Nimue Brown's Blog, page 104

Sparrows

A bit of messing about with pencils – I used photo references for all of these. First up, the sort of sparrow I see round here a lot.

This is a flock and I took a slightly more abstract approach. I love how some of the images of sparrows in flight contained an array of blobs that didn’t look anything like birds at all. Those three weird shapes are fairly accurate!

This one is an attempt at a Eurasian sparrow although I don’t think I nailed the shape. About two years ago, when Abbey was in Tokyo he used to send me photos of the birds on the bird feeders outside his window. I know a handful of words in Japanese. Abbey’s English is brilliant, but bird language is a bit specialist so it took us a while to figure out that his visitors were sparrows. They are different to my local sparrows, but clearly related.

Wessex Mysteries

I’ve been blogging for a few weeks now about crime, murder mysteries and working with David Bridger and I’m going to keep that coming because there’s plenty to think about around the project. This week we made a commitment to a trilogy, and that these will be The Wessex Mysteries.

Wessex is a wonderfully evocative name, I think. It conjures up two wildly different things. The first is Thomas Hardy, who had a fictional version of the south west that featured in his novels. I’m not a huge Hardy fan (I’ve read three now) but I am really interested in the idea of how stories relate to landscapes, and his Wessex has been highly influential for a lot of people.

Go back a bit further and Wessex is an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, and has strong associations with King Alfred. Alfred the Great is one of those historical figures who stands on the edges of history and myth – he’s the one with the burnt cake story. 

The Wessex area also has a lot of prehistory in it, and I’m looking forward to giving that more thought and attention as we go along. The presence of history in the landscape is definitely going to be a theme for these books.

Community Spaces

One of the great things about libraries is that these are spaces you can be in where you don’t have to pay. Warm, dry spaces with seats and things to do, where you can be for hours, no questions asked. 

In the warmer weather, there are parks and green spaces – for some of us, at least. There are benches in the high street. However, for the greater part, your scope for community participation, social spaces, activities, entertainment and leisure all depend on your ability to pay to access the space in the first place. It means poverty increases social exclusion and with the cost of living rising, ever more people will be priced out of opportunities to meet people and to socialise.

There are people who are perfectly happy being alone. However, most humans are social creatures and suffer intensely from loneliness without enough human contact. Passing people in the streets and seeing them in shops is not an answer to social needs. It’s better when we can do things together, form bonds, share things and feel like we’re part of something.

Stroud has a great initiative on at the moment and I wanted to flag it up as an example of a good project. We have a market area in town, but for much of the time it isn’t used. It’s a mix of open space and partially sheltered space – well ventilated but ok on a wet day. This summer, the council are opening it for a lunchtime each week and inviting community music groups to perform in the space, and putting out chairs for anyone who wants to come along. Bring lunch. Bring children. Bring the dog. It’s all good. It’s free, and friendly and pretty safe.

These are the kinds of spaces we need. Spaces that invite participation, that create interest and that don’t cost participants anything.

Costing the Earth

Here’s a handy list of things to avoid if you want to reduce your carbon impact.

Don’t own or use private jets.

Don’t own or use massive private yachts. The kind of little yachts that have sails are fine.

Don’t own a large company that is involved with ecocide. Don’t extract fossil fuels, don’t frack, don’t cut down rainforests, don’t pay people to do those things for you. Don’t own a massive agrobusiness. Don’t steal water from people or poison their water supplies. Don’t use massive fishing nets and industrial fishing boats.

Don’t lobby governments on behalf of any of those ecocidal companies.

Don’t invest in cryptocurrency.

Don’t go on cruise ships.

Don’t own or drive an SUV.

Don’t throw your clothes away after only wearing them once.

The odds are of course that only the last four things on that list are even options you have. This is because the vast majority of us are not the ones doing the vast majority of the harm. However, not doing the last four is still relevant and important, and it’s always worth doing what you can do.

The biggest job, for the majority of us, is changing the culture that celebrates poisonous over-consumption and pushing for laws to restrict it, and to end ecocide. 

Teaching the cat new words

Dogs are fairly open to commands and can be taught to do what they’re told to quite an impressive degree. Cats, less so. It’s not that cats don’t understand words – they are smart and can figure out meanings. They just aren’t motivated to please and obey in the same way.

All creatures have a better shot at language if you use the same phrases or words to signify the same things, and you keep it short. For some time now, Mr Anderson has understood many words pertaining to cat food and cat treats. He understands ‘cat go out?’ as meaning we’re going to put him on his lead. ‘Cat go down?’ is a question for when he’s being carried. He prefers to be carried out and walk back, most of the time, and it is helpful to remind him when we’re heading for home.

