Hermione Laake's Blog: Thoughts, page 10
June 4, 2020
My diabetes avoidance blog
Hello dear readers. Well, I’ve been away for at least 3 months. That is, I’ve not been blogging about diabetes.
Covid took over. I was worried about my mum and a couple of sisters and one daughter who, inspite of representing Dorset for heptathlon on several years running, and being a keen sports person, at one point in the top 100 athletes in GB, still suffers from asthma. In spite of the fact that, unlike her siblings who were born in London, she was born by the sea in Bournemouth hospital, Dorset. These family members are all susceptible to Coronovirus because of underlying health problems. This puts my own selfish cares about my health to the back of my mind. Still, I was a little worried about myself as, as you know, I was told I was at high risk of diabetes last year in February. Still, I know how much I’ve cut back on sugar, so I wasn’t too concerned, and how much I’ve increased my exercise.
I cycle 50 to 150 k a week in the spring and summer months and 35 to 50 k in winter. Cycling is said to improve the immune system. And it’s a great sport to take up in later life because it is possible to improve by tiny increments, at first merely seconds better will acquire the accolade of a virtual trophy from Strava. I love anything that inspires or encourages, don’t you?
My partner and I play tennis once or twice a week and the past twelve months prior to February 2020, before we locked down, we were playing tennis every single week for 12 solid months. That’s how great the weather has been. I was lucky vto have found a part time role as a key holder in z local shop for a year, and decided to leave teaching support for reliable regular salary with the benefit of an hour on the court at 3 pm after my shift instead of an hour driving.
The dry weather isn’t good for the plants though, and last year the daisies really suffered. This year part of my fitness regime has involved watering the daisies early with a 5 litre can. My back hander gas improved with this improvised weight training.
I’ve been meaning to share my sports regime with you, but I was blogging at 5/6 am before work these past 3 years, and it’s only since I resigned from my Sunday management role in February that I’ve been able to work on the administration of my blog and devote more time to networking and reading other blogs.
It’s been wonderful these past months in GB because creativity has really take off noticeably and there are some great, and witty blogs our there. I’m really missing my sister, who has kidney trouble, as she is the witty taurus with Gemini in her sign, rather like my daughter who is 30 this year and who had a “Lockdown” birthday aswell. Her name is Oriana, or Ory and she never fails to make me laugh. Take a look at the people I follow when you have time. Some are witty and others just interesting writers.
I think I had Covid-19 in March, as I had all the symptoms and then heart and lung pain for over a month afterwards, with a slight relapse at some point where I remember lying by the patio doors in the sun all day after a 30 k bike ride the day before. My son, who is an epidemiologist, warned me about this, so if you feel unwell take care, rest and drink lots of water. And if you don’t yet have a regular exercise regime there is still time.
Stay safe.
All my love,
Hermione
June 3, 2020
My diabetes avoidance blog
Hello dear readers. Well, I’ve been away for at least 3 months. That is, I’ve not been blogging about diabetes.
Covid took over. I was worried about my mum and a couple of sisters and one daughter who, inspite of representing Dorset for heptathlon on several years running, and being a keen sports person, at one point in the top 100 athletes in GB, still suffers from asthma. In spite of the fact that, unlike her siblings who were born in London, she was born by the sea in Bournemouth hospital, Dorset. These family members are all susceptible to Coronovirus because of underlying health problems. This puts my own selfish cares about my health to the back of my mind. Still, I was a little worried about myself as, as you know, I was told I was at high risk of diabetes last year in February. Still, I know how much I’ve cut back on sugar, so I wasn’t too concerned, and how much I’ve increased my exercise.
I cycle 50 to 150 k a week in the spring and summer months and 35 to 50 k in winter. Cycling is said to improve the immune system. And it’s a great sport to take up in later life because it is possible to improve by tiny increments, at first merely seconds better will acquire the accolade of a virtual trophy from Strava. I love anything that inspires or encourages, don’t you?
I’ve been meaning to share my sports regime with you, but I was blogging at 5/6 am before work these past 3 years, and it’s only since I resigned from my Sunday management role in February that I’ve been able to work on the administration of my blog and devote more time to networking and reading other blogs.
