Just to start: My alma mater Goldsmiths College (part of University of London) is trying to lay off 25% of their staff (130 jobs). Obviously, I am part of the academic boycott and stand with the union. The way universities have privatized themselves into something that resembles hedge funds makes me profoundly disgusted. I am proud of the student body for protesting Goldsmiths’s investments with Israel along with the planned redundancies of some of UK’s most radical scholars. Here is a Guardian article on the latest regarding the redundancies and why Goldsmiths seems to be “determined” to close its Black British literature course.
I have concluded my overseas leg of summer (maybe, maybe not? I’m currently looking up how to get a European pet passport for my Pomeranian), I am back from London after a chaotic few weeks. If you’re a paid subscriber you are up to date with my life as I outlined in the latest Voice Notes. If you are sad I haven’t been writing full posts I am sorry but my entire life is in a 10 x 10 storage unit and I don’t have an apartment so we are all doing the best we can with what we have.
I hadn’t been back to London since a jaunt in 2019 and this trip was a bit of a salve from my tainted memories of living there for most of my formative years. Someone who was an American ex-pat asked me why I had such a “bad time” and honestly it wasn’t even that “bad”, but I had been working so much for so little. Obviously, a theme. I was really in the muck of life! I had been in school, doorgirl-ing, hostessing, and nannying all at once. Sometimes the shadow of that era crosses my mind and I truly do not think I could muster the same energy to be juggling so many low wage jobs. On typical days I used to go to class, nanny for four hours, then go to my hosting shift and come home at midnight or one a.m. (all while traversing seas of drunk people in Shoreditch).
Strangely, I did not set foot in East London whatsoever which may have accounted for my more positive feelings. It also helped that the week I was there it was SUNNY almost every day (this actually may be the key). Oh, and I stormed a London office and demanded to be paid.
Anyway, many of my close, close, close best of friends are getting engaged or have recently gotten married (my reason for going to London!). Witnessing everyone on my feed going to weddings I have to ask… are people experiencing them like I AM! I feel like most people I know are going to weddings of people they aren’t even very close to? Is this true?
Each time I am told of an engagement or attend a wedding of a member of my intimate coterie, I feel like I process the five stages of grief (there is not a happier turn-of-phrase so that one must do). Emotions are in upheaval! Past, present, future collide! The only thing I can compare it to is when I see people reading a hundred or more books a year. Are they reading them from cover to cover or are they being fundamentally changed by the text? It’s a beautiful thing to be moved… profoundly changed by something.
Here are things that have gotten me through the last three weeks:
-The new song by Sarah Kinsley
-The story someone told me that the Fuschia flower was brought to the UK in the 18th century and traded for a bottle of whiskey. (see flower below)
-Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love (quote above)
-Okay besides a lip balm, this has been the only thing I’ve had in my purse for touch ups (in the shade Dancing Queen). I have received NUMEROUS compliments on its effects.
Ciao Ciao for now!