Saying ‘no’ to a cat is pointless. They hear you, but they are seldom that concerned about what you want if it doesn’t align with what they want. In recent weeks I’ve been working on the phrase ‘bad idea’. I say it when I think something isn’t going to go well for him, and I reinforce it by saying it when he makes a bad choice and it doesn’t play out well – usually this involves Mr Anderson having made unreasonable assumptions about how physics won’t impact on him. Saying ‘bad idea’ doesn’t get him not to do a thing, but increasingly I see him pause, and reconsider. Sometimes he changes his mind. Sometimes he clearly fancies picking a fight with physics and does the thing anyway.

Much of this has applications for people, too. It’s worth thinking about how individual people use language, what kind of language they respond to and what actually motivates them. Most people are far more like cats than like dogs. If you can find a way of communicating that engages them in the right way, what it is possible to communicate changes dramatically.

Nature for everyone

Not everyone in the UK has equal access to wild places and green spaces. I expect this is true of other countries as well. As is usually the way of it, underprivileged people are the ones least likely to be able to access green spaces. If you live in a flat with no gardens, then having some communal green space in walking distance is important for mental and physical health alike.

If you don’t have a car, and live in an urban environment, then our national parks are pretty inaccessible. Without good public transport infrastructure, you won’t be able to access the countryside closest to you, even. Safe routes for cycling would also really help with this issue.

Where can you access green spaces as a disabled person? Where can you find the information about accessible spaces? How do you find out where it’s possible to go with a wheelchair? What about if you have limited mobility – it’s not unusual to be able to walk, but unable to get over massive stiles in fences.

Nature for everyone means not pricing people out of the opportunity to spend time outside. It means accessible green spaces in urban areas. It means proper information about access and what to expect. It also means more than a stretch of mown grass and one lonely, tired tree! 

Here’s what we need from the government:

Make equal access to nature a core test of levelling upMake it a legal requirement in levelling up legislation for developers and public bodies to provide access to nature-rich green spaces for everyoneProvide funding for locally accessible nature-rich spaces by extending the Levelling Up Fund to green infrastructure projects.

Help ensure everyone has the equal right to nature. Sign this petition.

Talking about pain

There are two major factors that will impact on how your talking about pain is understood. One of these is who you are considered to be, and the other is whether you fit into expectations of pain communication. This happens in medical settings and also in any other context where talking about pain might be a thing.

Women have a much harder time of it than men getting pain taken seriously. Black women have an appalling hard time of it getting pain taken seriously. If you are perceived as drug seeking, attention seeking or fuss making you won’t get your pain taken seriously – this can often affect people with mental illness and neurodivergence, or anyone else who might be stigmatised. Sexism and racism inform how people interpret expressions of pain. Anyone who experiences prejudice is likely to find that prejudice shows up when they express pain and results in minimising, dismissal and a lack of help.

How you express pain and how that fits with expectations has a big impact on whether you get taken seriously. There are two particular groups I’m aware of that suffer around this. Neurodivergent people don’t express themselves in the same way as neurotypical people. A monotone speaking voice, or not using your vocal chords in the expected way can go against you. People with chronic illness have similar issues – when you live with pain all the time you don’t go around crying and screaming over the things that would make normally pain-free people cry and scream. So you aren’t believed.

I’ve had plenty of first hand experience of saying ‘my whole body hurts’ and being met with disbelief. I can say that calmly, because mostly I communicate calmly. It happened to me while I was giving birth. I expressed my distress in a calm voice and no one took me seriously. I got most of the way to being ready to push with no support or pain relief as a consequence.

If someone is expressing that they are in more pain than they can bear, then how they express that should not be the most important thing. Pain relief is widely available in many forms. There’s nothing weak or immoral about wanting it. The only consideration should be safe dosage. And yet, all too often for too many people, pain is dismissed or ignored. Why on earth would it even make sense to judge a person’s pain on how it compares to pain some imaginary other person might experience? Why should how normal or credible we find someone’s pain expression to be – which is so subjective – be a measure of what help they deserve?

Oh, but some people make a fuss about nothing.

Why does that external judgement carry so much weight against reported suffering? Why does it even matter? Pain relief isn’t a rare thing, it’s not massively expensive. Kindness isn’t a finite commodity. It’s much more important to ask why some people are taken more seriously than others, how privilege informs this, and how we ignore the presence of our own prejudices and assumptions when we downplay someone else saying they are in unbearable pain.

