312: hashtag soblessed

One of the great joys of parenting is the almost constant sense of bewilderment and the nagging feeling that you’ve missed something quite important somewhere along the line which will, in short order, come back to you just that little bit too late to do anything about it. Like being the only parent who forgets it’s non-uniform day, or odd socks day, or that it’s an INSET day and you’re the only parent who has taken their child to school (sorry, Thing 1). I’m nineteen years plus into this mothering lark and I still haven’t got the hang of it. If I end the day with the same number I started with I’m counting it as a win, even now. If they’re fed and clean, all the better though these days they take care of the latter themselves and they’re getting better at the former.

Don’t get me wrong, dear readers. I did not start this journey with quite such a cavalier attitude to my offspring.

When I started down this road I had visions of being the sort of parent who’d have all the kids’ clothes out ready for the morning, all co-ordinated and cute. I’d do baby led weaning and nary a jar of Cow & Gate cauliflower cheese would grace my shelves let alone baby crack (aka Petit Filou). Annabel Karmel would be my guru. They would be breakfasted on something healthy and be at school ready to learn with their socks up and their hair in plaits (not Thing 3, at least until Covid hit and his response to our DIY haircut was to refuse to have his hair touched for the next two years).

I wouldn’t be that parent who was in Tesco at 8am shoving the food tech ingredients into a basket and hissing ‘measure them when you get there!’. I would remember parents’ evening and to buy end of term cards for teachers, but not Roses or Quality Street. I too would be immaculately turned out, possibly with grown up shoes, tamed hair and flicky eyeliner. I’d be on time to the childminder, and would have meal plans that didn’t involve fish fingers. I would remember to book the appointments for parents evening.

Mum Barbie (TM) lived rent-free in my head, as the youth would have it.

I am sure I could have been Mum Barbie, really, except for that thing called real life that kept getting in the way. Thing 1 was a fussy eater, colicky when she was small and then she didn’t like pureed butternut squash and sweet potato, or green things. She would like one thing for a week so you’d lay in a stock. Big mistake. Huge mistake. I learned. Petit Filou to the rescue, as at least she was eating. At 19 she’s still a fussy eater. Still, I loathe beans and pulses of all description because of the texture so I can’t really criticise. Things 2 and 3 – jars all the way. Sanity saved. Thing 2 has turned out to be a foodie and will try anything – her favourite food was always ‘someone else’s’ and if we mislaid her in a restaurant she was to be found peering over a table at other people’s food, with an unnerving hard stare similar to that patented by Paddington.

As for the co-ordinated cute clothes – well, there were clothes and thank heavens the kids were cute. Tracy the childminder/lifesaver used to say that the parents at the school knew which parent had been responsible for dressing the child that morning. Three days a week I’d be off to work at 6am and Daddy was in charge of clothes. Just because everything has stripes it doesn’t mean they match. My own dressing for several of those early years was more ‘has anyone been sick on me? Nope? Good to go!’ than a ‘fit check’ as Thing 1 tells me these are called.

At no point did my children arrive at school with their socks up. Thing 1 was often handed over straight to first aid thanks to her ability to fall over from a standing start, while Thing 2 was usually screaming in fury at being left at school. Thing 3 was a dirt magnet. I gave up: they were there. I wasn’t late, although my hair remained (and remains) untamed and I still live in DMs and Converse. I tried ballet flats but with my Hobbit feet they’re never going to work. Flicky eyeliner remains beyond me even with felt tip pens and a stencil.

2017. First day of new school. Note socks.

I was in awe of those parents who managed with swan-like serenity to juggle their offspring from school to activity to gym to bed on time, probably via something home cooked and nutritious. The ones with the perfect blonde highlights, yoga pants and immaculate children with big bows in their hair. Their kids probably came home with the same clothes they started with and didn’t lose whole PE kits (twice). The ones who made things for cake sales, ran the PTA (in school hours – way to alienate the working parents, folks!) and who always managed to make it to school assemblies and sports days in time to sit at the front to cheer their child on, even though we weren’t supposed to. I hated sports days as a child and as a teacher, and even as a parent that never changed.

The Playground Mum Barbie cliquey mums at the gates who gathered in twittery groups and went for coffee at Costa and yoga classes together while I hared off down the hill to the station. Who collared mums they’d never usually deign to speak to when they wanted your support to get a child with what would turn out to be ADHD removed from the school ‘for his own sake, so he can have the care he needs (simper simper)’. The ones who share carefully curated family pictures on their socials with hashtags like ‘making memories’ and ‘so blessed’. In my head I knew that these weren’t ‘real life’ and their reality was probably much like mine, but one thing you learn when you live with mental health issues is that your head is a bloody liar at times.

No one carefully curates the moments when your phone rings with the school number on it and your heart sinks. Is it the umpteenth courtesy call of the week to say that Thing 2 has clashed heads with her inseparable buddy again and just to be aware. The fourth call in one day to say that the three year old had got overexcited playing dinosaurs in the playground before school and bitten someone, and did we need to have a chat about his behaviour before he started school six months later?

No one curates the moment when you’re trying to wrangle three kids out of the door and you wonder when it’s your turn to have the meltdown at the idea of putting shoes and coat on and going somewhere. The cluster feeding when they’re either attached to you or screaming and you can’t put them down, so you walk for hours pushing the buggy and crying quietly knowing that as soon as you get back to the house it’ll start again. The moment when they found the crayons or the maple syrup and redecorated the walls or carpet, or when they refused the carefully cooked fish fingers but ate the compost from the plants, or when you decided that enough was enough and everyone was having the same dinner. Stroganoff Gate remains one of the worst evenings of my life. When you’re on the phone trying to explain to the doctor that no, I can’t bring in the one with the suspected ear infection as the other one has confirmed chicken pox. I can laugh now about the year I begged – only half in jest – for just 24 hours without a sick child. I made it to 25 and it started again. No really, I can laugh about it now.

