Ellie's Airmiles

Yesterday I went with Mum, Dad, my eldest sister Lu and her baby Kate to the glamourous Market Rasen train station (which is actually quite cute now some of the village people have done it up) to pick up Ellie.

Ellie is my little sis' and has been away 7 months having amazing adventures you can read about here . She has come home a very different colour and seeming to have grown (mainly as she's half a foot taller than the rest of us anyway). And so we made a banner and took balloons and I made a cake...

Indonesia is a bugger to ice!

...of the places she went  -Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Viet Nam, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand and Fiji!

She seems to have brought the Fijian weather back with her, as well as a few Fijian swear words. Her washing has been hanging in the sun all day as she's slept and got excited over things like squash, which apparently is a really British thing, and hot water.

Kate is too tiny to remember her but Ellie has claimed her affections quickly with a bracelet of shells she made on the beach.

As a blackberry I would simply turn to weepy mush if I tried this, but have enjoyed travelling through her pictures and blog.

xxx

Pottery...erm?

So, long time no blog. I do apologise to you, dear mythical reader, though I have no valid excuse. I've just been doing the usual - USLES, job rejections and depression, as well as spending far too much time on the internet.

I'm now at home for the week waiting for my little sis to arrive back from her travels so I shall also be updating here and catching up there. This was the plan anyway, until I took a new medication, which has left me in a rather spaced out state for 2 days.

Never the less I have something to show you. Earlier this year I took up a New Year's challenge of seizing the year and started doing the pottery class that I'd previously been too scared to join. And here is my first pot....

...it's all right. I know what you're thinking and I agree, it is pretty hideous. But it is hideous with a purpose - a learning curve of ugly, if you will. It weighs 5lbs as we were encouraged to do something big as a first piece and the shiny, textured technique on the main body is called burnishing, which took 3 hours of polishing with a tea spoon to achieve, followed by a rub over with shoe polish once it was out of the kiln. The lip is glazed over a black and matching green slip. It's not quite a vase or a pot so lesson #1 is that now I'm going to make stuff with a purpose! So I've started on mugs and a teapot. Lesson #2 was that scrapping something I've spent an evening on is far more sensible than carrying on with something that I don't like and I guess lesson #3 was the techniques.  So, as it turns out, after all that waiting and wanting that I'm not great at pottery but at least I've tried.

Let's hope my next attempt will be less thorns and more blackberries!

xxx

Press play without a pause

Phew, what a week! I have just got back to Sheffield after challenging myself to a 4 day stint of theatre devising in Hull. I applied for Press Play - a tour of theatre devising for young people through the National Youth Theatre - not thinking that I would actually get  place. I was more than a little bit terrified when I did. This was to be 4 days of intensive workshopping in a new city with people I did not know and far out of my comfort zone. 

But I did it. Thanks in no small part to my Godfather's brother and family who live in Hull and took excellent care of me. I learnt a lot about devising theatre as opposed to writing it and came away with lots of ideas. I had one wobble on the 3rd day. The 'press' of 'press play' refers to THE press. We were looking at news stories, so many of them to do with pain and I got upset when some people in one of my groups wanted to put a 'clowning' effect on it. When the leader said clowning I think he was referring to facial expressions but we started to head more towards slapstick. A lovely beardy chap called Antonio tried to mediate and help but I couldn't take part in something I didn't agree with. You know how these things escalate into upset. I left and had a cry in the toilets. I couldn't run away. I'm not saying that I didn't want to, I just wasn't wearing shoes at the time. The hardest thing about getting upset like that is having to hold your head up and walk back into the room. I did, and was glad to see they had toned down the bits I had found offensive (though at the same time worried that the group leaders would think I had been making a fuss over nothing).

Even so, mostly it was really great. I lasted and learned and am more than a little bit proud of myself - I know some of the others were too. I wish I had been well enough to cope with study and these wonderful youth opportunities as I am now getting rapidly too old for them. I am toying with the idea of doing a short course at uni so I can get involved with some of the 'students only' stuff that goes on. Onwards and upwards.

Photosplosion

For those of you who don't know Craftster it is a craft website/forum where people share their creations. I wanted to upload my latest (and some older) stuff but can't get the pictures to work. So I'm going to try linking them over here instead. Get ready for a photosplosion!

Hmm, what else might I want to post to my Craftster account.

Woe is me.

Is it me or does the phrase ‘the misery of the human condition’ make everyone cringe? Last week I walked into an art gallery where that phrase was plastered over the wall to explain the ‘theory’ behind a series of photographs of old people dancing on a promenade. Please forgive me for failing to see the misery in something so touching as old couples boogying.

The real bone this makes me want to pick at is why we feel the need to justify everything in art through the eyes of archaic philosophies. Cannot something just be beautiful? Do we really need to have an obscure message behind every camera lens.

I once asked my flamboyant English teacher why we only studied depressing books – ‘Death of a Salesman’, ‘Of Mice and Men’ and so on. Without missing a beat he responded “Happiness writes white, dear girl” and minced off.  There is no doubt some truth in the phrase especially when writing a play or novel in which plot and narrative structure demand misery to make us cry so that we feel elated when we allowed to laugh.

