November 2022

 November summary: I am having a good time but I am also extremely ready for a break.

I have also been thinking a lot about pEDaGoGY

A word which I am still not entirely sure how to say out loud. An absolute professional, obviously.

Central London Samaritans decided to celebrate 70 years of being open 24/7 by trying to fill the phoneroom for 24 hours! Usually there are between 3 and 6 people on duty at a time, but there are 12 call stations in total, and it's very rare that the phoneroom is at capacity. We did it! It was also very hard to actually hear calls because maybe 12 people is actually too many people in that space 😅

The next day, ironically, the branch's ceiling collapsed in heavy rainsand took out all the electronics, and we had to close for the first time in 70 years (though have now reopened at another premises nearby until everything gets fixed)

My historic Quaker church's ceiling also fell in, and the steady drip from the ceiling in the room where I teach at UAL shorted all the electronics in half the room and turned into a flood in the basement toilets below. My lifelong rain anxiety returns.

Early November is a tough time for me and for Chase. Charlie died on November 6th two years ago, and even when I manage not to think about it, there's something about the changing of the seasons, oncoming darkness, leaves falling and chillier temperatures that brings back the memories unprompted. Meanwhile Chase hates the scary fireworks day bangs, which become ever more persistent in the run up to the 5th.

So me, my partner and Chase decided to run away from our fears and sadness to a cottage in the countryside (though it turned out I was still sad and Chase could still hear bangs, but it was all still a lot better than it would have been in London)

Chase hates trains but she managed to be a brave girl and tough out the journey, and was rewarded with her first time in the countryside since she came to us in January 2021.

I tried to be very gentle with myself, and it did help.

We took Chase for a long walk both days and she loved it. She's nearly 12 and it often feels like she's slowing down — especially in the winter when she gets scared of the dark and the noises in the park and just wants to go home all the time. But she ran through the long grass and mud in the fields like a puppy, and it made me feel a bit bad that we don't take her more exciting places more often (we don't take her more exciting places more often because she hates all forms of transport!)

Anyway, we had a nice time eating nice food in our nice cottage, even if it did rain most of the weekend.

I returned and threw myself back into work. It was ACTIVITIES WEEK for second year Graphic Media Design students at UAL, which meant a break from usual teaching, and a week of workshops and trips. On Monday I took around 50 students to see the Hallyu! Korean Wave exhibition at the V&A and it was hilariously stressful.

It was supposed to be me and my colleague Siân taking all the students round together. But the V&A let us know that due to ongoing COVID restrictions, we'd have to take them in three groups at staggered times. Okay, that's no biggie. But on the day, Siân had terrible flu, so I had to go it alone. Fine, I can cope, right?! Well, my printer was out of action so I only had the tickets digitally (Siân was going to bring the print outs) which meant I had to show each individual student in rather than just being able to hand them their tickets and send them on. This was... a bit stressful. But to make everything 10x worse, my colleague who arranged the trip had just put that students should meet me at 'the gallery entrance', which in the V&A could refer to any one of about 4 different places. 

As a result of this I spent the entire afternoon running around the V&A herding random groups of 1 or 2 students at a time into the show as I found them, and by the time I finally got to go round the exhibition myself (alone, as I'd had to wait outside until the very end of our time slot for any stragglers), I was too exhausted and strung out to fully appreciate it!

(It WAS good though)

The whole experience was very stressful, but definitely a learning opportunity...

The next evening it was finally time for the launch of THE TRANS DIMENSION! The Trans Dimension is a project that the studio I work for (GFSC) have worked on in collaboration with Gendered Intelligence — it's a listings site specifically hosting events by and for the trans community. In London for now, but soon to expand!

It's been a long time coming, and we were so excited to actually get a launch party for it! We all headed over to Queer Britain near Kings Cross, where we were joined by the incredible Travis Alabanza, who gave a deeply moving (and funny) speech about the importance of the site. It's so nice to see something kind of abstract that you've been involved in working on for so long actually come to fruition in a real place, with real people.

It was also lovely to see a bunch of familiar faces, and catch up with Kim and Ivan from GFSC. As a remote studio, we don't all get to see each other IRL that often!