Post-Natal Depression Barbie has never taken off, for some reason. Even poor old Pregnant Barbie was discontinued. There’s probably a reason for that.

Eventually you find your playground tribe. Often it’s the ones also dashing up the hill from the train, cursing the existence of Platform 1 and having to cross the bridge and the fact that there’s never a bus when you really need one. I was lucky and had a childminder who did pick-ups three days a week but on the rare occasions… We moved schools when Thing 1 went to secondary school: Things 2 and 3 started at the primary school in our village, where the worst thing that I heard on the first day was ‘They tried to play with me and they didn’t even introduce themselves!’. The playground parents were much friendlier, and the school was more welcoming. I think I got the hang of it all eventually – I still miss the odd parents evening, as telling me about a March date in the previous September, and sending 13 page newsletters is too much to wade through.

I think I’m winning. There’s three kids here and I’m pretty sure they’re mine – I’ll take it! #soblessed

Things making me happy this week

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Not this little thug, who attempted to hamstring me earlier for having the temerity to walk past her
Making a job offer to a new team member – made my day!
Thing 2’s new obsession with sourdough – cinnamon and raisin has been my favourite this week, though the rosemary and confit garlic is pretty impressive
Bridgerton. So frothy and flirty and fun. Benedict is redeemed
https://www.instagram.com/realpuppetregime/ on Instagram – very funny
Several days of sunshine, which went a long way to curing all ills
My thumb joint slowly improving – hopefully I’ll be able to crochet again soon

And that’s it from me for the week! Hope you’ve had a good one too.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Kate Shugak Investigations 5 – 10 – Dana Stabenow. That’s it. Nothing else.

310: on the up

On Wednesday my feet did not want to go to the office. They didn’t want to leave the house, get on the bus or step onto the Central Line either. It was a wobble day – the worst I’ve had for a while, and I very nearly gave in and let them take me home again. Only the fact that I had a day of interviews ahead of me kept me moving forwards.

I stopped at Pret on the way to the office in the hope that a hot chocolate would be an excellent brain reset. It wasn’t and the final stretch between Pret and the desk was like wading through treacle. A couple of hours burning through emails at least felt practical, and then I had to switch on the smile and chat to people who want to work with us. They’ve put the effort in to apply, so they deserve a good interview. We met some really lovely people, and I think I fooled them.

I reached out to an old friend who also has the odd wobble, and they checked in on me through the day and over the next couple – as I’d done for them a couple of weeks ago. This helped a lot, especially as they know enough not to ask why it’s a bad day. There’s often no reason.

As the organisation’s Mental Health First Aider – and as a parent, step-parent and friend of people who live with mental health issues – I know the advice I would give to a colleague, the kids or my friends. It would not have been ‘go to work and pretend everything was OK’, but to take a step back, go and talk to someone and see if there was a way to take a break for a few days. What I told myself, though, was that I would be fine once we got going. I chunked up the day into manageable bits so I only had to survive the morning, lunchtime, and the afternoon and not a whole day. Sounds weird but it worked.

The text message – brief but cheering – from my Beloved, simply saying ‘I’m cooking’ was a big help, taking something potentially stressful out of the equation. I can’t remember the last time he cooked spontaneously, so this was a nice surprise. I was able to go home, eat dinner and go and drink tea and read a book in a hot bath – much needed as the interview room had been freezing.

Thursday was marginally better, and Friday was a WFH day where some of the day was spent keeping Miriam’s house elves company. I survived the week with the help of a good playlist and kind friends. Every day I can say ‘I’ll phone the doctor tomorrow if I don’t feel better’ is another day I’ve functioned and another day fighting off the black dog. I do not have time to be unwell, as my late and much-missed mother-in-law used to say. I have too much to do.

Still, now I’m levelling out and hopefully this week will carry on the upward trajectory. If not, I can always phone the doctor….tomorrow.

EDIT: I intended also in this post to talk about Mychal Threets, a lovely librarian and Reading Rainbow presenter on NPR, who blew up Threads this week when he spoke candidly (as he always does) about his mental health. As he says, another day he can talk about it is another day he’s on the planet. However…some women took it upon themselves to complain to his employers about his use of his personal platform, calling him threatening and triggering. NPR supported him as did the people of Threads, who were saddled up and ready to ride at dawn to protect him. He champions libraries, library kids, autism, books, mental health. He’s great, and he’s right to use his platform for his issues. If we don’t talk enough about mental health the stigma attached to it continues, especially in the culture of toxicity which can exist in some corners of social media.

Good things this week (yes, there were some)

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Ballet with Thing 2 last Sunday – very, very funny. I thought the person next to me was going to fall off her chair laughing. I like matinee performances, as you can be home for teatime
The abundance of mindless trash on Kindle Unlimited that requires no thinking (and is not listed below!)
Lemon Drizzle cake courtesy of Thing 2
Getting round to making this yellow bag from a Merchant and Mills pattern
Discovering new music
The comfort of a warm furry cat tucked up on my shoulder as I write
How happy Dobby & Kreacher were to see me on Friday morning

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Here’s hoping this week is better! I’m off to the ballet with Sue on Wednesday, this time to see something with opera in it, and we have more interviews to do before we start shortlisting and meeting volunteers.

Same time next week, people. Chin up!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

House of Flame and Shadow – Sarah J. Maas (Audible)

Ride or Die – Hailey Edwards

First Witches Club – Maisey Yates

227: Tasmanian Devil mode engaged

This week I am feeling a little more human – thank you to all the lovely people who reached out to me after last week’s post via Facebook, WhatsApp and so on. It was much appreciated. Thanks also to my Dad, who told me to get on a plane next time and he’d pick me up at the airport for some time off from responsibility. The thought is very tempting, especially on evenings like Thursday when I got home from work at about 8.30 having been to a leaving do and no one had bothered to cook.

