One Year On!
Exactly a year ago on Monday 30 April 2018 I set off with FAR TOO MUCH LUGGAGE on the train down to Wales on the way to the little village of Kilmore Quay - a perfect way, and a perfect place, to start my six months travelling adventure.
Today I ducked out of all my commitments and instead came to Glasgow to the funeral of a lovely lady who took me 'under her wing' in 2011 when I was hiding out in a flat in Glasgow trying not to meet anyone while I wrote up my PhD. Her granddaughter did a eulogy where she said that her grandmother loved people. She loved feeding them, helping them, supporting them, phoning them up to see that they were ok - and that she could tell by all the nods in the room that her hunch was right, that everyone had that sort of connection with the lady.
After the funeral I wandered round the strangely named 'Western Necropolis' looking for my grandparents, till i was advised to check the painstakingly researched Scottish Jewish Cemeteries website where I discovered that in fact my grandfather Charles Frank and his wife Miriam are buried in Riddrie Cemetery on the other side of the city....
And here I am in 'Stereo', one of Glasgow's chain of vegan restaurants, writing this in between the burial and the Shiva - the bit where we all go to the house and have prayers and take food for the bereaved. A very lovely part of Jewish ritual. We are also around the mourning period for my dad, who died on this calendar day in 1989, but we use the date in the Jewish calendar when he died - 25th Nissan. Strangely, it's also the 25th Nissan today - i think that might be the first time since he died 30 years ago, that the two dates have coincided. So I'm glad I have taken the day out of my normal routine to think about death, continuity and anniversaries. (It's also the seventieth birthday of my old friend and ex boyfriend (and Morris historian!) Keith Chandler, so lots of things attach to this day).
anyway enough of death
I've been reflecting on the year, and what's happened since I came home.
The main change that I can write here is that I SEEM TO BE HAPPY ALL THE TIME.
That is SO strange. My general, resting, mood, before I went away, was, I think, negative, if not downright depressed - or more truthfully, OPressed, by the weight of the work commitments I was carrying. Having left them behind for six months, and just done things I actually wanted to do, I'm discovering that I can rebalance my paid work commitments to be things that feed my happiness.**
So, for my Scottish Council of Jewish Communities work, I'm actually getting PAID to help organise 'Scotland Limmud', a cultural festival of Jewish life and learning which will take place in November in Edinburgh - and we're going to be introducing a Klezmer and Yiddish song strand to the day, I hope - as well as an environmental strand and a disability equality strand.
At the Yiddish Summer Weimar festival last summer, I was wowed by a Syrian dance troupe who danced about the refugee experience - the first and only contemporary dance performance that I have CRIED during. And after trying for months to make a link, i''ve now managed to get my organisation to work in partnership with the Scottish Refugee Council to bring them to Scotland this year. (a hard brexit on 22 May would really mess up my life by the way! - though I realise my concerns are minor compared with diabetics, etc). As things stand there are going to be two performances in June, part of Refugee Festival Scotland (27 June in Edinburgh and 30 June in Glasgow) - both followed by Klezmer Ceilidhs with lovely local bands ... an open dance workshop on Sunday 30 June involving Klezmer Syrian, Contemporary and hopefully Israeli...they'll be running a workshop at a Glasgow primary school... and taking part in a symposium about refugee art run by the Scottish Refugee Council.
My other job at Halton Mill is also going very nicely, we have a 3 day a week administrator who's taken a lot of the work off my and Alison's shoulders... last week we launched our LIFT for which I started a fundraising campaign, with a group of five others, three years ago... i am so proud of this!
I've now got a Podcast Mentor, we try to meet weekly, (she's starting a blog so we're both responding very well to externally set deadlines) and I am revisiting my podcasts and interviews with a view to launching them on Apple Itunes later this month. This is so that the first one, about Vanessa's experiences, (you can hear it now on my website) can come out in the week of the anniversary of the Irish Abortion Referendum on 25 May.
I'm also involved with disinvestment and ethical investment - i've committed to change my bank from mainstream big four by the end of the year, and i'm looking at alternative ISAs (triodos bank crowdfunding ISAs, Rootstock, etc. i have the Skipton BS to thank for this - they gave me a financial review and said that it was ok to invest about 25 per cent of your savings in non secured things - and in fact quite a lot of the alternative ISAs etc ARE secured. The Skipton didn't have anything low carbon but it set me off looking at what alternatives there are - not just for me but for lots of my neighbours and friends. And I'm only just starting to find out about this stuff.