Poets are probably the worst for making misery a highbrow artistic activity, Wendy Cope wrote a wonderful poem expostulating about how comic poems must enter different competitions from ‘real’ poems and of course be rewarded with smaller prizes. If you have to be miserable to be in the arts then in seems strange that we all congregate here aspiring to get into the industry. There is nothing elegant about suffering and mental hospitals with barred windows and the stench of disinfectant.

Beautiful doesn’t have to be tragic and entertainment doesn’t have to be crass. While Vincent Van Gogh and Glee make excellent examples of tragic beauty and crass entertainment respectively there is also a whole world of examples to fight the other side of the argument. The old British sitcoms Yes Minister and The Good Life, the William Tell overture, Queen’s entire back catalogue or whimsical graffiti. 

A beautifully Yorkshire favourite of mine near Hallam Uni.

It’s all a question of balance. While it seems to be true that the best of each genre is often focussed on painful truths there will be so many examples where this has gone wrong leaving the artist with something pretentious and trite that they hastily zip to the recycle bin.

Misery of the human condition? Pah! We get enough of that on the news. Here’s a brief from me – I challenge you to make me laugh.

Being Proud not Jealous.

In my situation while I watch the successes of friends whom I have supported or family it is very difficult not to get a tinge of the green eyed monster. In fact I regularly become such a monstrosity - though hopefully only in private. I have lost touch with several friends because they are busy having the lives they planned and I find it too painful to watch what I feel I also deserved, perhaps deserved more than them sometimes too.

Today reading my little sister's travel blog I didn't feel jealous, I just felt proud. Granted I'd rather her dancing outfit for the bar where she worked had a little more to it but although pictures of koala bears and palm beaches flood her Facebook account my overwhelming feeling is of pride that she is so brave as to go and explore the world.

I want to exorcise that green-eyed monster. I don't like the person it makes me. Maybe this is how - I should remember to be proud of the part I took in making those other lives fit an let the happiness of others be my reward. Unfortunately I am not Mother Theresa so this will be easier said than done but hopefully this little stream of thought might help me remember.

Entering the debate

Well, Mr Chenko and Emily have both had their say and I think it's time for me to get on my high horse and ride into the debate on benefits. I have a few thoughts on: the working for free scheme; the disparity between disabled people's support and that of those lucky enough to have their health; and my view on minimum wage. But before I do, let me provide you with a little context...

I have been unemployed and on benefits for 4 years now. I am disabled, though not in anyway that is immediately obvious and my day to day life is a struggle. I never intended to go on disability benefits but when I phoned up to apply for JSA I was told I couldn't because I was not looking for full time employment. And so I have got on this incapacity benefit - the name of which makes me cringe - and I have spent 4 years trying to build myself up through part time education, medication, lifestyle changes and voluntary work. So now you know whose talking, what have I got to say?

Well firstly, I am fed up with the government targeting disabled people for their cuts when it is their policies and practise that allow employers to ask for disclosure, which allows them to discriminate. While most disabled people would probably struggle to work full time (especially with fatigue related disease) it is unfair not to give them the chance. Once on incapacity benefits for 6 months approximately 90% of claimants will be on it for life. It's not a cushy deal - living in naff rented accommodation, unable to afford to have children, being looked down on and having people believe you are ripping them off because your disability is hidden and they are ignorant.

I want to work! I want the identity and self-esteem, not to mention the wage and activity that employment brings. The Daily Mail and government are happy to label us as scroungers but the truth is with employers preferring people who are 'easier' to employ and the Jobcentre not giving us contact or guidance unless we really chase it (8 numbers, £2.60 and 68 minutes to get through to the Disability Employment Adviser's office - and she wasn't there and failed to return my call!). People on the old benefit like I am are not entitled to any fee remission at college if we want to learn new skills, unlike those on JSA or who have moved to the cut down benefit and the dodgy dealing 'back to work' schemes refuse to believe we have any skills in the first place.

On one Remploy course we had a day's lecture on personal hygiene - because apparently disabled is a synonym for 'stinky' - and the course leader made the woman next to me cry. Is it any wonder we lose our confidence in our ability to work? What's more us 'stinkies' are also apparently also 'thickies' - I was offered a beginners' literacy course more than once (my first degree is English Literature). It turns out they were pushing these courses because the companies get a fee for every person they get 'into training' - regardless of whether it is appropriate. In the end I gave up and started looking for part time work on my own.

After help from my university careers' service my CV is pretty pimped out and my own experiences of being on society's bottom rung inspired me to do an MA in Community Work. Looking around for entry level part time community jobs I found the Future Jobs Fund - perfect! It was designed especially to give bright jobseekers part time paid work experience in areas of the third sector. I thought I was falling on my feet.

Then my knees buckled - or to be more precise I was knee-capped. I was not eligible to apply and why?
Because I was on Incapacity Benefit rather than Jobseeker's Allowance. In other words, those opportunities were for the 'abled only. Two of my best friends were employed through the scheme and are still working, one has moved on to a job in marketing and one is still at the company, who have kept him on while he does an MSc. It's hard not to be bitter. Luckily they are awesome people so I don't begrudge them their successes.

So if I can't go to college or get onto job schemes for graduates and I can't do the low skilled work that is on offer through people like the Shaw Trust (I'm not being snooty, factory work caused my original nervous break down and I have been told more than once that I'm 'over-qualified') then what are my options?

For now I volunteer and study all I can online for free, but I'd really appreciate it if I could earn my living by doing something other than giving the Daily Mail someone to pick on.

To be continued...