2016, and the new sensation of not wanting anything new.

So, I’ve been holding out on writing my usual inevitable new year blog post.  Normally I can’t wait, and post it a few days after Christmas, overly eager for the new year and its attendant exciting air of, well, newness – as described in blogs passim, I’m usually all about the new.  I have craved change my whole life, which has led to lots of exciting things and some rather pointless dicking around as I treated my life choices like some sort of eternal Pizza Hut buffet, sampling this and that until suddenly realising that it’s 6PM, all the staff are waiting for you to leave, and there is no more deep pan Hawaiian left which you now know was the only one you ever really wanted in the first pla- OK, may be getting a little too far into this simile.  I just really like pizza.  And change.

However, 2015 was what you might call an embarrassment of riches in that regard.  Everything changed, then changed again.  The boyfriend and I, after saving money for as long as I can remember, finally bought a flat together – but not before the one our first offer was accepted on just after Christmas 2014 was whipped off the table at the last minute, resulting in a process that had been plodding judiciously along for years suddenly becoming an urgent imperative to find somewhere, anywhere of roughly the right location, size and price like NOW. Which we did, with a bit of blood, sweat and tears (lots of that last one on my part).

We eventually took possession in June, and spent two months completely redecorating – a lot of work, yet more change, and a process which plunged me (and, by association, poor long-suffering boyfriend) into some pretty deep neuroses.  It was whilst I was sitting on the floor of our new bedroom covered in paint and sobbing like a baby because we had run out of masking tape and what were we going to do that I worked out that just possibly there was more to my angst than our differences of opinion about home decor, and that I was in fact having a meltdown because the responsibility of co-owning a property was freaking me right the hell out, in a way I had entirely failed to anticipate during the whole slow burn build-up period.  We got through it, largely due to his common sense, forbearance, and ability to provide endless cups of tea whilst listening to my insecure monologuing without reaching for a carving knife (thanks for all that, by the way xxx).

And now, the flat is finished (for the most part), we have been living here for nearly 6 months, and it is my happy place. There is really nowhere I would rather be. But giving birth to my grown-up, home-owning self was a surprisingly draining process, and would have been more than enough to be getting on with as far as I was concerned.

However, while all this has been going on, I have also begun two new jobs in quick succession, each exponentially more challenging and responsible than the previous one, and both in institutions where constant change is the status quo. During the same period, my best friend since schooldays undertook a complete, radical career-and-life change which included her leaving the country. Although obviously this is her change and not mine (and is, by the way, fantastic and wonderful and the best decision she has ever made – go Lucie!), it nonetheless made a huge difference to my life too, because of the huge part she plays in it.  I miss her enormously, and her absence has made me suddenly, belatedly aware of how few really close relationships I have retained into adulthood, how small the circle is of people I feel I can turn to when I am happy, sad or scared and be absolutely confident they are going to be able to give me what I need in that moment. Which has actually been pretty good for me in some ways, as it means I’ve had to really think hard about what is and isn’t worth worrying about.  If I let myself get upset about every little thing, then without the immediate catharsis of ranting to a sympathetic ally – guess what? I’m just going to stay upset. So I have to be selective; I have to learn to shrug the small stuff off all on my own.  It’s been a ‘put-your-big-girl-pants-on’ kind of year in that respect as well.

So in every sphere – domestic, professional and personal – the winds of change have been a-howling through 2015 for me.  And so forgive me if, when considering 2016, I sound a wee bit lacking in ambition. But what I’m really hoping for this year is for things to stay the same.  For the foundations of my life as it is now, laboriously laid in the last year, to settle. When I really take the time to look at my life, I find that I am actually… content. And I want to get familiar with that feeling before the next whirlwind rides in, if that’s all the same to you, universe.  So this year I’ve got no resolutions, no goals to smash within the next twelve months. I’m just going to live a little while. I’ve changed my hair; surely that’s enough for one year?

A year of change… My happy place; my best girl; a modest to-do list; new hair

Happy new year everybody.  I hope you get all the changes (or not) that you are wishing for in 2016.

 

 

Come on 2015, let’s be having you

In a bit of a lull in the festive season, I have decided to get cracking on my new year’s resolutions.