I had a couple of days off this week, with the intention of relaxing – it’s probably an indicator of how bad a state I was that it was a real effort to slow down and not feel as if I HAD to finish everything I started. In retrospect, a nine-patch quilt wasn’t the best choice of lazy project. It lends itself to chain piecing for the patches, strips and blocks so you work almost on autopilot. I decided when the blocks were pieced together that I’d make it Quilt-As-You-Go rather than continue in automatic mode which meant some slower focus on keeping my stitching the ditch neat. You can see the quilted blocks here., and Bailey inspecting my work.

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So that was the weekend and Monday. My brain was still in overdrive, so when on Tuesday I got up, put my table up and caught myself going into autopilot I made the conscious decision to slow down. So I put the table away, picked up my book and decided to have a lazy day instead. And it was lovely! I had a lunchtime nap, watched some Doctor Who with Thing 2, read my book and later in the day I did some cross stitch and caught up with the temperature tracker which had been sadly neglected since the end of April.

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I wasn’t completely sane by the time I went back to the office on Thursday but I was definitely feeling the benefit of some time out. The quilt isn’t finished, but that’s OK – it’s not going anywhere and will still be there when I’m ready to work on it.

Things making me happy this week

Thing 2 becoming hooked on Doctor Who and asking for it to be put on in the evenings. We have just come to the end of David Tennant and Matt Smith has landed.
Having an 18 year daughter – where did the time go?
Sunshine (until it got too hot)
Dinner with London sister and Cardiff cousins on Saturday night
Making it to Week 4 on the Couch to 5k. Five minutes of running doesn’t sound like a lot….
Making business card holders for my lovely business cards. With pocketses!

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Same time next week, dear readers! The ironing awaits and I have run out of trousers….

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Spook Street/This Is What Happened/The Secret Hours – Mick Herron

Hot Water – Christopher Fowler

Down Under – Bill Bryson (Audible)

226: a visit from the hound

Full disclosure: this is not a post about actual dogs. Sorry. Especially to my cousin who really, really likes dogs.

It became increasingly obvious by the end of last week that I was in the middle of a fairly serious wobble, on a scale that I haven’t experienced for a while. I should probably have spotted it earlier in the week, when being in a room with people was too much, I was heading to bed at 8.30pm with a book to avoid the sensory overload of the TV, completely unable to concentrate at work and going round and round one piece of work that I just couldn’t get past, and seriously contemplating calling in sick and sitting in silence all day.

When I am on a downward spiral I have a tendency to make questionable decisions and while in my head I know that I should refrain from making them, that same head is the one causing the problem in the first place so those filters are not necessarily in place. At one point I even gave in and had a rest in the office on the giant beanbag (this is a thing! We are allowed to do this!) because I couldn’t keep going. I tried taking an afternoon off on the Friday but spent most of it waiting outside a lock-up to drop off our festival kit, as the person who was supposed to be there to meet me wasn’t, so that didn’t work. My Saturday was taken up with an extended family barbecue which meant I had to be sociable – not that I don’t love them all but I just didn’t have the capacity for it. Sunday was Cally Road Festival so I had to be extrovert all day when my entire being was fighting it…

Even a good long stomp through the fields on Monday morning in a ‘forced restart’ attempt didn’t help: I couldn’t hit my pace and felt like I was wading through treacle physically as well as mentally. The paths were sticky and swampy after several days of torrential rain, and the final straw was stepping on a tussock of grass which turned out to be disguising an ankle deep puddle.

When you’re (allegedly) a functioning adult with a responsible job and a family and several cats and a never-ending pile of laundry, you don’t feel you have luxury of giving in to a wobble – which means that you add denial to the load you’re carrying. Twenty plus years of dealing with depression should have taught me that this is a tactic which never works – a breakdown isn’t like a Teams meeting that you can schedule in between another couple of meetings, and unlike a piece of work you can’t block out a day in the diary to get it out of the way. I described it to a colleague as feeling like I was juggling axes and someone had just thrown me a chainsaw.

As the official office Mental Health First Aider (with a certificate to prove it!), if anyone came to me and said they were feeling like this I’d have taken them off for a cup of tea and a chat, helped them speak to their line manager, signposted all the things we have in place to support them, and probably encouraged them to take a few days off to rest. As the person having a mental health crisis this week, I forgot to do this for myself…there is an MH First Responder as well, but I forgot that in the moment and also she’d have had to refer me back to me….

Depression is also a terrible liar and tells you that you’re being silly and making a fuss and you’ll just be bothering people if you go and tell them how you’re feeling….so you don’t.

I am very lucky in that our organisation is inclusive and open and run by people who actually want you to thrive, rather than others I have worked in where you felt were dispensable as there would always be a stream of people waiting to work there. I felt confident enough on the Friday to say to my boss that I was struggling (probably so that she could sense-check my questionable decisions) and she checked back in with me on the Monday morning to see how I was doing and to work with me to put a plan in place for the week – an extra day at home if I needed it, time to rest etc. I think I am coming out of the other side now, and have booked a couple of days of me-time this week (plan: read books, turn fabric into other things, sleep). I think (I hope) that I am past the days when the first thing you do every morning is wonder whether this is going to be a good day or a bad one (now I just wonder which bit of me is going to ache most) but it was an unpleasant reminder that every so often the Black Dog can still put his paws on my shoulders.

