discover. I’ve written before about how privilege delayed some of us in acknowledging the struggles of people in other races. I have to admit, as Pride Month comes to a close, that I was similarly tardy in recognising the plight of people in the LGBTQIA+ community.

Early Encounters

The first time I remember someone actually discussing anything other than straight, non-cisgendered relationships, I was in first grade. A classmate used the term “pervert,” I asked what it meant, and my fellow 6-year-old replied, “It’s a man who has sex with other men.”

I wonder why that kid was given such a specific, rather homophobic definition. I wonder what sort of realisations he had as he got older.

Going to high school in the mid/ late 1990s, I had some classmates and friends who were able to be free and honest about their sexuality, and some who could not until later. I was unfazed by it, dealing with my own issues and not wishing to be hard on anyone else. But I did grow up in a church where such things were thought to be abnormal and downright wrong, and I realised during college that I had some prejudices.

This revelation was precipitated by a panel representing LGBTQIA + students from our campus. A girl among them shared how, when she came out, one of her older relatives sighed: “But you’re so pretty…”

My stomach lurched. I’d thought the same thing when I saw her amongst the group. I wasn’t attracted to her (I don’t work that way), but I suppose the implication was: She’s such a pretty girl, must she be squandered on something deviant? It’s a weird thought, because not only does it denigrate homosexual relationships, it also diminishes the value of women, as if beauty may only be reserved for men’s appreciation.

So I recognised that I’d been seeing this young woman as a character or a good-looking avatar, and had superimposed my own ideas of a happy relationship upon her. I had dehumanised her. I tried to be more aware and careful after that.

Going Beyond

You may notice I don’t use gendered language about my [no longer very childlike] child. Our Bear is nonbinary. In their words, it’s not something that can be explained because it’s not a decision.

This makes sense. In the same way no one invents electricity, a person does not necessarily journey toward an identity. It was always there waiting to be acknowledged.

*Love and colour in London during Pride month. “Love is the only language I speak fluently.”*

The brilliant thing about Bear being nonbinary is that we can have discussions about music and baseball and relationships and also about nail varnish and hair length. Of course, any one person should be able to experiment with every one of those things. One reason my kiddo feels “not in between two genders, just above it (or done with it all)” is because throughout history, we’ve created ridiculously rigid definitions for male versus female.

It’s all gone a bit beige and then Pride comes along and freshens things up.

I tend not to say I’m proud of my child because they are their own person; I can’t take credit for the many attributes I love about them. But seeing them settle and feel more free about who they are makes me very happy.

Looking at etymology, the earliest roots of the word proud lie in being forward, first, like a chief or leader. Above things, you might say. I am grateful to those in the LGBTQIA+ communities for marching forward and leading us to be more inclusive and colourful.

What does Pride month mean to you?

Quaint Customs

This Week’s Bit of String: A world of queens

Years ago my kiddo emerged from a swimming pool changing room and treated me to this fabulous idea:

“The reason I took so long was because I invented a new musical. It will use the music of Queen and be all about if history had queens instead of kings.”

How would the British empire be different as a matriarchy? If there had been a Henrietta VIII, for example, would she have gone through 6 husbands? Some of the queens they did have were pretty brutal. Would they have felt less pressure to be so if they weren’t sandwiched between kings?

I suspect the ruthlessness lies not in gender but in unquestioned power, in the philosophy that there’s a divine right to rule for a particular bloodline. How then could a monarch, male or female, not believe they’re better than everyone else? Why should they genuinely take interest in what goes on for any of their subjects?

*I mean, it’s fun to see something a bit different…*

I can’t help thinking about these things with the coronation of the new king. It’s a rather inescapable affair. As an immigrant living in Britain, I was initially bemused by the knitted crowns on top of Royal Mail letterboxes and the bunting strung across main streets. One of my favourite cottages to walk past put up signs saying, “Party like royalty.” Cute.

Then there were £10 souvenir brochures for sale, and you can’t get a chocolate bar without a shiny crown stamped on it, and the public are offered the “opportunity” to participate in the coronation by swearing allegiance to the king… It became unsettling. Especially considering the monarchy’s cruel legacy of colonialism and the slave trade, and the current cost of living crisis.

Class Differences

When the queen died, it was a day or two after the Conservatives made Liz Truss prime minister, and during the first week of school. When you’re running around making sure your students actually have lunch to eat, swapping in new unelected leaders for old ones does not impress you.

I don’t begrudge people whatever small pleasures they find in life. Clearly some people enjoy celebrating the monarchy. I wish they could get that feeling from other things. It’s like my Year 12 student not wanting to join a cooking class in making burgers, because she’s convinced nothing can be better than MacDonalds.

Shouldn’t bluebell-carpeted woods, chips from the local takeaway, maybe a trip to a local production of ChittyChittyBangBang, make Britons feel proud of their country rather than a random guy donning ridiculously expensive headgear?

Many are concerned about the massive cost of this event. I’m happy for the children of our parish if they enjoy the hula hoops our council decided to gift to every schoolchild to mark the occasion. I’m glad if people like getting together for town-funded street parties. But the district Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service, for example, has a waiting list of more than 200 young people with acute needs. Hula hoops are fun, but so’s cake and there’s a reason no one liked it when French royalty said, “Let them eat cake.”