I mentioned last year how I like to compartmentalise my past, and 2015 more than most years will give me ample opportunity to do so. This December has been very much a month of cutting off and letting go, and January will be a fresh start in more ways than one. I’m going to be so busy that if I manage to achieve anything at all, I’ll consider myself to be doing well, what with a couple of fairly hefty resolutions being more or less thrust upon me:

1. Do fantastically well in my first permanent post-qualification Library role.

The University of West London have very bravely agreed to take me on as Academic Support Librarian for their School of Nursing, Midwifery and Healthcare, and I will be starting on 5^th January. This is a logical sort of follow-up to my most recent role at LSHTM, but will also include a lot of new responsibilities, as well as a new institution in a new part of London, eventually within a new campus. I’m very excited, and a little bit terrified, but what I mostly am is grateful to be given such a great opportunity, and determined that UWL will have no reason to repent their choice. I plan to exceed their expectations and expand my own experience, and this is the main thing I intend to devote my energy and resources to this year.

2. Make a home

Having been saving about a third of our incomes for four years, my other half and I are finally ready, at 30, to join the adult population and buy our first home. I know this is something most people do, and often much earlier than we have managed it, but I am still unreasonably proud of us for having reached this point at last. Things are now moving fast – I put in an offer on a very nice flat just yesterday, and while that is of course no guarantee the whole thing is all sewn up, I’m excited by the idea that we may very soon be shutting our very own front door, growing weedy tomatoes in our very own back garden, and screaming blue murder when our very own boiler explodes and costs a small fortune of our very own money to repair. Ho for belated grown-up-ness!

Frankly, I think those two things together will be enough to be getting on with, don’t you? 

No?

Oh all right then…

3. Devise and keep up a new fitness regime

New job has the slight disadvantage of being the other side of bloody London to where I live (one and a half hour commute each way is looking likely). This is going to throw my fitness regimen (such as it is) all to hell – farewell, lovely scabby affordable ULU Energybase!

I’m going to have to come up with a new one that fits in with my new life, or resign myself to ever-encroaching blobbery. I fear that workout DVDs at sparrow’s fart may be involved (sorry, downstairs). And maybe even Kegels on the train (will have to learn not to make that funny face when doing them).

4. Make lots of jam and chutney and foist it upon my friends and loved ones.

Not much to enlarge on here. I have the kit, I have the jars, I have the time. Beware, oh friends, an avalanche of preserves is coming your way.

5. Get more involved in my profession

Conferences; articles; the Twittersphere. There’s a lot of library-based action going on out there, and I want a part of it.

6. Make some progress on my family photographs archive

Work on this was brought to a slight standstill last year when my laptop up and died. The Apple Genius said that it was the logic board, but I believe it was simply a dirty protest against having to receive so many scans of my gurning infant visage. New logic board is now in place, so we shall find out who was correct in the coming months.

7. Make a start on The Quilt

Along with the crates of photographs my mother offloaded on me (see blogs passim), I also received a rather lovely thing: the top half of a patchwork quilt. It’s in a thousand shades, with scraps of a huge range of vintage fabrics, all tacked with newspapers and magazines of the period it was made. It was pieced and stitched together by my mother and grandmother back in my mother’s late teens, a time when she and my nan could barely me in a room together without biting each other’s heads off. I like to imagine them stitching up the quilt together as a sort of stalemate or truce. A year or so ago Mum suggested I might like to finish it off, as I had been making a desultory attempt to learn quilting from my very gifted craftswoman, my boyfriend’s mother Pat Ashton-Smith. It has ever since been scrunched up in a bag under my desk. This year, I want at least to get it padded and pinned preparatory to stitching it up – in the long run, I’d like to give it to my niece, so that it will have passed through the hands of four generations of the family.

And those left over from last year…

8. Finish knitting this jumper…

…if only so I can start knitting something else. I am sick of the sight of the damn thing.

9. Learn French

If there’s one thing long commutes must be good for, it is surely listening assiduously to the adventures of Didier and Patrice and the improbable series of events that lead them into reciting irregular verbs by the hour. Oui je peux!