The Fox Beneath The Window

There was a fox beneath my window. It came silently in the night, and may have left long before I knew it had been there. I woke from sleep to the unmistakable, bitter musky smell of fox pee coming in through the window. It’s the second time recently that this has happened.

Behind the flat there’s an area of grass, with trees and a large stream. I’ve seen kingfishers and herons out there. I’ve heard foxes and badgers at other times. Otters pass through sometimes, although I’ve never seen one from the bedroom window. It’s busy out there after dark.

My only communication with the fox was the scent of pee. It’s not a charming smell, more the sort of thing to catch in your throat and leave a person feeling a bit queasy. But it is also the smell of fox presence, so I find it both horrible and comforting all at the same time. Twice now, I’ve lain there in the dark before the dawn, breathing in the unpleasant smell of the fox and feeling glad for the knowledge that a fox has passed beneath my window, and paused nearby for a stinky wee.

I also like that this isn’t a romantic story. It’s not an airbrushed take on nature, full of how lovely nature is. Sometimes, nature stinks, and it’s important that we engage with those aspects and don’t demand something safe and inoffensive.

Crime and Community

Last week when I posted about writing a murder mystery, HonourTheGodsBlog came in with some powerful comments. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I’ve no first hand experience of how murder impacts on people. I was however a teen in Gloucestershire during the Fred West case, and that certainly had a widespread impact on many people in the area, not only those who were directly affected.

Crime is something we tend to treat as a very individual issue – with individual perpetrators and individual victims. It remains difficult to do anything about situations of negligence that harm people in more subtle ways. If a person steals because they are hungry, then framing the crime as the theft, and not the hunger has significant implications.

I’ve poked around in this as an issue before – it’s something I raised in the novel Letters Between Gentleman – which had a Victorian setting. The deaths of workers in factories and as a result of industrial processes was widespread, but it wasn’t considered to be murder. That’s a political choice with a lot of implications. We’ve seen considerable improvements in labour laws, but we aren’t currently looking at the enormous damage to health and quality of life caused by work stress and insecure work. It’s not like beating someone up in an alley, except that in some ways, it’s exactly like beating someone up in an alley.

We don’t treat wage theft by companies with anything like the attention we might give to someone who stole from the till. Politicians don’t end up in court when their policies cause people to starve to death, or freeze to death, or die homeless on the streets. Even when the lines of cause and effect are perfectly clear, we don’t treat these deaths as crimes or as murders. We’re more likely to take to court someone who killed accidentally and do them for manslaughter than we are to challenge someone whose policy has demonstrably killed multiple people. 

The difficulty is that murder is framed as the intentional killing of a specific person. We aren’t really set up to deal with the deliberate killing of non-specific people. We’ve got international laws about doing it based on race, but nothing to hold to account someone whose deliberate and knowing choices result in the deaths of thousands of elderly people in care homes. 

How we make change

Go back ten years or so, and positivity ruled. All those chirpy memes, all those people ready to tell you to make the best of things and find the silver lining and quick to give you a verbal slapping if they thought you were wallowing in misery or just doing it for the attention. 

These days I see more online content deconstructing toxic positivity than I see people spouting it. I see more people talking about the realities of living with mental illness, grief, chronic physical conditions, trauma, neurodivergence and combinations of those things. I see fewer people suggesting that it would be all fine if you just tried to be more upbeat and maybe did some mindfulness. This is huge progress. At the moment we haven’t reached the level of a societal shift, but this is how that sort of thing comes to happen.

When I first started questioning the idea of relentless positivity, I didn’t even have words for what I was taking issue with. I don’t know who coined the term ‘toxic positivity’ but all power to them. It’s helpful having neat labels for things. When I was first trying to talk about things I experience as a person with a wonky body, and as a consequence of trauma and mental health impacts, I didn’t have ‘ableism’ as a word. I’ve been glad of that one, too, and of the work done by many people to identify what that means and how we deal with it.

Over the years, I’ve seen a number of issues I wanted to engage with getting picked up by increasing numbers of people. I’ve seen change beginning. When we share ideas and amplify each other, new things become possible. More people come to understand an issue. Societies are just large numbers of people, and societies can and do change in response to grass roots movement. So much can change if enough people want that to happen. And while big, heroic gestures can be attention grabbing and can advance a cause, there’s a lot to be said for people making small, everyday efforts to raise awareness, challenge convention and offer alternatives.