Things making me happy this week

An England football game that wasn’t 119 minutes of tedium (including extra time) with 90 seconds of excitement. I miss Gareth Southgate’s waistcoats. I like Gareth Southgate and would like him to win the Euros except for the fact that if this happened English fans would bang on about it for the next 60 years.
Things 2 & 3’s sports day on Friday. I loathed sports day as a pupil, detested it as a teacher and hated it as a parent but felt guilty if I missed it even though there are two parents in this household. Now they are in secondary school I don’t have to go and I don’t have to feel a single SMIDGE of guilt about it.
New business cards which means I have an excellent excuse to make a new business card holder, which my Beloved thinks is unnecessary but what does he know?
Handing over the community part of my job to our lovely new Community Partnerships Producer
Thing 1’s brownies and Thing 2’s S’more Cookies
Getting a date for Thing 3’s foot surgery that’s not months and months away – don’t panic Mother, it’s an ingrown toenail
Not having to work this weekend and a lovely swim in a weedless lake with Sue and Rachel on Saturday morning
Discovering a quilting technique – Kawandi – I haven’t tried yet but which looks like fun.

Today I get to spend some time with GrandThing 1 while my Beloved helps Timeshare Teen 1 move house before GTs 3 and 4 arrive, and I’m looking forward to my time off! Thing 1 is 18 on Monday so I must also make a cake and wonder how that happened….

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Going Rogue – Janet Evanovich

The Secret Hours – Mick Herron

The New Iberia Blues – James Lee Burke

Down Under – Bill Bryson (Audible)

210: mad March malaise

Ah, March. People who’ve worked with me for years will recognise this as my annual ‘chuck the toys out of the pram and swear I need another job’ moment, despite the fact that I love my job and really don’t want another one. Usually it’s related to the performance appraisal cycle, when I’m reviewing my year against targets and feeling as if I have achieved absolutely nothing.

In my head I know that the targets set the previous year are SMART (but VAGUE) and often don’t reflect the things I do across the year – which in some years have included writing a unit for the London Curriculum, working on hugely successful exhibitions and applications, developing innovative sessions, pulling off high profile events, to name a few things. If the things aren’t quantified in the targets I feel like a failure.

My current role doesn’t work to the April-March appraisal cycle but it turns out my brain hasn’t worked that out, so I’ve spent all week with a horrible case of impostor syndrome and associated wobbles. Oh yes, and a cold and the tail end of a cold sore.

Tuesday was the worst day. The cats were misbehaving, Thing 2’s work experience paperwork needed sorting out, I had a headache that wouldn’t go away, Thing 2’s eczema was making her miserable and it was clearly my fault, Thing 3 was being stroppy, Thing 1 has mocks and was stressed, my throat hurt, the big piece of work I’d finished the previous week was all wrong, everyone wanted me to do everything all at once, and I was clearly failing on all counts. I was also very, very tired.

I was very, very tired as on Monday I’d been to a conference at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, which meant getting up at 4.30am, travelling 3.5 hours each way and when I got back at 8pm they were all waiting to be fed (see? all this responsibility!). It was a really interesting day, despite the cold taking hold and feeling very down – all about values-led community engagement.

One of the breakout sessions, led by the team from the Bluecoat in Liverpool, got us thinking about resilience vs vulnerability and how we define them. Resilience is a word which has been massively overused in the culture sector for the past 15 years or so – ‘resilience training’ for staff, along with ‘change management’ training, is often chased rapidly by other re- words, like restructure, reorganisation, redundancy, and (the most recent one I’ve heard) realignment, Resilience has been pushed on us by years of under-resourcing and uncertain funding, and vulnerability – especially personal – is often masked by a culture of toxic positivity masquerading as resilience. It was a relief to have a conversation with a group of people with shared experiences from across the sector, including one who’d been at one of the same organisations as me during the post-Covid ‘recovery’ process.

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Chichester was lovely, too – I took a wander around it after the sessions and before the train – it’s a funny place, with about 12 phone shops interspersed with much higher-end shops (and a New Look with a frontage like the British Museum). There was some lovely street art as well, including a Stik piece, tucked away in side streets.

Pallant House Gallery’s exhibition of work by John Craxton, an artist who’d spent a long time in Greece, is worth a visit if you find yourself over that way. I adored the mischievous cats he’d captured in some of his paintings, and some of them would lend themselves beautifully to textile work.

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Other things making me happy this week:

Little lambs seen from the train (and going on a train. I like trains)
Early Saturday morning coffee
Deep Heat on a stiff neck
Spring being on its way – and an office with daylight and a door we can prop open to the fire escape to enjoy it.
Excellent progress on the Rivendell cross stitch and the alpaca scarf

Same time next week then! A couple of four day weeks coming up with the promise of chocolate eggs, what’s not to love?

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches – Sangu Mandanna

The Unfortunate Side Effects of Heartbreak and Magic – Breanne Randall

At Home – Bill Bryson (Audible)

Sweets: A History of Temptation – Tim Richardson

Noise Floor – Andrew Cartmel

A Blend of Magic – Kate Kenzie

188: the art of saying ‘no’

I am not entirely sure what happened to or in this week but I do know that on Friday morning I had to make a choice between attending all the things in my diary and making a show of myself by having a meltdown, or clearing the diary and spending the day at my desk making sense of my lengthy to-do list and looking at exciting spreadsheets. November looms, and with it National Illustration Day, which has mushroomed from a small(ish) schools thing to something that’s going to engage all sorts of people: a celebration of our community projects with various Islington groups with a friends and family event; school sessions; three days of drop-in illustration at Angel Central; an unrelated but well-timed community lights switch-on event the previous weekend at Islington Green – and business as usual happening all around it! I am wondering whether setting up a tent in the pop-up space at Angel Central for the week is a realistic suggestion…

I chose to clear the diary: while I do pride myself on being able to prioritise my workload (you should see my to-do chart) and manage multiple projects, sometimes you need to step back and remember that not everything has to be done all at once. Friday’s diary included an online meeting, an offsite meeting and a workshop in the afternoon. Both the meetings were for timebound projects but not urgent, and the workshop was a ‘nice to do’. Having walked from the station to the office giving myself unsuccessful pep-talks and arriving on the verge of a full-blown panic attack, clearing the diary seemed more sensible.