With the news of Twitter's (possible) imminent collapse, I finally joined both BeReal and the Fediverse (aka Mastodon), where you'll find me as @undividual and @undividual@toot.wales respectively. I am still getting to grips with the latter, but I can safely say that BeReal immediately leapt up to top spot as my favourite social network (ever?!)

The basic premise is that at a random time each day (though in practice it's usually afternoon/evening, so maybe not truly random) it pings all its users at once, who are given two minutes to open their camera, and take a snap of whatever they're currently up to, with the front and back facing cameras at the same moment. 

It goes live for 24 hours and after that is only visible to you in your archive. Users can add basic comments and reactions to each other's posts, and, that's it.

If you miss the 2 minute slot you can post up to 24h late, but everyone else will know you did. (There's no shame in it, it just means that it's a bit more obvious if you're intentionally framing your life to be a bit more exciting than it actually is)

Anyway, I think it's great and I think you should all join.

My second session in 'activities week' was a workshop! I got to choose the subject matter, so I did one all about visual diarying. A decent number of students showed up and humoured me as I talked through my history with the practice, other artists visual diary work, and set them some fun (?) exercises. I made this while they all worked on theirs :)

Just in case you were wondering how this is going (the only real bad part is that they're actually still quite a lot bigger than I wanted, but this is still a drastic improvement on how things were before)

In further 'Emma bites off more than she can chew' news, here's my fun (?) side project for 2023... 

When I was doing the open houses festival at my Quaker Meeting House, I became aware of 'the information boards' — a set of around 30 x A1 sheets of grey card which someone in the 90s stuck loads of tiny photocopied text, clip art, and poorly reproduced archival photographs to, with information about the meeting house, Quakers, and the surrounding area's history. Honestly, at this point they look like shit and most people there agree, but they still get dutifully wheeled out for every school visit, open house event, and any other time when the meeting house has visitors.

I naively thought 'well, I could just redesign them!' and dutifully volunteered to do so, but quickly realised this was a much bigger job than that. The content is, at this point, outdated, much of it is irrelevant and/or badly written, and there's loads of great stuff that we need to talk about more missing.

So not only have I offered to redesign the boards (much later on), I have also taken on the process of attempting to facilitate my fellow Quakers in discerning (a Quakerly word) what a set of boards made for the NEXT 30 or so years should contain. What do we keep, what do we cut, what do we add?

I ran a session with 6 of us to try and get the ball rolling on this, and it WAS fun but I am also very daunted by the scale of the task ahead of me...

The long dreaded moment arrives — Beatrice is leaving, and we have to find a new housemate.

I'm having a sad cycling time. Every ride is just such an adrenaline fest that it's really making me not wanna go out on my bike. I'm sometimes only cycling once every couple of weeks or so, and that's real sad when I have such a lovely bike, but especially as it gets colder and wetter, I just feel more and more like I'm gonna die under a van. (Not helped by my housemate Camille getting her bike, and nearly herself, crushed under a van later in the month)

We moved FAST! Get the listing on Spareroom! 50 responses in >24 hours! 3 interviews with our favs lined up, BOOM

I am getting better at this process (I hope?!), after previous learning experiences with Tabitha and Camille. Rather than inviting the first people who message for interviews, I instead waited until we had like 50 applicants and picked the best, and encouraged them all to come in one day, so that we could make a fast decision. It was actually harder than previous times because we loved all three of them, but also a lot less stressful than having interviews distributed over a whole week, and having to keep people waiting (and potentially losing them)

The London housing market is so brutal.

Forgot my swimming towel like a idiot

Picked up a trashy free magazine on the tube and decided to make this vaguely apocalyptic/extremely 2022 collage 

Sometimes it's nice to go to Borough Market and just buy lots of exciting vegetables

I've finally fully embraced my puffy unflattering duvet coat destiny

For one of Beatrice's last nights, former housemate (both here and for a couple of years in Brighton) Alex came for dinner! We had tasty treats and played some stupid games

Went to see the incredible My Neighbour Totoro production at the Barbican! Drew this drawing of the building on my ipad while waiting to go in, added the characters later that evening after we left :)