Story Selection

I don’t read much about the royal family. I got fed up with it as an adolescent in the mid 1990s when Princess Di or Fergie or the American equivalent, JFK Jr, were constantly on People magazine covers. I do think it’s fascinating how being born to that level of privilege and scrutiny would affect a person and their relationships. There’s a wealth of opportunity for stories there and many have utilised it. For me though, other stories are so much more crucial.

I hope everyone remembers that the queen wasn’t the only person who sacrificed and toiled in WWII; pretty much everyone I cared for in my nursing home job a decade ago did. King Charles isn’t the only person who helps with good causes. So many unsung heroes work hard, or run food banks or volunteer at youth centres or take in refugees.

I’ll spend much of today on housework and editing my novel’s penultimate chapter, featuring the voice of a refugee girl struggling in a new land. It is different from the chapters told by Eve herself, and I must make this extra, incredibly important voice work. I also plan to visit the swimming pool. It probably won’t be too crowded today while children are forced to sit at home near the telly. I hope they come away with wild ideas about how things could be different.

Will you be celebrating anything today?

The Value of Ordinary

This Week’s Bit of String: A blue dress in an empty village

We take somewhat unconventional holidays. They’re often centred around seeing family, since no one lives near us, or else we’ll make it to another city or even country but only find affordable accommodation in the outskirts. Most recently, we combined both these by visiting Malmo, Sweden, where our son had travelled from the US for a gaming event.

We stayed in a hotel a few miles south of the lovely old town and castle. When we hiked there, or to the sea, we passed apartment blocks. Some older, used by immigrant communities, with Ukrainian flags or halal pizzerias. Some with separate car parking space and bike lockup for each flat. We passed allotments for veggie gardens, quadrants of circles carved out of parkland. There was a whole, mid-city village of “summer houses,” too: painted huts with little shared gardens, hammocks, berry bushes, barbecue grills, all vacant for now. Some had small glassed-in porches; I saw a pretty, short-sleeved blue dress hanging in one. Waiting for a party?

*Horse-drawn cleaning cart for the high-rise outbuildings. Hyllie, Malmo, Sweden*

It might be nice to stay in luxurious resorts or in city centres where you can just step out and go to the theatre or something. But I maintain that no vacation is complete without a day when you’ve walked at least ten miles, and seeing a dress in an empty summer house window or passing a preschool blasting out Moana while rosy-cheeked, blond kids in full snowsuits sniffle and shove at each other are every bit as fascinating to me as a museum or a palace.

Checking Out the History

Not to say that I don’t enjoy cathedrals and castles and all that. They’re intriguing glimpses into history, and more and more they try to reflect the wider experiences of citizens. We visited Malmo Castle, and learned about the strife between Denmark and Sweden in the 17th century, reading about the people caught up in it, military and civilian, from both sides. There was also a very creepy recreation of a plague town from the early 1700s, complete with sound effects of children whimpering, because some people believed if you buried a child alive, the whole village would be saved from disease.

And there were horrific tales of torture and execution from the 1800s when the place served as a prison. There was an outline on the floor where a boy would have been beheaded, and child executions trigger me worst of all. Such a horrific lack of empathy.

On a slightly more hopeful note, the building later served as a shelter for refugees after World War II, and we saw one of the Swedish “white buses” which rescued thousands of people from concentration camps before the war ended, made possible by an agreement with Himmler—behind Hitler’s back.

I think travel, even when it’s not glamorous, serves to remind us of stories happening all around, at every echelon of society. It pricks my curiosity for how others live their lives, whether in a castle or in a high-rise apartment.

The Everyday Moments

The ordinary is worth noticing, not just in the places we visit, but in moments we spend with each other. While abroad, we ate most of our dinners at the shopping centre across from our hotel, treating our kiddo as well. In turn, we were given guest passes to the event so we could watch the game our Bear was streaming. It was a fun setup—arcade games, swinging chairs, soft serve ice cream. We cheered and readily made fools of ourselves as fans.

*City view through a window of the Castle’s cannon tower*

Later on, other gamers recognised my husband and I, saying how great that we’d come. It made me wonder, don’t their parents at least tune in virtually for their events? But a lot of people dismiss videogaming. I’ve never had time (or coordination, if I’m being honest) to do it myself, but I always tried my best to listen to the play-by-play accounts from my kid, so I could share in the successes and frustrations of one of my very favourite people. And look where it got Bear, having a blast in a city overseas, a break from the day job. It saddens me thinking how lonely some gamers must be at their families’ indifference, and how much their parents miss out. If people can’t summon the will to listen to their own kids’ interests, what hope for human empathy is there?

Now that I am separated from my child, living on opposite sides of the Atlantic, I miss quick conversations after work, the opportunity to provide a cup of tea or sandwich or cookie and be repaid with a smile and cuddle. I miss Bear popping down while I’m cooking or washing up. They would stand with one foot propped up behind the other knee like a stork, telling me about this or that game, how they might arrange the music, which gamer friend runs it, what time they hope to achieve speed running.

C.S. Lewis, in his memoir A Grief Observed, mentioned how he missed the “heartbreaking commonplace,” and that line has always stuck with me. The ordinary is so important. It’s the stuff we learn from, long for, and it’s vital for empathy, because when we talk about walking a mile in someone’s shoes, we don’t just mean their Sunday best.

Have you gained insight into people’s everyday lives from travel? Has it been useful for your writing or art?