I had a lovely time with Gill Ormond at the concert at the end of the Kleznorth festival this year.... I'm really enjoying living in the cohousing project... the cat is lovely and friendly.... and all is well!
It's time to go off to the Shiva House ....so i'm going to stop and send this while it's still the anniversary of all these things. I just bumped into two sisters who were part of my PhD research - which reminds me, since I've been back I have published my BOOK and have four vibrant young Glasgow Uni history of art students doing amazing things with the Hannah Frank art project (one is doing an inventory of all her original works, two of them are, even as I write, writing and recording audio descriptions of the works for people with visual impairment..... all with the Creative Scotland grant that i gained while I was travelling.
Here is ONE photo for the period - me, the senior curator at the Ben Uri gallery where I had my London launch, and Miriam Margolyes - who came to the launch :-)
and here's a recording of the London launch if you want to hear more, starting off with some lovely (and very relevant for the story) KLEZMER MUSIC by Steven Kallin of Oi Va Voi, and Josh Middleton of eclectic North London band Don Kipper.
SO - I can highly recommend leaving all your work responsibilities behind for six months and going off into the middle distance. I've come home renewed, rejuvenated, happy and buoyant. And with lots less stuff (I've already written about needing a lot less STUFF and giving away lots of my things... Anna has done this too, we both have two boxes of stuff in our bedrooms that we want to list to sell... mine's academic books (see this link if you'd like to nose...)
Wishing you all health and happiness in the coming year
(and a happy Mayday)
Fiona x
** I have a feeling that the happiness MAY be coming partly from the fact that I've more or less stopped eating dairy and grain over the last month. I've been doing the 'whole30' plan for April like I've done for a month each year over the past 3 or 4 years (along with the Carbohydrates Addict's Lifespan Programme that I have followed fulltime for the past 12 or so years). It's always made me feel happier and healthier but this is the first time that I've felt like the benefits to health and happiness were worth continuing beyond the exact 30 days that I'd committed to it. I'm not slavishly following it, I ate loads of all kinds of things over passover, I drink wine every Friday night for Shabbat, (also I think at my age you have to have some dairy milk for osteoporosis - any alternatives to that?? or is it already too late?) but it is easy and lovely.
Today I ducked out of all my commitments and instead came to Glasgow to the funeral of a lovely lady who took me 'under her wing' in 2011 when I was hiding out in a flat in Glasgow trying not to meet anyone while I wrote up my PhD. Her granddaughter did a eulogy where she said that her grandmother loved people. She loved feeding them, helping them, supporting them, phoning them up to see that they were ok - and that she could tell by all the nods in the room that her hunch was right, that everyone had that sort of connection with the lady.
After the funeral I wandered round the strangely named 'Western Necropolis' looking for my grandparents, till i was advised to check the painstakingly researched Scottish Jewish Cemeteries website where I discovered that in fact my grandfather Charles Frank and his wife Miriam are buried in Riddrie Cemetery on the other side of the city....
And here I am in 'Stereo', one of Glasgow's chain of vegan restaurants, writing this in between the burial and the Shiva - the bit where we all go to the house and have prayers and take food for the bereaved. A very lovely part of Jewish ritual. We are also around the mourning period for my dad, who died on this calendar day in 1989, but we use the date in the Jewish calendar when he died - 25th Nissan. Strangely, it's also the 25th Nissan today - i think that might be the first time since he died 30 years ago, that the two dates have coincided. So I'm glad I have taken the day out of my normal routine to think about death, continuity and anniversaries. (It's also the seventieth birthday of my old friend and ex boyfriend (and Morris historian!) Keith Chandler, so lots of things attach to this day).
anyway enough of death
I've been reflecting on the year, and what's happened since I came home.
The main change that I can write here is that I SEEM TO BE HAPPY ALL THE TIME.
That is SO strange. My general, resting, mood, before I went away, was, I think, negative, if not downright depressed - or more truthfully, OPressed, by the weight of the work commitments I was carrying. Having left them behind for six months, and just done things I actually wanted to do, I'm discovering that I can rebalance my paid work commitments to be things that feed my happiness.**
So, for my Scottish Council of Jewish Communities work, I'm actually getting PAID to help organise 'Scotland Limmud', a cultural festival of Jewish life and learning which will take place in November in Edinburgh - and we're going to be introducing a Klezmer and Yiddish song strand to the day, I hope - as well as an environmental strand and a disability equality strand.