It’s been wonderful these past months in GB because creativity has really take off noticeably and there are some great, and witty blogs our there. I’m really missing my sister, who has kidney trouble, as she is the witty taurus with Gemini in her sign, rather like my daughter who is 30 this year and who had a “Lockdown” birthday aswell. Her name is Oriana, or Ory and she never fails to make me laugh. Take a look at the people I follow when you have time. Some are witty and others just interesting writers.
I think I had Covid-19 in March, as I had all the symptoms and then heart and lung pain for over a month afterwards, with a slight relapse at some point where I remember lying by the patio doors in the sun all day after a 30 k bike ride the day before. My son, who is an epidemiologist, warned me about this, so if you feel unwell take care, rest and drink lots of water. And if you don’t yet have a regular exercise regime there is still nltime.
Stay safe.
All my love,
Hermione
Black and White? Binary perceptions?
I decided to write this now after reading a post on New Lune. I’ve been meaning to write something on this subject for weeks, but–Well, no ifs, no buts, as they used to tell me over and over again as a child….
You see, this year I’ve been writing and reading for my MA in creative writing at Kingston School of Art. We have been reading about several subjects, including, The idea of the death of the author, based around that famous essay by Roland Barthes in which an ambiguous challenge is placed after a colon, as to whether the author is dead or omnipotent or indeed simply, after all, the reader. The hyperreal, to put this in simple terms the dichotomy between the Disneyland version and the actual reality. The idea of the cataloged, or the fixed and dictionarised, by Jean Francois Lyotard which does not permit growth of perception. Gender, too many to mention, but some notable writers on the subject are Cixous, Butler, Carter, Gilbert and Gubar, and others, and race and ethnicity. I find the essays on the subject of race and ethnicity very illuminating and if you are interested then the Postcolonial Reader has some very good and very accessible essays in it on the subject of the lived experience of race and ethnicity.
I also read submissions for a journal, and have noticed that recently we are getting submissions from writers on the subject of race, which we were not getting before. Now it would be odd if we weren’t since we’ve also been receiving writing on Coronavirus of late. Writers often have their finger-on-the-pulse of the current mood of the people and they do their best to reflect on, challenge, and mirror that.
I decided, even though we were to choose from around seven subjects for our MA essay, to write about race and ethnicity. I did this because it seemed to me that this subject hasn’t been written about enough. Yes, I do mean that. I really don’t feel that the subject has been interrogated thoroughly. I wrote a 3000 word essay on the subject, which I researched thoroughly, and which, because an essay has to focus, I had to discard much of my research for, still, the question of my essay was not really centered around race and ethnicity but on what writers do. This may surprise you, but it is a subject that will not go away. I suspect this is because those of us who have not had the privilege of a university education, will not have interrogated this subject, and will, perhaps therefore, not have understood that writers who write creatively do not write subjectively. The best writers put out ideas and binary problems and leave them for the reader to unpick and to make sense of. They reflect the mood of a generation, or in this case, generation after generation, and they do this because they perhaps feel that the generation, or in this case, generation after generation, has not been heard properly. The writer seeks to illuminate the problem, the writer seeks to convey some truth about the problem.
What I want to know is, are you aware of the fact that it isn’t easy for a writer on race and/or ethnicity to get their work out there into the mainstream of publication? I know for a fact, from working for publications, and from listening to publishers talking at conferences, from reading work that is rejected, and from listening to published authors talking about their publishing journeys, that along the way to publishing, their work is censored. Why is this? You may innocently ask. Well, let me explain. This is because the publisher is accountable. The publisher is responsible for the content that they put out, and for any disturbance which arises from the publication of material. Perhaps when Trump posted on Twitter and Twitter added references for further reading, you were enlightened, I don’t know. Allow me explain another problem, not only this but it is very easy to misconstrue a work of art. The appreciation of art is a personal thing. The reaction that we get as readers, or appreciators of art is often very personal to our experience of life, which was why, as I penned my essay on race and ethnicity, I mused on the thought that the essay was really about all seven subjects of my study, it was about gender, it was about the hyperreal, it was about the death of the author problem. In fact, all writing is about all of these subjects. The reason for this is clear; we live in a world in which we act, as Shakespeare pointed out so succinctly, “all the worlds a stage”, which means that we appear in the world as this or that. We are catagorised for expediency, as Hume pointed out in A Critique of Pure Reason, we are “he”, “she”, “good”, “evil”, we are a son, a daughter, a writer, a man, a woman and we speak in a language, which again give the person we speak to an impression of who it is that we are, depending on whether or not we were raised in a place of perceived privilege, for example, or whether we choose to dress our gender. We are constantly at war with binary interpretations of who it is that we are. This, if you like binary perception, for me, appears to be the most important challenge that we face in our time.