10. Write. Write write write write write!

It’s been a good year for writing. I’m going to keep it up. Watch this space for more gibberish, excerpts of novels in the works, book reviews and maybe even some poetry (oh God).

EDIT: and a few more…

11. Pass my driving test

Self-explanatory really.  This will seal the holy trinity of adulthood – employed, property-owning driver 😛

12. Birth Companions

I am doing some voluntary literature search work for Birth Companions, a very worthwhile organisation.  Finally have some time to devote to this over the holidays, and will be proud to get it done and hopefully help them extend their influence.

SECOND EDIT: and two more…

13. Self care

I am extremely bad at this.  I am going to make 2015 the year I give myself a thorough and long overdue MOT – actually register with a doctor and a dentist, and sort out a few niggling problems that have been hanging around (and no doubt getting worse) for years out of idleness.  I’m an old girl now, can’t just keep expecting things to sort themselves out.

14. Join the British Bone Marrow Registry

Saw an interesting feature about bone marrow donation on TV over Christmas, and read some more on t’interweb – it really doesn’t sound as horrible as I imagined it, and it offers a fairly unique opportunity to save somebody else’s life without having to do anything unreasonably heroic (I am a colossal wimp, so this is useful).  I’m already signed up for someone to have any of my bits and bobs once I am dead – no reason not to offer up the regenerating parts whilst still alive.

And one more for luck…

15.  Learn to jive

Got a swing dance class with Swing Patrol for a Christmas present, which I just cashed in.  I SUCK like the suckiest thing to ever suck, but I loved it.  I am going to follow this up and get splendid at dancing, like the fabulous ladies I saw tonight whose calves seem to be spring-loaded.

A labour of love and librarianship: Archiving the family photos (Part 2)

Hello!  I know, I know, you’d probably given me up for dead.  A review of my New Year’s Resolutions fills me with shame and regret – a quick recap:

1. Give up drinking for January.
   Ah, well.  Ahem.  Moving on…
2. Learn to preserve food.
   This actually happened!  I have created pickled carrots and radishes!  See here!
3. Finish knitting this goddamn jumper.
   I still have three months!  Three!  *knits furiously*
4. Start writing this goddamn novel.
   I started a different one instead.  I’m calling this progress.  Shuddup.
5. Learn French.
   Nothing has happened AT ALL on this one.  Tres tres mal.
6. Get fit.
   Me and Jillian Michaels are once again in our sadistic abusive relationship.  The effects are as yet to be discerned.
7. Let my work into my life.
   This has really been happening!  I attended LILAC 2014, the information literacy conference, and got fully fascinated by all things info lit.  This expanded my Twitter-sphere of librarians and information professionals, and crammed my brain full of ideas for the future.
8. Be a good mentor.
   Another check!  The mentor scheme is complete, and I think we both got a lot out of the scheme.  More on this later.
9. Pick up my trumpet.
   Once again, ahem.
10. Write. Write write write write write!
    I have been writing, but nothing that is fit to be seen, unfortunately.  I have been loving writing it though, which was kind of the point!

So a mixed bag of success and failure, so far – let’s hope it’s a productive three months more.

So what on earth have I been doing all this time, I hear you cry?  Well, among other things, I have been getting cracking on this family photo project.  Although the bulk of the work is still to be done, there have been two significant steps forward:

1. Equipment
   I have acquired a photo scanner!  It’s an HP Scanjet 4850, and I’d love to pretend this was the result of an extended assessment and decision-making process, but in fact, this is what I was able to obtain second hand from family.  Seems to work fine though.
2. Software
   I spent a lot of time agonising about the appropriate method to catalogue these photos.  I couldn’t afford to shell out for a specialist piece of software; but the ultimate goal in all this was to share these photos with my family – a voluminous Excel spreadsheet of details with attachments was hardly going to fit the bill either.  Various free tools were tried and failed to fit the bill.  At this point, my colleague suggested Evernote – she was using it herself for a similar project, although she went on to describe the tool as “where I keep my life” (with a certain evangelical gleam in her eyes).  Having gotten started with Evernote, I was initially and pre-emptively thrilled (“This is exactly what I need!”) and then briefly disappointed (“What the hell kind of bloody hierarchy options are these?  Why is search so woundingly basic and stupid??”), and am now moving through the stages of Software Grief towards acceptance.  No, it doesn’t do everything I want it to do.  Yes, it does do enough to meet the purposes of 90% of the people who will use it.  Yes, it’s free.  Yes, it’s shareable and interactive.  Yes, you CAN search quickly and reliably for all the photos in the collection of you as a gappy toddler/your gran as a stunning newlywed.  It is good enough.

