Where I’ve been

I haven’t writ­ten here for a while. Life has been very busy, and apart from a holi­day to Italy, gener­ally stress­ful and a little depress­ing, and I’ve very rarely had access to the inter­net other than on my phone, which doesn’t encour­age updat­ing a blog (although I’ve got lots of things I’d like to put on here). On a person­al level, I moved out of London at the end of April. I was supposed to go down to Sussex to take care of my mum’s new flat until the Autumn. She inher­ited some money before Christ­mas, and moved house and bought a holi­day cottage in France with it. The plan was she’d have some things done to the new flat and then spend the whole summer in France sort­ing out the holi­day cottage how she wanted. “Some things” turned into “rip out all the elec­trics because they turned out to be illeg­al and unsafe, have all the walls replastered and replace the kitchen and bath­room”. Coupled with a build­er with a very elast­ic sense of time, it’s only just being finished at the end of this week. That means I’ve been living out of a suit­case since April. I’ve been to Italy and Shef­field in that time (very nice), visited relat­ives (very stress­ful) and spent a very claus­tro­phobic two weeks in a cara­van in France with my mum where we couldn’t go anywhere or do anything because there was a fuel strike and then floods (I didn’t murder her).

For the past week I’ve been sleep­ing in the corner of a kitchen that’s still a  build­ing site. I was supposed to be in Manchester this week­end for the North West Zine Fest, but I had to cancel due to train strikes (the bosses of the local train company pretty much deserve to be fired from a cannon for the way they run the service and treat their staff). The cat also developed a worry­ing giant lump on his face, and then disap­peared into half-built kitchen cupboards when we tried to take him to the vet the next morn­ing. When we caught him a couple of hours later the lump had disap­peared, with the vet not being able to find anything wrong with him either. A lot of worry for prob­ably noth­ing. On Wednes­day I will get my stuff back out of stor­age and actu­ally have a finished room to use, so touch wood, things will become more stable again.

The wider picture in the UK and the world has also been really depress­ing. Inter­na­tion­ally the crisis in Syria, the rise of Donald Trump and the massacre in Orlando have been notably horrible. At home the leadup to the EU Refer­en­dum had already been pretty depress­ing, all the xeno­phobes and racists seeing it as a chance to feel free to fly their bigot flags in public. Then to make matters worse, an MP who had campaigned to support refugees and stay in the EU was assas­sin­ated by a Neo-Nazi. Depress­ing times. Going to the polling station to vote remain on Thursday in a small town full of conser­vat­ive old people who are scared of foreign­ers (but you know, will still hire them to fix their bath­room or rent out houses to them) will prob­ably not be a fun exper­i­ence. I hope the smug smile gets wiped off Nigel Farage’s toad face.