There is a saying, “be yourself, everyone else is taken”. This clue as to who we are in this world is a powerful one, because if we continue to allow ourselves to take on the clothing of the “Other” as Said pointed out in his work Orientalism, we will only be viewed as “Other”. To be ourselves is a difficult thing, as Michael Blake pointed out in Dances with Wolves. The character in that work who was named Dances with Wolves by the Sioux was never really anything but himself; in spite of the binary judgments inflicted upon him, even the term “him” is a judgment (but we are stuck with it), he remained true to himself throughout the work of fiction. Even to the point of a death-defying ride up and down a line of armed aggressors, who were so impressed by his ability to control a horse, or his downright bravery that they failed to fire on him. Perhaps this long and very vivid scene was a metaphor, as many stories are, such as Waiting for the Barbarians (who are the barbarians really in this story?), or ‘Heart of Darkness’ (who are the colonised?), or Jane Eyre (who is the victim and who is the incarcerated?), perhaps the metaphor in that ride was this; that you must, in the end, be seen. All of your flaws must be out, and you must, above all things, own them. And then, all you have to do is accept the love that you receive in spite of all your flaws.
Michael Jackson penned the words, ‘I don’t want to spend my life being a colour’ (Michael Jackson, ‘Black or White’, Dangerous, 1991 ). This lyric resonates with me above most lines from books and poetry that I have ever read, because, believe it or not, one of the first things which was picked out about me as a child and pointed out to me, I remember most vividly as if it was yesterday, and that line was “you have olive skin, don’t you”. Why does this stand out? Well, perhaps because, apart from a later reference to my gender, a greengrocer called me “sonny”, or my looks, my sister once asked me what I thought my greatest asset was, and told me that it was my nose, which I found liberating because I absolutely hated my nose and wanted a button nose. Still, those were the only four occasions, apart from later on as a teenager when I was derided for living in a Council House by a school acquaintance who had her parents remove her from my girls school when she found out, and much later than that when my south-west London accent was derided and, just for the accent, I was called a snob, and then too a few selfish and unthinking comments from lovers who were (no doubt) comparing me to some airbrushed perfection they had masturbated to in a magazine, in which I ever saw myself through anybody else’s eyes.
Do you notice any theme in my writing? I was labelled a gender and a colour early on in my life, and, after that, as I grew up, my looks and then my social status were a subject of interest to people around me. And yet, all of the comments were projections. Projections of perception. Of course, I am much more than my gender, my colour or my looks and so are all of you reading this article, but who among you is brave enough to be seen, to notice me, or to really look at anyone else without the lens of the binary?
All my love,
Hermione
Bibliography:
Blake, Michael, Dances with Wolves (London & New York, Penguin Books, 1998).
Jackson, Michael , ‘Black or White’, Dangerous, 1991
June 1, 2020
May 30, 2020
May 28, 2020
May 26, 2020
Why are we killing ourselves? Money?
I am writing this in May 2020.
On Friday, the air was so clear that you could see for miles. It was a day with high winds, and I watched in awe as an oak tree of around 70 years old, danced in the breeze, swirling it’s whole body, because it appeared anthropromorphised, and shaking it’s arms Iike it was lost in a dancing frenzy.
Of course we know that there is a biological reason for this, and that the tree sends out tiny spores which communicate with other trees in the region. In other words, this isn’t just a dance of joy which has no meaning, there is a deeper purpose to it.
Indulge me for a moment. Imagine for one minute that when “Lockdown” occured, you were deprived of all entertainment. For some reason you were unable to access the internet, read free blogs like this one, read free journals and reportage, stream music, watch media on your screen. What would be left?
Creativity
Three things, people, nature and your own creativity.
Now we both know that this virus excluded us from interacting with people. We couldn’t just leave our families at home and enter another world for the day; whether we wanted to or not, we had to stay put. That left only two things, nature and creatively. Those of us who thought, wrongly or rightly, that we were not creative may have spent more time on nature, cutting the lawn, the hedges, tending a plant, walking the dog, taking the family outside. Many of us, if we are honest, relied on the creativity of others to get us through this to some extent. We listened to an old song, we discovered a new channel or radio station, we found a blog, a new recipe, a piece of art or photography that inspired us. We read a book we had been meaning to.