One topic that comes up over and over again in job interviews is time management: how do you cope with deadlines, with multiple projects; how do you prioritise. I have even set prioritisation tasks for co-ordinator and contact centre roles and asked candidates to explain their reasoning (sorry, people! Although not you, Mr Patronising PhD man applying for a role you’re vastly overqualified for. Not you.). A better question might be about strategies people use when they are overwhelmed, making space for employers to show an understanding of the impact of stress at work.

Last year there was a lot in media – social and later mainstream – about quiet quitting and this year it’s been ‘lazy girl jobs‘. I can’t say I agree with the idea that you should just work to your job description, especially in a small team where everyone needs to pitch in with things to make a project work. Over the last couple of years I have seen this in action: ‘well, my job description says Monday to Friday, my job description says I finish at 5’, and – increasingly – sticking rigidly to ‘minimum’ onsite hours. This creates resentment within the team, particularly with those colleagues who are the ones who recognise that a job goes beyond the description and who are inevitably the ones who pick up the slack and ensure that schools are greeted, that evening events are staffed, that all the things that can’t happen remotely still happen. Over the years I have manned front desks, sat in galleries, shifted furniture, delivered emergency school sessions, ‘meeted and greeted’ groups, told stories, hopped behind the bar, cleared tables, made coffee, lugged boxes, and many other things that aren’t explicitly in my job description but which needed to be done. It’s in my management skillset: don’t ask someone to do something you’re not prepared to do yourself. It comes under ‘and other reasonable duties as requested by your manager’.

Residents at Lady Dinah’s Cat Emporium: advocates of both radical rest and work-life balance

I do, however, believe strongly in the concept of work-life balance, and that sometimes you have to say no. I’ve been very lucky over the last ten years or so to have managers who have understood this (all women – coincidence?) and who have modelled excellent behaviour for me as I’ve moved up the ranks. There is also a movement towards Radical Rest in the arts and culture sector, spearheaded by a group of sector professionals including my predecessor in my current role. Giving ourselves permission to rest (or to say no) is quite tricky, it seems.

Other things making me happy this week

Thing 2 is 15 today, and currently opening her presents with glee
Hot glue guns and Christmas crochet
Not having to get on the Central Line for another 10 days
Toast

And tomorrow I am off to Wales for half term,

Underground Overground – Andrew Martin

White Butterfly – Walter Mosley

The E. Nesbit Megapack

Victory Disc/Flip Back – Andrew Cartmel (Audible)

141: more meetings than you can shake a stick at

Well, that was a week of highs and lows, it really was. One of those weeks (another one of those weeks) when you’re in so many meetings that you haven’t got time to do your job, but this week it got on top of me and sparked a meltdown panic attack on Wednesday which was definitely the low point.

The problem with not having a museum to do museum learning in is that every time you want to deliver a session – piloting new content – you need to take all the kit that in business-as-usual times would be in a handy cupboard, pack it in boxes and suitcases, seriously consider taking two 84 litre Really Useful Boxes and a massive wheelie suitcase on public transport to the school (in Ilford, in this case, on a train strike day) and then get real and book a cab. We had two sessions booked at a school where the DT department are up for almost anything, so we took the kit over on Monday – thanks to the aforementioned train strike and the seemingly interminable November weather, the journey took the best part of two hours to go 15 miles. Then, having delivered the kit to the school, I had another several hours in traffic to get home. Oh joy. What is described as ‘managed decline’ on the Central Line meant three out of four trains were terminating at Loughton, and there was an 18 minute wait for the first Epping train….which then waited five minutes at Loughton for the next terminating train as the changeover driver was on that one. I have decided every time I have to wait fifteen minutes for a train to Epping I am going to claim a refund. A faff, but the service is appalling at the moment: 42 minutes to do a 12 minute journey (four stops!) is unacceptable.

Tuesday – the day of the sessions – was amazing. I have been working with a designer called Lea Jagendorf to develop sessions which support two of the case studies in the new Design Gallery: ‘Design Can…’ is the starting point and these two sessions supported ‘Design makes things last longer’ and ‘Design responds to people’s needs’. It turned out Lea had been set as homework for the two classes, so she was confronted with 45 A3 posters all about herself…

We have built a learning collection of objects which will be in the new gallery, from the anti-hostile design DEFIANT by Hamzah Al Asadulloh to adaptive clothing by Tommy Hilfiger and Vans, alongside pieces by Petit Pli and Expandals. The sessions offer opportunities to brainstorm ideas, to try rapid prototyping with a variety of materials, and to collaborate on responding to briefs. Both classes had some amazing ideas and we’ll be seeing them again to do some co-curation for the same gallery in a couple of weeks. This week I am testing the final design session – ‘If the Shoe Fits’ – which explores user-centred design through our collection of historic and modern children’s shoes, with lots of practical making with a very varied set of materials. Support from my fabulous creative learning facilitator – who feels about materials the way I feel about shoes and books – has been invaluable.

The less said about Wednesday morning the better, but luckily the team around me are amazing and they got me through the rest of the day – which finished in Bethnal Green with a ‘sneak peek’ for local teachers. I overcatered, but the staffroom at the school benefited the next morning! It’s so good to be able to share what we’re doing behind the scenes and to ask teachers what they want from us. Miriam retrieved me from the station, fed me dinner and we played D&D which is always a high point of the week. Three of us brought lebkuchen as game snacks – it’s that time of year again!