So I have the tools; I have the photos; what I still lack is any real strategy.  I have started scanning and indexing photos on a “I like this one” basis, but I have no long term plan.  I also still have no real systematic way of dealing with the fact that I have very little info on a lot of the photographs – mysterious men in uniform and ladies in Sunday hats abound.  Not to mention the ephemera.  Any tips from librarians/archivists/de facto family historians on ways to address these matters would be greatly appreciated.  In the meantime, please see below a picture of me, looking slightly barking mad, as a child.  Enjoy!

New Year, New Blog

Happy 2014, one and all!  Well, nearly.  I like to get the jump on the new year, as, for me, it is always a time of great change (real or anticipated).  I am a huge fan of the whole new year shebang – the party, the countdown, the kiss, and the slew of earnest resolutions more honoured in the breach than the observance.  I am not even slightly cynical about it.  New year, new start.  Again.

It’s the hopefulness I like, and the impetus the new year gives me to reanimate my spirit from whatever rut it has worn itself into in the preceding year – a shot in the arm, a shake awake, and a timely (hah!) reminder that life is passing, and won’t come again – and that really, truly, it is not good enough to spend weeks at a time achieving nothing more remarkable than an encyclopaedic knowledge of the various ailments suffered by the characters of Tenko.  It is the opportunity for change.

As I get older, new year is taking on even greater significance, as the pace of change that life imposes on me on its own account (as opposed to the chosen changes I laboriously will into being) slows down.

Between leaving school and my late 20s, life hustled me along with gratifying haste.  First I had a gap year, an experience that hooked me on the intoxicating drug of constant change for its own sake, of always having somewhere else to go.  Then university, which although a solid stint of three years, was a constant cycle of change – first this flat, then that, these friends then those, this unit and then the next, exams, holiday plans, dead time followed by deadline, on and on.  Then two masters degrees, interspersed with full-time jobs that lasted for six months, eight months, ten months – between 2007 and 2010, I lived in a different city every year.

I liked being able to earmark chunks of my past based on some significant aspect like that – the city I lived in, the qualification I obtained, the job I had, the person I loved, each year a discreet unit with little long term overlap.  I liked the simplicity and the variety of it, and this preference seeped into other aspects of my life – although I am always buying things, I tend to give a lot of things away; although I have passionate connections to my friends, the oldest and best of them will tell you how hopeless I can be at keeping in touch.  The wheel turns and I turn with it, keen for renewal, for the new.

However, as I stare down the barrel of 30, I realise that wheel is slowing down, and that I am… accreting.  I have lived in the same city for four years, the same flat for two; I have been in the same job (a proper, full-time, permanent, professional job) for 18 months.  I save money, I own furniture, I am planning to buy a flat as soon as may be.  I am becoming (belatedly) a grown-up.  This is both gratifying and terrifying in equal measure.  It is as if hitherto I have been a liquid, sloshing around from corner to corner and shape to shape, and now I am solidifying at an alarming rate, becoming the person I will have to live with for the rest of my life.  If I allow it to happen, I will turn around in five or ten years time and find that I remain, give or take a few wrinkly bits, the exact same person that I am today, and will have simply lived out several repetitions (with minor variations) of the same year.  The world will permit that; it no longer demands change, or choice.  It is I myself who must demand it, if I want it.

And I do; I want to keep on changing, to keep on learning, to keep on opening doors of possibility rather than letting them shut behind me.  I want to continue to be able to say, “that was they year that I achieved that goal/had that experience/made that start.”  And so I do what I do every year around this time – I make a list of hopes and dreams, call them resolutions, and make a promise to myself to try to change, to learn, to open the doors.  Here’s to 2014, the year that I:

1)     Give up drinking for January. 
OK, it’s hardly stunning in its originality, nor is it exactly challenging; but being booze free for a time gives me the time, the money and the energy to do the other things I want to do.