At the Yiddish Summer Weimar festival last summer, I was wowed by a Syrian dance troupe who danced about the refugee experience - the first and only contemporary dance performance that I have CRIED during. And after trying for months to make a link, i''ve now managed to get my organisation to work in partnership with the Scottish Refugee Council to bring them to Scotland this year. (a hard brexit on 22 May would really mess up my life by the way! - though I realise my concerns are minor compared with diabetics, etc). As things stand there are going to be two performances in June, part of Refugee Festival Scotland (27 June in Edinburgh and 30 June in Glasgow) - both followed by Klezmer Ceilidhs with lovely local bands ... an open dance workshop on Sunday 30 June involving Klezmer Syrian, Contemporary and hopefully Israeli...they'll be running a workshop at a Glasgow primary school... and taking part in a symposium about refugee art run by the Scottish Refugee Council.
My other job at Halton Mill is also going very nicely, we have a 3 day a week administrator who's taken a lot of the work off my and Alison's shoulders... last week we launched our LIFT for which I started a fundraising campaign, with a group of five others, three years ago... i am so proud of this!
I've now got a Podcast Mentor, we try to meet weekly, (she's starting a blog so we're both responding very well to externally set deadlines) and I am revisiting my podcasts and interviews with a view to launching them on Apple Itunes later this month. This is so that the first one, about Vanessa's experiences, (you can hear it now on my website) can come out in the week of the anniversary of the Irish Abortion Referendum on 25 May.
I'm also involved with disinvestment and ethical investment - i've committed to change my bank from mainstream big four by the end of the year, and i'm looking at alternative ISAs (triodos bank crowdfunding ISAs, Rootstock, etc. i have the Skipton BS to thank for this - they gave me a financial review and said that it was ok to invest about 25 per cent of your savings in non secured things - and in fact quite a lot of the alternative ISAs etc ARE secured. The Skipton didn't have anything low carbon but it set me off looking at what alternatives there are - not just for me but for lots of my neighbours and friends. And I'm only just starting to find out about this stuff.
I had a lovely time with Gill Ormond at the concert at the end of the Kleznorth festival this year.... I'm really enjoying living in the cohousing project... the cat is lovely and friendly.... and all is well!
It's time to go off to the Shiva House ....so i'm going to stop and send this while it's still the anniversary of all these things. I just bumped into two sisters who were part of my PhD research - which reminds me, since I've been back I have published my BOOK and have four vibrant young Glasgow Uni history of art students doing amazing things with the Hannah Frank art project (one is doing an inventory of all her original works, two of them are, even as I write, writing and recording audio descriptions of the works for people with visual impairment..... all with the Creative Scotland grant that i gained while I was travelling.
Here is ONE photo for the period - me, the senior curator at the Ben Uri gallery where I had my London launch, and Miriam Margolyes - who came to the launch :-)
and here's a recording of the London launch if you want to hear more, starting off with some lovely (and very relevant for the story) KLEZMER MUSIC by Steven Kallin of Oi Va Voi, and Josh Middleton of eclectic North London band Don Kipper.
SO - I can highly recommend leaving all your work responsibilities behind for six months and going off into the middle distance. I've come home renewed, rejuvenated, happy and buoyant. And with lots less stuff (I've already written about needing a lot less STUFF and giving away lots of my things... Anna has done this too, we both have two boxes of stuff in our bedrooms that we want to list to sell... mine's academic books (see this link if you'd like to nose...)
Wishing you all health and happiness in the coming year
(and a happy Mayday)
Fiona x
** I have a feeling that the happiness MAY be coming partly from the fact that I've more or less stopped eating dairy and grain over the last month. I've been doing the 'whole30' plan for April like I've done for a month each year over the past 3 or 4 years (along with the Carbohydrates Addict's Lifespan Programme that I have followed fulltime for the past 12 or so years). It's always made me feel happier and healthier but this is the first time that I've felt like the benefits to health and happiness were worth continuing beyond the exact 30 days that I'd committed to it. I'm not slavishly following it, I ate loads of all kinds of things over passover, I drink wine every Friday night for Shabbat, (also I think at my age you have to have some dairy milk for osteoporosis - any alternatives to that?? or is it already too late?) but it is easy and lovely.
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