Thursday was a day of actually achieving stuff (emails! work! planning!) which made me feel a lot better, and Friday was an adventure to Clerkenwell to meet the designer Sam Hecht of Industrial Facility who along with his partner Kim Colin made a collection of under-a-fiver objects from all over the world. They are loaning it to the new Design Gallery, and this is what we’ll be co-curating with the Ilford school the week after next. The collection is full of little oddities like magic potato peeling gloves and a terracotta foot scrubber: things designed for a specific purpose, some of which meet the need and others – like a combined craft knife and scissors – don’t. I’ve had fun tracking the objects down to create a handling collection, so my Amazon algorithms are a bit skewed at the moment. Clerkenwell is one of my favourite bits of London, all little courts and alleyways with a mix of new and ancient buildings. I also got to use the Elizabeth Line – the easiest change at Stratford and only three stops! It’s making my inner tube nerd very happy, that line, and I am looking forward to being able to hop onto it at Stratford and go all the way to Ealing to see London sister.

Other things making me happy this week…

Speaking of London sister – it was her birthday on Friday and despite postal strikes her present and card arrived, and she likes them.
The Christmas cake is baked and ready to be fed with rum for the next few weeks
Lots of crochet done in preparation for the Christmas Market next week
Dog walk with Miriam, Jill (who’s got up two days running!) and the house elves, followed by a mooch round the market, coffee, pastries and a good therapeutic giggle.
Tom Waits on Spotify
A glorious swim at 9 degrees with Jill this morning, with much swearing as we got in.

Now I must go and do the ironing, before spending some time with a glue gun and various other bits and bobs.

See you next week!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Quite – Claudia Winkleman

Murder Before Evensong – Revd. Richard Coles

Don’t Need The Sunshine – John Osborne

54: one of those weeks

It’s been a funny old week, really. At work we were coming to the end of the consultation period for what we hope was the last phase of the restructure (for a while, anyway) and, being a union rep, its been a bit frenzied for the last couple of months. The people I have been supporting have been angry, confused, upset, worried – about themselves, their colleagues and friends, and the collection – and frustrated. It’s been made more difficult as there was an anonymous leak to the press before it was announced to the museum staff, so the process has been happening under scrutiny from the broadsheets, Radio 4, a few of the arts journals and even parliament, where an early day motion was brought about the National Art Library.

I have come away from the process knowing a lot more about the workings of the conservation and curatorial teams, and have seen the museum values of generosity, collaboration and innovation demonstrated by the staff on a daily basis. The term ‘grace under fire’ has never made more sense, particularly as some of the meetings were being led by people whose jobs were also at risk of redundancy. It’s never felt more important to be a part of the union.

The kids have also been at home for their Easter holidays, which always makes online meetings more of a challenge! At least I wasn’t trying to manage home learning as well as the meetings, which really would have been the final straw. As it was, I made it as far as Wednesday and then decided I’d take Thursday off to clear my head.

Wednesday evening was a bit of a treat. As part of the rehoming of the learning collection I had sent some boxes off to Northern Ireland to Time Steps Living History, which is a historical interpretation company. Owned by Ireland sister, Time Steps provides sessions in schools, community venues, care homes, and historic sites and celebrated 10 years in business this week. ‘Sent some boxes’ sounds quite straightforward, doesn’t it? It skims over the fact that in the process I have had to raise a complaint with Hermes who won’t accept parcels for NI as they think it’s international (their international site thinks otherwise), and have a lengthy web chat with DPD whose delivery driver was unable to raise the museum contact despite having two phone numbers, a one hour slot when people were actively looking out for them and detailed instructions on which gate to use. Still, they got there in the end.

Where was I? Oh yes, Wednesday evening. Ireland sister and I videochatted while she unpacked the boxes, as I’d forgotten what was in them. It felt like Christmas for me, watching her discover tiny clogs, lots of ephemera, historic costume replica, toys, and more. All these things have been hidden in boxes in our cupboards, and now they’ll be having a new life when she can get back into schools and the community. My niece and nephew were also on the call – she is a mini history buff and he is incurably curious, pouncing on the wooden toys and experimenting. After a really hard few days (weeks!) it was wonderful to bring a bit of joy to someone.

My gorgeous niece Catrin modelling a replica bonnet. Image © Time Steps/Stephanie Lavery

Thursday became a bit of a mental health day, with reading and making things and generally not looking at screens except when I wanted to. It was lovely to be able to talk to the Things without having to take a pair of earphones off, be able to listen to the Minecraft explanations without half my mind being on my next meeting, and to be able to sit in silence at times. Silence is under-rated in these days of working from home and hyperconnectedness.

Simnel cake – shared with the neighbours

I have also managed to swim twice this week. The urge to get back in the water – chilly or not – has been so strong in the past few weeks that I’ve been able to visualise the chill of the water as it creeps up the legs of my wetsuit. On Monday I was so happy afterwards I got the giggles, as well as the silly grin we all get. The air was warmer than the water, which was sitting at 9 degrees, so getting changed was quite pleasant. Yesterday, the water was 10.6 degrees and the air was in single figures with a biting wind, so I was glad of my onesie with no awkward fastenings. In the van next to us a little girl had put her face underwater and got brain freeze – luckily I still had some hot chocolate left in the flask to share with her!

Copped Hall walk

Last Sunday my beloved and I dragged Things Two and Three out for a walk (Thing One was having a bit of a wobble so didn’t join us). We parked up behind the cricket pitch in Epping, crossed over the M25 on the Bell Common tunnel and followed the footpath up to Copped Hall. I’d never been up there before, but had always had the footpath earmarked for exploration at some point.

The path takes you down through a field where we could see a herd of deer ahead of us, and past a pillbox which is part of the Outer London Defence Ring – it was the second one listed in this blog post if you want more details! You then follow the road up past some very large houses (Rod Stewart is a former resident on the estate) and finally come up to Copped Hall itself. The kids loved climbing the tree outside and sitting on the haha watching the world go by. The walk back took us past woodlands swathed in primroses and violets, past the deer again and up a steep hill bordered by blackthorn in bloom. Copped Hall itself is being restored by volunteers, so it’s not open to the public apart from a few days a year, but we are planning to go back on one of those.