Who are the “key workers”?
As the weeks rolled on, we began to appreciate who we needed, the “key workers” – not just the NHS, but shop people; people who served us and stacked shelves. We decided they ought to be praised and thanked. We clapped for them on Thursdays, we put signs outside our houses, signs of thanks and encouragement.
One thing that struck me was that we did not acknowledge in all this, the creative people that sustained us, the broadcasters, the artists, the writers, and singers. Yes, we mentioned that people were reading more and turning to books, yes, we remembered singers that died during the pandemic, and yet never once did I hear anyone mention that key workers were artists, writers and broadcasters; creative people.
GDP
Something else happened during “Lockdown,” people kept worrying about GDP, market volatility, the price of oil, business failing. In short: money.
After a while, because the virus didn’t go away, because people kept on dying, because the pandemic moved and inflicted its special kind of horror on Italy, Spain, New York, and then Britain, we began to look for hope. We began to celebrate nature. We noticed that birds were singing, we mused that they seemed to be singing louder. We noticed more flies were visible and finally, because we were all “grounded” as some of us refereed to it, we began to experience the joy of cleaner air. Finally, just last week, we noticed the clearer air; we noticed that we could see further. Those of us lucky to have been alive in the 1970s noticed how like then this was; how quiet, how clean.
By now, many of us were working from home. We’d adapted easier than expected to the “new normal.” We didn’t need our ritual coffee in the morning, at Starbucks, Nero, Costa, Coffee 1, or our local coffee shop. That habit we had stolen to compensate us for the lack of a break in the morning or afternoon, if we were Private Sector workers, was no longer a necessity. We made our own coffee and established different routines in our front gardens. Nature began to sustain us once more. We noticed the birds singing louder. We were told this was because the lack of noise from cars meant birds were venturing into hedges and trees to nest closer to roads. Still, whether that was true or not, we noticed the birdsong and we enjoyed it. Here in Britain, we marvelled at our ability to show self-restraint and consideration for ourselves and others by staying at home and observing social distancing rules when out and about.
Money, money, money
Maybe some of us have realised how we have been sleepwalking towards our own destruction. I don’t know. It’s just that yesterday I went out for my daily cycle ride (something I’ve been doing since 2017, when I lost my job in a local school), and didn’t want to sucumb to the depressed state I found myself in in 2016, when I had little income, and put on a large amount of weight because I had to survive on around £7 a day for several months with a child to feed and drive to a school 9 miles away. As I was saying, I went out for my usual bike ride, which varies from 6k to 40k, and discovered that the Bristol air was, once again, thick with exhaust fumes.
It strikes me that one thing we have learned is how interconnected we all are. We need one another, and nature, to survive. Nature sustains us.
Why then, do we return so readily to our oxygen polluting vehicles? Why are we so keen to drown out the birdsong, to pollute our clear skies, to damage the habitats of our wildlife?
Many of us have been able to work from home. For many of us this has not been without challenges. We have had to change, to find new ways of working. But surely this is better than the alternative we had before. The choked roads, the choked children.
The health of our children
I have five children, and the two youngest have the worst hay fever and asthma. Why is this? In short, what is causing our bodies to overreact to the environment around us. What will it take for us to wake up and see that we all deserve an equal share of happiness and health? It isn’t necessary, as I did, for several months in 2018, to drive 20 or 30 miles to work everyday. To sit in a car for hours, clogging up roads with petrol fumes and preventing cyclists from riding in peace, or children from enjoying the out doors.
Mass suicide?
Just before this pandemic a large number of birds were said to have made a misjudgement which caused them to crash into a road killing themselves. Whatever the reason for this mass suicide, surely anyone can see that, like this metaphoric death, we had been killing ourselves and nature, maybe even our very nature, which sustains us in times of crisis. If we continue to do this, as Greta Thunberg and others have warned us, then all the money in the world will not save us.
We need to work and to share our unique gifts, but do we really need to sit in cars and offices staring at screens for hours to do that?
Two things have sustained us in this crisis, Love And Nature.
May 25, 2020
Thoughts
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