2)     Learn to preserve food.
This one’s a bit folksy, but I really love the idea of making my own jams and pickles.  Last year, on a trip to the US, I fell so in love with pickles that I bought this brilliant book from the overwhelmingly vast and wonderful Powell’s bookstore in Portland, flew back home full of good intentions… then stuffed it on a shelf and forgot about it for eight months.  Fail.  2014 will be the year that I put food in jars.  Mmmmm, botulism, here I come.

3)     Finish knitting this dratted jumper.
I have been knitting the same jumper for about two years.  At one point, I left it for so long it got weevils and had to be fumigated.  This is getting ridiculous.  Just.  Do.  It.

4)     Start writing this dratted novel.
Even more shameful than an unfinished novel is a novel you never began.  For getting on 10 years (yes, that’s right, 10 years) I have been claiming to be ‘writing a novel’ about Caravaggio.  Thus far, it consists of about 4000 words total of miscellaneous first draft scraps, including one passage referred to in my house as the ‘sex in a cupboard’ scene, which out of context (and as there is no novel, there is no context) just sounds wrong.  This is EMBARASSING, and must be remedied.

5)     Learn French.
I don’t want to live in the UK for the whole of the rest of my life.  I don’t have any solid plans or immediate intentions, but one day, I want to live and work abroad.  French specifically may or may not be useful, but it’s good to keep your hand in with languages.

6)     Get fit.
2013 may not have been the standout most exciting year of my life, but it did contain one notable feature – I got fit.  Not Schwarzenegger fit – I doubt that that is either achievable or desirable for a pudgy English girl – but daily exercise, bags of energy and endorphins, I-can-feel-my-muscles-when-I-walk fit.  I hardly looked different at all, but I felt fantastic.  And then my birthday and Christmas came along, and an orgy of overindulgence has left me bloated, lazy and knackered.  I want to feel fantastic again.

7)     Let my work into my life.
It’s time to can this attitude I’ve had that paid work and my “real life” are mutually exclusive.  I think this is a hangover from my uni days, when the need to have a paying part time job (or jobs) alongside my full-time study meant that it was very important to carve out time that wasn’t for work, and wasn’t for study – clearly demarcated ‘me’ time in which I could abandon the otherwise omnipresent guilty feeling that whatever I was doing, I probably ought to be doing something else.  In real terms, it means that I turn up to a job and I work, hard, and for as long as is necessary to get the work done to the best of my ability – but when I go home that’s that.  This doesn’t actually make the slightest bit of sense anymore, given that I am finally working in a field that interests and challenges me, and about which I have some actual opinions.  I’ve met lots of knowledgeable, passionate people working in information, and I want to be one of them.  I want to be talking about it, learning about it, and getting involved in a way that goes beyond what is relevant to the specific task I’m doing at the time.

8)     Be a good mentor.
Through my job, I’ve been able to get involved in an email-based pupil mentoring programme, and have been paired with a really, nice, smart girl who’s just started her GCSEs.  I want to do my very best to help her achieve her goals this year.

9)     Pick up my trumpet.
I have a (slowly rusting) trumpet under the bed.  Time to get it out and start pissing off the neighbours.

10)  Write.  Write write write write write!
This is the big one.  Writing used to be my LIFE.  It was all I did, all I wanted to do – I still have a trick of mind where I narrate my life to myself in my head as I’m living it, because I used to write as naturally as breathing.  Most of it was ghastly bad, of course, but that’s beside the point.  The sheer volume of my creative output, and the pleasure it used to give me, was spectacular.  And it still gives me a buzz like nothing else.  Even now – writing what is essentially a glorified shopping list – watching the sentences appear on the page, reaching for the word that will work, is the best feeling I have had all day.  I am going to commit to writing something creative – a bit of novel, a blog post, even a poem (God help us all) – at least three times a week.

That’s probably enough to be getting on with for now.  Loads of other things I’d like to do, and hopefully will, but these ten resolutions will give me something to goad myself into action with when all I want to do is slump down on the sofa and read Damn You, Autocorrect for five hours straight.

Any encouragement, suggestions or lists of your own will be received with interest!