So that’s been my week! Today I was out at 7am ‘checking to see if the Easter Bunny had been hiding eggs in the garden’. I had hoped that this phase of my life was over, but the horror on the face of Thing Two when I tried to suggest that the Easter Bunny had already given me the eggs for them melted my resolve. This afternoon we are going to see Timeshare Teenager #1 and the grandchild for the first time since last summer, and the sun is just coming out so hopefully it’ll be a bit warmer! Happy Easter to you all: may it be peaceful and filled with the things that bring you joy.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading

The Animals at Lockwood Manor – Jane Healey

A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux) – James Lee Burke

A Dangerous Man – Robert Crais

Vesuvius by Night – Lindsey Davis (Audible)

A Comedy of Terrors (Flavia Albia) – Lindsey Davis (Audible)

Week forty seven: it’s half term, give yourself a break!

We’ve made it! It’s half term – for the kids at least, though I have booked a day off on Thursday – and so we have a week off from daily Zoom lessons, Google classroom and the constant round of nagging about doing the work set. I cannot fault their schools, and am in awe of their teachers who are planning and delivering online work and feeding back on it, while also doing the same for the key worker children in school, managing pastoral care and also looking after their own families… but I am so glad it’s half term.

Not just for me, but for my mum (and dad) friends as well. We are working parents, without exception, and while we are expert jugglers and plate spinners – often holding at least two conversations while simultaneously sorting laundry, thinking about dinner, and praying for bedtime – there is a limit to the number of plates we can keep spinning before something drops. Right now, we are spinning all these parental plates and at the same time juggling the work oranges as well. I know that I am not the only one who feels like we aren’t giving enough time to either. It’s hard to help with maths when you’re in a Teams meeting, for a start. Children – especially young ones – don’t understand that there are other demands on your time and don’t respect the boundaries of an online meeting. Older children can be a help sometimes, but they have their own work to do and its not fair to put extra responsibility on them.

In ‘normal’ times we have our work heads and our home heads, and often we have a commute in between so we have a chance to swap them over, to decompress on the train home, to think about dinner before we are faced with actually having to cook it, to read a few chapters of a book or to listen to a podcast. You don’t realise how valuable that down time is until you don’t have it. Over the last couple of weeks I have been finishing work quite late (for me, anyway, as a committed morning person!), getting up from the dining table where I’ve been working, and starting on dinner straight away in response to the ‘what’s for dinner/when’s dinner/how long till’ conversations. By Thursday I’d completely lost the will to ~~live~~ cook and resorted to the chippy. My head was so overfull that I couldn’t contemplate dinner as well, let alone trying to cook something that everyone would eat. Dinner that night was just one too many plates to spin, so I gave up.

On Friday all three of mine were on a screen-free, mindfulness, wellbeing sort of day as decreed by their schools. An excellent idea, and the secondary school sent home ideas of things they could do (I really approved of the one that said ‘make your parent a hot drink’). I, on the other hand, did not have a screen free, mindful sort of day. I was trying to focus on what my museum learning might look like in three years time. It was too cold – with a wind chill of -8 – to send them outside for any length of time. I couldn’t stop to play board games or do jigsaws, or to go for a walk in the sunshine, so their wellbeing day didn’t do a lot for me.

So this week it’s half term and I still have work to do, and I am going to give myself a break. If they spend a whole day on Minecraft while talking their friends, I am not going to worry about it: they can’t go on playdates with them, so this is the contact they can have. If Thing 1 wants to stay in bed watching emotional teen movies till lunchtime, fine. We can all benefit from a bit of a break, whether its from parental plate spinning or algebra. And yes, there might even be takeaway one night.

Creative chaos

After last week’s ramble about wanting to learn to draw, I picked up my sketchbook and did a couple of Craftsy classes online – I started the ‘Urban Sketching in 15 minutes a day’ course, and then yesterday I tried a line drawing one about how to sketch a house. I really enjoyed them and am learning to embrace the imperfections, as one of the tutors was very keen to impress on me. Craftsy is a great source of courses at the moment, and I took advantage of an offer a couple of months back to get a year’s premium membership for about a fiver rather than $70.

In the year of the handmade gift I sent off a TARDIS cross stitch to a lovely Whovian friend – he and his husband have just bought their dream home, so I used a design by NERDpillo to make this one. I almost didn’t want to fill in all the blue as the black lines were so clean and sharp, but I did. I’m so pleased they like it!

It’s been proper brass monkeys weather this week – today is the first day in a week that the thermometer has gone above one degree. I was quite excited on Tuesday when I got to add a new colour to the Temperature Tree as it was so cold. You can also see a little toadstool in a hoop that I did purely to try out a string art backing technique, and an ombre string art heart card.

Finally, I chopped all my hair off on Friday morning – I tried the unicorn horn method that I used last time and it was still too long at the back, so I put it in pigtails and chopped both off at collarbone level. I love it, it’s curly and I can get a brush through it in seconds flat.

(I was also really, really chuffed to be told on Friday that my article for CPRE had received 2000 views.)

Happy Valentines Day

A shout out to another creative friend here – the very lovely Emma, whose Etsy shop provided my gifts to my beloved for my anniversary last weekend and Valentine’s Day today.

There’s been a sweet theme this year: he indulged my passion for liquorice, and as well as torpedoes I have been given several bags of Spogs. These are a standing joke between us: when we were first together I had a bag of liquorice allsorts, and I’d saved all the spogs for last as they were my favourites. I came home to find he’d eaten them all as he thought I didn’t like them.

So that’s week 47! Happy Valentines Day to you all, you gorgeous bunch. See you next week!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

The Grave Tattoo – Val McDermid

Inspector Hobbes and the Blood – Wilkie Martin

Week forty five: Pollyanna rides again

I was all set this week to write a thoroughly bad-tempered, miserable post, I really was. It’s been a long and frustrating week, after all. On Tuesday evening an article I’d written was pulled at the very last minute with no explanation or communication: by that point it had been through four editors, had been built on the web platform by another colleague, had had all the photos retaken, and was scheduled to go live. It was a piece I was proud of and had worked hard on, but with no feedback from the person who’d rejected it…what do you do? All writers (get me! a writer!) send work into the void, to a certain extent, but that void should not exist within your own workplace and certainly not your own department.