Beatrice left! I'd like to say 'I'll miss her', but to be honest, I've barely seen her! She spent most of the pandemic with family in France, and after a sudden bereavement has been in France since February this year, so she's hardly been around for the three years I've lived here. It's kind of nice to have an absent housemate, in the sense that they're no hassle, but we're very much hoping our new housemate might be a bit more present — in a good, and not annoying way, of course 😅 (I didn't do a drawing about her moving in, but in the end we picked Beth as our new housemate, so she will probably pop up in future drawings)

Perhaps my lack of sadness about Beatrice leaving is influenced by my extreme grump about her failure to properly prepare for moving out (she didn't clean her room and left loads of trash behind). Spen loves driving, and so volunteered to drive her all the way to Lille in a van with her stuff (which they had a great time doing!) Beatrice persueded Spen to take her trash to the tip when they returned in the van, so we dutifully prepared to do this. 

(Not mentioned in this comic, we live near a funeral parlour, and when we got back, all the parking spaces outside our house were taken up with a funeral cortege. Spen parked the van round the corner for half an hour while we had lunch and waited for the hearse and limos to leave, and GOT A DAMN TICKET. So we're already stressed as we headed to the tip.)

It takes ages to drive to the tip, which is only around a 25 min walk away. It takes nearly 25 minutes by van because DRIVING IS BULLLLLSHITTTTTT (like I literally cannot overstate how much I hate riding in cars, vans etc. It is the worst and beyond my comprehension why anyone would willingly travel that way. Claustrophobic, aggravating, and soooo slowww)

So anyway I'm already stressed and mad when we get to the tip. We think we can just go through the regular way to the big hoppers where you dump different varieties of junk, but it turns out vans are NOT meant to go that way, and we land a big scrape in the side of the van squeezing through the too narrow entrance. (Potential £1500 fine from the van hire company, arrrrgh?!?!) And when we get in, the tip man immediately makes us leave because NO VANS

We have to drive to the other side of the site to the scary industrial tip where all the big waste vans go, and it turns out you have to jump through a load of hoops like buying a high vis vest, showing ID and proof of address, and have the van weighed before you go in.

Another technically challenging ramp to go up (I mean, not for Spen who is a very good driver but I find it stressful to observe), and then we have to queue behind house clearance trucks and those wire sided vans for AGES. 

And when we finally get in — no hoppers, just A GIANT INCINERATOR! Most of Beatrice's trash is recyclable but the tip people won't let me just walk it over to the hoppers a hundred metres away, for health and safety reasons (I'm wearing my damned £9 high vis!!)

By this point I am so mad and desperately need to pee that I just throw almost all of it into the incinerator and get the fuck out of there (with the exception of the bags of clothes which I just couldn't bring myself to dispose of in that way)

The whole thing was just inordinately stressful (I may also have been PMTing) and left me with (a probably unfair amount of) bitterness towards Beatrice for not dealing with her shit herself.

Anyway, cheered myself up the next day by going (fake) curling with pals.

At a summer party two years ago, me and a few others randomly got chatting about curling and how much we'd all like to try it. I told them all to hold that thought for 6 months, and once winter came, I organised a curling session at one of London's 'pop up' curling clubs, for winter 2021. However, it got cancelled due to high winds, so my tickets rolled over to this year, when we FINALLY got our long awaited curling trip!

We were devastated to discover that a) it was not on ice, and b) no brushing... And yet we still had a really good time!? We've now found an actual ice curling venue, and so are going to try and go there in January for Curling episode II.

Had a BUSY WEEKEND — Dav and Justin were in town catsitting for Dav's sister, and Harriet, Tom and Max came up to London for the day, and we all went to the Horniman Museum. I'd forgotten how much I dislike taxidermy but I did enjoy the retro displays and the room of instruments (and seeing some of my fav friends)

Put on my rubbish tip high vis to try and make cycling less scary

I cannot overstate how much I am looking forwards to having a break over Christmas

Had a lovely dinner out tonight with a friend — bought the fancy drinks for £5.50, and was then outraged when the waitress swept them away with like, 1/4 glass of juice and the tasty lumps of fruit left behind! (Am I a cheapskate?!)

I am very much looking forwards to December — got some more hard (but interesting) work, a cute lil mini break, and of course, christmas! More on all of that next time...