By Thursday I was so miserable about the amount of time I’d wasted on this piece – particularly as I’d sworn after the first experience back in October that I absolutely, definitely wasn’t going to do another one – that I’d decided I’d had enough of museum education and started looking on all the job sites for something else. (Dramatic, moi? Never!)

I had also had a conversation with one of our little team about the culture of toxic positivity that exists at the moment. Our reaction to everything that’s thrown at us is ‘yes, we can do that!’. I know we can do it because we are really, really good at what we do and we have an amazing project to showcase our talents, but right now thanks to Covid-19 we don’t have the breakout spaces to sit with our colleagues and share our fears and worries. We don’t have the space to think about failure and to work through potential pitfalls. Whether that space is a Friday lunch at the Japanese Canteen, pizza in The Florist, or a walk around the lake in Vicky Park, those moments with our work family are so important to our wellbeing. Sometimes we need to throw our toys out of the pram with people who understand the pressure we are under to deliver in a time of huge uncertainty, when the whole sector is in a state of recovery and restructure. Sometimes its having a safe space to say ‘well yes, of course we can do it, but we need x, y, and z to be able to do it properly’ without fear of being thought of as negative. I have so much faith in our project and the amazing things it will do, but sometimes our faith in ourselves wobbles.

Then yesterday I had my first session with a life coach. This was a contact from a friend who is training to be one herself, and she and her fellow trainees need people to practise on: I had never thought of this as something I needed to do, but why not help people out? It costs us nothing but time, they achieve their qualification and who knows, it might be interesting.

And oh, it was. I have done a coaching for management course so was aware of the process, but hadn’t really experienced it myself. When we had our introductory chat she asked me to think about something I wanted to work on – at that point I hadn’t just had a really miserable week, so didn’t have anything specific, but luckily my crisis of faith turned up at just the right time. We had an hour session, and it was so interesting to feel the way my energy rose when I was talking about what I love about museum education and why I do the job I do. We talked about some steps I could take to get some perspective on our project and to rebuild my confidence in my own skills, and by the end of the first session my sense of purpose and pleasure in my job was starting to be restored.

I ended the week feeling a lot more positive than I did at the start, and this post is considerably less grumpy than I’d planned.

The power of a puddle

Another thing that’s cheered me up has been a couple of good welly wanders with friends (only one at a time, of course). Yesterday, despite the miserable weather (promised snow, got copious rain) Miriam and I took her house-elves/hounds Dobby and Kreacher round the aptly-named flood meadow, then left them to warm up in the house while we carried on for another couple of miles down to Dial House and back. The rain mostly held off while we were out, and we had a good chat that didn’t include Minecraft at any point, which was definitely a plus!

Jill and I went out for our usual sunrise ramble this morning, making our way through the woods towards Tawney Common and round in a loop. We both slipped over on the ice – my hand and arm are really painful and I expect there will be a bruise on my nethers later, but when we’d finished laughing we carried on. The route we take faces due east, so we get the best of the sunrise over the fields.

Where we have had so much rain over the past few days and then a freeze overnight, the flooded fields had frozen around the plants and trees as well as in the footprints, leaving ice patterns. It was good to see from the hoofprints that even deer are prone to the odd slip and slide in the mud too!

Bushes frozen in a couple of feet of water

We were in very good spirits this morning, frightening the wildlife with our renditions of The Hippopotamus Song and The Gnu Song, not to mention A Windmill in Amsterdam and stamping on the ice in puddles. We are missing the swimming but we’re so lucky to live where we do: it’s not Yorkshire, and it’s not Wales, but it’s not bad, as we are wont to say when looking out over the Essex countryside.

Other stuff….

I haven’t got a lot to show this week as the main thing I have been working on will be a gift, but here’s the latest Temperature Tree (up to the 26th, I think – count the leaves!) to be going on with. My very colour deficient sister wants to know where the key is, but since she has difficulty distinguishing between shades of green and blue I’m not convinced a key will help!

I went to the optician’s this week for my annual eye test (only nine months overdue!). At forty I didn’t need any glasses at all, and was very smug at my glasses-wearing family. Then came the glasses for looking at the computer, which at my next eye test became my distance glasses and there was a new pair for the computer and close work. Now I need new distance glasses, my computer/close up ones are for middle distance and I require a third pair for reading and close-up work. This is just getting silly….

On Friday I took a day off as I had been asked to write a crafty piece for a charity’s website, which I was (and am!) really excited about: I love to write and to make things, so this was my dream project! Hopefully I’ll be able to share it next week, along with the citizen science project it will support.

A film I was interviewed for last year, about the importance of teddies and wellbeing, was finished and added to YouTube: I hate seeing myself on camera but I’m proud to be part of this. You can find out more about Workshy Films here. I have put the film at the bottom of the post, or you can watch it on YouTube.

It’s been a week of ups and downs, all in all, but today is the end of January which seems to have lasted about three times as long as usual, and this week contains not just Thing 3’s 10th birthday (how did that happen?) but my beloved and I’s 17th not-wedding anniversary and my niece’s 12th birthday. I have a box of deliciously gooey brownies from Ridiculously Rich by Alana which arrived as a surprise from London sister yesterday along with a new sourdough starter as I managed to kill Kevin (sorry Kevin), so snacks are sorted. I do love getting unexpected post!

I wish you all a good week, and I’ll see you at the end of week 46!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Nice Jumper – Tom Cox

Ring the Hill – Tom Cox

Educating Ruby – Guy Claxton and Bill Lucas